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 PERSONAL IDEALISM 
 
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PERSONAL IDEALISM 
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS BY 
 EIGHT MEMBERS OF THE 
 UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 HENRY STURT 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited 
 
 NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1902 
 
 A U rights reserved 
 
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PREFACE 
 
 This volume originated in the conversations and discus- 
 sions of a group of friends drawn together primarily by 
 their membership in the Oxford Philosophical Society. 
 The Society was started in the spring of 1898, and 
 among some of the most regular attendants at its meetings 
 a certain sympathy of view soon declared itself. In the 
 course of two years the trend of opinion had grown so 
 definite as to suggest to me the project of a volume of 
 essays. Among those who- seemed likely to contribute I 
 circulated a programme which made it the object of our 
 volume " to represent a tendency in contemporary thinking, 
 to signalise one phase or aspect in the development of 
 Oxford idealism." That tendency was summed up in a 
 phrase which I thought I was originating at the time I 
 wrote the programme, though it seems to have occurred 
 independently to others. 1 It is the phrase we have chosen 
 for our title, " Personal Idealism." For me our volume 
 fulfils the purpose with which it was projected so far as it 
 develops and defends the principle of personality. 
 
 Personality, one would have supposed, ought never to 
 have needed special advocacy in this self-assertive country of 
 ours. And yet by some of the leading thinkers of our day 
 it has been neglected ; while by others it has been bitterly 
 attacked. What makes its vindication the more urgent is 
 
 1 Prof. Howison uses it to characterise the metaphysical theory of his Limits 
 of Evolution, published last year. 
 
 V 
 
vi PERSONAL IDEALISM 
 
 that attacks have come from two different sides. One 
 adversary tells each of us : " You are a transitory resultant 
 of physical processes" ; and the other: " You are an unreal 
 appearance of the Absolute." Naturalism and Absolutism, 
 antagonistic as they seem to be, combine in assuring us 
 that personality is an illusion. 
 
 Naturalism and Absolutism, then, are the adversaries 
 against whom the personal idealist has to strive ; but the 
 manner of the strife must be different in each case. Per- 
 sonal Idealism is a development of the mode of thought 
 which has dominated Oxford for the last thirty years ; it 
 is not a renunciation of it. And thus it continues in the 
 main the Oxford polemic against Naturalism. To it and 
 to Naturalism there is no ground common, except that 
 both appeal to experience to justify their interpretations 
 of the world. Thus against this adversary the argument 
 must take the form of showing that from naturalistic 
 premises no tolerable interpretation of the cardinal facts 
 of our experience can be made. If it be asked what are 
 those cardinal facts, I should answer : Those which are 
 essential to the conduct of our individual life and the 
 maintenance of the social fabric. They are summarily 
 recognised in the credo that we are free moral agents in a 
 sense which cannot apply to what is merely natural. 
 Round this formula of conviction are grouped the ques- 
 tions debated with Naturalism in our volume. They are 
 the reality of human freedom, the limitations of the evolu- 
 tionary hypothesis, the validity of the moral valuation, 
 and the justification of that working enthusiasm for ideals 
 which Naturalism, fatalistic if it is to be logical, must 
 deride as a generous illusion. If these crucial questions be 
 decided in our favour, the system of Naturalism is con- 
 demned. 
 
 Accordingly, where Naturalism confronted us, we were 
 not unfrequently obliged to take the aggressive and carry 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 the war far into the enemy's country. But in the other 
 essays a different line of action has been taken. The 
 Absolutist is a more insidious, perhaps more dangerous 
 adversary, just because we seem to have more in common 
 with him. He professes to agree with us in the funda- 
 mental conviction that the universe is ultimately spiritual ; 
 against the naturalist it was just this conviction which had 
 to be vindicated. We decided, then, to meet the Absolu- 
 tist with what may be called a rivalry of construction. 
 Absolutism has been before the world for a century, more 
 or less. It has put forth its account of knowledge, of 
 morals, and of art ; and that account, suggestive though it 
 is, has not satisfied the generality of thinking men. If the 
 grounds of dissatisfaction be demanded, I can only give 
 the apparently simple and hackneyed, but still fundamental 
 answer, that Absolutism does not accord with the facts. 
 Thus, instead of entering upon the intricate task of refuting 
 Absolutism, we have felt free to adopt the more congenial 
 plan of offering specimens of constructive work on a 
 principle which does more justice to experience. Our 
 essays are but specimens. They indicate lines of thought 
 which could not be worked out fully in the space allowed. 
 But they are extensive enough, let us hope, to enable the 
 reader to judge whether their general line of interpretation 
 is not more promising than that of Absolutism. 
 
 It may be objected that we are wrong in assuming that 
 Absolutism cannot be reconciled with the principle of per- 
 sonality. In reply two points of incompatibility may be 
 specified shortly; further particularity is impossible without 
 a much fuller statement, more especially since Absolutism 
 is not so much a definite system as an aggregate of 
 tendencies without a universally acknowledged expositor. 
 The two points in respect of which Absolutism tends 1 to 
 
 1 I use a guarded phrase, because what follows is not entirely true of exponents 
 of Absolutism so distinguished as Prof. Henry Jones and Prof. Royce. 
 
viii PERSONAL IDEALISM 
 
 be most unsatisfactory are, first, its way of criticising human 
 experience, not from the standpoint of human experience, 
 but from the visionary and impracticable standpoint of 
 an absolute experience ; and, secondly, its refusal to 
 recognise adequately the volitional side of human nature. 
 Both matters are dealt with in the essay on Error which 
 stands first in the volume. There it is shown that 
 error and truth are not dependent upon the Absolute ; in 
 other words that we can know with certainty without 
 knowing the absolute whole of Reality ; and that, if we 
 err, it is by human criteria, not by a theory of the Absolute, 
 that we measure the degree of our error. Further, in regard 
 to volition, the same essay shows that error is relative, 
 not to the content of knowledge only, but also to its 
 intent, i.e., the intention of the agent in setting out upon 
 his search for knowledge. The reader may be left to 
 trace for himself the wider operation of these principles. 
 
 In conclusion there is one feature in our essays to 
 which I would venture to call attention as constituting 
 what to my mind is the most valuable feature of their 
 method ; that is, the frequency of their appeal to ex- 
 perience. The current antithesis between a spiritual 
 philosophy and empiricism is thoroughly mischievous. If 
 personal life be what is best known and closest to us, 
 surely the study of common experience will prove it so. 
 ' Empirical idealism ' is still something of a paradox ; I 
 should like to see it regarded as a truism. 
 
 H. S. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 ESSAY PAGE 
 
 I. Error. By G. F. Stout, M.A., Wilde Reader in 
 
 Mental Philosophy i 
 
 II. Axioms as Postulates. By F. C. S. Schiller, M.A., 
 Fellow and Assistant Tutor of Corpus Christi 
 College ...... 47 
 
 III. The Problem of Freedom in its Relation to 
 
 Psychology. By W. R. Boyce Gibson, M.A., 
 Queen's College, Lecturer in London University . 134 
 
 IV. The Limits of Evolution. By G. E. Underhill, 
 
 M.A., Fellow and Senior Tutor of Magdalen College 193 
 V. Origin and Validity in Ethics. By R. R. 
 
 Marett, M.A., Fellow and Tutor of Exeter College . 221 
 VI. Art and Personality. By Henry Sturt, M.A., 
 
 Queen's College . . . . .288 
 
 VII. The Future of Ethics : Effort or Abstention ? 
 By F. W. Bussell, D.D., Fellow, Tutor, and Vice- 
 Principal of Brasenose College . . . 336 
 VIII. Personality, Human and Divine. By Hastings 
 
 Rashdall, D.Litt, Fellow and Tutor of New College 369 
 
 Note. — Each writer is responsible solely for his own essay. 
 
 IX 
 
ERROR 1 
 By G. F. Stout 
 
 SYNOPSIS 
 
 I. In Error, what is unreal seems to be thought of in the same way as the 
 real is thought of when we truly know it. How is this possible ? As 
 an essential preparation for answering this question we must first deal 
 with another. Do other modes- of thinking exist besides those which 
 can be properly said to be either true or false ? There are two such 
 modes, (i) Indeterminate or problematic thinking. (2) Thinking of 
 mere appearance without affirming it to be real. 
 2 and 3. To think indeterminately is to think of something as one of a group 
 of alternatives, without deciding which. The indeterminateness lies in 
 not deciding which ; and so far as the indeterminateness extends there 
 is neither truth nor error. Whatever is thus indeterminately thought 
 of belongs to the Intent of consciousness. The term Content should 
 be reserved for what is determinately presented. 
 
 In cognitive process, indeterminate thinking takes the form of questioning 
 as a mental attitude essentially analogous to questioning. Interrogative 
 thinking is the way we think of something when we are interested in 
 knowing it, but do not yet know it either truly or falsely. Its distinc- 
 tive characteristic is that the decision between alternatives is sought 
 for in the independent reality of the total object in which we are 
 interested. This object is regarded as having a determinate constitution 
 of its own, independently of what we may think about it. We are 
 active in cognitive process only in compelling the object to reveal its 
 nature. The activity is experimental ; its result is determined for us 
 and not by us. 
 
 In the play of fancy, on the contrary, we do not seek to conform our 
 thought to the predetermined constitution of our object. We select 
 alternatives as we please, and to this extent make the object instead of 
 adapting ourselves to its independent nature. 
 
 1 Throughout this essay I am deeply indebted to the criticisms and sugges- 
 tions of Professor Cook Wilson. In particular, I have substantially adopted his 
 account of the distinction between abstract terms and adjectives, in place of a less 
 satisfactory view of my own. 
 
 B 
 
2 G. F. STOUT i 
 
 4. Besides indeterminate thinking there is yet another mode of thinking 
 which is neither true nor false. It consists in thinking of mere appear- 
 ance without taking it for real. This happens, for example, in the play of 
 fancy. Mere appearance consists in those features of an object of con- 
 sciousness which are due merely to the special conditions, psychological 
 and psychophysical, of its presentation, and do not therefore belong to 
 its independent reality. 
 
 5 and 6. Error occurs when what is merely apparent, appears to belong to 
 an independent reality in the same way as its other real features. 
 The conditions under which this occurs may be divided under two 
 heads. (1) Confusion. (2) Ignorance and inadvertence. Ignorance 
 or inadvertence are present in every error, Confusion only in some. 
 
 7. It follows from the very nature of error that it cannot exist unless the 
 
 mind is dealing with something independently real. Hence, some truth 
 is presupposed in every error as its necessary condition. 
 
 8. There are limits to the possibility of error. There can be no error 
 
 unless in relation to a corresponding reality, which is an object of 
 thought for him who is deceived. Further, this reality must be capable 
 of being thought of without the qualification which is said to be illusory. 
 Hence, among other results, we may affirm that abstract objects cannot 
 be illusory unless they contain an internal discrepancy. For, they are 
 considered merely for themselves, and not as the adjectives of any other 
 reality in relation to which they can be illusory. So far as the abstract 
 object is merely a selected feature of actual existence, it is not merely 
 not illusory ; it is real. It is something concerning which we can think 
 truly or falsely. 
 
 9. But the constructive activity of the mind variously transforms and modifies 
 
 the abstract object, in ways which may have no counterpart in the 
 actual. To this extent, the abstract object may be relatively unreal. 
 None the less, such mental constructions, so far as they belong to 
 scientific method, are experimental in their character and purpose. 
 They serve to elicit the real nature of the object as an actual feature 
 of actual existence. Thus abstract thinking, even when it is construc- 
 tive, gives rise to judgments concerning -what is real. These judgments 
 may at least be free from the error of ignorance. For the mind may 
 require no other data to operate on in answering its questions except 
 those that are already contained in the formulation of them. Errors 
 of confusion and inadvertence may still occur. But even these are 
 avoidable by simplifying the problems raised. Thus, abstract thinking 
 yields a body of certain knowledge, 
 to. Certainty, then, is attainable. It exists when a question is made to 
 answer itself, so as to render doubt meaningless. When this is so 
 the real is present to consciousness, as the illusory can never be. 
 
 I. The General Nature of Error 
 
 § 1. The question raised in the present essay is funda- 
 mentally the same as that discussed in Plato's Thecetetus. 
 The Thecztetus may be described as a dialogue on Theory 
 of Knowledge. But the central problem did not take the 
 same shape for Plato as it does for most modern epistemo- 
 logists since the time of Descartes. What the moderns 
 
i ERROR 3 
 
 trouble themselves about is the nature and possibility of 
 knowledge in general. How, they ask, can a particular 
 individual be in such relation to a reality which transcends 
 and includes his own existence as to know it. Can he 
 know it otherwise than through the affections of his own 
 consciousness which it produces ? If it can only be known 
 in this way, can it be said to be known at all ? Are not 
 his own mental states the only existences which are really 
 cognised ? Questions of this sort occupy modern philo- 
 sophers, and they have given rise to the Critique of Pure 
 Reason, among other results. But I cannot see any 
 evidence that in this form they gave much trouble to 
 Plato. The nature and possibility 6f knowledge would 
 probably not have constituted a problem for him at all, 
 had it not been for the existence of error. That we can 
 know was for him a matter of course, and it was also a 
 matter of course that we may be ignorant. But he was 
 puzzled by the conception of something intermediate be- 
 tween knowing and not knowing. If an object is present 
 to consciousness, it is pro tanto known ; if it is not present 
 to consciousness, it is not known. But in so far as it is 
 known there can be no error, because the knowledge 
 merely consists in its presence to consciousness. And 
 again, in so far as it is not known there can be no 
 error, for what is not known is not present to conscious- 
 ness : it is to consciousness as if it were non-existent, 
 and therefore the conscious subject as such cannot 
 even make a mistake concerning it. Hence we cannot 
 be in error either in respect to what we know or to 
 what we don't know, and there seems to be no third 
 alternative. 
 
 This is Plato's problem, and ours is fundamentally akin 
 to it. For with him we must assert that, in knowing, the 
 object known must be somehow thought of, and in this 
 sense present to consciousness. The grand lesson of the 
 history of Philosophy is just that all attempts to explain 
 knowledge on any other assumption tumble to pieces in 
 ruinous incoherence, and that from the nature of the case 
 they must do so. The only form such attempts can take 
 
4 G. F. STOUT i 
 
 is to treat knowledge simply as a case of resemblance, 
 conformity, or causality, between something we are 
 conscious of and something we are not conscious of. 
 What we are conscious of we may be said to know 
 immediately. But the something we are not conscious 
 of, how can that be known. The only possible pretence 
 of an answer is that the knowing of it is wholly constituted 
 by its somehow resembling, or corresponding to or causing 
 what is actually present to consciousness. But this 
 pretended answer in all its forms is utterly indefensible. 
 The supposed conformity, resemblance, or causality is 
 nothing to us unless we are in some manner aware of it. 
 If I am to think of A as resembling B or as corresponding 
 to it or as causing it, I must think of B as well as of A. 
 Both A and B must be in some way present to my 
 consciousness. 
 
 The very distinction of truth and error involves this. 
 Truth is frequently defined as the agreement, and error 
 as the disagreement, of thought with reality. But this 
 definition, taken barely as it stands, is defective and mis- 
 leading. It omits to state that the reality with which thought 
 is to agree or disagree must itself be thought of, and that 
 the thinker must intend to think of it as it is. Otherwise 
 there can be neither truth nor error. I may imagine a 
 dragon, and it may be a fact that dragons do not actually 
 exist. But if I do not intend to think of something 
 which actually exists, I am not deceived. And, on the 
 same supposition, the actual existence of dragons exactly 
 resembling what I imagine would not make my thought 
 true. It would be a curious coincidence and nothing 
 more. So in general, if we assume a sort of inner circle 
 of presented objects, and an outside circle of unpresented 
 realities, we may suppose that the presented objects are 
 similar or dissimilar to the real existences, or that in some 
 other way they correspond or fail to correspond to them. 
 But the resemblance or correspondence would not be truth 
 and the dissimilarity or non-correspondence would not be 
 error. Even to have a chance of making a mistake we 
 must think of something real and we must intend to think 
 
i ERROR 5 
 
 of it as it really is. The mistake always consists in 
 investing it, contrary to our intention, with features which 
 do not really belong to it. And just here lies the essential 
 problem. For these illusory features seem to be present 
 to cognitive consciousness in the same manner as the real 
 features are. 1 How then is it possible that they should 
 be unreal. This is our problem, and evidently it is closely 
 akin to that raised by Plato. But there is a difference 
 and the difference is important. Our difficulty arises from 
 the fact that when we are in error what is unreal appears 
 to be present to consciousness in the same manner as 
 what is real is presented when we truly know. While 
 the erroneous belief is actually being held, the illusory 
 object seems in no way to differ for the conscious 
 subject from a real object. The distinction only arises 
 when the conscious subject has discovered his mistake, 
 and then the error as such has ceased to exist. The 
 essential point is not merely that both the illusory and 
 the real features are presented, but also that they are 
 both presented as real and both believed to be real. 
 It is not enough to say that they are both really 
 appearances. We must add that they are both apparent 
 realities. 
 
 Now the question did not take this shape for Plato. 
 The difficulty which he emphasises is not that what is 
 unreal may be present to consciousness in the same way 
 as what is real. The stumbling-block for him is rather 
 that it is present to consciousness at all. For what is 
 present to consciousness must, according to him, be known ; 
 and if it is known, how can it be unreal ? On the other 
 hand if it is not present to consciousness, it is simply 
 unknown. Thus there would seem to be no room for 
 that something intermediate between knowing and being 
 ignorant which is called error. 
 
 Before proceeding to deal with our own special 
 difficulty it will be well to examine the Platonic assump- 
 
 1 It will be found in the sequel that I admit cases where the conditions which 
 make error possible are absent, and in these cases the real is present to conscious- 
 ness in a different manner from that in which the unreal is capable of being 
 presented. 
 
 M 
 
6 G. F. STOUT i 
 
 tion that whatever is in any way present to consciousness, 
 whatever is in any way thought of, is known — unless 
 indeed error be an exception. Besides knowing and 
 being mistaken it is also possible merely to be aware of 
 a mere appearance which not being taken for reality is 
 therefore not mistaken for reality. This is a point to 
 which we shall recur at a later stage. For the present I 
 wish to draw attention to another mode of thinking which 
 is neither knowing, nor mere appearance, nor error. 
 
 II. Intent and Content 
 
 § 2. Cognitive process involves a transition or at- 
 tempted transition from ignorance to knowledge, and where 
 we are trying to make this transition there may be an 
 intermediate state which is neither knowledge, nor 
 ignorance, nor error. We may be interested in knowing 
 what we do not as yet know. But we cannot be 
 interested in knowing what we do not think of at all. 
 In what way then do we think of anything before we 
 know it or appear to know it ? I reply that it is an 
 object of interrogative or quasi-interrogative consciousness. 
 It is thought of as being one and only a certain one of a 
 series or group of alternatives, though which it is we leave 
 undecided. 
 
 Sometimes the question is quite definite. The 
 alternatives are all separately formulated. Thus we may 
 ask — Is this triangle right-angled, acute, or obtuse? In 
 putting the question we seek for only a certain one of the 
 three alternatives, but until the answer is found we do 
 not know which of them we are in search of; we do not 
 know it although we think of it. 
 
 Sometimes the question is only partially definite ; only 
 some alternatives or perhaps only one of them is 
 separately formulated. Thus we may ask — Has he gone 
 to London, or where else ? 
 
 Sometimes again, the question is indefinite. What is 
 sought is merely thought of as belonging to a group or 
 series of alternatives of a certain kind, which are not 
 
i ERROR 7 
 
 separately formulated. Suppose that I am watching the , 
 movements of a bird. My mental attitude is essentially ^ 
 of the interrogative type even though I shape no definite 
 question. I am virtually asking, — what will the bird do 
 next ? The bird may do this, that, or the other, and I 
 may not formulate the alternatives. But whatever 
 changes in its position or posture may actually occur, are 
 for that very reason what I am interested in knowing 
 before I know them. I am looking for the determinate 
 while it is as yet undetermined for me. Or, to take an 
 illustration of a different kind. I have to find the 
 number which results from multiplying 1947 by 413. 
 At the outset I do not know what the number is, and yet 
 there is a sense in which I may be said to think of it. 
 I think of it determinately as the number which is to be 
 obtained by a certain process. So far I may be said to 
 know about it. But the knowledge about it is not 
 knowledge of what it is. Yet this is what I aim at 
 knowing, and therefore I must in some sense think of it. 
 I think of it indeterminately. I think of it as being 'a 
 certain one of a series of alternative numbers, which I do 
 not separately formulate. 
 
 So far I have considered only cases in which know- 
 ledge is sought before it is found, so that the transition 
 from the indeterminate to the determinate comes as the 
 answer to a question definite or indefinite. But there are 
 instances in which this is not so. There are instances 
 in which the answer seems to forestall the question. A 
 picture falls while I am writing. I was not previously 
 thinking of the picture at all, but of something quite 
 different. My attention is only drawn to the picture 
 by its fall. But the picture then becomes distinguished 
 as subject from its fall as predicate. This means that 
 the picture is thought of as it might have existed for 
 consciousness before the fall took place. It is regarded 
 as relatively undetermined and the predicate as a deter- 
 mination of it. The fall of the picture comes before 
 consciousness as if it were the answer to a question. 1 
 
 1 Of course if we suppose that the noise of the fall first awakens 
 
8 G. F. STOUT i 
 
 )h. The relation of subject and predicate is essentially- 
 analogous to what it would have been if we had pre- 
 viously been watching to see what would happen to the 
 picture. 
 
 In this and similar instances, there is an actual dis- 
 tinction of subject and predicate essentially analogous to 
 that of question and answer. But in a very large part 
 of our cognitive experience no such distinction is actually 
 made. I look, let us say, at my book-shelves, and I am 
 aware of the books as being on the shelves and of the 
 shelves as containing the books. But I do not formulate 
 verbally or otherwise the propositions : — " The books are 
 on the shelves," or " The shelves contain the books." 
 Neither the books nor the shelves are regarded as re- 
 latively indeterminate and as receiving fresh determination 
 in the fact that one of them stands in a certain relation to 
 the other. Again, I may meet a friend and begin to talk 
 to him on some political topic, proceeding on the assump- 
 tion that he agrees with me. I find that he does not, 
 and only then do I wake up to the fact that I have been 
 making an assumption. And it is only at this point that 
 the distinction of subject and predicate emerges. Such 
 latent or unformulated presuppositions are constantly 
 present in our mental life. They are constantly involved 
 in the putting of questions. They are constantly involved 
 in the conception of the subjects to which we attach pre- 
 dicates, and also in the conception of the predicates. 
 The nature, function, and varieties of this kind of cog- 
 nitive consciousness we cannot here discuss. It is suffi- 
 cient for our purpose to note that all such cognitions are 
 capable of being translated into the subject -predicate 
 form, without loss or distortion of meaning. Further, this 
 translation is necessary if we are to submit them to 
 logical examination. In particular, we cannot otherwise 
 deal with any question relating to their truth or falsity. 
 The disjunction, true or false, does not present itself to 
 
 the question — What is falling ? before we think of the picture, the fall is subject 
 and the picture predicate. But I do not think that this account of the matter 
 always holds good in such cases. 
 
i ERROR 9 
 
 consciousness until we distinguish subject and predicate. 
 In the absence of this distinction there is only uncon- 
 scious presupposing or assuming. But when the dis- 
 tinction is made it is essentially analogous to that of 
 question and answer. 
 
 So far as our thought is indeterminate there can be 
 neither truth nor error. But it must be remembered that 
 our thought is never purely indeterminate. A question 
 always limits the range of alternatives within which its 
 answer is sought ; and the question itself may be infected 
 with error. A man for instance may set out to find the 
 square root of two. In the formulation of the question 
 he leaves it undetermined what special numerical value 
 the root of two has. But he assumes that it has some 
 determinate numerical value. To this extent his question 
 is infected with error, and it can have no real answer 
 unless it is reshaped. If he seems to himself to find an 
 answer, he does but commit a further error. What he 
 thinks he wants to know, is not what he really wants to 
 know. Hence in finding what he really wants to know 
 he must alter the form of his question. 
 
 This leads me to make a suggestion in terminology. 
 The term 'content of thought' is perpetually being used 
 with perplexing vagueness. I propose to restrict its 
 application. We cannot, without doing violence to 
 language, say that the indeterminate, as such, is part of 
 the content of thought. For it is precisely what the 
 thought does not contain, but only intends to contain. 
 On the contrary, we can say with perfect propriety that it 
 belongs to the intent of the thought. It is what the 
 conscious subject intends when its selective interest 
 singles out this or that object. 
 
 From this point of view we can deal advantageously 
 with a number of logical and epistemological problems. 
 For instance it throws light on the proposed division of 
 propositions into analytic and synthetic. Whatever can 
 be regarded as a judgment, whether expressed in words 
 or not, is and must be both analytic and synthetic. It is 
 synthetic as regards content and analytic as regards intent. 
 
io G. F. STOUT i 
 
 While I am watching a bird, whatever movement it may- 
 make next belongs to the intent of my thought, even before 
 it occurs. It is what I intend to observe. But the special 
 change of posture or position does not enter into the con- 
 tent of my thought until it actually takes place under my 
 eyes. Hence each step in the process is synthetic as re- 
 gards content though analytic as regards intent. This holds 
 generally for all predication which is not mere tautology. 
 If the predicate did not belong to the intent of its subject, 
 there would be nothing to connect it with this special 
 subject rather than with any other. If it already formed 
 part of the content there would be no advance and there- 
 fore no predication at all. 
 
 From the same point of view, we may regard error as 
 being directly or indirectly a discrepancy between the 
 intent and content of cognitive consciousness. 
 
 Sometimes the discrepancy lies in a latent assumption. 
 The initial question which determines the intent of thought 
 may itself be infected with error, as in the example of a 
 man setting out to find the square root of two. In such 
 cases it would seem that a man cannot reach truth 
 unless he finds something which he does not seek. 
 But the reason is that there is already a discrepancy 
 between intent and content in the very formulation 
 of his initial question. The man is interested in 
 formulating an answerable question, and he fails to 
 do so. Similarly wherever error occurs there is always 
 an express or implied discrepancy between intent and 
 content. 
 
 It follows that truth and error are essentially relative 
 to the interest of the subject. To put a question seriously 
 is to want to know the answer. A person cannot be right 
 or wrong without reference to some interest or purpose. 
 A man wanders about a town which is quite unfamiliar 
 without any definite aim except to pass the time. Just 
 in so far as he has no definite aim he cannot go astray. 
 He is equally right whether he takes a turn which leads 
 to the market-place or one which leads to the park. If 
 he wants to amuse himself by sight-seeing it may be a 
 
i ERROR 1 1 
 
 mistake for him to go in this direction rather than in that. 
 But if he does not care for sight-seeing, he cannot commit 
 this error. On the other hand if his business demands 
 that he should reach the market-place by a certain time, 
 it may be a definite blunder for him to take the turn 
 which leads to the park. In this example the interest is 
 primarily practical and the blunder is a practical blunder. 
 But the same principle holds good for all Tightness and 
 wrongness even in matters which appear purely theoretical. 
 Our thought can be true or false only in relation to the 
 object which we mean or intend. And we mean or 
 intend that object because we are, from whatever motive, 
 interested in it rather than in other things. If a man 
 says that the sun rises and sets, he may refer only to the 
 behaviour of the visible appearance of the sun, as seen 
 from the earth's surface. In that case you do not convict 
 him of error when you remind him that it is the earth 
 which moves and not the sun. For you are referring to 
 something in which he was not interested when he made 
 the statement. Error is defeat. We mean to do one 
 thing and we actually do another. So far as the error is 
 merely theoretical what we mean to do is to think of a. 
 certain thing as it is, and what we actually do is to think 
 of it as it is not. 
 
 This implies that the thing we think of has a constitu- 
 tion of its own independent of our thinking — a constitution 
 to which our thinking may or may not conform. A 
 question is only possible on the assumption that it has 
 an answer predetermined by the nature of the object of 
 inquiry. It is this feature which marks off the interroga- 
 tive consciousness peculiar to cognitive process from the 
 form of indeterminate thinking which is found in the play 
 of fancy. While the play of fancy is proceeding, its 
 object is at any moment only partially determined in 
 consciousness, and each step in advance consists in fixing 
 on one alternative to the exclusion of others. But the 
 intent of imaginative thinking is different from that of 
 cognitive, and consequently the decision between com- 
 peting alternatives is otherwise made. An examination 
 
12 G. F. STOUT i 
 
 of this difference will carry us a step farther in our 
 inquiry. 
 
 III. Imaginative and Cognitive Process 
 
 S 3. Imaginary objects as such are creatures of our own 
 making. When we make up a fairy-tale for a child the 
 resulting object of consciousness is merely the work of 
 the mind, and it is not taken by us for anything else. 
 In the development of intent into content, of indeterminate 
 into determinate thinking, the decision among alternatives 
 is made merely as we please, whatever be our motive. 
 It depends purely on subjective selection so far as the 
 process is imaginative. 
 
 It is necessary to add this saving clause. For no 
 imaginative process is merely imaginative. Even in the 
 wildest play of fancy, the range of subjective selection is 
 restricted by limiting conditions. Gnomes must not be 
 made to fly, or giants to live in flower-cups. Thackeray's 
 freedom of selection in composing Vanity Fair was 
 circumscribed by his purpose of giving a faithful repre- 
 sentation of certain phases of human life. In so far as 
 such limiting conditions operate, the mental attitude is 
 not merely imaginative. It is imaginative only in so far 
 as the limiting conditions still leave open a free field for 
 the loose play of subjective selection. 
 
 This freedom of subjective selection is absent in 
 cognitive process. Instead of deciding between alterna- 
 tives according to his own good pleasure, the conscious 
 subject seeks to have a decision imposed upon him 
 independently of his wish or will. It is true that 
 cognitive process may include a varied play of sub- 
 jective selection. But there is one thing which must 
 not be determined by subjective selection. It is the 
 deciding which among a group of alternative qualifica- 
 tions is to be ascribed to the object we are interested 
 in knowing. 
 
 In cognitive process as such we are active merely in 
 order that we may be passive. Our activity is successful 
 
i ERROR 13 
 
 only in so far as its result is determined for us and not 
 by us. 
 
 In this sense we may say that the work of the mind 
 when its interest is cognitive has an experimental character. 
 What is ordinarily called an experiment is a typical case 
 of this mental attitude. A chemist applies a test to a 
 substance. The application of the test is his own doing. 
 But the result does not depend on him : he must simply 
 await it. Yet he was active only in order to obtain this 
 result. He was active that he might enable himself to 
 be passive. He was active in order to give the object an 
 opportunity of manifesting its own independent nature. 
 His activity essentially consists in the shaping of a 
 question so as to wrest an answer from the object of 
 inquiry. In all cognitive process the mental attitude is 
 essentially analogous. Suppose that I am interested in 
 knowing whether any number of terms in the series 
 1 +2 + 4 +^, etc., have for their sum the number 2. I 
 may proceed by actually adding. This is a mental 
 experiment, but it turns out to be unsuccessful. It 
 does not transform my initial question into a shape in 
 which it wrests its own answer from its object. By 
 adding any given number of terms I find that the sum is 
 less than two. But the doubt always remains whether 
 by taking more terms I may not reach a different result. 
 Under this mode of treatment my object refuses to mani- 
 fest its nature so as to answer my question. I fail to 
 obtain an answer by waiting for data which I have not 
 got — by waiting till some number of terms shall present 
 itself having 2 for their sum. Accordingly I re- 
 sort to another form of experiment. I appeal to ex- 
 perience a priori, instead of experience a posteriori. 
 Instead of looking for data which I have not got, I try 
 to obtain an answer by manipulating the data which I 
 already possess in the very conception of the series as 
 such, and of the number 2. I fix attention on the form 
 of serial transition, and I inquire whether this is capable 
 of yielding a term such as will make 2 when it is 
 added to the sum of preceding terms. I find that 
 
i 4 G. F. STOUT i 
 
 such a term must be equal to the term that precedes 
 it, and that according to the law of the series each 
 term is the half of that which precedes it. Hence 
 no number of terms can have 2 as their sum. My 
 experiment is successful. It translates my question 
 into a shape in which it compels an answer from its 
 object. 
 
 Suppose again that I am verifying the statement that 
 two straight lines cannot enclose a space. I conceive 
 two lines as straight, ignoring all else but their being 
 lines and their being straight. I then consider the 
 varying changes of relative position of which they are 
 capable, and I find by trial that only certain general 
 kinds of variation are possible. If I think of them as 
 not meeting at all, they refuse to enclose a space. The 
 same is true when they are thought of as meeting at one 
 point only. But if they meet at more than one point 
 they insist on coinciding at all points. This result of my 
 experiment does not depend on my activity ; it is deter- 
 mined for me by the nature of the object on which I 
 operate, by the constitution of space and of straight 
 lines. 
 
 It will be seen that I have included under the term 
 experiment two very different groups of cases. To the 
 first group belong such instances as the application of a 
 chemical test. Their distinctive character is that an 
 answer to the question raised cannot be obtained merely 
 by operating on the data which are already presupposed 
 in putting the question itself. When I am watching to 
 see what a bird will do next, the decision does not come 
 merely from a consideration of what I already know 
 about the bird. The decision is given by a posteriori 
 experience. On the other hand, if I want to know 
 whether two straight lines can enclose a space I need no 
 data except lines, straightness, and space as such. I can 
 shape my question by mentally operating on these data 
 so that it answers itself. The decision is given by a 
 priori experience. But both results obtained a priori and 
 those obtained a postei'iori are equally due to an experi- 
 
i ERROR 1 5 
 
 mental process, to an activity that exists in order that it 
 may be determined by its object. 
 
 IV. Mere Appearance and Reality 
 
 § 4. All error consists in taking for real what is mere 
 appearance. In order to solve the problem of error we 
 must therefore discover the meaning of this distinction 
 between mere appearance and reality. We are now in a 
 position to take this step. We have a clue in the 
 foregoing discussion of the nature of the imaginary object 
 as such. The imaginary object as such is unreal and we 
 see quite clearly wherein its unreality consists. It is 
 unreal inasmuch as its imaginary features as such have 
 no being independently of the psychical process by which 
 they come to be presented to the individual consciousness. 
 They are merely the work of the mind, merely the product 
 of subjective selection and. they are therefore mere 
 appearances. But though they are mere appearances, 
 they are not therefore illusory or deceptive. They are 
 not deceptive, because they are not taken for real. 
 While the purely imaginative attitude is maintained, 
 they are not taken either for real or unreal. The question 
 does not arise, because in imagination as such we are not 
 interested in the constitution of an object as independent 
 of the process by which we come to apprehend it. 1 On 
 the other hand when the question is raised whether what 
 we merely imagine has this independent being, we commit 
 no error if we refuse to affirm that it has. Mere appear- 
 ance is not error so long as we abstain from confusing it 
 with reality. 
 
 The imaginary object is only one case of mere appear- 
 ance. It is the case in which the nature of what is 
 presented to consciousness is determined merely by the 
 psychical process of subjective selection. But there is 
 always mere appearance when and so far as the nature of 
 
 1 The fact that the object is merely imaginary is not attended to. We do not 
 contrast it as unreal with something else as real. If we are externally reminded 
 of its unreality, the flow of fancy is disturbed. The flow of fancy is also disturbed 
 if we are called on to believe that our fancies are facts. The whole question of 
 reality or unreality is foreign to the imaginative attitude. 
 
1 6 G. F. STOUT i 
 
 a presented object is determined merely by the psycho- 
 logical conditions of its presentation, whatever these may 
 be. There is always mere appearance when and so far 
 as a presented object has features due merely to the 
 special conditions of the flow of individual consciousness 
 as one particular existence among others, connected with 
 a particular organism and affected by varying circum- 
 stances of time and place. 
 
 In ordinary sense-perception the thing perceived is 
 constantly presented under modifications due to the 
 varying conditions of the perceptual process. But what 
 we are interested in knowing is the thing so far as it has 
 a constitution of its own independent of these conditions. 
 Hence whatever qualifications of the object are recognised 
 as having their source merely in the conditions of its 
 presentation are pro tanto contrasted with its reality as 
 being merely its appearances. 
 
 An object looked at through a microscope is presented 
 as much larger and as containing far more detail than when 
 seen by the naked eye. But the thing itself remains the 
 same size and contains just the same amount and kind of 
 detail. The difference is due merely to conditions affect- 
 ing the process of perception, and it is therefore merely 
 apparent. On the other hand, the details which become 
 visible when we use the microscope, and which were 
 previously invisible, are ascribed to the real object. The 
 parts of the object being viewed under uniform perceptual 
 conditions, whatever differences are presented must be due 
 to it, and not to the conditions of its presentation. The 
 visible extension of a surface increases or diminishes 
 according as I approach or recede from it, and the visible 
 configuration of things varies according to the point of 
 view from which I look at them. But these changes 
 being merely due to the varying position of my body 
 and its parts are regarded as mere appearances so far 
 as they are noted at all. 1 If I close my eyes or look 
 
 1 To a large extent they pass unnoted. We have acquired the habit of 
 ignoring them. So far as this is the case, they are not apprehended as appear- 
 ances of the thing perceived. 
 
i ERROR 17 
 
 away, objects, previously seen, disappear from view. But 
 this being due merely to the closing of my eyes or my 
 turning them in another direction is no real change in 
 the things. They are really just as they would have been 
 if I had continued to look at them. 
 
 It is important to notice that in cases of this kind the 
 mere appearance is not to be identified with any actual 
 sense-presentation. The appearance is due to a certain 
 interpretation of the sensible content of perception, 
 suggested by previous experience. When we see a stick 
 partially immersed in a pool, the visual presentation 
 is such as to suggest a bend in the stick itself. Even 
 while we are denying that the stick itself is bent, we are 
 thinking of a bend in it. Otherwise the act of denial 
 would be impossible. This being understood, it is easy 
 to see that all cases of mere appearance are in principle 
 analogous to the examples drawn from sense-perception. 
 Mere appearance exists wherever anything is thought of 
 as having a character which does not belong to it inde- 
 pendently of the psychical process by which it is appre- 
 hended. Unless this character is affirmed of its inde- 
 pendent reality, there is no error. If a man denies that 
 two lines are commensurable, or if he questions whether 
 they are so or not, their commensurableness must have 
 been suggested to his mind. If the lines are really 
 incommensurable, this suggestion is mere appearance. 
 Should he affirm them to be commensurable he is in 
 error. 
 
 We now pass to two important points of principle. 
 In the first place it should be clearly understood that 
 mere appearance is a qualification of the object appre- 
 hended and not of the mind which apprehends it. There 
 is here a complication due to an ambiguity in the term, 
 appearance. It may mean either the presenting of a 
 certain appearance or the appearance presented. The last 
 sense is that in which I have hitherto used the word in 
 speaking of mere appearance. A stick, partly immersed 
 in a pool, appears bent in the sense that it presents the 
 appearance of being bent. The bend is the appearance 
 
 C 
 
1 8 G. F. STOUT i 
 
 presented. Now the presenting of this appearance is an 
 adjective of the stick as an independent reality. The 
 stick which is really straight really presents the appearance 
 of being bent. It does not merely appear to appear 
 bent : it really appears so. Given the psychological and 
 psychophysical conditions of its presentation, it is part of 
 its independently real nature that it should wear this 
 appearance. But the apparent bend is not a qualifica- 
 tion of the independently real stick. It is a qualification 
 of a total object constituted by the real stick so far as it 
 is present to consciousness and also by certain other 
 presented features which are due merely to the special 
 conditions under which the real stick is apprehended. 
 Mere appearance is in no sense an adjective of the cogni- 
 tive subject. The person to whom a straight staff appears 
 as bent when it is partially dipped in a pool is not himself 
 apparently bent on that account, either bodily or mentally. 
 He who imagines a golden mountain is not himself the 
 appearance of a golden mountain : his psychical processes 
 are not apparently golden or mountainous. The existence 
 of mere appearance is not that of a psychical fact or event 
 except in the special case where the real object thought 
 of happens to be itself of a psychical nature. 
 
 In the second place, the distinction between mere 
 appearance and reality is relative to the special object we 
 are interested in. In ordinary sense-perception we are 
 interested in the objects perceived so far as they have a 
 constitution independent of the variable conditions bodily 
 and mental of the perceptual process. Contrast this with 
 the special case of a beginner learning to draw from 
 models. For him what in ordinary sense-perception is 
 mere appearance becomes the reality. He has to repro- 
 duce merely what the object looks like from the point of 
 view at which he sees it. And he finds this a hard task. 
 The visual presentation is apt to be apprehended by him 
 as having qualifications which do not belong to its own 
 independent constitution, but are merely due to the 
 conditions of his own psychical processes in relation to it. 
 His established habit of attending only to physical 
 
i ERROR 19 
 
 magnitude and configuration leads him to think of 
 physical fact even in attempting to think only of the 
 sensory presentation. Thus a child in drawing the profile 
 of a face will put in two eyes. But the physical fact so 
 far as it is unseen does not belong to the reality of the 
 visual presentation. It is therefore mere appearance 
 relatively to this reality, and in so far as it is confused 
 with this reality, it is not only mere appearance but error. 
 
 V. Special Conditions of Error 
 
 § 5. Having defined what we mean by mere appear- 
 ance we have now only one more step to take in order to 
 account for error. We have to show how the mere appear- 
 ance of anything comes to be confused with its reality. 
 
 It is clear from the previous discussion that there can 
 be neither truth nor falsehood except in so far as the 
 mind is dealing with an object which has a constitution 
 predetermined independently of the psychical process 
 by which it is cognised. 
 
 Such logical puzzles as the Litigiosus and Crocodilus 
 involve an attempt to affirm or deny something which 
 is not really predetermined independently of the affirma- 
 tion or denial of it. In the Litigiosus the judgment to 
 be formed is supposed to be part of the reality to which 
 thought must adjust itself in forming it. Euathlus was 
 a pupil of Protagoras in Rhetoric. He paid half the fee 
 demanded by his teacher before receiving lessons and 
 agreed to pay the remainder after his first lawsuit if 
 he won it. His first lawsuit was one in which Protagoras 
 sued him for the money. The jury found themselves in 
 what appeared a hopeless perplexity. It seemed as if 
 they could not affirm either side to be in the right without 
 putting that side in the wrong. The difficulty arose from 
 the attempt to conform their decision to a determination 
 of the real which had no existence independently of the 
 decision itself. Apart from the judgment which they 
 were endeavouring to form, the reality was indeterminate 
 and it could not therefore determine their thought in the 
 
20 G. F. STOUT i 
 
 process of judging. The Crocodilus illustrates the same 
 principle in a different way. A crocodile had seized a 
 child, but promised the mother that if she told him truly 
 whether or not he was going to give it back, he would 
 restore it. There would be no difficulty here if the 
 mother's guess were supposed to refer to an intention 
 which the crocodile had already formed. But he is 
 assumed to hold himself free to regulate his conduct 
 according to what she may happen to say, and so to 
 falsify her statement at will. There is therefore no 
 predetermined reality to which her thought can conform 
 or fail to conform ; which alternative is real, is not pre- 
 determined independently of her own affirmation of one 
 of them. Hence an essential condition of either true or 
 false judgment is wanting. One consequence of the 
 general principle is that a proposition cannot contain any 
 statement concerning its own truth or falsity. Before the 
 proposition is made in one sense or another its own 
 truth or falsity is not a predetermined fact to which 
 thought can adjust itself. Thus if a man says, " The 
 statement I am now making is false," he is not making 
 a statement at all. On the other hand, he would be 
 speaking significantly and truly if he said " The statement 
 I am now making contains nine words." For he can 
 count each word after determining to use it. His pre- 
 cedent determination to use the word is an independent 
 fact which he does not make in the act of affirming it. 
 
 For error to exist the mind must work in such a way 
 as to defeat its own purpose. Its interest must lie in 
 conforming its thought to the predetermined constitution 
 of some real object. It must be endeavouring to think 
 of this as it is independently of the psychological 
 conditions of the thinking process itself. And yet, in the 
 very attempt to do so, it must qualify its object by 
 features which are merely due to such psychological 
 conditions. 
 
 I cannot pretend to give anything approaching a full 
 analysis of the various special circumstances which give 
 rise to this confusion of appearance and reality. But 
 
i ERROR 21 
 
 the following indication will serve to illustrate the general 
 principle involved. 
 
 Errors may be roughly classified under two heads 
 which we may designate (i) as errors of confusion, 
 and (2) as errors of ignorance, inadvertence, and forget- 
 fulness. All errors involve a confusion of appearance 
 and reality. But this confusion is the error itself, not 
 a condition determining its occurrence. When we speak 
 of an error of confusion, we mean an error which not 
 only is a confusion, but has its source in a confusion. 
 Again, all errors involve some ignorance, inadvertence, 
 or forgetfulness. Whenever any one makes a mistake, 
 there is something unknown or unheeded which would 
 have saved him from error if he had known and taken 
 account of it. But we can distinguish between cases in 
 which ignorance or inadvertence or forgetfulness are the 
 sole or the main source of the erroneousness of a belief, 
 and those in which another and a positive condition plays 
 a prominent part. This other positive condition is what 
 I call confusion. I shall begin by explaining wherein 
 it consists, and illustrate it by typical examples. 
 
 (1) Errors of Confusion 
 
 § 6. There is a confusion wherever our cognitive judg- 
 ment is determined by something else than the precise 
 object which we are interested in knowing. We mean to 
 wrest a decision from just this object concerning which the 
 question is raised ; but owing to psychological conditions, 
 other factors intervene without our noticing their opera- 
 tion and determine, or contribute to determine, our 
 thought. Optical illusions supply many examples. I 
 must content myself with one very simple illustration 
 of this kind. 
 
 / 
 
 In the above figure there are two straight lines, a b 
 and ef\ the part c d is marked off on a b, and the 
 
22 G. F. STOUT i 
 
 part g h on e f. c d is really equal to g h. But 
 most persons on a cursory glance would judge it to be 
 longer. The reason is that though we mean to compare 
 only the absolute length of c d with the absolute length 
 of g h, yet without our knowing it, other factors help 
 to determine the result. These are the relative length 
 of c d as compared with a b, and the relative length 
 of g h as compared with e f. This example is typical. 
 In all such instances we mean our judgment to depend 
 on comparison of two magnitudes as presented to the 
 eye. But these magnitudes are presented in more or 
 less intimate union with other items so as to form with 
 these a group which the attention naturally apprehends 
 as a whole. Hence there is a difficulty in mentally 
 isolating the magnitudes themselves from the contexts 
 in which they occur so as to compare these magnitudes 
 only. We seek to be determined by the nature of the 
 object which we are interested in knowing, but we escape 
 our own notice in being determined by something else. 
 This is confusion. 
 
 Another most prolific source of confusion is found in 
 pre- formed association. All associations are in them- 
 selves facts of the individual mind and not attributes of 
 anything else. If the idea of smoke always calls up in 
 my mind the idea of fire as its source, this is something 
 which is true of me, and not of the fire or the smoke as 
 independent realities. It might seem from this that 
 whenever our judgment of truth and falsehood is deter- 
 mined by association, we commit a confusion. But this 
 is not so ; for it is the function of association to record 
 the results of past experience ; and when the results 
 recorded are strictly relevant to the object we are 
 interested in knowing, and to the special question at 
 issue, there is no confusion. 
 
 The association between 12x12 and equality to 
 144 registers the result of previous multiplication of 12 
 by 1 2. There is therefore no confusion in allowing it 
 to determine our cognitive judgment. But the associative 
 mechanism may become deranged so that 12x12 calls 
 
i ERROR 23 
 
 up 154 instead of 144. In that case to rely on it as a 
 record involves an error of confusion. 
 
 It often happens that certain connections of ideas 
 are insistently and persistently obtruded on consciousness 
 owing to associations which have not been formed 
 through experiences relevant to the question at issue. 
 So long and so far as their irrelevance is unknown or 
 unheeded, the irrelevant association determines the course 
 of our thought in the same way as the relevant. Take 
 by way of illustration an argument recently used by an 
 earth-flattener. The earth must be flat ; otherwise the 
 water in the Suez Canal would flow out at both ends. 
 The associations operative in this case, are those due to 
 experience of spherical bodies situated on the earth's 
 surface. Whenever the earth-flattener thinks of the 
 earth as a globe, inveterate custom drives him to think 
 of it as he has been used to think of all the other globes, 
 of which he has had experience. But the question at 
 issue relates to the earth as distinguished from bodies 
 on its surface. Hence a fallacy of confusion. 
 
 One effect of repeated advertisements such as those of 
 Beecham's pills, covering several columns of a newspaper, 
 is to produce this kind of illusion. Self-praise is no 
 recommendation. But self-praise skilfully and obtrusively 
 reiterated may suffice to produce an association of ideas 
 which influences belief. 1 
 
 Errors due to ambiguity of words come under this 
 head. A word is associated with diverse though allied 
 meanings, and, as we go on using it in what aims at being 
 continuous thought, one meaning insensibly substitutes 
 itself for another. Being unaware of the shifting of our 
 object from A to A f we go on assuming that what we 
 have found to be true of A is true of A'. We begin for 
 instance by talking of opponents of government, meaning 
 
 1 Many persons have a prejudice against advertisements. I share this 
 prejudice myself. And yet the obtrusive vividness and persistent reiteration of 
 some of them does now and then produce in me a momentary tendency to believe 
 which might easily become an actual belief if I were not on my guard. Allitera- 
 tive and rhetorical contrast often help to stamp in the association. " Pink pills 
 for pale people " is a good instance. Of course the whole effect of advertisement 
 cannot be explained in this way. 
 
24 G. F. STOUT i 
 
 advocates of anarchy, and we proceed to apply what 
 we have said of these to opponents of some existing 
 government. 
 
 " Bias " is a source of confusion distinct from irrelevant 
 association, though the two frequently co-operate to 
 produce error. Bias exists so far as there is a tendency 
 to accept one answer to a question rather than another 
 because this answer obtrudes itself on consciousness 
 through its connection with the emotions, sentiments, 
 desires, etc. of the subject or in one word, because it 
 is specially interesting. The interest is most frequently 
 agreeable. But it may also be disagreeable. In return- 
 ing home after the discovery of the famous footprint, 
 Robinson Crusoe's terror caused him to mistake every 
 bush and tree, and to fancy every stump at a distance 
 to be a man. To say that a man's mind is intensely 
 occupied in escaping or guarding against danger, is 
 equivalent to saying that he is intensely interested in 
 finding out what the danger is and where it lies. Hence 
 he will be on the alert for signs and indications of peril. 
 He will therefore attend to features of his environment 
 which would otherwise have passed unnoted, and he 
 will neglect others which he would otherwise have 
 attended to. Thus fear may influence belief by determin- 
 ing what data are, or are not, taken into account. By 
 excluding relevant data it may give rise to error of 
 inadvertence. But besides this the data which fear 
 selects are also emphasised by it. They obtrude them- 
 selves with an insistent vivacity proportioned to the 
 intensity of the emotion. This insistent vivacity directly 
 contributes to determine belief and becomes a source of 
 error of confusion. In view of current statements this 
 last point needs to be argued. 
 
 The prevailing view appears to be that errors due to 
 bias are merely errors of inadvertence. Dr. Ward, for 
 example, strongly takes up this position. " Emotion and 
 desire," he remarks, " are frequent indirect causes of 
 subjective certainty, in so far as they determine the 
 constituents of consciousness at the moment — pack the 
 
i ERROR 25 
 
 jury or suborn the witnesses as it were. But the ground 
 of certainty is in all cases some quality or some relation 
 of these presentations inter se. In a sense, therefore, the 
 ground of all certainty is objective — in the sense, that 
 is, of being something at least directly and immediately 
 determined for the subject and not by him." l 
 
 What Ward's argument really proves is that subjective 
 bias cannot be recognised by the subject himself as a 
 ground or reason for believing. It does not follow that 
 it may not directly influence belief through confusion. 
 In cases of confusion we seek control proceeding from the 
 nature of our object, and we find our thought determined 
 by something else which we fail to distinguish from the 
 objective control we are in search of. Now there seems 
 to be no reason why subjective interest should not, in this 
 way, mask itself as objective control. Connection with 
 emotion and desire may give to certain ideas a persistent 
 obtrusiveness which is not always adequately traced to its 
 source. But this persistent obtrusiveness, when and so far 
 as it is not traced to its source in emotion and desire, must 
 appear as if it arose from the nature of the object. It 
 will thus appear to the subject as something which 
 determines him and is not determined by him. This 
 confusion may assume three forms. In the first place 
 there are instances in which it is very difficult to dis- 
 cover any other cause of belief except subjective bias. 
 The person who holds the belief cannot assign any reason 
 for it except that he feels it to be true. Sometimes, no 
 doubt, there may be in such cases an objective ground 
 which the believer finds it impossible to express or 
 indicate to others. But there are instances in which the 
 sole or the main factor seems to be subjective bias. 
 What is believed obtrudes itself upon consciousness vividly 
 and persistently because of its peculiar kind and degree 
 of interest so that it is difficult to frame the idea of 
 alternative possibilities save in a comparatively faint, 
 imperfect, and intermittent way. 
 
 The second class of cases is less problematical. I refer 
 
 1 Article on "Psychology," in Ency. Brit. p. 83. 
 
26 G. F. STOUT i 
 
 to instances in which there are relevant reasons for belief 
 but reasons which are inadequate to account for the actual 
 degree of assurance, apart from the co-operation of bias. 
 A regards B with hatred and jealousy so that the mere 
 imagination of B's disgrace or ruin has a fascination for 
 him. Something occurs which would produce in an 
 impartial person a suspicion that B had been behaving in 
 a disgraceful way. A at once believes the worst with 
 unwavering decision and tenacity. It may be that the 
 impartial person, who only entertains a suspicion, has just 
 as restricted a view of the evidence as A. The restriction 
 may be due to ignorance or indifference in his case, and 
 mental preoccupation in A's. But for both the relevant 
 evidence may be virtually the same. The difference is 
 that in A's mind it is reinforced and sustained by 
 subjective bias which he does not sufficiently allow for. 
 In a third class of instances irrelevant association co- 
 operates with subjective bias. This is perhaps the most 
 fertile source of superstitions and of those savage beliefs 
 of which superstitions are survivals. Take for example 
 the tendency which some uneducated persons and even 
 some who are educated find irresistible, to think of their 
 bodies as still sentient after death. Sit tibi terra levis 
 is more than a metaphor. It points back to the belief 
 that the weight of the superincumbent earth actually 
 distresses the corpse. It is a Mahometan superstition 
 that the believing dead suffer when the unhallowed foot of 
 a Christian treads on their graves. In the old Norse 
 legends to lay hands on the treasure hidden in the tomb 
 of a chief is to run a serious risk of rousing its owner from 
 his long sleep to defend his possessions. Perhaps there 
 are few people who look forward to their own funeral 
 without figuring themselves to be present at it not only 
 in body but in mind. This whole point of view is in part 
 due to a firmly established association arising from the 
 intimate connection of mind and body during life. But 
 besides this we must also take into account the gruesome 
 fascination of such ideas. Their vivid and absorbing 
 interest makes it difficult to sret rid of them, and this 
 
i ERROR 27 
 
 persistent obtrusiveness in so far as it is not traced to its 
 source in psychological conditions contributes to 
 determine belief in their reality. 
 
 (2) Errors of Ignorance and Inadvertence 
 
 We turn now from the error of confusion to the error 
 of mere ignorance, which must be taken to include all 
 forgetfulness or inadvertence. As I have before pointed 
 out, all error involves some ignorance or inadvertence ; 
 but in the case of confusion there is also some other 
 positive ground of the erroneousness of the belief. An 
 irrelevant condition operates as if it were relevant. It 
 would not do so, if we were fully and persistently aware of 
 its presence and influence, and to this extent the error of 
 confusion is one of ignorance or inadvertence ; but the 
 ignorance and inadvertence is not the sole cause of error. 
 There is also the undetected influence of the irrelevant 
 factor determining the course of thought. In the error 
 of mere ignorance or inadvertence, on the other hand, the 
 sole ground of the erroneousness of the belief lies in the 
 insufficiency of the data, at the time when it is formed. 
 But here we must guard against a misapprehension. The 
 error is not identical with the ignorance or inadvertence. 
 It is a belief having a positive content of its own. Nor 
 is it correct to say even that the determining cause of 
 this belief lies in the ignorance or inadvertence. Mere 
 negation or privation cannot be the sole ground of any 
 positive result. What directly determines belief is the 
 data which are presented, not anything which is un- 
 presented, and we must add to these as another 
 positive condition the urgency of the interest which 
 demands a decision and will not permit of a suspense of 
 judgment. It is these factors which are operative in 
 producing the belief. Ignorance and inadvertence 
 account only for its erroneousness. In all cognitive 
 process we seek to be determined by the nature of our 
 object. But if the object is only partially known, what is 
 unknown may be relevant so that if it had been known 
 
28 G. F. STOUT i 
 
 and heeded another decision would have been imposed 
 on us. 
 
 As an example of error due to mere ignorance, I may 
 refer to a personal experience of my own. Some time 
 ago I set out to visit a friend who, as I assumed, was 
 living in Furnival's Inn. I found on arrival that the 
 whole building had been pulled down. My error in this 
 case was not due to any confusion. The evidence on 
 which I was relying was all relevant and such as I still 
 continue to trust on similar occasions. I went wrong 
 simply because certain events had been occurring since 
 my previous visit to Furnival's Inn without my knowing 
 of them. 
 
 Inadvertence is not sharply divided from mere 
 ignorance. It includes all failure to bring to conscious- 
 ness knowledge, already acquired and capable of recall, at 
 the time when it is required for determining our decision. 
 It may also be taken to include other failures to take into 
 account knowledge which would have been immediately 
 and easily accessible if we had turned our attention in the 
 right direction. Mill gives many examples under the 
 head " Fallacies of Non-observation." From him I quote 
 the following : — " John Wesley, while he commemorates 
 the triumph of sulphur and supplication over his bodily 
 infirmities, forgets to appreciate the resuscitating influence 
 of four months' repose from his apostolic labours." 
 Wesley knew that he had taken rest and also that rest 
 has commonly a recuperative effect in such cases. His 
 failure lay in omitting to take these facts into account 
 owing to subjective bias, as an amateur physician with 
 crochets and as a religious enthusiast. 
 
 So far as error is traceable to ignorance or inadvertence, 
 it is perhaps abstractedly possible to conceive that it 
 might have been avoided by an absolute suspense of 
 judgment. I might have refused to count on the con- 
 tinued existence of Furnival's Inn, or even on the chance 
 of it, on the ground that I did not know all that had 
 happened in relation to it, since I saw it last. But such 
 suspense of judgment cannot be uncompromisingly main- 
 
i ERROR 29 
 
 tained as a general attitude throughout our whole mental 
 life. It would be equivalent to a refusal to live at all. 
 Any one who carried out the principle consistently would 
 not say " this is a chair " when he saw one. He would 
 rather say, " This is what, if my memory serves me right, 
 I am accustomed to regard as the visual appearance of a 
 chair." In thus cutting off the chance of error we should 
 at the same time cut off the chance of truth. In order 
 to advance either in theory or practice, we must presume — 
 bet on our partial knowledge. We must take the risk 
 due to an unexplored remainder of conditions which may 
 be relevant to the issue we have to decide on. But there 
 is another alternative. A mental attitude is possible 
 intermediate between absolute suspense of judgment and 
 undoubting acceptance of a proposition as true. We 
 may judge that the balance of evidence is in favour of 
 the proposition. Instead of unreservedly expecting to 
 find Furnival's Inn, I might have said to myself that it 
 was a hundred to one I should find it. So far as this 
 proposition has a practical significance as a guide to 
 action it can only mean that I should be right in relying 
 on similar evidence in 99 cases out of 100. But such an 
 attitude does not really evade the possibility of error 
 arising from ignorance and inadvertence. For (1) we are 
 liable to go wrong even in the estimate of probabilities. 
 There are, for example, vulgar errors of this kind which 
 mathematical theory corrects. (2) In determining the 
 probability of this or that proposition, we proceed on the 
 basis of a preformed body of beliefs which are themselves 
 liable to be erroneous. In particular, we are apt to 
 assume undoubtingly that our view of competing alterna- 
 tive is virtually exhaustive, when it is really not so. But 
 we cannot be always sifting these latent presuppositions to 
 the bottom. If we constantly endeavoured to do so in a 
 thorough-going way, it would be impossible to meet the 
 emergencies of practical life or even to make effective 
 progress in knowledge. It is a psychological impossibility 
 to assume and maintain a dubitative attitude at every 
 point where ignorance or inadvertence are capable of 
 
3<d G. F. STOUT i 
 
 leading us astray. We have not time for this, and in 
 any case the complexity and difficulty of the task 
 would baffle our most strenuous efforts. (3) Continued 
 attention to the possibility of a judgment being 
 wrong would for the most part hamper us in the 
 use of it. In believing, we commit ourselves to act on 
 our belief, to adapt our conduct and our thought 
 to what is believed as being real. In so doing we must 
 more and more tend to drop demurrers and reservations. 
 I cannot every time I return to my house after absence 
 keep steadily before my mind that it may have been 
 burnt down without my knowing it. When we have 
 committed ourselves to a belief so as to conform our 
 thought and conduct to it, it becomes more and more 
 interwoven with the whole system of our mental life. 
 Our interest in its consequences and implications diverts 
 attention from considerations which point to its possible 
 or probable erroneousness and at the same time this same 
 interest forms a subjective bias of growing strength which 
 is likely to lead to an error of confusion. 
 
 Absolute suspense of judgment, as we have defined it, 
 would exclude even a judgment of relative probability. 
 There is, however, a different meaning which attaches in 
 ordinary language to the phrase " absolute " or " complete " 
 suspense of judgment. It is frequently taken to mean 
 that the balance of probability for and against a proposi- 
 tion is regarded as even. This kind of suspense does not 
 prevent us from acting as if the proposition were true or 
 false. But neither does it exclude error. For the 
 judgment that probabilities are equally balanced is itself 
 liable to error, like other judgments of probability. 
 Besides this, such a judgment is not by itself sufficient to 
 determine action. It must be supplemented by other 
 beliefs of a more positive kind, and in regard to these the 
 possibility of error again emerges.' A man may regard it 
 as an even chance whether a certain operation will kill or 
 cure him. He may, none the less, decide to undergo it, 
 so that his practical decision is the same as if he had no 
 doubt of a favourable result. But the practical decision 
 
i ERROR 3 i 
 
 is founded on another belief, the belief that the advantage 
 of a favourable issue is greater than the disadvantage of 
 an unfavourable issue. Again a general may think the 
 chances even, of the enemy coming this way or that to 
 attack him. Merely on this basis he could not in- 
 telligently make provision for one contingency in 
 preference to the other. In order that he may do so, he 
 must be influenced by other beliefs of a more determinate 
 kind. He may, for instance, believe that if the enemy 
 comes one way, it is useless to attempt resistance, and 
 that if he comes the other, the attack can be repelled. 
 On these assumptions he will proceed as if he un- 
 doubtingly accepted the second alternative. Our result, 
 then is — (i) That absolute suspense of judgment excluding 
 even the judgment of probability is equivalent to suspense 
 of action. (2) That the relative suspense of judgment 
 which consists in affirming even chances, does not suffice 
 to determine action unless it is supplemented by other 
 beliefs in which one alternative is preferred to others. 
 Hence it appears that practical decision involves theoretical 
 decision, and that we must constantly risk error by 
 presuming on partial knowledge if we are to live at all. 
 
 Here we must close this sketch of the special conditions 
 of error. The topic in itself is almost inexhaustible. But 
 what has been said may serve to illustrate our general 
 position. 
 
 This position is simply that error is a special case of 
 mere appearance. It is mere appearance which also 
 appears to be real. The essence of all mere appearance 
 is that it is a feature of an object which belongs to it 
 only in virtue of the psychical conditions under which it is 
 apprehended. In the case of error the psychical con- 
 ditions so operate that mere appearance is not recognised 
 as such, but is on the contrary presented as if it were real. 
 
 VI. No Error is Pure Error 
 
 § 7. The rest of this essay will be occupied with some 
 corollaries which flow from our general position. 
 
32 G. F. STOUT i 
 
 One of these is that no error is pure error. However 
 much we may be deceived, the total object of our thinking 
 or perceiving consciousness cannot be entirely illusory. 
 
 This does not mean that error is only truth in the 
 making, or that truth can always be obtained by some 
 adjustment, compromise, combination, or higher synthesis 
 of diverging views. When I say that error is never pure 
 error I am not adopting the attitude of the landlord of 
 ' The Rainbow ' in Silas Marner. " Come, come," said the 
 landlord, " a joke's a joke. We must give and take. 
 You're both right and you're both wrong as I say. I 
 agree with Mr. Macey here, as there's two opinions ; 
 and if mine was asked I should say they're both right. 
 Tookey's right and Winthrop's right, and they've only got 
 to split the difference and make themselves even." It is 
 no such comfortable philosophy that I am advocating. 
 On the contrary, I admit and maintain that in the 
 ordinary acceptation of the word a man may be and 
 frequently is " completely wrong," and also that he may 
 be and sometimes, though not so frequently, is completely 
 right. But I would point out that such phrases are used 
 in ordinary parlance with a certain tacit and unconscious 
 reservation. " Completely wrong " means completely 
 wrong so far as relates to the point at issue — to the 
 question which alone possesses interest for the parties 
 concerned. If a man meets me some morning and tells 
 me, in good faith, that Balliol College has been burned 
 down during the night, I say, with justice, that he has been 
 completely deceived, when it turns out that there has been 
 no fire, and that Balliol College is just as it was. If my 
 informant were to defend himself from the charge of 
 complete error by alleging that after all Balliol College 
 really exists, and that fires really take place, I should call 
 his answer irrelevant and stupid. Yet the answer would 
 be true enough, and it would only be stupid because of its 
 irrelevance. It would be irrelevant because the existence 
 of Balliol and the occurence of fires were facts taken for 
 granted as a matter of course. There was never any 
 question concerning them. When I said that he was 
 
i ERROR 33 
 
 entirely deceived, I meant that he was so deceived on the 
 only point of interest which could lead him to make the 
 statement at all, or me to listen to it. 
 
 Thus in ordinary intercourse we may be completely 
 right in saying that a man is completely wrong. But 
 this is possible only because the statement is made with a 
 tacit and unconscious reservation. It is made with 
 reference not to the total object present to the mind of 
 the person who is deceived, but with reference to that 
 part of it which alone interests us *at the moment. 
 But when we are concerned with the philosophical theory 
 of error, what is uninteresting in ordinary intercourse 
 becomes of primary importance. We must consider the 
 total object, and when we do so, we are compelled to 
 recognise that some truth is implied in every error. For 
 otherwise the word " error " loses all meaning. 
 
 The unreality of what is unreal lies wholly in its 
 contrast with what is real. It must be thought of as 
 qualifying some real being. Its unreality is relative not 
 to any real being whatever taken at random, but only to 
 that real being to which it is referred as a character or 
 attribute. 
 
 It is essential to the possibility of error that both the 
 real being and its unreal qualification must be present to 
 consciousness. I may imagine an animal and describe it 
 as imagined. Another person who is acquainted with 
 some actual animal more or less resembling what I have 
 imagined may regard my description as referring to this. 
 From his point of view he may show that parts of my 
 description are unreal. But he does not convict me of 
 error unless he can show that I intended to describe the 
 animal which he has in mind. 
 
 It does not follow that the explicit subject of an 
 erroneous judgment must itself be real and not illusory. 
 It may be illusory in relation to a more comprehensive 
 subject, which is real. If I am told that Cleopolis, the 
 capital of fairy-land, was burnt down last night, I reply 
 that Cleopolis and fairy - land never had any actual 
 existence. Here I condemn both subject and predicate 
 
 D 
 
34 G. F. STOUT i 
 
 as illusory. But in doing so I regard the subject as itself 
 a predicate of a more comprehensive subject which really 
 exists. I presuppose a certain kind of reality which I 
 call actual existence. This consists in a system of things 
 and events continuously connected in an assignable way 
 with my own existence at the present moment, and 
 including what happened last night. When I say that 
 Cleopolis never actually existed, I deny that it ever 
 formed a partial feature of this reality. 
 
 What has been said of the subject of an erroneous 
 judgment applies also to the predicate. The predicate 
 cannot be entirely unreal. This follows from the fact that 
 the distinction between subject and predicate is relative to 
 the point of view of the person judging, and fluctuates 
 accordingly. Whether I say " this horse is black " or 
 " this black thing is a horse " depends on the point of 
 departure of my thought and not on the nature of its 
 object. If I begin by regarding the object as a horse 
 and then proceed to qualify it as black, " black " is 
 predicate and horse subject. If I begin thinking of the 
 object as a black thing and then proceed to qualify it as 
 being a horse, horse is predicate and "black thing" is 
 subject. 
 
 Considerations of this kind have led some writers to 
 regard error as ultimately consisting merely in a mis- 
 placement of predicates. Subject is real and predicate is 
 real ; we err only in putting them together in the wrong 
 way. This manner of speaking seems to me misleading so 
 far as it suggests that the illusory object, as such, having 
 no positive content of its own, can be resolved without 
 remainder into constituents which are not illusory but real. 
 The fallacy lies in the tacit assumption that A as predicate 
 of B is just the same A as when it is predicated of C, D, 
 E, etc. This is not ^so. In predicating A of 5 we 
 think of A as related in a specific way to the other 
 constituents and attributes of A, But this relatedness of 
 B is as much part of the positive content of our thought 
 as whatever may be left of B when we abstract from this 
 relatedness. Besides this, B when it is thought of as 
 
i ERROR 35 
 
 existing in these relations is thought of as adjusted to 
 them and modified accordingly. In Goldsmith's poem of 
 the mad dog, the people make a mistake in saying that 
 the man would die. 
 
 The man recovered of the bite ; 
 
 The dog it was that died. \ 
 
 Here it is assumed that the man is real, the dog is real 
 and the death is real. It would seem therefore that the 
 error lay merely in a wrong arrangement — in coupling 
 death with the man instead of with the dog. But in fact 
 the death of a man is something different in its nature 
 and implications from the death of a dog, and a man 
 dying is something different from a dog dying. Perhaps 
 if the man had died, the world would have lost a church- 
 warden. But this could not be part of the meaning of 
 the death of the dog. 
 
 VII. Limits to the Possibility of Error 
 
 § 8. If the essential conditions of error are absent, what 
 is taken for real must be real. From this point of view 
 we can prescribe limits to the possibility of error. A 
 belief cannot be erroneous unless it ascribes to a real 
 existence, as such, some qualification which does not 
 belong to it. The real existence must itself be present 
 to consciousness, and the subject must mean it to be 
 qualified by the features which are said to be illusory. 
 Thus, when an illusion is spoken of, we have a right to 
 inquire what the reality is in relation to which it is an 
 illusion. We have a right to insist that this reality 
 must be thought of by the subject who is deceived. We 
 have also a right to insist that it must be capable of 
 being conceived without the feature or features which 
 are said to be illusory. Otherwise there would be a 
 circle. 
 
 Now there are cases in which no such reality is 
 assignable, and it is consequently meaningless to speak 
 of error. I believe in the totality of being, and it is 
 
36 G. F. STOUT i 
 
 nonsense to say that I may be deceived. For there is 
 no more comprehensive reality of which the totality of 
 being can be conceived as a partial feature or aspect. 
 Whatever point there may be in the ontological argument 
 for the existence of God lies in this. Again, I believe 
 that my consciousness exists, and my belief cannot be 
 illusory. For it cannot be illusory unless I regard my 
 consciousness as a qualification of some reality which is 
 not so qualified. Now whatever this reality is supposed 
 to be, it must be a reality which is present to my con- 
 sciousness when I commit the error. In other words, 
 we cannot think of any reality to contrast with illusion 
 which does not include the very feature that is alleged 
 to be illusory. 
 
 A more interesting illustration is supplied by the 
 objects of abstract thought. 
 
 The object signified by an abstract term is not 
 regarded as an adjective of anything else. In sub- 
 stituting for an adjective the corresponding abstract 
 noun we leave out of count adjectival reference and 
 treat the object of our thought only as a substantive. 
 This does not mean that we cease to regard it as an 
 attribute ; for all abstract objects are essentially attributes 
 and must be recognised as such. " Adjectival reference " 
 does not merely consist in being aware that an attribute 
 is an attribute. The distinctive function of adjectives is 
 the attribution of an attribute to a thing. Their specific 
 office is to express the connection of a certain attribute 
 with whatever other attributes the thing may possess. 
 Unless the thing is expressly considered as possessing 
 other attributes, the adjectival reference loses all signifi- 
 cance. On the contrary, an attribute abstractly con- 
 sidered is considered by itself: the fact that the things 
 which it qualifies possess other attributes is regarded as 
 irrelevant to the purpose of our thought. Things are 
 referred to only in so far as they may possess the attribute 
 in which we are interested, to the neglect of their other 
 features. 
 
 The addition of such phrases as qua, or " as such," 
 
i ERROR 37 
 
 to an adjective always annuls the adjectival reference and 
 substitutes for it the abstract point of view. When I say 
 " white things," I include in the intent of my thought 
 whatever other attributes may belong to the things besides 
 whiteness. Hence in passing from intent to content, I 
 can affirm that " white things are tangible." When I say 
 " white things as such, or qua white," I exclude from the 
 intent of my thought the other attributes of white things, 
 though I do not of course deny their existence. Hence 
 I cannot say that " white things as such, or qua white, are 
 tangible." In like manner, we cannot say that " whiteness 
 is tangible." For, " whiteness " is equivalent to white 
 things as such, or qua white. 
 
 If this account of the abstract object is correct, such an 
 object cannot be illusory unless it is internally incoherent. 
 For illusion exists only if a qualification is ascribed to 
 something to which it does not belong. But an attribute 
 abstractly considered is regarded merely as an attribute 
 of whatever may happen to possess it. Whiteness is 
 regarded only as an attribute of whatever things are 
 white. But white things must be white. There is only 
 one conceivable way in which the abstract object can be 
 unreal. It may be unreal because by its own intrinsic 
 nature it is incapable of existing. But this can be the 
 case only when it is internally incoherent. When it is 
 internally incoherent, it is illusory, because it contains 
 illusion within itself, apart from reference to anything 
 else. 1 
 
 The concept of a solid figure bounded by twelve squares 
 is unreal in this manner. For the nature of solid figures, 
 abstractedly considered, is such as to exclude the qualifica- 
 tion attributed to it. Similarly any abstract object is 
 illusory if one of its constituents is thought to be a 
 possible or necessary qualification of another which it 
 
 1 Just as adjectival reference may be annulled by the phrases "as such," or 
 qua, so abstraction may be annulled by making the abstract object a subject 
 of a judgment in which it is affirmed to be an attribute of something. For its 
 connection with other attributes of the thing essentially belongs to the import 
 of such a judgment. The judgment is possible because the fact of the abstract 
 object being an attribute is one of its own essential adjectives. When we say 
 that it is an " attribute of," we merely give this adjective a specific determination. 
 
38 G. F. STOUT i 
 
 does not so qualify. I speak only of possible or necessary, 
 not of actual connection, because the question of actuality 
 involves an adjectival reference beyond the content of the 
 abstract object itself. When we say that a solid figure is 
 not actually bounded by twelve squares, we mean that 
 nothing actually exists, combining the attributes of a solid 
 figure and of being bounded by twelve squares. But 
 this in itself would not make the abstract object illusory : 
 for in its abstractedness it is not intended as the adjective 
 of anything else. 
 
 Assuming internal coherence it seems clear that the 
 abstract object cannot be illusory. But is it real ? and if 
 so in what sense ? I answer that it is real if it is possible to 
 make a mistake or even to conceive a mistake concerning 
 it. It is real, if it is an object with which our thought 
 may agree or disagree. This seems to me the only 
 relevant use of the term reality in theory of Knowledge, 
 and more especially in theory of Error. 
 
 It may be urged that the truth or error which has an 
 abstraction for its object is only hypothetical or conditional, 
 resting in an assumption. Now, it is becoming a custom 
 with some writers to use such words as " hypothetical " or 
 " conditional " with perplexing vagueness. In the present 
 case the meaning seems very obscure. Certainly truth 
 and falsehood relating to an abstraction presuppose that 
 it is just this abstract object which we intend and nothing 
 else. But how can this make the truth or error itself 
 hypothetical or conditional ? I affirm that the sky is blue 
 and some one tells me that my statement is hypothetical 
 because it can only be true or false on the condition that 
 I really mean the sky and not, let us say, a piece of coal, 
 or the Christian religion. This is so plainly nonsense 
 that it seems futile to waste words over it. 1 
 
 But is not abstract thought unreal, because it takes 
 something to be self-subsistent which is not so ? I 
 answer that abstract thought does nothing of the kind. 
 It neither affirms nor denies the adjectival relations of the 
 abstract object, but simply attempts to ignore them and 
 
 1 This point is further considered below. Cf. p. 45. 
 
i ERROR 39 
 
 to deal with whatever is then left to think about. In 
 some cases, there may, perhaps, be nothing left and the 
 experiment fails altogether. In others, there may be very 
 little left and the experiment, though successful, is un- 
 fruitful. In yet others, the result may be the opening out 
 of a wide and rich field for thought, and then the experi- 
 ment is both successful and fruitful. 
 
 If we ask why in some cases the experiment proves 
 fruitful in consequences and in others not so, the answer 
 must be looked for in the intrinsic nature of the subject- 
 matter. The essential requisite is a relational system 
 such that given certain relations others are necessarily 
 determined without reference to further data. Some 
 important developments in this direction depend on serial 
 order. The subject-matter exhibits what Herbart used 
 to call a Reihen-form or complex of Reihen-formen. In 
 ultimate analysis there is serial order wherever the rela- 
 tion of betweenness or intermediacy (Herbart's Zwischen) 
 is found. A number lies between numbers in a numerical 
 series, a position in space between other positions, a part 
 or a moment of time between other parts or moments of 
 time, a musical note of a certain pitch between other 
 notes higher and lower than it. The more complex and 
 systematic is this serial connection including serial inter- 
 connection and correspondence of series, the more wide 
 and fruitful is the field for abstract thinking. 
 
 VIII. Abstract Thinking 
 
 § 9. Abstraction may be regarded as a means of 
 eliminating the conditions of the error of ignorance. By 
 abstraction we can so select our object that each step of 
 cognitive process shall proceed merely from the given 
 data to the exclusion of unexplored conditions so that 
 the judgment depends purely on experience a priori. 
 Take such a judgment as 74-3 = 10. Here equality to 
 10 is and is meant to be something which merely depends 
 on the nature of 7 and of 3 and on the result of the 
 process of adding. For this reason the judgment is 
 
40 G. F. STOUT i 
 
 called necessary. It does not therefore follow that it 
 must be true, but only that its truth or falsehood depends 
 on the known data and on nothing else. Hence, if it is 
 true, it is necessarily true, and if it is false, it is neces- 
 sarily false. Only one condition of error is excluded by 
 abstraction : error will not be due to ignorance and con- 
 sequent presumption on partial knowledge. None the 
 less inadvertence and confusion may still lead to mistakes. 
 But even these sources of illusion may disappear when the 
 data from which we start are sufficiently simple. Thus, 
 abstract thinking leads to a large body of knowledge which 
 may be regarded as certain. 
 
 It may be said that abstract thinking plays tricks 
 with its abstract object. It does not merely fasten on 
 certain features of the actual world and consider their 
 intrinsic nature, to the disregard of all else. It transforms 
 the object of its selective attention and gives it forms and 
 relations which have not been found in the actual world 
 and perhaps may never have actual existence. The 
 process of mathematical definition which is the very life- 
 blood of the science consists mainly in constructions of 
 this kind. The perfect fluid or the perfect circle of the 
 mathematician are typical examples. 
 
 At the first blush, it would seem that in such construc- 
 tions we are leaving the real world for figments of our 
 own making. But this is not so. All such construction 
 is in its essential import an experimental activity. In it 
 we are active only in order that we may be passive. We 
 operate on the object only in order that we may give it 
 an opportunity of manifesting its own independent nature. 
 And the object always is or ought to be some actual 
 feature of concrete existence. The constructive process 
 has two main functions. It may either be (i) a means 
 of fixing and defining the abstract object in its abstract- 
 ness, or (2) a way of developing its nature. Constructions 
 of the first kind are merely instruments of selective 
 attention — vehicles of abstraction. They enable us to 
 represent the abstract object in such a way that we can 
 deal with it conveniently and effectively. The conception 
 
i ERROR 41 
 
 of a perfect fluid is an excellent example of this procedure. 
 Fluidity actually exists in the concrete inasmuch as fluid 
 substances actually exist. But the mathematician cannot 
 investigate fluidity effectively under the special conditions 
 of its existence in the particular fluids known to him, 
 such as water. For all these fluids are only more or less 
 fluid. They are also more or less viscous, and this intro- 
 duces a complication which he is unable to disentangle. 
 To meet this difficulty he frames the conception of a 
 perfect fluid. In studying the perfect fluid, he investigates 
 fluidity without reference to the complications arising 
 from the partial viscosity of known fluids. When the 
 conception is once formed, the perfect fluid manifests an 
 independent nature of its own which thought does not 
 make but finds. And whatever may be found to be true 
 of it is true of all particular fluids in so far as they are 
 fluid. It holds good of fluids as such. The body of 
 judgments thus formed expresses the nature of fluidity, 
 and fluidity is an actual feature of the concrete world. 
 Geometrical space is a construction of a similar kind. 
 The geometer, as such, is interested merely in the nature 
 of space and spatial configuration. His only reason for 
 referring to the contents of space is that the conception 
 of figure involves demarcation of one portion of space 
 from another by some difference of content. Otherwise, 
 he has no concern with the particular things which are 
 extended in space or with the physical conditions of their 
 existence. Accordingly, he fixes and formulates his 
 abstract object by framing the conception of a space in 
 which the distribution of contents is to be limited by 
 spatial conditions, and these only. This conception enables 
 him to represent his abstract object in such a way that he 
 can deal with it effectively, unhampered by irrelevancies. 
 
 In the second kind of construction, we develop the 
 nature of our abstract object. We begin by distinguish- 
 ing some general feature of the concrete world which is 
 initially presented to us in certain particular forms. But 
 as soon as we consider this feature abstractly, we discover 
 that in its own intrinsic nature it is capable of other 
 
42 G. F. STOUT i 
 
 determinations which have not been ascertained to exist 
 in the concrete. Reality belongs to such constructions 
 inasmuch as they express the real nature of a real feature 
 of concrete existence. The determinations which we 
 ascribe to the abstract object are not figments of our own. 
 They are so founded in the nature of our object as to be 
 necessarily possible. But it is only to this extent that 
 they claim to be real. Geometrical construction furnishes 
 a familiar example. The term figure, as ordinarily used, 
 implies demarcation ; it implies the bounding off of one 
 portion of extension from another by some difference in 
 the character of the extended contents. Now it may be 
 doubted * whether in the physical world or in our own 
 mental imagery extended contents are ever so arranged 
 that their boundaries form perfectly straight lines, or 
 exactly equal lines, or perfect circles, or perfect spheres. 
 None the less these conceptions express the actual nature 
 of space, and to this extent they have an indisputable 
 claim to be regarded as real. If we consider the distribu- 
 tion of the contents of space as conditioned only by the 
 nature of space, it must be possible for adjoining surfaces 
 to bound each other so as to form a perfectly straight 
 line ; and the same holds good for other perfect figures. 
 To understand this we must note that all demarcated 
 figure presupposes what we may call undemarcated figure ; 
 all delineated lines presuppose undelineated lines. A 
 particle cannot move so as to describe a line unless the 
 path it is to traverse already exists. In any portion of 
 solid space there must be any number of undemarcated 
 surfaces which are perfectly plane, and in each plane there 
 must be any number of undemarcated lines which are 
 perfectly straight and of circles which are perfectly 
 circular. 2 The geometrical possibility of demarcated figures 
 simply consists in the actual existence of corresponding 
 undemarcated figures. From this point of view, such 
 geometrical constructions as the perfect circle are neces- 
 sarily possible. They express the actual nature of space, 
 
 1 I do not affirm that the doubt is ultimately justified. 
 2 Cf. Hallam's Criticism of Locke in his History of European Literature. 
 
i ERROR 43 
 
 and are, in this sense, real. But it is only in this sense 
 that the geometer regards them as real. 
 
 It may be said that after all we do not know whether 
 such demarcated figures as the perfect circle ever actually 
 exist. I reply that the geometrician does not affirm their 
 actual existence. What he does affirm as actual is that 
 constitution of space on which the possibility of these con- 
 structions is founded. To affirm a possibility is to affirm 
 that certain conditions A actually exist, have existed, or will 
 exist, of such a nature that if certain other conditions B 
 were actualised, something else C would be actualised. B 
 is hypothetical. C as dependent on B is also hypothetical. 
 But A is actual ; and apart from A the hypothetical pro- 
 position would have no meaning. In the present instance, 
 C is the existence of such demarcated figures as the perfect 
 circle ; B is the existence of certain physical or psycho- 
 logical conditions ; A is the actual constitution of space. 
 It is in A that the geometrician is interested. Further, 
 his insight in regard to A enables him to understand how 
 and why, if B were actualised, C must necessarily be 
 actualised. Owing to the actual nature of space as 
 cognised by him, C is and is seen to be necessarily 
 possible. Even where the connection of antecedent and 
 consequent lacks this intelligible transparency, it still 
 remains true that every valid hypothetical proposition 
 expresses the actual nature of some specific reality. If 
 certain conditions are fulfilled, this acorn will grow into 
 an oak. This means that the actual acorn as I hold it 
 in my hand is actually constituted in a certain manner. 
 Similarly, the full import of any hypothetical proposition 
 can only be expressed by translating it into a corre- 
 spondingly specific categorical proposition. 
 
 As a last example of abstract thinking we may refer 
 to the science of number. Numbered groups of existing 
 things must be distinguished from pure number. There 
 are, let us say, three eggs in this basket and three terms 
 in a syllogism. Here we have only two distinct groups 
 of three, because there are only two groups of countable 
 things to be numbered. But if we ignore the adjectival 
 
44 G. F. STOUT i 
 
 relation of number to something else which is counted, 
 we find that an interminable series of groups of three is 
 necessarily possible. It may be said that number must 
 always be the number of something. In a sense, this is 
 true. But the something may be anything whatever if 
 only it is capable of being numbered. Thus pure number 
 is not considered as an adjective of anything except of the 
 numerable as such. This is equivalent to making it 
 merely an adjective of itself and therefore not an adjective 
 at all. It is not an adjective because the conception of 
 the numerable as such is included in the abstract con- 
 ception of number itself. Now pure number thus defined 
 is certainly real inasmuch as it has a positive and 
 determinate nature to which our thought concerning it 
 may or may not conform. We can discover arithmetical 
 truths and we can make arithmetical blunders. Further 
 the field for thought which has pure number for its object 
 is inexhaustible in range and complexity. A mind such 
 as that of Aristotle's deity might occupy itself for ever 
 with abstract number and nothing else to all eternity 
 without exhausting its resources. So long as it was 
 interested in this object there would be no reason why 
 it should turn to any other. 
 
 IX. Certainty 
 
 § io. In the initial statement of our problem stress was 
 laid on the apparent fact that the unreal in erroneous belief 
 is present to consciousness in the same manner as the real 
 in true belief. We have now to point out that this is not 
 always so. It is not so where the essential conditions of 
 the possibility of error are absent. For, in such cases, a 
 question answers itself so as to render doubt meaningless. 
 This holds good for my assertion of my own existence as 
 a conscious being and for such propositions as " 2 + I = 3 " 
 or " Trilateral figures are triangular." In instances of this 
 kind we can raise a doubt only by abandoning the proper 
 question for another which is irrelevant. We may, for 
 instance, ask : How far can we trust our faculties ? But 
 
i ERROR 45 
 
 inquiries of this sort are futile and even nonsensical. 
 They presuppose a meaningless separation of the thinking 
 process from what is thought of, and then proceed to ask 
 how far the thinking process, regarded merely as 
 someone's private psychical affection can be " trusted " to 
 reveal a reality extraneous to it. In all cognition, what 
 we " trust " is not the psychical process of thinking or 
 perceiving, but the thing itself which is thought of or 
 perceived — -the thing concerning which we raise a question. 
 
 It is urged by Mr. Bradley that all propositions, except 
 perhaps certain assertions concerning the Absolute as such, 
 must be more or less erroneous. His reason is that they 
 are all conditional and that their conditions are never 
 fully known. Whatever exists, exists within the universe 
 and it is conditioned by the whole constitution of the 
 universe. But if what exists within a whole is con- 
 ditioned by so existing, no assertion as to what exists is 
 true if stated apart from this condition. This argument 
 seems to involve a confusion. It confuses conditions of 
 the truth of a proposition with conditions of that which is 
 stated in the proposition. 1 When I say, — " If this 
 witness is to be trusted, Jones committed the theft," the 
 "if" introduces a condition of the first kind. It suggests 
 uncertainty. When I say, " If a figure is trilateral it is 
 triangular," the "if" introduces a condition of the 
 second kind. It does not suggest uncertainty. My own 
 existence as a conscious being has conditions far too 
 complex and obscure for me to discover. But these 
 conditions do not condition the truth of the proposition 
 that I exist. The inverse is the case. Because I am 
 certain that I exist, I am certain that all the conditions 
 of my existence, whatever they may be, exist also. Be 
 they what they may, they are all logically included in the 
 import of my thought when I affirm my own existence. 
 
 Mr. Bradley's contention seems to rest on the assump- 
 tion that, unless the universe is completely known, every 
 
 1 This distinction corresponds in principle with that drawn by Mr. W. E. 
 Johnson, between Conditional and Hypothetical propositions. Cf. Keynes, Formal 
 Logic, pp. 271 sea. 
 
46 G. F. STOUT i 
 
 assertion or denial about its contents must be liable to 
 the error of ignorance, or rather, must actually incur the 
 error of ignorance. Since we do not know everything, it 
 is assumed that there always may be, or rather, must be 
 something unknown which would be seen to falsify our 
 judgment if we knew it. But this view is untenable if 
 we are right in maintaining that there are limits to the 
 possibility of error. Unexplored conditions can affect the 
 truth of a statement only in so far as they are relevant, and 
 their relevancy in each case depends on the nature of the 
 question raised. Suppose the question to be, What is 
 the sum of two and two ? By the very nature of the 
 problem there can be no relevant data except just two 
 and two considered as forming a sum of countable units. 
 It may be urged that perhaps the numbers to be added 
 do not exist, or that they may be incapable of forming a 
 sum. But these doubts become meaningless as soon as 
 we try to count. If there is nothing to count there can 
 be no counting. But the supposition is absurd. Suppose, 
 per impossibile, that we fail to find anything to count in 
 the first instance. Our failure may then be counted as 
 one thing and the act of counting it may be counted as 
 another, and this second act of counting as yet another, 
 and so on ad infinitum. 
 
 To pursue this topic farther would lead outside the 
 limits of the present essay. It is enough here to insist 
 that there is such a thing as logically unconditioned truth. 
 In order to attain absolute knowledge, it is by no means 
 necessary to wait until we have attained an adequate 
 knowledge of the absolute. The truth of judgments 
 concerning what is real is not logically dependent on the 
 truth of judgments concerning " Reality " with a capital R. 1 
 
 1 I am aware that this essay is likely to raise more questions in the reader's 
 mind than it even attempts to solve. Some of these I hope to deal with in the 
 future ; e.g. the relation of the universal to the particular, the nature of the 
 material world, and the nature and possibility of thought as dependent on the 
 constitution of the Absolute. In dealing with these topics, I hope to develop 
 more fully the grounds of that divergence from Mr. Bradley which is referred to 
 in § 10 and implied elsewhere. 
 
II 
 
 AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 
 By F. C. S. Schiller 
 
 I. The Growth of Experience 
 
 1. Agreement that the world is experience + connecting principles — why we 
 
 should start rather than conclude with this. 
 
 2. But (a) whose experience ? Ours. Why self cannot be analysed away ; 
 
 why knowledge of self depends on experience. 
 
 3. (b) Experience of what ? The world. But what the world is, it is not 
 
 yet possible to say completely. 
 
 4. (1) The World not ready-made datum but constructed by a process of 
 
 evolution, 
 
 5. (2) i.e. of trial or experiment — original flexibility or indeterminateness 
 
 of world. Experiment suggested by practical needs — conscious and 
 unconscious experimenting. 
 
 6. (3) Limits of experimenting— ' matter ' as resisting medium — impossi- 
 
 bility of saying what it is in itself. Conception of material world 
 developing in experience. Value of Aristotelian description of a 
 ii\r) capable of being moulded. 
 
 7. (4) The ' World,' therefore, is what is made of it — plastic. How far, 
 
 to be determined only by trying. But methodologically plasticity 
 assumed to be complete. Provisional character of our ' facts.' 
 
 8. Bearing of this 'pragmatism ' or ' radical empiricism ' on the nature of 
 
 axioms. Their origin as postulates to which we try to get world to 
 conform. Contrast with the old empiricism and apriorism. 
 
 II. Criticism of Empiricism 
 
 9. (1) Its standpoint psychological, (2) intellectualist, (3) axioms pre- 
 
 supposed in the experience which is supposed to impress them on us — ■ 
 Mill's admissions, (4) derivation not historical, but ex post facto recon- 
 struction, (5) its incompleteness, (6) impossibility of really tracing 
 development of axioms and so unprogressiveness. 
 
 III. Criticism of Apriorism 
 
 10-25. Its superficial plausibility and real obscurity. Fallacy of inferring 
 
 from § 9 (3) that there are a priori truths. 
 II. How postulates also yield 'universality' and 'necessity.' ' Necessity r 
 
 and need. 
 
 47 
 
48 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 12. 'Condition of all possible experience' means? Might be (i) cause or 
 
 psychical antecedent, (2) presupposition of reflection (logical), or (3) 
 ethical or asthetical. Objections. 
 
 13. Meaning of ' a priori '; (1) logical or (2) psychological* Equivocations of 
 
 apriorist authority. 
 14-18. The a priori as logical. But why analyse in Kant's way? Exclusive 
 correctness of Kantian analysis not to be based either ( 1 ) on its a priori 
 truth, or (2) on experience of its satisfactory working. Else why should 
 Kantians have tried to better it ? 
 
 1 5. Kant's derivation of his analysis from psychology. 
 
 16. Even if it were satisfactory, no proof that it would be the only or the 
 
 best possible. 
 
 17. If a priori is not in time, its superiority to the a posteriori merely 
 
 honorific. 
 
 18. Kant's analysis neither simple nor lucid. 
 
 19-22. A priori as psychical fact. But if so, has it (1) been correctly 
 described? (2) how is it distinguished from innate idea? (3) does not 
 epistemology merge in psychology? 
 
 20. As facts a priori truths have a history, which must be inquired into. 
 
 21. A priori faculties tautologous, and 
 
 22. should not be treated as ultimate. 
 
 23. Result that science of epistemology rests on systematic confusion of 
 
 alternative interpretations of apriority. The proper extension of logic 
 and psychology. 
 
 24. Intellectualism of both apriorism and empiricism incapacitates them from 
 
 recognising unity and activity of organism. How this may be recognised 
 by deriving axioms from a volitional source by postulation. 
 
 25. Kant's recognition of postulation in ethics — its conflict with his 'critical' 
 
 theory of knowledge — resulting dualism intolerable. Hence either 
 (1) suppress the Practical Reason or preferably (2) extend postulation 
 to Theoretic Reason. 
 
 IV. Some Characteristics of Postulation 
 
 26. Postulates at first tentative and not always successful — their various 
 
 stages and common origin — the theoretic possibility of changing axioms 
 not practically to be feared. 
 
 27. Postulates not a coherent system inter se except as rooted in personality. 
 
 V. The Postulation of Identity 
 
 28. Not to be derived out of nothing, but out of a prior psychical fact on 
 
 the sentient level of consciousness — why consciousness itself cannot be 
 derived — its characteristics on the sentient level. 
 
 29. Hence identity (of self) first felt in the coherence and continuity of 
 
 mental processes, and forms basis for the postulation of identity — the 
 practical necessity of recognising the ' same ' in the ' like.' 
 
 30. Once postulated, identity proves a great success, though never completely 
 
 realised in fact. Stages of identity -postulation : (1) recognition of 
 others and objects of perception. But these change and so do not 
 provide a stable standard of comparison. Hence (2) postulation of 
 ideally identical selves. 
 
 31. (3) Meaning demands absolute identity and recognition leads to cogni- 
 
 tion — advantage of classification by ' universals ' which abstract from 
 differences. 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 49 
 
 32. (4) The use of language, i.e. identifiable symbols, connected with the 
 
 demand for identity. 
 
 33. Logical bearings of this doctrine. The practical purpose of the judgment 
 
 as the clue to the meaning of predication and as determining the limits 
 to which abstraction shall be carried. 
 
 34. Limitations and conventions on which the logical use of identity depends. 
 
 VI. Other Postulates 
 
 35. The concurrent development of consciousness of 'self and ' other ' = the 
 ' external world, ' postulated to account for felt unsatisfactoriness of 
 experience. 
 
 39. Postulation of Contradiction and Excluded Middle. 
 
 37. Hypothesis a form of postulation. 
 
 38. Causation a demand for something whereby we can control events. Its 
 
 various formulations relative to our purposes. Sufficient Reason. 
 The absolutely satisfactory as 'self-evident.' The infinite regress of 
 reasons and causes limited by the purpose of the inquiry. 
 
 39. Postulate of ' Uniformity of Nature.' Suggested by gleams of regularity 
 
 amid primitive chaos. Methodological advantage of postulating com- 
 plete regularity. Its practical success. 
 40-3. The Space and Time Postulates. Kant's reine Atischamtng a hybrid 
 between perception and conception and so a confusion of psychology 
 and logic. Really psychological data have served as basis for concep- 
 tual constructions which are methodological postulates. 
 
 41. Construction of physical space out of sensory data. Geometrical space 
 
 a construction to calculate behaviour of real bodies. Antithesis between 
 qualities of perceptual and conceptual space — reasons for postulating 
 the latter. 
 
 42. Alternative conceptual constructions of 'metageometry.' Their obscurity 
 
 due to their greater complexity and uselessness. A conceptual space 
 is valid in so far as ztseful, but never real. 
 
 43. Time: (i) subjective, (2) objective, (3) conceptual. (1) Too variable to 
 
 be useful, (2) a social necessity, but relative, (3) a postulate. 
 
 44. Other postulates, e.g. substance, passed over. 
 
 45-7. Postulates not yet fully axiomatic. (1) Teleology — its derivation from 
 the postulate of knowableness. Necessity of anthropomorphism. 
 Rational human action teleological. Why this is not extended by 
 science to nature. Its misuse by professed believers — possibility of 
 future use. 
 
 46. Ultimately mechanical methods imply teleology, assuming that world 
 
 is partly conformable to our ideals. But part being given, we must 
 assume all. Postulation as illustrating the teleology of axioms. 
 
 47. (2) Religious postulates — personality and goodness of God — immortality. 
 
 VII. Concluding Reflections 
 
 48. The psychological possibility of instinctive postulation and its relation 
 
 to logical justification. 
 
 49. The method of origins never gives complete explanation. But validity 
 
 must be connected with origin. Completeness unattainable while 
 knowledge is still growing. 
 
 50. Effects on philosophy — a return to practice and a perception of the 
 
 inadequacy of intellectualism. 
 
 E 
 
50 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 51. Belief in the alleged incompetence of the reason due to (1) the putting 
 
 of questions which have no practical value and ultimate meaning, 
 (2) 'antinomies.' But these at bottom volitional and due to a refusal 
 to choose between conflicting aims. E.g. the 'insoluble mystery of 
 evil.' Methodological necessity of assuming all real problems to be 
 soluble. 
 
 52. Gain to philosophy because (1) more responsibility felt about volun- 
 
 tary confusions of thought which (2) are more easily remedied and 
 to which (3) the young are not pledged. Invigorating effect of Prag- 
 matism. 
 
 I 
 
 § I. The first survey of his subject ought to be sufficient 
 to appal the intending writer on almost any philosophic 
 topic. The extent, variety, and persistence of the diverg- 
 ences of opinion which he finds are such that he needs 
 to be possessed of unusual faith and courage not to 
 despair of convincing even an unprejudiced reader — and 
 in philosophy where shall he be found ? — that his under- 
 taking holds out any prospect of scientific advance. For 
 it needs no little philosophic insight to perceive that 
 these divergences, instead of discrediting Philosophy, are 
 really a subtle tribute to its dignity. They testify that 
 in our final attitude towards life our whole personality must 
 be concerned, and tend to form the decisive factor in the 
 adoption of a metaphysic. As soon as a metaphysic 
 attempts to be more than ' a critical study of First Pre- 
 judices,' and essays to be constructive, it will always come 
 upon a region where different men argue differently, and 
 yet with equal cogency, from (apparently) the same 
 premisses. The most reasonable explanation of this 
 phenomenon is to admit that as the men are different, 
 and differ in their experience, neither the data which 
 have to be valued, nor the standards by which they are 
 valued, can really be the same. Indeed, the whole history 
 of philosophy shows that the fit of a man's philosophy is 
 (and ought to be) as individual as the fit of his clothes, 
 and forms a crushing commentary on the intolerant 
 craving for uniformity which ineffectually attempts to 
 anticipate the slow achievement of a real harmony by 
 the initial fallacies and brusque assumptions of a ' cheap 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 51 
 
 and easy ' monism. It behoves the true philosopher, 
 therefore, to be tolerant, and to recognise that so long as 
 men are different, their metaphysics must be different, and 
 that even so, nay for this very reason, any philosophy is 
 better than none at all. 
 
 But though the ultimate differences of philosophic 
 opinion are probably too deeply rooted in human idio- 
 syncrasy to be eradicated by any force of argument, it is 
 none the less conducive to the progress of every philo- 
 sophic discussion that some common ground of (at least 
 apparent and preliminary) agreement should be found on 
 which the rival views may test their strength. This is 
 accordingly what I have tried to do, though it was not 
 without difficulty that I seemed to discover two funda- 
 mental points of initial agreement which would, I think, 
 be admitted by nearly all who have any understanding of 
 the terms employed in philosophic discussion. The first 
 of these is that the whole world in which we live is 
 experience and built up out of nothing else than experi- 
 ence. The second is that experience, nevertheless, does 
 not, alone and by itself, constitute reality, but, to construct 
 a world, needs certain assumptions, connecting principles, 
 or fundamental truths, in order that it may organise its 
 crude material and transmute itself into palatable, manage- 
 able, and liveable forms. 
 
 Acceptance of these two propositions does not perhaps 
 carry us far, and I have no desire to exaggerate its 
 controversial value. For, as soon as we attempt to go a 
 step farther and ask what, more precisely, is this ex- 
 perience, out of which, and for the sake of which, it is 
 agreed that all things are constructed, we speedily realise 
 that we have, here also, stumbled unwittingly into a very 
 quagmire of metaphysical perplexities. It is indeed a 
 convenient fashion in high philosophic quarters to treat 
 the harmless truism with the enunciation of which I have 
 ventured to start, as the final term in a protracted course 
 of dialectical philosophy, and to put forward Experience 
 (written of course with very large capitals) as the ultimate 
 explanation of all things. My excuse for not treating my 
 
52 F. C. S. SCHILLER „ 
 
 readers (if any) to a similar performance must be that I 
 have neither the heart nor the head for feats of this kind, 
 and that they can always fall back upon the consoling 
 dictum that experience is Experience (with the addition 
 ' of the Absolute ' thrown in, if they are very inquisitive), 
 when they have found that my explorations in a very 
 different direction lead to nothing interesting or valuable. 
 
 § 2. I shall accordingly proceed to divide my question 
 into two. If all the world be experience and what is 
 needed to understand that experience, (i) whose experi- 
 ence is it ? and (2) of what is it experience ? To both 
 questions again some will be satisfied to reply — ' of the 
 Absolute, of course.' If that really contents them, and 
 is all they wish to know, they had better read no further. 
 For my part I hold that this answer, even if it were true 
 and intelligible, is of no scientific or practical value what- 
 soever, and hence cannot be of any philosophic value 
 either, except to votaries of philosophies which have no 
 scientific or practical value. 
 
 To the first question, therefore, I shall make bold to 
 answer, ' our experience,' or, if that imply too much 
 agreement among philosophers, and I may not take a 
 common world for granted, more precisely, ' my 
 experience.' 
 
 Here again I must be prepared to be assailed by a 
 furious band of objectors intent on asking me — " Who 
 are you ? How dare you take yourself for granted ? 
 Have you not heard how the self is a complex psycho- 
 logical product, which may be derived and analysed 
 away in a dozen different ways ? And do you actually 
 propose to build your philosophy upon so discredited a 
 foundation ? " 
 
 To all this the simplicity of my humble reply may, I 
 fear, be thought to savour of impertinence. I shall 
 merely say " Abate your wrath, good sirs, I beseech you. 
 I am right well aware of what you urge. Only I have 
 observed also a few facts which in your scientific zeal you 
 have been pleased to overlook. In the first place I notice 
 that these analyses of the self you allude to are various, 
 
n AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 53 
 
 and that so the self may find safety in the very multitude 
 of its tormentors. I observe, secondly, that the analysis 
 is in every case effected by a self. And it always gives 
 me a turn when the conclusion of an argument subverts 
 its own premiss. Next I note that these analyses being 
 the products of a self, must, if that self is (like my own) 
 rational, serve some purpose. But unless that purpose is 
 the highest of all (which in your case I see no reason 
 to suppose), the validity of the whole procedure will be 
 relative, and its value methodological. It may be 
 excellent, therefore, for your purposes and quite 
 unsuitable for mine. And, lastly, I observe that an 
 analysis does not fall from heaven ready made ; it is the 
 product of a purposive activity, and however appalling it 
 may sound, it remains brutum fulmen until such time as 
 somebody chooses to adopt it. It is from this act of 
 choice, then, that its real efficacy springs, and if I choose 
 to analyse differently or not at all, if I find it convenient 
 to operate with the whole organism as the standard unit in 
 my explications, what right have Scribes and Pharisees 
 to complain ? For in either case the choice must be 
 justified by its consequences, by the experience of its 
 working, and I am not aware that anything valuable or 
 workable has resulted from the psychological analyses in 
 question. I am therefore sanguine that the assumption of 
 my own existence, which I provisionally make, may very 
 possibly turn out better and be less futile than any of 
 the denials of the self which it may seem convenient to 
 maintain for certain restricted and technical purposes of 
 psychologies which neglect their proper problem in their 
 anxiety to be ranked among the ' natural sciences.' 
 
 " As for the other, personal, question — ' Who am I ?' — 
 that we shall see. I say we pointedly, because, to be quite 
 frank, I too am still learning what I am, by experience. 
 For unfortunately I was as little endowed with any 
 a priori knowledge of myself as of anything else. Hence 
 I can only say, provisionally, that I am at least what I 
 am, and what I am capable of becoming. For I have a 
 notion that my career is not yet over. In saying this 
 
54 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 I do not, of course, lay claim to anything unknowable ; I 
 only mean that I am not anything completely known, 
 either to myself or any one else, until I cease to have new 
 experience. And if you are content to share these 
 humble attributes and to be selves in this sense, you are 
 very welcome ! " 
 
 § 3. I come next to the second question — what is it 
 I experience ? The answer must be very similar. My 
 knowledge of the object of experience — we may call it 
 ' the world ' for short — is still imperfect and still growing. 
 And so though I may provisionally describe it by all the 
 ordinary phrases as ' external,' and material, and spatial, 
 and temporal, I do not attach much value to them, and 
 cannot honestly say that I know what it ultimately is. 
 For I do not know what it will ultimately turn into. 
 Not of course that I despair on that account of 
 ultimately answering this question also to everybody's 
 satisfaction (and especially to my own ! ). Only the 
 world of knowledge always seems to be painted on an 
 uncompleted background of the unknown, and fresh 
 knowledge is always coming in which modifies the total 
 impression. This knowledge is largely (or perhaps 
 wholly) the result of guesses which I cannot help making, 
 like my fathers before me, for practical reasons. As for 
 the character and the details of these guesses, are they not 
 written in the histories of human sciences and religions ? 
 
 § 4. In reflecting on these histories, however, I observe 
 several things which seem to have no slight bearing on 
 the question of the nature of the world and our knowledge. 
 
 (1) The world, as it now appears, was not a ready- 
 made datum ; it is the fruit of a long evolution, of a 
 strenuous struggle. If we have learnt enough philosophy 
 to see that we must not only ask the ontological question, 
 What is it ? but also the profounder epistemological 
 question to which it leads, How do we know what it 
 is ? we shall realise that it is a construction which 
 has been gradually achieved, and that the toil thereof 
 dwarfs into insignificance the proverbial labour Romanam 
 condere gentem. As a rule we do not notice this, partly 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 55 
 
 because we are taught to neglect the history of ideas 
 for the sake of burdening our memory with the history 
 of events (which very likely did not happen in the manner 
 alleged), partly because the sciences have a habit of 
 evading the verbal confession of the changes which the 
 growth of knowledge has wrought in their conceptions. 
 Thus the physicist continues to use the term ' matter,' 
 although it has come to mean for him something very 
 different from the simple experiences of hardness and 
 resistance from which its development began, and although 
 he more and more clearly sees both that he does not 
 know what ' matter ' ultimately is, and that for the 
 purposes of his science he does not need to know, so 
 long as the term stands for something the behaviour 
 of which he can calculate. 
 
 § 5. (2) I observe that since we do not know what 
 the world is, we have to find out. This we do by trying. 
 Not having a ready-made world presented to us the 
 knowledge of which we can suck in with a passive 
 receptivity (or rather, appearing to have such a world 
 to some extent only in consequence of the previous 
 efforts of our forerunners), we have to make experiments 
 in order to construct out of the materials we start with 
 a harmonious cosmos which will satisfy all our desires 
 (that for knowledge included). For this purpose we 
 make use of every means that seems promising : we try 
 it and we try it on. For we cannot afford to remain 
 unresistingly passive, to be impressed, like the tabula rasa 1 
 in the traditional fiction, by an independent ' external 
 world ' which stamps itself upon us. If we did that, we 
 should be stamped out. But experience is always more 
 than this : it is either experiment or reaction, reaction 
 upon stimulation, which latter we ascribe to the 'external 
 world.' But reaction is still a kind of action, and its 
 character still depends in part on the reacting agent. 
 Nor have we any independent knowledge of the ' external 
 
 1 It is hard to say why this inadequate illustration should continue to haunt 
 philosophic discussion, the more so as it always missed the point. For as 
 Lotze has so well observed the ' receptivity ' of the tablet is really due to the 
 intrinsic nature of the wax and not to an absence of positive character. 
 
56 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 world ' ; it is merely the systematic way in which we 
 construct the source of the stimulation on which we feel 
 ourselves to be reacting. Hence even our most passive 
 receptivity of sensations can, and should, be construed 
 as the effortless fruition of what was once acquired by 
 strenuous effort, rather than as the primal type to which 
 all experience should be reduced. In it we are living 
 on our capital (inherited or acquired), not helping to carve 
 out (' create ') the cosmos, 1 but enjoying the fruits of our 
 labours (or of those of others !). Which is pleasant, but 
 not interesting. What is interesting is the course of 
 the active experimenting which results in the arts, the 
 sciences, and the habits on which our social organisa- 
 tion rests. 
 
 I proceed accordingly to consider the mass of experi- 
 ments which collectively make up the world-process and 
 by their issue determine the subsequent course of affairs. 
 At the outset there seems to be nothing determined, 
 certain, or fixed about it. We may indeed shrink from 
 the assertion of an absolute indeterminism, but it is certain 
 that we cannot say what made or determined the character 
 of the first reaction, and that the first establishment of a 
 habit of reaction is a matter of immense difficulty. And 
 to a less extent this indeterminateness persists as the 
 structure of the cosmos grows. The world is always 
 ambiguous, always impels us at certain points to say, 
 ' it may be,' ' either . . . or,' etc. 2 Nor were it well 
 that it should grow rigid, unless we were assured that it 
 would set in forms we could not wish to change. As it 
 is, we have no absolute nor initial rigidity. All deter- 
 minations are acquired, all are ratified, by their working ; 
 
 1 It is significant that most of the words which have been used to express 
 the conception (?) of creation are metaphors which meant originally to hew 
 or shape. For if, as seems probable, the conception of absolute ' creation ' 
 ('out of nothing') be ultimately unthinkable, the assumed 'metaphor' will be 
 able to supply the true conception. 
 
 2 We do not, of course, affect the fact by assuming its absolute determination, 
 'if only we knew all.' For this is merely a postulate, devised to keep us in 
 good heart while calculating, and in order that we may be able to forecast the 
 future. We may be able to achieve the realisation of this ideal in a cosmos 
 absolutely determined and absolutely satisfactory, but at present it is not true 
 that for us practically all things are determined. 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 57 
 
 nothing can be said to be absolutely exempt from modi- 
 fication and amendment by experience of its working. 
 
 The intellectual cosmos also neither has nor needs 
 fixed foundations whose fixity is an illusion. Like the 
 physical universe it is sustained by the correspondence 
 and interplay of its parts ; or, if we prefer it, floats freely 
 in a sea of the unknown, which now and again buffets it 
 with its waves, but across which the sciences have 
 established well-travelled routes of intellectual inter- 
 course. 
 
 The cosmos grows, as we have said, by experiment. 
 Such experiment may have been random at first (as 
 for methodological purposes we shall be prone to assume) ; 
 at all events it was vague, and its prescience of its issue 
 was probably obscure. In any case its direction is 
 ultimately determined not so much by its initial gropings 
 as by the needs of life and the desires which correspond 
 to those needs. Thus the logical structures of our mental 
 organisation are the product of psychological functions. 1 
 
 It must next be admitted that when it is said that 
 the world is constructed by experiment, the conception 
 of experiment is taken very widely and in a way that 
 extends far beyond the conscious experiment of the 
 scientist who is fully aware of what he does and what he 
 wants, and precisely controls all the conditions. Of the 
 ' experimenting ' which builds up the cosmos the scientific 
 experiment is only an extreme case which even now is 
 comparatively rarely realised. Most of the experimenting 
 that goes on is blind or very dimly prescient, semi- 
 conscious or quite unconscious. To what extent there 
 is consciousness of the experimenting depends of course 
 on the mental development of the beings engaged in it ; 
 for while in the lowest it is infinitesimal, the more intel- 
 ligent they become the more capable they are of taking 
 the experimenting into their own hands. 
 
 But from the experimenting itself there is no escape ; 
 
 1 In this aspect logic is related to psychology as morphology is to physiology. 
 A 'logical necessity,' therefore, always rests upon, issues from, and is discovered 
 by, a psychological need. Dr. Bosanquet adopts the comparison, but does not 
 work it out, in his Logic. 
 
58 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 it goes on, and if we refuse to experiment, we are ex- 
 perimented with. Nay, in this sense we are all nature's 
 experiments, attempts to build up a world of beings that 
 can maintain themselves permanently and harmoniously. 
 We are asked as it were, " Can you do this ? " and if we 
 cannot or will not, and " do not answer," we are eliminated. 
 The elimination which is involved in this experimenting 
 habit of nature's has in modern times been widely 
 recognised, under the name of Natural Selection ; its 
 essence is that a large number of individuals and varieties 
 should be produced on trial (as ' accidental variations ' 
 or Beta fxolpq), and that upon those that stood their trials 
 best should devolve the duty of carrying on the world. 
 The conception of Natural Selection was suggested by 
 human selection ; its procedure by trying is so far 
 analogous to that of our own intelligence, and it is denied 
 to be that of an intelligence only because of a misunder- 
 standing of the methodological character of the postulate 
 of indefinite variation. 1 We may therefore plausibly 
 contend that if a superhuman intelligence is active in the 
 forming of the cosmos, its methods and its nature are the 
 same as ours ; it also proceeds by experiment, and adapts 
 means to ends, and learns from experience. 
 
 We see then that there are two excellent reasons for 
 conceiving the notion of experiment so broadly. In the 
 first place it becomes possible thereby to comprehend 
 under one head the infinite complications and gradations 
 which are possible in the consciousness of the experimenter, 
 from the most random restlessness and the most blindly 
 instinctive adaptations, to the most clearly conscious 
 testing of an elaborate theory ; in the second, it serves 
 to bring out the radically tentative tendency which runs 
 through the whole cosmos. And if the propriety of a 
 phrase may be held to atone for the impropriety of a 
 pun, we may sum up our result by saying that the clue to 
 experience must be found not in words but in deeds, and 
 that the method of nature and the true method of philo- 
 sophy is not a Dialectic but a Trialectic. 
 
 1 Cf. Contemp. Rev., June 1897, p. 878. 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 59 
 
 8 6. (3) In describing our activity in constructing 
 the world by experimenting or making trial, I may seem 
 to have ignored the subject-matter of the experiment, 
 that in which and the conditions under which we 
 experiment. But of course I have no intention of 
 denying the existence of this factor in our experience 
 and, consequently, in our world. We never experiment 
 in vacuo ; we always start from, and are limited by, 
 conditions of some sort. Just as our experiment must 
 have some psychological motive to prompt it and to 
 propel us, so it must be conditioned by a resisting 
 something, in overcoming which, by skilfully adapting 
 the means at our disposal, intelligence displays itself. 
 Let it be observed, therefore, that our activity always 
 meets with resistance, and that in consequence we often 
 fail in our experiments. 
 
 But while there can be no dispute as to the fact of 
 this resistance, there may be not a little as to its nature, 
 and no slight difficulty about defining it with precision. 
 It would be pushing Idealism to an unprofitable extreme 
 to revert at this point to the ancient phrases about the 
 Self positing its Other and so forth. But the opposite 
 and more usual device of dubbing it an objective or 
 material world which exercises compulsion upon us, is 
 also not free from objection. 
 
 For what is so misleading about this traditional 
 manner of talking is that it implies just what we have 
 seen to be untrue, viz. that there is an objective world 
 given independently of us and constraining us to 
 recognise it. Whereas really it is never an independent 
 fact, but ever an aspect in our experience, or better still, 
 a persisting factor in it, which we can neither isolate nor 
 get rid of. Hence, however far back we essay to trace 
 it, we can never say either what it is really and in itself, 
 or that it has disappeared. If we take it as it appears 
 in our experience as now organised, we are, similarly, 
 met with the difficulty that what it now is is nothing 
 definitive, but merely a term in a long development the 
 end of which is not yet in sight. And if, led by such 
 
60 F. C. S. SCHILLER » 
 
 considerations, we look forward and declare that the 
 objective world most truly is whatever it develops into, 
 who will take it upon himself to prophesy concerning its 
 future developments, and guarantee that it will always 
 remain objective in the way it is at present, that it will 
 continue to resist and constrain ? For already it is only 
 partially true that it constrains us ; it is becoming 
 increasingly true that we constrain it, and succeed in 
 moulding it into acceptable shapes. In what sense, 
 therefore, should we continue to call ' objective ' a world 
 which had ceased to be objectionable and had become 
 completely conformable and immediately responsive to 
 our every desire ? 
 
 The truest account, then, it would seem possible to 
 give of this resisting factor in our experience is to revive, 
 for the purpose of its description, the old Aristotelian 
 conception of ' Matter ' as v\t) Be/cri/cr) tov etSovs, as 
 potentiality of whatever form we succeed in imposing on 
 it. It may be regarded as the raw material of the 
 cosmos (never indeed wholly raw and unworked upon), 
 out of which have to be hewn the forms of life in which 
 our spirit can take satisfaction. To have lost this sense 
 of ' matter,' in the effort to render its notion more precise 
 and useful for the purposes of the natural sciences, is a 
 real loss to philosophy. And yet the notion of matter 
 as an indeterminate potentiality which, under the proper 
 manipulations, can assume the forms we will, reasserts 
 itself de facto whenever the great physicists set themselves 
 to speculate respecting the ' ultimate constitution of 
 Matter.' For provided only that their results enable 
 them to calculate, more or less, the behaviour of sensible 
 matter, they never hesitate to calculate into existence 
 new ' ethers ' and modes of matter and to endow them 
 with whatever qualities their purpose demands and their 
 imagination suggests. 
 
 § 7. (4) The world, then, is essentially v\t], it is what 
 we make of it. It is fruitless to define it by what it 
 originally was or by what it is apart from us (?) v\rj 
 ayvcocrros icaO' avrrjv) ; it is what is made of it. Hence 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 61 
 
 my fourth and most important point is that the world is 
 plastic, and may be moulded by our wishes, if only we are 
 determined to give effect to them, and not too conceited 
 to learn from experience, i.e. by trying, by what means we 
 may do so. 
 
 That this plasticity exists will hardly be denied, but 
 doubts may be raised as to how far it extends. Surely, 
 it may be objected, it is mere sarcasm to talk of the 
 plasticity of the world ; in point of fact we can never go 
 far in any direction without coming upon rigid limits and 
 insuperable obstacles. The answer surely is that the 
 extent of the world's plasticity is not known a priori, but 
 must be found out by trying. Now in trying we can 
 never start with a recognition of rigid limits and in- 
 superable obstacles. For if we believed them such, it 
 would be no use trying. Hence we must assume that we 
 can obtain what we want, if only we try skilfully and 
 perseveringly enough. A failure only proves that the 
 obstacles would not yield to the method employed : it 
 cannot extinguish the hope that by trying again by other 
 methods they could finally be overcome. 
 
 Thus it is a methodological necessity to assume that the 
 world is wholly plastic, i.e. to act as though we believed 
 this, and will yield us what we want, if we persevere in 
 wanting it. 
 
 To what extent our assumption is true in the fullest 
 sense, i.e. to what extent it will work in practice, time and 
 trial will show. But our faith is confirmed whenever, by 
 acting on it, we obtain anything we want ; it is checked, 
 but not uprooted, whenever an experiment fails. 
 
 As a first attempt to explain how our struggle to 
 mould our experience into conformity with our desires is 
 compatible with the ' objectivity ' of that experience, the 
 above may perhaps suffice, though I do not flatter myself 
 that it will at once implant conviction. Indeed I expect 
 rather to be asked indignantly — ' Is there not an objective 
 nature which our experiments do not make, but only 
 discover? Is it not absurd to talk as if our attempts 
 could alter the facts ? And is not reverent submission to 
 
62 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 this pre-existing order the proper attitude of the searcher 
 after truth ? ' 
 
 The objection is so obvious that the folly of ignoring 
 it could only be exceeded by that of exaggerating its 
 importance. It is because of the gross way in which this 
 is commonly done that I have thought it salutary to 
 emphasise the opposite aspect of the truth. We have 
 heard enough, and more than enough, about the duty of 
 humility and submission ; it is time that we were told 
 that energy and enterprise also are indispensable, and that 
 as soon as the submission advocated is taken to mean 
 more than rational methods of investigation, it becomes a 
 hindrance to the growth of knowledge. Hence it is no 
 longer important to rehearse the old platitudes about 
 sitting at the feet of nature and servilely accepting the 
 kicks she finds it so much cheaper to bestow than half- 
 pence. It is far more important to emphasise the other 
 side of the matter, viz. that unless we ask, we get nothing. 
 We must ask often and importunately, and be slow to 
 take a refusal. It is only by asking that we discover 
 whether or not an answer is attainable, and if they cannot 
 alter the ' facts,' our demands can at least make them 
 appear in so different a light, that they are no longer 
 practically the same. 
 
 For in truth these independent ' facts,' which we have 
 merely to acknowledge, are a mere figure of speech. The 
 growth of experience is continually transfiguring our 
 ' facts ' for us, and it is only by an ex post facto fiction 
 that we declare them to have been ' all along ' what they 
 have come to mean for us. To the vision of the rudi- 
 mentary eye the world is not coloured ; it becomes so only 
 to the eye which has developed colour ' sensitiveness ' : just 
 so the ' fact ' of each phase of experience is relative to 
 our knowledge, and that knowledge depends on our efforts 
 and desires to know. Or, if we cling to the notion of an 
 absolutely objective fact of which the imperfect stages of 
 knowledge only catch distorted glimpses, we must at least 
 admit that only a final and perfect rounding- off of 
 knowledge would be adequate to the cognition of such 
 
n AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 63 
 
 fact. The facts therefore which we as yet encounter are 
 not of this character : it may turn out that they are not 
 what they seem and can be transfigured if we try. Hence 
 the antithesis of subjective and objective is a false one : 
 in the process of experience ' subject ' and ' object ' are 
 only the poles, and the ' subject ' is the ' positive ' pole 
 from which proceeds the impetus to the growth of 
 knowledge. For the modifications in the world, which we 
 desire, can only be brought about by our assuming them 
 to be possible, and therefore trying to effect them. There 
 is no revelation either of nature or of God, except to 
 those who have opened their eyes ; and we at best are 
 still self-blinded puppies. 
 
 Even the notion that the appearances which reality 
 assumes to our eyes may depend on the volitional attitude 
 which we maintain towards them is a truism rather than 
 an absurdity, 1 and nothing is more reasonable than to 
 suppose that if there be anything personal at the bottom 
 of things, the way we behave to it must affect the way it 
 behaves to us. The true absurdity, therefore, lies in our 
 ignoring the most patent facts of experience in order to 
 set up the Moloch of a rigid, immutable and inexorable 
 Order of Nature, to which we must ruthlessly immolate 
 all our desires, all our impulses, all our aspirations, and ail 
 our ingenuity, including that which has devised the very 
 idol to which it is sacrificed ! 
 
 § 8. The above sketch of the nature and manner of 
 the process which has moulded us and the world of our 
 experience may have seemed to bear but remotely on the 
 relations of Axioms to Postulates. In reality, however, 
 it will be found that the whole subsequent argument has 
 already had its main lines mapped out by our introductory 
 discussion of the Weltanschauung which Prof. James 
 has called pragmatism and radical empiricism} For when, 
 
 1 Cf. James' Will to believe, pp. 28, 6i, 103 foil. And it is, of course, psycho- 
 logically true that not only our delusions but also our perceptions depend on what 
 we come prepared to perceive. 
 
 2 Regarded as labels perhaps, neither of these terms is quite satisfactory. 
 But as philosophic, like political, parties are commonly named (or nicknamed) by 
 their opponents, it would be premature to attempt fixity of nomenclature until 
 criticism has had its say. 
 
64 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 as we must do, we apply it to the theory of our cognitive 
 faculties and the first principles whereby in knowledge we 
 elaborate our experience (8 i), it leads to a very distinctive 
 treatment of epistemological problems, differing widely 
 from those traditionally in vogue. It follows that the 
 general structure of the mind and the fundamental 
 principles that support it also must be conceived as 
 growing up, like the rest of our powers and activities, that 
 is, by a process of experimenting, designed to render the 
 world conformable to our wishes. They will begin their 
 career, that is, as demands we make upon our experience 
 or in other words as postulates, and their subsequent 
 sifting, which promotes some to be axioms and leads to 
 the abandonment of others, which it turns out to be too 
 expensive or painful to maintain, will depend on the 
 experience of their working. 
 
 The contrast with both of the traditional accounts of 
 the matter, both that of the old empiricism and of 
 epistemological apriorism is well marked, and I hope to 
 show that its superiority is no less palpable. 
 
 The truth is that both the traditional accounts of the 
 nature of Axioms are demonstrably wrong, and though to 
 give such a demonstration may appear a digression, it will 
 ultimately facilitate our progress. I shall accordingly 
 indulge in a criticism, which will show that the axiomatic 
 first principles, whereby we organise and hold together our 
 knowledge, are neither the products of a passive experienc- 
 ing, nor yet ultimate and inexplicable laws or facts of our 
 mental structure, which require from us no effort to attain 
 comprehension but only recognition and reverence as ' a 
 priori necessary truths.' In the case of empiricism the 
 criticism will be comparatively brief and easy, because its 
 inadequacy is pretty generally conceded ; apriorism will 
 demand a lengthier and more difficult discussion, because 
 it has attempted to conceal its inadequacy behind so many 
 technicalities of language, so many obscurities of argu- 
 mentation and a fundamental duplicity in its standpoint. 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 65 
 
 II 
 
 8 9. Taking then the old empiricism first, we observe 
 that there seems to be little doubt about its standpoint. 
 Its derivation of the axioms is frankly psychological, 
 and describes how the mind may be conceived actually 
 to come by them. Its psychology is doubtless mistaken, 
 and its recourse to psychology to settle the problem of 
 knowledge may often be crudely worded, but it propounds 
 a definite method of answering a real question. And we 
 are at least free from the perplexities which arise in 
 apriorism when an argument is conducted on two planes at 
 once, the psychological and the epistemological (logical), 
 and the relations of the two are left carefully undefined. 
 
 Secondly, it should be noted that empiricist psychology 
 is at bottom quite as much infected with intellectualism 
 as that of the apriorists. It conceives, that is, the 
 experience which yields the elements of our mental 
 structure as cognitive (' impressions,' ' ideas,' etc.) ; it 
 does not place the central function of mental life in 
 volitional striving and selective attention. Now intel- 
 lectualism, though it may lend itself to many descriptive 
 purposes in psychology and hence will probably never 
 wholly disappear, is ultimately a misdescription of mental 
 life even as psychology, while it is essentially incapable 
 of connecting itself with the wider biological context, in 
 which the organism is conceived as reacting on its 
 environment, or with the higher ethical plane, on which 
 it is conceived as a responsible person. 
 
 I pass to the graver counts of the indictment. Em- 
 piricism conceived a purely passive mind as being moulded 
 by an already made external world into correspondence 
 with itself in the course of a process of experience which 
 overcame whatever native refractoriness the mind pos- 
 sessed. 1 Hence we come by our belief that every event 
 has a cause in consequence of the fact that there are 
 causes in nature, and that this eventually impresses itself 
 
 1 It is thus the exact converse of the account given above (§ 6) in which 
 moulding activity was due to ' mind,' and resistance to ' matter.' 
 
 F 
 
66 F. C. S. SCHILLER u 
 
 upon us ; two and two make four, because there are units 
 which behave so, and we must count them thus and not 
 otherwise, though in another world, as Mill consistently 
 observed, they might insist on making five, and force 
 upon us a new arithmetic. So also it is because nature is 
 uniform that an unbroken series of inductions per enumera- 
 tionem simplicem hammers into us the principle of the 
 ' uniformity of nature.' 
 
 To all this the fatal objection holds that these prin- 
 ciples cannot be extracted from experience because they 
 must already be possessed before experience can confirm 
 them. Hume's simple discovery, that the connection of 
 events which all assume is never a fact of observation, is 
 as awkward for empiricism as for apriorism. Unless, 
 therefore, we look upon the succession of events as 
 possibly regular, it can yield no evidence of a principle 
 of regularity ; until we count them, things are not 
 numbered, until we look for order, order does not 
 appear. In the case of the uniformity of nature Mill 
 indeed practically concedes this ; he admits {Logic, bk. iii. 
 ch. iii. § 2, and ch. vii. § i) that "nature not only is 
 uniform, but is also infinitely various," that some pheno- 
 mena " seem altogether capricious," and that " the order 
 of nature as perceived at a first glance presents at every 
 instant a chaos followed by another chaos." Now if this 
 is still true of the impression produced on us by nature, 
 whenever we assume the receptive attitude of a disinterested 
 observer, how much more of a chaos must nature have 
 appeared to the primitive intelligence which had yet to 
 lay down the fundamental principles of cosmic order ? 1 
 
 The truth is that the whole empiricist account of the 
 derivation of axioms is not psychological history experi- 
 enced by the primitive mind : like so much ' inductive 
 logic ' it is at best an ex post facto reinterpretation (for 
 logical purposes) of such experience by a reflecting mind 
 which has already grasped, and long used, the principles 
 
 1 There is of course ample evidence that this was actually felt to be the case. 
 Primitive animism is [inter alia) an explanation of the material chaos of experi- 
 ence by a corresponding spiritual chaos, conceived as rather more manageable. 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 67 
 
 of cosmic order. To the primitive mind such principles 
 can at most be suggested by the regularity of phenomena 
 like, eg., the alternation of day and night, or of organic 
 habits (breathing, heartbeat, hunger, etc.) already acquired 
 before reflection begins ; but if mere experience were the 
 source of axioms, such suggestions of regularity would 
 necessarily have their effect effaced by the preponder- 
 antly chaotic character of the bulk of experience, and 
 would be swept away by a cataract of ' lawless ' 
 impressions. 
 
 Again it is incumbent on us to note the difficulty of 
 generalising the empiricist derivation of Axioms : though 
 Empiricism is over 2000 years old, it has never been 
 completely carried out, and few indeed would be found to 
 envy the empiricist the task, e.g. of adequately deriving 
 the Principle of Identity. 
 
 And lastly, it affords just ground for complaint that 
 empiricism as it stands, does not really satisfy the desire 
 the appeal to which constituted its chief charm. It does 
 not really exhibit the derivation of the axioms in a 
 process of experience. It asserts indeed that such a 
 derivation occurred. But it assigns to it a date in a 
 so remotely prehistoric and prelogical age that it is im- 
 possible to observe the details of the process. And in 
 any case the process is complete. Thus, according to 
 Mill, the romance of the axioms is past before real 
 thinking and scientific induction begin : association has 
 engendered them, but that does not prevent them from 
 being final constituents of the present intellectual order; 
 once established " in the dim red dawn of man," they 
 are exempt from further vicissitudes, and undergo no 
 selection or real confirmation in the development of our 
 intelligence. Thus they lay claim to the same vicious 
 finality as their rivals the a priori structures of the mind : 
 neither the one nor the other leaves room for a real 
 growth in the intrinsic powers of the mind. 
 
68 F. C. S. SCHILLER 
 
 III 
 
 § 10. But to castigate empiricism is to flog a dead 
 horse ; to go on an expedition against apriorism is to 
 plunge into an enchanted forest in which it is easy to 
 miss the truth by reason of the multitude of " universal 
 and necessary truths " which bar one's way. 
 
 At first, indeed, nothing seems easier and more obvious 
 than the considerations upon which apriorism is based. 
 If there are certain truths which are necessary to all 
 knowing, which are implied in the existence of every 
 act of knowledge, if these truths cannot be derived from 
 experience because they are presupposed by all experi- 
 ence, if, as we said, we must be in possession of them 
 before experience can confirm them, then what can we 
 do but call them a priori and suppose that they reveal 
 the ultimate self-evident structure of the mind, which 
 we must recognise, but which it would argue impiety to 
 question and fatuity to derive ? 
 
 Nevertheless I propose to show that beneath the thin 
 crust of this self-evidence there lie concealed unsuspected 
 depths of iniquity, that the clearness of the doctrine is 
 superficial and gives way to deepening obscurity the 
 farther it is explored, that in every one of the specious 
 and familiar phrases, which apriorists are wont to fling 
 about as the final deliverances of epistemological wisdom, 
 there lurk indescribable monsters of ambiguity. Nay, 
 my criticism will culminate in a demonstration that 
 the whole conception of an independent and autonomous 
 theory of knowledge is afflicted with an ineradicable 
 and incurable confusion of thought, the clearing up of 
 which demolishes the locus standi of the whole apriorist 
 position. 
 
 Let us note then in the first place that as an inference 
 from the break-down of the old empiricism apriorism is 
 devoid of cogency. It does not follow that because the 
 ' necessary ' truths are presupposed in all experience they 
 are, in the technical sense, a priori. We must indeed 
 be possessed of them to organise our experience, but we 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 69 
 
 need not be possessed of them in the manner asserted. 
 It suffices that we should hold them experimefitally, as 
 principles which we need practically and would like to 
 be true, to which therefore we propose to give a trial, 
 without our adoring them as ultimate and underivable 
 facts of our mental structure. In other words they may- 
 be prior to experience as postulates} 
 
 §11. Similarly the method of postulates is capable of 
 supplying an alternative explanation of what, since Kant, 
 have been esteemed two infallible marks of a genuine a 
 priori truth, viz. its universality and necessity. It is 
 not enough merely to contend that these truths cannot 
 come from experience, because experience can only give 
 fact and not necessity (or at least not an objective 
 necessity), and because it can never guarantee an absolute 
 universality which applies to the future as well as to 
 the present and past. For a postulate possesses both 
 these valuable characteristics by as good a right as an a 
 priori truth, and is not afflicted with the impotence that 
 besets a mere record of past experience. 
 
 Its universality follows from its very nature as a 
 postulate. If we make a demand that a certain principle 
 shall hold, we naturally extend our demand to all cases 
 without distinction of time, past, present, and to come. 
 The shrinking modesty which clings to the support of 
 precedent is out of place in a postulate. A truth which 
 we assume because we want it may as well be assumed 
 as often as we want it and for all cases in which it may 
 be needed. We can make it therefore as universal as 
 we please, and usually we have no motive for not 
 making it absolutely universal. 2 Nor is the enormity 
 
 1 To meet the obvious criticism that most people are quite unaware that they 
 postulate in knowing, it may be well to add that the postulating, like the ' experi- 
 menting,' may proceed with little or no consciousness of its nature. Indeed 
 this is precisely the reason why the voluntarist and postulatory character of 
 mental life has been so little recognised, and its assertion still appears such a 
 novelty in philosophy. The philosophers who indignantly reject it argue that 
 they are not aware of postulating, and ergo there is no such thing. But this 
 is a mere ignoratio elenchi, and does not prove that they are not deluded. 
 
 2 Sometimes, it is true, a principle which is assumed as useful for one 
 purpose turns out later on to conflict with another. The scientific postulate of 
 determinism and its relations to the ethical postulate of freedom are a good 
 example. In such cases there is a temptation to deny the absolute universality 
 
70 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 of a postulate lessened, or atoned for, by self-denying 
 economy in the use of it. A postulate is none the less 
 a postulate because it is a little one, and if in making 
 it we sin, we may as well sin boldly. 1 
 
 Similarly the ' necessity ' of a postulate is simply an 
 indication of our need. We want it and so must have it, 
 as a means to our ends. Thus its necessity is that of 
 intelligent purposive volition, not of psychical (and still 
 less of physical) mechanism. 2 The inability to think 
 
 of one or both of the conflicting principles. But the better way of obviating the 
 conflict is to emphasise the fact that each principle is relative to the purpose for 
 which it was assumed, and that consequently, on their respective planes and from 
 their several points of view, both principles may be universally valid, though one 
 or the other, or both, must eventually be subjected to reinterpretation. 
 
 1 It is a great satisfaction to me to find myself on this point in complete agree- 
 ment with Dr. Hodder [The Adversaries of the Sceptic, p. 14) whose merciless 
 castigation of the half-hearted postulatings of some modern logicians, can, 
 to my mind, be met only by an open avowal of the fundamental part played by 
 postulation in the constitution of all knowledge (including Dr. Hodder's scepticism). 
 
 2 I am of course painfully aware that the term necessity is exceedingly 
 equivocal. At first sight it seems as though we could distinguish — 
 
 1. 'Absolute' and intrinsic necessity sui (et optimi) juris (Aristotle's 
 avayKaiov dirXwj Kal ■n-pwrws), of which the 'necessity' of a priori truths is 
 commonly reputed to be an illustrious example. 
 
 2. The conditional necessity of a logical train of thought, in which the 
 conclusion follows ' necessarily ' from its premisses. 
 
 3. The necessity of the ' necessary conditions ' under which all actions take 
 place. This influence of the given material is Aristotle's ov ovk (Lvev. 
 
 4. The necessity of means to ends (Aristotle's Siv ovk &vev to ayadbv), which 
 renders the ' necessary ' ultimately the ' needful.' 
 
 5. The psychical feeling of ' having to ' or ' compulsion ' (Aristotle's 
 avayKaiov fllq.). 
 
 But in reality the last two alone of these senses are primary and descriptive ot 
 ultimate facts about our mental constitution, from which the others may be 
 derived. The feeling of necessity (No. 5) may be evoked by a variety of 
 circumstances, by physical constraint, by attempts to deny facts of perception, or 
 to interrupt a train of thought which coheres, either logically, or psychologically 
 (for all minds, or for an individual's mind). It arises wherever a volition is 
 thwarted, and not until this occurs ; hence the necessity alike of fact and of 
 reasoning appears to be ' implicit. ' The truth, however, is that factual data 
 and logical reasonings are not ' necessary ' in themselves ; their ' necessity ' is 
 only aroused in consciousness when the will needs to affirm them against 
 resistance in the pursuit of its ends. That ' 2 and 2 must be 4 ' only marks the 
 rejection of some other result : if we desire to adhere to our system of 
 arithmetical assumptions and are determined to go on counting, we cannot be 
 called upon to add 2 and 2 in any other way. But behind the ' can't ' there 
 always lurks a ' won't ' : the mind cannot stultify itself, because it will not 
 renounce the conceptions it needs to order its experiences. The feeling of 
 necessity, therefore, is at bottom an emotional accompaniment of the purposive 
 search for the means to realise our ends (sense 4). And inasmuch as the 
 pursuit of means is unmeaning except in beings working under limitations 
 in their choice of means, which means are themselves extracted from the 
 resisting material (v\r/), the 'necessity' of the material conditions (sense 3) 
 comes to be bound up with and included under this (4th) head. 
 
 As for ' absolute necessity ' (sense 1) it is altogether a misnomer, involving a 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 71 
 
 them otherwise, which is supposed to distinguish necessary 
 truths, is at bottom a reficsal to do so, a refusal to strip 
 oneself of useful means of harmonising one's experience 
 at the summons of a casual doubt. To argue, then, from 
 the universality and necessity of our axioms to their 
 a priori origin is a non sequitur which should not be 
 allowed to pass unchallenged, even if there were no 
 alternative theory in the field. 
 
 S 1 2. Let us consider next the possible meanings 
 of the phrase ' a condition of all possible experience.' 
 When an a priori truth is so denominated, what is the 
 precise meaning attached to ' condition ' ? Does it mean 
 that; without which experience cannot be, or cannot be 
 thought, or cannot be thought in an cesthetically pleasing or 
 ethically satisfactory manner? Evidently we ought to 
 distinguish between a truth which is operative as a 
 psychical antecedent fact causing the subsequent 
 experience and a logical factor which is detected in that 
 experience by subsequent reflection, but need not be 
 actually present in consciousness at the time of 
 experiencing, and so cannot be called a psychical fact. 
 In the latter case the ' condition of the possibility of 
 experience ' is not anything actually necessary to the 
 experience, but rather necessary to its ex post facto 
 reconstruction which ministers to our desire for the logical 
 ideal of an intelligible system of experience. 
 
 And of course the answer to the question — what are 
 the conditions of thinking such a logical system]? — will 
 depend on the mode of logical analysis we may choose to 
 adopt : hence the burden of proof will rest with the 
 advocates of any particular form of apriorism that their 
 account is the only one possible. 
 
 All these considerations may be urged with still 
 
 contradiction in adjectis : necessity is always dependence, and the factual only 
 becomes ' necessary ' by having a ground assigned to it, i.e. by sacrificing 
 its independence and becoming hypothetical. But the hypothetical necessity of 
 thought (sense 2), into which it is thus absorbed, is itself reducible to a means : 
 Our coherent systems of ' necessary connection ' can (and will) be shown to be 
 but means for the realisation of our purposes in thinking, and apart from these 
 possess no necessity. No one need add 2 and 2 as 4 unless he needs to add, i.e. 
 wills to add them, because he needs arithmetic. 
 
72 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 greater force against versions of the a priori conditions of 
 experience which reduce themselves to demands (it is 
 true for the most part semi-conscious and unavowed) 
 that the cosmos shall conform to various aesthetical and 
 ethical ideals : such demands may be entirely legitimate 
 in their way, and I myself would be the last to think the 
 worse of any philosopher for showing susceptibility to 
 ethical and aesthetical ideals, and holding that their 
 realisation also is included in the conditions of a thoroughly 
 rational experience. But should they not be avowed as 
 such ? and is it not entirely improper to mask them under 
 the ambiguity of ' the conditions of experience ' ? There 
 remains then only the first interpretation, which takes the 
 ' condition ' to be an actual psychical fact, and so decides 
 in one way the very debatable question which must next 
 engage our attention. 
 
 S 13. What does a priori mean? When we speak 
 of ' the a priori principles implied in the existence of 
 all knowledge,' do we mean implied logically or psycho- 
 logically ? Are they, that is, the products of a logical 
 analysis or psycJdcal facts ? Is the ' priority ' asserted 
 priority in time (psychical fact) or priority in idea (logical 
 order) ? Or, horribile dictu, can it be that the a priori, 
 as it is used, is a little of both, or each in turn, and that 
 the whole apriorist account of our axioms rests on this 
 fundamental confusion ? 
 
 Of course it would be very pleasant if we could 
 answer this question by an appeal to authority, if we 
 could find, for choice in Kant, or, if not, in some of 
 his followers and interpreters, an unambiguous and 
 authoritative settlement of this question. But unfortu- 
 nately Kant's own utterances are so obscure, ambiguous, 
 and inconsistent, and his followers are in such disagreement, 
 that this short and easy way is barred/ and that we shall 
 have to adopt the longer, and perhaps more salutary, 
 method of arguing out the logical possibilities of each 
 interpretation. 
 
 § 14. I shall, accordingly, begin by considering the 
 interpretation of the a priori as a term in a logical 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 73 
 
 analysis, as it seems on the whole to be that best 
 supported and most supportable. 
 
 If we take the a priori as the outcome of a logical 
 inquiry, as the product of a logical analysis describing 
 how the formation of knowledge out of its constituent 
 factors is to be conceived, if the world is to be thinkable 
 (i.e. to satisfy our logical ideals), then the first point of 
 which we shall require an explanation is how we come 
 by these factors. In the Kantian analysis knowledge 
 is said to arise out of the union of heterogeneous 
 elements, Sensation and Thought, the former supplying 
 the Matter, the latter the Form. But what authenticates 
 Kant's fundamental antithesis of Matter and Form, 
 Sensation and Thought, so that it should be imperative 
 on every one to set out from it in his analysis of the 
 nature of knowledge ? Why are we not to be at liberty 
 to conduct our analysis in whatever way and by whatever 
 principles appear to us most suitable ? Why should we 
 be tied down to Kant's factors ? Has not Mr. Shadworth 
 Hodgson recently shown that it is possible to construct 
 a logical analysis of knowledge as elaborate and careful 
 as Kant's (though perhaps just as unsound ultimately) 
 without having recourse to a use of a priori principles ? 
 Or better still, should we not do well to go back to 
 Aristotle and find in his antithesis of mediate and 
 immediate, discursive and intuitive, the basis of an 
 analysis quite as legitimate in theory and far more 
 fertile in practice? Is it not in short an unavoidable 
 methodological defect of any ' epistemological ' argument 
 that it must rest on an arbitrary selection of fundamental 
 assumptions ? 
 
 So far as I can see, the exclusive claims of the 
 Kantian analysis could be defended only in two ways. 
 It might be alleged that the recognition of its truth was 
 itself an a priori necessity of thought. Or it might be 
 contended that its correctness was guaranteed by the 
 manner of its working, by our finding that, as a matter of 
 subsequent experience, it did enable us to account rationally 
 for all the observed characteristics of our knowledge. 
 
74 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 But would not the first defence be exposed to the 
 crushing retort that it begged the question, and was 
 nothing more than a circular argument which tried to 
 make the unsupported allegation of a necessity of thought 
 into the logical ground of that allegation ? 
 
 The second defence on the other hand seems 
 obnoxious to a double objection. In the first place has 
 it not a pronounced empiricist trend, and is it consonant 
 with the dignity of apriorism to introduce a sort of 
 transcendental ' payment by results ' into the estimation 
 of theoretical philosophemes ? And secondly, if we 
 answer thus, it will be necessary, but not easy, to show 
 that de facto the Kantian epistemology gives a complete 
 and satisfactory answer to the whole problem. And I 
 hardly anticipate that the distinguished philosophers who 
 have devoted their lives to proving the necessity of going 
 beyond Kant to Fichte, or Hegel, or Herbart, or 
 Schopenhauer, because of the glaring defects they have 
 found in Kant's system, will find it to their taste so to 
 defend the Kantian position, even though it has supplied 
 them with the common foundation of their several systems. 
 We must either deny, therefore, that the truth of the 
 Kantian analysis of knowledge is vouched for by its 
 self-evident adequacy, by the pellucid cogency of its 
 constructions, or assert that the whole procession of 
 philosophers that has started from Kant has gone 
 hopelessly astray. 
 
 But after all it is not we who are concerned to find 
 our way past the uninviting horns of this dilemma ; 
 whether the Kantian analysis of knowledge is perfect and 
 his followers have erred in amending it, or whether it is 
 fundamentally wrong and his followers have erred in con- 
 tinuing it, the point which has now aroused our curiosity 
 is what guarantees it offers for the correctness of its 
 presuppositions. Let us turn, therefore, to the history of 
 philosophy and inquire whence as a matter of fact Kant 
 derived the presuppositions of his analysis. 
 
 §15. I greatly fear the answer will be shocking. 
 Kant's whole construction seems to be based on psychology, 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 75 
 
 nay on the psychology of the period ! How can this be 
 reconciled with the assiduity with which the dominant 
 school of Kant-Pharisees has preached that epistemology 
 and psychology have nothing to do with each other and 
 that the former must be kept quite clear from contamina- 
 tion with the latter ? After it has been so long and 
 laboriously instilled into us that subservience to psychology 
 is the one deadly sin which the good epistemologist must 
 shun, that psychology is the wicked realm of Hume, Mill, 
 and the Devil, have we not a right to be shocked when 
 we find that Kant himself has distilled his elixir vitce from 
 this broth of Hell ? Is it not intolerable then to force 
 us to employ psychological assumptions as to the nature 
 of mind ? For even though it is permitted to receive 
 instruction from a foe, we know that it is prudent to 
 dread the Danaans even when they are bearing gifts. 
 
 And yet the facts are hard to argue away. Is not the 
 antithesis between the 'matter' of sensation and the 'form' 
 of thought the old psychological distinction invented by 
 Plato? Again has it not often been shown 1 that in its 
 conception of the ' manifold of sensation ' the Kantian 
 system presupposes all the figments of an empiricist 
 psychology, and implies the very psychological atomism 
 which the whole subsequent history of philosophy has 
 shown to be unworkable, and which the simplest intro- 
 spection shows to be untrue ? And is it not in a large 
 measure because he vainly and falsely follows, nay out- 
 does, Hume in assuming a wholly unformed and unfounded 
 v\rj of sensations, which not all the a priori machinery 
 made in Germany can ever really lick into shape, that 
 Kant's epistemology breaks down ? 
 
 And what Kant adds to this psychological mixture of 
 Platonic dualism and Humian atomism is a no less 
 unoriginal ingredient. It consists simply of a number 
 of faculties, invented ad hoc, upon which devolves the duty 
 (which we are vainly assured they are capable of fulfilling) 
 of organising the formless matter with which they are 
 supplied. But does not this commit the Kantian theory 
 
 1 Most recently and lucidly in Mr. Hobhouse's Theory of Knowledge, p. 42. 
 
76 F. C. S. SCHILLER « 
 
 of knowledge to another psychological fallacy, the effete 
 and futile doctrine of faculties ? In fine what answer 
 should we be able to make, nay how should we disguise 
 our sympathy, if an enfant terrible should arise and declare 
 that so far from being uncontaminated with psychology 
 Kantian epistemology was in reality nothing but a 
 misbegotten cross by faculty psychology out of Humian 
 atomism ? 
 
 I have never been able to discover from the apriorists 
 what they conceive to be the relation of logical analysis 
 to psychological fact, i.e. the actual process of experience, 
 but if, as experience shows, some reference to the latter 
 occurs, and is indeed inevitable, we may at least demand 
 that the reference should be made clear and explicit. And 
 in addition it may fairly be demanded that if a theory 
 of knowledge cannot but rest on presuppositions as to the 
 factual nature of conscious life, recourse should be had to 
 psychological descriptions of the best and most modern 
 type, before an attempt is made to decide what super- or 
 extra-psychological principles are ' implied in the exist- 
 ence of knowledge.' 
 
 § 1 6. It would seem then that the attempt to construe 
 the a priori as a logical analysis independent of psycho- 
 logical fact is not practicable, and cannot really dispense 
 with an appeal to psychological assumptions which are 
 arbitrary and exploded. But the difficulties of this theory 
 of the a priori by no means end here. Supposing 
 even that somehow, aided, let us say, by some spiritual 
 influx from a nolimenal world, we had succeeded in con- 
 structing a complete account of the structure of knowledge 
 which satisfied every logical requirement, worked perfectly, 
 and was applicable to everything that could be called 
 knowledge, even so we should have gained an aesthetical 
 rather than logical advantage. Our epistemology would 
 be beautiful, because great and symmetrical, but would it 
 be indisputably true ? Could we not conceive some other 
 philosopher gifted with an equally synoptic imagination 
 setting himself to compete with our lovely construction, 
 and succeeding, perhaps, in throwing it into the shade of 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 77 
 
 oblivion by a rival structure based on different assumptions, 
 built up by different connections and excelling its pre- 
 decessors in completeness, simplicity, and aesthetic 
 harmony P 1 
 
 Theoretically at least any member of such analyses of 
 knowledge would seem to be possible ; for they have only 
 to construct imaginary logical systems, to describe how 
 knowledge may be conceived to be put together, without 
 restriction as to the choice of principles assumed and 
 without reference to what actually occurs in rerum natnra. 
 It would need therefore the decree of some absolute and 
 infallible despot of the intelligible world to secure for 
 whatever a priori account was preferred — on account of its 
 simplicity or aesthetic completeness or practical convenience 
 — a monopoly of epistemological explanation. 
 
 §17. However, even this may be conceded. I am in 
 a yielding mood and not disposed to cavil or to stick at 
 trifles, and so will not contest the right divine of Kant 
 and his dynasty — he has too great a bodyguard of 
 philosophy professors. 
 
 I proceed only to point out a consequence of the 
 attempt to construe the a priori logically without reference 
 to psychical fact. It follows that its priority is not in 
 time. For the whole matter is one of logical analysis. 
 The actual knowledge, which the epistemologist professes 
 to analyse, is then the real fact, and prior to the analysis 
 which professes to explain it. It is the actual presupposi- 
 tion of the analysis which distinguishes in it an a priori 
 and an a posteriori element. Thus in actual fact the 
 a priori and a posteriori elements in knowledge are co- 
 eternal and co-indispensable, even though not esteemed 
 co-equal. The priority therefore of the a priori is solely 
 an honorific priority in dignity. A priori and a posteriori 
 are merely eulogistic and dyslogistic appellations, which 
 we are pleased to bestow upon factors which we are 
 pleased to distinguish in one and the same act of know- 
 ledge. In the concrete reality they are fused together ; 
 there is no form without matter and no matter without 
 
 1 That this actually occurs has been shown above (§ 14). 
 
78 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 form — crvve^evydaL fiev yap Tavra (paiverao /ecu ^(opi,cr/j,bv 
 ov he^ecrOat} 
 
 Now if this be the case, I cannot for the life of me see 
 why such inordinate importance should be attached to the 
 distinction of a priori and a posteriori, nay to the whole 
 epistemological theory, nor why the naming and pre- 
 cedence of such abstractions should be accounted essentials 
 of philosophic salvation. What now hinders us from 
 inferring from the course of the argument that the 
 procedure and terminology of our epistemological analysis 
 is arbitrary and indifferent, and that the real test of truth 
 comes, not from any distinctions we assume beforehand, 
 but a posteriori and empirically from the manner of its 
 working ? 
 
 § i 8. As far as the Kantian analysis of knowledge is 
 concerned, the issue can be narrowed down to this 
 question, whether it works, and is the simplest and most 
 convenient analysis that can be devised. If such a 
 contention on its behalf can be substantiated, let it be 
 called true, in the only sense in which mortal man can 
 intelligibly speak of truth ; if not, let it be finally housed 
 in that ' Museum of Curios ' which Prof. James has so 
 delightfully instituted for the clumsy devices of an 
 antiquated philosophy. 2 
 
 Now this is a question which I could not presume to 
 answer for others without a thorough knowledge of their 
 tastes and customs of thought ; but personally I have 
 long felt towards the Kantian epistemology not much 
 otherwise than Alphonso the Wise felt towards the 
 Ptolemaic astronomy when he realised its growing com- 
 plications ; and if by incantations or recantations or 
 decantations I could induce its author to leave the society 
 and the otium cum dignitate of the Thing-in-itself, I would 
 fain relieve my feelings by apostrophising him as follows : — 
 
 ' Oh mighty Master of both W r orlds and both Reasons, 
 Thinker of Noiimena, and Seer of Phenomena, Schematiser 
 of Categories, Contemplator of the Pure Forms of Intuition, 
 
 1 Aristotle, Eth. Nick. x. 4. 11. 
 2 Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results, p. 24. 
 
n AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 79 
 
 Unique Synthesiser of Apperceptions, Sustainer of all 
 Antinomies, all-pulverising Annihilator of Theoretic Gods 
 and Rational Psychologies, I conjure thee by these or by 
 whatever other titles thou hast earned the undying 
 gratitude of countless commentators, couldst thou not 
 have constructed the theory of our thinking activity more 
 lucidly and more simply ? ' 
 
 § 19. At this point it would seem to be time for 
 believers in the a priori to shift their ground and to try 
 another version of its meaning. I expect to be told, 
 and in no measured terms, that I have misinterpreted 
 and maligned Kant, and blasphemed against the sacred 
 image of immutable truth which he has set up. Epistemo- 
 logical analysis is not the arbitrary pastime of an idle 
 imagination, ivSe^ofievov aWces e^eiu in myriad ways. 
 A priori truths are facts which can neither be nor be 
 conceived otherwise, and without which no other know- 
 ledge can be or be conceived. 
 
 " You will not surely," I shall indignantly be asked, 
 " deny that you think by the principle of identity, that 
 you predicate the categories of substance and causality, 
 that you refer your experiences to a synthetic unity of 
 apperception, that you behold them in space and time ? 
 And we call these operations a priori, to indicate that 
 without them you cannot know or experience anything 
 at all." 
 
 Very well, then, let us recognise the a priori truths as 
 facts. If it is on this condition alone that I may use 
 them, I will gladly grovel in the dust before them rather 
 than that they should withdraw the light of their counten- 
 ance and I should be cast into outer darkness. Still I 
 cannot but hope that the said light is not so blinding 
 that I cannot behold their features. Permit me, therefore, 
 to trace them and to bask in their beauty. 
 
 The a priori axioms are facts — real, solid, observable, 
 mental facts — and woe betide the philosopher that collides 
 with them ! In one word they are psychical facts of the 
 most indubitable kind. 
 
 My delight at having found something tangible at 
 
8o F. C. S. SCHILLER u 
 
 the bottom of so much obscure terminology is so sincere 
 that I have not the heart to be critical about their psycho- 
 logical credentials. Let me waive, therefore, the question, 
 mooted before, whether they have always been described 
 with psychological accuracy, and by the best psychological 
 formulas. I waive also the cognate question whether 
 their description suffices to distinguish them unequivocally 
 from their discredited ancestors, the innate ideas, which 
 since Locke we have all been taught to deny with our 
 lips. I will postpone also an obvious question as to 
 what is now to prevent the theory of knowledge from 
 being absorbed in psychology. For I have no wish to 
 " sycophantise " against an argument which bids fair to 
 become intelligible. 
 
 § 20. But of course I cannot close my eyes to the 
 consideration that observable psychical facts have a history. 
 The a priori axioms, therefore, may be contemplated 
 historically, and psychogenetically ; and then, perhaps, the 
 valet within me whispers, it will turn out that they were 
 not always such superhuman heroines as they now appear, 
 and that they have arrived at their present degree of 
 serene exaltation from quite simple and lowly origins. 
 Accordingly I shade my eyes, thus, and scrutinise their 
 countenances, so, and lo ! I begin to discriminate ! They 
 do not all seem to be of an age or of equal rank ; some, 
 as Plato says, 1 are irpecrfieia ical hwd/xei virepkyavaai. 
 Others seem to have been admitted into the Pantheon 
 in historic times, while yet others have been thrown 
 into the background, or even into Tartaros. Shade of 
 Plato ! is not even the supercelestial World of Ideas 
 exempt from change ? Nay more, their manners and 
 bearing are not uniform, and I swear by Aphrodite, 
 I believe some are rouged and powerless to hide the 
 ravages of age ! 
 
 To carry on the imagery would be too painful, but 
 I must adhere to its meaning. If the a priori axioms 
 are in any sense psychical facts, or contained in psychical 
 facts, each of them has a theoretically traceable history, 
 
 1 Republic, 509 B. 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 81 
 
 and in many cases that history is visibly written on their 
 faces. They are complex growths which constitute 
 problems for the philosophic mind ; they are in no sense 
 solutions of the problem of knowledge, or of any other. 
 
 Whoever then can carry their analysis farther, either 
 historically, by showing how, when, and why they arose, 
 or logically, by systematically connecting them with and 
 deriving them from the other constituents of our nature, 
 or by the mixed method to which the gaps in our know- 
 ledge will probably long compel us, i.e. by supplementing 
 and colligating actual observation by hypothesis, will 
 have deserved well of philosophy, even though he will 
 have had to sacrifice the dogma of the verbal inspiration 
 of the Kantian Criticism. 
 
 § 21. Any such further inquiry into axioms, therefore, 
 is necessarily preferable to any view which is content to 
 leave them plantees la as insuperable, indissoluble, un- 
 questionable, ultimate facts which obstruct the advance of 
 science by their unintelligibleness. For what could be 
 more disheartening than to encounter this serried array 
 of a priori ' necessities of thought ' entrenched behind 
 craftily contrived obstructions of technical jargon, and 
 declining to yield or to give any account of themselves ? 
 
 Can we indeed, so long as we tolerate their pretensions, 
 be truly said to have explained the nature of knowledge 
 at all ? For what do they do to explain it ? What do 
 they do beyond vainly duplicating, as yuaraia e'lSr), the 
 concrete processes of actual knowing ? At best they 
 seem nothing but the capita mortua of a defunct faculty 
 psychology, which offers us only a tautological Svva/xa in 
 lieu of the evep^eta whereof we desired an explanation. 
 
 I have experience of the spatially extended — forsooth, 
 because I am endowed with a ' pure ' faculty of space 
 perception ! I experience succession — forsooth, because I 
 have the ' pure ' form of empty time ! I refer my 
 experience to my 'self,' and the operation is 'explained ' 
 by being rebaptised in the name of the Synthetic Unity 
 of Apperception ! 
 
 I know of course that Kant supposed himself to have 
 
 G 
 
82 F. C. S. SCHILLER u 
 
 guarded against this interpretation and the criticism which 
 it provokes, by denying that the 'pure intuition ' of Space 
 or Time is a priori only in the sense in which, e.g. the 
 colour sense is prior to the colour perception. 1 But I 
 should dispute his right to do this, and contend that 
 in so far as he succeeded in establishing a difference, it 
 was only at the cost of making the ' pure intuition ' 
 prior to experience in the evil psychological sense of 
 the ' innate idea.' 2 
 
 § 22. "But is not this whole indictment based on a 
 refusal to recognise the axioms as ultimate ? And what 
 do you hope to gain thereby ? For surely you do not 
 mean to refuse to recognise anything as ultimate ? And 
 what more deserving objects could you find for such 
 recognition than the body of necessary truths ? " 
 
 Certainly I do not in the least mean to commit myself 
 to a denial of anything ultimate. Every inquiry must 
 stop, as it must begin, somewhere. Only I am disposed 
 to deny that we should stop with the ' necessary truths.' 
 And I urge that if by one method a fact (under investiga- 
 tion in pari materia, of course) appears ultimate, which 
 by another is easily susceptible of further analysis, then 
 the latter method is logically superior. And I contend 
 also that the so-called a priori truths do not look ultimate, 
 and that it is highly disadvantageous to treat them as 
 such : I am preparing to contend that upon proper 
 investigation they turn out to be certainly derivative, and 
 that a knowledge of their ancestry will only increase the 
 regard and affection we all feel for them. 
 
 It appears, then, that if a priori truth be taken as 
 psychical fact, it is arbitrary to treat it as ultimate, and 
 that we have every motive to connect it with the rest 
 of our mental constitution. We have thereby completed 
 the proof that the apriorist account of our axiomatic 
 
 1 Critique of Pure Reason, § 3, s.f. 
 
 2 Kant supports an erroneous doctrine by downright psychological blunders. 
 Thus he asserts that he can ' think ' empty Space and Time, but not objects out 
 of Space and Time. If we resolve the ambiguity of ' think,' it will appear (a) 
 that both the objects and the 'pure intuitions' are alike conceivable, and (b) that 
 they are alike unimaginable. But Kant contrasts the unimaginableness of the 
 objects with the conceivableness of the intuitions to make the latter seem 'prior.' 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 83 
 
 first principles is invalid, in whichever way it is con- 
 sistently taken. 
 
 § 23. But then it never is consistently taken. Neither 
 in Kant nor in any of his successors is either interpretation 
 of the a priori consistently adhered to. When objections 
 are raised against the manifestly fictitious nature of its 
 psychological foundations, all connection with psychology 
 is indignantly disavowed. If, on the strength of this 
 disavowal, the whole theory of knowledge is treated as a 
 pretty structure which need comply only with logical 
 canons of formal consistency, the actual reality and de 
 facto use of the axioms is thrust down our throats. 
 
 And the worst of it is that this duplicity of attitude is 
 unavoidable. For it is in truth essential to the whole 
 epistemological point of view. There is no room for a 
 separate theory of knowledge with a peculiar standpoint, 
 if we assign to psychology and logic the whole field that 
 each of them can and ought to occupy. 1 In the so-called 
 theory of knowledge the primary problem is psychological ; 
 it is a question of the correctest and most convenient de- 
 scription of what actually occurs in acts of knowing, i.e. a 
 question of psychological fact. To logic on the other hand 
 it appertains to estimate the value of all these cognitive 
 processes : all questions as to whether the judgments that 
 claim truth actually attain it, as to how cognitions may 
 be rendered consistent, may realise the purposes which we 
 have in knowing, may contribute to the ideals we set before 
 ourselves in knowing, fall into the province of the science 
 which aims at systematising our cognitions into a coherent 
 body of truth. Between these two what remains for epis- 
 temology to do ? From what point of view, and with what 
 purpose is it to treat knowledge, if both the facts and their 
 valuation are already otherwise provided for ? It is not 
 a normative science like logic, and it is not descriptive 
 science like psychology. And the ' critical ' question — 
 how do we know ? — important though it is in itself, surely 
 
 1 I do not of course maintain that either science does this at present. It is 
 just because they are not clear as to the character and relations of their re- 
 spective standpoints that they leave a sort of no man's land around their border 
 line, for hybrids like epistemology to squat on. 
 
84 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 does not suffice to found a science. For the question 
 cannot be answered unless it is asked on the basis of 
 definite facts and with a definite aim in view. And 
 whenever it is answered, the answer will always be found 
 to be in terms either of psychology or of logic. 
 
 §24. As the outcome of our criticism of the two 
 current theories of the nature of our axioms we have 
 arrived at the conclusion that neither the apriorist nor 
 the empiricist account is tenable. Both have proved 
 unsatisfactory ; the former because it represented the 
 axioms as mere brute facts of our mental organisation 
 (either entirely disconnected or connected only among 
 themselves), the latter as the fictitious imprints of a 
 psychologically impossible experience on a purely passive 
 mind. 
 
 At bottom the failure of both accounts springs from 
 the same source. Both are infected with an intellectualism 
 which is a libel on our nature, and leads them to take 
 too narrow a view of its endowment. Because of this 
 common intellectualism they fail to realise the central fact 
 which we always encounter so soon as we abandon the 
 abstract standpoints of the lower sciences and try to 
 conceive our relation to our experience as a whole, the 
 fact that the living organism acts as a whole. Or to bring 
 out separately the aspects of this central fact which 
 empiricism and apriorism severally misinterpret, we may 
 say that the organism is active and the organism is one. 
 
 Empiricism, with its fiction of the tabula rasa, fails 
 to appreciate the first aspect ; to see that, even in its 
 reactions on its environment, the organism is active, 
 reacting in a mode decided by its own nature and guided 
 by its aspirations towards a harmony of its experience. 
 Its whole attitude is one of volition and desire, which is 
 ultimately a yearning for the Apocalypse of some 
 unearthly ideal of harmonious equilibration in its whole 
 experience, and for the attainment of this end the whole 
 intellectual apparatus is a means. 1 
 
 1 Of course this has not wholly escaped the notice of philosophers even in former 
 days, and so we may remind ourselves of Spinoza's conatus in suo esse perseve?-are. 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 85 
 
 In short, the Trpwrov ifrevSos of the old empiricism 
 is to have failed to recognise this fact of living activity 
 and its bearing on the growth and constitution of 
 the mind. 
 
 Again the organism is one and reacts as a whole. 
 This is what apriorism fails to appreciate. In the fierce 
 struggle for existence we need all our forces, and require 
 a compact control of all our resources to survive. The 
 organism, therefore, cannot afford to support a dis- 
 interested and passionless intelligence within it, which 
 hovers unconcerned above the bloodstained battlefields 
 of progress, or even sucks a ghoulish and parasitic 
 sustenance from the life-blood of practical striving. 
 ©ecopta must not be separated from irpafys, but related 
 to it as means to end ; thought must be conceived as 
 an outgrowth of action, knowledge of life, intelligence of 
 will, while the brain which has become an instrument of 
 intellectual contemplation must be regarded as the 
 subtlest, latest, and most potent organ for effecting 
 adaptations to the needs of life. 1 
 
 Thus the irpcorov tyevSos of apriorism is to take our 
 intelligence in abstraction from its biological and psycho- 
 logical setting, from its history, from its aim, and from 
 the function which it performs in the economy of our 
 nature. It perpetrates a ^copta-fios between knowing and 
 
 of Schopenhauer's Will -to -live, nay of Herbart's account of sensations as 
 self- maintenances of the soul. At the present day, voluntarism bids fair to 
 prevail over intellectualism, having obtained the support of men like James, 
 Wundt, Ward, Sigwart, Stout, Paulsen, Renouvier, etc. Since this was written 
 the recently published remains of Nietzsche ( Wille zur Macht, iii. I. 1901) have 
 made it manifest that he also conceived our axioms as postulates transformed 
 into ' truths ' by their usefulness, and that I might have quoted from him some 
 telling phrases to this effect. 
 
 To all this even Mr. Bradley's reiterated asseverations {Mind, N. S. , No. 41, 
 pp. 7, 9, etc. ) that he "cannot accept " principles which he sees to be subversive of 
 the dogmatic assumptions of his whole philosophy hardly seem a sufficient counter- 
 poise. 
 
 1 Of course this doctrine does not involve a denial of the existence (though 
 it does of the rationality) of a ' pure ' or ' disinterested ' love of knowledge ' for 
 its own sake. ' All our functions are liable to perversion and so as a psychological 
 fact, there may also occur such a perversion of the cognitive instinct ; nay, history 
 would even seem to show that it may persist and even be strengthened in the 
 course of evolution. But then the explanation probably is that ' useless ' 
 knowledge is not nearly so useless as its votaries suppose, and that in the minds 
 which are capable of it the love for it is connected with other mental capacities 
 which are both useful and valuable. 
 
86 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 feeling which renders both impotent and their de facto 
 union unintelligible. 
 
 But when we try to grasp experience as a whole, we 
 must set ourselves above the encumbering abstractions 
 of a psychological classification that has transgressed the 
 limits of its validity. By conceiving the axioms as 
 essentially postulates, made with an ultimately practical 
 end, we bridge the gap that has been artificially 
 constructed between the functions of our nature, and 
 overcome the errors of intellectualism. We conceive the 
 axioms as arising out of man's needs as an agent, as 
 prompted by his desires, as affirmed by his will, in a 
 word, as nourished and sustained by his emotional and 
 volitional nature. 1 It is manifest that we thereby knit 
 together the various factors in our nature in a far closer 
 and more intimate union than had previously seemed 
 possible. Our nature is one, and however we distinguish, 
 we must not be beguiled into forgetting this, and 
 substituting a part for the whole. And, correspondingly, 
 we open out the prospect of a systematic unification of 
 experience of a far completer and more satisfactory 
 character than can be dreamt of by an intellectualist philo- 
 sophy. For just as the unity to which we may (and 
 indeed must) now aspire is no longer merely that of the 
 frigid abstraction called the ' pure ' intellect, but includes 
 
 1 I am not here concerned with the intra -psychological questions as to the 
 number and nature of the psychic 'elements,' as to whether special volitional 
 or affective processes must be recognised in psychology. For the question 
 cannot be answered until it has been settled what is to be the purpose of the 
 psychological description. Like all conceptions, the meaning and validity of 
 those of psychology are relative to the use to which they are put, and in the 
 abstract they have only potential meaning. As Dr. Stout well puts it (p. 10), 
 one "cannot be right or wrong without reference to some interest or purpose," 
 and before bespeaking their readers' attention for the details of their classifications, 
 psychologists should above all make it clear what they propose to do with them. 
 Now I do not doubt that it is quite possible, and for certain purposes even con- 
 venient, to devise descriptions in purely intellectual terms, which entirely dispense 
 with the conceptions of volition, of agency, and even of feeling. Only of course it 
 must not be imagined that any such descriptions are final and sacrosanct. They 
 are purely methodological, and their validity extends as far as their usefulness. 
 And the question arises whether they can be used for a purpose like that which 
 we have in view. If not, we are entitled to describe differently. For it cannot 
 be too soon or too strongly emphasised that there is no intrinsic or absolute 
 truth or falsehood about any of our assumptions, apart from the manner of 
 their workinsr. 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 87 
 
 and satisfies the will and emotions, so the corresponding 
 unity of the cosmos will not be a purely intellectual 
 formality (such as every world must possess ex vi 
 definitionis), but a complete harmony of our whole 
 experience. 
 
 §25. It is a curious fact that in passing from the 
 a priori to the postulate we can appeal to the authority 
 of the same Kant whose characteristic doctrine of an 
 independent theory of knowledge we have been compelled 
 to reject. For Kant, in accordance with his peculiar 
 greatness, which his critics' very criticisms have ever 
 recoiled to recognise, became partly and tardily aware 
 of the fatal error of his intellectualism and of the 
 impossibility of accommodating the whole of life on 
 the basis prescribed by the Critique of Pure Reason. 
 After constructing for the ' Pure Reason ' a fearful and 
 wonderful palace of varieties, full of dungeons for 
 insoluble antinomies, dispossessed sciences and incarcer- 
 ated ideals, haunted and pervaded by the sombre mystery 
 of the Noiimenon, he came upon the problem of practical 
 life and found himself unable to organise the moral order 
 similarly, i.e. without reference to the demands which we 
 make upon experience. 
 
 Hence he was constrained to rationalise conduct by the 
 assumption of ethical postulates, which boldly encroached 
 and trespassed on the forbidden domain of the unknowable, 
 and returned thence laden with rich spoil — God, Freedom, 
 and Immortality. 
 
 This achievement is too often underrated, because 
 it seems to have cost Kant so little — merely a decree 
 for the creation of one more hardly-noticed addition to 
 the lengthy list of faculties, yclept the Practical Reason, 
 conjured into existence ad hoc, and apparently as 
 obedient as the rest to her author's word. 
 
 But in reality the consequences of enunciating the 
 principle of the postulate are far more momentous, and 
 with a little reflection, it soon appears that Kant has 
 evoked a force which he cannot curb or confine within 
 the borders of his system. The immediate consequence 
 
88 F. C. S. SCHILLER u 
 
 of admitting ethical postulates which outflank the 
 ' critical ' negations of the Pure Reason, is a conflict 
 between the Pure Reason, which had denied the 
 possibility of knowing the subjects of the Postulates, and 
 the Practical Reason, which insists that we must 
 practically believe and act on these tabooed dogmas. 
 Kant essays indeed to delimitate an arbitrary and 
 unscientific frontier between their domains, based upon 
 psychologically untenable hairsplitting between knowledge 
 and belief, 1 but the most indulgent reader cannot but feel 
 that the dualism of the Pure and the Practical Reason 
 is intolerable and their antagonism irreconcilable, while 
 the dual character which this doctrine imposes upon Kant 
 as both the Cerberus and Herakles of the Noumenal 
 world is calculated to bring ridicule both upon him and 
 upon his system. 
 
 In view of this fundamental incongruity between the 
 organising principles of knowledge and action, one of 
 two expedients had to be adopted. The first is that 
 preferred by the main body of Kantians to whom the true 
 and epochmaking Kant is the writer of the first Critique. 2 
 They regarded the Practical Reason as a bit of a joke 
 and accounted for Kant's subsequent recantation of his 
 ' critical ' results either wittily like Heine, 3 or dully, like 
 — but no ! too many have written on the subject for me 
 to mention names ! 
 
 The faithful few who tried to balance themselves in 
 the unstable equilibrium of Kant's actual position, who 
 believed his assurances as to the supremacy of the 
 Practical over the Theoretic Reason and its speculative 
 impotence, were left in a sad perplexity. They accepted 
 the dogma, without venturing to define it, and were 
 
 1 How can one prevent one's knowledge and one's belief from affecting each 
 other ? If we think at all, either the knowledge will render impossible the prac- 
 tical belief, or a conviction will arise that a belief we constantly act on , which 
 permeates our whole being and never fails us, is true. Personally indeed I 
 should say that such was the origin and ratification of all truth. Conversely, 
 a belief which is foredoomed to remain a mere belief soon ceases to be acted 
 on, i.e. to be a belief in any real sense at all. The history of religions is full 
 of deplorable examples. 
 
 2 Or rather of its dominant doctrine. 
 
 3 Philosophic in Deutschland. 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 89 
 
 troubled with an uneasy consciousness that it would not 
 bear thinking out. 
 
 Even here, however, there was a notable exception. 
 Fichte, with the enterprise and courage of youth, took 
 the Practical Reason seriously in hand, and combining 
 the doctrine of its supremacy with Kant's hints as to a 
 common root of the two Reasons, 1 proceeded to posit 
 the Self as an ' absolutes Sollen,' whence were to be 
 deduced both the Not -Self and the practical and 
 theoretical activities. The whole construction of the 
 Wissenschaftslekre, however, proceeds in a to7to9 virepovpd- 
 vlo<; which is too high for my humbler and concreter 
 purpose — I mention it merely as a partial anticipation 
 of the second and sounder way of conceiving the 
 relations of the Practical and the Theoretical Reason to 
 which I now proceed. 
 
 It is impossible to acquiesce in Kant's compromise 
 and to believe by the might of the Practical Reason in 
 what the Theoretic Reason declares to be unknowable. 
 For if the suprasensible and noumenal does not really 
 exist, it is both futile and immoral to tell us to believe 
 in it on moral grounds ; the belief in it is an illusion, 
 and will fail us in the hour of our direst need. If the 
 belief in the postulates is to have any moral or other 
 value, it must first of all be used to establish the reality of 
 the objects in which we are bidden to believe. We cannot 
 act as if the existence of God, freedom, and immortality 
 were real, if at the same time we know that it is hopelessly 
 inaccessible and indemonstrable. We must therefore 
 choose ; we must either trust the Theoretical or the 
 Practical Reason (unless, indeed, we are to conclude 
 with the sceptic that both alike are discredited by their 
 conflict). 
 
 If we choose to abide by the former, the undeniable 
 fact of the moral consciousness will not save the postulates 
 of the Practical Reason from annihilation. It may postu- 
 late as it pleases, as pathetically or ridiculously as it 
 likes, its desire shall not be granted to it, and it will 
 
 4 E.g. in the introduction to the Critique of Judgment. 
 
go F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 prove nothing. By postulating the inadmissible it merely 
 discredits itself. To the plea that the moral life must 
 live and feed upon the substance of unverifiable hopes, 
 Science must ruthlessly reply u je rCen vois pas la necessite." 
 If then the moral life demands freedom, and freedom be 
 an impossibility, the moral life must inexorably be crushed ; 
 Kant is der Alles-zermalmende, as Heine thought, and 
 nothing more. 
 
 If on the other hand the Practical Reason be really 
 the higher, if it really has the right to postulate and 
 ethical postulates are really valid, then we really stand 
 committed to far more than Kant supposed. Postulation 
 must be admitted to be capable of leading to knowledge, 
 nay, perhaps even to amount to knowledge, and indeed 
 the thought will readily occur that it lies at the very 
 roots of knowledge. For of course postulation cannot 
 be confined to ethics. The principle, if valid, must be 
 generalised and applied all round to the organising 
 principles of our life. The Theoretic Reason will in this 
 case be rendered incapable of contesting the supremacy 
 of the Practical Reason by being absorbed by it and 
 shown to be derivative. Thus postulation is either not 
 valid at all, or it is the foundation of the whole theoretic 
 superstructure. 
 
 We stand committed, therefore, to the assertion that 
 in the last resort it is our practical activity that gives 
 the real clue to the nature of things, while the world as 
 it appears to the Theoretic Reason is secondary — a view 
 taken from an artificial, abstract and restricted standpoint, 
 itself dictated by the Practical Reason and devised for 
 the satisfaction of its ends. 
 
 But to carry through this programme the price must 
 be paid. The Critique of Pure Reason must be not 
 merely revised, but re-written. It must be re-written in 
 the light of the principle of the Postulate. Or as Prof. 
 Ward has excellently put it, Kant's three Critiques must 
 be combined into one. 1 The simplest thing of all, 
 however, is to proceed independently to show in what 
 
 1 Naturalism and Agnosticism, ii. p. 133. The whole passage is admirable. 
 
n AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 91 
 
 manner our fundamental axioms are postulated, now 
 that we may be held to have exhibited the necessity of 
 the principle and its historical justification. 1 
 
 IV 
 
 §26. We have already incidentally discovered some 
 of the chief characteristics of the Postulate, such as its 
 universality and necessity (§ 11), its experimental char- 
 acter (8§ 5, 8, 11), its psychological origin from practical 
 needs, its function in holding together the intellectual and 
 practical sides of our nature and developing the former 
 out of the latter (§§ 24, 25). But it will not be amiss to 
 consider some further points of a general character before 
 proceeding actually to trace the development of specimen 
 postulates into axioms. 
 
 The first point which perhaps will bear further 
 emphasis is that mere postulating is not in general enough 
 to constitute an axiom. The postulation is the expression 
 of the motive forces which impel us towards a certain 
 assumption, an outcome of every organism's unceasing 
 struggle to transmute its experience into harmonious and 
 acceptable forms. The organism cannot help postulating, 
 because it cannot help trying (§ 5), because it must act or 
 die, and because from the first it will not acquiesce in less 
 than a complete harmony of its experience. It therefore 
 needs assumptions it can act on and live by, which will 
 serve as means to the attainment of its ends. These 
 assumptions it obtains by postulating them in the hope 
 that they may prove tenable, and the axioms are thus the 
 outcome of a Will-to-believe which has had its way, which 
 has dared to postulate, and, as William James has so 
 superbly shown, has been rewarded for its audacity by 
 finding that the world granted what was demanded. 2 
 
 1 For its relation to Aristotelianism, cf. the art. on ' Useless Knowledge ' in 
 Mind, N.S., No. 42. 
 
 2 Practical postulation is the real meaning of his much misconstrued doctrine 
 of the ' Will to believe.' It is not so much exhortation concerning what we ought 
 to do in the future as analysis of what we have done in the past. And the critics 
 of the doctrine have mostly ignored the essential addition to the ' will to believe," 
 viz. ' at your risk, ' which leaves ample scope for the testing of the assumed 
 belief by experience of its practical results. 
 
92 F. C. S. SCHILLER h 
 
 But the world does not always grant our demands. 
 The course of postulation does not always run smooth. 
 We cannot tell beforehand whether, and to what extent, a 
 postulate can be made to work. Compliance with some 
 of our demands is only extorted from the refractory 
 material of our ' world,' by much effort and ingenuity and 
 repeated trial. In other cases the confirmation we seek 
 for remains incomplete, and the usefulness of the postulate 
 is proportionately restricted. Sometimes again we may 
 even be forced to desist from a postulate which proves 
 unworkable. 
 
 It follows that we may find postulates (or attempts 
 at such) in every stage of development. They may 
 rise from the crudest cravings of individual caprice to 
 universal desires of human emotion ; they may stop short 
 at moral, aesthetic, and religious postulates, whose validity 
 seems restricted to certain attitudes of mind, or aspects 
 of experience, or they may make their appeal to all 
 intelligence as such ; their use as principles of the various 
 sciences may be felt to be methodological, or they may 
 have attained to a position so unquestioned, useful, and 
 indispensable, in a word so axiomatic, that the thought of 
 their being conceived otherwise never enters our heads. 
 
 But even the most exalted of these apyah avairoheiKToi 
 T<hv fir) ivhe^ofxevwv aX\w<; e^etv differ from their humble 
 relatives in human wishes not in the mode of their genesis, 
 but in their antiquity, in the scope of their usefulness, in 
 the amount and character of the confirmation which they 
 have received in the course of experience, in a word, in 
 their working and not in their origin. They are the 
 successful survivors in the process of sifting or ' selection ' 
 which has power also over the products of our intellectual 
 striving. 
 
 But it ill becomes them on this account to give them- 
 selves airs and to regard their position as immutable and 
 unassailable. For in many cases they retain their hold 
 over our affections only faute de mieux. They are the 
 best assumptions we can work with, but not the best we 
 can conceive. And some one may some day discover a 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 93 
 
 way to work with what are now unsupported postulates, 
 and so raise them to axiomatic rank. Thus whatever 
 axioms we may at any time employ are, and ever remain 
 relative to the nature of our desires and our experience, 
 and so long as changes may occur in either, inexhaustible 
 possibilities of corresponding developments must be ad- 
 mitted in the list of our axiomatic principles. An 
 emotional postulate may become the guiding principle of 
 a new science, a methodological principle may become 
 superfluous and be discarded or be superseded by a better, 
 a primitive desire may die down and cease to nourish a 
 postulate, nay even a full blown axiom may be conceived 
 as becoming otiose under changed conditions of experience. 
 While our empiricism is thus too radical, and our 
 trust in experience too honest, to permit our theory to 
 assign to any axiom an absolutely indefeasible status, 
 we must yet admit that practically the possibility of 
 modifying them is one that may safely be neglected. 
 The great axioms or postulates are so ineradicably 
 intertwined with the roots of our being, have so intim- 
 ately permeated every nook and cranny of our Weltan- 
 schauung, have become so ingrained in all our habits of 
 thought, that we may practically rely on them to stand 
 fast so long as human thought endures. For apart from 
 the fact that it would be gratuitous to suppose a revolution 
 in our experience sufficient to upset them, they are 
 protected by our laziness. To think always costs an 
 effort, and the effort of thought required to undo the 
 structure of mind which has grown up with the ages 
 would be so gigantic that we should shrink with a 
 shudder from the very thought thereof. And all for 
 the sake of what ? Merely to show that the mental 
 order was constructed bit by bit by postulation and 
 might be constructed otherwise ! And would it not be 
 sheer insanity to upset the authority of the axioms in use 
 unless we were prepared to substitute others of superior 
 value ? There is therefore in general little prospect of 
 revolutionary plots against the validity of axioms. The 
 enterprise would too much resemble an attempt by a coral 
 
94 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 polyp to cut itself adrift from its reef and to start de 
 novo. So we do as the corals do and build on the 
 corpses of our ancestors, hoping that if they were right 
 we also shall profit by following suit, that if they were 
 wrong, the consciousness of our wrongness will at least be 
 borne in upon us with a less painful promptitude than if 
 we had set out to go wrong on our own account. 
 
 § 27. It follows as a matter of course, and will 
 readily be comprehended, that, if our axioms have the 
 origin alleged, if postulation pervades our whole mental 
 life and forms the nisus formativus of mental development, 
 no exhaustive, or even systematic, table of axioms can, 
 or need, be drawn up. In principle their number and 
 nature must depend on our experience and psychical 
 temperament. They will radiate from human personality 
 as their centre, and their common service in ministering 
 to its needs will bestow upon them sufficient unity to 
 debar us from attempts to force them into artificial 
 systems which at best can result only in sham ' deduc- 
 tions ' of the rational necessity of the actual, while 
 making no provision for the possibilities of future 
 development. 
 
 We may therefore absolve ourselves from the supposed 
 duty of giving a 'deduction of the categories,' or even 
 an exhaustive list of axioms and postulates. This is 
 the more fortunate as it justifies us in considering only 
 such select specimens of the growth of postulates and 
 their development into axioms, as may suffice to illustrate 
 the principle, or prove particularly interesting, and enables 
 us to save much time and spare much weariness. 
 
 V 
 
 § 28. Which of our fundamental axioms I select 
 therefore, does not matter much, any more than the 
 order in which they are treated ; but as I am anxious 
 not to incur the charge of shirking difficulties, I shall 
 begin with tracing the genesis of one which is perhaps 
 the most difficult, as it is certainly one of the most 
 
„ AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 95 
 
 fundamental and axiomatic — viz. the basis of all thinking 
 in the strict sense of the term, the Principle of Identity. 
 
 Not, of course, that I propose to derive it out of 
 nothing. I must entirely disavow the Hegelian (or hyper- 
 Hegelian ?) ambition of conjuring all Being into existence 
 out of Not-being by a Dialectical Process working in 
 vacuo ; I have not even got the whole of concrete reality 
 up my sleeve to insinuate bits thereof into my conclusions, 
 whenever and wherever my reader's attention has been 
 relaxed by some tortuous obscurity of argumentation. I 
 prefer honestly to start from what may be taken to be, so 
 far as psychology can describe it, matter of psychical fact. 
 For I hold that epistemological speculation like every 
 other, must take something factual for granted, if it is not 
 to be vain imagining, and defy those who contest my 
 presuppositions to state the alternatives they are in a 
 position to offer. If on this account a claim be advanced 
 that my initial basis of psychical fact is a priori, that is, 
 prior to the axiom to be derived, I make no objection. 
 I am content that it should be called so, if the phrase 
 comforts anybody, and if I am permitted to point out (1) 
 that such priority is only relative, pro hac vice, and for the 
 purposes of the present inquiry, (2) it is admitted to lie 
 below the level of what can properly be called thought. 
 For I wish to make it quite plain that the psychical fact 
 from which I propose to start, is on what I may perhaps 
 best call the sentient level of consciousness, i.e. involves only 
 a consciousness which feels pleasure and pain, which 
 strives and desires without as yet clear self-consciousness 
 or conception of objects. 
 
 In so doing, I assume, of course, the existence of 
 consciousness or sentiency as a datum, and abstain from 
 the alluring expedient of conducting my whole plea on 
 the more concrete plane of biological discussion, obvious 
 and seductive as it might appear to start thence and to 
 argue (1) that the genesis — by a so-called 'accidental 
 variation ' — of the concomitance of psychical with 
 physical process was of great survival-value to the lump 
 of matter which first happened to find itself alive and 
 
96 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 dimly conscious ; (2) that subsequently great advantages 
 accrued to organisms in which these mental processes 
 cohered and coalesced and became continuous and 
 centralised, until they culminated in self-consciousness. 
 There is a fatal facility and engaging modernity about 
 arguments of this sort, and they bring out an important 
 aspect of the truth. For it is not too much to say, that 
 every step in the development of our axioms, including 
 even the steps hypothetically conceived to precede con- 
 sciousness, could be plausibly formulated in terms of 
 survival-value. But though it might be easy in this way 
 to enlist the support of the biologically-minded, I prefer 
 to conduct the argument on a higher and more philo- 
 sophic plane, in order to avoid even the appearance of 
 the varepov irporepov which is inevitably involved in 
 every derivation of consciousness. 
 
 In assuming consciousness, moreover, we are bound to 
 assume also the characteristic features whereby it is 
 psychologically described, e.g. its continuity, coherence, 
 conativeness, and purposiveness. It should be observed 
 further that in pointing out these characteristics of 
 consciousness, we are not attempting to define 
 consciousness. For why should we court failure by 
 propounding an inevitably inadequate formula, to contain 
 and constrain that which embraces all existence, 
 generates all formulas, uses them and casts them aside in 
 its victorious development ? Whoever is possessed of 
 consciousness himself will recognise to what in him 
 the description of consciousness refers ; unless he were 
 capable of this, the most exhaustive definitions would 
 impinge on him in vain and without conveying a glimmer 
 of meaning. That consciousness is a psychic fact 
 therefore I shall assume ; what it is, I must leave to my 
 reader's own consciousness to inform him. I have then 
 in consciousness a rrrov <tt<o of psychic fact beyond which 
 we neither can nor need go. 
 
 Nor I think need we allow the objection to perturb 
 us that our present conception of consciousness may be 
 miserably inadequate. In view of its continuing develop- 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES - 97 
 
 ment in the course of experience the suggestion is 
 probably true ; but we do not need the adequate concep- 
 tion of consciousness, which could be reached only in the 
 seventh heaven, and there might have become superfluous. 
 And in any case our ignorance of what the ulterior 
 development of consciousness may portend, is no reason 
 for refusing to recognise in it the actual features which 
 are relevant to our purpose. 
 
 § 29. Now among the factual features implicit in all 
 consciousness, though perhaps hard to distinguish in its 
 lower forms and not as yet completely expressed in any 
 that we have so far reached, is an identical self — or what 
 we are subsequently able so to designate. By this I do 
 not of course mean anything lofty and metaphysical, but 
 merely a convenient description of certain psychical facts. 
 I have no quarrel with the psychologists who argue 
 against an antiquated view of futile and unknowable soul- 
 substance, and insist that the only self they can recognise 
 is just the implicit ' owning ' of all conscious processes. 
 If the coherence and continuity of conscious processes 
 can under the proper conditions develop into explicit 
 self- consciousness, that is enough ; and so long as the 
 psychologists are able and eager to tell us all about the 
 psychogenesis of the self, I see no reason why their 
 accounts should not be referred to with gratitude and 
 respect. 
 
 But my problem is not one of origin, but of the origin 
 of validity ; i.e. assuming this conscious self to have been 
 developed, I have to trace out how it proceeds to the 
 conception and postulation of identity. The felt self- 
 identity of consciousness, which, however it arises, is a 
 psychical fact, is, I contend, the ultimate psychical basis 
 for raising the great postulate of logical identity, which is 
 the first and greatest of the principles of discursive thought 
 and introduces order into the chaos of presentations and 
 analyses the avyKe-^v/xivov of primitive experience. 
 
 Now this achievement is not a ' necessity of pure 
 thought' so much as of practical life; and without postula- 
 tion it would remain impossible. The unceasing flow of 
 
 H 
 
9 8 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 like impressions by itself would not suggest the recurrence 
 of what has preserved its identity in change ; nor would 
 even its felt likenesses suffice to engender a perception 
 of identity. 1 To obtain identity we must first desire it 
 and demand it ; and this demand, though it would be 
 impossible if we did not feel ourselves to be identical 
 selves and fruitless if we could not discover such around 
 us, is a distinct step beyond anything given in passive 
 experiencing. 
 
 Thus the conception of identity is a free creation of a 
 postulating intelligence which goes beyond its experience 
 to demand the satisfaction of its desires. But it must 
 have been the felt sameness of the continuous conscious 
 life that suggested the clue to the recognition of the same 
 in the recurrence of the like. 
 
 § 30. Edwin meets Angelina in her winter furs whom 
 he admired last summer in fig leaves ; he recognises her 
 identity in the differences of her primitive attire. That 
 such things as the persistence of identity through change 
 should be, and what they mean, he could learn only from 
 the immediate experience of his own identity. That they 
 are is his postulate, a postulate that fills his heart with the 
 delicious hope that Angelina will smile on him as be- 
 witchingly as before. Why should I introduce sordidness 
 into this romance, by dwelling also on the coarsely 
 practical advantages of recognising objects in one's sur- 
 roundings ? 
 
 Yet it is surely plain that the recognition of the same 
 amid variety of circumstance is advantageous ; and if 
 desiring it to be true, because he felt his whole happiness 
 depended on it, Edwin made bold to postulate it, he well 
 deserved the rich rewards which poured in as an over- 
 whelming experience of its working confirmed his postulate. 
 
 1 It seems to me clear that psychologically perception of likeness is ultimate, 
 anterior to identity, and incapable of being reduced to it. The analysis of likeness 
 into ' partial identity ' is a logical procedure which occurs when we manipulate 
 the psychical fact with a logical purpose and try to conceive the likeness. But 
 then conception is admittedly a matter of thought, and thought rests on the 
 principle of identity. What the tautology of the Hegelian definition ( ' identity 
 is identity in difference') is struggling to express (or conceal?) is really the ttse of 
 logical conception in manipulating the felt likenesses. Cf. the discussion in 
 Mind between Prof. James and Mr. Bradley (N.S. , Nos. 5-8). 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 99 
 
 We, of course are far removed from the scene of this 
 primitive idyll, and have long since ceased to notice what 
 a postulate identity was, and for the matter of that still 
 is. We need a world of philosophic quibbling to bring 
 before our eyes the fact that strict identity never yet 
 was found by land or sea, but is always and everywhere 
 a construction of our mind, wade by voluntary concentration 
 on the essential and rejection of the irrelevant. 1 
 
 Nor, of course, did Edwin know this. He had pos- 
 tulated under the impulsion of practical need, without 
 knowing what he did. The enormity of the logical 
 consequences of his act was hidden from him and only 
 gradually revealed. Still less did Angelina know that 
 she had become the mate of the first animal rationale. 
 
 Edwin, again, could not foresee that his original 
 postulate would not suffice, and that stupendous efforts 
 of abstraction were still before him if he would complete 
 the postulate of identity and attain to the purity of its 
 present logical use. 
 
 In recognising Angelina he had of course (although 
 he realised it not) construed her identity upon the model 
 of his own. But the concrete given identity of self- 
 consciousness is a slender basis for the construction of 
 the logical ideal ; indeed it even proves unequal to the 
 requirements of a social life, and needs on this account to 
 be sublimated and idealised into a concept that transcends 
 the given. 
 
 The concretely identical, alas, changes in the flow of 
 differences ! Edwin has grown bald and Angelina 
 wrinkled, and I grieve to say, they often quarrel. They 
 are no longer what they were when each succumbed to 
 the other's charms, and identity seems dubious and a 
 fraud. Eheu fugaces Postwne ! Postulate I The cure is 
 a hair of the dog that bit you. Edwin must postulate 
 once more, must postulate a more permanent self which 
 rises superior to such mischances of a mortal life, and, 
 
 1 If identity were ever found, Dr. Hodder's amusing strictures {Adversaries 
 of the Sceptic, pp. 116-117) on Mr. Bradley's "identity of indiscernibles " would 
 be fatal to every use of the principle. 
 
 LofC. 
 
ioo F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 ever at its best, feeds on ambrosia and drains the nectared 
 cups with changeless gods ! 
 
 Gods, did I escape my own notice saying ? What 
 are gods and how do they arise ? As men, but greater ! 
 Projections of ideals which the actual suggests, but seems 
 to trample under foot ! The sign-posts clearly point to 
 the religious postulates and a track which here diverges 
 from our own. 
 
 § 31. For though it would be fascinating to trace 
 the course of postulation to which religious concep- 
 tions owe their birth, we must follow the dry and dusty 
 road of logical postulation by whose side the hardiest 
 flowers of the boldest rhetoric can scarce contrive to 
 blossom. A constant and unchanging self is needed 
 not merely to satisfy what subsequently develops into 
 the religious instinct, but also in order to yield a trust- 
 worthy standard of comparison for the purposes of 
 everyday life. If Edwin likes his mammoth steak well 
 done to-day and underdone to-morrow, no woman can 
 live with him. A stable standard of reference in our 
 judgments is an urgent practical need. Hence the ideal 
 of absolute identity begins to dawn upon the logical 
 horizon, and it is recognised that the possibility of mean- 
 ing depends on its constancy, and that perfect constancy 
 could be realised only by perfect knowledge. 
 
 And, not otherwise, recognition leads on to cognition, 
 and cognition to the same postulate of conceptual identity 
 or constancy. The process which took the recurrence of 
 a similar presentation to mean that of the same individual, 
 will bear extension to the resemblances of natural kinds. 
 From recognising individuals we proceed to recognise 
 species, a task made easier by the psychological careless- 
 ness which overlooks individual differences. 1 Now every 
 step in this process is a training in abstraction. At first 
 even Edwin could not recognise his Angelina without 
 divesting her (in thought) of her enveloping differences. 
 
 1 It is conceivable, indeed, that this process actually preceded in practical 
 urgency, and therefore, in time, the recognition of individuality. But that would 
 not impair the argument, for under some conditions the discrimination of 
 individuals is unnecessary and all individuals are practically the same. 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 101 
 
 But by the time he can discern in their manifold disguises 
 the surrounding objects that are useful or dangerous, he 
 has a pretty sound working control of that weapon of 
 analysis which we now call the principle of identity. 
 
 No doubt it still is, and long remains, an evvXov etSo? 
 — pure logic not becoming needful so soon as pure 
 mathematics — but sooner or later some one was sure to 
 ask what was this universal ' man ' which was so glibly 
 predicated of white, black, yellow, and brown. And then 
 of course the v\r] would be in the fire, and a bloodless 
 ballet of philosophers would commence to dance round 
 the unearthly conflagration. 
 
 S 32. I forgot to mention, by the way, that soon after 
 recognising identity in Angelina, Edwin had (of course) 
 invented language. As to why the expression of his 
 emotions on that prehistoric occasion resulted in the 
 euphonious sound of " Angelina," he can indeed state 
 nothing intelligible. But by association's artful aid he 
 got into the habit of venting this utterance whenever he 
 saw her. And then one morning he not only said it, 
 but meant it ! Prodigious ! the sound had become a 
 symbol ! It puzzled him very much, and he had that, 
 until then, unheard-of thing, a nervous headache, for 
 three days afterwards, which puzzled him still more. 
 He put it down to daemonic inspiration (a notable advance 
 in theology !) and went on thinking. Then he proceeded 
 to instruct Angelina, and after a painful process (to her !) 
 got her to answer to her name. And, behold, when their 
 children were born they all learned to talk, i.e. to apply 
 similar and identifiable sounds to an indefinite plurality 
 of similar objects. Which, of course, in those days was 
 an immense advantage. And ever since the children of 
 men have been the only anthropoids that could talk and 
 impart ideas — whether they had them or not ! 
 
 All this happened such a very long time ago that I 
 cannot exactly tell you when, and have had (like Plato) 
 to make a myth of it. Whether in so doing I have not 
 condensed into a single myth what was really the gradual 
 achievement of many generations of mortals it were 
 
102 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 pedantic to inquire. The illustration serves, I hope, to 
 bring out the main point, viz. that the affirmation of 
 identity, without which there is neither thought nor 
 judgment, is essentially an act of postulation (more or 
 less consciously felt to be such) which presupposes as its 
 psychological conditio sine qua non the feeling of the self- 
 identity and ' unity ' of consciousness. 
 
 §33- The derivation of identity I have sketched also 
 goes some way, I think, to explain why in real life men 
 so long enjoyed immunity from the ravages of the predi- 
 cation puzzle. Identity being a practical postulate, 
 modelled on the immediacy of felt self-identity, the 
 postulation of absolute conceptual identity developed very 
 slowly, and there never was any practical danger lest the 
 meaning of the postulate should be pressed into a form 
 calculated to defeat its original purpose. The inherence 
 of attributes in a substance, the relation of a thing to its 
 qualities, are not as such practical problems, and the 
 difficulties which the intellectual play of reflective idlers 
 has discovered in them did not exist in practice. In 
 practice the meaning of terms was defined by their use, 
 and the will-o'-the-wisp of a 'truth' dissevered from 
 utility had not yet been permitted to frustrate the very 
 instinct of which it claimed to be the loftiest satisfaction, 
 nor to eviscerate the conception of ' truth ' of its real 
 meaning. 
 
 And so tacit convention kept the identity postulated 
 true to a sense that allowed of the possibility of predi- 
 cation. 
 
 Hence that .S should be 6" and yet also P, nay that it 
 could be P, just because it was primarily S, seemed no 
 more remarkable than that the self which was glutted 
 with beef yesterday should to-day be hungry, and just 
 because of this identity, should prepare once more to 
 assume the predicate of ' beef-eater.' It would be vain 
 therefore to impose on the logic of postulation with 
 bogies of an identity excluding differences ; the calm 
 reply would be that postulates need not, and must not, be 
 pressed beyond the point at which they fulfil their 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 103 
 
 purpose. An interpretation of identity therefore which 
 excluded predication would stultify our supreme purpose 
 in reasoning as completely as a failure to identify, and 
 would therefore be invalid. 
 
 And yet we should be equally stern in resisting the 
 allurements to evade the difficulty by relaxing the 
 strictness with which identity is postulated in every valid 
 argument. To the objection that ' abstract identity ' 
 would be the death of predication, because if A were 
 perfectly and unalterably A it could never become any- 
 thing else, the answer is plain. Abstract identity is never 
 found, but has always to be made. It is made, there- 
 fore, in whatever way and to whatever extent it is needed, 
 and remains subservient to the purpose of its maker. It is 
 a postulated ideal which works, though nature never quite 
 conforms to it ; before it could be fully realised, the need to 
 which it ministers, the necessity of unceasing predication 
 which is forced upon us by the Becoming of the world, 
 would have had to pass away ; and once we had transcended 
 change, identity, together with the processes of discursive 
 thinking which are built upon it, might safely be added to 
 the weapons discarded by the spirit in its advance towards 
 perfection. But as a matter of fact identity continues to 
 be useful just because it continues to be a postulate which 
 never is fully realised. It may therefore blandly be 
 admitted that A is A is an impotent truism, so long as it 
 is vividly realised that A shall be A is an active truth that 
 remoulds the world. 
 
 §34. It is in its limitations, perhaps, that the postu- 
 latory nature of the principle of identity, and of the 
 conceptual use of mental imagery based on it, appears 
 most clearly. For, as has already been remarked, there 
 ever remains a discrepancy between the identity of the 
 real and the logical ideal, a discrepancy to which we have 
 grown accustomed, a discrepancy on which the use 
 of the concept depends, but which, indubitably, renders 
 identity a postulate rather than a ' law.' 
 
 For in strict fact nothing ever is, everything becomes, 
 and turns our most conscientious predications into false- 
 
104 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 hoods. The real is here, there, and everywhere, until we 
 stop breathless in our chase and point, gasping. The 
 ' eternal truths,' unable to sustain the pace, have long 
 ceased to reside with us — if indeed they ever gladdened us 
 with theophanies even in the Golden Age of Plato — and 
 have gone down or up (one really cannot be precise about 
 astronomical directions in these Copernican days) into the 
 tottos vot]tos, where it is possible to preserve one's 
 dignity without doing any work. In their stead we have 
 craftily devised conventions, such as that becoming shall 
 mean being, and that for our purposes relative identity may, 
 under the proper precautions, serve as well as absolute. 
 But we stand unalterably committed to the postulate that 
 identity there shall be, though everywhere we have to 
 make it and by force to fit it on the facts. And so we 
 get on very nicely with truths, as with dresses, that last 
 only for the occasion or for a season, and console ourselves 
 with visions that in the end Being will absorb Becoming 
 and impermanence cease from troubling and predication 
 be completely true and unchanging and perfect and 
 categorical. If by that time we have outgrown the very 
 need of predication, it does not matter to us now ; for 
 nothing of the sort is likely to happen to any of us for 
 ever so long ! 
 
 VI 
 
 §35. The myth of Edwin and Angelina has reminded 
 me (perchance by avdfivr/cns) of another of still more 
 ancient date, and if I have obtained forgiveness for 
 telling so much about them, I may venture to relate the 
 story of another being whose name was Grumps. Or 
 rather, that would have been his name, if names had then 
 been invented. I cannot quite say who or what Grumps 
 was, but he lived ever so long ago and was very stupid, 
 very nearly as stupid as everybody else. He was so 
 stupid that he did not know the difference between himself 
 and other people, but still in his muddled way — he lived, 
 I fancy, in the slime at the bottom of the sea — he wanted 
 to be happy, though he did not know himself nor what 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 105 
 
 his happiness could be. But one day (or night — it does 
 not really matter which it was, — because there was no light) 
 he made a mistake and got outside a jagged flint stone 
 which he could not digest. It hurt him very much and 
 he nearly died. But ever after his agony Grumps knew 
 the difference between himself and other people, and 
 whenever anything hurt him or happened not to his liking 
 (which was very often) he put it down to the other people. 
 For he felt sure he would never hurt himself. And it 
 made such a difference to his way of living that he grew 
 very big and fat. But everybody else was too stupid to 
 know why. 
 
 Which fable, being translated into the decent obscurity 
 of technical language, means that the ( external ' world is 
 a postulate, made to extrude inharmonious elements from 
 consciousness, de jure if not de facto, in order to avoid 
 ascribing them to the nature of the self. Not of course, 
 that this is at first consciously so argued, or that the 
 segregation of the two poles of the experience -process 
 into Self and Not- Self need be conceived as arising 
 otherwise than pari passu. But we may conceive that 
 it is the felt unsatisfactoriness of experience which sug- 
 gests the differentiation of Subject and Object and pos- 
 tulation of the latter as an alien ' Other,' causing the 
 unsatisfactoriness. 
 
 The advantage and the confirmation are obvious as 
 before. And if any one will not believe me, let him go 
 to bed and dream ; he will find that there too he projects 
 his dream world from himself and ascribes to it externality, 
 just because, and in so far as, he is baffled by an experi- 
 ence he cannot control. 
 
 Contrariwise it may be conjectured that if we got to 
 heaven (having forgotten our whole past) and found that 
 everything took exactly the course desired, no sense of 
 the ' otherness ' of our experience could grow up. We 
 should either suppose that we were almighty, that every- 
 thing was what it was because we desired it, or we should 
 cease to make the distinction between self and ' other,' 
 i.e. should cease to be self-conscious. 
 
io6 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 §36. The postulatory aspect of other important 
 axioms I must pass over lightly. The principle of 
 Contradiction may be taken as simply the negative side 
 of that of Identity ; in demanding that A shall be itself, 
 we demand also that it shall be capable of excluding 
 whatever threatens its identity. Applied to propositions, 
 it demands that we shall be enabled to avoid the jar of 
 incongruous judgments ; but the volitional nature of this 
 demand is clearly attested by the frequency with which 
 contradictions are de facto entertained by minds which 
 either do not allow them to come into actual conflict, or 
 actually enjoy the conflict. The Principle of Excluded 
 Middle similarly, demands that it shall be possible to 
 make distinctions sharp and disjunctions complete, in 
 order that we may thereby tame the continuous flux of 
 experiences. But in both these cases (as before) our 
 postulates are not precise transcriptions of fact ; they are 
 valid because they work, because nature can be made to 
 conform to them, even though not wholly. They derive 
 therefore their real meaning and true validity from the 
 fact that they are applicable to experience, that incom- 
 patibles and strict alternatives are met with, that contrary 
 and exclusive attributes are found. 
 
 § 37. I may here call attention to the fact that in 
 scientific research the postulatory procedure of our intel- 
 ligence is displayed in the formation of Hypotheses. A 
 hypothesis is a suggestion we assume and (however 
 tentatively) act on, in order to see whether it will work. 
 It always proceeds from some degree of psychological 
 interest ; for about that in which no one is interested 
 no one frames even the most fleeting hypothesis. A 
 real hypothesis therefore is never gratuitous ; it is pur- 
 posive and aims at the explanation of some subject. 
 In other words it presupposes a desire for its explana- 
 tion and is framed so as to satisfy that desire. The 
 desire for an answer stimulates us to put the question to 
 nature and nature to the question. 1 We assume, that is, 
 that the hypothesis is true, because it would be satisfactory 
 
 1 Or, as Lady Welby says, it is the pressure of the anszver that puts the question. 
 
n AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 107 
 
 if it were, and then we try and see whether it is workable. 
 If it is not, we are more or less disappointed, but try 
 again ; if it is, it rapidly rises to be the theory of the 
 phenomena under investigation, and may under favourable 
 circumstances attain to axiomatic value for the purposes 
 of the inquiry. A good example of this is afforded by 
 the conception of , Evolution. This originated as a wild 
 hypothesis suggested by remote analogies ; in the hands 
 of Darwin it became a theory which correlated a vast 
 number of facts ; and now its usefulness is so universally 
 recognised that it is accepted without discussion as a 
 methodological axiom which guides research in all the 
 sciences concerned with the history of events. 
 
 Now the fundamental part played by Hypothesis in 
 the discovery of new truth is being more and more plainly 
 admitted by logicians. Novelty neither arises by formal 
 ratiocination in vacuo, as an apriorist logic seemed to 
 imply, nor yet is it spontaneously generated by the mere 
 congregation of facts, as logical empiricism strove to 
 maintain. Facts must be interpreted by intelligence, but 
 intelligence always operates upon the basis of previously 
 established fact. The growth of knowledge is an active 
 assimilation of the new by the old. Or in other words, 
 our hypotheses are suggested by, and start from, the facts 
 of already established knowledge, and then are tested by 
 experience. We confront them with the new and dubious 
 facts and try to work with them ; and upon the results of 
 this trial their ultimate fate depends. 
 
 Now this is exactly what we have seen to be our 
 procedure in postulating. We must start from a psychical 
 experience which suggests the postulate ( = the previous 
 fact suggesting the hypothesis) ; we must use the postulate 
 (or hypothesis) as a means to an end which appears 
 desirable ; we must apply the postulate to experience (a 
 postulate and a hypothesis not capable of and not in- 
 tended for use are alike invalid) ; and the final validity of 
 the postulate (or hypothesis) depends on the extent 
 to which experience can be rendered congruous with it. 
 
 May we not infer that the use of Hypothesis in the 
 
108 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 logic of induction confirms our assertion of the postu- 
 latory origin of axioms ? Is it not the same process 
 which now yields fresh truth which we supposed to have 
 been active from the first and to have laid the foundations 
 of knowledge ? And if it can now establish the validity 
 of the truths it elicits, why should it not first of all have 
 established its own validity by establishing the validity of 
 our fundamental axioms ? 
 
 8 38. The principle of Causation again is pretty 
 plainly a postulate. Causation, as James says, 1 is an 
 altar to an unknown god, a demand for something, we 
 know not what, that shall enable us to break up and 
 to control the given course of events. Now this demand 
 may be satisfied in various ways at different times and 
 for various purposes, in a manner which greatly conduces 
 to the vitality of controversy. Historically, our original 
 model for constructing the conception of cause is our 
 immediate experience in moving our limbs, on the basis 
 of which the far-famed ' necessary connection ' — which at 
 bottom is only the conceptual translation of the feeling 
 of ' having to ' — is postulated. This primitive conception 
 of causation, however, does not prove adequate for all 
 our later purposes, especially when, as is usually the 
 case, it is misunderstood and mismanaged. So we 
 proceed to other formulations of causality, which, however, 
 are no less clearly dependent on our experiences and 
 relative to our purposes. ' Cause ' means identity when 
 we wish to construct the equations of physics and 
 mechanics ; it means regular succession when we are 
 content to view phenomena from without ; it involves 
 real agency when, as rarely occurs on the plane of the 
 natural sciences, 2 we desire to grasp the motive forces 
 of phenomena from within. Every event shall have a 
 cause — -in order that we may be able to produce it or 
 to check its production. Similarly the principle of 
 
 1 Principles of Psychology, ii. p. 671. 
 
 2 The possible exception is biology, in which the Darwinian method |puts 
 difficulties into the way of regarding organisms as automata whose psychic life 
 may be neglected. For if psychic activity has no causal efficacy, why was it 
 developed in a world controlled by the law of struggle for existence? 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 109 
 
 sufficient Reason demands that everything shall be 
 capable of reasoned connection with all things — i.e. we 
 decline to live among disjecta membra of a universe. 
 
 How intensely postulatory these axioms are, is best 
 seen when we consider what is too often neglected, viz. 
 the limits of their use. The unchanging is the uncaused ; 
 no reason is required for that which is 'self-evident.' 
 But, psychologically, everything is self-evident which 
 provokes no question, and what alone would be absolutely 
 self-evident would be the absolutely satisfactory. Thus 
 the only complete logical truth would be one which left 
 no room for further questions by reason of its absolute 
 psychological satisfactoriness. And conversely nothing 
 arouses the questioning spirit more readily than the 
 unsatisfactory. As has well been said, there is a problem 
 of evil, but not of good. It is precisely in so far, there- 
 fore, as experience is unsatisfactory that we have need 
 of a principle of Sufficient Reason. It has to be left, 
 with so much of the panoply of practical life, at the 
 gates of Heaven. 
 
 Comprehended as a postulate, therefore, the principle 
 of Sufficient Reason no longer exercises an unsympathis- 
 ing tyranny of pure reason over reluctant desires ; it does 
 not drive us to seek for reasons that can never satisfy 
 without end ; it only enables us to assign a reason when- 
 ever we will, and the situation seems to us to need one. 
 
 The Xvcris of the airopia of the infinite regress of 
 causes is similar. It means " you may go back as far 
 as ever you will " ; it does not mean " you must go back, 
 whether you will or not." As for the unchanging (or what 
 is taken to be such) the causal demand has no power 
 over it ; it has no cause because it has no changes with 
 which it is practically necessary to grapple. 
 
 § 39- Upon the assumption of the existence of 
 universal laws of nature, otherwise known as the Uni- 
 formity of Nature, I may bestow a somewhat fuller 
 treatment, for reasons which can perhaps be conjectured 
 by those of my readers who have been engaged in 
 philosophic instruction. 
 
no F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 To primitive man — we may suppose ourselves to have 
 got down to semi-historical times — nature inevitably still 
 appears very chaotic and uncomfortable. He desires an 
 explanation of the circumstances that oppress him, and 
 is prepared to clutch at any straw. He partially gratifies 
 this desire by projecting as the ' causes ' of such happen- 
 ings ' spirits ' naturally and necessarily conceived ex 
 analogia kominis, and wild and malevolent enough to 
 account for the chaos and the discomfort. 
 
 But after all the chaos is not complete ; it is inter- 
 spersed with gleams of uniformity. Though under the 
 promptings of misplaced paternal pride, Helios may 
 conceivably entrust his chariot to the unpractised hands 
 of Phaethon, yet within the memory of the oldest in- 
 habitant the sun has risen and set with regularity. So 
 too a number of organic rhythms, breathing, cardiac 
 pumping, digestion, hunger, etc., have by this time reached 
 a regularity which can hardly be overlooked. There is 
 therefore no lack of psychical experience to suggest 
 regularity, and the whole force of association, driving the 
 mind into habitual courses, disposes it to expect a re- 
 currence of the familiar. 
 
 Perfect regularity, therefore, can be postulated ; and 
 the temptation to do so is great. For while no ameliora- 
 tion of man's miserable state can be expected from the 
 scientific caution that dares not step beyond the narrow 
 bounds of precedent, the postulation of universal laws is 
 fraught with infinite possibilities of power. If nature is 
 regular, it can be trusted ; the future will resemble the 
 past — at least enough to calculate it — and so our past 
 experience will serve as guide to future conduct. There 
 is, moreover, a glorious simplicity about calculating the 
 future by the assumption that out of the hurly-burly of 
 events in time and space may be extracted changeless 
 formulas whose chaste abstraction soars above all reference 
 to any ' where ' or ' when,' and thereby renders them 
 blank cheques to be filled up at our pleasure with any 
 figures of the sort. The only question is — Will Nature 
 honour the cheque? Audentes Natura juvat — let us take 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES in 
 
 our life in our hands and try ! If we fail, our blood will 
 be on our own heads (or, more probably, in some one 
 else's stomach), but though we fail, we are in no worse 
 case than those who dared not postulate : uncompre- 
 hended chaos will engulf both them and us. If we 
 succeed, we have the clue to the labyrinth. Our as- 
 sumption, therefore, is at least a methodological necessity ; 
 it may turn out to be (or be near) a fundamental fact 
 in nature. We stand to lose nothing and to gain every- 
 thing by making a postulate which is both a practical 
 necessity and an obvious methodological assumption, 
 pointing out a way of investigating a subject with which 
 we must grapple, if we will to carry on the struggle which 
 is life. 
 
 Quid plura ? Experience has shown that Nature 
 condones our audacity, and step by step our assumption 
 has been confirmed. The ' reign of law ' has turned out 
 to be as absolute as ever we chose to make it, and our 
 assumption has worked wherever we have chosen to apply 
 it. Thus the speculations to which we were first driven 
 in the hungry teeth of savage facts by the slender hope 
 of profit, by the overpowering fear of the ruin which 
 stared us in the face, have slowly ceased to be speculative 
 and become the foundations of the ordinary everyday 
 business of life. Our postulates have grown respectable, 
 and are now entitled axioms. 
 
 § 40. By way of a change I may pass to consider the 
 function of the postulate in a very different region, viz. 
 the construction of our conceptions of Space and Time, 
 which since Kant it has become difficult not to treat of in 
 analogous fashion. In Kant, of course, it will be 
 remembered that they are treated as twin instances of 
 ' pure ' ' intuition ' or ' perception ' (reine Anschauung) giving 
 rise to synthetic judgments a priori and needing to be 
 systematically distinguished both from perceptions ( Wahr- 
 nehmung) and from conceptions. Nevertheless it will 
 hardly escape an unprejudiced observer that a ' pure 
 intuition ' is strangely intermediate between a perception 
 and a conception. 
 
ii2 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 Of this curious fact the explanation which I shall 
 venture to suggest is that in reality the reine Anschauung 
 is a hermaphrodite, both perceptual and conceptual, and 
 that Kant's doctrine on the subject rests on a systematic 
 confounding of these two aspects. He argues first that 
 Space and Time cannot be perceptions by appealing to 
 their conceptual nature, and then that they cannot be 
 conceptions by appealing to their perceptual character. 
 So he has to construct the pure intuition as a third thing 
 which they may safely be, seeing that they can be neither 
 percepts nor concepts. But he has overlooked the 
 possible alternative that, as so often, the same word has 
 to do duty both for percept and concept, and that by 
 ' Space ' and ' Time ' we mean now the one and now 
 the other. This ambiguity having escaped his notice, 1 
 the result is that the whole doctrine of the Transcendental 
 yEsthetic is pervaded by a thorough-going confusion of 
 psychology and logic. 
 
 As against Kant, I shall contend that the nature of 
 Space and Time remains an inexhaustible source of 
 paradox and perplexity, until it is recognised that in each 
 case what has happened has been that certain psycho- 
 logical data have been made the basis of conceptual con- 
 structions by a course of methodological postulation. 
 
 § 41. In the case of Space these psychological data 
 consist of the inherent extension or spatiality of the 
 perceptions of the senses of sight and ' touch ' ( = 
 pressure + muscular contraction + articular motion), in 
 consequence whereof we can no more perceive the un- 
 extended than (despite Kant) we can perceive empty 
 Space. These perceptual spaces are fused by the 
 necessities (needs) of practical life, which force us to 
 correlate the visual and tactile images of objects, into a 
 single perceptual or real space, in which we suppose 
 ourselves and all objective realities to be immersed. 
 Thus spatiality is a given attribute of the real world as 
 empirical originally as its colour or its weight. 
 
 1 The simplest and most flagrant proof of this is to be found in the fact that 
 Kant does not distinguish between the problems of pure and applied geometry. 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 113 
 
 But this real space is very far from being identical 
 with the space of the geometers. Geometrical space is 
 a conceptual construction founded upon space-perception 
 and aiming at the simplest system of calculating the 
 behaviour of bodies in real space — a matter obviously of 
 the greatest practical importance. Hence it is built up 
 by a series of postulates into an ideal structure which 
 at no poitit coincides tvith our perceptual space and in many 
 respects is even antithetical to it. 
 
 Thus it is commonly stated that ' Space ' (conceptual) 
 is one, empty, homogeneous, continuous, infinite, infinitely 
 divisible, identical, and invariable. Now every one of 
 these attributes is the product of an idealising con- 
 struction the purpose of which is to facilitate the inter- 
 pretation and manipulation of the movements of bodies in 
 real (physical or perceptual) space, which stands in the 
 sharpest contrast with our conceptual construction by 
 being many, filled, heterogeneous, continuous only for per- 
 ception (if atomism be true), probably finite, 1 not infinitely 
 divisible (atoms again !) and variable. 
 
 And this is how and why we construct the qualities 
 of our ideal geometrical space. We make it one and 
 identical by correlating our sense-spaces, by fusing the 
 multitude of fields of vision and by refusing to recognise 
 the spaces of our dream experiences, in order that 
 we may have a common standard to which we can 
 refer all our space-perceptions. We make it empty 
 and invariable by abstracting from that which fills it 
 and changes in it, in order that nothing may distract us 
 from the contemplation of its pure form. We make it 
 infinite and infinitely divisible by carrying actual motions 
 and divisions on in thought, because it is sweet to imagine 
 that no limit exists beyond which we cannot penetrate. 
 We make it continuous by idealising an (apparent) 
 feature of perception, in order to confer upon it a mystic 
 invulnerability. And lastly we make it homogeneous — 
 structureless, and therefore able to receive any and every 
 
 1 I should say ' certainly ' myself, but I prefer to understate the case. Cf. 
 Riddles of the Sphinx, ch. ix. §2-11. 
 
 I 
 
ii4 F. C. S. SCHILLER u 
 
 structure — in order to relieve our minds and practical 
 forecasts of the utter and incalculable heterogeneity 
 which renders the physical qualities of real space different 
 at every point. And last of all we make perceptual and 
 conceptual space share in the same name, because for 
 practical purposes we want to identify the latter with the 
 former and to affirm its validity, and are not concerned to 
 save philosophers from confusion. 
 
 And yet when the philosopher has laboriously 
 disentangled the varied threads that are woven into the 
 texture of practical life, and questions us, we can realise 
 the character of our constructions. We can see full well 
 that all these attributes which conceptual space postulates 
 are impossible in perceptual space ; that is just the reason 
 why we demand them. They are pure abstractions which 
 idealise the actual and serve the purpose of enabling us to 
 simplify and to calculate its behaviour. And so long as 
 our assumptions come sufficiently near to reality for our 
 practical purposes, we have no reason to emphasise the 
 distinction between the two senses of ' Space ' and 
 indeed are interested rather in slurring over the 
 divergence between pure and applied mathematics. 
 
 § 42. Our assumption, then, of geometrical space is 
 true because it works and in so far as it works. But 
 does it work ? In modern times ingenious attempts have 
 been made to contest this assumption, and to reconstruct 
 geometry ' on an empirical basis ' or at least, to construct 
 alternatives to the traditional ' geometry of Euclid.' 
 These ' metageometrical ' speculations have indulged in 
 many crudities and extravagances and have not in all 
 cases succeeded in freeing themselves from the very con- 
 fusions they were destined to dissipate. But they have 
 achieved a great work in stirring up philosophers out 
 of their dogmatic trust in ' the certainty of mathe- 
 matics,' and forcing them to realise the true nature of 
 geometric postulates. 
 
 The chief philosophic results of the Non-Euclidian 
 metageometry are briefly these. The Euclidian space- 
 construction rests upon ' the postulate of Euclid ' as to 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 115 
 
 parallel straight lines, which Euclid postulated in the 
 innocency of his heart, because he wanted it, and the 
 indemonstrableness of which had ever since been con- 
 sidered a disgrace to geometry. The simple explanation 
 of this fact proffered by metageometry is that conceptual 
 space is a generic conception capable of being construed 
 in several specific ways, and that Euclid's postulate (or its 
 equivalent, the equality of the angles of the triangle to two 
 right angles) stated the specific differentia of the space 
 Euclid proceeded to construct. But out of the same data 
 of spatial perception other systems of conceptual geometry 
 might have been constructed, whose distinctive postulates 
 (as to the number of ' parallels ' to be drawn through a 
 given point or as to the sum of the angles of the ' triangle ') 
 diverged symmetrically from that of Euclid and would 
 give rise to coherent, consistent and necessary geometries, 
 logically on a par with Euclid's and differing from the 
 latter only in the point of usefulness. 
 
 For, however much the new geometries of ' spherical ' 
 and ' pseudo-spherical ' space x might claim to rival the 
 logical perfections of the traditional geometry, they have 
 not been able to contest its practical supremacy. Their 
 assumptions are much less simple, and their consequences 
 are much less calculable and much less easily applicable 
 to the behaviour of objects in real space. It seems to be 
 possible indeed to conceive experiences which would be 
 most easily and conveniently interpreted on meta- 
 geometrical assumptions, but it has had to be reluctantly 
 acknowledged that so far no such experiences have fallen 
 to our lot. Euclidian geometry is fully competent to do 
 the work we demand of our geometrical constructions. 
 
 But that does not make it more real than its rivals. 
 They are all three conceptual constructions which may or 
 may not be valid and useful, but which are alike in- 
 competent to claim existence. Hence the question which 
 
 1 The alleged geometry of four dimensions seems to rest on a false analogy. 
 The three dimensions of our space constructions are empirical and depend on 
 the original data of our space-senses, which in their turn seem to depend on the 
 triple analysis of motions by means of the semicircular canals of the ear, and the 
 behaviour of the physical bodies to which they are adaptations. 
 
n6 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 has been so much debated in metageometrical controversy, 
 viz. ' whether our space is Euclidian or not ' is strictly 
 nonsense. It is like asking whether the Sistine Madonna 
 is the mother of Christ. To ask whether our space is 
 Euclidian or Non-Euclidian is like disputing whether this 
 assertion may be more truly made of the Sistine Madonna 
 or of the Madonna della Sedia. For like Raphael's pictures 
 all our conceptual geometries are ideal interpretations of 
 a reality, which they surpass in beauty and symmetry, 
 but upon which they ultimately depend, and it would be 
 hard to adduce more eloquent testimony of the dependence 
 of these theoretic structures on practical needs than the 
 fact that from the first the conceptual interpretation of 
 spatial experiences instinctively adopted by mankind 
 should have been that which subsequent analysis has 
 shown to be the simplest, easiest, and most manageable. 
 
 § 43. For illustrative purposes the construction of the 
 conception of Time is vastly inferior to that of Space. 
 The conception of Time involves a much more arduous 
 effort of abstraction and its lack of ' Ansdiaulichkeit' is 
 such that it can hardly be conceived, and certainly cannot 
 be used, without an appeal to spatial metaphor. Hence 
 I must confine myself to a few hints showing the close 
 analogy of the method of its conceptual construction with 
 that of Space, in the hope that they may prove (jxovavTa 
 
 (TVP€TOLCrLV. 
 
 Nothing but misunderstanding of the nature of Time is 
 possible unless it is recognised that the word covers three 
 different things which may be distinguished as subjective, 
 objective, and conceptual Time. 
 
 Of these subjective Time (or times, since every centre 
 of experience possesses an indefinite plurality of his own, 
 if we do not — as for practical purposes we always do 
 — exclude the times of dreams, etc.) alone can claim to be 
 a matter of immediate experience. It consists in the 
 psychical facts of succession and memory, and its ' present 
 time ' always has duration. It forms the psychological 
 basis of all time-constructions, but for practical purposes 
 it is well nigh useless. Our subjective time estimates 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 117 
 
 vary too enormously for us to live by them. The time 
 which to the philosopher may pass all too rapidly in 
 metaphysical discussion, may bore the schoolboy to 
 extinction ; and conversely the philosopher might prefer 
 extinction to listening for three hours a-day to a discus- 
 sion of cricket matches or to a Parliamentary debate. 
 
 Hence for the purposes of what Prof. Ward calls 
 intersubjective intercourse it is necessary to devise or 
 somehow to advance to a ' Time ' which shall be more 
 objective. Objective Time is what we live by, and what 
 we read upon the faces of our ' time-pieces ' (provided 
 they ' keep time ' !) correcting thereby our subjective 
 estimates of the flow of successive experience. As this 
 example shows, objective time depends upon constructions 
 (including that of our watches) and motions, or more 
 precisely, upon the synchronism of motions and the 
 assumption of physical constants. But it remains wholly 
 relative, and this enables the philosopher to deduce some 
 curious and interesting consequences. 1 
 
 To reach absolute ' Newtonian ' Time, flowing equably 
 and immutably from a infinite and irrevocable Past, 
 through a ' punctual ' {i.e. durationless and infinitely 
 divisible) and yet exclusively real Present, to an infinite 
 Future, conceptual postulation has to be called into play. 
 The absoluteness and equable flow are demands for a 
 constancy which objective Time will not show ; the con- 
 struction of Past, Present, and Future results from the 
 need to arrange the facts of memory ; the infinity and 
 infinite divisibility, as in the case of space, result from a 
 thinking away of the contents and limits of the actual 
 experience. But on the whole the usefulness of conceptual 
 Time seems very limited, and is counterbalanced by 
 troublesome antinomies as soon as it is separated from 
 the experience it is intended to interpret. 2 
 
 § 44. I pass over the axiomatic postulates of arithmetic, 
 the methodological postulates which are found in every 
 
 1 Cf. Riddles of the Sphinx, ch. iii. § 6, and ix. § n. 
 
 2 The best illustration of this perhaps is that if conceptual Time were real, 
 or ' Time ' really had the attributes postulated for it, Achilles never could catch 
 the Tortoise. Cf. Riddles of the Sphinx, ch. xii. § n. 
 
u8 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 science and the metaphysical postulates involved in the 
 conception of substance : the first, because I may refer to 
 Prof. James's account of them in the Principles of 
 Psychology (ii. p. 653 foil.) and have no desire to 'outdo 
 the good man ' ; the second, because of their number and 
 the amount of special knowledge which it requires to 
 expound and appreciate them ; the third, because in all 
 its traditional forms I am sceptical as to the usefulness, 
 and therefore as to the validity, of the conception of 
 substance, and cannot stay to propound measures for its 
 reform. 1 
 
 § 45. On the other hand too much may be gleaned 
 from the consideration of postulates which are not yet 
 acknowledged to be axiomatic, nor indeed universally 
 to be valid, for us to pass them over. I may mention 
 in the first instance the assumption of Teleology. 2 
 
 Teleology in one sense is an indubitable postulate 
 of the highest significance. In the interpretation of 
 nature, we must always assume a certain conformity 
 between nature and human nature, in default of which 
 the latter cannot understand the former. Thus human 
 nature is the sole key to nature which we possess, and 
 if it will not unlock the arcana, we must resign ourselves 
 to sceptical despair. If, therefore, every attempt to know 
 rests on the fundamental methodological postulate that 
 the world is knowable, we must also postulate that it 
 can be interpreted ex analogic/, Jiominis and anthropo- 
 morphically. 3 And moreover the closer the correspond- 
 
 1 The outcome of orthodox philosophic criticism of the substance- concept at 
 present seems to be that substantiality cannot be legitimately affirmed of the 
 psychical and must be reserved for the physical. Meanwhile the substantiality of 
 the ultimate counters of physical speculation is becoming more and more shadowy, 
 and its assumption more and more superfluous. The situation seems to me some- 
 what absurd. But q ue j 'aire so long as those concerned prefer the fog and decline 
 to clear the atmosphere ? Cf. however my art. on the Conception of 'Evipyeia 
 (Mind, N.S., No. 36). 
 
 2 By Teleology I do not mean, of course, the contemplation of parts in their 
 relation to a whole, but what the word — until (by way of compromising with its 
 enemies) it was attenuated to a futile shadow of itself — always meant, viz. the 
 assertion of purposive intelligence as an agency in the world. 
 
 8 Cf. Riddles of the Sphinx, ch. v. § 6. As Dr. Julius Schultz well says 
 in his stimulating book. Die Psychologie der Axiome (p. 99 and passim), to 
 think is to anthropomorphise. Intellectualists will perhaps admit this eventually 
 — shortly before their extinction ! 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 119 
 
 ence between nature and human nature can be shown 
 to be, the more knowable will the world be, and the more 
 we shall feel at home in it. Hence, it is a methodological 
 demand to anthropomorphise the world as far as ever 
 we can. 
 
 Now human nature, in so far as it is ' rational,' is 
 teleological — it pursues ends which appear to it reasonable 
 and desirable, and tends to become more and more 
 systematically purposive the more highly it develops. 
 Of course, therefore, we must try to find this action for 
 the sake of ends throughout nature, or if we fail, to find 
 the most efficient approximation to it we can. Now, 
 with regard to the actions of our fellowmen, and indeed 
 in the case of all animal life, the full ascription of 
 teleology is not only practicable but practically unavoid- 
 able. But with regard to the other departments of 
 nature, and indeed nature as a whole, modern science 
 has persuaded itself that teleological explanations are 
 at present unworkable and therefore ' unscientific.' The 
 ideal of scientific explanation is ' mechanical,' and this 
 is taken to be anti-teleological. 
 
 So far, therefore, teleology remains a postulate, which 
 it is not possible to carry through, and to render an 
 axiom of biological or physical research. The situation 
 is deplorable, but not desperate. For, in the first place, 
 the antiteleological bias of natural science is largely due 
 to the perverse use professing teleologists have made of 
 their postulate. Instead of treating it as a method 
 whereby to understand the complex relations of reality, 
 they have made it into an apybs \6<yos which shut off 
 all further possibilities of investigation, by ascribing 
 everything to a ' divine purpose,' and then, in order to 
 shirk the laborious task of tracing the working of the 
 divine intelligence in the world, adding the suicidal ' rider ' 
 that the divine purpose was inscrutable. Teleological 
 explanation was thus rendered impossible, while the 
 mechanical assumptions were found to be capable of 
 working out into valuable results, it is true of a lower 
 order of intelligibility. In the second place, although 
 
120 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 the teleological postulate is not useful in the present 
 stage of scientific development, that is not to say that 
 it cannot be rendered useful hereafter. It is open to 
 any one to adopt the method, and if he can show 
 valuable results attained thereby, he will not find true 
 scientists slow to recognise its validity. Hitherto indeed 
 the method has failed, not so much because men could 
 not use it, as because they would not, or at least would 
 not use it properly. If, at any time, they should want 
 to use it, they would probably find that it was useful 
 far beyond the limits of its present application. 
 
 § 46. But even these limits are in reality far wider than 
 is ordinarily recognised. In another way from that which 
 we have just been considering the validity of teleology 
 is raised above the very possibility of question. What 
 are these mechanical explanations which have so success- 
 fully preoccupied the fertile fields of science ? They are 
 devices of our own, methods which we have tried and 
 found workable, ideals conceived by our intelligence to 
 which we are coaxing reality to approximate ; they are 
 pervaded by human purposiveness through and through, 
 and prove that, so far as we have tried, nature conforms 
 to our thoughts and desires, and is anthropomorphic enough 
 to be mechanical. In being mechanical it plays into our 
 hands, as James says, and confesses itself to be intelligible 
 and teleological to that extent at least. There is no 
 intelligibility without conformity with human nature, and 
 human nature is teleological. A mechanically law-abiding 
 universe does conform to some of our demands and is so 
 far intelligible. We must assume, therefore, that this 
 conformity will extend further, that, if we try sincerely 
 and pertinaciously and ingeniously enough, we can force 
 nature to reveal itself as wholly conformable to our nature 
 and our demands. Nothing less than that will content 
 us, and nothing less than that need be assumed. Nay, 
 any attempt to stop short at something less, e.g. at a 
 world which was mechanically intelligible, or even intel- 
 lectually intelligible, but ignored our moral and emotional 
 demands, would seem to jeopardise all that the pertinacity 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 121 
 
 of our sciences has achieved. A world which can be ' fully- 
 explained,' but only in mechanical or barely intellectual 
 terms, is not fully intelligible, is not fully explained. Nay, 
 at bottom it involves the most abysmal unintelligibility of 
 all, to my thinking. It lures us into thinking it rational, 
 only to check our progress by insuperable barriers later 
 on. Compared with the tantalising torment of this 
 supposition, and the derisive doubt it reflects on all our 
 earlier ' successes,' a scepticism which consistently assumes 
 a fundamental incommensurability of man and his ex- 
 perience, and a consequent unknowableness of the world, 
 and patiently endures their practical consequences, would 
 seem more tolerable and dignified. 
 
 We must, therefore, assume all or nothing — we have 
 some (unless we choose to lose it by lack of faith) ; we 
 must hope and strive for all. Shall we then, in face of 
 all the successes of our sciences, infer that all intelligence 
 (our own included) is a fond delusion for which there is 
 no room vis-a-vis of true reality ? miseras hominum 
 mentes, pectora cceca ! Can it really be that they cannot 
 see that every triumph of the most rabidly ' anti- 
 teleological ' mechanical method is, from the ' synoptic ' 
 standpoint of philosophy, so much more welcome testimony 
 to the power of the human mind and will to grapple 
 with its experience, and confirms the validity of its 
 teleological assumptions ? At all events such blindness, 
 whether it be involuntary or voluntary, is not possible to 
 one who has grasped the truth that theoretic truths are 
 the children of postulation. His eyes are opened, and 
 the question whether teleology is valid is finally closed. 
 For is not his whole theory one continuous and over- 
 whelming illustration of the doctrine that without purposive 
 activity there would be no knowledge, no order, no rational 
 experience, nothing to explain, and no means of explain- 
 ing anything? What, in a word, is his whole account of 
 mental organisation but a demonstration of the teleology 
 of axioms ? 
 
 \ 47. I must pass over with a mere mention sundry 
 postulates of a religious character, whose position has 
 
122 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 been rendered still more dubious than that of teleology by 
 the prevailing misconceptions as to the validity of postu- 
 lation. An intelligent reader will perhaps gather from 
 what has been said in the last section why the Personality 
 of God should be esteemed an indispensable postulate. 
 The fact again that the goodness of God is a methodo- 
 logical postulate x will be found to throw much light on 
 the rationality of all religions, just as the pitiably in- 
 adequate way in which it has actually been carried out 
 illustrates the irrationality which unfortunately ever 
 clings even to the best of them. 
 
 Is Immortality a postulate, as Kant maintained ? If 
 so, in what sense and to what extent ? These are 
 questions well worthy of being pondered, not without a 
 cautious discrimination between immortality in Heaven 
 and in Hell. But at present we are too profoundly 
 ignorant as to what men actually desire in the matter, 
 and why, and how, to decide what they ought to desire. 
 Hence, pending the publication of the results of a 
 statistical inquiry undertaken by the American Branch of 
 Society for Psychical Research, which I hope will 
 yield copious and valuable data, profitable discussion of 
 these questions must be postponed. 2 
 
 VII 
 
 §48. Having in the above sections exemplified the 
 method by which the postulatory nature of representative 
 axioms may be displayed, I may proceed to round off my 
 essay with some concluding reflections. 
 
 I will begin with a couple of cautions. In the first 
 
 1 Even devil-worshippers must assume that their god is susceptible to flattery and 
 capable of being propitiated, i.e. is good to them ; a thorough fiend would paralyse 
 all religious activity. As for a non-moral ' deity, ' it cannot be worshipped and 
 may with impunity be ignored. Wherefore, q.e.d. 
 
 2 It seems probable that the result will be to show that though immortality 
 may be (logically) a postulate it is not (psychologically) postulated, or at least 
 not postulated with scientific intent. If so the anomalous condition of the doctrine 
 is due to the fact that the great majority do not desire to have a future life proved, 
 do not attempt to prove it, and thwart the few who do attempt this. Hence the 
 state of our knowledge remains commensurate with that of our desire, and the 
 ' postulate ' remains a mere postulate without developing into a source of 
 knowledge. 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 123 
 
 place in default of a knowledge of the historical details of 
 the psychological development of our earlier postulates, I 
 have had to content myself with schematic derivations in 
 logical order. The real procedure was probably far more 
 complicated, casual, and gradual, and far less conscious 
 than I have represented it. In fact I see little reason to 
 suppose that any of the makers of the early postulates 
 had any consciousness of the logical import of their 
 procedure or knew why they made them. We know this 
 often to have been the case, that, e.g. the logical and 
 geometrical postulates were used long before they were 
 reflected on scientifically, and still longer before they were 
 understood. But this is no real difficulty, and we can 
 study the psychological processes involved by observing 
 any one who is persuading himself of the truth of what he 
 would like and would find it convenient to believe, e.g. 
 that he loves where money is, or that being in love his 
 mistress is perfection. It is only for the cold-blooded 
 analysis of an unconcerned observer that logical chasms 
 yawn in such processes ; the agent himself in the heat of 
 action is wafted over them unawares by the impetuous 
 flow of instinctive feeling, and would doubtless reject our 
 analysis of his motives with the sincerest indignation. 
 
 For to an unreflective and uncritical mind whatever 
 looks likely to gratify desire presents itself with an 
 inevitableness and aesthetic self-evidence which precludes 
 all doubt. And we are all unreflective and uncritical 
 enough to accept the self-evidence also of the devices we 
 denominate ' truth,' until at least the doubt as to their 
 real character has been forced upon us. 
 
 It should be clear from this how I should conceive the 
 logical question with regard to postulation to be related to 
 the psychological, and how I should reply to an objector 
 who was willing to grant that postulation is the method 
 whereby we come by our axioms psychologically, but 
 denied that this affected the logical problem of their 
 justification. 
 
 To this we should reply that we also distinguish 
 between the motives which assume and the trials which 
 
124 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 justify an axiom. A postulate does not become 
 axiomatic until it has been found to be workable and in 
 proportion as it is so. But we deny that the two 
 questions can be separated and logic be cut adrift from 
 psychology and dissipated in the ether of the unintelligible. 
 Psychological processes are the vehicles of truth, and 
 logical value must be found in psychological fact or 
 nowhere. Before a principle can have its logical validity 
 determined, it must be tried ; and it can be tried only if 
 some one can be induced to postulate it. Logical 
 possibilities (or even ' necessities ') are nothing until they 
 have somehow become psychologically actual and active. 
 A ' truth ' which no one ever conceives is nothing. It is 
 certainly no truth. 
 
 Hence it is impossible to treat the logical question of 
 axioms without reference to the actual processes whereby 
 they are established, and their actual functioning in minds 
 which entertain the logical in close connection with their 
 other ideals. If therefore it is by postulation that we do 
 know, we cannot but base on postulation our theory of 
 how we ought to know. Here, as elsewhere, the ideals of 
 the normative science must be developed out of the facts 
 of the descriptive science. Regarded from the stand- 
 point of the higher purpose of the former, 1 the 
 psychological processes must be purged of the hesitations, 
 inconsistencies and irrelevancies which clog them in their 
 actual occurrence, and when this evaluation is completed, it 
 yields the norms which ought to be, but as yet are only in part. 
 Thus (as must indeed have become obvious to a careful 
 reader of the preceding sections) the logical account of 
 Postulation is an idealised version of the course of actual 
 postulating. But for this very reason it has a guiding 
 power over the actual processes, which the fancy processes 
 of an abstracted logic, legislating vainly in the void, can 
 never claim. 
 
 § 49. Secondly, I am of course aware that in applying 
 to the problem of knowledge the method of origins I am 
 debarred in one sense from giving a complete explanation. 
 
 1 Which of course is itself a psychological fact. 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 125 
 
 For granting that I have succeeded in connecting our 
 cognitive apparatus with the earlier functions of conscious- 
 ness by means of the principle of the postulate, it is open 
 to any one to demand the reason why we should be 
 capable of feeling and volition, and so gradually to drive 
 me back into the formless, mindless, undifferentiated void 
 which is conceived to precede all evolution. That this 
 difficulty should occur in all theories is no answer, and a 
 poor consolation. 
 
 The true answer is that the method of origins is of 
 relative validity and that in the end we never find out 
 ' what a thing really is ' by asking ' what it was in the 
 beginning.' Nor does the true value of the method 
 reside in the (illusory) starting-point to which it goes 
 back, but in the knowledge it acquires on the way. The 
 true nature of a thing is to be found in its validity — 
 which, however, must be connected rather than contrasted 
 with its origin. ' What a thing really is ' appears from 
 what it does, and so we must study its whole career. We 
 study its past to forecast its future, and to find out what 
 it is really ' driving at' Any complete explanation, 
 therefore, is by final causes, and implies a knowledge of 
 ends and aims which we can often only imperfectly 
 detect. 
 
 All this of course applies also to the case of knowledge. 
 Knowledge cannot be derived out of something other and 
 more primitive ; even if the feat were feasible, it would 
 only explain ignotutn per ignotius. Hence to analyse it 
 into ' elements ' and ' primary forms ' is in a manner 
 illusory ; so long as its structure is not completed, the 
 final significance of its forms cannot be clearly mirrored 
 in its structure. Ultimately, therefore, it is impossible to 
 explain the higher by the lower, the living organism of 
 growing truth by its dissected members. If we desire 
 completeness, we must look not to the vkt], as in different 
 ways our theories of knowledge all have done, 1 but to the 
 
 1 For both the apriorist and the empiricist accounts add this to the catalogue 
 of their shortcomings. Both explain the system of actual concrete knowledge 
 which is growing to completion in the cosmic process, by a reference to the 
 beggarly elements out of which it has arisen, composed of the abhorrent skeleton 
 
126 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 Te'Xo?. And to claim definitive finality for any present 
 theory of knowledge would seem to crave no slight equip- 
 ment with the panoply of ignorance. 
 
 But is the end in sight ? Can we infer from what 
 knowledge has been, and now is, what it should be, and 
 God willing, will be ? We can of course (as explained 
 in the last section) construct, to some extent, the ideal on 
 the basis of our knowledge of the actual. But though 
 therefore an answer is not perhaps wholly inconceivable 
 even to this question, an exploration of the seventh Heaven 
 is hardly germane to the present inquiry. 
 
 § 50. I cannot more fitly close this rough sketch of a 
 great subject than by adding a few words as to the prob- 
 able effect on philosophy of a more general adoption of the 
 principle I have advocated. It may, I think, reasonably 
 be anticipated that it will have a reviving and most in- 
 vigorating influence upon an invaluable constituent of 
 human culture which too often has been betrayed by the 
 professing champions who were bound and paid to sustain 
 its banner against the attacks of fools and Philistines. 
 Philosophy is once again, as so often in its history, ' the 
 sick man' among the sciences: it has suffered unspeakable 
 things at the hands of a multitude of its doctors, whose 
 chief idea of a proper regimen for the philosophic spirit 
 has been to starve it upon a lowering diet of logic-chopped 
 conundrums, to cut it off from all communication with 
 real life and action, to seclude it in arid and inaccessible 
 wastes whence there is an easy descent to the House of 
 Hades, and by constant blood-letting to thrust it down 
 into the gloomy limbo where a pallid horde of useless, half- 
 hypostasised abstractions vainly essays to mimic the wealth 
 and variety, the strength and beauty of reality. That 
 philosophy has not perished out of the land under such 
 treatment testifies with no uncertain voice to its divine 
 destiny and to the glow of ambrosial fire that courses 
 in its veins. We may expect, therefore, a marvellous 
 
 of the a priori necessities of thought in the one case, and the crude mass of 
 chaotic experiences in the other. But from the standpoint of the reXos what 
 knowledge has become is truer, because more valuable, than what it has become 
 out of. 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 127 
 
 recovery once it has by the might of postulation shaken off 
 the twofold curse under which it has for so long laboured, 
 the curse of intellectualism and the curse of a will that does 
 not know itself, and in its self-diremption turns against 
 itself, to postulate the conflicting and incongruous. 
 
 Intellectualism, to which it has already several times 
 been necessary to refer in unappreciative terms, is 
 naturally the besetting sin of philosophers, and a per- 
 ennial idol of the academic theatre. Intellect being 
 the distinguishing characteristic of the philosopher and 
 the indispensable means of holding a mirror up to 
 nature, he exhibits a constant tendency to substitute 
 the part for the whole and to exalt it into the sole and 
 only true reality. His infatuation is such that it seems 
 to him to matter not one whit, that it proves patently 
 and pitiably unequal to its role ; that to maintain itself 
 in the false position into which it has been forced, it 
 has to devastate reality and call it truth ; that it has 
 to pervert the empty scliemata of ' universal ' abstractions 
 from their legitimate use as means to classification, and 
 erecting them into ends, to substitute them for the living 
 reals ; that even when it has been permitted to cut and 
 carve the Real at its pleasure, and to impose on us two- 
 dimensional images in lieu of the solid fact, it has in the 
 end to confess that the details and individuality of the 
 Real elude its grasp. 
 
 But when, for the sake of bolstering up an inhuman 
 and incompetent, and impracticable intellectualism, an 
 attempt is made to cut down the scope of philosophy 
 to an attenuated shred which intellectualism can con- 
 template without dismay, when we are required to believe 
 that philosophy need aim only at understanding, 1 and 
 at understanding in general, without either condescending 
 to the particular, or considering that which ' passeth all 
 understanding,' it is high time to protest. It is the 
 individual concrete experience in all its fulness which 
 
 1 The thing is of course really impossible. A mere ' understanding ' which 
 excludes any aspect of the given reality is not even understanding in the end, and 
 would only aggravate our sense of the burden of an unintelligible world. 
 Cf. § 46. 
 
128 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 every man worthy of the name wants philosophy to 
 interpret for him ; and a philosophy which fails to do 
 this is for him false. Intellectualism is necessarily false 
 because it only operates with conceptions, whose purpose 
 and essential construction incapacitate them from account- 
 ing for the individuality from which they have abstracted. 
 It reduces the philosopher to an impotent spectator of 
 a supra-rational universe which he can interpret only as 
 irrational. 
 
 And in this case the on -looker sees nothing of the 
 game, because he sees a game which he does not under- 
 stand, and cannot understand unless he has tried to play 
 it. It is a false abstraction of intellectualism to divorce 
 thinking from doing, and to imagine that we can think 
 the world truly without acting in it rightly. But in reality 
 this is quite impossible. ' Pure ' thought which is not 
 tested by action and correlated with experience, means 
 nothing, and in the end turns out mere pseudo-thought. 
 Genuine thinking must issue from and guide action, 
 must remain immanent in the life in which it moves 
 and has its being. Action, conversely, must not be 
 opposed to thought, nor supposed to be effective without 
 thought ; it needs thought, and elaborates it ; it is not 
 a " red mist of doing " which obscures the truth, but the 
 radiance which illumes it. 
 
 In Lebensfluten, im Thatensturm, 
 
 Wallt es auf und ab . . . 
 
 So schafft es am sausenden Webstuhl der Zeit 
 
 Und wirket der Menschheit lebendiges Kleid. 
 
 Faust, Act i. Scene i (with the 
 necessary variations). 
 
 To trace, therefore, to their root in the postulations of 
 personal need the arrogant pretensions of ' pure thought,' 
 and thus to get rid of the haunting shadow of intel- 
 lectualism, reopens the way to a philosophy which re- 
 mains in touch with life, and strenuously participates in 
 the solution of its problems. 
 
 8 51. Such practical success in its completeness is, 
 of course, a sufficiently remote contingency ; but there 
 
n AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 129 
 
 is a further reason for the expectation that it will be 
 greatly facilitated by the proof of the volitional foundations 
 of our intelligence. For it disposes also of another 
 serious and inveterate source of philosophic confusion, 
 and constant stimulus to philosophic despair, viz. the 
 notion that philosophic difficulties arise out of the 
 incompetence of the reason. Now there is some foundation 
 for this notion. A certain class of philosophic problems, 
 to wit, those which have no earthly concern with practical 
 life (like, e.g. the Absolute and its habits), and so cannot 
 be tested by action, are really ultra vires of an intelligence 
 which was devised and developed to harmonise experience. 
 But then we have all along contended that such problems 
 are not real problems at all, but miasmatic exhalations 
 of a false intellectualism, which has misconstrued its own 
 nature and powers. Such problems are insoluble, because 
 in the end they are unmeaning. But there are other 
 cases where the intellect seems to fail us in questions 
 of the most pressing practical importance. Hence so 
 long as the dogma of the primacy of the intellect prevails, 
 it seems hard to acquit the human reason of the 
 charge of being infected with fundamental disabilities 
 and insoluble antinomies. For is it not easy to draw 
 up a formidable array of incompatible assertions and to 
 provide each with a 'proof in logically unexceptionable 
 terms ? 
 
 But of these ' difficulties ' it now seems possible to 
 propound a profounder explanation. The real root of 
 the trouble may be found to lie in the will rather 
 than in the reason, whose innocent amiability is always 
 ready to provide an intellectual formulation for the most 
 discordant aims and the most obscure desires. Let us, 
 therefore, insist that before the reason is condemned 
 untried, and philosophy is finally reduced to a trivial 
 game which may amuse but can never really satisfy, it 
 is necessary to inquire whether the ' antinomies ' do not 
 arise rather from volitional discord than from intellectual 
 defect, whether the contradictions of the reason are not 
 forced upon it by an indecision which knows not what 
 
 K 
 
130 F. C. S. SCHILLER n 
 
 it wills, a division of the will which insists on willing 
 incompatibles, or a lack of courage and endurance which 
 fails to follow out what it wills. 
 
 That this should be the case need not arouse surprise. 
 We are all sufficiently aware that systematic thinking, 
 clearly conscious of its aim, is a somewhat infrequent 
 phenomenon, and that in myriad ways intellectual confusion 
 renders possible the co-existence of inconsistent doctrines 
 in the same mind. But the intellectualist phrasing of our 
 terminology renders us slow to recognise that infirmity of 
 purpose is a no less rampant affliction, that numbers of 
 really intelligent persons are addicted to the retention of 
 incompatible desires, and either do not know what they 
 will, or cannot ' make up their minds ' to will consistently. 
 Indeed it is probably true to say that 'confusion of will' 
 is a better description of a very common psychic condition 
 than ' confusion of thought,' and that most of what passes 
 for the latter is more properly ascribed to the former. 
 For all such volitional indecision, whereof a desire both to 
 eat one's cake and to have it is by no means the least 
 venial form, masks itself in intellectual vestments, and 
 so contributes to cast doubt upon the faith that, with 
 patience and proper treatment, our minds are adequate 
 instruments to cope with the practical problems of our 
 experience. 
 
 In illustration of this doctrine a single very common 
 and glaring instance may, on the principle exemplo ab uno 
 disce omnes, suffice. The insolubility of the ' mystery of 
 evil ' arises simply and solely out of the fact that people 
 will neither abandon the practice of passing moral 
 judgments on events, nor the dogmas which render all 
 ethical valuation ultimate foolishness. As soon as they 
 make up their distracted ' minds ' {wills) which of the 
 incompatible alternatives they will choose to abide by, 
 whether they prefer to vindicate the supreme validity of 
 moral distinctions, or the ' infinity of God ' and the 
 absolute ' unity of the universe,' the mystery disappears. 
 For Evil visibly arises from certain limitations, performs 
 certain functions, subserves certain purposes, is connected 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 131 
 
 with certain conditions, in the economy of the universe, 
 all of which admit of being empirically determined or 
 conjectured. All that is required, therefore, to bring the 
 existence of Evil into accord with the postulated goodness 
 of God is that we should conceive (as we easily can) a 
 deity subject to the limitations, working under the 
 conditions, aiming at the purposes, which we believe 
 ourselves to have discovered. Similarly, if we deny that 
 moral attributes can fitly be applied to the deity or the 
 universe, Evil is simply a natural fact like any other. Of 
 course, if we refuse to do either of these things, and insist 
 on maintaining both these positions, we manufacture a 
 mystery which is as insoluble as we have made it. It is 
 insoluble because we will not either live in (or with) a non- 
 moral universe, or give up indulging a perverted taste that 
 revels in infinities. Thus it is not our ' reason ' which is 
 to blame, but our ' will. 5 For neither reason nor revelation 
 compels us to frustrate the belief in God's goodness by 
 that in His infinity. 
 
 And even in cases where a modicum of genuine 
 intellectual confusion has entered into the composition of 
 an antinomy of the reason, it is impossible to deny the 
 complicity, and ultimate responsibility, of the ' will.' 
 Intellectual confusion is most frequently the product of 
 habitual thoughtlessness, carelessness, inattention and 
 laziness, and even where it is due to sheer stupidity, 1 the 
 obstinacy which adheres to an antinomy after its solution 
 has been clearly displayed is a volitional quality — of a 
 reprehensible kind. 
 
 We may infer then that there are no theoretically 
 insoluble problems, or at all events that we have no right 
 
 1 The moral valuation of stupidity is much too high ; perhaps in consequence 
 the prevalence of an intellectualism which, by divorcing knowledge and action, 
 encourages people to bestow moral admiration upon what is intellectually 
 contemptible. Stupidity is commonly supposed to have an intrinsic affinity with 
 virtue, or at least to be a quality of which no man or woman need be morally 
 ashamed. In reality, however, it may be questioned whether it is ever found 
 without moral guilt, either in its possessors or in their social medium. Hence, as 
 well as for the purpose of evincing the sincerity of their rejection of intellectualism, 
 it would be well if philosophers devoted some of their surplus ingenuity to 
 inverting their ancient paradox that 'vice is ignorance' and expounding in its 
 stead the profounder and more salutary dictum that ' ignorance is vice. ' 
 
132 F. C. S. SCHILLER a 
 
 to assume so, but are methodologically bound to assume 
 the opposite. 1 
 
 § 52. But, it may be urged, how does all this, even if 
 true, help Philosophy ? Is it not just as bad, nay worse, 
 that men should hug intellectual contradictions to their 
 bosoms, and cherish absurdities with an affectionate 
 devotion, than that they should believe themselves their 
 reluctant victims ? 
 
 I think not, for three reasons which I will set down. 
 
 (1) The man who realises that he is inconsistent, 
 deliberately and of malice prepense, can more easily be 
 made to feel the responsibility for his mental condition 
 than he who imagines that the very constitution of his 
 mind brings him to his wretched pass. Moreover in most 
 cases, the desires which attach him to one or other of 
 the incompatible beliefs are not such as he really respects, 
 and would easily faint from shame or wither with publicity. 
 
 (2) Confusion of will may be remedied, like confusion 
 of thought, by attention and reconsideration. Many who 
 have hitherto proceeded unchallenged in blissful ignorance 
 of their motives, who have lacked a clear consciousness 
 of what they will and why, once they had their attention 
 called to it would set to work to clear away the confusion. 
 
 (3) There is hope from the young, even though the 
 old generation should obstinately cling to its inveterate 
 errors. Errors as a rule are not renounced ; they die 
 out. In this particular case the prospect is perhaps a 
 little brighter than usual, because not all who now believe 
 in their speculative impotence really enjoy their position. 
 And the young are in a different case : their natural 
 sympathies are rather with a philosophy that makes the 
 blood run warm than with one that congeals the natural 
 flow of thought by the chilling vacuity of its abstractions. 
 And they have little or no inducement to adopt the 
 gratuitous and uncomfortable perplexities of their seniors. 
 And besides errors clearly seen to arise from perverse 
 
 1 I am already inclined to deny that, despite the utmost efforts of sceptics, 
 theologians, and Mr. Bradley, there exist any theoretical antinomies which can be 
 pronounced insoluble in principle — unless indeed the ' eternal cussedness ' of man 
 be esteemed such. 
 
ii AXIOMS AS POSTULATES 133 
 
 attitudes of will are no longer so readily communicable as 
 while they were disguised as theoretic dogmas. Nor 
 should it be forgotten that intellectualism is intrinsically 
 duller, less inspiring, and more difficult to follow than 
 voluntarism, which appeals more directly to the hopeful- 
 ness, courage and enterprise which are the precious 
 heritage of youth. 
 
 So that on the whole we need not despair of Philosophy. 
 Nay, we may gradually hope to see substituted for the 
 disheartening and slothful twaddle {pace all the distin- 
 guished persons who have repeated it) about the infirmities 
 of the human reason and its impotence to break through 
 the adamantine barriers of an alien world, exhortations 
 bidding us be of good cheer and go forth to seek, 
 if we would find, urging us to act if we would know, 
 and to learn if we would act, and assuring us that if 
 insuperable limits exist to the development and progression 
 of the human spirit, man has not as yet taken pains 
 enough to discover them, while it is the part of a cur 
 and a craven to assume them without need. 
 
 And so we must essay to weld together thought and 
 deed, or rather, to resist the forces that insidiously dis- 
 sever them and pit the intellect against the will in mean- 
 ingless abstraction. For by a philosophy that seriously 
 strives to comprehend the whole of experience, the unity 
 of the agent is never forgotten in the multiplicity of his 
 pursuits, but is emphatically affirmed in the principle of 
 postulation, which pervades all theoretic activity, generates 
 all axioms, initiates all experiment, and sustains all effort. 
 For ever before the eyes of him whose wisdom dares to 
 postulate will float, in clearer or obscurer outline, the 
 beatific vision of that perfect harmony of all experience 
 which he in all his strenuous struggles is striving to attain. 
 And instead of immolating his whole life to the enervating 
 sophism that it is all an ' appearance ' to be transcended 
 by an unattainable ' reality,' let him hold rather that 
 there can be for him no reality but that to which he wins 
 his way through and by means of the appearances which 
 are its presage. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM IN ITS 
 RELATION TO PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 By W. R. Boyce Gibson 
 
 Part I. Freedom : A Defence and a Statement 
 
 Much of the perplexity attaching to the problem of Free-Will arises from 
 the wide-spread belief that free-will and universal determinism are not 
 necessarily incompatible. 
 
 In upholding this view the theory of ' soft ' determinism, as it has been 
 called by Prof. James, makes such concessions to the theory of ' hard ' or 
 mechanical determinism as render freedom logically impossible. Dr. 
 Bosanquet and M. Fouillee, for instance, make concessions of this kind. 
 
 The crucial concession is made when soft determinism concedes that only 
 matter in motion can be a determinant of material changes ; for the 
 consequence of this admission is a logical dilemma which compels the 
 conceder to own that he must be either a materialist or a supporter 
 of the conscious automaton theory. 
 
 To escape from this dilemma, we must either retract the concession which 
 led to it, or show that the conclusions to which the concession logically 
 drives us are all absurd. 
 
 The retracting of the concession is virtually a challenge to the mechanical 
 determinist to prove his own statement instead of pressing us to accept 
 it as axiomatic. 
 
 To this demand for verification the mechanical determinist answers by 
 pointing to the growing fruitfulness of science wherever the proposition 
 in question is accepted as a regulative principle. Such verification is, 
 however, by no means complete, and cannot disprove the reality of 
 effective psychical initiative. 
 
 The attempt to waive this demand for verification on the ground that the 
 typically individual element involved in an act of free-will eludes by its 
 very particularity the possibility of a scientific handling, cannot be 
 regarded as valid. 
 
 The alternative way of escape from the original dilemma by showing 
 the absurdity of its conclusions is the simplest so far as the positive 
 indictment of absurdity is concerned. It is palpably absurd to deny 
 that ' meaning ' is a determinant of material changes. 
 
 The more difficult task consists in answering the counter-indictment of 
 absurdity brought forward by Naturalism in self-defence. But we are 
 
 134 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 135 
 
 able to show : (a) that the principle of psychical initiative is in no 
 way incompatible with the principle of the Conservation of Energy, 
 properly understood ; and (/3) that it does not violate the meaning oi 
 the causal concept, inasmuch as the idea of causal nexus does not pre- 
 suppose either a measured equivalency or a homogeneity in nature 
 between cause and effect, and the idea of psychical causality in particular 
 is no more open to the charge of inconceivability than is the idea of 
 causality through material agency. 
 
 10. If Freedom is not Soft Determinism, neither is it Indeterminism. The 
 
 necessity for choosing definitely between these two rival theories arises 
 only when the issue is restricted to the abstract consideration of some 
 specific volitional act. It is therefore imperative to clearly define the 
 issue at stake by insisting that freedom is the essence not only of self-con- 
 scious volitional activity but of consciousness itself, and that we cannot 
 profitably discuss its possibility unless we start from the relation in which 
 the conscious subject stands to its object within the unity of experience. 
 
 11. From this fundamental standpoint we can make a distinction between two 
 
 forms of Psychology, only one of which is justified on the ground of its 
 fundamental postulate in treating the Ego as a free agent ; the postulate 
 in the one case being the deterministic assumption of the physical 
 sciences, and in the other the assumption of a mutual independence of 
 subject and object which is at one and the same time relative and real. 
 
 12. A criticism of Prof. James's indeterministic position shows that Indeter- 
 
 minism errs in three main ways : i° in its restricted, abstract point of 
 view, 2 in its recourse to the Deus ex machina, and 3 in its formalism. 
 
 Part II. The Psychology of First Causes: A Fundamental 
 Distinction stated and applied 
 
 1. Statement of the Distinction 
 
 13. It is customary with psychologists to look upon the deterministic 
 
 assumption as a necessary postulate of scientific inquiry. This is true 
 of what is known as Empirical Psychology, whose method is essentially 
 inductive. But Psychology may be treated from another and more 
 inward point of view as a Science of Free Agency, and as such 
 accepts as its fundamental assumption a certain relation between 
 subject and object, which guarantees the real though relative in- 
 dependence of the subject. This distinction is marked not only by 
 a radical dissimilarity in the nature of the postulate, but by a corre- 
 spondingly radical difference of method. 
 
 2. Development of the Distinction 
 
 14. A complete definition of Psychology should include a reference to the 
 
 points of view from which it is to be studied. For the point of view 
 determines the method, and the radical difference of method referred 
 to above constitutes the best differentia between the two main forms of 
 psychological treatment. The Inductive Method is not the only method 
 for investigating the facts of the mental life. It is the method proper to 
 the spectator's point of view. From the point of view of the experient 
 himself, what is truly explanatory of his mental activity is not laws 
 inductively reached, but final causes, ends of action, the synthetic 
 principles through which the agent helps in creating his own destiny. 
 
 15. Consciousness has for long been regarded as essentially a synthesis, but 
 
 its unity has been persistently conceived as a combining form rather 
 than as a causal agency. It is only recently that Dr. Stout's con- 
 
136 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 ception of the unity of consciousness as conative unity or unity of interest 
 has brought the causal factor to the front. 
 
 3. Application of the Distinction 
 
 16. Ambiguities of a fundamental kind arise so soon as we ask ourselves 
 
 what it is that we really mean when we call Psychology a Natural 
 Science. Is it merely descriptive, or is it explanatory as well ? Is it a 
 mechanical science or a teleological science, or both ? In what sense 
 is it natural as opposed to normative ? In what sense is it natural as 
 opposed to metaphysical ? The distinction already traced between 
 the Inductive Psychology and the Psychology of First Causes will 
 help us to unravel these ambiguities. 
 
 17. i°. A discussion of the first difficulty shows us that Psychology is 
 
 descriptive or explanatory according as it is studied from the spectator's 
 point of view and by the Inductive Method, or from the inward point 
 of view of the experient himself by the help of what may perhaps be 
 called the Synthetic or Teleological Method. 
 
 18. 2°. As a solution of the second ambiguity, we see that as a science 
 
 of first causes Psychology is primarily and essentially teleological in 
 its method, but that as an inductive inquiry its method is essentially 
 mechanical. 
 
 19. 3 . With regard to the relation in which Psychology stands to the 
 
 Normative Sciences, it can be shown that the Psychology of first causes 
 stands in a far more obvious and intimate relation to such a science as 
 Logic or Ethics than does the purely empirical Psychology. 
 
 20. Finally, 4 , touching the relation in which Psychology stands to Meta- 
 
 physics, we find that whilst Inductive Psychology stands to Metaphysics 
 in precisely the same relation as do the physical sciences, it is otherwise 
 with the Psychology of first causes. It can, in fact, be shown that the 
 distinction between the inductive and the teleological Psychologies affords 
 a basis for a corresponding distinction in the relation of Metaphysics to 
 Psychology. 
 
 Part I. Freedom : A Defence and a Statement 
 
 § 1. The question of free-will owes its obscurity far less to 
 its own inherent difficulty than to the perplexities which 
 have been thrown in its way by the theory of universal 
 determinism. Though there is overwhelming positive 
 evidence in favour of free-will, evidence at least as strong 
 in its own sphere as that of the inertia of matter in the 
 sphere of abstract mechanics, there is still in many 
 quarters a strong disposition to hold it as an illusion 
 because of the difficulty it finds in adjusting itself to the 
 demands of this insatiable theory. The problem is 
 moreover gratuitously obscured through a certain over- 
 considerateness on the part of the free-willists that 
 completely succeeds in defeating its own end. Deter- 
 minism of the strictest mechanical kind — so the agreement 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 137 
 
 runs — shall have free sway over all the lower realm of 
 matter in motion, provided only that the free subject be 
 left to develop apart along spiritual lines according to its 
 nature. This concession hard determinism smilingly 
 accepts, and, on the strength of it, triumphs as assuredly 
 as it does with all those schemata of psychophysical 
 parallelism which are at bottom of its own making. 
 It concerns us then to show that that soft determinism 
 which fights freedom's battle whilst keeping aloof from 
 the true fighting line and complacently yielding to the 
 mechanical philosophy all its heart's desire, cannot possibly 
 secure the freedom that it claims. We must insist on the 
 fact that the only true champion of freedom is the hard- 
 hitting anti-determinism that joins issue with mechanism 
 along its own frontiers, stoutly maintaining its right to 
 reclaim much of the ground that has been unlawfully 
 appropriated by the mechanical philosophers. 
 
 § 2. As an instance of what Prof. James so aptly calls 
 " soft " determinism, we may take the attitude adopted 
 by one of our foremost thinkers. " Why object," writes 
 Dr. Bosanquet, " to the mind being conditioned by the 
 causation or machinery of the sequence of bodily states ? 
 The important point is, what the thing actually is ; i.e., 
 what is its nature, and in what does its organisation consist? 
 We are quite accustomed to find that the things we value 
 most have been able to develop through a system of 
 mechanical causation," * and he adds elsewhere : " If you 
 think the whole universe is mechanical or brute matter, 
 then we can understand your trying to keep a little mystic 
 shrine within the individual soul, which may be sacred 
 from intrusion and different from everything else — a 
 monad without windows. But if you are accustomed to 
 take the whole as spiritual, and to find that the more you 
 look at it as a whole the more spiritual it is, then you do 
 not need to play these little tricks in order to get a last 
 refuge for freedom by shutting out the universe." 2 
 
 Now in answer to this we must say, with all respect, 
 three things: — (1) We do not object to the mind being 
 
 1 The Psychology of the Moral Self, p. 124. - Ibid. p. 9. 
 
138 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 conditioned by this mechanism, but object only to the 
 indifference shown as to the amount or extent of the 
 conditioning. The most exalted conception of my 
 spiritual nature will be poor consolation if I have to 
 recognise that my being here and not there in the body 
 at any given instant is a fact determined entirely by 
 mechanical considerations. (2) It is quite true that from 
 the point of view of mind's capacity for freedom, its nature 
 is the most important consideration, but whether such 
 freedom is an illusion or not, depends entirely on whether 
 it remains throughout this life of ours a mere capacity 
 and nothing more, or an actual energy that does work 
 after its own nature. But whether this is so or not 
 depends again on whether the exigencies of mechanism 
 really leave scope for it or not ; a permanent possibility 
 of freedom is of no avail if a rigorous mechanism does all 
 the work in its own rigid way. From the point of view 
 of the free-will controversy the positive nature of mind is 
 therefore not the essential thing, but rather its relation to 
 matter and the laws of matter. (3) The question cannot 
 be decided from the watch-tower of spiritualistic monism, 
 for such spiritualism has no basis, much less a superstruc- 
 ture, except in so far as it has won the ground it builds 
 upon from the rapacity of a theory that claims the whole 
 universe for its exclusive footing. And so long as that 
 footing is held uncontested, no amount of spiritual 
 complacency can avail anything. 
 
 M. Fouillee is another soft determinist. Like Dr. 
 Bosanquet and others of the same convictions he has in 
 reserve a most valuable armoury to be used in freedom's 
 cause when once freedom can find ground to stand upon 
 and room to move in. " We are indeed children of the 
 Cosmos," he says, 1 " yet, once brought forth and dowered 
 with a brain, we possess stored up within us some of the 
 conditions of change and movement which are found in 
 Nature, a share in the causality of the universe, interpret 
 that expression as you will ; if anything is active in this 
 world of ours, we too are active ; if anything that is itself 
 
 1 La Psychologie des Iddcs-Forces, Introduction, p. xxiv. 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 139 
 
 conditioned, conditions in its turn, we ourselves condition 
 likewise. The line of connection between antecedent and 
 consequent, whatever it may be, passes through us." But, 
 we may ask, within a system of universal causality, 
 however interpreted, what room is there for initiative ? 
 An initiative that enters, it doesn't matter how, into any 
 closed system of antecedents and consequents is itself 
 determined, not by itself but by the antecedents. That 
 which conditions after being conditioned is simply trans- 
 mitting, not initiating, some capacity to condition which 
 originates, we must suppose, with some great far-off First 
 Cause. If we are children of the Cosmos in this sense 
 we are at best mere accumulators of potential spiritual 
 energy which, at the prick of some antecedent, passes into 
 the kinetic and actual forms. This conclusion is not at 
 all modified by M. Fouillee's repeatedly emphasised dis- 
 tinction between mechanical and spiritual determinism. 
 Both are determinisms, that is the main point, the one 
 hard and rigid, the other soft and flexible. Thus we read 
 in the second volume of the Idees- Forces : " If the facts of 
 Psychology cannot be truly brought under the idea of 
 mechanism, they stand in no such intractable relation to 
 the idea of determinism, provided that by determinism we 
 understand something far more complex and at the same 
 time more flexible than the determinism of the philo- 
 sophers, notably the associationists ; " x and on another 
 page of the same treatise, " Psychological determinism is 
 doubtless much more flexible, indefinite, incalculable, than 
 is physiological determinism, still, from our point of view, 
 it is none the less a determinism." 2 Now this pliant 
 conception of determinism resembles nothing so much as 
 the easy indeterminism which M. Fouillee so resolutely 
 opposes. Thus in his essay on the " Dilemma of Deter- 
 minism," Prof. James writes as follows : — " Indeterminism 
 says that the parts have a certain amount of loose play on 
 one another," and again, " Indeterminism thus denies the 
 world to be one unbending unit of fact " ; 3 and the 
 
 1 Fouillee, La Psychologie des I dies- Forces, ii. p. 282. 2 Ibid. i. p. 267. 
 
 3 James, The Will to Believe and other Essays, p. 150. 
 
1 4 o W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 language undoubtedly suits the needs of Indeterminism 
 much better than it can do those of Determinism, however 
 soft and yielding. 
 
 Are we then after the example of James himself, to 
 find refuge from our chafe against the flexibilities of free 
 determinism in the shapeless arms of indeterminism? Such 
 a reactionary movement is, as we shall try to point out 
 later, needlessly heroic. Is it not possible, we ask, to 
 cleave to the ancient name of Freedom without posing 
 either as an indeterminist or as a determinist, rigid, soft, 
 or free ? We hold that it is certainly possible, and hope 
 to justify the distinction in the sequel ; meantime, with 
 this end in view, we may return with advantage to the 
 main line of our argument. 
 
 § 3. The soft determinist, as already remarked, has a ten- 
 dency to put matter in motion completely under the control 
 of the mechanical philosopher, complacently believing that 
 whatever conclusions the latter may legitimately come to, 
 on his own ground, will undergo spiritual renewal and 
 take on the meaning of liberty so soon as they come 
 under the transfiguring spell of some higher category. 
 Such complacency is, however, most inopportune, for the 
 concession it so gracefully yields up is all that the 
 mechanical theory needs or asks for; for in virtue of it the 
 body of the free-minded philosopher down to its minutest 
 tremors is at once most ruthlessly enslaved : he cannot 
 even extend his generous hand without simply carrying out 
 a predetermined necessity of action which the Laplacean 
 calculator could have foreseen emerging at the birth of 
 time from the original nebula. 
 
 Let us now press this issue more closely, and ask 
 wherein this concession precisely consists. There is, I 
 think, a difference of point of view here which is the 
 cause of much confusion. The apologist of mind is very 
 apt to think that the only reserve he need make when 
 dealing with the mechanical philosopher is to point out 
 that the matter in motion committed into the hands of 
 the latter has a certain aspect which cannot in any way 
 concern his physics. It is not only extended and inert 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 141 
 
 and so on, but it is knowable. The idealist, of the type 
 we are considering, seems to imagine that, when considered 
 afresh as knowledge, matter in motion will become duly 
 penetrated with such spiritual meaning as will lift it 
 entirely beyond the reach of the physicist. Meanwhile 
 the living body pays the penalty of the spirit's tran- 
 scendentalism, the physicist taking care of that in his 
 own way. The mechanical philosopher, in other words, 
 considers the concession from an entirely different point 
 of view. As sole trustee of matter in motion he at once 
 safeguards his interests by insisting on the doctrine that 
 only matter in motion can determine in any way the 
 movements of matter. This is how he understands the 
 concession. 
 
 Here then is the crucial statement definitely stated : 
 " Only matter in motion can be a determinant of material 
 changes," and the psychologist must either allow its validity 
 or at once reject it as insufficiently verified. We will 
 suppose that he does the former, and on this assumption 
 follow the concession into its various consequences. 
 
 The concession once made by the apologist of mental 
 agency, his opponent, the naturalist, approaching him 
 in Socratic fashion asks him whether he believes that 
 mind determines the movements of matter. If the 
 psychologist forgets himself sufficiently in the truth of 
 things and answers in the affirmative, he is handed the 
 following syllogism to reflect over : — 
 
 Whatever determines movements of matter is itself 
 
 matter in motion. 
 Mind determines movements of matter. 
 .'. Mind is itself matter in motion. 
 
 Ergo : You are a materialist. 
 
 If this bait fails, however, the second is sure to succeed. 
 For when the psychologist, repudiating all connection with 
 materialism protests that he does not believe that mind is 
 matter in motion, that, in fact, mind is not matter in 
 motion, his opponent is at once able to answer him as 
 follows : — You admit then the two following premises : 
 
142 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 1. Whatever determines movements of matter is 
 
 itself matter in motion. 
 
 2. Mind is not matter in motion ; 
 
 you must therefore admit the following conclusion : 
 
 Mind does not determine the movements of matter. 
 Ergo : You are a supporter of the Conscious 
 Automaton Theory. 
 
 Now there is no escaping from this cruel alternative, 
 once the major premise has been conceded. This is 
 shown on a big scale by the later history of Philosophy. 
 The Barbara syllogism was tried first and accepted by 
 Holbach, Lamettrie, Helvetius and the rest. It was the 
 hey-day of Materialism. Gradually it became obvious 
 that such materialism was ridiculous, consciousness being 
 irreducible to a mode of motion. Camestres then came 
 into favour, and psychophysical parallelism into vogue. 
 Yes, and in our own day when so many find shelter 
 under the shadow of Huxley and Avenarius, this second 
 syllogism is still cherished as the germ and root of all 
 true Philosophy. 
 
 § 4. What then are we to do ? One of two things. We 
 must either push on or retrace our steps, for to stand 
 where we are is to confess ourselves beaten. Either way 
 is a way out. Formally, the push-ahead method is the 
 better of the two ; i.e., if we can show that the conclusion 
 of the second syllogism is quite as ridiculous as the 
 conclusion of the first, that it is quite as absurd to reduce 
 consciousness to complete inactivity as it is to reduce 
 it to a calculable mode of motion, we shall make it 
 impossible for our opponent to ferret out new middle 
 terms in order to prove the same old conclusion in 
 different ways, for the conclusion will have been disproved 
 once and for all. 1 
 
 1 Moreover, we shall have the pleasure of meeting with Scepticism on the 
 way, for wherever there is a formally valid syllogism with a conclusion proved 
 to be materially false, and with premises asserted to be obvious, there will 
 Scepticism be found. Scepticism in fact is none other than an attitude of 
 philosophical sulks which persists in obstinately sticking to premises though all 
 the conclusions to which they lead have had to be given up. ' ' I have one 
 conclusion in reserve," it says, "which becomes the more convincing the more 
 
m THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 143 
 
 We have then two methods of procedure open to us, 
 the push -ahead method of contradicting the conclusion 
 of a syllogism and the falling-back method of retracting 
 the admission that led to all the trouble. Let us consider 
 more closely the logical relation between them. 
 
 §5. It is important in the first place to notice what 
 is involved in the retracting of an admission. Such 
 retraction simply means non-acceptance of the retracted 
 statement as a proved statement ; it does not imply any 
 ability to disprove it even by a single instance. It says : 
 " I see now that I was not justified in accepting that 
 fateful major premise as obvious or proved, nor do I 
 consider myself bound to accept it until you can 
 completely verify it." On the other hand, the flat 
 contradiction of the conclusion that mind does not 
 determine material changes requires much more than 
 this. A direct proof that in at least one instance or 
 class of instances mind does actually determine the 
 movements of matter would of course be the most 
 satisfactory way of meeting the requirement. Such a 
 direct proof is, however, out of the question since we 
 have not yet discovered how it is that mind, qua mind, 
 can come into contact with matter at all. The assertion 
 is, however, capable of a very stringent indirect proof. 
 This indirect proof in its primitive and essential bearing, 
 consists in a reductio ad absurdum of the conclusion we 
 wish to contradict ; and indeed the proposition that mind 
 has its share in determining material changes is quite 
 sufficiently established by the absurdities to which the 
 contradictory assertion inevitably leads, as Dr. Ward in 
 his Gifford Lectures has so ably shown. 1 Still, the 
 indirect proof remains incomplete so long as it leaves 
 unanswered certain objections that are at once raised 
 
 you demolish all the others, for these serve as premises for it just in proportion 
 as they are proved absurd." And this is the final syllogism : — 
 
 A mode of reasoning according to which conclusions necessarily inferred 
 from obvious premises are yet demonstrably absurd is not to be trusted. 
 
 Now the process by which we human beings acquire Knowledge is just such 
 a mode of reasoning. 
 
 Therefore, Knowledge is not to be trusted. 
 
 1 Cf. also Sigwart, Logic, Eng. trans. , ii. pp. 388-393. 
 
144 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 by the naturalist so soon as the result of the reductio ad 
 absurdum proof is stated in the positive form, " Mind 
 therefore, is a determinant of mental change." 1 We 
 shall come across these by-and-by. 
 
 We proceed now to develop these two lines of 
 defence : — 
 
 1. The retraction of the major ; 
 
 2. The contradiction of the conclusion. 
 
 § 6. i. The retraction of the major of the Naturalistic 
 Syllogism. — The retraction of the major is, as we have 
 seen, equivalent to the request that the mechanical 
 philosopher will please verify his statement before he 
 presses us to accept it ; and our main business is to see 
 clearly what this demand for verification really involves. 
 It is in the first place most essential to note that the 
 demand must not be addressed to physical science as 
 such. Physical science has no ears for such a question. 
 If the physicist deigns to reply at all, he will say 
 something of this kind. " You are laying your meddle- 
 some hand on the great regulative principle which defines 
 the nature and meaning of my science. You are asking 
 me to verify the principle upon which all my verifications 
 are based. I can no more fall in with your request than 
 Euclid could have done had he been asked for a proof 
 of his own axioms, or the great Stagirite himself, had 
 a proof of his Principle of Contradiction been demanded 
 of him." This language is not exaggerated. The 
 physicist, qua physicist, is perfectly justified in resenting 
 as an impertinence the demand that he shall prove the 
 principle which at every step of his work determines 
 the direction of his inquiry. An illustration from 
 Astronomical Science may help to make our meaning 
 clear. Towards the middle of the nineteenth century 
 certain puzzling irregularities were observed in the 
 
 1 This contradiction of the conclusion indeed requires, as we have already 
 hinted, more of the negator than the denial of the major premise itself involves ; 
 for in the latter case it is only necessary to show that something other than 
 matter in motion can set matter in motion, whereas the denial of the conclusion 
 requires the special proof that the movements of matter can be determined 
 by mind. 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 145 
 
 movements of the planet Uranus. There were two 
 conceivable ways of hypothetically explaining these 
 irregularities. Either Uranus was being disturbed by 
 the influence of matter in motion elsewhere, or by some 
 volitional agency of more than human power. This 
 second alternative was not in itself inconceivable. It 
 was inadmissible only as a scientific explanation. It was 
 an alternative that Astronomy could not possibly have 
 admitted without ipso facto admitting that it had reached 
 the limits of the science, i.e. without ceasing to be 
 Astronomy. Suppose, however, that some incalculable 
 demon had really been responsible for the perturbations. 
 Could Astronomy, we ask, have ever found it out ? By no 
 means. It would be still puzzling its mighty intellect 
 for a mechanical solution and meanwhile be blaming its 
 telescopes, the irreflecting nature of the surface of the 
 disturbing body, its extraordinary density that left it too 
 small for visibility just there where it ought to have been, 
 etc., etc., and so it would go puzzling on for ever, 
 readjusting its hypotheses, even that of gravitation itself, 
 if necessary, in order to render the phenomenon 
 mechanically intelligible. It would, in fact, simply repeat 
 over again in its improved modern way, those processes 
 of adjusting and readjusting epicycles and excentrics 
 which were forced by the same respect for postulates 
 upon the bewildered observers of the Middle Ages. 
 
 So much for the physicist, qua physicist, and his 
 connection with the matter. Regulative principles, qua 
 regulative principles, must be left severely alone. They 
 are principles for working with and not for discussing. 
 
 We must turn then to the philosopher in physics who in 
 the capacity of naturalist first forced upon our attention 
 the doctrine we are disputing. We must demand our 
 verification from him. What then does the mechanical 
 philosopher say by way of justifying the statement that 
 he makes ? He puts himself at the outset under the 
 shadow of the physicists. " The physicist," we hear him 
 say, " is of course quite right in having nothing to do 
 with you. All the material sciences presuppose the non- 
 
 L 
 
146 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 interference of mind. They stipulate in the first place 
 that whatever is subjective in sensation or opinion shall 
 be winnowed away by objective verification, and pre- 
 suppose in the second place that such objective verification 
 is not thwarted by the caprice of some incalculable demon 
 or other untraceable volitional agency." "Now this silence 
 on the part of Physics," he continues, " is the best proof 
 possible of the real truth of its regulative principle : it is 
 being perpetually verified by its fruits. Apart from the 
 living body all moving matter has already been deanthro- 
 pomorphised, while as regards the living body itself, our 
 mechanical physiologists are busy deanthropomorphising 
 that, and are proving successful beyond expectation. 
 Indeed it is becoming abundantly clear that it is only the 
 complexity of this material that now stands in their way, 
 and that when that difficulty has been overcome, there 
 will be nothing occult or undetermined, even in the 
 most sprightly of men. The spins and rolls and intimate 
 twists of a man's body will then be seen to be as 
 mechanically unidetermined as are the motions of a 
 spinning-top, a billiard ball, or a screw." Now there is 
 only one answer to this, the simple reminder, namely, that 
 uniform success in the application of any working principle 
 to any subject-matter does not verify it in those special 
 regions where it has not yet been applied, and that where 
 great spiritual issues seem to depend on its not being 
 universally applicable to the subject-matter in question 
 there is every reason to cry out " unproven !" even though 
 your opponent is seated triumphantly on the Milky Way 
 and you are squeezed between the inner and the outer 
 rinds of a man's brain. If the physiologist were ever 
 able, in detail, to show that all the molecular movements 
 in a living body were entirely determined by mechanical 
 relations, then the idea of psychical guidance would be 
 exploded. " Thereafter," as Dr. Ward puts it, " the idea 
 of psychical guidance would not conflict with a theory, it 
 would be refuted by facts." x But no such verification 
 is forthcoming. Physiology has not shown that its 
 
 1 Naturalism and Ag?iosticism, ii. p. 71. 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 147 
 
 subject-matter is coextensive with the sum-total of the 
 molecular changes within the organism. As a science it 
 is deanthropomorphic by definition ; its assumptions and 
 methods are mechanical, but the life it studies is not 
 therefore deanthropomorphised. It has not yet proved 
 that there are no eminent causes, 1 no body set in motion 
 by mind. It only assumes that there are none, and works 
 upon that assumption. Psychology must see that a 
 methodological assumption is not stiffened into an axiom, 
 and in the meantime rest content that its fundamental 
 belief in the reality of effective psychical initiative and 
 guidance is at least not disproved by physical science, 
 since the latter has failed to prove that certain physical 
 events within the living organism may not have other 
 than physical conditions. 
 
 § 7. This, I fancy, is the only way in which the ad- 
 vancing tide of matter can be restrained from that undue 
 encroachment upon the frontier-shores of mind which, if 
 demonstrably successful, would reduce Psychology to the 
 level of a Science of pure Illusion. I can think of only 
 one other suggestion for coping with the difficulty, as 
 alluring as it is inadmissible. Why not state frankly, so 
 it may be urged, that this demand for verification is a 
 demand which Science by its very nature is precluded 
 from satisfying ? The movements wherein freedom finds 
 expression, are they not of that highly individualised type 
 which Science, on account of its general character, cannot 
 possibly bring under its control ? Does not Science fix 
 and universalise whatsoever it touches, can it ever take 
 into consideration at all motions which being under an 
 individual's control, will never recur again under precisely 
 the same conditions ? And if this is the case, can we not 
 conclude that Science on account of the uniform generality 
 of its processes is for ever debarred from investigating the 
 individualised movements of living bodies in motion, and 
 hence for ever debarred from disproving the assertion of 
 immediate experience, that mind can help in determining 
 the movements of matter ? 
 
 1 Cf. Ward, id. ii. p. 73. 
 
148 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 This specious plea that the real unknowable for Science 
 is the individual element, and that this individual element 
 is precisely what is involved in the assertion of free-will 
 cannot be seriously entertained in this connection, for the 
 simple reason that to hold the individual thus beyond the 
 reach of Science is either to beg the whole question or to 
 underestimate the possibilities of Science. The only 
 individuality we can here be dealing with is the atomic 
 individuality of matter in motion, and this being so, a 
 judicious use of the scientific imagination will, I think, 
 enable us to picture to ourselves how Science could 
 grapple with the difficulty which such material individu- 
 ality presents. We must imagine a wonderfully-devised 
 instrument, a combination of biograph, stereoscope, and 
 improved Rontgen apparatus, which could be so worked 
 as to reproduce in its own mechanical way upon a screen 
 all the motions of all the individual cells of a living body, 
 and with it the environment with which the body happened 
 to be in immediate contact during any continuous lapse 
 of time. Let us further suppose that this instrument is 
 helped out by a microscope that can indefinitely increase 
 the spatial dimensions of things, and that an indefinitely 
 slow motion in time is secured through an extraordinary 
 perfection of the biograph section of the instrument, on a 
 principle similar to that which now enables scientists to 
 study at leisure, in its successive stages, the moment's 
 history of the splash of a drop. The record once taken 
 would be indefinitely reproducible, so that the objection as 
 to the uniqueness of the momentary states of brain and 
 body would cease to exist. The conditions under which 
 the movements took place could always be renewed. 
 The mechanical philosopher would then be able to follow 
 in detail the movements of each individual cell, follow 
 each remotest tremor to its source in the periphery or 
 central organ, and so eventually have the chance of putting 
 his regulative principle to its final test. Of course it 
 would not be necessary, so far as verification of the point 
 at issue is concerned, to study more than one typical 
 instance, provided it were really typical. The individual 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 149 
 
 whose motions were thus being recorded would have to 
 be taken when he was deliberately excercising his will 
 with a knowledge of the issues involved. 
 
 We may consider ourselves then fully justified in 
 pressing the mechanical philosopher for the verification 
 of " that most unwarrantable assumption " that, whatever 
 determines the movements of matter is itself matter in 
 motion, and in building up our mental philosophies 
 meanwhile, on the assumption that it will never be 
 verified, and that a conscious effort of the mind can 
 bear its associated body at any time in an absolutely 
 unpredictable direction, and to an absolutely unforeseeable 
 distance in that direction. The element of weakness 
 involved in this attitude may be summed up in the fact 
 that, from the standpoint of this argument, we are always 
 exposed to the bare possibility of having to confess in 
 some dim future age that our opponent's statement has 
 been duly verified and must be accepted. Still the 
 possibilities of such verification, in the problem under 
 discussion, are so immeasurably remote that they may 
 be treated as infinitesimals of an infra-logical order and 
 be entirely neglected. Such neglect may moreover prove 
 to be strictly justified by the results reached along the 
 second line of procedure wherein we contradict the 
 conclusion of the naturalistic syllogism by the help of 
 a reductio ad absurdum, to which second defence we now 
 proceed. 
 
 I 8. 2. The contradiction of the conclusion of the natural- 
 istic syllogism by means of a reductio ad absurdum. — The 
 thesis that mind can not in any way determine material 
 movements, that, as Dr. Sigwart puts it, " we stand in no 
 other relation to our bodies than to the motion of the 
 fixed stars " 1 is one of the most extraordinary paradoxes 
 that the wit of man has ever propounded. We must 
 try and show that it is also one of the most absurd. Its 
 essential purport is, that all material changes that occur 
 in the body or out of it, take place in entire indifference 
 as to whether they chance to be accompanied by con- 
 
 1 Logic, Eng. trans, ii. p. 391. 
 
ISO W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 sciousness or not. Consciousness is only an echo, a 
 shadow, an epiphenomenon, an emanation from nowhere, 
 that appears so soon as certain essential conditions are 
 realised, e.g., the sufficient nutrition of the various parts 
 of the nervous system, and disappears with the disappear- 
 ance of any one of these essential conditions, but neither 
 its coming nor its staying nor its going concerns in any 
 way anything but itself. Thus, according to the theory 
 we are criticising, the movements of the pen with which 
 these words are written and the written words themselves 
 are, as movements and products of movement, perfectly 
 independent of the instinct and the thought that find 
 expression through them : they would have come to pass 
 in precisely this way and no other had the last spark 
 of consciousness flickered away countless ages ago ; and 
 the reader who interprets the printed type and lingers 
 over some sentence, his whole statuesque attitude, 
 whatever it be, was a foregone conclusion when the 
 first atom in space gave its first little shiver. 
 
 To describe such paradoxes as these is really to 
 explain them away : they shrivel off in their own light. 
 Still it is best to seize even an absurdity by some 
 tangible handle. Let us then replace the somewhat 
 vague conception of " mind " by the much clearer one 
 of " meaning," and ask ourselves whether any theory 
 that makes meaning ineffectual in determining the 
 movements of one's body can evade the charge of 
 absurdity ? Let us take two or three definite instances. 
 Consider for a moment the import that the words " yes " 
 and " no " have on certain critical occasions. " Yes " 
 sets the young blood careering in all directions, " no " 
 determines for the body the attitude typical of wounded 
 pride, misery, or despair. Shall we say that this 
 difference is simply the difference in organic reverberation 
 consequent on the difference in tympanal flutter due to 
 two such different air-vibrations as that set going by a nasal 
 and that other set going by a sibilant ? Or take another 
 instance. A goes up to B as he leans with his back to 
 the mantelpiece and tells him in French that his coat- 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 151 
 
 tails are on fire. The organic result is imperceptible. 
 He repeats the statement in English and B's whole body 
 instantaneously reacts. Or again you insult A, who 
 happens to be deaf, and he smiles at you ; you treat B 
 to the same epithets, and he flings you them back in 
 scorn. Meaning and Motion are then unquestionably 
 connected in this sense that that which is not matter 
 in motion, namely meaning, is yet an important deter- 
 minant of material changes, and the theory that compels 
 us to deny the connection in this sense is hopelessly 
 absurd. 
 
 § 9. There seems to be but one intelligible retort to 
 this charge of absurdity. It takes the " tu quoque " form, 
 " I'm mad, that's true, but so are you." This retort 
 consists in bringing forward certain important objections 
 to the statement that mind can determine material 
 changes with the conviction that they are unanswerable, 
 so that when the final reckoning is made the most 
 formidable verdict for the critic of naturalism will be 
 that thesis and antithesis are equally absurd, that it 
 is just as impossible to maintain that mind can determine 
 matter as it is to maintain that it cannot. 
 
 a. Let us start with the most frequent as well as the 
 most superficial objection that is raised by Naturalism 
 to the idea that mind can determine the movement of 
 matter. The statement, it is urged, is incompatible with 
 the great principle of the Conservation of Energy. Let 
 us briefly examine this objection. It starts with assuming 
 that mind or mental activity can only control matter 
 on condition of introducing into or abstracting from 
 the material system a certain supply of fresh energy 
 or capacity for physical work, and this it is maintained 
 is quite out of the question. And the reason given is 
 simply this, that the amount of energy in the material 
 universe is constant. 
 
 Now, in the first place this statement is far from 
 being the record of an ascertained fact. What physicist 
 has ever established an equation between the whole 
 energy of the universe at any time, including the energies 
 
152 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 of all the stars of heaven and all the cells of all living 
 bodies, and its energy at a subsequent moment of time. 
 No physicist, we may safely say, has ever dreamt of 
 such an equation. The equation of constancy is in 
 fact a most unjustifiable extension in indefinitum of 
 the well-known equation of equivalence. The fallacy 
 involved in this extension is picturesquely exposed by 
 Dr. Ward. " Those who insist that the quantity of this 
 energy in the universe must be constant seem to me," 
 says Dr. Ward, " in the same position as one who should 
 maintain that the quantity of water in a vast lake must 
 be constant merely because the surface was always level, 
 though he could never reach its shores nor fathom its 
 depth." l 
 
 This remark leads us on at once to our second point, 
 to wit, that the so-called principle of the constancy of 
 energy has not even the hypothetical necessity of a 
 regulative principle of Physics. What guides the 
 physicist in forming his energy -equations is not the 
 idea of the constancy of energy within the universe, but 
 that of the balance of energy about any given change as 
 fulcrum. The energy -level must remain constantly the 
 same. There must be equivalence between the distribu- 
 tion of energy within the system under consideration 
 and any subsequent redistribution of this energy within 
 the system. The " constancy of energy " as a postulate 
 of physics comes indeed to nothing more than this. 
 " Given a finite, known quantity of physical energy — 
 energy, that is, which has its mechanical equivalent — - 
 then if that energy be measured after any transformation, 
 it must be precisely equivalent in amount to the original 
 quantity." It is stipulated, in other words, that lost 
 energy can always be found again provided the precise 
 amount lost is known. There is no attempt to deal 
 with the whole amount of energy in the universe at 
 any time, a perfectly indefinite, incalculable quantum. 
 The assumption of constancy is therefore not in any 
 way the physicist's assumption. Just as the postulate 
 
 Naturalism and Agnosticism, ii. p. 76. 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 153 
 
 of the indestructibility of matter is really nothing more 
 than the balance of weights after a chemical change, 
 so that of the indestructibility of energy is nothing more 
 than the mathematical balance — in terms of mechanical 
 equivalents — between the capacity for work within a 
 certain closed system before a certain amount of actual 
 work is done, and the capacity for work within the same 
 closed system after the transformation has taken place. 
 The first postulate has meaning only in so far as bodies 
 have weight, the second only in so far as energies have 
 their mechanical equivalent ; in either case, to express 
 the matter more generally and more accurately, the 
 postulate has meaning only in so far as the possession 
 of a common denominator enables it to be made. 
 
 Now when the constancy of energy is understood 
 in this strictly economical and scientific sense, the 
 interpretation cannot in any way demand the exclusion 
 of mind from among the possible determinants of material 
 changes, except as a convenient, or rather, necessary 
 postulate for the working purposes of physics, — without 
 making the assumption that the truth of a principle 
 within a closed circle of material agency sufficiently 
 justifies the inference that material things must under 
 all circumstances form a circle closed on all sides. 1 Here 
 again we have to defend the rights of spirit and spon- 
 taneity by insisting that Physical Science shall not make 
 statements that stultify all spiritual life and make history 
 ridiculous unless it be prepared to prove them to the 
 hilt. The conservation of energy is quite incapable 
 of any such proof, and Naturalism would do well to 
 ponder over these words of Dr. Sigwart : — " Even if 
 equivalence between all chemical events and mechanical 
 motion, heat, electricity, etc., were fully established 
 empirically, yet we could be certain of the truth of 
 the principle only within the sphere in which its deter- 
 minations were obtained, in those purely physical and 
 chemical events of inorganic nature which we reduce 
 to exact casual laws in such a way that every event may 
 
 1 Cf. Sigwart, Logic, Eng. trans, ii. p. 387. 
 
154 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON in 
 
 be calculated from its conditions." But in Psychology 
 we have not the same footing. The possibility of stating 
 the amount of potential energy stored up in a sperma- 
 tozoon or a germ " is a hypothesis justified upon Methodo- 
 logical grounds, but not a proved proposition." x 
 
 The result of this discussion may be explicitly stated 
 as follows. It has shown that the doctrine of the 
 Conservation of Energy can offer no decisive objection 
 to the theory that mind controls matter by actually 
 increasing or diminishing the amount of energy in the 
 universe. It was important that we should gain this 
 concession from our opponents. We could indeed have 
 evaded the whole argument had we been content to allow 
 that mental control over matter can take effect without 
 any energy being introduced into or withdrawn from the 
 physical universe ; for once we allow that mind while 
 controlling and directing energy, is yet not a source of 
 energy, we have no cause of dispute with the principle of 
 Conservation. Energy being directionless or rudderless — 
 to use Dr. Ward's expression — mind could then play the 
 part of a rudder without interfering with the unconditional 
 integrity of the principle in question. But such evasion, 
 like many another, would have been worse than profitless. 
 The concession, while it gave a handle to the mechanical 
 philosopher for effective purposes of counter -thrust, 
 avails the conceder nothing. For the principle of the 
 Conservation of Momentum which takes direction of 
 motion as well as velocity into account is ready to 
 swallow up what the Conservation of Energy can spare. 
 As soon as mind makes its modest attempt to direct the 
 dance of the vital molecules without putting into its work 
 any physical energy, contriving to push constantly at 
 right angles to the direction of motion with the ideal 
 accuracy of the mathematician, it is snapped up as 
 trangressing the inviolable unideterminism of physical 
 changes — and this is the root of the whole mechanical 
 theory — according to which not only the energy but the 
 direction of motion of every atom of matter is pre- 
 
 1 Logic, Eng. trans, ii. p. 384. 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 155 
 
 determined from the very outset. 1 Energy is directionless 
 not in the sense of drifting chancewise at every turn but 
 in the sense of its being a function of velocity only, 
 and not of this velocity's direction. It is directionless only 
 when abstracted in thought from the matter that embodies 
 it : the moving matter itself, as the physicist conceives it, 
 moves eternally along in its predetermined courses, and 
 its capacity for work goes with it. In a word there can be 
 no loopholes in a system which is based on the postulate 
 that there shall be none. " That a rigorous determination 
 is deducible from the mechanical scheme is due to the 
 fact that it has been put into the fundamental premises." 2 
 j3. A somewhat deeper-going objection to the theory of 
 mind's control over matter suggests itself naturally at this 
 point of our inquiry. Granted that it has been shown 
 that as a statement of fact the objection grounded on the 
 Conservation of Energy is baseless, and that it is equally 
 impossible to maintain that the doctrine has any binding 
 claim over our thought, it may yet be urged that inas- 
 much as our theory expresses a causal relation between 
 mind and matter, it violates the meaning of the causal 
 concept and is therefore inadmissible. But before we 
 fall in with this objection let us look well at the causal 
 chain with which our objector proposes to fetter us, and 
 fix our attention, in particular, on its three main links. 
 Each of these, we find, bears its own peculiar inscription. 
 On the first we read that there must be quantitative 
 equivalence between cause and effect ; on the second that 
 there must be qualitative likeness or homogeneity between 
 cause and effect, and on the third that the connection 
 between cause and effect must be scientifically conceivable. 
 Now we propose to show that these conditions which the 
 all -enslaving naturalist imposes on his conception of 
 
 1 The same fundamental objection applies to Sigwart's own footnote suggestion 
 (Logic, Eng. trans, ii. p. 386) that it might be possible to maintain the 
 hypothesis that the physical law of energy remained intact, and that only the 
 conditions of the transition from active energy into potential, and vice versa, vary 
 with relations to psychical states. 
 
 See also Petzoldt, Einfiihrung in die Philosophie der Reinen Erfahrung, 
 Leipsic, 1900, Part I. ch. i. especially p. 16. 
 
 2 Dr. Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, ii. p. 67. 
 
156 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 Causality, far from constituting the essential and obligatory 
 definition of the causal concept, are not only unnecessary 
 in themselves but implicitly recognised as unnecessary by 
 Science herself. 
 
 The first link in this triple objection to the idea of 
 a causal psychical control over matter consists essentially 
 in the assertion that as we cannot measure psychical 
 events as we can physical events, there is no possibility of 
 a causal nexus between them. That we cannot measure 
 psychical events as we can physical events needs no 
 proving but, as Dr. Sigvvart reminds us, " even in the 
 region of Natural Science, many causal connections have 
 been accepted as existing beyond doubt, and regarded as 
 inductively proved, before their equations were known ; 
 that friction produces heat and that heat, through the 
 expansion of steam, gives rise to motion, was ascertained 
 before Mayer and Joule had found the equations which 
 enabled them to calculate how much of the heat produced 
 changes into motion, and how much is useless for the 
 purposes of the steam-engine." 1 Similarly if we take the 
 connection between an effort and the consequent muscular 
 activity, noting how the work of the muscles increases 
 with the amount of exertion, we see that though we 
 cannot measure exactly the intensity of the effort made, 
 we have still as much a right to consider as causal the 
 connection between effort and muscular contraction as we 
 had the original connection between friction and heat. 
 
 On the second link we have the hoary adage " like 
 can only be produced by like." Dr. Ward has helped us 
 to a better grasp of what this adage implies, by reviving 
 the old Cartesian distinction between the causa eminens 
 and the causa formalis. " Thus if one body is set in 
 motion by another, the motion is produced formaliter in 
 the Cartesian sense ; but if a body were set in motion by 
 mind, such motion would be produced eminenter." 2 Now 
 this heterogeneity of nature which, in the case of mind and 
 matter, is supposed by Naturalism to constitute a chasm 
 
 1 Logic, Eng. trans, ii. p. 384. 
 2 Dr. Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, ii. p. 73. 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 157 
 
 unspannable by any causal bridge, is characteristic not 
 only of eminent but also of formal causes. Is it not Lotze 
 who reminds us that the action between two material 
 bodies, if we only look deep enough, is quite as mys- 
 terious as interaction of the eminent kind ? To the 
 physicist who looks no further than his figures there is 
 of course all the difference in the world between the 
 mathematically calculable character of the former, and 
 the incalculable character of the latter, but this is a 
 question that concerns merely the value of the causal 
 idea for physical purposes, not the nature of the idea 
 itself. Moreover, since the category of reciprocity has 
 come into vogue, the unit of causal action is taken to be 
 an interaction between two substances, forces, or factors, 
 and the question as to the respective natures of agens 
 and patiens regarded as irrelevant, from the point of 
 view of causality, agens and patie?is developing the 
 interchange, each according to its own nature. 
 
 The third link introduces us to that mole-like creature, 
 the " Inconceivable," whose grasp of facts is literally 
 determined by the reach of its own nose. Now, when 
 reach and grasp are co-extensive, it generally happens 
 that the common horizon is determined by the limits of 
 sense-perception. Thus when the brilliant imagination 
 of Prof. James is baffled by the fact of mental activity, 
 and he declares that mental activity is probably a mere 
 " postulate " because no amount of introspection can 
 possibly reveal it, he is simply identifying the inconceiv- 
 able with the unintuitable. But if this unintuitable 
 character of the action between mind and matter is the 
 obstacle alluded to in the motto on the third link, it is 
 an objection that applies in another and more funda- 
 mental way to all the connections which thought establishes. 
 " It is no objection," writes Sigwart in a striking passage, 
 " that we can form no intuitable picture of what takes 
 place," for " what we can intuit is never more than the 
 event and the linking of events, never the fact that the 
 one is grounded by the other. For ordinary conscious- 
 ness the connection between my will and the motion of 
 
158 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 my arm is just as intuitable, i.e. just as firmly grounded 
 in immediate experience and association, as the trans- 
 mission of a shock from one billiard ball to another ; it 
 may be, indeed, that we should find the latter even less 
 comprehensible, if we had not been previously familiar 
 with our power of thrusting a body away by a voluntary 
 movement of the hand." l 
 
 The objection of inconceivability may, however, bear, 
 not on the unintuitable character of mind's action on 
 matter, but on its intractability, on the fact that science 
 is perfectly nonplussed by it. This may well be, but 
 when so stated, the objection ceases to be directed at its 
 former mark. It no longer urges that mental control over 
 matter cannot be causal, on the ground that it is unin- 
 tuitable and therefore inconceivable, but only lays stress 
 on the fact that this admittedly causal relation is quite 
 unanalysable. Indeed Dr. Ward himself brings forward 
 this objection. " It must be candidly confessed," he says, 
 " that, however much we insist on the fact that mind can 
 direct and control inert mass, we are quite unable to 
 analyse the process." 2 This is only too true. Had it 
 been otherwise the objections of determinism would have 
 admitted of being attacked directly, instead of by the 
 indirect methods we were compelled to adopt. 
 
 If we may indulge the hope, at this point of our 
 inquiry, that the objections of hard determinism have 
 been sufficiently met, and that the concessions of soft 
 determinism have been shown to yield more than the 
 problem of Freedom can spare, we may, I think, turn 
 with a good conscience to the task of clearly defining 
 our relations with Indeterminism, or, as it is sometimes 
 called, Libertarianism. 
 
 § 10. Now the present writer must frankly confess that 
 of the two objectors to mechanical determinism, the flexible 
 determinist on the one hand, and the bold indeterminist 
 on the other, he has the greater sympathy with the 
 latter, and considers him the more valuable champion of 
 
 1 Logic, Eng. trans, ii. p. 387. 
 2 Naturalism and Agnosticism, ii. p. 85. 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 159 
 
 free-will, in so far at least as the ground-work of the 
 problem is concerned. It seems impossible not to agree 
 with Prof. James in saying that once a man's alleged 
 spontaneity is completely at the mercy of its antecedents 
 and concomitants it is logically indifferent what these 
 determinants may be, whether of the crow-bar or the 
 velvety type, whether they constitute a nexus of cranial 
 motions and dispositions, or a nexus of motives, character, 
 and circumstance. Whether the predetermination be 
 physical or psychical the result is in both cases the 
 same : the act of spirit could not have been other than 
 it was. 
 
 It is under the heating influence of this conviction 
 that Professor James throws the deterministic mechanism 
 for guiding free-will completely overboard and commits 
 himself heroically to the rudderless steersmanship of 
 chance. " Determinism," he says— and under the title 
 he includes the soft as well as the hard species — " denies 
 the ambiguity of future volitions, because it affirms that 
 nothing future can be ambiguous." l Indeterminism on 
 the other hand affirms this ambiguity unequivocally, and 
 gives it its true unequivocal name " Chance." " Inde- 
 terminate future volitions," we read, " mean chance " 2 
 " Whoever uses the word chance, instead of freedom," 
 adds our author some pages further on, " squarely and 
 resolutely gives up all pretence to control the things he 
 says are free. . . . It is a word of impotence, and is 
 therefore the only sincere word we can use, if, in grant- 
 ing freedom to certain things, we grant it honestly, and 
 really risk the game. Any other word permits of 
 quibbling, and lets us, after the fashion of the soft de- 
 terminists, make a pretence of restoring the caged bird 
 to liberty with one hand, while with the other we 
 anxiously tie a string to its leg to make sure it does 
 not get beyond our sight." 
 
 Now it is hard to feel ungratefully towards such 
 refreshing similes as these, but the word " chance " is 
 
 1 Essay on "The Dilemma of Determinism" in the vol. entitled The Will 
 to Believt and Other Essays, p. 158. 2 Ibid. 
 
160 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 surely too desperate. Though under the magical touch 
 of the great psychologist it puts on the beautiful appeal 
 of a free gift — the idea of chance being at bottom, so 
 we are told, exactly the same thing as the idea of gift, — 
 even this cannot conceal its utter spiritual nakedness. 
 In James's own words " it is a word of impotence," and 
 seems to betoken a spirit not our own that works for 
 chaos, a comet-like visitant that flaunts its own caprice 
 in our bewildered faces rather than the essence of our 
 own selves working for freedom and order. 
 
 But, comes the protest, is it not more impotent still 
 to sit on the fence lamenting both the impotence of the 
 spirit fettered by a flexible fate and the equally im- 
 potent condition of the spirit through which, as through 
 a reed, the breath of Chance bloweth where it listeth, 
 than it would be to trust oneself resolutely to the one 
 issue or to the other ? Yes, we answer, it surely is, so 
 long as we are limited to a fictitious partition between 
 two equally illogical alternatives, but we beg leave to 
 protest against this arbitrary restriction both of our 
 problem and of our preference. 
 
 And here we touch the heart of the whole matter : 
 to wit, the narrowness of the issue as it is presented 
 by the Indeterminist, and as it is characteristically 
 accepted by the flexible determinist. The Indeterminist, 
 like the Britisher, is king of his own castle, and woe to 
 the combatant who fights the battles of Freedom within 
 that breezy but treacherous enclosure. Of such a kind 
 is the indeterministic challenge of Professor James. The 
 professor chooses his own position. It is the position to 
 which his physiological researches and mechanical pro- 
 clivities have led him. " Future human volitions," he 
 tells us, " are as a matter of fact the only ambiguous 
 things we are tempted to believe in " ; l consequently we 
 shall be greatly helping to clear up the real issue of 
 this free-will controversy as well as greatly simplifying 
 the whole discussion if we agree, as we must, to restrict 
 our attention to some specific volitional act. " Both 
 
 1 James, Text-book of Psychology, p. 155. 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 161 
 
 sides admit that a volition has occurred. The inde- 
 terminists say another volition might have occurred in 
 its place : the determinists swear that nothing could 
 possibly have occurred in its place." * Are you then a 
 determinist or an indeterminist, for there is really no 
 fence to sit on, and you must be one or the other ? 
 
 Now we are prepared to urge that the triumph of 
 the indeterminist is due solely to the willingness of his 
 opponent to fight him on his own issue. Dr. Stout, for 
 instance, seems to have fallen into this trap when in dis- 
 cussing the forming of a decision, he says : " At this 
 point the vexed question of free-will, as it is called, arises. 
 According to the libertarians, the decision, at least in 
 some cases, involves the intervention of a new factor, not 
 present in the previous process of deliberation, and not 
 traceable to the constitution of the individual as deter- 
 mined by heredity or past experience. The opponents 
 of the libertarians say that the decision is the natural 
 outcome of conditions operating in the process of 
 deliberation itself. There is, according to them, no new 
 factor which abruptly emerges like a Jack-in-the-box in 
 the moment of deciding." 2 So stated, we say, the issue 
 is between Indeterminism and Soft Determinism, and we 
 give our vote in favour of the Jack-in-the-box. 
 
 Fortunately, however, for the interests of freedom the 
 issue is, even on psychological ground, a much wider one 
 than the above quotation would lead one to suppose. 
 Prof. James tells us that the consciousness of an alternative 
 being also possible, a consciousness which characterises 
 effortless volition as surely as it does free effort is, in the 
 case of effortless volition, a most undoubted delusion 
 (cf. Text-Book of Psychology \ p. 4 5 6). We hold, on the 
 contrary that it is as certainly not a delusion, and that 
 freedom is the essence not only of self-conscious volitional 
 activity but of consciousness itself, that it is a permanent 
 attitude of the conscious subject, consciousness always 
 implying a consciousness of the subject's relative in- 
 
 1 James, Text-book of Psychology ', p. 155. 
 2 Manual of Psychology, p. 589. 
 
 M 
 
162 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 dependence in relation to the object that conditions but 
 does not necessarily regulate its activity. 
 
 §ii. We have now reached the crux of our whole 
 inquiry. The ground here is full of pitfalls and we must 
 proceed as warily as possible. Our aim is to find a basis 
 for freedom within the restricted province of Psychology 
 itself. In order to do so we shall find it necessary, as we 
 hope to point out in detail in the second part of this 
 Essay, to draw a distinction between two radically 
 different conceptions of the purport and meaning of 
 Psychology, only one of which is qualified to discuss or 
 even to consider the question of freedom. Each 
 Psychology starts with its own characteristic statement 
 as to the nature of the experience it proposes to examine. 
 Each makes an assumption with regard to the nature of 
 that experience, an assumption which determines the 
 whole further course of the inquiry, and each inquiry 
 further is stamped as specifically scientific — as opposed to 
 philosophical or metaphysical — by the fact that it makes 
 this assumption. The assumption in the one case is 
 deterministic, the individual's experience being here 
 considered as something to be explained independently 
 of the personality of the experient himself, to be explained 
 briefly by the so-called laws of psychical causality. The 
 assumption in the other case must be non-deterministic 
 and allow us to treat the individual's experience as the 
 experience of a free agent. It is the assumption of a 
 more inward Psychology than the other. It seeks to 
 define the relation of the experient to that which he 
 experiences in such a way as to safeguard at one and the 
 same time both the unity of that experience and the 
 relative independence of the free agent with respect to 
 the conditioning elements in that experience. The 
 assumption then of the more inward Psychology is that 
 the relation between the experiencing subject and the 
 objects which condition its experience is that of a duality 
 in unity — the unity consisting in the permanent indis- 
 solubility of the relation, and the duality in that co-opera- 
 tive opposition of the two factors within the unity of 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 163 
 
 experience whereby a certain relative independence is 
 secured to each. 
 
 With the metaphysical validity of this assumption we 
 are not concerned. Taken as an ultimate metaphysical 
 point of view it may or may not lead us to monads and 
 other haunts of subjective idealism. This is, indeed, 
 matter for further discussion, but it lies outside the limits 
 of a psychological inquiry. What we are especially 
 concerned to point out is that once we accept the 
 assumption as a valid statement of the relation of the 
 factors within immediate experience we ipso facto accept 
 certain facts as fundamental for the Psychology based on 
 that assumption : for to accept an assumption respecting 
 the nature of real experience is just to posit as real 
 whatever facts that assumption involves. In the present 
 instance the two essential facts involved are — (1°) the in- 
 dissoluble tie connecting the subjective and objective 
 factors in experience — a tie such that the former can 
 can have no experience save through the latter ; and (2 ) 
 the relative independence of both factors, the freedom of 
 the agent and the conditioning quality of the objects. 
 
 Accepting this assumption then as truly indicative of 
 the fundamental character of all immediate experience, 
 whether it be the experience of reflection — the so-called 
 internal experience — or the experience of sense-perception 
 — the so-called external experience, — we have freedom 
 given us as a fact which can only be disputed by dis- 
 puting the assumption. Freedom, then, as the fundamental 
 fact of this more inward Psychology, is the relative 
 independence of the subject which the duality of Subject 
 and Object in the unity of Experience presupposes. 
 
 Now this relative independence means real independ- 
 ence, that kind of independence which has something of 
 the nature of James's " original," " spiritual," " force," has 
 its independence, in fact, without its indeterminism. 
 What this independence means may be best gathered by 
 considering its counterpart, the independence of the 
 objective factor in the unity of Experience. This in- 
 dependence of the object — an independence hardly 
 
1 64 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 sufficiently realised, perhaps, by Idealistic monism, though 
 strongly emphasised by Dr. Stout — is shown in at least 
 two ways : — 
 
 i°. By the way in which it conditions subjective activity 
 at every turn of experience, in the sense of limiting it in 
 various ways ; 
 
 2°. By the fact that the conquests of subjective activity 
 are all so many discoveries of the nature and capabilities 
 of that which conditions it, as well as of its own nature 
 and capabilities. The results of such activity depend on 
 the nature of the conditioning material which is being 
 manipulated. The number of stones in a heap does not 
 alter with the counting or the counters. 
 
 But to discuss in any detail the relative independence 
 of object or subject would lead us too far. Our concern 
 is just to point out that the problem of Freedom can 
 only be seen aright from this inner, central point of view, 
 a point of view present not only in volitional decisions, 
 but in every act of mind whatsoever. 
 
 § 12. We are now in a position to point out in 
 conclusion, the precise relation in which we stand 
 to Indeterminism. Indeterminism as represented by 
 Professor James errs, in our opinion, in three main 
 ways : — 
 
 i°. It sets the problem of Freedom from its own 
 restricted, abstract point of view. It starts with the 
 deterministic endeavour to eliminate freedom as far as 
 possible from all the processes of mind. At last it 
 reaches a crux, a residual psychic phenomenon, the 
 phenomenon of effort, when Freedom must either be 
 pressed out of the universe altogether, and Morality and 
 Religion, to say nothing of Knowledge, become mere 
 phantasms of feeling and fancy, — or else paraded as the 
 absolutely undetermined, the absolutely unconditioned. 
 Meanwhile the fundamental inner relation of all immediate 
 experience is ignored. The irpwrov -fyevhcxs of Indeter- 
 minism is that it first sets the problem of Freedom on a 
 dualistic basis, and so can see no tertium quid between 
 the absolutely unconditioned and the absolutely predeter- 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 165 
 
 mined. It can only offer us the choice between Fatalism 
 and Chance. It can see no meaning in relative inde- 
 pendence. 
 
 2 . Closely connected with this prime defect we have 
 the cognate defect of the Deus ex machina. This 
 drawing on the radically discontinuous is a weakness 
 inherent in and common to all systems that are too 
 abstract for their purpose or subject-matter. "If we 
 are to understand the world as a whole," says Dr. Ward, 
 " we must take it as a whole." 1 So if we want to under- 
 stand immediate experience as a whole we must take it 
 as a whole from the start, and in so doing, bear the 
 possibility of freedom with us from the beginning. This 
 is a point of fundamental importance, but need not be 
 insisted on any further in the present connection. 
 
 3 . Closely connected again with this defect, is the 
 fact that Indeterminism is mere Formalism. For it 
 does not show us freedom as issuing out of the nature 
 of anything, not even of the free subject himself, still 
 less out of the fundamental character of immediate ex- 
 perience, but as starting suddenly upon the scene like 
 an apparition at the Egyptian Hall. 
 
 And yet despite these three objections it may be 
 urged against us in conclusion that the notion of relative 
 independence, inasmuch as it connotes real independence, 
 is shared alike by ourselves and the Indeterminists. 
 This, it will be said, is the characteristic mark of Inde- 
 terminism, and the objections brought forward, are not 
 so much objections to Indeterminism itself, as to a 
 certain species of Indeterminism from which we choose 
 to differ. If this rejoinder be made, if it be thought that 
 the objections do not constitute points of difference 
 radical enough to suggest a difference truly generic, this 
 further discussion must be relegated to metaphysics. 
 Psychology — at least the Psychology we have in view — 
 accepts a relative yet real independence as fundamentally 
 present in the central fact of immediate experience. It 
 is for metaphysics to analyse this independence and to 
 
 1 Naturalism and Agnosticism, ii. p. 87. 
 
1 66 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 find out, if it can, how it can be or cannot be at one and 
 the same time, both real and relative. That it cannot 
 be indeterminate and is certainly relatively independent, 
 and so free in the genuine sense of the word, remains 
 meanwhile the working conviction of the Psychology of 
 Immediate Experience. 
 
 Part II. The Psychology of First Causes: A Fun- 
 damental Distinction stated and applied 
 
 § i 3. Perhaps one of the most suggestive facts in connec- 
 tion with the present state of Psychology, is the marked 
 way in which it holds aloof from the problem of Freedom. 
 " Psychology, like every other science," writes Hoffding, 
 " must be deterministic, that is to say, it must start from 
 the assumption that the causal law holds good even in 
 the life of the will, just as this law is assumed to be valid 
 for the remaining conscious life and for material nature, 
 If there are limits to this assumption, they will coincide 
 with the limits to Psychology." 1 James speaks in a 
 precisely similar manner though with less right, seeing 
 that the form in which he states his theory of free effort 
 brings it inevitably within the scope of psychological 
 enquiry. The theory, as is well known, concerns simply 
 " duration and intensity " of mental effort. " The question 
 of fact in the free-will controversy," he writes, " is extremely 
 simple. It relates solely to the amount of effort of 
 attention which we can at any time put forth. Are the 
 duration and intensity of this effort fixed functions of the 
 object, or are they not ? " 2 Still, despite this purely 
 psychological turn which Professor James gives to the 
 problem, he is quite decided that the question of free- 
 will should be kept out of Psychology. " Psychology as a 
 would-be ' science,' must, like every other science, postulate 
 complete determinism in its facts, and abstract consequently 
 from the effects of free-will even if such a force exists." 3 The 
 free effort of Indeterminism is " an independent variable," 
 
 1 Outlines of Psychology, p. 345. 
 2 James, Text-Book of Psychology, p. 456. 3 Ibid. p. 238. 
 
hi THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 167 
 
 and " wherever there are independent variables, 1 there 
 science stops." 2 Hence, he adds, " So far as our volitions 
 may be independent variables, a scientific Psychology- 
 must ignore that fact, and treat of them only so far as 
 they are fixed functions." 3 
 
 Now the question before us is the following : — Is this 
 deterministic assumption a necessary postulate of scientific 
 inquiry ? Are we, as Psychologists, compelled to ignore 
 the question of freedom ? If so, what conceivable relation 
 can there be between Psychology and the problem of 
 Freedom ? By way of answering this question, we propose 
 to make a distinction between what we hold to be two 
 radically different treatments of the Science of Psychology, 
 each of which has its own separate problem and method 
 of solving it. We propose to state this distinction as briefly 
 and plainly as we can, to develop it, and lastly to apply it to 
 the solution of certain fundamental confusions that still 
 attach to the conception of Psychology as a Natural 
 Science. 
 
 1. Statement of the Distinction 
 
 There is at present a fruitful, highly-developed, and 
 rapidly self-differentiating Science usually known as 
 Empirical Psychology. In its methods and aims it 
 completely resembles the procedure of the physical 
 Sciences. It shares the same postulate — that of a 
 universal determinism — and hence also the same con- 
 ception of what is to constitute a legitimate explanation. 
 In so far as such method falls short of the ideal method 
 of the physical model, such deficiency is due, not to any 
 lack of faith in the efficacy of the method or the postulate, 
 
 1 It would be a much truer use of language to say that Science cannot stand 
 until it has acquired its independent variables, than to say that it must stop 
 because it finds them. The calculus is built up upon the independent variable, 
 as all considerations of velocity and acceleration presuppose time as the inde- 
 pendent variable. Of course the independent variables of Mathematical Physics 
 are only relatively independent, and indeed their independence is a mere mathe- 
 matical fiction, but this difference in the two meanings of independent variable, 
 the mathematical and the libertarian, helps to bring out the absoluteness of 
 James's conception of free effort. 
 
 2 James, Text-Book of Psychology, p. 455. 3 Ibid. p. 457. 
 
168 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 but to the intractability of the subject-matter. Thus Dr. 
 Sigwart, after laying down the inductive method as the 
 ideal method even in Psychology — in default of the 
 deductive — adds the following words : — " A process quite 
 parallel to the induction of Natural Science is, however, 
 opposed partly by the impossibility of measuring psychical 
 phenomena, partly by the variability of psychical subjects 
 in consequence of their development, and partly by the 
 great differences between individuals which are to some 
 extent connected with this development. Except there- 
 fore within the sphere of Psychophysics in the narrower 
 sense, we cannot hope to establish exact general laws, by 
 which the concrete temporal course of successive events 
 in Consciousness would be determined on all sides in an 
 unmistakable way." 1 
 
 It is from the point of view of this purely Inductive 
 Psychology that the deterministic assumption becomes a 
 necessity of method. All Inductive Sciences presuppose 
 determinism 2 for the very simple and general reason that 
 they are concerned with the discovery of laws, i.e., of 
 uniformities descriptive of the actions and interactions of 
 the material considered. Hence from the point of view 
 of Empirical Psychology, Hoffding is perfectly justified in 
 stating that the limits of psychical determinism would 
 mark the limits of Psychology. 
 
 But, as we have already pointed out in the first Part of 
 this Essay, this purely inductive treatment of Psychology 
 is not the only conceivable form of treatment, nor is it, 
 indeed, that form of treatment which the peculiar subject- 
 matter of Psychology essentially demands. There is the 
 inner, vital, truly causal point of view, a point of view not 
 only individualistic but inward, which, accepting as its 
 fundamental assumption the duality of subject and object 
 
 1 Logic, Eng. trans, ii. p. 374. 
 
 2 Throughout this inquiry we conceive the Inductive Method specifically as a 
 Method founded on the Mechanical postulate, the postulate of universal de- 
 terminism. This postulate represents the demand which science makes for 
 Mechanical Explanations, the test or standard of legitimate explanation. It is 
 surely not untrue to affirm that if a suggested explanation violates this postulate 
 of mechanical connection, Science will have none of it. The essential limitation 
 of this method and its Postulate, we take to be this, that it does not and cannot 
 recognise explanation by final causes, in any genuine sense of the term. 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 169 
 
 within the unity of experience, accepts with it the freedom 
 or relative independence of the subject as its fundamental 
 fact. The distinction, then, that we propose to make 
 is that between the now well-established Inductive 
 Psychology, on the one hand, and this inward Science of 
 Free Agency on the other, and the first distinctive feature 
 of difference between these two Psychologies we take to 
 be this, that whilst the Science of Free Agency accepts 
 the capacity for real freedom as its fundamental fact, the 
 Inductive Psychology unreservedly accepts the determin- 
 istic assumption as its only possible working postulate. 
 A second fundamental difference between the two treat- 
 ments, a difference we cannot here do more than indicate, 
 is to be found in the fact that whereas Inductive 
 Psychology aims at discovering laws and combinations of 
 laws, and at tracing uniformities within the psychical life, 
 the newer — or the older — Psychology aims at showing 
 how the free causal agency with which it is primarily 
 concerned determines its own development. Were the 
 term self-determination less ambiguous and difficult than 
 it is, it might not be amiss to characterise this inward 
 treatment of the psychical life as the Psychology of Self- 
 Determination ; but as this well-worn expression is 
 somewhat too pliant for purposes of distinction, the 
 more startling though by no means desperate name of 
 " the Psychology of first causes " would, we think, be 
 found to hit the point more firmly and more truly. We 
 must leave the title to defend itself in the pages that 
 follow, noting simply in the meantime that any difficulties 
 which the term " first causes " may awaken are not for 
 Psychology to solve. It is not the business of Psycho- 
 logy to make easy the task of Metaphysics. Its duty is 
 to state its assumptions as to the nature of individual 
 experience, accept as real the facts which that assumption 
 necessitates, and then to push boldly forward with a 
 sound conscience on its own lines. Let us now proceed 
 to a more developed statement of what is assumed in a 
 Psychology of first causes, and to a more definite treat- 
 ment of its relation to Inductive Psychology. 
 
170 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 2. Development of the Distinction 
 
 § 14. I propose to start with the following definition. 
 Psychology is the Science of Immediate Experience 
 considered primarily from the point of view of the 
 experient and only secondarily from the point of view 
 of an external observer. This definition, it will be 
 noticed, diners apparently from the customary definition 
 of a Science in that it is so worded as to include not only 
 the statement of the subject-matter of the science but also 
 the point of view from which that subject-matter is to be 
 regarded. The inclusion of point of view within a 
 definition may seem unusual and require justification. It 
 is unusual, no doubt, to define a Science in terms of its 
 point of view but this is not because the statement of the 
 point of view is unessential to the definition, but simply 
 because it is always presupposed that the point of view is 
 that of the external observer, of an observer, that is, whose 
 method is conditioned by the decisive fact that he 
 approaches his data from the outside. If Geology and 
 Psychology had been the only two sciences ever studied 
 we should have had to include within our definition of 
 Geology the statement that the point of view taken 
 throughout was exclusively that of the external observer. 
 
 The objection, however, will probably be raised that as 
 the definition of a Science includes as a rule only the 
 statement of its subject-matter, the additional reference to 
 a point of view is, to say the least, gratuitous unless it can 
 be shown that the subject-matter will be differently 
 treated according as the one point of view or the other is 
 taken ; and the objection may be supported by the 
 contention that whether the point of view taken be that 
 of the experient or of the external observer, the mode of 
 treatment will always remain the same, consisting, in 
 short, in the method of Scientific Induction. Now this 
 contention in so far as it insists on no element being 
 admitted into the definition of a science which does not 
 directly or indirectly serve to specify its subject-matter, 
 must be accepted as valid, and it is only our conviction 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 171 
 
 that the view-point in this case does affect the treatment 
 of the subject-matter that has determined its inclusion. 
 The statement, however, that scientific induction is the 
 only conceivable method which can do justice to the facts 
 of the mental life is the very statement we are bent on 
 disputing. Scientific Induction is a method born of the 
 needs of the physical sciences, a method which aims at 
 unifying the phenomena of a science within an organised 
 system of laws of an essentially hypothetical character ; 
 it is in short a method that expresses not the necessary 
 mode of activity of mind as such in the presence of a 
 given subject-matter but its mode of procedure when 
 treating this subject-matter from the point of view of the 
 external observer whether in sense- perception or in 
 introspection. For when we say that the point of view 
 from which the experient considers his own immediate 
 experience fundamentally determines the way in which 
 that experience shall be treated, we have not mere 
 Introspection, as such, in mind. Introspection, as the 
 name implies, is no doubt a psychological point of view, a 
 form of observation, and not, as it is often loosely called 
 a " source " or a " method," but the method adopted in 
 Introspection, may as assuredly be that of scientific 
 induction as is the method adopted in Comparative 
 Psychology. The point of view of the experient is in fact 
 not to be identified with that of the inner spectator in 
 Introspection, but is the point of view of one who, 
 approaching his subject-matter from the inside, does not 
 pass from disconnected data to uniformities that combine 
 them, from the ceaseless flux of conscious states to the 
 laws by which it is ordered, but from the very outset 
 starts with the unities of mind, and from the vital 
 interests and aims which express them. For the 
 experient the real fundamentals are not fact and law but 
 appetite and its satisfaction, or more specifically, to use 
 Dr. Stout's own expression," the self-realisation of conscious 
 purpose." In a word it is the essentially vital point of 
 view. Let me give an illustration which I trust will not 
 be pressed too far. The participators in an orchestral 
 
172 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 concert may be divided into three classes, those who are 
 outside the walls of the concert hall and have at best only 
 the sounds at their disposal to symbolise what is going on 
 within the walls, the ticket-holders inside who not only hear 
 the sounds but see how they are being produced, and 
 finally the performers themselves who are not only aware 
 of the sounds and the processes that give them, but 
 inwardly realise the hidden unities of purpose and 
 interests of which all else is but the means or the 
 expression. Thus at any moment of the performance the 
 outer spectator, we will say, experiences a sound, the 
 inner spectator in addition the workings to which the 
 sound is due, and the performer himself the inspiration of 
 of the musical purpose and interest which is the source 
 and fountain-head of all that is happening. 
 
 No one can use the term " vital " nowadays without 
 some word of apology or at least of explanation. Mine 
 need only be brief. If life and mind are treated as 
 coextensive, a hypothesis by no means disproved by the 
 facts, and if life further is not treated as an impenetrable 
 tertium quid between matter and mind, but merely as 
 that which makes mental development possible and gives 
 it its true inward quality, then the term " vital " fulfils a 
 function which no other term can fulfil so well. That it 
 should have no specific bearing on the explanations of the 
 physiologist or biologist is due simply to the fact that it 
 is purposely and profitably ignored by all investigators 
 who do not need to consider mind as an influential factor, 
 or to recognise any selective agency other than that of 
 natural selection. But a science of immediate experience 
 is in a different position, and psychologists who neglect 
 the vital factor with all that it involves, are mere inner 
 spectators, not experients, and can at best, like Wundt, 
 reach the conception of mental development as that of a 
 very complex system of reciprocal interactions between 
 the parts of the process. 
 
 The spectators' points of view, with their methods of 
 scientific induction, are of course as essential for the full 
 development of psychological science as is the more vital 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 173 
 
 point of view, but they do not seize the subject at its 
 heart. They miss the inner significance of mental 
 development as a continuous acquisition of meanings and 
 values, and they miss the true explanatory syntheses that 
 dominate the development, finding them not in the 
 fundamental factors or motives of that development but 
 in laws of psychical or physical causality. Let us refer 
 again to the case of Wundt. Wundt, like Fouillee, insists 
 on the notion of Psychology as a science of immediate 
 experience, as a science that starts, not from a number 
 of generalised concepts, but from the actuality of the 
 individual mind itself. But while insisting on the in- 
 dependent nature of psychical processes, he has not 
 shown how this independence of nature gives proof of its 
 independence in determining mental development, but he 
 has treated the development analytically after a rigorously 
 inductive fashion. The main problem which mental 
 development offers to the psychologist, according to 
 Wundt, is the discovery of the laws, the psychical laws, 
 whereby its uniformities and connections may be seized ; 
 and these laws differ from the simpler laws of relation and 
 combination that characterise psychical activity in com- 
 plexity only, the interconnection with which they are 
 concerned being of a more intricate and comprehensive 
 kind. Thus instead of showing how development is deter- 
 mined through its own vital syntheses Wundt lays stress 
 on certain fundamental forms which such determination 
 takes. It is the spectator's and not the vital point of view. 
 It would indeed be a step in the direction of greater 
 clearness were these so-called laws of mental development 
 referred to not as " laws " but as " forms." The laws of 
 " mental growth," " heterogeny of ends," and of " develop- 
 ment towards opposites " as treated by Wundt, are they 
 not rather descriptive forms affording a comprehensive 
 bird's-eye view over the phenomena of mental develop- 
 ment, than " causal laws of mental development " ? The 
 reason given for calling them " causal " laws is that they 
 are found by a process of induction precisely similar to 
 that employed in discovering the causal laws of Nature. 
 
174 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON 
 
 in 
 
 "Just as the nature of physical causality," says Wundt, 
 "can be revealed to us only in the fundamental laws of 
 Nature, so the only way we have of accounting for the 
 characteristics of psychical causality is to abstract certain 
 fundamental laws of psychical phenomena from the 
 totality of psychical processes." 
 
 Now this reasoning is to my mind quite unsound. 
 Granting that the nature of physical causality can be 
 revealed to us only in the fundamental laws of Nature, 
 we must find the reason for this in the fact that we are 
 here dealing with that aspect of experience which shows 
 us change and the occasions of change in abstraction 
 from any inner activities that may be ultimately re- 
 sponsible for the change. But in inward experience 
 what we are most intimately aware of is precisely the 
 causal activity we abstract from when we view the object 
 from the outside. Here we are not compelled by the 
 nature of the case to be content with the revelation of 
 cause in the observable form of law, but are at liberty to 
 study causes at first hand, and the processes whereby they 
 conspire to determine their own effects. It is not true 
 then that the only way we have of accounting for the 
 characteristics of psychical causality is to do as Wundt 
 bids us, — standing over our inner experiences, as it were, 
 with a view to threading them together as best we may, 
 and calling the result " laws of psychical causality." We 
 are prepared, on the contrary, to maintain that such laws 
 are not laws of psychical causality at all, any more than 
 the laws of change and interchange of inert masses are 
 laws of physical causality. All causes are first causes. 
 Otherwise they are mere effects within an endless chain 
 of events, and have no determinative power whatsoever : 
 they transmit, but do not determine. Where, as in 
 abstract Physics we are restricted to the continuous 
 changes of an energy that has neither beginning nor end, 
 transforming itself indefinitely within the two endless 
 continua of Space and Time, there is no place for 
 causality, but only for varying effects due to varying 
 relations of position, speed, etc., between the moving 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 175 
 
 masses. The world for Physics is one vast continuous 
 effect taking the form of change, and its problem is to 
 discover the laws not which regulate or determine, but 
 according to which are regulated or determined, these 
 never-ceasing changes. 
 
 It seems then a very questionable plan to import a 
 pis-aller method of scientific procedure from a sphere 
 where it seems the only one available, into another where 
 causal methods in the genuine sense of the word are at 
 once suggested by the facts themselves. Psychology 
 will of course always require those methods that seek 
 for law in default of cause, as so much of the material 
 it takes in hand presents just those features which have 
 compelled the physicist in his own sphere to restrict his 
 attention to laws of change. But this is no reason why 
 experience in what is most vital and essential to it should 
 not be treated according to its own nature, instead of 
 having its inwardly experienced development brought 
 under the same forms of inductive procedure as are 
 adopted when discussing the development of a nebula, 
 say, into a system of suns and worlds. In the latter 
 case we can discuss the development only from the out- 
 side, whereas in the case of self-experience, we have to 
 get outside of ourselves before we can take up the 
 spectator's point of view. 
 
 What then is this truly causal procedure proper to 
 the vital view-point, and to the vital view-point only ? 
 If we are debarred from law are we not debarred from 
 order as well, and even from intelligibility ? In answer 
 to this we may say in the first place that if law is defined 
 as the means whereby order and intelligibility are intro- 
 duced within the flow of events, the choice can only lie 
 between law and nescience. But a synthesis that de- 
 termines some drift of mental development is not a mere 
 law descriptive of the process it both induces and directs 
 but is the cause of that process in the only true sense of 
 the word, that namely of a cause in action, working out 
 its own ends in conformity with its own nature. The 
 nature of a causal agency is one thing, laws which 
 
176 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 describe the conditions under which that activity works 
 quite another : the former may be best described as a 
 synthetic principle that explains change, the latter as a 
 description of some constant and general feature charac- 
 teristic of this change. It would not be amiss, I think, 
 were we to go a step farther than we went just now in 
 advocating the distinction between " law " and " form," 
 and suggest that the word principle be restricted to this 
 strictly causal, synthetic point of view, so that all principles 
 should be by definition principles of the nature and 
 action of first causes and synthetic agencies. We should 
 then be able to say of every principle, that it was not a 
 law, or preferably, a form, and of every law that it was 
 not a principle, but only the statement of some descriptive 
 uniformity. We should talk then of the Form, or Law, 
 or Theory, but not of the Principle, of Gravitation, we 
 should talk of the principle of subjective selection, so far 
 as by that we referred to a synthetic causal activity of 
 Consciousness, but of the form, law, or theory of natural 
 selection. 
 
 §15. That Consciousness is essentially a synthesis has 
 been since Kant's day a widely accepted doctrine of Psycho- 
 logy, 1 but it plays even in the most modern text-books a 
 formal rather than a causal role. The circumstances under 
 which the problem arose, are no doubt largely responsible 
 for this. It was set by Hume in such a way as to bring 
 to the front the conception of the Unity of Consciousness 
 as a combining form rather than as a causal agency. 
 Either conception would have served to give that co- 
 herency to the flow of Consciousness which the problem 
 required for its solution. But the former was given 
 and has prevailed ever since. Let us consider Hoffding's 
 treatment of the Unity of Consciousness by way of 
 illustration. " The peculiarity of the phenomena of 
 Consciousness as contrasted with the subject-matter of 
 the science of external nature," he says, " . . . is precisely 
 that inner connection between the individual elements 
 in virtue of which they apppear as belonging to one and 
 
 1 Cf. , e.g. , Hoffding, Outlines of Psychology, pp. 47, 48, 49, 117, 138, 140. 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 177 
 
 the same subject." 1 This is, as Hoffding himself confesses, 
 a purely formal conception, but it is not therefore barren. 
 For it is not only the fundamental form, but also the 
 fundamental condition " 2 or presupposition of conscious 
 activity as we know it. Thus " it is only because one 
 and the same self is active in all opposing elements that 
 their mutual relation comes into Consciousness." l More- 
 over this formal character of the Unity of Consciousness 
 which distinguishes it from all material connections is 
 sufficient to disprove as a Psychological absurdity any 
 attempt to combine two egos or Consciousnesses into one 
 ego. 4 Finally this formal unity is not only the general 
 form and presupposition of all conscious activity but runs 
 like a connecting thread through all the specific forms 
 which that activity takes. " The nature of the ego is 
 manifested in the combination of the sensations, ideas, and 
 feelings, and in the forms and laws of the combination." 5 
 
 This formal conception of the Unity of Consciousness 
 has no doubt its conveniences. It is economical and 
 easily understood. But it is an abstract, non-psycho- 
 logical conception, and has proved quite as misleading 
 as it has proved useful. Hoffding, indeed, realises that 
 there is a real aspect of the Unity of Consciousness as 
 well as a formal aspect. " The form of Consciousness," 
 he says, " is common to all conscious beings ; individuality 
 consists in the definite content which is embraced by the 
 formal unity," 6 consists essentially, in fact, in a dominant 
 vital feeling ; 7 but even as a feeling its function is 
 simply that of keeping the concrete life of the individual 
 together, a unifying, combining function. But it is at 
 least not abstract, and that is a distinct gain to the 
 psychological value of the conception. 
 
 Quite recently a definite attempt has been made to 
 emphasise the causal aspect of this synthetic activity of 
 Consciousness. I allude to Dr. Stout's conception of 
 conative unity or unity of interest. It supplies a triple 
 
 1 Hoffding, Outlines of Psychology, p. 47. " Ibid. p. 136. 
 
 3 Ibid. p. 140 ; cf. also p. 117. 
 
 4 Ibid. p. 138. 5 Ibid. p. 136. 6 Ibid. p. 139, cf. also p. 49. 
 
 7 So Wundt, cf. Outlines of Psychology, Eng. trans, p. 221. 
 
 N 
 
178 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON in 
 
 need. In the i° place it is a real vital unity, consisting 
 not in a mere feeling but containing all the elements 
 that enter into a complete attitude of Consciousness : 
 appetition, feeling-tone, and attentive or cognitive aspect ; 
 (2 ) it is a causal agency, not a mere combining activity ; 
 (3 ) it is a workable conception of the synthetic unity 
 of Consciousness. 
 
 Now I do not propose to develop in any way these 
 three notable contributions to the science of Psychology. 
 There is, however, one remark I should wish to make. 
 Readers of the " Manual " will, I think, discover that 
 though there is no explicit recognition in those pages 
 of the distinction we have been attempting to draw, that 
 the distinction nevertheless exists, and is stated if not 
 explicitly, yet in principle. For Dr. Stout maintains 
 that the central interest of Psychology consists in the 
 study of mental development as the self-realisation of 
 conscious purpose in " the study of conscious endeavour, 
 as a factor in its own fulfilment " 1 and shows how 
 continuity of interest and of attention is the principle 
 which, when articulately developed under the impetus 
 given by objects, is the determinative explanatory 
 principle in both reproduction and association. More- 
 over, and this seems most important, Dr. Stout, following 
 up Mr. Bradley's famous distinction in the opening pages 
 of his Principles of Logic, has presented this mental 
 development to us as consisting essentially in acquisition 
 of meaning. The stages in mental development are 
 represented as " stages in the evolution of meaning 
 towards definiteness and explicitness." 2 Now there 
 seems ground for maintaining that just in so far as 
 mental development is presented in the light of an 
 evolution of meanings and values, it is presented from 
 the truly inward point of view and from the point of 
 view which can alone furnish a living and a suitable 
 psychological basis for Ethics, ^Esthetics, and the Theory 
 
 1 This phrase is taken out of a course of lectures by Dr. Stout on the 
 Fundamentals of Psychology. The italics are mine. 
 
 2 Dr. Stout, Manual of Psychology, p. 89. 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 179 
 
 of Knowledge in their inward aspects. The attempt 
 made in this Essay towards establishing a certain 
 fundamental distinction of psychological treatment, may 
 accordingly be viewed as an addendum to the Manual, 
 for it was suggested by reflecting on the necessary 
 implications of the Theory of Conation as elaborated 
 in that important work. 
 
 We come now to our last point. We have stated 
 and developed under such inspiration as we have already 
 acknowledged what we believe to be a fundamental and 
 important distinction. It remains for us to show that 
 the distinction is not an arbitrary, manufactured product, 
 but a fruitful and explanatory principle. " 
 
 3. Application of the Distinction 
 
 §16. Psychology, we are told, is a Natural Science. 
 Let us examine this commonplace statement and see 
 whether it is after all quite so satisfactory and free from 
 ambiguity as at first sight it appears. 
 
 It is generally asserted or understood, in the first 
 place that, as a Natural Science, Psychology must be 
 concerned both with describing and explaining the 
 subject-matter of which it treats, but when we come to 
 close quarters with this distinction between the descriptive 
 and the explanatory functions of the science we meet 
 with strange inconsequences that leave us with a mind 
 all in confusion. Thus we find Prof. James starting with 
 the conception of Psychology as a Natural Science with 
 an explanatory function to fulfil, 1 and closing with the 
 conviction that it is after all only a Natural History 2 
 and cannot do more than describe the states of 
 Consciousness it set out to explain ; whilst, on the other 
 hand, Dr. Stout himself, after telling us blankly at the 
 outset that Psychology " has only to do with the natural 
 history of subjective processes as they occur in time," 3 
 heroically proceeds to furnish us with the very explanatory 
 agencies that are needed to bring true science into 
 
 1 James, Text-book of Psychology, p. i. 9 Ibid. p. 468. 
 
 3 Stout, Manual of Psychology, p. 6. 
 
180 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 history and justify the claim of Psychology to pose as 
 an explanatory science. 
 
 Here then is a first ambiguity. In stating that 
 Psychology is a Natural Science, do we mean that it is 
 merely descriptive, or explanatory as well, — a mere 
 Natural History or a genuine Science ? 
 
 A second ambiguity the issues of which are closely 
 involved with those of the first arises from the fact that 
 to many minds " science " and " mechanical science " are 
 synonymous terms. In calling Psychology a Natural 
 Science these mechanists hold in reserve the latent con- 
 viction that it is a Science only so far as Cerebral 
 Physiology is able to afford it firm mechanical support. 
 To such the notion of a teleological science is a contra- 
 dictio in adjecto if it denotes a return to what they 
 conceive to be the superstition of final causes ; but is 
 otherwise harmless and even useful in so far as it serves 
 merely to describe a feature of psychical phenomena that 
 can be explained, or rather explained away, by natural 
 selection. Thus Prof. James is able to preface his con- 
 viction that Psychology is now " on the materialistic 
 tack" 1 and must be allowed full headway in its 
 mechanically directed course, with an approval of another 
 " gradually growing conviction " of modern thought, 
 that " mental life is primarily teleological." 2 
 
 Here then is a second ambiguity. In stating that 
 Psychology is a Natural Science, do we mean that it is 
 a mechanical science, a teleological science, or both ? 
 
 Now in addition to these two positive sources of 
 ambiguity due to our uncertainty as to what we do mean 
 when we talk of Psychology as a Natural Science, we 
 are met by others equally confusing so soon as we 
 attempt to decide what we do ?iot mean when we make 
 that same assertion. Of these the two most important 
 are those associated — (i°), with the distinction between 
 "natural" and "normative"; (2 ) with the distinction 
 between " natural " and " metaphysical." Let us briefly 
 consider in turn each of these familiar distinctions. In 
 
 1 James, Text-book of Psychology, p. 3. 2 Ibid. p. 4. 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 181 
 
 the first place we must draw attention to the fact that 
 either distinction can be made as obvious as we please, 
 and be so stated as to give us no more trouble, provided 
 we are content to follow a line of treatment by which 
 clear dualisms can always be extracted from the most 
 entangled dualities. This consists briefly in abstracting 
 the respective differentia of the two members of the 
 antithesis for the purposes of distinction, and abstracting 
 away all else so as to leave a clear space intervening for 
 the exclusive use of the mind in its to-and-fro passages 
 in between. Thus, to take the first antithesis, all chance 
 of mutual interference between the opposing terms is 
 removed by stating that natural science deals with the 
 " mere is," and normative discipline with the " should 
 be " or the " ought," provided the further stipulation is 
 made that the " is " is a mere question of events or 
 occurrences, obeying fixed laws of their own in com- 
 plete indifference to the ends towards which they 
 may be diverted by a regulative discipline. Thus the 
 machinery of association is paraded as a mere " is " 
 which thinking can freely regulate in conformity with 
 ideals of which the machinery gives no hint. A difficulty 
 arises, however, when we seek to render intelligible this 
 relation between the " is " and the " ought " in conformity 
 with the principles of Continuity. 1 The attempt is then 
 made as a rule to show that the ideal is immanent in the 
 actual, and only needs a little elaboration to fulfil a true 
 regulative office ; unfortunately the processes whereby 
 the actual assimilates and digests the ideal are not 
 usually well-considered, so that the device comes to 
 nothing more than the trick of conveying the ideal into 
 the actual, and then withdrawing it when needed, with 
 all the deftness and complacency of a prestidigitist. 
 Indeed it must be so unless the " is " is otherwise 
 understood than as a serious of " occurrences " or mere 
 " events in time." Hence this distinction on closer view 
 reveals ambiguities and uncertainties of a fundamental 
 
 1 Cf. the blank amazement of Professor Liebmann in that most delightful 
 chapter " Gehirn und Geist " of his book Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit. 
 
1 82 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON in 
 
 kind. The same must be said of the relation between 
 the natural and the metaphysical. Whilst it is true that 
 no science whose assumptions are abstract in this sense, 
 that they are not assumptions as to the nature of Reality, 
 can resent as an interference the metaphysician's 
 criticism of this assumption in the light of his more 
 ultimate conceptions, it is quite otherwise when, as in the 
 case of the more inward treatment of Psychology, the 
 initial assumptions that are made are assumptions as to 
 the nature of Reality — from the point of view, at any- 
 rate, of individual experience. The question must then 
 be asked : "Is a Psychology that makes assumptions, or 
 postulates as to the nature of Reality, to be regarded as 
 a natural or as a metaphysical science?" and together 
 with it this further question : " Is Metaphysics then a 
 Science without assumptions, and if not, how are we to 
 distinguish between a Psychology that makes assumptions 
 as to the nature of Reality and a Metaphysics that does 
 precisely the same thing ? " 
 
 These existing ambiguities now stated, we proceed to 
 show to what extent they can be unravelled by the help 
 of the distinction between the Inductive Psychology and 
 the Psychology of first causes. We have four questions 
 to ask and answer: — 
 
 i°. Can Psychology justly lay claim to be an ex- 
 planatory science or is its function merely 
 descriptive ? 
 
 2°. Is Psychology a mechanical or a teleological 
 science ? 
 
 3°. In what relation does Psychology stand to the 
 normative sciences ? 
 
 4°. In what relation does Psychology stand to Meta- 
 physics ? 
 
 i°. Is Psychology a Descriptive or an Explanatory 
 Science ? 
 
 § 17. In answer to the first query we would unhesitat- 
 ingly maintain that Inductive Psychology, in so far, at any 
 rate as it is Psychology and not a schematised Physiology, 
 
m THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 183 
 
 is a merely descriptive Science. From this point of view 
 the effort of Inductive Psychology as represented by Prof. 
 James and in a more systematic though less convincing 
 manner by the school of Avenarius, to make cerebral laws 
 responsible for the explanation of psychical effects, is 
 readily intelligible ; for it is, so far as I can see, the only 
 quasi-explanatory outlet for the exclusive devotee of 
 Inductive Psychology. The line of reasoning which these 
 cerebral explicants take is put very clearly by Mr. Petzoldt 
 in his recently published Introduction to the Philosophy 
 of Pure Experience. It consists essentially in the 
 following argument : — The only intelligible principle 
 of explanation is that founded on the thoroughgoing 
 unideterminism of events. Such unideterminism is not 
 anywhere traceable within the mental sphere. Mental 
 processes must therefore either remain permanently 
 inexplicable or be explained through their connections 
 with material processes, for these alone proceed uni- 
 determinately. As all known facts agree in showing that 
 the only material processes in immediate relation with 
 psychical processes are the processes of the brain, it 
 follows irresistibly that if there is to be a science of mind 
 at all, psychical processes must be conceived of as the 
 dependent concomitants of brain-processes and receive 
 their unideterminateness through their connection with 
 these. And the conclusion runs : " If this is not so, then 
 mental science is a mere descriptive phantasmagoria, in 
 plainer words an illusion." 
 
 Here we have the clear statement of the pass to which 
 we are reduced when we insist on the psychical life being 
 regulated like the object-matter of the physicist on the 
 lines of a strictly mechanical unideterminateness. We 
 are obliged to make the reality of immediate experience 
 dependent for its intelligibility on physiological sequences 
 of a more or less manufactured and fictitious kind, for as 
 Lewes himself puts it — and the remark is abundantly 
 verified in the character of the Avenarian method — 
 much that passes as a physiological explanation of mental 
 facts is simply the translation of those facts in terms of a 
 
1 84 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON in 
 
 physiology that is merely hypothetical. 1 Still if a 
 hypothetical physiological scheme is the only form that 
 psychical explanation can ultimately take, it must be 
 welcomed as supplying at least provisionally a much-felt 
 want, and we who accept it must reconcile ourselves as 
 best we may to the absurdities, the dualisms, and the 
 scepticisms which are its inseparable concomitants. 
 
 I cannot see, however, that we are under any necessity 
 to trace out our explanations of psychical processes by 
 the aid of the ideal scalpel of the Avenarians. Human 
 intelligence having got the idea of causality from the 
 action of the relatively independent agencies in immediate 
 experience, introduces it into its study of external pheno- 
 mena under the name of Force. It abandons this 
 concept, however, as superfluous so soon as it is able to 
 replace it by the more systematic conception of Law, 
 of unidetermining law. This twice - refined product of 
 shadowy thought is then reintroduced, a ghost of a ghost, 
 into its original home. It has no longer anything 
 psychical about it, but is a breathless, mechanical, and 
 purely fictitious creature ; yet its plain duty, we are told, 
 is to oust from the mental life all causal agencies that are 
 not of its own rarefied kind, and to exercise full sway over 
 the soulless dregs or "states" of consciousness that persist 
 even after all original causal agency has been withdrawn. 
 One can hardly help thinking that this unidetermining 
 fiction from the ideal realm of abstract physics resents 
 even the presence of these submissive fragments of 
 mentality, and would fain have a free field in which to 
 recreate consciousness afresh after its own heart. Perhaps 
 the post-Avenarians will bring us to this ere long. 
 
 These remarks are of course not aimed at the inductive 
 treatment of psychical processes and states, which is as 
 essential and important as it is limitedly descriptive, but 
 
 1 Quoted by Alfred Fouill6e, Psychologie des I dies- Forces, i. p. 252 ; cf. 
 also James, Text-Book of Psychology, p. 278: — " Truly the day is distant when 
 physiologists shall actually trace from cell-group to cell-group the irradia- 
 tions which we have hypothetically invoked. Probably it will never arrive. 
 The schematism we have used is, moreover, taken immediately from the 
 analysis of objects into their elementary parts, and only extended by analog}' to 
 the brain." 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 185 
 
 only at such pseudo- Psychology as goes to its own 
 physiological fictions for causal explanations in the spirit 
 of the savage who seeks his counsel from the idols of his 
 own making. Such flimsy usurpation of the true ex- 
 planatory function of free spiritual agency has surely been 
 tolerated all too long, seeing how wholly gratuitous it 
 undoubtedly is. For in actual concrete experience, we 
 are presented at first hand with a living causal agency, 
 continuously effective in mental development, to ignore 
 whose effective presence is to ignore the whole inwardness 
 and power of the psychical life, to treat it as something 
 husk and hollow and as cleanly devitalised as abstractive 
 power can make it. 
 
 Inductive Psychology with its deterministic assumption 
 necessarily ignores this vital factor as the regulating agent 
 in mental development. In doing so it excludes the 
 natural causal factor and is logically doomed to a purely 
 descriptive function. Inductive Psychology we repeat, is 
 necessarily and exclusively descriptive. The so-called 
 causal connections between stimulus and sensation, can 
 be causal only so far as causal agency is recognised in 
 the material world as a real inherent factor, and the idea 
 of " force " as no longer a mere subjectively valid concept. 
 But such a recognition of the rights of force in the 
 material world implies a recognition of the relative 
 independence of the objective factor in immediate experi- 
 ence, and this again implies a recognition of the relative 
 independence of the subject within the unity of that 
 experience, a recognition, that is, of a certain free, causal 
 agency as an effective factor in mental development. 
 The original free-will and force, its correlate, depend 
 together. Once free psychic agency is ignored by the 
 necessities of a deterministic science, the correlate force 
 has no longer any right of presence but must sink to the 
 rank of a mere convenient figment of the physicist's 
 speech to give way eventually, first to energy and then to 
 the pure law of a pure unideterminism. 
 
 It is only then in its truly inward aspect that 
 Psychology is a genuine explanatory science. For it 
 
1 86 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 deals there with free agency as the central, essential factor 
 in its own development, following the causal principle as 
 it were into all its effects and watching how out of such 
 effective work eventually grow the great ideal structures 
 of the Self and the World as systems of meaning and 
 value. Psychology, then, we may say in conclusion, is 
 descriptive or explanatory according as it is an inductive 
 Psychology or a Psychology of first causes and free 
 agencies, a Psychology studied from the outside or a 
 Psychology studied from the inward point of view of the 
 experient himself. 
 
 2°. Is Psychology a Mechanical or a Teleological 
 Science? 
 
 § 18. We have seen that as a purely inductive science 
 Psychology abstracts unreservedly from the relative 
 independence of the subject in immediate experience. 
 With the abstraction of this relative independence goes 
 all possibility of teleological explanation in Psychology 
 together with any and every other kind of explanation. 
 All that remains is the possibility of describing after the 
 mechanical pattern processes of a teleological kind. And 
 this is what inductive Psychology actually does in dealing 
 with mental development. But a science, as we would 
 say, is mechanical or teleological according as its method 
 is mechanical or teleological, hence Inductive Psychology 
 is essentially a mechanical science, inasmuch as its whole 
 method of procedure is modelled on that of the 
 mechanical sciences. It may take cognizance of the 
 adjustments of inward to outer relations, of adaptations of 
 means to ends, and the like, but its sole aim therein is to 
 bring these adjustments and adaptations within some 
 descriptive scheme of laws. In short, it seems impossible 
 to admit as teleological a science that treats teleological 
 data on the mechanical model, the model, that is, of a 
 descriptive treatment whose goal is the discovery of law 
 and uniformity everywhere and in everything. It would 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 187 
 
 be just as reasonable to talk of Physiology as a 
 teleological science. 
 
 As a science of first causes, however, the Psychology of 
 Immediate Concrete Experience is essentially teleological. 
 For its aim is to show how causes whose freedom can find 
 effect only in the selection of ends and the choice of 
 means to realise them, contrive to realise their ends in 
 virtue of a persistence of interest that continues active 
 despite all temporary interruption, until the ends are 
 reached. It is thus not only a science of first causes but of 
 final causes, and its method is that which is natural to such 
 a science, that, namely, of making the fundamental 
 principles of finality centrally responsible for the work of 
 explanation. We should accordingly be prepared to 
 maintain that as a science of first causes Psychology is 
 primarily and essentially teleological in its method, but 
 that as an inductive inquiry, its method is mechanical and 
 descriptive, and indeed so much so that the attempt to 
 take on explanatory functions inevitably leads, as the 
 history of the subject has shown, to the introduction into 
 Psychology of a purely mechanical scheme of explanation, 
 such as that of the physiological vital series of Avenarius. 
 
 3°. In what Relation does Psychology stand to the 
 Normative Sciences? 
 
 §19. The Psychology of the will to think correctly, or 
 of the will to act rightly, or of the will to feel deeply 
 the inspiration of beauty is in each of these three 
 directions of volition the science of a dominating funda- 
 mental interest. Thus as Dr. Sigwart reminds us in the 
 Introduction to his Logic, the function of Logic as a 
 normative discipline is to regulate that region of our 
 voluntary thinking, and that region only, which is 
 governed by the desire to think the truth. A 
 psychological analysis of the will to think correctly 
 implies, then, an analysis of a certain specific unity of 
 interest, interest in the true form or structure of 
 knowledge. Hence that Psychology which takes as its 
 
1 88 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 fundamental problem the question as to how the mental 
 life is built up by the progressive differentiations and 
 interjunctions of such unities of conative effort, how, in a 
 word, unity of meaning is developed through unity and 
 continuity of interest in an object appears to me to stand 
 in a peculiarly intimate relation to these standard 
 disciplines, and that type of analysis which takes the form 
 of showing how unity of purpose is the central factor in 
 its own development, treating such unity of purpose as 
 the persistence of a free agent in its own self-directed ends 
 is the form of analysis naturally suited to bear the super- 
 structure of a normative discipline. 
 
 Inductive Psychology, on the other hand, appears to 
 supply loose material rather than a psychological basis 
 for normative science. It deals with the " is " of the 
 psychical life as a succession of events or occurrences and 
 seeks the uniformity of law amid the flux of mental 
 change. It thus seizes the mental life, not as a " self- 
 realising " process, to use a hazardous but expressive term, 
 but rather as a product of the reign of law, to be 
 analysed out into laws and their combinations. Failing 
 to seize the inner meaning of self-development, it fails ipso 
 facto in adapting its analysis to the inner requirements 
 of a regulative elaboration. Whereas the more inward 
 Psychology, through an analysis which ultimately takes 
 the form of a synthetic development of final causes, is 
 throughout concerned with a striving after what is better, 
 with an " is-ought " so to speak, Inductive Psychology is 
 only incidentally concerned with such a striving, and even 
 when busied with it, investigates its laws of development 
 from the same external point of view which Physics 
 adopts in investigating the facts of external nature. A 
 gap is thus left between the psychological analysis on the 
 one hand, and the elaborative treatment on the other, 
 which gives to the normative superstructure the look of 
 something shaped out of alien material, rather than of a 
 growth out of what is naturally akin to it. 
 
 It therefore seems to me that the continuity between 
 Psychology and the regulative disciplines can be truly 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 189 
 
 secured only when Psychology is considered from the 
 point of view of the experient, as the Psychology of the 
 first and final cause. 
 
 4°. In what Relation does Psychology stand to 
 Metaphysics ? 
 
 § 20. Inductive Psychology stands to Metaphysics in 
 precisely the same relation as the physical sciences. 
 Physical Science abstracts at the start from all considera- 
 tions that are indifferent to it, and makes just such 
 assumptions with regard to its subject-matter as it requires 
 for its own best development. These postponed considera- 
 tions and conventional assumptions are then taken up by 
 the metaphysician, and furnish food for his reflection. 
 In such relation there seems no room for ambiguity. 
 Inductive Psychology has its abstract, limited point of 
 view, e.g., its deterministic assumption, and is therefore 
 amenable to metaphysical control in precisely the same 
 sense as in the science of mechanics. But the Psychology 
 of first causes is not so simply related to Metaphysics. 
 For it has this in common with Metaphysical inquiry 
 that both it and Metaphysics are equally interested in 
 the fundamental assumption as to the nature of Experience 
 upon which assumption its whole superstructure is based. 
 The two sciences seem to meet in the Theory of Know- 
 ledge, or to use a truer and more inclusive expression, in 
 the Theory of Experience. Is this more inward 
 Psychology, then, to be classed as an offspring of 
 Metaphysical Inquiry, or as more closely related to the 
 Natural Science of Inductive Psychology ? 
 
 In our opinion it is still a scientific Psychology and 
 not a Metaphysics. For (i°), though concerned with its 
 own assumptions it is not concerned with the assumptions 
 of any other Science, whereas Metaphysics is concerned 
 with assumptions in general ; (2 ) its aim is to explain 
 causally, so far as it is able, and from the inside, what 
 Inductive Psychology explains, so to speak, descriptively 
 and from the outside. Its subject-matter is therefore the 
 
igo W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 data of psychical experience and in so far as it has such 
 specific data, is more akin to a Science than to a Meta- 
 physics. Moveover (3 ), it does start with an assumption 
 as to the nature of Reality suited to its own peculiar 
 problem, and the mere fact of this assumption being made 
 seems to constitute a barrier-fact between the Science of 
 first causes and Metaphysics, even though the function of 
 Metaphysics be conceived as purely critical, and not as 
 consisting in the reconstruction of Reality on a basis free 
 from all assumptions. 
 
 Assuming then that we are entitled to regard the 
 Psychology of first causes as a Science and not as a 
 Metaphysic, it remains for us to point out that the 
 distinction between the two Psychologies, the inductive 
 and — as we may here suitably call it — the synthetic 1 
 Psychology, affords a basis for a corresponding distinction 
 in the relation of Metaphysics to Psychology. The 
 essence of the inductive method is that it starts with a 
 medley of disconnected facts or data, and aims at dis- 
 covering hypotheses wherewith to connect and explain 
 the facts. These hypotheses are relatively to the facts 
 they seek to explain fluctuating and unstable. Inductive 
 procedure in a word starts with that which is to be 
 explained and aims at explanations which are always 
 hypothetical and liable to be superseded by others. That 
 which gives unity and explanatory coherency to inductive 
 science is just this hypothetical, fluctuating element. 
 Synthetic procedure, on the other hand, starts not with the 
 something that has to be explained, but with the ex- 
 planatory factors themselves, and its endeavour is to 
 justify the explanatory function of these factors. Hence, 
 whereas the unifying explanatory element in inductive 
 procedure is hypothetical, it is accepted in synthetic 
 procedure as the fundamental fact or factor. This 
 distinction made, Metaphysics, it seems, may, according 
 as its procedure is inductive or synthetic, become the 
 abstract science of ultimate hypotheses, or the concrete 
 science of the First Synthesis, Cause, or Universal 
 
 1 Synthetic in the teleological, not in the abstract logical, sense of the term. 
 
in THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM 191 
 
 Agency, the science of the Absolute in the sense of the 
 Whole. This science of a Synthetic Metaphysic would 
 stand to Psychology in some such relation as the Science 
 of the First Cause to the Science of first causes. But 
 the result is not here the important point ; rather the 
 nature of the relation. From which end, we ask, are we 
 to start in our endeavour to pass from Synthetic Psychology 
 to Synthetic Metaphysics ; from the Absolute or from 
 the Individual's Experience ? It seems to me that we 
 must start from the latter. A Science of synthesis may 
 find its culminating triumph in an all-inclusive and 
 explanatory Theism but it must surely grow out of much 
 humbler considerations. Immediate individual experience 
 is the one true vital synthesis whence all such synthetic 
 effort must assuredly start, for it is that which is ever- 
 present with us as the fountain-head of all our knowledge. 
 To be fruitful and progressive all synthetic Science whose 
 aim is to reconstruct the Real according to its own nature, 
 without abstracting from any essential feature of Reality 
 as it is known to us, must be rooted in the immediate ex- 
 perience of the individual first cause, and grow out thence 
 in some specific way. And if such growth should 
 eventually bring with it not only the larger vision of 
 Reality, but a simultaneous growth out of the individual- 
 istic starting-point altogether, — is this not both natural 
 and logically inevitable ? The roots of a tree grow and 
 ramify pari passu with the branches, and the mustard-tree 
 of the Kingdom of Knowledge is assuredly no exception 
 to this universal law of Expansion. The one essential 
 safeguard of concrete synthetic science we take to be this, 
 that it should from the very outset cleave to Reality, 
 grasp, that is, at something which shares the nature, 
 though it share not the fulness, of the Absolute. If the 
 limitedness of its point of view compels it to grapple 
 itself to Reality by the help of some assumption, the 
 assumption merely interprets the nature and scope of its 
 contact with Reality, and does not signify an abstract 
 remove of one or more degrees from such living contact 
 with the Real. Once at grasp with Reality, the logic of 
 
192 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON m 
 
 growth will surely justify it in bringing wider and yet 
 wider reaches of the Real within its compass, in passing 
 from one relative whole of Experience to another and yet 
 another, each more comprehensive and organic than the 
 one preceding it, until some fruitful vision of the whole 
 be reached. In some such way as this, perhaps, might 
 the Psychology of first causes prepare the way for the 
 Philosophy of the First Cause. 
 
IV 
 
 THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 
 
 By G. E. Underhill 
 
 I. The Problem 
 
 i. The relation of Philosophy to the Sciences. 
 
 2. Within what limits does the process of Evolution hold good ? 
 
 3. The meaning of Evolution. 
 
 II. Presuppositions of Evolution 
 
 4. a, Becoming. 
 
 5. b, One and Many. 
 
 6. c, Things. 
 
 7. d, Time and Space ; e, Force. 
 
 III. Gaps in Nature and in Knowledge 
 
 8. Science, though it assumes the homogeneity of matter and that Natura 
 
 7io7t facit saltwn, recognises the gaps between the inorganic and the 
 organic, and between life and mind. 
 
 IV. Evolution in the Inorganic Sphere 
 
 9. Science regards even the chemical elements as evolved from homogeneous 
 
 matter according to eternal laws of motion. 
 
 10. Science (a) never deals with origins, (6) aims to express differences of 
 
 quality in terms of quantity. 
 
 11. But differences of quality, though they have quantitative aspects, are not 
 
 mere differences of quantity : they are no less real and no more 
 phenomenal than differences of quantity. 
 
 12. The aspects of things, with which mechanical science deals, are products 
 
 of mental creation and are measured by standards which again are 
 products of mental creation. 
 
 13. Thus mechanical science limits its Evolution to the changes of position 
 
 and shape of homogeneous particles of matter according to eternal laws 
 of motion. 
 
 14. Natural Selection may be regarded as due to Chance, if by Chance is 
 
 meant a cause or causes unknown to human calculation. But ' blind ' 
 Chance is not a possible object of science. 
 
 O 
 
194 G. E. UNDERHILL iv 
 
 V. Evolution in the Organic Sphere 
 
 15. Life is a factor in organisms, which presents problems distinct from their 
 
 mechanical and chemical aspects. 
 
 16. Life implies adaptation and with it the notion of Teleology. 
 
 1 7. The Evolution of organisms can only be ' explained ' by describing the 
 
 succession of consequent upon antecedent stages according to unchanging 
 biological laws. 
 
 18. Adaptation implies purpose ; though the metaphor is taken from human 
 
 adaptation of means to ends, science is not concerned to decide whether 
 such purpose is conscious or unconscious. 
 
 19. But philosophy sees in such purpose only one more instance of rational 
 
 agency in things, parallel to those laws of matter, motion and force, 
 which are capable of expression in rational terms. 
 
 VI. Evolution in the Sphere of Consciousness 
 
 20. The problem of Evolution is here generically the same as in biology : 
 
 given consciousness and certain permanent laws of mental processes, 
 successive stages in mental Evolution can be explained in the sense that 
 they can be described more or less accurately as happening in 
 accordance with such permanent laws. 
 
 VII. Results of the Inquiry 
 
 21. The Evolutionist (a) cannot deal with origins, (b) must assume permanent 
 
 and unchanging laws of development, and (c) must discover relations 
 intelligible to his own reason. 
 
 22. The Darwinian Evolution is fundamentally the same as the Aristotelian 
 
 conception of Final Cause. 
 
 O fl(V 0"DV07TTtKbs SiaXeKTIKOS, O Se [AT] OV. 
 
 I. The Problem 
 
 § 1. No one has maintained more strongly than Plato the 
 close connection between philosophy and the special 
 sciences, and nowadays Mr. Herbert Spencer, following 
 boldly in his footsteps, has entitled his own work 
 Synthetic Philosophy, implying thereby that his own 
 aim is similarly to exhibit the relations of one science 
 to another and the relations of the whole body of 
 scientific truth to philosophy in general — to survey as 
 from a high watch tower the totality of relations that 
 constitute the universe. But in this age of specialisation 
 no mind is large enough and no life is long enough to 
 enable any single man to grasp even the principles of 
 all the separate sciences — much less the immense body 
 of truths that depend upon them. Even Mr. Spencer 
 after many years of incessant labour has been obliged 
 
iv THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 195 
 
 to omit two important volumes in his long series — the 
 two volumes which were to deal with the inorganic 
 kingdom and describe or explain the transition from 
 inanimate matter to things endowed with life. In fact, 
 the philosopher of the present day is at a distinct 
 disadvantage when compared with his predecessor of 
 even two or three generations ago. Descartes, Leibnitz, 
 Kant were leaders of science as well as philosophers, 
 and practically knew all that the science of their day 
 could teach them. The modern philosopher, more often 
 than not, has had no scientific training, and is dependent 
 for his general notions of scientific truth on second-hand 
 evidence or on authority. If by some chance or other he 
 excels in one science, he cannot excel in all. He has 
 too to contend against another difficulty, in some ways 
 even harder to meet. While he is but too well aware 
 of his own ignorance of the sciences, scientific men, 
 eminent in their own special branches, are by no means 
 so modest. They are apt to think, like the Athenian 
 artisans, of whom Socrates complained of old, that 
 because they know one thing well, they know all. And 
 more especially are they apt to think that they can lay 
 down the law with equal certainty in philosophical 
 subjects. Now, though it may be true that all men 
 who think at all, are bound to philosophise, it by no 
 means follows that they are bound to philosophise well. 
 Indeed philosophy, like science, needs its own special 
 training, and, if the study of it can reveal to us no royal 
 road to truth, yet it can warn us against many by-paths 
 which in past times have led men into hopeless errors, 
 and now stand as open as ever to allure the wanderer 
 from the truth : and into some of these the scientific 
 man, turned philosopher for the nonce, has shown himself 
 peculiarly ready to stray. 
 
 § 2. The subject of the present essay is a modest one : 
 it is to consider, some forty years after the appearance 
 of Darwin's Origin of Species and of Spencer's First 
 Principles, the limits within which the theory of Evolution 
 seems to be applicable, and to consider them from a 
 
196 G. E. UNDERHILL iv 
 
 philosophical point of view. The writer is well aware 
 of his own ignorance of the sciences, and can pretend 
 to no very deep or encyclopaedic study of philosophy. 
 Acute critics of every school have dealt, favourably or 
 unfavourably, with the various exponents of evolutional 
 doctrines — none more ably than Professor James Ward 
 in his four l brilliant lectures on " the Theory of 
 Evolution," wherein Mr. Spencer is the chief object of 
 his onslaught. The present writer, however, wishes to 
 deal, not so much with the truth or falsity of particular 
 views about Evolution, as with the general limits within 
 which the process of Evolution as such can ideally be 
 supposed to apply. Does the acceptance of Evolution 
 involve the iravra pel of Heraclitus as against the 
 Eleatic permanence of being ? or is it rather a case of 
 possible variations within constant fixed terms ? 
 
 8 3. Darwin, it is well known, hardly ventured on any 
 speculations outside the range of his own observations 
 upon plant and animal life. Hence the strength of his 
 position. Mr. Spencer would apparently extend the 
 evolutional process to the whole universe, though it 
 is by no means clear what he would wish to include 
 in the universe. When he tells us that " there is an 
 alternation of Evolution and Dissolution in the totality 
 of things," we not unnaturally suppose that he means 
 to include everything. Not so, however, for when he 
 speaks of force, he tells us : " By the persistence of Force, 
 we really mean the persistence of some Power which 
 transcends our knowledge and conception. The mani- 
 festations, as recurring either in ourselves or outside of 
 us, do not persist ; but that which persists is the 
 Unknown Cause of these manifestations." Again, he 
 asserts the existence of " an Unconditioned Reality, 
 without beginning or end." Perhaps indeed he would 
 not include force or power or the laws of nature under 
 the term things. Still as manifested to us, they are 
 certainly " phenomena," and if all phenomena are but 
 the manifestations of an "Unknown Cause" — be this 
 
 1 Cf. Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. i. p. 185 ff. 
 
iv THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 197 
 
 Unknown Cause mind or matter — it is hard to see 
 what differentia is left him, whereby to distinguish 
 things as phenomena from force, gravitation, etc., as 
 phenomena ; so that, if the process of Evolution is to 
 apply to all phenomena universally, it ought to be as 
 applicable to gravitation as it is to elephants. In fact 
 in Mr. Spencer's hands the term " Evolution " has passed 
 away entirely from its old and limited meaning of the l 
 " gradual unfolding of a living germ from its embryonic 
 beginning to its final and mature form," to the quite 
 different meaning of the " process by which the mass 
 and energy of the universe have passed from some 
 assumed primeval state to that distribution which they 
 have at present." Evolution in this sense is, in a word, 
 the process of the World's Becoming. 2 And it is in 
 this sense that many scientific men — let alone philo- 
 sophers — use the term quite outside its old limitation 
 to the development of vegetable and animal forms. 
 Thus Sir Norman Lockyer, in an article 3 dealing with 
 recent attempts to trace the origin of the chemical 
 elements, habitually speaks of the Evolution of the 
 elements from something homogeneous to their present 
 heterogeneity. 
 
 It is then in this wider sense of ' Becoming ' that 
 the term ' Evolution ' will be used in this essay, and 
 it is the writer's object to deal with the presuppositions 
 which any philosophical account of the World's Becoming 
 in general or any scientific account of any Becoming 
 in particular must necessarily start. 
 
 II. Presuppositions of Evolution 
 
 § 4. The most obvious of all the presuppositions is 
 Becoming itself. It can only be taken as an ultimate 
 fact given us in immediate perception — a fact which 
 
 1 Ward, ibid. vol. i. p. 186. 
 
 2 Evolution is often defined as the gradual process of adaptation between 
 inner and outer relations, and doubtless it is so used in particular cases ; but 
 obviously there can be no evolution of the "universe" in this sense: for there 
 can be no outer relations, outside the universe. 
 
 3 Nature, Ixi. p. 131 ff. 
 
198 G. E. UNDERHILL iv 
 
 Thought as such can never grasp or explain. For Be- 
 coming is always continuous. Thought is successive. 
 A bar of iron at the temperature a is raised by heating 
 to the temperature /3. Though the process of heating 
 is continuous, Thought can only represent it to itself as 
 passing through a succession of stages x 1 , x 2 . . . x n , each 
 one of which it can describe with greater or less accuracy. 
 Still in Thought a similar interval can equally well be 
 imagined to exist between x 1 and x 2 , so that, however 
 exactly all these intermediate stages may be described, 
 the continuous process as such always defies description. 
 And necessarily so, for while Reality is concrete, Thought 
 is in its nature abstract, and as abstract is so far inadequate 
 to Things. Indeed it is hardly too much to say that 
 all the failures in philosophical and scientific explanations 
 are ultimately due to failure at some point or other to 
 recognise this fundamental difference between Thought 
 and Things. All explanation of whatsoever kind must 
 ipso facto be abstract and as such inadequate, though its 
 inadequacy is more often than not helped out by tacit 
 assumptions and additions, which we are so accustomed 
 to make that they escape our notice — assumptions and 
 additions derived from the most familiar processes of 
 immediate perception. To recur to the illustration of 
 the heating of the iron bar ; we often say that we 
 understand what is meant by its temperature being 
 raised from a to ft, when really we do not understand it 
 by Thought (for it is a continuous process), but only 
 either perceive it actually by our senses or else imagine 
 it. No explanation therefore can deal with a concrete 
 thing as a whole ; it can only deal with its various 
 aspects or states, so that the one and only way to avoid 
 error is to be perfectly aware, what abstraction has 
 actually been made, what other aspects have been 
 deliberately left out — aspects which must just as de- 
 liberately be added on before the explanation can pretend 
 to any completeness. The Pythagorean attempt to 
 explain Things by numbers is one of the most obvious 
 of such mistakes. Nowadays it may indeed sound 
 
iv THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 199 
 
 absurd to say that because all things are numerable, 
 they must therefore be caused by numbers. But are 
 modern philosophers quite sure that because they have 
 outgrown this particular error, they are quite free from 
 the taint of the same fallacy ? Is there not a similar 
 error in thinking that because all things are material 
 and in motion, therefore they must have not only their 
 ultimate, but their complete explanation in terms of 
 matter and motion, whatever other qualities they may 
 possess in addition. 
 
 But before proceeding further it will be well to remind 
 ourselves what is meant by " explanation " in the scientific 
 sense. A scientific explanation may give one of two 
 things : either it may give an accurate quantitative 
 formula, e.g. Newton's law of gravitation ; or in cases of 
 causation the antecedent conditions. Both modes are 
 highly abstract, and the latter suffers from an inherent 
 defect : for " the true nature of the cause," as Professor 
 Andrew Seth x puts it, " only becomes apparent in the 
 effect." The antecedents in abstraction from their conse- 
 quents are not real antecedents at all. Cause and effect 
 in reality are inseparable. Taken by themselves the 
 antecedents do not explain the consequent ; taken 
 together with the fact of their combination and of their 
 change they are identical with the consequent : for the 
 continuous process involved in causation always eludes, as 
 we saw, intellectual expression. 
 
 § 5. At the same time, however, that we have to admit 
 this ultimate difference between abstract Thought and con- 
 crete Things, the very possibility of science at all postulates 
 the intelligibility of the universe. It is a postulate which 
 the most elementary science has to take for granted, and 
 which is confirmed by each new discovery. We cannot, 
 or at any rate we need not, go so far as Hegel and say 
 that the rational is the real and the real is the rational, 
 but we cannot advance one step without assuming in some 
 sense or other the rationality of Things. Whether we 
 take it with Plato's Socrates as a gift of gods to men sent 
 
 1 Man's Place in the Cosmos, p. 15. 
 
200 G. E. UNDERHILL iv 
 
 down by some Prometheus, or whether we call it with 
 Mill the Uniformity of Nature, or with the late Duke of 
 Argyll the Reign of Law, we must admit that all things 
 are made up of the One and the Many and have 
 determinateness and indeterminateness in themselves. 
 This again is an ultimate fact of our experience and for 
 it we can bring forward no reason or explanation. From 
 the point of view of their oneness they become intelligible 
 to us, and the task of all science is to discover this one- 
 ness, but their multiplicity or manifoldness which staggers 
 our intellect and is utterly beyond its grasp, is equally 
 an ultimate fact of experience, and as such must be 
 taken into account, if the system of our Thought is to be 
 made in any degree adequate to the system of Things. 
 
 S 6. But these two fundamental postulates of science, 
 the first that Things become, the second that Things are 
 both one and many, evidently involve a third postulate, 
 quite as fundamental, if not more so — the postulate of 
 Things. What right have we to talk about Things at all? 
 It is again only our experience that gives us this right. 
 For us Things are a product of this experience, and in 
 our experience Things are only given in correlation with 
 Thoughts. As Kant put it, our Understanding makes 
 Nature, but does not create it. For purposes of science, 
 however, we abstract Things from our Thoughts, and for 
 this purpose Lotze's l definition of a Thing is as good as 
 can be arrived at. " A Thing," he says, " is the realised 
 individual law of its procedure." By this definition he 
 implies that Things — at any rate as they are given us in 
 perception — are both particular and changeable, change- 
 able, however, only according to a law which connects 
 the various changes, properties, or phenomena of the thing 
 with each other ; and that this law realised here and now 
 in a particular instance constitutes the Thing : for a law 
 "has no reality except in the case of its application." In 
 other words the individual thing of perception is both a 
 universalised particular and a particularised universal : or 
 as Mr. Bradley 2 puts it, "the individual is both a concrete 
 
 1 Metaphysic, p. 68, Eng. trans. 2 Logic, p. 175. 
 
iv THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 201 
 
 particular and a concrete universal. ... So far as it is 
 one against other individuals, it is particular. So far as it 
 is the same throughout its diversity, it is universal." 
 
 S 7. This essay, however, is not the place for a meta- 
 physical discussion upon the ultimate nature of the real, 
 or matter, or substance. Here it is necessary merely to 
 point out the postulates of all scientific thinking without 
 attempting to justify them. We must then in some sense 
 take it for granted that Things exist, that Things change, 
 that Things are one and many, that Things are intelligible. 
 We must also postulate that Things are in time and 
 space, and are acted upon by force. In fact these 
 postulates are already involved in those already taken for 
 granted. For nothing (if psychical things be excluded) 
 can change except in time and in space, and except there 
 be some force, external or internal, to make it change. 
 
 III. Gaps in Nature and in Knowledge 
 
 8. The ideal of most men of science from the early 
 Atomists downwards has been to explain "the multiplicity 
 of things by the help of changeable relations between un- 
 changeable elements." Matter, it has been assumed, is 
 homogeneous, and the difference of its apparent qualities is 
 to be accounted for by the varying arrangements, or motions 
 of its ultimate particles, for entia non sunt multiplicanda 
 prceter necessitatem. If then we can once arrive at these 
 unchangeable elements, the conception of Evolution must 
 obviously be inapplicable to them. Men of science have 
 also been haunted by another ideal, expressed in the old 
 maxim Natura non facit saltum, or in its more modern 
 form, the law of continuity. Guided by these ideals they 
 have been extremely unwilling to admit the existence of 
 any gaps in their science; and if in the existing imperfect 
 state of knowledge, they have been obliged to admit the 
 actual presence of such gaps, they have always hoped that 
 the advance of knowledge would tend to fill them up 
 entirely or reduce them to a minimum. At the present 
 time the most serious gaps are the gap between the 
 
202 G. E. UNDERHILL iv 
 
 inorganic and organic worlds and the gap between life and 
 mind. As a consequence the existing sciences fall into 
 three corresponding groups — the sciences dealing with 
 physical phenomena, like Physics and Chemistry, the 
 sciences dealing with vital phenomena, like Animal and 
 Vegetable Physiology, and the sciences dealing with 
 mental phenomena, Psychology, Ethics, etc. 
 
 We must therefore ask how far the conception of 
 Evolution in its wider sense of " Becoming " is applicable 
 in these three groups taken severally. 
 
 IV. Evolution in the Inorganic Sphere 
 
 § 9. As already mentioned, Sir Norman Lockyer sees an 
 exact parallel between the evolution of the inorganic, and 
 that of the organic world. " In the problems of inorganic 
 evolution," he says, 1 " which we have now to face, it is 
 sufficiently obvious that we have to deal with a continu- 
 ously increasing complexity of chemical forms, precisely 
 as in organic evolution the biologist has tried to deal, and 
 has dealt successfully, with a like increase of complexity 
 of organic forms." 
 
 Again he speaks of the material world being "built 
 up of the same matter under the same laws," and he can 
 see no break in the order of material evolution from end 
 to end. The chemical elements, he believes, are not 
 ultimate. He quotes with approval the words of Dr. 
 Preston : 2 — " We are led to suspect that not only is the 
 atom a complex composed of an association of different 
 ions, but that the atoms of those substances which lie in 
 the same chemical group are perhaps built up from the 
 same kind of ions, or at least from ions which possess the 
 same ejm, 3 and that the differences which exist in the 
 materials thus constituted arise more from the manner 
 of association of the ions in the atom than from differ- 
 ences in the fundamental character of the ions which 
 build up the atoms." 
 
 1 Nature, lxi. p. 131. 
 2 Ibid. p. 133. 3 e — electric charge ; w = mass. 
 
iv THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 203 
 
 § 10. These attempts to express the differences of the 
 chemical elements in terms of matter and motion may 
 be taken as typical of all theories which attempt to 
 reduce qualitative differences to quantitative differences, 
 or to describe secondary qualities in terms of primary 
 qualities. The first point to notice is, that the problem 
 of ultimate origin or first cause is — and with reason — left 
 untouched. Matter and motion are taken for granted : 
 indeed for physical science there is no need to go behind 
 them. Matter, further, is assumed to be homogeneous, 
 and motion to manifest certain unchangeable laws, like 
 Newton's laws of motion, etc. Evidently therefore there 
 can be no evolution either of homogeneous matter as such, 
 nor of the unchangeable laws of motion. Evolution for 
 the man of science has no absolute beginning. His task is 
 simply to describe the process as exactly as possible from 
 the given state of matter and motion x to the state y 
 which is ex hypothesi later in the order of time. Thus, if 
 we take the Nebular Hypothesis of the evolution of our 
 planetary system, we by no means get back to the 
 beginning of things. Theoretically, it must be just as 
 possible to give a scientific description — in other words, 
 a determinate and exact description in terms of matter 
 and motion — of the assumed nebulous state as to give 
 a scientific description of the planetary system in its 
 present state. The evidence may indeed be more difficult 
 to collect and formulate, but it lies in pari materia. 
 Secondly it is remarkable that such theories all more or 
 less tacitly assume that the qualitative differences of the 
 chemical elements and other supposed composite effects 
 are fully explained by their quantitative differences, which, 
 it is hoped, may ultimately be measured according to 
 some unit or units of numerical relations. This surely is 
 a large assumption and must not be allowed to pass 
 unchallenged. Does it necessarily follow that — if x be 
 taken as their unit of measurement — because one chemical 
 element can be described as 2 or and another as 30*", all 
 their differences are traceable to their numerical difference, 
 1 or? To take an analogous instance: an organ, a 
 
204 G. E. UNDERHILL iv 
 
 piano, and a violin may all sound the same note, which 
 may be numerically measured by its number of vibrations 
 e.g. 50 per second, yet at the same time the timbre given 
 to this same note by the three instruments is so different 
 that it can be at once detected even by the most un- 
 trained ear. These differences of timbre again can be 
 numerically measured in terms of subordinate vibrations, 
 and are recorded on the metallic discs of the phonograph 
 quite as distinctly as the different notes themselves. That 
 there is an essential connection between sounds and 
 vibrations is sufficiently obvious. But that sounds are 
 vibrations and that vibrations are sounds, is not so 
 obvious ; for they may be, for all we know, joint effects 
 of an unknown cause y. Sound we know as a perception 
 of hearing : the minute vibrations we know as a conception 
 abstracted from our perceptions of sight and touch. How 
 are we to pass from the evidence of the one sense to the 
 evidence of the other ? 
 
 §11. To return to the chemical elements, there is 
 similarly no evidence to show that the differences of the 
 chemical elements from each other are exhausted by such 
 differences as they possess, which are capable of being 
 expressed in terms of matter and motion. To apply the 
 analogy just adduced, is it not quite conceivable that two 
 different chemical elements might be describable in 
 identical numerical terms of matter and motion and yet 
 possess such a different timbre, so to speak, that their real 
 difference could not be denied ? Such hypotheses can 
 only be taken to give any hope of an ultimate explanation 
 of Things on the assumption — surely a very large one — 
 that there is nothing real in the universe except matter, 
 motion, and their laws of action and interaction. Similarly 
 in the sphere of colour : blue may be described as light of 
 wave length x and red as light of wave length y : the 
 primary qualities, that is to say, manifested by these two 
 colours, may be perfectly numerable or measurable. None 
 the less, red is still red and blue is still blue. It is an 
 attempt to account for a complex whole by its most 
 measurable part or aspect, while all the time the relation 
 
iv THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 205 
 
 between the part and the whole remains quite un- 
 intelligible. It is like saying that, because this man is 
 just and has two legs, the two legs are the cause of his 
 justice. In a word these theories one and all imply or 
 are apt to imply that the primary qualities alone are real, 
 in Locke's words, " do really exist in the bodies them- 
 selves," " are in the things themselves, whether they are 
 perceived or no ; and upon their different modifications it 
 is that the secondary qualities depend." Berkeley and 
 Hume demonstrated the fallacy of this position long ago 
 and no one has ventured since seriously to impugn their 
 arguments. As Mr. Bradley has clearly put it, 1 " the line 
 of reasoning, which showed that secondary qualities are 
 not real, has equal force as applied to primary. The 
 extended comes to us only by relation to an organ [of 
 sense] ; and, whether the organ is touch or is sight or 
 muscle-feeling — or whatever else it may be — makes no 
 difference to the argument. For, in any case, the thing 
 is perceived by us through an affection of our body, and 
 never without that." And again, " without secondary 
 quality extension [which is involved in all the so-called 
 primary qualities] is not conceivable." It is needless here 
 to reproduce the various arguments at length. Bacon 
 complained of the old Scholastic Logic as being subtilitati 
 naturce longe impar. Surely some of our scientists of to- 
 day are victims of the same mistake : they accept as 
 ultimate facts the immutability of matter, the conservation 
 of energy, the transmutation of force, the development of 
 the various sense organs from a primary sense of touch or 
 a muscular sense, and taking any concrete thing, they 
 strip off all its secondary qualities as in themselves of 
 no importance, being only manifestations or modifications 
 of its primary qualities ; then they take its primary 
 qualities and describe them in terms of some assumed 
 units of measurement. This done, they expect us to 
 believe that even if they have not explained the nature of 
 the real thing as it is in itself, yet they have given us the 
 whole of its phenomenal nature, and that nothing more 
 
 1 Appearance and Reality, p. 14. 
 
206 G. E. UNDERHILL rv 
 
 need or can be known about it. It may of course very 
 well be that the relation of the primary to the secondary 
 qualities involves an insoluble problem : the important 
 point is that it is a problem and must not be passed over 
 in such phrases as — " all chemical atoms have a common 
 basis, and build new mental images on this basis " l — 
 phrases which imply that matter and motion alone are real, 
 all other qualities being more or less mental illusions. 
 
 So far then we have arrived at this result. Natural 
 science for its purposes takes account only of the 
 numerable or measurable qualities of things, and in dealing 
 with secondary qualities, like colour, sound, and taste, 
 regards them as results of their primary qualities, without, 
 however, explaining their causal connection ; and is also 
 very apt to speak of them, as Locke did, as " the certain 
 bulk, figure, and motion of the insensible parts in the 
 bodies themselves." 
 
 §12. Two further points in the above analysis here 
 call for notice : the first is the predominance of the mental 
 factor in the primary qualities and their estimation or 
 description in various units of measurement ; the second 
 is the limitation which this abstract view of things imposes 
 upon the problem of Evolution. 
 
 To begin with the first point. Before any thing, e.g. 
 the motion of a billiard ball, can be made the subject 
 of scientific investigation at all, it must undergo a large 
 amount of mental preparation. It cannot with any hope 
 of success be treated in its concrete entirety. It must 
 be taken as an instance of the operation of a universal 
 law or laws. We must neglect as irrelevant to our 
 purpose many of the particular circumstances that 
 surround its motion, like, e.g. its colour, its material, the 
 colour of the cloth on which it rolls, the time of day, 
 the place, the person who rolls it, etc. etc. All these 
 circumstances taken together make up the concrete 
 individual phenomenon, but for our purpose we abstract 
 them, until we have left one or more aspects of the 
 phenomenon only, sufficiently simple for our science of 
 
 1 Lockyer, Nature, lxi. p. 297. 
 
iv THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 207 
 
 mechanics to be able to cope with. In other words, 
 having thus arrived at the mechanical aspect of the 
 problem, the science is able to give a mechanical 
 explanation of it : but the power to arrive at this 
 aspect, is entirely due to the mind's power of abstraction. 
 This is no mere reassertion of the epistemological truth 
 that the unit of knowledge is subject plus object — the 
 interrelation of the knowing mind and the object known 
 — so that we can never arrive either at subjects per se 
 or at objects per se. The point for emphasis is that the 
 objects of all mechanical sciences are not the things of 
 common experience as such at all, but only one particular 
 aspect of them, namely, their primary qualities, and that 
 this aspect, like all other particular aspects, is arrived at 
 by mental abstraction. Equally true is it that the 
 mechanical explanation or description of these primary 
 qualities, when it is given, is just as much a mental 
 product. Though it deals with matter and motion, it is 
 expressed in terms of law, number, or measure. 
 
 Historically, the conception of a Law of Nature is of 
 course anthropomorphic. But natural science uses the 
 term not in its juridical sense, but in the sense of a 
 uniformity of sequences or coexistences. To arrive at 
 such uniformities, however, we have to compare instances 
 together, and to abstract from their individual character- 
 istics the identical process in them to which, having thus 
 abstracted it, we give the name of law. The law we 
 arrive at is the result of this abstraction and without it 
 is impossible. The applicability of such conceptions to 
 the multiplicity of phenomena is one of the best evidences 
 of the rationality of things. All Nature is akin, as Pindar 
 sang, and there is as much Mind in Things as there is 
 in ourselves. Similarly, when we use measures or 
 numbers in our mechanical descriptions, not only are we 
 obliged to take some arbitrary standard like a mile or a 
 minute for our unit, but the very processes of numbering 
 or of measuring are abstract mental creations. So true 
 is it that even in the inorganic kingdom it is rather mind 
 that explains matter than matter that explains mind. 
 
208 G. E. UNDERHILL IV 
 
 §13. To come now to our second point, the limitation 
 imposed by natural science on the problem of Evolution. 
 " We now know," we are told, 1 " that heat, sound, light, 
 chemical action, electricity, and magnetism are all modes 
 of motion " ; 2 the different physical forces may be 
 converted from one form into another : heat may be 
 changed into molar movement or movement of mass ; 
 this in turn into light or sound, and then into electricity, 
 and so forth. Accurate measurement of the quantity of 
 force which is used in this metamorphosis has shown that 
 it is " constant " or " unchanged." That is to say, the 
 Evolutionist has for his problem in the inorganic kingdom 
 — from the mechanical point of view — to show, describe, 
 enumerate, or measure the various motions whereby the 
 different atoms, ions, or particles of homogeneous matter 
 assume the configurations or arrangements that constitute 
 in the first instance the various chemical elements ; then 
 how these elements under these same unchangeable laws 
 of motion get into a nebulous state ; again how under the 
 same laws the nebulae pass into more shapely planetary or 
 other systems ; and finally how in each planet or at any 
 rate some of the planets, oceans, and continents, mountains 
 and plains, lakes and rivers, are formed by the same 
 agencies. Matter and motion, motion and matter — and 
 their quantitative relations, are to mechanical science the 
 real essences of all things. This, then, is the problem of 
 Evolution for mechanical science : given as permanencies, 
 homogeneous matter and certain unchangeable laws of 
 motion, which ex hypothesi are liable to no evolution — to 
 trace the motions whereby the ultimate particles assume 
 different positions or configurations at different times 
 and places. When the mechanical Evolutionist has 
 solved this problem, he has achieved his task — a task in 
 itself legitimate, noble and useful, but not exhaustive. 
 For Nature to the mechanical Evolutionist is an abstrac- 
 tion, a Nature of primary qualities, not Nature in 
 her concrete reality. In reality Nature is not thus 
 
 1 Haeckel, Riddle of the Universe, p. 235, Eng. trans. 
 2 Ibid. p. 217. 
 
iv THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 209 
 
 separated from her secondary qualities nor from her 
 relations to mind. Nature has indeed to be studied in 
 parts and in aspects, because citius emergit Veritas ex 
 errore quam ex confusione. But Nature herself is a whole, 
 and the parts are only what they are by their relations to 
 this whole. The parts, the aspects, the qualities, the 
 relations which we have thus deliberately abstracted, must 
 be scientifically described and restored to their proper 
 places again, if our knowledge about Nature is ever to be 
 at all adequate to Nature herself. " For we know in 
 part : . . . but when that which is perfect is come, that 
 which is in part shall be done away." 
 
 § 14. Before leaving this subject we may note that 
 some scientists in treating of inorganic evolution use the 
 Darwinian term " Natural Selection " to describe what they 
 consider to be the most important of the causal agencies 
 at work. A word must be said later on 1 as to the anthro- 
 pomorphic metaphor involved in the term. Their meaning 
 obviously is that among all possible alternatives the present 
 state of the universe is due to blind chance. " Since 
 impartial study of the evolution of the world," 2 as Haeckel 
 puts it, " teaches us that there is no definite aim and no 
 special purpose to be traced in it, there seems to be no 
 alternative but to leave everything to blind chance. . . . 
 Neither in the evolution of the heavenly bodies nor in 
 that of the crust of our earth do we find any trace of a 
 controlling purpose — all is the result of chance." This 
 may indeed be admitted if " chance " be taken in its 
 strictly scientific sense, as equivalent to " a cause or causes 
 unknown to human calculation " ; and it is in this sense 
 that Haeckel himself takes it, for he adds : " This, 
 however, does not prevent us from recognising in each 
 ' chance ' event, as we do in the evolution of the entire 
 cosmos, the universal sovereignty of nature's supreme law, 
 the law of substance!' In other words, if there be taken 
 for granted, as necessary presuppositions, particles of 
 homogeneous matter and all the known laws of Nature, 
 then we may say that the present state of the cosmos is 
 
 1 Infr. § 19. 2 Haeckel, Kiddle of the Universe, p. 218, Eng. trans. 
 
 P 
 
210 G. E. UNDERHILL iv 
 
 due to the action upon these particles of all the known 
 laws of Nature plus chance, where " chance " means other 
 uniform causes that are unknown. Surely this is a mere 
 truism, which properly interpreted serves only to emphasise 
 once more the supremacy of Mind. For all known laws of 
 Nature are ipso facto intelligible and general formulae ; there- 
 fore by analogy we have every reason to suspect that the 
 unknown laws of Nature, could they be discovered, would 
 also be intelligible formulae, and therefore in like manner 
 sure evidence of intelligible and intelligent agency — in a 
 word of Mind. If, however the emphasis be laid on the 
 adjective " blind " and the cosmos be consequently taken 
 as a purely " fortuitous concourse of atoms," not only is 
 this utterly against all scientific evidence ; but the chances 
 of there being any " cosmos " at all are mathematically nil 
 — one against infinity. This amounts to the denial of 
 any intelligible order or rationality in things, and without 
 some such rationality science can have no object. In a 
 word there can be no science. 
 
 V. Evolution in the Organic Sphere 
 
 § 15. When we pass from inorganic to organic evolu- 
 tion, we cross the unbridgeable gap recognised by all men 
 of science. Thus Sir John Burdon-Sanderson, speaking in 
 1893, 1 tells us: "The origin of life, the first transition 
 from non-living to living, is a riddle, which lies outside 
 our scope." In other words life must be taken as an 
 ultimate fact of experience. But life is unknown to us 
 apart from living organisms, and a living body may be 
 defined in the words of Sir Michael Foster 2 as " a machine 
 doing work in accordance with certain laws " : and " we 
 may seek," he goes on to say, " to trace out the working 
 of the inner wheels, how these raise up the lifeless dust 
 into living matter, and let the living matter fall away 
 again into dust, giving rise to movement and heat. Or 
 we may look upon the individual life as a link in a long 
 chain, joining something which went before to something 
 
 1 British Association Address, 1893. 2 British Association Address, 1899. 
 
iv THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 211 
 
 about to come, a chain whose beginning lies hid in the 
 farthest past, and may seek to know the ties which bind 
 one life to another. Of the problems presented by the 
 living body viewed as a machine, some may be spoken of 
 as mechanical, others as physical, and yet others as 
 chemical, while some are, apparently at least, none of 
 these." Here again we see the powers and uses of 
 mental abstraction : organisms are conceived as bundles 
 of qualities, presenting various aspects. For scientific 
 purposes these aspects can be detached from the whole 
 and treated separately : thus organisms are, from one 
 point of view, matter in motion, and as such present 
 problems for mechanical and physical solution : from 
 another point of view, animal heat, digestion, etc., involve 
 chemical changes and are fit, subjects for chemistry ; for 
 living bodies possess secondary as well as primary qualities. 
 At this point many scientists have stopped under the 
 notion, we are told, 1 that, " however complicated may be 
 the conditions under which vital energies manifest them- 
 selves, they can be split into processes which are identical 
 in nature with those of the non-living world, and, as a 
 corollary to this, that the analysing of a vital process into 
 its physical and chemical constituents, so as to bring these 
 constituents into measurable relation with physical or 
 chemical standards, is the only mode of investigating them 
 which can lead to satisfactory results. . . . The methods 
 of investigation being physical or chemical, the organism 
 itself naturally came to be considered as a complex of 
 such processes, and nothing more. And in particular the 
 idea of adaptation, which is not a consequence of organism, 
 but its essence, was in great measure lost sight of." Here 
 then we have a distinguished physiologist reiterating the 
 old complaint of Bacon already quoted that the method 
 used is subtilitati naturae longe impar — that ' adaptation,' 
 the ultimate essence of organism is lost sight of. 
 
 § 16. What, however, does the professor mean by 
 ' adaptation ' ? " Action," he tells 2 us, " is of its essence. 
 . . . The activities of an organism are naturally distin- 
 
 1 Burdon-Sanderson, British Association Address, 1893. 2 Ibid. 
 
212 G. E. UNDERHILL .v 
 
 guishable into two kinds, according as we consider the 
 action of the whole organism in its relation to the externa! 
 world or to other organisms, or the action of the parts or 
 organs in their relation to each other. . . . Organised 
 nature as it now presents itself to us has become what 
 it is by a process of gradual perfecting or advancement, 
 brought about by the elimination of those organisms 
 which failed to obey the fundamental principle of adap- 
 tation. Each step therefore in this evolution is a 
 reaction to external influences, the motive of which is 
 essentially the same as that by which from moment 
 to moment the organism governs itself. And the whole 
 process is a necessary outcome of the fact that those 
 organisms are most prosperous which look best after their 
 own welfare." From these passages two points clearly 
 emerge : the first is that in the opinion of the professor 
 the strictly biological attributes of organisms can never 
 find their ultimate explanation in mechanical and chemical 
 processes ; the second, that adaptation is the most essential 
 characteristic of living organisms, and that this adaptation 
 is the result of the interest of the individual which is " the 
 sole motive by which every energy [or activity] is guided." 
 In other words the teleological factor is, according to the 
 professor, the most important, and the teleological aspect 
 of organisms has little or nothing to do with their 
 mechanical or chemical aspects. It is impossible without 
 them, but is inexplicable by them. 
 
 §17. Again, an organism is meaningless without its 
 environment — without its relations to other organisms and 
 to lifeless things. The problem of evolution is therefore to 
 trace the process of adaptation between the organism and 
 its environment. This problem is strictly biological — not 
 physical or chemical — and cannot therefore be reduced to 
 terms of number or measurement : any explanation 1 
 therefore that can be given must take the form of a 
 statement, as accurate as possible, of the antecedent 
 conditions of the organism under investigation. But how 
 is this to be done ? Logically the mode of procedure is 
 
 1 Cf. sup. § 4. 
 
iv THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 213 
 
 precisely the same as in the inorganic sciences. All the 
 postulates necessary in the latter have to be taken for 
 granted and a few more, like that of life and adaptation, 
 have to be added to them ; and in addition to the physical 
 and mechanical laws of the inorganic sciences the biologist 
 has to assume the working of certain biological laws, 
 arrived at by mental abstraction from the observation of 
 the actual processes in living organisms. Under these 
 limitations the evolution of species is scientifically ex- 
 plicable. In other words, though science can never tell 
 us why nor even how one species changes into another 
 species ; yet it can, or at any rate hopes to, describe 
 accurately the antecedent conditions of any given stage 
 in the process. Thus to explain a consequent species it 
 must show that the antecedent species was transformed 
 into it in accordance with the observed laws of Heredity, 
 Variation, Natural Selection, etc. This is the way in 
 which Darwin conceived the problem. " It is interest- 
 ing," he writes at the end of his Origin of Species, " to 
 reflect that these elaborately constructed forms [i.e. of 
 plant and animal life], so different from each other, and 
 dependent on each other in so complex a manner, 
 have all been produced by laws acting around us. 
 These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with 
 Reproduction ; Inheritance which is almost implied by 
 reproduction : Variability from the indirect and direct 
 action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse : 
 a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for 
 Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing 
 Divergence of Character and the extinction of less- 
 improved forms. . . . There is grandeur in this view of 
 life, with its several powers, having been originally 
 breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one ; 
 and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according 
 to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning 
 endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have 
 been, and are being evolved." In other words, if we 
 take for granted or as ultimate facts of experience the 
 laws of Growth with Reproduction, of Inheritance, and 
 
2i 4 G. E. UNDERHILL iv 
 
 of Variability, resulting in Natural Selection, then it is 
 possible to trace the evolution of species from the past 
 stage x, through the stages abed ... to the present 
 stage y. For science it is a process without beginning 
 and without end ; we never get to the origin of species : 
 we have to assume as ultimate principles Growth, 
 Inheritance, and Variability, with their consequence 
 Natural Selection — the most essential attributes of all 
 organisms — and with these laws to help us, we can in 
 some measure describe how " endless forms most beautiful 
 and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." 
 These laws are assumed to be permanent, and as such 
 not liable to evolution, and yet at the same time they 
 are attributes or processes in the organisms which exhibit 
 them, and which are evolved according to them. Once 
 more we find ourselves face to face with the old world 
 problem — the reconciliation of the Permanent Unity of 
 Parmenides with the Perpetual Flux of Heraclitus. 
 
 § 1 8. 'Adaptation,' however — the teleological factor — 
 we have been told, is the essence of organism. The 
 consideration of this dictum and its implications will 
 lead us to a path which is, philosophically, much more 
 hopeful. Does ' Adaptation,' we may ask, necessarily 
 imply ' design ' or ' purpose,' whether conscious or 
 unconscious ? Many, perhaps most, scientists, have 
 abandoned the old meaning of conscious purpose — and 
 for the very good reason that they can get on very well 
 without it. For science, as such, cannot know agencies, 
 but only the products of agencies : just as e.g. psychology 
 cannot know faculties, but only the products of faculties. 
 But it follows by no means that what we cannot know 
 in the sense of forming an idea or image of it, cannot 
 exist. In the strict sense of the term, we can know an 
 animal in its earlier state a and in its later state b. But 
 as Professor Burdon- Sanderson puts it, "to assert that 
 the link between a and b is mechanical, for no better 
 reason than that b always follows a, is an error of 
 statement, which is apt to lead the incautious reader or 
 hearer to imagine that the relation between a and b is 
 
iv THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 215 
 
 understood, when in fact its nature may be wholly- 
 unknown." Until Biology can give antecedents for 
 Adaptation, Heredity, and Variability, it has to take 
 them as ultimate facts or principles, and to work with 
 them as such : it does not and need not concern itself 
 with the further question of the Critical Philosophy — how 
 are they possible ? This further question is the business 
 of the philosopher, when he is dealing with ultimate 
 biological problems, just as in Mechanics he has to 
 discuss the presuppositions of matter, motion, and force ; 
 and, if in this sphere he can frame his answer on the 
 same lines as his answer to the ultimate mechanical 
 problems, he approaches nearer to the Monistic ideal 
 which is the goal of each science in its separate sphere 
 as well as of philosophy as a whole. ' Adaptation ' then 
 is the essence of organic life, and adaptation necessarily 
 implies the adaptation of means to ends. But whence 
 is this conception derived ? There can, of course, be 
 only one answer : from our own conscious adaptation 
 of means to ends in practical matters. So much every 
 biologist will admit : but most will maintain that the 
 use of the term in respect of organic growths is a mere 
 metaphor, and that we cannot draw any inference from 
 the suitability of the metaphor to the operation of any 
 conscious purpose or design in organic structures. 
 Scientifically they are perfectly right, because there is 
 not and from the nature of things cannot be any 
 evidence of consciousness, such as we know it in ourselves, 
 as present in vegetables or in animals, whether low or 
 high in the scale, outside the human animal : to science 
 adaptation is a law — expressed ipso facto in rational 
 terms — under which a great multiplicity of particular 
 phenomena may be brought. What lies behind it, 
 biology does not know, because there is no biological 
 evidence. 
 
 §19. But the philosopher, remembering how in the 
 mechanical and chemical sciences the rational conceptions 
 of law, number, and figure alone brought order into the 
 chaos of the manifold, will see in biological adaptation no 
 
216 G. E. UNDERHILL iv 
 
 mere metaphor, but, reasoning by analogy, will see 
 positive evidence of rational agency. Just as he saw the 
 physicist and chemist compelled to interpret the relations 
 of matter, motion, and force in terms of reason, and 
 inferred that our minds were able thus to interpret 
 inorganic Nature because somehow there was a like mind 
 in her, so here again he sees the biologist unable to 
 advance a step without the rational conception of 
 ' adaptation,' and in the same way argues that such 
 interpretation can only be successful on the hypothesis 
 that somehow there is in organic Nature a reason 
 similar to our own, which adapts her means to her ends. 
 "If man can by patience," writes Darwin, 1 "select 
 variations useful to him, why, under changing and 
 complex conditions of life, should not variations useful to 
 Nature's living products often arise, and be preserved or 
 selected ? What limit can be put to this power, acting 
 during long ages and rigidly scrutinising the whole 
 constitution, structure, and habits of each creature- 
 favouring the good and rejecting the bad." Over and 
 over again Darwin thus personifies Nature and he does so 
 because he cannot help it — neither is there any reason 
 why he ought to help it. For our own conscious mind is 
 the only key we possess to unlock the secrets of Nature, 
 and if this key will not fit, we have no other. In a word, 
 the evolutionist in the organic kingdom, proceeds in 
 precisely the same way as the evolutionist in the 
 inorganic kingdom. Like him he starts with matter, 
 motion, and force, and chemical change : in addition he 
 assumes as ultimate facts or principles life and the laws of 
 life, adaptation, reproduction, variation, etc. He makes 
 no attempt to give any evolutional genesis of these first 
 principles ; to him they are permanent causes : and then 
 having assumed all this, he describes with as scientific 
 accuracy as possible how the organism x changes into the 
 organism y through the intermediate stages abed . . , 
 And his description is successful and convincing, but only 
 under these limitations. 
 
 1 Origin of Species, new edition, 1900, p. 643. 
 
iv THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 217 
 
 VI. Evolution in the Sphere of Consciousness 
 
 § 20. But little space is left for the consideration of 
 the Mental and Moral Sciences, which come next in order ; 
 but the limitations under which the evolutionist proceeds 
 in this sphere are so very similar that so long an 
 exposition is hardly necessary. In the Mental sciences it 
 makes little difference from the point of view of this essay 
 whether the evolutionist be a psycho-physicist or a pure 
 psychologist. If he be the former, he will start with the 
 principles of biology and attempt to give a history of the 
 successive nerve -states and brain -states in the lower 
 animals and in man which precede and which follow the 
 facts of feeling and of consciousness. But just as life was 
 an ultimate fact and insoluble problem to the biologist, so 
 here feeling and consciousness are ultimate facts and 
 insoluble problems to the psycho-physicist. " There is a 
 gulf," says Dr. Stout, 1 " fixed between the physical and 
 the psychical, of such a nature that it is impossible coinci- 
 dently to observe an event of the one kind and an event 
 of the other kind, so as to apprehend the relation between 
 them. . . . No analysis can discover in the psychological 
 fact any traces of its supposed physical factors." If on 
 the other hand the evolutionist be a pure psychologist, he 
 will start with consciousness as an ultimate fact, he will 
 try to discover the general laws of mind and mental 
 processes and then he will attempt to describe " in 
 succession the various stages in the development of the 
 individual mind, passing from the more simple and 
 primitive to the more developed and complex." 2 
 Logically the task before the mental evolutionist is the 
 same as that before the biological evolutionist. He must 
 start with the ultimate fact of conscious mind : he must 
 discover the permanent laws of mental processes — of their 
 variation, reproduction, and heredity, and then he will be 
 able with some accuracy to describe the successive stages 
 in mental evolution ; but here, just as much as in the 
 changes of the inorganic sphere, and as in the vital process 
 
 1 Analytic Psychology, vol. i. p. 4. 2 Ibid. p. 36. 
 
2i 8 G. E. UNDERHILL iv 
 
 of the organic sphere, the actual processes involved will 
 ipso facto elude his understanding. Mental products and 
 the laws and stages of their production — these constitute 
 his science. The real process is beyond him — the process 
 as it actually goes on in fact. 
 
 VII. Results of the Inquiry 
 
 §21. Our inquiry need not be further pressed : three 
 points at least should now be plain. The first is that the 
 evolutionist can never deal with origins. Wherever he 
 begins his analysis — be it in the inorganic, organic, or 
 mental sphere — he must start with some fact of experience 
 and assume it as ultimate — at any rate for his particular 
 purpose. The second is that all evolutionists alike 
 assume the discovered laws of development to ■ be 
 permanent and unchanging, and but few stop to ask, 
 whence comes this permanence and absence of change ? it 
 is a real question and raises a real difficulty. For from 
 another point of view these laws are themselves qualities 
 of the very things, whose evolution it is the object of 
 science to trace. Gravity is just as much a quality as a 
 law of masses ; reproductive power is just as much a 
 quality as a law of animals ; association of ideas is just 
 as much a quality as a law of mind. What then, we ask 
 in vain, is the differentia whereby such permanent 
 qualities are to be distinguished from qualities more 
 fleeting. Why should there be supposed to be an 
 evolution of chemical elements, but no evolution of 
 gravity ? 
 
 Thirdly and lastly in all scientific discoveries of what- 
 soever kind the human mind discovers itself and its own 
 intelligible relations ; the laws of motion, the law of 
 gravitation, the orbits of the planets, the atomic weight of 
 the chemical elements — so far as they are intelligible to 
 us at all — are intelligible because the mind can number 
 and measure and finds its own numbers and measures in 
 them. The adaptation of organisms — that adaptation 
 which constitutes their very essence — is intelligible because 
 
iv THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 219 
 
 our mind knows what it means by adapting means to 
 ends. Still more obvious is it that in the Mental Sciences 
 our own mind is our only key to the facts and laws of 
 other minds. Tavrbv vovs ical votjtov. 
 
 §22. The doctrine of Evolution then is a doctrine 
 of limited and not of universal application. It has been 
 most successfully applied in the sphere from whence it 
 came — the organic kingdom. In its wider sense — 
 perhaps only distinguishable from mere change or be- 
 coming by implying some increase in complexity of form 
 — it is bearing good fruit as a working hypothesis in the 
 inorganic kingdom. When applied to the development 
 of conscious and social phenomena, it is very hard to 
 distinguish Evolution from what our forefathers called 
 history. But in whatever sphere it is applied, its limita- 
 tions are equally apparent. It must have a matter of 
 some sort in which to manifest itself and its manifestations 
 are conceived, whether rightly or wrongly, to take place 
 according to certain laws. And by all evolutionists 
 alike, this matter, whether materially or ideally interpreted, 
 and these laws are conceived of as permanent and 
 unchanging — i.e. as not themselves subject to Evolution. 
 In a word, the One and the Many, the Permanent and the 
 Changeable, involve problems just as insoluble to us as 
 they were to Parmenides and Plato, and we have not 
 evolved (nor indeed are we likely to evolve) any new 
 mental processes whereby to solve them. Human science 
 conquers new kingdoms, but she conquers them with her 
 old weapons — mental reconstruction of sensible experience 
 according to mental principles. Darwin's discovery of 
 the variability of species is no exception to the rule. 
 The mental principle which he used is that which 
 Aristotle formulated as final cause — nothing more or less : 
 what he did was to prove that it held good in a sphere 
 and in a way in which no one hitherto had thought of 
 applying it. This old conception, thus newly applied, 
 has indeed been disguised under the strange but now 
 familiar names of Evolution, Adaptation, Natural Selection 
 — probably for no other reason than Bacon's old con- 
 
220 G. E. UNDERHILL iv 
 
 demnation of the misuse of final causes in physical 
 sciences — causa finalis lantum abest ut prosit, ut etiam 
 scientias corrumpat. In the minds of Bacon's opponents 
 final cause was a notio male terminata. In Darwin's 
 mind it became a notio bene terminata through his careful 
 observations and experiments. Numberless passages in 
 the Origin of Species might be cited ; thus referring 
 to Natural Selection and his favourite canon Natura non 
 facit saltum, he writes, 1 " [Hence] we can see why through- 
 out nature the same general end is gained by an almost 
 infinite diversity of means, for every peculiarity when 
 once acquired is long inherited, and structures already 
 modified in many ways have to be adapted for the same 
 general purpose." Long ago Aristotle 2 on a slender 
 basis of facts asserted eanv apa to evetca rov iv rols (frvcrei 
 ytvo/j,€voi,<; kuI ovacv. Two thousand years later Darwin 
 proved the assertion by marshalling the facts. 
 
 1 P. 646. - Phys. ii. 8. 6. 
 
V 
 
 ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 
 
 By R. R. Marett 
 
 I. Enunciation of Problem 
 
 i. The vital problem of modern Ethics is how to reconcile the standpoints 
 of Origin and Validity. 
 
 2. Meaning of these terms defined and illustrated. 
 
 3. The problem one of General Philosophy since (a) it pertains not only 
 
 to Ethics but e.g. to Religion and Art ; (6) it involves the difficulty 
 about the relation of the conscious to the non-conscious (instinct). 
 
 II. Determination of Metaphysical Attitude 
 
 4. What is to be our attitude towards our subject taken simply as matter 
 
 of experience ? Metaphysics, the (would-be) theory of experience as a 
 whole, must be experimental, if ' experience is experiment ' ; which 
 doctrine of the psychologist, however, calls itself for metaphysical 
 endorsement. 
 
 5. In ' presentness of experience ' the psychologist provides the metaphysician 
 
 with a standard of reality, whereby he may judge all discursive thinking 
 to be experimental merely. 
 
 6. And metaphysical thinking forms no exception to this rule, its special 
 
 danger being that it exceed the limits of valid experimentation, there 
 being a kind of barely logical conjecture which leads to nothing. 
 
 7. Our policy will be to try to avoid this kind of thinking (' metalogic '), 
 
 and to face the ' facts ' of Empirical Psychology. 
 
 III. Delimitation of Sphere of Ethics 
 
 8. Another preliminary task is to define the scope of Ethics — a subject 
 
 on which the vaguest views prevail. A treble limitation must suffice 
 us here. 
 
 9. {a) Life is not all conscious life, and Ethics has no concern with instinct 
 
 as such. 
 
 10. (b) Conscious life is not all morality, and the aspect with which Ethics 
 
 deals presents a certain ' reference ' and ' quality ' in combination, either 
 of which so far as it is found apart from the other does not come within 
 the range of Ethics proper. 
 
 1 1. (c) Morality as a product is but partially due to moral theory, whether 
 
 as science or as art, since, besides instinct and quasi -instinctive 
 
 221 
 
222 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 impulse, there is constitutional feeling to be reckoned with before bare 
 idea can pass into achievement. 
 
 IV. Ground-plan of Proposed Synthesis 
 
 12. A first glance at the facts offers hope of reconciling Origin and Validity. 
 
 Our appreciations of right and wrong manifestly involve some acquaint- 
 ance with Origin in the sense of the history, or previous record, of the 
 virtues. 
 
 13. Such extreme views as (a) that the only Origin worth considering is 
 
 ' ultimate origin,' and (b) that Validity resides in ' things-as-they-are,' 
 are due to metaphysical prejudice which will not stand criticism. 
 
 14. Hence (a) proposed synthesis — an intuitionism tempered by historical 
 
 criticism ; (b) proposed method — to confute the irreconcilables on either 
 side. 
 
 V. Mere Origin as an Ethical Standpoint 
 
 15. The evolutionary school has no right to base its 'rational utilitarianism' 
 
 on the fact of the ' unconscious utilitarianism ' of physiological nature. 
 The latter represents a mere 'is,' whereas the moralist has to explain 
 and justify an ' ought.' 
 
 16. This is, however, not the transcendental 'ought' of the apriorist, but a 
 
 psychological 'ought,' within which the empiricist has to recognise 
 diverse moments that ' seem ' to imply determination from without and 
 determination from within as occurring at once and together. 
 
 17. Certain evolutionists indeed, by formally distinguishing between the 
 
 psychological effects of ' natural ' and ' conscious ' selection, admit the 
 bare fact of this duality in unity. It remains to follow up the idea into 
 the concrete. 
 
 18. For instance, let us consider the phenomena of man's history as a domestic 
 
 being. 
 
 19. These, though they agree in being psychical phenomena, display a 
 
 duality of intrinsic character which, by a working hypothesis, we will 
 ascribe to a divergence between the ' aims ' of natural and conscious 
 selection. 
 
 20. It may, however, be contended from the side of Origin that these specific 
 
 facts on the whole testify to the predominance of the instinctive 
 moment in the moral consciousness. 
 
 21. But now consider the closely-related history of the idea of Purity. Here 
 
 we seem to have a moral principle that has severed its connection with 
 instinct and persists by reason of a validity of its own. To call it a 
 'by-product,' with the evolutionist, is simply to confess it inexplicable 
 from that point of view. 
 
 22. In the absence, then, of any explanation from the side of Origin, the 
 
 balance of empirical probability is in favour of the spontaneous 
 origination of this ideal by the moral consciousness. 
 
 23. A glance at the general history of the virtues (as classified in five 
 
 ' natural ' groups) confirms the view that the duality in question runs 
 right through morality as a product. 
 
 24. The domestic virtues appear on the whole to subserve the ' natural ' end of 
 
 race-preservation. 
 
 25. And this is also true of the national virtues. 
 
 26. On the other hand, the personal virtues seem rather to make for a 
 
 'spiritual ' end, namely self-perfection. 
 
 27. As is even more palpably the case with the transcendental virtues. 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 223 
 
 28. Whilst the international virtues show the two moments at work together. 
 
 29. The appearances, then, are not unambiguous, much less do they un- 
 
 ambiguously favour a metaphysical naturalism, the ethical implications 
 of which can easily be proved to be a tissue of inconsistencies. 
 
 30. On the other hand, suppose the votary of Origin eschew the naturalistic 
 
 metaphysic, and concede a provisional validity to ' spiritual ' as distin- 
 guished from ' natural ' motive on the ground that the one no less than 
 the other is a persistent feature of historical morality, will he not 
 proceed from history to introspection in search of a moral ' ought ' 
 that is relatively unambiguous and one ? 
 
 VI. Validity as an Ethical Standpoint 
 
 31. Introspection, regarded as a branch of Empirical Psychology complemen- 
 
 tary in scope to the historical or comparative branch, shows us that 
 there is immanent in the consciousness of the typical moral subject of 
 to-day a finally decisive power of selective valuation amongst moral 
 principles. 
 
 32. Further, introspection can to some extent explain why the moral will is 
 
 ultimately governed by this kind of 'intuition,' namely, because (a) 
 discursive thinking, as contrasted with feeling, to which intuition is 
 more nearly akin, involves distraction of attention and consequent 
 enervation of will ; (b) discursive thinking about futurities, as distin- 
 guished from abstract immediacies, is enervating even as regards the 
 will to think ; (c) discursive thinking about feelings is apt to do per- 
 manent injury to the power of feeling, and hence to that of willing with 
 confidence. 
 
 33. Now the authoritativeness of moral intuition, to judge by its psycho- 
 
 logical appearance, is not the mere 'fatality' of instinct. 
 
 34. Nor is it the external compulsiveness of custom and law. 
 
 35. On the contrary it is essentially internal, i.e. self-imposed ; and rational, 
 
 i.e. capable of furnishing the supreme organising principle of a norma- \j 
 
 tive Ethics that is at once preceptive and explanatory. 
 
 36. As to the finality of such a form for Ethics from the point of view of 
 
 General Philosophy and of Metaphysics, it would seem that normative- 
 ness is common to the human sciences, and that there is at any rate 
 much to be said in favour of a Ideological interpretation of the universe. 
 
 VII. Suggestions for a Combined Use of the Two 
 Standpoints in Empirical Ethics 
 
 37. An ultimate authoritativeness in Ethics being, on the various grounds 
 
 alleged, allowed to Validity, what scope can be found for Origin as a 
 supplementary principle ? Now so far as Origin means naturalism, its 
 services can be dispensed with altogether. 
 
 38. But if Origin stand for the comparative study of the relations of the 
 
 'objective,' i.e. external, factor to the 'subjective,' i.e. internal and 
 self-authorising, factor in moral process, it has an important function 
 to fulfil. 
 
 39. Whilst Validity is from first to last the affirmative principle in Ethics, 
 
 Origin is the critical. The ' laws ' that they conjointly establish are 
 ultimately self-imposed ordinances, rather than observed uniformities, 
 simply because of the ' fact ' that moral practicability, whether as 
 sought or as studied, depends in the last resort on ourselves rather than 
 on circumstances. 
 
 40. Thus the form most fitting for Ethics as a whole would seem to be that 
 
 of a critical intuitionism. Solvitur — aut dissolvitur — experiendo ! 
 
24 R. R- MARETT 
 
 I. Enunciation of Problem 
 
 § i. A SYNTHESIS of the methodological principles of 
 Ethics would prove very welcome to the philosopher. For, 
 regarded philosophically, Ethics is in a bad way. Hostile 
 camps divide the land. Now two courses are open to the 
 peace-maker. He may break up the disputed territory into 
 lots. Man's interest in himself as a moral being may con- 
 ceivably have to content itself in the future with a chapter 
 in psychology or anthropology here, a scrap-book of pensees 
 there. Or the peace-maker may induce the contending 
 parties to compose their differences. And this, we may 
 be sure, when practicable, is the simpler and more grateful 
 task. At all events, it is along these lines that one's 
 natural prejudice bids one seek for a solution. 
 
 Meanwhile it is all in favour of a settlement being shortly 
 reached by the one way or by the other, that the matter 
 and cause of the dispute are tolerably manifest. If Ethics 
 splits into fragments, it will split on the question of Origin 
 versus Validity. Or, on the other hand, if Ethics is to 
 maintain its integrity as Ethics, Origin and Validity must 
 be reconciled, that is, room must be found for both prin- 
 ciples of explanation to operate freely within a single, 
 well-marked, centrally-governed, self-supporting province 
 of thought. 
 
 § 2. These principles are doubtless of such familiar import 
 as scarcely to stand in need of preliminary definition. 
 Origin, taken in an ethical connection, represents the 
 standpoint from which moral judgments — that is, 
 appreciations of the morally good and bad as applied 
 witn regulative intent to human character and conduct — 
 are explained by reference to the previous stages of a 
 historical development imputed to them. Validity is the 
 standpoint from which such judgments are explained by 
 reference to their present worth and significance to the 
 moral subject — to the person or persons uttering them. 
 
 A few miscellaneous examples taken from various 
 text-books, ethical and otherwise (the authors of which 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 225 
 
 may go bail for the facts alleged), will serve to illustrate 
 the general bearing and force of the antithesis : — 
 
 We wear clothes to-day from a sense of decency. 
 Originally they furnished our ancestors with a means of 
 sexual attraction. 
 
 For us monogamy rests on a theory of the rights of 
 woman. Originally the form of marriage was the 
 immediate outcome of the numerical proportions of the 
 sexes within a given ' area of characterisation.' 
 
 This man admires his own class for its intrinsic 
 superiority to the vulgar in point of manners. The 
 origin of his prejudice is to be sought in the racial scorn 
 of a conquering people for its serfs. 
 
 That man holds by fasting as conducive to moral 
 self-discipline. In its origin fasting was a means of 
 producing * ecstatic vision.' 
 
 I play golf as a relaxation. Play originally constituted 
 man's apprenticeship in the serious arts of life. 
 
 We burn Guy Fawkes for fun. Once the act had 
 political significance. In the background, perhaps, there 
 lurks a rite designed to reinvigorate a corn-spirit. 
 
 I think it morally abominable to commit homicide ; 
 bad taste to speak evil of the dead ; disrespectful to 
 approach my sovereign too closely ; dirty to allow 
 another to eat off my unwashed plate. Once these 
 practices were shunned from fear of ghosts or of 
 magical infection. 
 
 Now, presuming (as I do on the strength of its past 
 and present tendency) that Ethics cannot afford to ignore 
 either of these standpoints in favour of the other, is 
 there any way, I ask myself, whether through subordi- 
 nation or through co-ordination, of reducing them to a 
 single standpoint — of freeing the ethical ' because ' of 
 that fundamental ambiguity which threatens the very 
 existence of Ethics as a working system of explanatory 
 principles ? That, in outline, is the problem to be 
 attacked. 
 
 § 3. By way of opening the campaign, let us take the 
 auguries. The foregoing illustrations suggest two 
 
 Q 
 
226 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 observations which may serve to convey a hint of the 
 kind of affair before us. 
 
 (a) The first is that the difficulty about choosing 
 between the standards of Origin and Validity is not con- 
 fined to Ethics, regarded as one amongst several ' organised 
 interests ' of the human spirit. Thus some of our cases 
 seemed to relate primarily to the history of Religion ; 
 others again to that of Art on its recreative side. Hence 
 we must be prepared to have to cast about somewhat 
 widely for a mediating view. Our object must be to 
 provide a form for our theory of the moral life that will 
 likewise be applicable to our theory of the ' higher life ' as 
 a whole. 
 
 (b) The second is that, of the various ' origins ' 
 alleged, some are palpably more original than others. 
 Sometimes, as when I forget Guy Fawkes the Popish 
 plotter in Guy Fawkes the occasion of fireworks, one 
 conscious motive has but retired in favour of another. 
 Sometimes a motive will have altered mainly in respect to 
 the degree of clearness with which the subject grasps it. 
 Thus my prejudice against the serf-class — against ' colour,' 
 let us say — may all along have rested on dimly rational 
 grounds. Sometimes, however, a more radical form of 
 change would appear to have occurred. The motive of 
 shame that bids me cover my nakedness may be contrasted, 
 not with another motive bidding me ingratiate myself 
 with the other sex, which motive may or may not have a 
 certain weight with me still, but with an instinct or 
 organic trend, implanted in my body by natural selection 
 in such a way as to bring about the result contemplated 
 by the last-mentioned motive independently of any act of 
 will on my part. Now this, the most original of so-called 
 origins, will presumably constitute the real point d'appui 
 of the more uncompromising champion of the historical 
 method of explanation. His Origin par excellence will be 
 ' instinct.' Thus there looms ahead the problem of how 
 to correlate the ' spiritual ' and subjective with the 
 purely ' natural ' and external. It looks as if the 
 combatants must be brought to parley ' from opposite 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 227 
 
 sides of the ditch.' Here, then, is further reason to 
 suppose that the argument is bound to transcend the 
 strictly ethical plane ; that, in fact, however specific be 
 the application it is intended to give to its conclusions, 
 these cannot be established without the aid of — let us call 
 it, General Philosophy. 
 
 II. Determination of Metaphysical Attitude 1 
 
 § 4. General Philosophy, however, hardly amounts to 
 Metaphysics. On the highest and most characteristic 
 plane of Metaphysics we shall venture but for a moment. 
 And that at once. For, if we are to be thorough, we 
 must start by determining our general attitude towards 
 our subject regarded simply as matter of experience. 
 
 Metaphysics, as it is commonly defined, is the theory 
 of experience as a whole. But this is what we would 
 have it be rather than what it is. Actually, it comprises 
 all thinking of which it is the guiding interest to bring 
 our manifold ideal constructions of experience into the 
 completest attainable accord, establishing such accord 
 on grounds that shall seem sufficient, even if they do not 
 exclude a logical possibility of doubt. 
 
 For, if ' experience is experiment,' Metaphysics, at once 
 because it helps to constitute, and because it contemplates, 
 experience, must itself be experimental. 
 
 But is experience experiment ? " Surely," the plain 
 man will say, " it is not wholly or merely so. There is 
 nothing in the ordinary sense experimental about a 
 haunting sense of pain. Rather it would seem as if the 
 statement were but intended as a simplification for 
 descriptive purposes of our perplexed experiences. ' Is ' 
 must here mean ' is pre-eminently, characteristically, and 
 on the whole.' " 
 
 1 Sections II. and III. , containing introductory matter which suffers from 
 much compression, may be omitted by the reader who is impatient to embark on 
 the main theme, so long as he is prepared to allow (a) that all philosophy must 
 be empirical in the sense that it must relate to an experience capable of having 
 such actuality as we have experience of ' personally ' ; (b ) that the scope of 
 Ethics, the theory of moral good, is narrower than that of the theory of the good 
 in life as a whole. 
 
228 R R. MARETT v 
 
 Now the doctrine comes in the first instance from 
 the psychologists. Certain of them find in it an adequate, 
 or at any rate a convenient, basis for the particular 
 ' construction ' which, as psychologists, they deem true 
 or least untrue. The construction in question is built 
 up somewhat as follows. The conscious individual in 
 his active capacity — for example, as when he thinks — is 
 moved by interests. These sum themselves up in a 
 master- interest, his desire to live well. This master- 
 interest, however, defies all his efforts to yield it 
 immediate full satisfaction. Thus it ever harks forward 
 towards an indefinite future. Hence, since in conscious 
 experience regarded from this point of view the sense 
 of wanting perpetually both outflanks and outweighs the 
 sense of having, experience is fundamentally a trying, 
 and thinking in particular a thinking-onwards rather than 
 a thinking-out or thinking-to. 
 
 But is this point of view finally tenable ? Is it, not 
 merely good, but good enough ? Can we, not merely 
 as psychologists, but as reasoners in search of synthesis, 
 fairly content ourselves with it? That is what the 
 metaphysician — or, since one man may suffice for both 
 characters, the psychologist turned metaphysician — has 
 to decide as best he can. He has to decide, for instance, 
 whether, in the foregoing description, the stress laid on 
 conation and the conative moment in thinking, the 
 comparative indifference shown to the passive or merely 
 feeling side of our nature, the assumption that our diverse 
 and often incompatible interests can be summated, the 
 refusal to recognise the existence of states of complete 
 content, the identification of the reaching-beyond-itself 
 of consciousness with a reaching-forward in time — 
 whether all these things hold good and must hold good, 
 not merely for the purposes of psychology, but for the 
 purposes of the most comprehensive thinking possible 
 for us. 
 
 I hope, then, after thus openly acknowledging the 
 prerogative of Metaphysics as a final court of rational 
 appeal, that I shall not be misunderstood if I proceed 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 229 
 
 to declare that this psychological account of the essential 
 nature of experience is likewise to me metaphysically 
 satisfactory, in the sense that for the purposes of the 
 most comprehensive thinking it seems as good as can 
 be got. 
 
 § 5. The standard of psychological reality is presentness 
 or actuality of experience. " But ' presentness,' " says 
 the metaphysician, "does not — cannot — hit the mark. 
 
 No ' what ' can be equivalent to ' that.' " " Its inexpres- 
 
 sibleness, then, being, if you will, presumed, let us go on 
 to express it as best we can." So answers the 
 psychologist ; and it is his great merit that he has had 
 the courage to set out on this task apparently foredoomed 
 to failure. The metaphysician, on the other hand, is 
 wont to tie himself up into such knots with his heaven- 
 sent principle of contradiction, that he cannot get ' fairly 
 started ' at all, much less find himself in a position to 
 'report progress.' Yet this, paradoxical as it may sound, 
 is just what the psychologist has done. Though lacking 
 a visible ' take-off,' he has started, he has got on. 
 Wherefore I am the more prepared to follow him. 
 
 The psychologist has showered ' whats ' on the 
 inexpressible ' that ' of actual experience, and has found 
 to his delight that some of them have the power to stick. 
 Ludicrously inadequate they doubtless are — if you start 
 with expecting adequacy of our thought - symbols. 
 Consider the so-called 'positive' attributes that the 
 psychologist has ventured to ascribe to his ' reality.' 
 Presentness, actuality, warmth, intimacy, all-inclusiveness, 
 the me-now, a psychosis, and so on — do any of these 
 anchors take firm bottom ? Or consider the so-called 
 4 negative ' attributes — the ' infinite ' judgments which 
 proclaim their subject not merely this or that. ' Not in 
 time,' ' no quality, nor mode, nor subject, nor object, of 
 experience,' ' not felt, nor thought, nor willed,' ' not past, 
 nor future, nor the external world, nor you, nor God,' 
 ' not one, not many,' etc., etc. — how hollow and meagre, 
 beside the fact, is all this indirectness ! " But the 
 absurdity," you say, " of trying to make me understand 
 
230 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 that of which by intuition I am perfectly aware already ! " 
 Not at all. The psychologist, if he has somehow made 
 you understand what he is driving at, has performed a 
 great feat. He has compounded intuitions with you — 
 or, let us say (to leave ' you ' somewhat arbitrarily out 
 of account), with himself. He has projected the intuition 
 of presentness into the world of thought as an intuition. 
 He has found a universal standpoint in the fact about 
 which he is more certain than about anything else. " As 
 sure as I am alive and here " (what matter the words if 
 they but be ' to that effect ' !) represents his ne plus ultra 
 of conviction. 
 
 Which standpoint, I maintain, is no needle-point. 
 Though we be not angels, there is room upon it for us 
 all — even for the metaphysician. The practical failure 
 of his attempt to argue himself out of his sense of present 
 existence ought to provide him with an inkling of where 
 the counterfoil lies to the ' appearance ' he decries but 
 finds it so hard to get away from. Appearance attaches 
 to experience in so far as it is divided. I do not say 
 ' divided against itself.' Experience does not always 
 make a 'poor show.' To be 'in' it or 'of it is enough 
 to constitute show as such. It comes to this — that 'this 
 presentness ' is more vital to the existence in experience 
 of any of ' these presents ' than any of them are vital to 
 its existence. To the extent to which the intuition of 
 presentness does — I do not say ' must,' but ' does ' — ■ 
 prevail over all discriminative analysis of the elements 
 presented, to this extent is the ' absoluteness ' of the 
 former exalted above the ' relativity ' of the latter. To 
 put it thus to myself is formally of course an experiment. 
 Yet, if ever experimentation reaches the limits, not of 
 logical possibility, perhaps, but of a logically valid 
 possibility, it must surely be at the point at which the 
 experiment is instantly confronted by the verification — 
 when presentness leaps up from the suggestion of 
 presentness, and overtakes itself. 
 
 § 6. Psychological reality has been cited in order that 
 it may bear witness. It has been cited because it seems 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 231 
 
 to afford the most crucial proof that, in default of a 
 perfect proof, is to be obtained of the experimental 
 character of discursive thinking as such. Here is some- 
 thing which I cannot argue myself out of, nor yet prove 
 myself to have. Suppose I try to prove that presentness 
 is. I must put the proposition to myself as meaning 
 something — e.g. that, presentness removed, there would 
 be nothing. But how can I possibly be present to verify 
 the prediction ? The conditions necessary to the proof 
 fall outside one another, not in any merely temporal 
 sense, but really. Hypothesis and verification cannot 
 conceivably come together in any actual experience such 
 as we know in ourselves. Discursive thinking, then, it 
 would seem, is confined to the sphere of the actually 
 possible — nay to the sphere of representability, which, in 
 what the psychologist cannot but regard as its hither aspect, 
 is but the possibility of a possibility, a condition conditioned 
 by something itself conditional, namely presentability. 
 
 Thus the essence of all mere thinking — be it meta- 
 physical, or be it of narrower scope — is to be conjectural, 
 or, as I would prefer to say, experimental. For in a 
 sense there are no definable limits to conjecture. There 
 is an experimentation unworthy of the name that is 
 merely logical. Left to itself mere thinking cannot draw 
 the rein on its innate discursiveness. I can conjecture in 
 a barely logical way about a presentness of non-existence. 
 With a certain play and show of reasoning I can follow 
 the notion up to the very verge of suicide — intellectual or 
 actual. But, intuition being permitted to interfere, at 
 least this kind of guess-work is pronounced futile, and in 
 that pronouncement the utmost bounds of valid conjecture 
 are set up. Conjecture is restricted to readabilities. 
 In the conviction that they must be readabilities we 
 are at the point where conjecture verges on certainty. 
 On the other hand, what the readabilities may or may 
 not do and be is purely problematic. Precarious inference 
 following in the wake of a capricious memory has to decide 
 as best it can. Framework and filling of our experience 
 — the things that must be, can be, have been, will be, 
 
232 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 ought to be — all alike are doomed to a relative subsistence 
 which we can sufficiently know to be such by the per- 
 petual contrast it affords to the ever-presentness that is. 
 
 § 7. The foregoing considerations will not have been out 
 of place in such an essay as this if they in any way serve to 
 point out to the ethical student in search of synthetic prin- 
 ciples that the true field for his energies lies, not in the no- 
 man's-land of dogmatic ' Metalogic,' 1 but in the workaday 
 world of Empirical Psychology. It is an essential part of 
 the experimentalist theory that in philosophic inquiry the 
 preliminary attitude makes all the difference. It is not 
 intended to oppose the free assumption of an intellectual 
 attitude to a no less free submission to the teachings of 
 fact. It were a bastard ' Pragmatism ' that proclaimed 
 licence as the final authoriser of law. The true Pragmatism 
 asserts no more than that in science nothing can be 
 ' done ' unless the prior resolve be there to face the facts 
 fairly. It but reaffirms the old saying that ' none are so 
 blind as those who will not see.' The point of the remark 
 lies in its application to the case of the • metalogician.' 
 When a man's presupposition is that he has no call to 
 face the facts because forsooth they are ' mere facts ' ; and 
 when further he maintains that this is no presupposition, 
 because he is a metaphysician, and Metaphysics can ' do 
 without presuppositions,' i.e., by beginning nowhere in 
 particular can end up everywhere at once ; then it is time 
 to retort on him with a reminder which, were it not so 
 necessary, might sound a truism. 
 
 Our concern, then, shall be, submitting ourselves to 
 that attitude of ' scientific ' inquiry so foolishly maligned 
 by some, to confront the never-ending task of correlating 
 the relativities — the apparent readabilities — of human 
 experience. As the data will be experimental, so must 
 be the results ; the stream cannot rise above its source. 
 From Empirical Psychology we shall gratefully accept the 
 ' personal ' or ' anthropocentric ' standpoint, which, even in 
 order to discount its own bias, our thought, it would seem, 
 is in nature bound to adopt. And, as regards Metaphysics, 
 
 1 The word is framed on the analogy of ' metageometry,' ' metapolitical,' etc. 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 233 
 
 though we have already had recourse to its aid so as the 
 more circumspectly to choose our path, we had better 
 resolve that for the rest its place shall be on the further 
 side of the sciences. Though it may easily be less, it 
 cannot, so we have judged, be more than a final critical 
 survey of the organised facts of experience as if 'a concrete 
 whole, with the object of guaranteeing us such intellectual 
 impartiality and breadth of view as may be possible in 
 our necessarily adventurous attitude towards life in 
 general. Hence, since we cannot in what follows hope to 
 defend our conclusions (save in so far as may by anti- 
 cipation have been done) against criticisms applying to 
 the general standpoint and broader principles of the 
 psychology they rest on, we had best at once renounce 
 all claim to metaphysical exhaustiveness, and be content to 
 regard our experiment, in virtue of its wide yet inter- 
 mediary scope, as simply an essay in General Philosophy. 
 
 III. Delimitation of Sphere of Ethics 
 
 § 8. Having trenched on Metaphysics just in so far as 
 seemed necessary in order to define our general attitude 
 towards the problem in hand, let us now proceed to get 
 within somewhat closer range of its specific matter. But 
 we have not yet done with preliminaries. 
 
 It will be remembered that the instances taken at 
 random to illustrate the antithesis between Origin and 
 Validity suggested of themselves two things. The first 
 was that Ethics is one amongst several ' organised interests ' 
 of the human spirit. The other was that altogether outside 
 the sphere of the interests that move the will, yet at every 
 point conterminous with it, lies the mysterious domain of 
 instinct. It would, therefore, seem advisable for us to arm 
 ourselves at the outset with some notion of the limits — I 
 might even say 'the limitations' — of Ethics proper. 
 
 There is a confused impression prevalent that, because 
 all willed conduct has in some degree an ethical aspect, 
 therefore Ethics is the theory of human practice in general. 
 Nay, now that a clever, though unscrupulous, trick of 
 
234 R- R- MARETT v 
 
 naming has enabled ' the unconscious ' to pretend to so 
 many of the attributes of spirit, it is hard to say where, if 
 anywhere, the line round Ethics would be drawn by some. 
 On the other hand, seeing that divide et impera is the 
 watchword of advancing science, it is hardly too much 
 to say that the crying need of Ethics is for narrow limits, 
 and the narrower the better. Indeed, if a competent 
 psychologist, realising that there are almost numberless 
 ways in which a man may bring himself to perform the 
 act he believes to be socially salutary, were carefully to 
 characterise the feeling or thought that exerts the decisive 
 influence in each case, I believe that a score of varieties 
 would spring into existence where but one form of moral 
 prompting is recognised to-day. And I believe that, of 
 these varieties, four-fifths might be eliminated as non-moral 
 without prejudice to Ethics as a theory of somewhat 
 comprehensive sweep. 
 
 Meanwhile, in an essay of the present kind, only the 
 broadest distinctions, and those most firmly founded on 
 common consent, can be noticed. It will, in fact, suffice 
 to place a treble limitation on the scope of Ethics. Let us, 
 then,brieflyremind ourselves: (a) that life is not allconscious 
 life ; (&) that conscious life is not all morality ; and (c) that 
 morality as a product is but partially due to moral theory, 
 whether organised as science or as art. 
 
 § 9. (a) From a narrowly practical point of view there 
 may be little use in dwelling on the suspicion of agencies at 
 work in some indefinite ' outside,' whence they are some- 
 how able to control the phases of our spiritual life. 
 Nevertheless, the suspicion is too well grounded on 
 ' appearance ' to be ignored at the scientific level of 
 thought. The question of our ' ideal ' self-sufficiency and 
 freedom, if not left to settle itself, must at least be raised 
 in such a way as not to prejudice an open-minded 
 recognition of the ' facts.' And, psychologically, the 
 facts are these, that a sense of freedom coexists with a no 
 less lively sense of constraint. Now, as, I hope, the sub- 
 sequent argument will tend to show, it is of vital importance 
 for man that he should allow himself to lean chiefly on 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 235 
 
 his sense of freedom. Even on deterministic principles 
 fatalism might reasonably be denounced as fatal policy. 
 There may, then, be good psychological reason why at 
 the moment of action, nay whenever it is action that 
 is directly contemplated, a man should try to forget 
 that his existence is hung somewhere between the 
 opposite poles of blind instinct and autonomous rationality. 
 When, however, it is simply a question of the ' facts,' to 
 hail ourselves as the absolute masters of our fate is not 
 even a ' noble ' lie. 
 
 § 10. (b) Next as regards the ratio borne by morality 
 to conscious life as a whole. Even if we be ready to say, 
 with Matthew Arnold, that morality constitutes " three- 
 fourths of life," at least we are admitting it to be less than 
 all. I would not deny that in the scheme of the 
 ' organised interests ' a place might be assigned to, and 
 might even in some measure be occupied by, a supreme 
 science and art of life — call we them severally Philosophy 
 and Religion, or what we will. It can, however, but plunge 
 us in methodological chaos to identify such architectonic 
 and all-embracing theories of man's function in the 
 universe with the science and art of Ethics. 
 
 The determinate subject-matter of Ethics, as those who 
 have actually worked at its problems would seem generally 
 prepared to admit, is the conduct of life just in so far as 
 it is subject to the influence of a particular kind of praise 
 or blame. Whether administered by self or others, it is 
 usually regarded as belonging to a single kind. And the 
 characters by which this kind may be recognised are com- 
 monly held to be two, namely a reference and a quality, 
 which taken strictly together suffice to constitute it speci- 
 fically unique. So far it is comparatively plain sailing. The 
 difficulty begins when this reference and this quality have 
 to be defined. Both prove singularly elusive notions. Hence 
 the moralist as a rule is driven to indirect methods of de- 
 scription. He tries to bring out the nature of the differen- 
 tial characters of the moral judgment by contrasting them 
 with those of certain allied kinds of judgment. But thus 
 to transcend the limits of Ethics is not to widen them. 
 
236 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 For example, let us suppose sociality to be the 
 distinctive object of ethical reference, and purity or 
 disinterestedness of motive to be the specific mark of 
 ethical quality. How is the moralist to invest these 
 terms with meaning? Sociality is vague enough. And 
 as to purity or disinterestedness, how on earth is he to 
 convey an impression of them to a mind that does not 
 meet him half-way? Thus a strong temptation besets 
 him to ' stand outside ' his subject. To his indistinct 
 analysis of the moral judgment he can at least oppose 
 some counter-analysis, say, of our appreciations of beauty 
 and truth on the one hand, and of our prudential 
 valuations — the calculations of ' enlightened selfishness ' — 
 on the other. The former show purity without the social 
 reference, the latter has the social reference but lacks 
 purity. Morality consists in the combination of the two. 
 " And now," says the moralist, " you have an inkling of 
 what I am driving at." 
 
 Subsidiary studies of this sort, however, but betoken a 
 certain inevitable multiplication of interests, due to our 
 natural tendency when seeking for side-lights to follow out 
 each abstract resemblance overfar. They cannot be held 
 to enlarge the sphere of Ethics proper. Doubtless such 
 methodological restrictions are somewhat tiresome to 
 observe. Tiresome or not, however, they are the prime 
 conditions of scientific continence and sane activity. It 
 is to save time and labour, and not for the simple pleasure 
 of framing empty cadres, that science adopts the watch- 
 word divide et impera. 
 
 Nay, it is precisely because it has hesitated to impose 
 any strict delimitative rule upon itself that ethical science 
 is still so backward. Ethics till of late has been merged 
 in General Philosophy to the prejudice of both. Its 
 ultimate presuppositions have received almost exclusive 
 attention. And the basis of fact, apart from which, as I 
 believe and have tried to show, the attempt to set up 
 presuppositions is the merest waste of time, has for the 
 most part been supplied by prejudice, by imagination, 
 and by the kind of uncritical history that embodies both 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 237 
 
 these sources of error in their most insidious form. 
 Ethical science, then, as one amongst many sciences 
 (sundry of which, indeed, are likewise ' moral,' but only in 
 the sense in which Mill spoke of the ' moral sciences '), 
 must confine itself to its special task, if it is to throw 
 light on what is but an aspect, though a highly important 
 aspect, of the problem — what are the conditions of the 
 best life possible for man. 
 
 § 1 1. (c) And now to complete our account of the limita- 
 tions of moral philosophy. It is surely obvious that, in 
 neither of its complementary forms, neither as science 
 pronouncing indicatives nor as art issuing imperatives, is 
 theory equivalent to practice, or moral theory to moral 
 practice. That our one hope lies in trying to think 
 rationally I do indeed believe. But a life that was all 
 rationality — a rationality, so to speak, that 'did itself — 
 were a condition of existence which even the ' metalogician ' 
 finds it difficult to conceive, and which at any rate 
 he would scarcely regard as possible ' for us.' 
 
 I am not simply recurring to the ' fact ' of instinct — 
 of forces that impinge on the moral nature ' from without.' 
 There are other forces in the background of consciousness 
 that, if not wholly blind, as the instincts, are at least 
 purblind. Constantly we hear the voice of reason 
 without being able to obey, and, like Goethe's Fisdier, 
 ' half sink and half are drawn ' from the living atmo- 
 sphere of active consciousness into the dim choking 
 depths of some half-physical passion. No doubt even 
 at these depths there proceeds a conscious life of a kind. 
 But the laws that govern it are such as to be hardly 
 comparable with those that hold good at the higher level. 
 Interest, purpose, selectiveness, will — these terms no 
 longer apply save as psycho-physical metaphors. 
 
 Nay, not to dwell exclusively on the obscurer phases 
 of ' organic ' consciousness, let us consider for a moment 
 the opposition between reason and feeling taken in their 
 broadest sense. The subject is clearly one that will 
 intimately concern us later, seeing that Origin and 
 Validity are to one another something as a judgment 
 
238 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 based on history to a judgment based on impulse. Let 
 us note our own inevitable bias in approaching such a 
 problem as the one before us. There is at least a half- 
 truth at the back of the view that a man is born either 
 a Platonist or an Aristotelian, a Stoic or an Epicurean, 
 an intuitionist or a utilitarian, an idealist or a 
 materialist. We are spiritually- minded or worldly- 
 minded, believers or sceptics, romanticists or realists, 
 and so forth, primarily at least in virtue of a certain 
 fundamental endowment of massive sentiment. The 
 ceaseless ideas glance to and fro ; but they have rarely 
 force enough to affect the centre of temperamental gravity. 
 On the side of thought advance by give and take is rela- 
 tively easy. But constitutional prejudice, unlike thought, 
 recognises absolute differences. Indeed, save in the 
 case of the rarer spirits, reflection in regard to the 
 broader issues of life has scarcely a chance of making 
 itself felt save indirectly through the medium of what 
 may without prejudice be described as the ' social con- 
 sciousness.' The expert changes his mind for better 
 or worse. His generation, or the next, half-consciously 
 accepts the new faith. And last of all, perhaps, such 
 wholly subconscious agencies as imitation and early train- 
 ing succeed in the course of centuries in giving a fresh 
 turn to the national or racial ' trend.' 
 
 Morality, in short, implies the co-operation of disparate 
 and even discrepant factors, standing as it does to moral 
 philosophy as achievement to bare idea. Even though 
 we suppose, with the logical optimist, that the conditions of 
 such achievement are expressible in ideal form, and that they 
 must be so expressed ere perfect achievement is possible, 
 it is none the less a ' fact ' of our distracted workaday 
 experience that it is one thing to yield full intellectual 
 assent to some counsel of perfection, and quite another 
 to succeed in living up thereto. 
 
ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 239 
 
 IV. Ground-Plan of Proposed Synthesis 
 
 § 1 2. And now let us close with our task. We have to 
 reconcile as best we can the standpoints of Origin and 
 Validity regarded as presumably cognate principles of ethical 
 explanation. Perhaps, then, after all a certain measure 
 of success awaits us. A first glance would seem to show 
 that these two points of view have far more in common 
 than the uncompromising attitude of their respective 
 partisans would ever lead us to suspect. 
 
 We have just seen that Origin and Validity, though 
 standing primarily for purely theoretical points of view, 
 present an antithesis of which the force and sharpness 
 is largely due to an underlying opposition between two of 
 the deepest-lying elements of our nature. Origin is prim- 
 arily a concern of thought, Validity a matter of feeling. 
 And thought is not readily brought to act on feeling, 
 nor feeling persuaded to accommodate itself to thought. 
 Smith's ancestry is at the mercy of the dreary 
 lucubrations of the Heralds' Office. His present worth, 
 on the other hand, is as he and his neighbours feel about 
 it, and (up to a certain point, at least) is independent of 
 disclosures on the part of Burke or Debrett. 
 
 But we must not press this simile. To inquire into 
 moral origins is no piece of gratuitous snobbery to be 
 resented in the interest of the honest convictions of the 
 hour. In this connection we must be respecters of 
 descent. In the case of our moral habits and ideas 
 descent affords a most important criterion of re- 
 spectability, though taken by itself the criterion is 
 inadequate. 
 
 Moral principles are no isolated atoms. Rather they 
 may be likened (for our present purpose, at any rate) to 
 the functions of an evolving organism. The higher the 
 organism, the more completely will a hierarchy of 
 co-operating factors have been established. And in such 
 a hierarchy authority will tend to be bestowed on tried 
 service. For the latter offers a promise of further service 
 
240 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 to come, which, if occasionally disappointing, is never- 
 theless the surest amongst available means of forecast. 
 
 In the case of the virtues, then, their previous record, 
 so to speak, as distributed over the whole series of the 
 affiliated forms they have assumed in the course of their 
 history, may be accepted as a guarantee, good as far as 
 it goes, of a future career of usefulness. Changes in 
 function or even structure may have affected the family 
 identity to a considerable extent. Still, a tendency of 
 a more or less marked kind is likely in every instance 
 to be discernible. And on this it ought to be possible 
 to found some conditional anticipation of events. 
 
 If, therefore, we understand by Origin, not some 
 hypothetical first - beginning, but total back - history or 
 previous record, surely it is plain common -sense that 
 considerations of Origin must have some weight in our 
 appreciations of right and wrong. And since it is 
 equally obvious that thought unsupported by feeling is 
 powerless to found a habit of will, here, then, are manifest 
 indications of concurrence on which to base our recon- 
 ciliation of these standpoints. 
 
 § 13. Let us next for a moment take stock of the 
 misconstructions to which either principle is subject at 
 the hands of its extremer partisans. There is clearly 
 critical work for us ahead. Indeed, the outlook portends 
 that, could prejudice, presumably of a metaphysical kind, 
 be put at arm's length, a compromise between the two 
 standpoints would quickly settle itself, to the infinite gain 
 of Ethics as a specific branch of inquiry. 
 
 (a) The uncompromising champion of Origin is all 
 for ' ultimate origins ' — whatever those may be. He is 
 probably at heart a materialist. And it must be allowed 
 that contemporary evolutionism is only too ready to play 
 into his hands. He is one of those whose perverted 
 taste for the transcendental leads them to confine their 
 interest almost wholly to what may be nicknamed c the 
 science of prehistorics.' This constitutes a region of 
 inquiry wherein the imagination can roam at its own 
 sweet will, untrammelled by books of reference or other 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 241 
 
 base mechanical apparatus. Such a person has a ' short 
 way ' with the upholder of Validity. If his mythical 
 protanthropus is credited with a nasty habit of avoiding 
 cold water, then baths are a worthless convention, and 
 homo sapiens is a fool for his lixiviatory pains. 
 
 Now our general policy towards such a person will 
 plainly be to declare that he has not the smallest right to 
 speak in the name of the Comparative Method ; that 
 Origin means history ; and that the history of morals 
 means the description, anthropological and psychological, 
 of the relations which a certain group of interacting 
 spiritual, quasi - physical, and (if we find that it pays 
 ethically to go so far back) even physical forces have 
 displayed during such time as the process in question 
 has actually lain open to what may be termed in the 
 broadest sense ' historical ' observation. 
 
 (b) The no less uncompromising champion of Validity 
 may be portrayed in a sentence. He is probably an 
 idealist ; but, for all that his metaphysical prepossessions 
 ought to lead him to distinguish between ' present ' and 
 ' ideal ' worth, he has nevertheless conceived a violent 
 prejudice in favour of Things-as-they-are. 
 
 With him we must gently reason thus. " Are not 
 moral intuitions good in the good man, but, in the case at 
 least of the impenitently bad man, are they not bad ? 
 Granted, if you will, that our intuitions are bound to 
 outrun any power we may have of testing and verifying 
 their effects. But what of our generation ? Suppose that 
 you who are good and I who am bad have stuck to our 
 intuitions on the whole through life for better and worse 
 respectively, will the object-lesson we afford be wholly lost 
 on society ? Does society frame its moral standard by 
 blindly compounding a mass of intuitions? Surely the very 
 intermingling of moral natures must, as it were, generate 
 thought. Whatever its members as individuals may do, 
 society at least is sure to display some approach to 
 ' intelligence without passion ' — some capacity for impar- 
 tially assigning effects to their apparent causes. But here 
 we have a kind of moral philosophy in the making ; and 
 
 R 
 
242 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 its compiler, society, by no means deaf to historical con- 
 siderations. Clearly, then, it is our duty as moralists to 
 recognise the existence of this Ethics of common 
 sense. Nay more, it is our one and sufficient duty, by 
 contributing method in the shape of a wider inductive 
 survey and closer reasoning, to make it into an Ethics that 
 truly deserves the name." 
 
 § 14. Now in what direction do these inchoative con- 
 clusions and criticisms point ? Will they not serve to 
 give us an inkling both of what sort of synthesis we are 
 likely to achieve, and of how we must proceed so as to 
 achieve it ? 
 
 {a) Firstly, then, as regards the sort of synthesis, or 
 compromise, in prospect. Our recent conclusions are 
 suggestive in the following way. Origin, we decided, was 
 history, or performance up to date. Validity, on the 
 other hand, seemed to stand for a more or less intuitive 
 perception of the worth of certain moral principles ' in 
 themselves ' ; which perception, however, though immedi- 
 ately it tended to express itself as a feeling or sentiment, 
 yet might be regarded as to some extent embodying the 
 results of a previous acquaintance with the history of the 
 moral experiments of mankind. At the same time we 
 were made aware of the extreme indirectness of the 
 process whereby this knowledge came to exert an influ- 
 ence on the conduct of the individual. It looked as if 
 his wisest policy on the whole was to rest — provisionally, 
 as it were — on his intuitions. But we may be sure that, 
 if the facts of life, subjective and objective taken together, 
 show it to be, and to have ever been, his wisest policy to 
 put the logic of feeling before the logic of history, the 
 science which aims at rationalising morality will have to 
 pronounce the policy and the logic that guides it in the 
 strictest sense of the term reasonable. No doubt, as we 
 saw, the social consciousness is in a manner capable on 
 its own account of elucidating the conditions of moral 
 conduct. Nay more, it seemed to do this in so impersonal 
 and objective a way as hardly, one might suppose, to 
 include amongst these the condition involved in this need 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 243 
 
 and inclination on the part of the individual moral agent 
 to trust to his intuitions. The social consciousness, how- 
 ever, is something that exists between members of society 
 who before they are anything else are ' persons.' Hence 
 it cannot, in virtue of its own impersonality, undertake to 
 ignore a condition that applies, if not collectively, yet 
 distributively and individually, to those socially-minded 
 persons for whom it legislates, namely the need and in- 
 clination felt by every moral subject to interpret the moral 
 life from within itself rather than by reference to its 
 circumstances. All of which would seem to hold good 
 ethically, whether as metaphysicians we choose to call 
 this tendency ' provisional ' in view of some anticipated 
 apotheosis of the mere understanding, or prefer to regard 
 the priority of the intuitive to the discursive reason as 
 from every point of view final for the human spirit. 
 
 Thus a first glance would seem to indicate that an 
 intuitionism, tempered by critical reflection, yet character- 
 istically and predominantly an intuitionism, is the Ethics 
 natural and proper to man. So much for the claims of 
 Validity. On the other hand, the expert investigator of 
 moral Origins would likewise seem to have plenty to do. 
 His function is to be editor-in-chief of that ' critique of 
 moral confidence,' apart from which such confidence is 
 indistinguishable from mere rashness. The moral subject 
 does not walk by faith because faith is blind, but, on the 
 contrary, because, purblind as it is, it is yet the most long- 
 sighted of his mental powers. 
 
 (d) Secondly, as regards method. The criticisms of 
 the previous section foreshadowed a simple, and, I hope, 
 adequate, plan of procedure. They showed us that we 
 are dealing with two parties, each of which has been led 
 by its own ' irreconcilables ' to overstate its case. Evi- 
 dently, then, our policy as would-be arbitrators is, so to 
 speak, to summon mass-meetings of each party in turn. 
 Face to face with their pretensions, let us try to reason 
 away whatever therein seems excessive. Could this be 
 done, the formality of a final adjudication ought not to 
 delay us long. 
 
244 R - R - MARETT v 
 
 To particularise, let us first confront the 'evolutionary' 
 inquirers into Origin with the ' facts,' and ask them 
 whether their working hypotheses do not practically fail to 
 account for the almost unconditional Validity of certain of 
 the ' higher ' — more ' spiritual ' — moral motives. Then, 
 on the other hand, let us contrive such a version of the 
 rights of Validity as shall secure it undisputed primacy, 
 and yet not absolute immunity from all control, direct or 
 indirect, on the part of the study of Origins. It will 
 thereafter but remain to draw up some sort of balance- 
 sheet of concessions given and received, in order to 
 determine for each principle its legitimate share of 
 authority in morals. 
 
 V. Mere Origin as an Ethical Standpoint 
 
 S i 5. That there are evolutionists and evolutionists is 
 being gradually recognised, even by those who are disposed 
 to distrust all alike that arrogate to themselves this title. 
 For our present purpose, however, they must revert to all 
 the inconveniencies of close companionship. In regard to 
 morals, at least, let them be treated as being of one mind. 
 To the ethical portions of the Descent of Man and to the 
 Data of Ethics let there be ascribed a common faith, the 
 faith of naturalism, and a common set of working 
 principles, the principles of natural selection, of the 
 association of ideas, and so forth. Possibly injustice will 
 hereby be done to the individuals concerned (though of 
 individuals, if only for reasons of space, there will be little 
 mention for good or ill). But this is to be condoned 
 on account of the greater ' objectivity ' that may by this 
 means be given to something that can only be described 
 as an ' atmosphere ' — an atmosphere thick with meta- 
 physical bacilli which the average man of science (is he 
 not used to vitiated atmosphere ?) breathes with comfort 
 doubtless, but not perhaps without a certain cost. 
 
 The evolutionists that I have in my eye — the ex- 
 tremists of whom I would present a composite impres- 
 sion — may be charged with subscribing to some form 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 245 
 
 of that moral philosophy to which Mr. Spencer has 
 given the question-begging name of ' rational utilitari- 
 anism.' 1 In support of such a position they are wont 
 to bring forward an array of evidence which (in my 
 opinion at least) would be sufficiently convincing, were 
 it but strictly relevant. Nature, they assert, that is, 
 physiological nature, is wholly given over to an 
 'unconscious utilitarianism '—understanding here by 
 ' utility ' the quality of making simply for survival. It is, 
 for instance, in view of this ' biological end ' (for these 
 naturalistic philosophers are prodigal of psychological 
 metaphor) that protective mimicry produces the leaf- 
 pattern on the butterfly's wing. The whole essence of 
 instinct, in short, consists in this its function of 
 protectiveness. Its be-all and end-all is to modify the 
 play of the vital forces to the profit of the organism in its 
 struggle for existence. 
 
 Well, suppose we grant this. Suppose we say that, 
 regarded as an ' empirical law,' the generalisation fairly 
 fits the ' facts.' Ethically, however, the crux of the 
 utilitarian argument does not, and can not, lie here. Why 
 forsooth must we take the alleged ' law ' for more than it 
 is logically worth ? We have been presented with certain 
 1 facts ' — certain things that are, and moreover are in 
 virtue of physiological nature being what it is. But why 
 therefore conclude, as if the parity of reasoning were 
 unquestionable, that utilitarianism, in the sense of the 
 pursuit of sheer survival, provides the ' law ' {i.e. policy, 
 not generalised observation) that ought to govern the 
 conscious nature of man ? 
 
 " At any rate a most familiar crux," says the 
 naturalistic philosopher. " The things that are and 
 the things that ought to be — the inevitable ' ditch.' 
 But we have not the smallest intention of jumping it, 
 because we do not want to get across. There is fairly 
 firm walking-ground on our side. On the other side — 
 well, our friends who are after Free Will, the Absolute, 
 and so on, may be standing still in order to think better, 
 
 1 Cf. Data of Ethics, § 21. 
 
246 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 but they certainly do not seem to be getting on." — " But 
 we," let us answer, " are with you on your side of the ditch. 
 With you we entrust ourselves to the ' facts ' ; and would 
 inquire with you whether they all point one way." 
 
 § 1 6. For there are, or have been, those loftily unpractical 
 metaphysicians who would declare that to reason from 
 the ' is ' of empirical science to the ' ought ' of normative 
 Ethics is nothing short of a paralogism. That free or 
 unconditioned will has alone the right to pronounce the 
 ' ought ' is, they would contend, an axiom. Which axiom 
 rests on a priori grounds of proof. Wherefore it is bound 
 to remain wholly unaffected by any merely phenomenal 
 evidence of a ' trend,' be it physiological or psychological, 
 in human nature. 
 
 But they are at best but dubious allies of Validity that 
 thus seek to cut it off ' as if with a hatchet ' from Origin. 
 Moreover, whilst their talk makes for unconditional dualism, 
 they live (like the rest of us) a life of distracted monism. 
 The ' ought ' of their practice gives the lie to the absolute 
 ' ought ' of their books. To their concrete consciousness 
 (for are not they, even as we are, human ?) the ' ought ' of 
 practical life is a unity qualified by an inner diversity. It 
 is two things at once — subject to actual warring experi- 
 ences, and assertive of a de jure authority to combine these 
 under a law. No, there is almost more hope for that other 
 apriorist Mr. Spencer, who, if he renders ' ought ' com- 
 pletely superfluous by treating it as the empty subjective 
 echo of an inflexible objective ' is,' at any rate errs in the 
 cause of synthesis. And even cocksure materialistic 
 synthesis is better than the dualism that spells philo- 
 sophic despair. 
 
 Let us, then, stick to our initial resolve to be 
 experimental. Let us entrust ourselves to the guidance, 
 uncertain though it needs must be, of a critical empiricism. 
 For us there shall be a psychological ' ought ' that is no 
 less empirical fact in its way than the uncompromising 
 'is ' of instinct. We shall frankly admit it as part of our 
 working hypothesis with regard to moral obligation that 
 certain determinations ' from without ' do as a matter of 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 247 
 
 ' fact ' form a moment m it. On the other hand, we 
 shall no less frankly assume on the strength of 
 ' appearances ' — on the testimony of consciousness, to wit 
 — that we are also able to some extent to determine our 
 own courses. Such a double-edged provisional view is not 
 dualism, but its antidote. It postulates no ultimate incom- 
 patibility, but rather foreshadows eventual convergence. 
 Origin and Validity, if ever they are to fight it out and 
 be friends, must first be given the chance of meeting on 
 common ground. And then by all means — atXivov 
 dlXivov elire, to 8 ev vi/cclto). 
 
 §17. It will perhaps be objected, however, that some 
 evolutionists at all events are quite ready ' at a certain 
 level of thought ' to recognise this duality in unity of the 
 psychological ' ought ' ; that, in particular, a distinction 
 which opposes the psychological effects of ' natural ' to 
 those of ' conscious ' selection is finding its way into 
 current sociology. 
 
 Quite so. The distinction is there. But is it used ? 
 It is old enough, indeed, to have borne fruit. For it goes 
 back as far as Bagehot — that most level-headed of 
 the exponents of Development. Already in Physics and 
 Politics we find the contrast drawn between the savage 
 mind, " tatooed all over" with its indelible unalterable 
 notions, and the mind of one living in the " age of 
 discussion," who can put off the old man in favour of 
 the new almost as readily as he can change his coat. 
 But in the mouths of Bagehot's successors the distinction 
 survives as a vague platitude. (After all, what can be 
 vaguer than current sociology ?) Or worse, where Bagehot 
 employed a few picturesque expressions to differentiate 
 the two stages of a continuous evolution, the solemn 
 parade of a technical antithesis now gives the suggestion 
 of an absolute separation. ' The savage is selected, the 
 civilised man selects ' — this is the sort of statement we 
 read, or might read any day. 
 
 But it is just this kind of phrase-making with a 
 hatchet that is not wanted in comparative psychology. 
 For, when we speak of the effects of ' natural ' as opposed 
 
248 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 to those of ' conscious ' selection, what ought we to mean ? 
 Surely, the pure instincts. But every genuine student of 
 social and moral origins knows that, as far as the pure 
 instincts are concerned, he is, for the practical purposes of 
 his science, as far off from them when dealing with the 
 savage as when dealing with civilised man. For example, 
 the analogies between the habits of animals and the 
 customs of the most backward native of Australia prove 
 so faint as to cast no light at all on any of the special 
 developments within the moral nature of the latter. The 
 savage is no automaton. He reveals more ' inwardness ' 
 the more closely he is studied. Doubtless, however, he 
 differs from his civilised brother in being relatively 
 unselective. He too has his principles. But they come 
 to him early in life, and, when they come, they come to 
 stay. Hence Nature tends to deal with his heresies 
 somewhat after the manner of a Spanish inquisitor. She 
 gets at the heresy through the heretic. But with civilised 
 man the inquisitorial method of conversion is on the 
 whole a failure. One martyr makes many proselytes. 
 Principles have, as it were, made themselves independent 
 of persons. Consequently they must be acquitted or 
 condemned on their own merits by a jury of their peers. 
 Or, to vary the metaphor, the struggle for existence is 
 transferred from civilised mankind to his ideas. The 
 ideas fight, and the civilised individual, being ' adaptable,' 
 finds salvation by consorting with the winner. But the 
 most primitive 'Why -why' is also reflective and 
 ' adaptable ' — at any rate in regard to the smaller 
 matters of life. Generally and on the whole, he too is the 
 self-determining man, and not the animal which is 
 determined. The presumable instincts of some far-off 
 progenitor cannot, by the most ardent advocate of 
 ' parallelism ' as a principle of constructive psychology, be 
 said to have reproduced themselves at all directly or 
 exactly in the sentiments and ideas that ' react ' — as the 
 phrase is — upon his conduct. These instincts may, or 
 may not, in some metaphysical sense have been gradually 
 'translated ' into terms of consciousness. The translation, 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 249 
 
 however, is at any rate of so free a description that the 
 working psychologist is bound to distinguish, and to rate 
 at a certain value of its own, the peculiar contribution of 
 the translating mind. 
 
 What, then, is wanted in the comparative psychology 
 of morals? The answer is obvious — "Not question- 
 begging terminology, but question-solving research." For 
 ours is the empirical ' level of thought ' ; and the empiricist 
 has no business to decide a priori whether a man's sense 
 of Validity enables him wholly or in part to guide him- 
 self, or whether Origin (in the naturalistic sense of 
 instinct), operating ' subliminally ' as a vis a tergo, does 
 all the guiding for him. He must put aside extreme 
 metaphysical views, such as that all consciousness is mere 
 ' epiphenomenon,' or, contrariwise, that all consciousness 
 as such involves selectiveness in the sense of spontaneity. 
 His business is to go to the facts — to let them speak for 
 themselves. Now his facts are prima facie all of a piece, 
 in that they are all alike psychical. On the other hand 
 their import is ambiguous, some making for determinism, 
 others for freedom. Hence he is bound to work in the 
 first instance on the hypothesis of a duality in unity. He 
 must concede the possibility of there being two moments 
 in the moral nature, a ' fatal ' and a ' free.' And he must 
 try his best to disentangle these two threads, when 
 analysing a given ' mixed state ' of consciousness, by 
 means of such empirical tests as the appearances 
 themselves suggest. 
 
 When, however, we would seek for enlightenment on 
 this, or any other, point in psychological histories of moral 
 evolution, behold none worthy of the name are in 
 existence ! Who, then, shall blame us if as irresponsible 
 essayists we venture in a fragmentary way to anticipate 
 the tenor of such an investigation ? 
 
 §18. Let us, then, first consider the case of a specific 
 development throughout which the leading part would 
 seem to be played by the ' fatal ' moment in our moral 
 nature. 
 
 When the savage embarks on matrimony he is moved 
 
250 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 thereto by a considerable variety of converging ' causes ' — 
 to use a neutral term. In the background, according to 
 the evolutionist, there must be postulated as most 
 ' original ' cause of all a mating instinct. This, of all 
 ' deferred ' instincts, is, he maintains, the most complex. 
 It embraces diverse moments, the ' objects ' of which range 
 from the mere gratification of appetite, or of a jealous 
 desire for ' sexual appropriation,' to the cherishing, feeding, 
 housing, and protecting, of wives and offspring. All this, 
 however, is in the background. The practical anthro- 
 pologist knows of instinct only as a hypothetical something 
 that has precipitated and particularised itself in a mass 
 of customs. These customs, no doubt, are relatively — 
 but only relatively — ' blind.' It is true that, for example, 
 the time and mode of his marriage are virtually pre- 
 determined for the tribesman. But to say that imitation 
 and tradition ' insensibly ' put their special, and, as it were, 
 local, stamp on the plastic congenital tendency is either 
 to speak in a metaphor, or to go beyond the facts. It 
 were indeed far truer to say that a specifically social 
 consciousness, though of a rudimentary kind, has already 
 come into play. Nor are higher manifestations of its 
 influence far to seek. Marriage custom as supported either 
 by an actively persecuting public opinion, or by a system 
 of gentile vendetta encouraged by public opinion, is 
 nascent law. Or again, disasters, whether coincidental or 
 causally connected, attending the violation of marriage 
 custom concur with various other grounds and occasions 
 of belief in a supernatural principle to reinforce ancestral 
 usage with the authority of religion. And though, as 
 compared with law, religion may be somewhat capricious 
 in its choice of a social cause to champion, yet as often as 
 it happens to take the side of salutary practice, it is 
 probably the more effectual ' pro-ethical sanction ' of the 
 two. Further, with the coming into being of such legal 
 and religious ordinances — which, as a rule, will coincide 
 in their injunctions, as for instance when they jointly 
 prohibit marriage within the kin, or with certain kinsfolk 
 — there must correspondingly arise (the evolutionist at 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 251 
 
 any rate cannot disallow this appeal to his ' law of 
 association ') prudential considerations in the breast of the 
 individual. Which considerations, i must be admitted, 
 constitute integral factors in a social consciousness, seeing 
 that in respect to the conduct they enjoin, though not as 
 regards the motive they allege, they are actually on a par 
 with ethical judgments proper. Nor indeed are indica- 
 tions lacking of the existence of distinctively ethical 
 sentiments and ideas on the subject of love and marriage 
 in the minds of the most backward savages known to 
 anthropology. Two illustrations must suffice. Let us 
 note how such deliberate and solemn pronouncements as 
 the ' ten commandments ' at initiation or the wedding- 
 address — not to mention the thousand folk-tales and 
 proverbs that lightly flit from mouth to mouth — exalt 
 the virtues of the good husband for their own sake and ' in 
 themselves,' that is, as simply fine and admirable. Or 
 again, let us note how the rhapsodies of the love-sick swain 
 (though doubtless apt to be tinged with a more or less 
 delicate sensuality — such as appears so frequently in their 
 modern counterpart !) yet are found likewise to profess 
 a tenderness and disinterestedness of affection that 
 argues the presence of a certain ethical ideal amongst 
 the incentives of courtship. 
 
 § 1 9. Well (taking for what it is worth this perfunctory 
 sketch of a vastly complex development), what are we to 
 make of the ' causes ' alleged ? Do they make on the 
 whole for determinism, or do they make on the whole for 
 freedom ? On the face of them all the causes are alike 
 psychical. Some are ethical, the rest are (in Mr. Spencer's 
 phrase) ' pro-ethical.' If a non-ethical determinant, 
 namely instinct, lurk in the background, it must be 
 discovered by the flavour of ' Origin ' that it imparts to 
 its effects in consciousness. Perhaps the adherent of 
 Validity exclaims : " If the claimant cannot appear in 
 person, surely the case goes by default." — No, as empirical 
 psychologists, we have decided to hear him through his 
 representatives. If, however, these halt and hesitate in 
 their report, that is his look-out. 
 
252 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 Let us allow, then, in regard to these causes, that, 
 although all are alike in being psychical, and even, in 
 a broad sense, purposive, they form a mass of ambiguous 
 appearances. In the case of some the ' biological end ' 
 of sheer survival seems 'really' to be subserved. In the 
 case of others the enhancing of the worth of life seems 
 sufficient motive ' in itself Sometimes the (assumed) 
 primordial instinct seems directly reproduced in the 
 conscious tendency. Sometimes it seems replaced by 
 something independently authoritative. Nor is the 
 ambiguity noticeable merely when we look at the facts 
 of consciousness 'from the outside.' When we look into 
 ourselves it feels at times as if we were half unconsciously 
 shaping our policy to suit our instinctive leanings, at 
 other times as if we were compelling those leanings 
 to subordinate themselves to our sense of worth and 
 right. 
 
 Let us, therefore, give the naturalistic thinker a fair 
 hearing when he pleads for 'original' survival -seeking 
 bias as the predominant moment in man's career as 
 a domestic being. Let us even put up with such 
 exaggerations as there may be in the statement of his 
 case. When the most that he can affirm is a relative 
 predominance, and no definite criterion of predominance 
 is to hand, the literary device of ' colouring ' may not 
 unpardonably be employed as a scientific make-shift. 
 
 8 20. " The moral sentiment," we shall suppose our evolu- 
 tionist to argue, " which makes itself felt in the domestic 
 virtues, is on the whole and predominantly but the slavish 
 echo of a congenital tendency. With this tendency the 
 sentiment in question is doubtless out of harmony at times. 
 To that extent, however, it is out of harmony with man's 
 real and abiding welfare — to wit, the welfare that consists 
 in surviving and causing to survive. The home life of 
 savages may present forbidding features to the idealisers 
 of love and marriage. Their semi-instinctive customs, 
 nevertheless, are capable of sustaining a breed of hardy, 
 and so presumably happy, men. Nor does the civilised 
 man, for all that he may be shocked to hear it, depart 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 253 
 
 far from the ways of his remote forebears when bent on 
 founding a family. With him as with them love is 
 mostly ' blind.' Reasons, moral or otherwise, fail on 
 the whole to affect it. Civilised love pays little conscious 
 attention to material, and less to physiological, considera- 
 tions touching the future. Nor can it even be affirmed 
 that a coldly rational matrimonial policy when tried has 
 been found to pay. Nor would any one maintain that 
 the schemes of marriage reform propounded by the wise 
 have redounded to their credit. Or once more, is it not 
 significant what little prominence is given in the writings 
 of the moralist to the canons of domestic duty — 
 understood in any broad and scientific sense ? To marry 
 ' well ' is hardly reckoned amongst the cardinal virtues. 
 And why ? Because the trend of instinct renders ethical 
 precept on this head practically superfluous. You say 
 you are free. You say that ' follow Nature ' in our sense 
 of ' Nature ' cannot serve as a general rule of life. That 
 may be, or may not be. At any rate, however, you must 
 admit that, in respect to marriage, Nature, unwilling that 
 the preservation of the race should depend on the 
 fluctuations of opinion as to the merits of this or that 
 ideal, has made what is virtually a saving-clause in the 
 charter of freedom you suppose her to have bestowed on 
 man. ' Follow Nature/ in fact, in regard to marriage, 
 is a rule that is capable of satisfying prudence and 
 conscience alike. It is not in point to reply that various 
 pro -ethical and ethical sanctions have a perceptible 
 ' reactive ' effect on the family life of the veriest savage. 
 These influences are ' really ' effective only in respect to 
 the choice of means. The supreme end of race-propaga- 
 tion is ' given ' all along. And it is no less ' given ' when 
 it is somehow represented within the field of conscious 
 attention than when it operates occultly as a pure 
 biological force. You may insist, if you will, on the 
 ideal possibilities rather than on the actual achievements 
 of conscious selection in this connection. But harp as 
 you will on the intrinsic reasonableness of some Platonic 
 marriage-machine that shall knit woof and warp together 
 
254 R - R - MARETT v 
 
 according to the principles of an enlightened psychology, 1 
 you cannot make out much of a case for the superiority 
 of man's to primal nature's ways. As far as the history 
 of marriage goes, our evolutionary utilitarianism with its 
 doctrine that sheer survival is the ' real ' standard of the 
 good stands approved by your practical failure to point 
 in this case to a self-supporting spiritual motive that 
 works — that puts itself prominently at the head of affairs, 
 and justifies its position in consciousness by the felt 
 excellence of its peculiar fruits." 
 
 And now as impartial judges let us give ear to the 
 other side. 
 
 § 21. The upholder of conscious selection may be sup- 
 posed to open his reply by remarking that his opponent 
 has considerably underrated the ' reactive ' effects of such 
 forces as religion and morality on love and marriage ; 
 that, consequently, he will set forth with all due regard 
 to the claims of history the development of a principle — 
 the principle of Purity — which has precisely this appear- 
 ance about it, that, whether ultimately a product of 
 natural selection or not, it has at any rate cut itself 
 entirely free from instinct, and acquired the position 
 of an independent self-feeding focus of moral energy. 
 
 The sense of moral purity, according to the evolutionist, 
 is the outcome of taboo. How taboo itself arose, however, 
 he is hardly able to explain. Why should man ' in the 
 beginning ' by force of instinct have avoided contact with 
 certain things by no means always palpably noxious or un- 
 clean in themselves ? And why — when all allowance is 
 made for the sanctioning power of custom, that ' instinct to 
 conserve instincts ' — was this special kind of avoidance 
 made so absolute, so invincibly will-compelling, by the 
 world-wide sentiment of the race ? 
 
 It will be said — and perhaps, historically speaking, not 
 without good reason — that awe of the Uncanny is in the 
 main responsible for this attitude of ' reverential detestation' 
 on the part of the savage towards so much that he need 
 but understand to appreciate and use. But what naturalistic 
 
 1 Cf. Plato, Politicus, 310. 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 255 
 
 explanation will account for the existence and power of 
 this mystic awe ? The follower of Darwin will doubtless 
 be content to describe it as a ' by-product ' of the growth 
 of the intellect. But is this any explanation at all ? Is it 
 not merely a curt restatement of the fact to be explained ? 
 This fact is that certain manifestations of mind to which 
 the evolutionist cannot ascribe any function — that is, 
 which do not seem to him to subserve directly and in 
 themselves the so-called ' ends ' of natural selection — do 
 nevertheless persist by the side of other activities which 
 he regards as palpably furthering survival. All that ' by- 
 product ' does, therefore, is to mask the gratuitous 
 assumption that some ' latent affinity ' compels the two 
 groups of phenomena, the useful and the useless, to stand 
 or fall together. ' By-product,' in short, represents but 
 the colourless negation of a raison d'etre — presumably 
 designed as a counterfoil to the teleological view that the 
 so-called by-product exists and persists on the strength of 
 the promise it contains, in other words, of its eventual 
 destination. " But no," replies the evolutionist ; " ' by- 
 product ' has doubtless its metaphysical implications of a 
 nature unfavourable to teleology, but it likewise has its 
 strictly scientific use. It serves to mark the actual, 
 though possibly unexplained, connection between a 
 particular form of ' irrational quantity ' and a particular 
 race-preserving tendency. Thus for example, the mystic 
 horror which the savage displays towards a corpse or 
 towards an issue of blood may be connected by the use 
 of a notion such as ' by-product ' or ' overflow ' with that 
 definitely protective instinct which warns him, or at any 
 rate warned his ancestors, of the proximity of death and 
 danger. These taboos, in short, fall into line with what the 
 biologist knows as ' cases of misapplied instinct' 1 Nature 
 works on a system of averages, and has to allow for a margin 
 of error." To all of which the champion of Validity 
 replies that expressions such as * by-product,' ' overflow,' 
 and ' misapplied instinct ' may have a certain designatory 
 value, but that their explanatory value is nil, 
 
 1 Cf. Darwin, Descent of Man, i. 3 ad Jin, 
 
256 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 " Meanwhile," he continues, " is it not at all events 
 a far cry from these questionable rudiments to that 
 sentiment of moral purity which in the heart of civilised 
 man calls aloud (with so much, be it admitted, of the 
 solemn insistence of primitive taboo) for the scrupulous 
 avoidance in thought and word and deed of all that by 
 the aid of its own self-attested standard it judges to be 
 morally contaminating and abominable ? Doubtless the 
 evolutionist will be forward with his ' explanation ' — to 
 wit, his mere ' exterior history ' — of the transition. He 
 will tell us, for example, that lustration was first of all 
 adopted as a means of ' drowning the infection ' — at this 
 point, probably, already conceived as literally a ' spiritual ' 
 infection ; and that afterwards, not so much by analogy 
 as by a direct extension of scope, lustration and the 
 lustral idea came to be applied to the cleansing of ' sin,' 
 namely the infection derived by contact (at first including 
 even involuntary contact) with certain impure things, as, 
 for instance, bloodshed. But, granting the plausibility of 
 this ' exterior history,' where do we find in it any 
 explanation of the fact that man's sense of purity has 
 shaken itself free of its back-history in becoming rational 
 and ethical ? Taboo is virtually irrational. It may 
 indeed in a secondary way further tribal survival by 
 strengthening pre-existing habits of self-discipline. But 
 primarily, directly, intrinsically, of its own right as an 
 independent institution, it has no utilitarian function of 
 this or any other kind to which the adherent of mere 
 Origin can refer us. Taboo may provide the holy water. 
 But it does not provide the sentiment that puts the water 
 to a moral use." 
 
 § 22. Perhaps the time has scarcely come for us to attempt 
 to arbitrate between the rival pleaders. But it certainly 
 would seem as if in his concluding question the supporter 
 of Validity offers something of a poser to the rational 
 utilitarian. " Whence," he asks him, " is this sentiment 
 of the moral value of Purity, this appreciation of the 
 virtue that ' holiness ' imparts ? " To which the only 
 possible reply forthcoming from the side of Origin must 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 257 
 
 be somewhat as follows. " Ethical sentiment at first grew 
 strong within its proper nursery, the field of domestic 
 and tribal co-operation. Then it proceeded to moralise 
 religion, art, and the various other intellectual superfluities 
 that man had found time to enjoy, or groan under, by the 
 way. This moralisation imparted to these latter as it 
 were an entirely fresh dose of life. Thus, though useless 
 as regards their original proclivities, they have been 
 actually enabled to enrol themselves amongst the factors 
 which make for the survival of civilised man." 
 
 But these superfluities that turn out by a ' chance ' not 
 to have been superfluous after all — are they ' natural,' even 
 according to the working hypothesis which the evolutionist 
 makes concerning ' Nature ' ? Surely it is putting a 
 considerable strain on the ' Happy Accident theory ' to call 
 upon it to account, not merely for ' spontaneous variations,' 
 but likewise for the ' spontaneous ' persistence of all sorts 
 of superfluities. These obliging ' sports ' of nature 
 persevere in their being although there is no ' biological 
 end ' for them to serve. Then lo and behold, one day the 
 moral consciousness awakes to the fact of their existence, 
 and does them the supererogatory favour of providing 
 them with an ideal end ! 
 
 We are not called upon here to decide whether the 
 naturalistic ' explanation ' of the genesis of the idea of 
 moral purity is metaphysically possible or impossible — 
 whether it is metaphysically conceivable or not that 
 ' external nature,' like man, is capable of indulging in 
 sports and slips, and then of making up the lost ground 
 by subsequently turning them to useful account. Our 
 concern here is entirely with the balance of empirical 
 probability. We have left behind us that serene, if barren, 
 region of philosophy where all compromise between the 
 claims of Matter and Mind is on a priori grounds for- 
 bidden. We are allowing that some of our propensities 
 may bear as it were automatically on simple race- 
 preservation, whilst others again may possess as ideal 
 and spiritual motives of conduct a validity of their own. 
 And we are appealing to Origin in the sense of history 
 
 s 
 
258 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 for the means of verifying, or refuting, our working hypo- 
 thesis. 
 
 Such, then, being our method, let us be the less ready 
 to conspire offhand with the adherent of mere Origin — of 
 the theory that the ' unconscious utilitarianism ' of outer 
 nature is the real force at work in the moral consciousness 
 — to conceal what even he must allow to be gaps, 
 inevitable, perhaps, but still gaps, in an otherwise 
 plausible argument If the history of the idea of moral 
 purity ' appears ' to testify to the moralisation, by a free 
 act on the part of our spiritual nature, of an unmoral and 
 purposeless taboo, then, putting aside for the moment all 
 metaphysical prepossessions, let us allow that the balance 
 of empirical probability is in favour of the spontaneous 
 origination of a specific ideal by the mind. And so too, 
 if previously it appeared that the evolutionary historian of 
 the development of love and marriage made out his case, 
 let us be prepared to admit as regards another specific 
 ' end ' that the mind was on the whole but passively re- 
 affirming what the animal nature had predetermined. 
 
 §23. It would occupy too much space, were even the 
 evidence available, to proceed on these lines to examine 
 the human virtues one by one with the object of dividing 
 them, according as a ' fatal ' or a ' free ' moment seemed 
 to predominate in their constitution, into ' natural ' and 
 ' spiritual ' — or whatever we are to call those of them 
 which on the hypothesis of an all-controlling struggle for 
 bare existence have to be regarded as more or less 
 unessential and adscititious. Indeed, were it possible 
 thus to deal with them on their individual merits, it is 
 exceedingly probable that we should soon be driven to 
 abandon this method of hard-and-fast contrast in favour 
 of some more discriminative mode of treatment. As it is, 
 however, we must work to suit our limitations. The 
 most we can attempt, before proceeding to sum up on the 
 question of the value of mere Origin as an ethical stand- 
 point, is a rough classification of the virtues under heads 
 as determined by their history, and a wholesale character- 
 isation of the prevailing purport of each group according 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 259 
 
 as it tends to emphasise the one or the other kind of end, 
 the ' natural ' or the ' spiritual' 
 
 Regarded as matter of history the virtues seem 
 naturally to fall into five groups— the Domestic, the Tribal 
 or National, the International, the Personal, and the 
 Transcendental. Of course this, as any other classification 
 of the kind, must be pronounced ' artificial ' in the sense 
 that it is nothing but a piece of student's apparatus. If 
 it has a principle behind it, however, it is this eminently 
 natural and historical principle, that, speaking very 
 broadly, this arrangement of the virtues corresponds with 
 the order of their appearance in time. Some sort of 
 incoherent family life comes first ; then through the clan 
 something worthy of the name of tribe is reached ; then 
 syncecism, intermarriage, trade, religious proselytisation, 
 and, not least of all, war itself break down the hostile 
 barriers between people and people ; then, compara- 
 tively late in the day, the unit (who before was but a 
 fraction) 'finds himself; and, latest of all, the aspira- 
 tions of certain of the most unitary of the units 
 towards the highest kind of individuality lead them 
 to sacrifice everything to this, or some closely allied, ideal 
 principle. 
 
 If, then, we accept for working purposes this 
 classification of the virtues into five groups, we shall find 
 that the first two groups appear on the whole to subserve 
 the ' natural ' end of race-preservation, and the two last to 
 make for a ' spiritual ' self-perfection, whilst the remaining 
 group presents intermediate features. 
 
 § 24. Of the Domestic virtues we have heard something 
 already, though we were not allowed to notice in any 
 detail the many-sided nature of the influence they exert 
 on race-preserving conduct, as notably, for instance, when 
 they pave a way for the advent of the National virtues by 
 the promotion of gentile solidarity. Affection, dutifulness, 
 respect, fidelity, and so forth, as between husband and 
 wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters, and 
 generally as between all those who are bound together by 
 ' kindly ' (that is, kin-ly) relations, are to all appearance 
 
2 6o R. R. MARETT v 
 
 the outcome of a single ' natural ' impulse ; which impulse, 
 if it undergo considerable modification in respect to the 
 channels along which it flows as the ' control ' of 
 consciousness increases, yet at all events would seem to 
 keep fairly true to its assumed ' original ' destination, the 
 maintenance of a healthy and fertile breed of men. No 
 doubt there are certain changes which go near to affecting its 
 main character. For example, as, with the development 
 of the National virtues, society grows more widely 
 coherent, the mutual support of the whole brotherhood of 
 blood-relations becomes less and less essential to the 
 prosperity of each separate household ; so that the function 
 of the family ' instinct ' is to this extent curtailed. Or 
 again, as there is gradually developed a refined sense of 
 the claims of personality, the ' utilitarian ' aspects of 
 marriage tend to fade into the background, and romantic 
 love as between ' kindred souls ' comes to assert itself 
 under favourable circumstances as truly an ' end in itself.' 
 To which, however, the supporter of the theory of the 
 predominating ' natural ' fatality may not without some 
 reason reply that, in the former case, one instinct is but 
 foregoing a part of its dominion in order to make room 
 for another, whilst, as regards the latter case, he may 
 urge that the exigencies of ' spiritual love ' do not at any 
 rate tend seriously to interfere with the workings of the 
 underlying physiological cause. 
 
 § 25. Again, it is a colourable view that the National 
 virtues, no less than the Domestic, must be ranked amongst 
 the indispensable conditions of a persistent society regarded 
 simply as a kind of ' natural ' organism. The traces are 
 apparent in man of a ' social instinct,' which, by bringing 
 about a devotion to common interests, a friendliness of 
 intercourse, and a willingness to give and take, converts 
 the state into a compact body, capable as such of 
 asserting itself with success as against competing associa- 
 tions. Patriotism, good-fellowship, and justice (not to 
 mention in their detail the virtues subordinate to these 
 three, whereof loyalty, charity, and honesty are severally 
 examples) would seem to be the triple historical outcome 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 261 
 
 of what — to borrow Kipling's phrase — may be called the 
 ' pack-law ' of the social animal — 
 
 As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward 
 
 and back — 
 For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the 
 
 Wolf is the Pack. 
 
 Doubtless, however, the history of these virtues has 
 its other side. The spirit of patriotism as exalted in the 
 self-sacrifice of a Decius almost touches the Transcen- 
 dental virtues. The refinements of social intercourse, 
 as interpreted, for instance, by Aristotle in his analysis 
 of the ' elegant virtues,' seem to take their place less 
 naturally amongst the objects of an ' art of living ' than 
 amongst those of an ' art of living well' Or once more, 
 justice, the sympathetic respect for another's ' rights,' 
 surely presupposes as a condition of the sympathy a 
 ' sense of rights ' on the part of the individual such as 
 lies at the root of the Personal virtues. Allowing for 
 all this, however, on the ground that our present contrast 
 of tendencies is admittedly a drastic expedient, let us 
 concede to the party of mere Origin that perhaps the 
 character which shows uppermost in this group, when 
 everything has been taken into account that tells 
 the other way, is still that of ' preliminary virtues ' — 
 appliances of group -survival, without which man must 
 live ' cyclopically,' nay, in such a condition of chaotic 
 atomism that, as the Jungle Book suggests, not even 
 homo homini lupus would any longer be predicable of such 
 a being. 
 
 §26. To attempt to represent the Personal virtues, that 
 is, the various forms of commendable self-respect, as 
 altogether lacking a ' natural ' base would be, of course, 
 to break off all communications with the allies of Origin. 
 But this is precisely what, at our empirical ' level,' we 
 can not, and must not, do. Let us, therefore, go so far 
 as even to accept the theory that, of all the instincts 
 proper to the biological organism, self-preservation is 
 the most original. " For the individual organism," argue 
 the defenders of this view, " is historically prior to the 
 
262 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 social. It is true that the most rudimentary forms of 
 life look like 'jellified republics.' But their constitution 
 is not really political. Either the parts cohere, and the 
 economy they compose is therefore to some extent 
 physiologically ' internal/ and thus individual as against 
 them. Or they tend to split off and become each an 
 independent centre of vitality — once more the individual." 
 Well, be this as it may, let us be prepared to allow that 
 the socially respectable tendencies of man as self-regarding 
 — the laudable ambitions, implanted in him by tradition 
 and training no less than by instinct, to live, to love, to 
 own, to enjoy, to be distinguished in his person, to be 
 forcible in his personality — are in some degree, at all 
 events, the historical outcome of that nisus to persist 
 though it be at the expense of others, which all living 
 matter manifests in one or another form. 
 
 But is this the only side — or the striking side — to 
 the history of these virtues ? Has not the original nisus 
 in a most remarkable way ' translated ' itself out of a 
 mere ' will to live ' into a ' will to live well ? ' " What 
 does not bear on survival is by-product," is the curt 
 answer of the upholder of natural selection. Well, we 
 cannot discuss that ' explanation ' here. At least, 
 however, let us note that, in connection with the Personal 
 virtues, ' Nature ' would seem to allow the superfluous ' will 
 to live well' considerable play. It is not the force and 
 range of the human appetite for personal well-being that 
 is, naturalistically, so unaccountable. It is rather the 
 extraordinary extent to which that appetite, when 
 circumscribed by a due regard for the similar appetites 
 of others, can be indulged without prejudice, and 
 yet without apparent assistance, to the struggle for bare 
 existence. Most unaccountable fact of all from this — and 
 indeed from any — point of view, man would seem actually 
 capable of deliberately framing, and carrying out, the 
 resolution to put an end to his life. But can this be 
 regarded as mere exhaustion and pale extinction on the 
 part of the natural propensity to persist ? Is it not, rather, 
 to all appearance the positive conquest of instinct by 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 263 
 
 something absolutely alien to it ? How can instinct have 
 generated that out of itself which from above, as it were, 
 turns upon it and slays it ? How can the stream rise 
 proprio motu above its source ? 
 
 § 27. At precisely the other end of the moral scale to 
 suicide we find the Transcendental virtues, and from them 
 may hope to obtain a less ambiguous illustration of the power 
 of the human will to prevail against Nature ' even to the 
 death.' These virtues embody the aspiration towards a 
 more or less unconditional perfection of existence — the 
 ' life after God.' To the most refined spirits they appear 
 to contain ' in themselves ' the promise and foretaste of 
 such a life. Holiness, pure unselfishness, the love of the 
 ideal — these seem not so much to be 'of the 'natural 
 life ' as ' above ' it. Representing, then, as they do the 
 supremest and maturest effort of morality to transcend itself, 
 these virtues do not lend themselves readily to historical 
 derivation, if ' history ' is to mean biology. No doubt the 
 biologist can point to plenty of instances of apparent 
 self-devotion occurring in the animal world — the mother- 
 bird that risks her life for her offspring, and so on. But 
 does the parallel quite hold good — any more than that of 
 the savage, or indeed the civilised man, who is prepared 
 to die fighting for home and country ? Does such 
 bravery, save in rare and easily distinguishable cases, 
 amount to ' devotion to principle ' ? It is by the lofty and 
 broad ideality attaching to them as motives, rather than 
 by any particular form of objective manifestation, that the 
 Transcendental virtues make themselves known. Which 
 essential ideality of theirs it is that indicates a close 
 connection between their development and that of the 
 higher forms of Personal virtue. For it is characteristic 
 of them that, whereas they cause themselves to be pursued 
 almost apart from considerations of personal or even 
 national survival, they nevertheless, by the intense subjec- 
 tivity of their appeal to the individual consciousness, tend 
 to suggest a quasi-personal interest and value that is 
 somehow able to outlast the phenomenal fact of death. 
 " Simply the miser and his gold," says the evolutionary 
 
264 R- R- MARETT v 
 
 associationalist. " Your ' martyr of conscience,' just like 
 the suicide or any other kind of madman, is a victim of 
 the idee fixe!' — Perhaps. But this is at all events to put 
 additional burthen on the theory that Nature in the sense of 
 blind Chance stumbles along a mean of coincidences, and 
 touches passing perfection in producing and preserving the 
 ' average man.' 
 
 §28. The International virtues may be taken last in 
 order on the ground that they present mixed features. Thus, 
 on the one hand, the principle of ' syncecism ' may be 
 invoked in favour of a ' natural ' explanation of their 
 development. For, undoubtedly, it furthers group-survival 
 that the hospes should under certain conditions be 
 recognised in the hostis. The area of trade, marriage, 
 military alliance, and so forth, being widened, the tribe is 
 reinvigorated by the introduction of fresh blood and fresh 
 ideas. On the other hand, a humanitarianism, which 
 contemplates ' the parliament of Man ' as an ideal pos- 
 sibility, and which, moreover, has borne actual fruit in such 
 an act as the abolition of slavery throughout Christendom, 
 has rather the appearance of a spontaneous creation on 
 the part of our moral and rational nature. The alternative 
 view presumably is that, in so far as humanitarianism does 
 not ' assist natural selection ' by serving as a specious 
 cloak for national aggrandisement, it is an ' overflow,' and 
 a dangerous kind of ' overflow ' at that. A curious notion 
 this, that Nature should grow ever more wild and freakish 
 in her promptings as man feels himself to attain more 
 nearly to steadfastness of ideal purpose and endeavour ! 
 
 § 29. And now to sum up on the subject of the value of 
 mere Origin as a standpoint and starting-point of ethical 
 explanation. 
 
 We have tried to look at matters from the point of 
 view of Origin (understanding, however, by Origin, not 
 any occult fons emanationis, but simply past history) ; 
 and what do we find ? Not by any means that the 
 moral of the facts is unambiguous ; much less that it 
 is unambiguously in favour of the contentions of ' rational 
 utilitarianism ' — or, to give it the name it deserves, 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 265 
 
 ' naturalistic utilitarianism.' For there was borne in upon 
 us (by the help, it is true, of some very violent contrasts) the 
 suggestion of a tendency superinducing itself upon a 
 tendency — of a spiritual process growing out of a natural 
 process, and yet modifying, and even transcending, it. It 
 was far from appearing that survival (in the evolutionary 
 sense of race-preservation) is the end that wholly, or on 
 the whole, has weighed consciously with the successful 
 type of man. On the contrary, it took some special 
 pleading to show even that survival was the general 
 motive presented in the ' preliminary virtues.' Thus the 
 appearances seemed to tell, if anything, against the theory 
 of ' rational utilitarianism,' so far as the latter might be 
 supposed to base itself on experience proper, and, in its 
 'normative' capacity, to argue from a genuinely empirical 
 ' is ' to a no less empirical, that is, experimental, ' ought.' 
 It was, however, fairly obvious all along that, in so far as 
 it pretended to rest on history, ' rational utilitarianism ' was 
 a sham. Its appeal was never to veritable history, but to 
 something conceived to lie at the back of history, namely, 
 the ' is really ' of an a priori metaphysical naturalism — 
 something, therefore, no better, but, so far as it is given to 
 masquerading, worse, than the confessedly a priori ' ought 
 really ' of the transcendentalist intransigeant. With 
 a priori naturalism, then, considered as a ' method of 
 origins ' which offers to provide an ethical ' norm,' let us 
 now shortly deal. 
 
 Evolutionary naturalism as a metaphysical theory of 
 experience as a whole undertakes to formulate an all- 
 embracing view of the facts of life. Needless to say, 
 however, it finds this an excessively difficult thing to do. 
 A certain pair of disparates, namely consciousness and 
 biological process, it is quite at a loss to reconcile. Hence, 
 unification being apparently beyond its reach, it has to 
 resort to a pis-aller. It attempts simplification. It 
 pronounces biological process the ' reality ' and conscious- 
 ness the ' appearance.' Its definition of life is that it is a 
 conditional inheritability of bodily functioning. Its essence 
 consists in the inheritability — the quality it has of allowing 
 
266 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 itself to be handed on from generation to generation. 
 Thus life is a sort of Athenian torch-race. The torch, 
 which is consciousness of life, is a wholly decorative 
 feature of the ceremony. For it cannot afford an incentive 
 to the runners. Not merely has it no value in itself. It 
 cannot even stand to them as the symbol of something 
 else of value to them — as the symbol of a possible prize 
 to be won. 
 
 Consciousness, then, being as such no conditioning 
 element in the process it ' appears along with,' but its 
 empty echo, all our valuations, seeing that they are 
 necessarily ' for ' a consciousness, are empty echoes too. 
 Meanwhile naturalism has projected itself beyond con- 
 sciousness. The tale runs that a despairing drill-sergeant 
 once bade his awkward squad — " fall out and look at 
 themselves." It is not added that they actually did so. 
 Naturalism, however, has performed this precise feat. 
 But it is seemingly more easy to project oneself beyond 
 consciousness (facilis descensus /) than from beyond to 
 project oneself back. To pass from this materialism to 
 the formulation of an ethical norm — from the assertion 
 that all valuations are superfluous to the pronouncement 
 that one kind of valuation is, notwithstanding, better than 
 another — demands of one the kind of intellectual back- 
 somersault that is apt to land one anywhere and nowhere 
 at once. Not thus, however, does it appear to naturalism. 
 " Though we be but echoes," it says, " we must try to do 
 the echoing properly. Now reality is persistence in time. 
 Therefore persistence in time is what we ought really to 
 aim at. For only consider ! It is really that which we are 
 aiming at all along — if we would but recognise the fact ! " 
 — But who can make anything of such a rigmarole ? 
 
 § 30. Naturalism, however, is not always of this uncom- 
 promising kind (though indeed the more rigorous form of 
 the creed is popular enough). There is also naturalism 
 the mere ' point of view.' Suppose, then, that a thinker 
 of ' scientific ' leanings puts his case thus. " I do not 
 pretend to unify. I am content (as you have said) to 
 simplify. I merely wish to see how far a ' biological 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 267 
 
 view ' of life will carry me. I for one reckon existence as 
 the condition of all good things. Well (metaphorically, 
 if you insist), so does Nature. But Nature, according to 
 biology (which no doubt, as you will remind me, is 
 simplifying within its own sphere when it uses function as 
 an evaluatory test), has its ' sports,' its purposeless by- 
 products. Then why not consciousness too ? Trans- 
 ferring my biological standard to Ethics, I ask : Are these 
 idealistic excesses — " exultations, agonies " — of the moral 
 consciousness, on which you have laid so much stress, 
 useful, that is, favourable to the prolongation of man's 
 existence on earth ? If they positively interfere with 
 this result, I for one vote that they go. If they neither 
 hinder nor help, I say that they are not worth the 
 serious attention of a truly practical man. If, however, 
 they are of use, biologically speaking as it were — ah ! 
 that would be another matter altogether." 
 
 To which let us reply : " As tried by your test of 
 ' function ' (which, whether you allow it or not, harks back 
 to the idea of reality as persistence in time), surely these 
 excesses, as you are pleased to call them, of the moral 
 consciousness are no purposeless accidents, since they are 
 not eliminated as the race evolves, in the way that 
 biological ' sports ' are eliminated, but persist, nay flourish 
 ever the more wantonly the farther man proceeds along 
 the path of secular change." 
 
 Now doubtless there are more heroic ways in which 
 philosophers have sought to rid themselves of such a foe. 
 They have, for instance, refused on a priori grounds to 
 regard goodness as in any way conditional — whether upon 
 the maintenance of the bodily life, or otherwise. But we 
 have chosen to meet the empiricist on his own ' level.' 
 We have appealed to his own standard of reality — per- 
 sistence in time. If, then, it turn out when the ' facts ' are 
 examined that certain moral sentiments and ideas, to 
 which he cannot ascribe any particular race -preserving 
 function (for it must be a particular and specific function 
 if he is to conform to the requirements of biology), do 
 nevertheless refuse to be eliminated, but persist and acquire 
 
268 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 strength as they go, will he not admit that they have a 
 prima facie empirical validity of their own ? And suppose 
 he do, will not he go a step farther ? 
 
 We are not imputing to this upholder of naturalism in 
 a modified form any definite materialistic creed. We do 
 not ask him, therefore, to reconsider such a theory as that 
 consciousness is an echo, an epiphenomenon, or what not, 
 in favour of the view that consciousness may after all be 
 capable of ' loading the dice ' — of bringing about co- 
 incidences in a way that the mathematical doctrine of 
 chances cannot warrant. We are only asking him to 
 proceed a step farther at the same empirical 'level' that was 
 adopted at the start. He is supposed to have allowed on the 
 strength of the historical ' appearances ' that a prima facie 
 validity of their own attaches to certain ' spiritual ' 
 tendencies as distinguished from other ' natural ' tendencies 
 which have a use that is biologically obvious. Well, at 
 this point — so far as history goes, so far as the standpoint 
 of mere Origin serves him — he stops. There seems to 
 be, historically speaking, so little to choose between the 
 validity of the one, and the validity of the other, set of 
 motives, that we obtain no unambiguous ' is ' with which 
 our experimental ' ought ' may be brought to conform. 
 We are left inquiring : Which of the two kinds of motive 
 has, empirically and for us, the higher validity ? Mere 
 Origin, it seems, cannot tell us. But is there no supple- 
 mentary test ? The following, then, is the further step 
 which we ask our friend of ' scientific ' leanings to take 
 with us : Will he stand by and offer us his criticisms 
 whilst we consult our inner sense of Validity to see 
 whether it can supply us with a moral criterion of a more 
 nicely discriminative kind than mere Origin seems able to 
 provide ? 
 
 VI. Validity as an Ethical Standpoint 
 
 \ 3 i. Our farther step, it has been agreed with the up- 
 holder of naturalism as a mere point of view, must not take 
 us beyond the.empirical ' level.' In a sense, then, we can- 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 269 
 
 not leave history. We may have done with ' back-history ' 
 — with mere Origin. But there is also present history — 
 the latest, still unfinished, chapter of the history of Man. 
 Which latest chapter may, for our present purpose, be 
 held to consist of psychological matter, and that mostly 
 of the kind acquired by ' introspection.' Now intro- 
 spection, paradoxical as it may sound, is essentially a 
 historical method. The introspective psychologist as such 
 undertakes to be [ scientific' But this is to have already 
 transcended the bounds of a purely ' solipsistic ' interest in 
 self. For by that resolve he commits himself to the task 
 of observing what is psychologically common to himself 
 and other persons. He is, as it were, chartered by himself 
 and them to describe the appearance to itself of a typical 
 mind of to-day ; and, if he cannot make the ' personal equa- 
 tion,' it is simply bad introspection. Meanwhile, of course, 
 all introspective work tends to wear a sort of ' solipsistic ' 
 colour on its surface. I naturally do not emphasise the 
 all-pervading assumption that this of mine is also yours. 
 For by that same assumption the direct proof or refutation 
 of my assertions lies within your reach. Why, then, should 
 you have your attention distracted from the facts described, 
 by being forced to hear at the same time how I in some 
 more or less indirect fashion have come to believe them 
 to be the common property of our minds ? 
 
 What power, then, has introspective psychology to 
 assist us at the present juncture ? It will be remembered 
 that the back-history of the virtues appeared to present 
 us with two classes of motive, the ' natural ' and the 
 ' spiritual,' both having a certain prima facie validity of 
 their own, even as tried by naturalistic standards ; and 
 that, therefore, we felt ourselves driven to seek for some 
 supplementary test that might yield us an unambiguous 
 ' ought,' whenever (as in practice must constantly occur) 
 the need should arise for us to set one kind of motive 
 against the other, and, for better or worse, to choose 
 between them. In search of which test we have 
 proceeded from ' back- history ' to 'present history.' 
 What, then, does the latter tell us ? 
 
270 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 Surely this — -that, as empirical matter of fact, the 
 moral consciousness of the normal individual of to-day 
 bids him, in every case of conflict between principles, 
 to clwose the ' higher ' ; enables him immediately to 
 distinguish in a general zvay between ' spiritual ' and 
 ' natural ' principles ; and, at the same time, teaches him to 
 recog'nise the one kind as in itself of ' higher ' validity 
 than the other. 
 
 Now this, I would maintain, or something yielding an 
 analysis approximately the same, 1 is introspectively the 
 fact. Nor have I any objection to restating the matter 
 from a point of view more acceptable to the evolutionist. 
 I am equally ready to maintain it to be the fact that the 
 successful individual of a successful race to-day normally 
 feels thus, and, what is more, that he normally tends to 
 ' act up ' to such a feeling. 2 I would even bargain with 
 the evolutionary materialist and say that, if he will admit 
 that these intuitional promptings form an important class 
 of ' appearances ' which he can neither incorporate within 
 his system of utilitarian ethics nor explain away, I for 
 my part am willing to concede as a bare possibility that 
 the successfulness of that ' higher life ' for which these 
 promptings pave the way may after all in some un- 
 intelligible way be its ' biological reason.' But I insist, 
 meanwhile, that the moral consciousness gives no hint 
 that there is, or could be, any such reason at the back 
 of these its most solemn injunctions. Nay more, I would 
 add that, if any hint of the kind intrude itself from 
 some extra-moral region of thought, a shock of moral 
 revolt is the natural result. 
 
 §32. Nor does introspective psychology merely show 
 us that these intuitional promptings speak the master- 
 
 1 The reader may prefer Wundt's formulation of the law of " the hierarchy of 
 moral ends," which runs as follows : " When norms of different orders contradict 
 each other, that one is to be preferred which serves the larger end : social ends 
 come before individual ends, and humanitarian ends before social ends " 
 {Principles of Alorality (trans. Washburn), p. 140). 
 
 2 To much the same effect a recent popular work (which, however, loses sight 
 of the ' person ' in the member of society, and is thus restricted to taking an 
 ' outside ' view of human development) describes social evolution as ' ' the 
 progressive subordination of the present and the individual to the future and the 
 infinite" (B. Kidd, Principles of Western Civilisation, p. 84). 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 271 
 
 word in morality. It can likewise show us in a manner 
 why — that is, how — this is so. Let us revert to the plan 
 of broadly colligating Validity with a kind of feeling and 
 Origin (in the sense of the study of historical cause and 
 effect) with a kind of thought. Considering this feeling 
 and this thought in their relation to future action, let us 
 name them respectively ' foretaste ' and ' forecast.' Why, 
 then, on the showing of introspection, is foretaste rather 
 than forecast supremely effective as an authoriser of 
 ethical conduct ? 
 
 (a) Well, for one thing, it is matter of direct experi- 
 ence that will, though never merely strong, or the 
 strongest, feeling, nevertheless depends on strong feeling 
 as its proximate condition. Thinking, on the other hand, 
 so far as it is no mere echo of passion, but ' real' thinking, 
 that is, a process of discursive reasoning governed by its 
 own laws, is ' cool.' Thus it is easy to see how ' the 
 native hue of resolution ' may be i sicklied o'er with the 
 pale cast of thought.' The mind cooled down by thinking 
 becomes, for the nonce at any rate, and permanently, if 
 it dwell too long in the world of mere possibilities, dis- 
 qualified for action. Discursiveness as such means 
 diffusion of interest, dissipation and distraction of attention. 
 As thought moves from symbol to symbol, each of these 
 must in some degree be felt. Feeling, however, as such 
 involves appetition, Which appetition, though it partly 
 helps to further the action of thinking, is partly wasted by 
 the way. Hence each fresh step in thought levies a tax 
 on the by no means unlimited fund of volitional energy 
 available for the time being. Contrast the forcibleness of 
 intuition. It presents an object that is distinct, because 
 relatively discontinuous with its psychical background, and 
 capable therefore of seizing upon the whole man. It 
 presents, not one amongst several bare possibilities, but a 
 content hardly discrepant with, because so absolutely com- 
 plementary to and continuous with, me-now — a 'to be ' 
 which even now almost ' is,' as the mental panorama is 
 focussed to a vivid point and a burst of sanguine assurance 
 heralds the consummating act of will. 
 
272 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 (b) Further, let us note what forecast as such must 
 mean for us as beings who desire to will reasonably, that 
 is, so as to have the theoretical and the practical 
 ' conscience ' satisfied at once. A mere forecast, even 
 though its framing involve a minimum of discursiveness, 
 cannot, if taken as such, yield that sense of logical 
 cogency which in the case of an abstract proof expresses 
 itself as a feeling of conviction having close affinity to the 
 feeling of moral obligation. So long as we are but 
 striving to analyse the immediate, that is, any object so 
 far as it presents itself to us as a self-contained whole 
 having no ' other ' that cannot be excluded for the nonce 
 by the very act of mental objectification, we are subject 
 to the feeling of logical necessity — of complete, if but 
 temporary, satisfaction with our thought. In a case where 
 we are forecasting, however, we are trying to argue from 
 the present to the absent — from the known to the 
 unknown. We are ' speculating,' in short, in the business- 
 man's sense of the term. Hence, in proportion as we 
 are aware of what we are about, we cannot but be 
 haunted by a more or less lively presentiment of possible 
 mistake and its consequences. It is not wholly or mainly 
 from forecast, therefore, that there is born the confidence 
 which can restore us to spiritual unity and set us free 
 to ' identify ourselves ' with the object of desire. 
 
 (c) Lastly, moral forecast as moral is liable to a special 
 kind of ineffectiveness with which personal experience is 
 likely to have acquainted us. The material out of which 
 we shape a moral forecast must consist in part of facts 
 relating to the nature of our own emotional leanings and 
 likings. But knowledge 'of or 'about' feelings is 
 different from knowing, in the sense of experiencing, 
 feeling as it is ' in itself.' Nay more, the available 
 mental energy being at any moment limited, the one 
 kind of experience is bound, temporarily at least, to over- 
 ride and outbid the latter. The sense of the feeling gives 
 way to the sense of the logical relations of the concept 
 whereby the feeling is represented. Reflection holding 
 the attention, the feeling reflected on survives as but the 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 273 
 
 bloodless phantom of itself. But this deadness of sensi- 
 bility produced in us by self-analysis is utterly out of place 
 in the presence of a call to action. To pass to the state of 
 mind wherein we are able to make the feeling integral to 
 and effective in the object of desire requires the forcible 
 revival of the desiccated image. This, however, is bound 
 to put a great strain on the imagination ; which strain 
 cannot fail to communicate itself to the moral economy 
 as a whole. How fatal, for example, it usually is to 
 reason about the pleasures likely to accrue from a given 
 course of action. As we dwell on the thought of them, 
 they grow ever paler and more impalpable, till paralysing 
 doubt assails us as to their worth — a doubt that probably, 
 could we but know it, is not in the least justified by the 
 actual condition of our power of enjoyment. How direct 
 and infallible, on the other hand, is the suasion of moral 
 foretaste. When intuition is allowed the upper hand in 
 consciousness, what we feel at one moment is made the 
 object of endeavour at the next, and never a chance is 
 given to doubt and dally by the way. 
 
 § 33- " Well and good," answers the 'rational utilitarian.' 
 " I have no doubt that introspective psychology testifies 
 in some such way as you have described to a certain 
 ineffectiveness of moral reflection when unsupported by a 
 vivid sense of what it feels like to be moral. But you 
 prove too much. The blind obedience of the slave to an 
 authority he is incapable of understanding exhibits a 
 ' sanguine assurance ' not a whit less effective — to say the 
 least of it — than that which you suppose to be supremely 
 authoritative in the normal moral consciousness. So I 
 ask you to come one step farther. What so immediately 
 effective as instinct ? I am ready to admit, if you insist 
 on it, that the application of the terms resulting from an 
 analysis of human action to the kind of life or experience 
 studied by the biologist is more or less metaphorical. 
 But, seek as you will to expel the word ' instinct ' from 
 your psychological text-books, the fact has to be faced 
 that certain deep-seated forms of natural trend determine 
 the human will as (I contend) no mere ideal kind of 
 
 T 
 
274 R - R - MARETT v 
 
 moral intuition has ever succeeded in doing, instilling 
 absolute confidence by focussing the attention on strong 
 physical feeling and on that alone. Instinct, then, by 
 the showing of the very introspection on which you rely, 
 is, as our naturalistic ethics also assumes, the pattern 
 laid up, not in ' heaven,' but in those inmost recesses of 
 our nature to which the mere consciousness has no direct 
 access, whereto moral conviction must approximate in 
 proportion as it is sound. The natural and not the ideal 
 feelings just because they have more of the true intuitional 
 flavour about them — more forcibleness and fatality — have 
 the first call on our attention." 
 
 To which the champion of Validity may justly reply as 
 follows. " Introspection supports history in testifying to 
 the ' fact ' that what you choose to call the instinctive 
 ' will ' is being steadily replaced, as civilisation and 
 education advance, by a will of equal or greater energy 
 that rests on the ideal feelings. It is useless for you to 
 try to put back the hands of the clock. Inwardly and 
 outwardly the appearances favour the view that spirit 
 has come to stay. Construe the implications of this ' fact ' 
 as you will. Say, if you are not going to desert the 
 working assumptions of evolutionism, that spirit stays 
 merely because it pays — that its validity consists, not in 
 what it seems to be, but in what it does. But at least 
 admit as an empiricist that practically and for us it has 
 intrinsic validity. When the bent of progressive man is 
 towards attending more and more to what of itself seems 
 to claim more and more of his attention, why bid him 
 hand himself over by a sort of spiritual suicide, by an act 
 of will-renouncing will, to an apparently decaying force, the 
 very existence of which ' in ' — we cannot rightly say ' for ' 
 — him is not a matter of direct consciousness at all ? 
 Naturalism ? Why, it is rank £/>znaturalism." 
 
 §34. And now let us suppose the rational utilitarian, 
 unable to convince us — and, let us hope, himself — that 
 instinct is the prototype of the effective moral intuition of 
 to-day, to fall back on his second line of defence. " Leav- 
 ing instinct out of the question," he proceeds, " what of 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 275 
 
 authority ? The savage is at the mercy of custom. 
 iravTwv vo/jlos fta<rtXev<i. Well, is the civilised man who 
 trusts to his intuitions a whit more self-determining ? 
 Is not ' I will my station and its duties ' a survival of 
 barbarism ? To put foretaste before forecast may be wise 
 policy for the masses — for the white slave. But can 
 intuition afford due scope for the exercise of a reason- 
 able will ? Utilitarianism, rationality, science — these go 
 together, and together they determine human progress. 
 The intuitionist may apply to himself the words which 
 the immortal Silver addresses to his fellow-conspirators : 
 1 We're all foc's'le hands. . . . We can steer a course, but 
 who's to set one ? That's what all you gentlemen split 
 on, first and last' " 
 
 " For look at the facts," he continues. " See what 
 the despotism of foretaste involves in the matter of 
 applied Ethics. What aptitude do the intuitionists show 
 for tackling concrete problems ? Their catalogue of par- 
 ticular virtues is a farrago of abstractions, destitute of all 
 arrangement and inner consistency. And the farrago 
 boasts an immutable nature. It descended wholesale 
 from heaven at the time of the original ' spiritual 
 influx ' ! Or at best, when evolutionism has made 
 the fact of moral progress too patent to be any longer 
 denied, some quibbling philosophy of ' type ' and ' stan- 
 dard ' l is requisitioned to explain how this precious 
 pantheon of sacred forms does somehow condescend to 
 adjust itself to our changing needs and uses." 
 
 " And all this comes of exalting foretaste at the expense 
 of forecast — of dwelling on the ' quality ' of moral action 
 and leaving the ' reference ' to settle itself. Mere feeling 
 is only too prone to attach itself to this or that ideal, 
 irrespectively of its bearing on the rest. Thus it is that a 
 principle puts on ' unconditionality ' — say, the principle of 
 not lying to a murderer, for all that the lie might save the 
 life of his intended victim. But the psychologist knows 
 better than to respect the ' man of one idea,' the victim 
 of ' mental obsession.' He is typically the lunatic." 
 
 1 The allusion is to Lecky's History of European Morals, chap. i. 
 
276 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 " Meanwhile, given sound political and social institu- 
 tions, controlled by intelligent men who think for them- 
 selves, it will be for the best that intuitions, promulgated 
 by authority, should govern the moral life of the unedu- 
 cated. Since these cannot discover for themselves what 
 is right, it remains that they should adopt the surest plan 
 of bringing themselves to do what a superior wisdom 
 decides to be to their advantage. For them let principles be 
 as ' unconditional ' as you please. Here is the opportunity 
 for intuitionism. I am willing to concede — though 
 unfortunately your inveterate intuitionist is not likely 
 to set store by the concession — that reflection ' on a sup- 
 posed right to tell lies from benevolent motives ' is not for 
 the uneducated. And, since the uneducated outnumber the 
 educated by ten to one, I allow you that in nine cases out of 
 ten a simple-minded concentration of sentiment on the 
 beauty of truthfulness will best serve the cause of morality. 
 For feeling, as you urge, is concentrative, calculation 
 dispersive. The victim of ethical obsession, as compared 
 with the puzzled blockhead who labours in the toils of a 
 shillyshallying casuistry, is in the less parlous plight. 
 The latter utterly fails to mobilise such moral powers as 
 he has. The former at all events acts — acts immediately 
 and strongly, though, apart from a wise authority in the 
 background, not circumspectly. But Ethics proper is the 
 concern of the educated. Show me if you can that an 
 Ethics which puts foretaste before forecast is natural to 
 the educated man whose highest aspiration it is to be 
 self-determining — to exercise a reasonable will." 
 
 All of which lies open to a retort which, if it be 
 necessarily somewhat ad hominem, is at all events hardly 
 to be rebutted from the side of mere Origin. "Who are 
 you that speak of rationality ? You have to admit that a 
 certain persistent feature of morality — its predominant 
 ideality of foretaste — is unaccountable on the hypothesis 
 that whatever fails to bear on survival must sooner or 
 later be eliminated. ' By-product ' forsooth. An attempt, 
 not even specious, to gloss over a negation. You 
 pretend to rationalise life, nay the cosmic process. And 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 277 
 
 behold the plain facts about morality contradict that 
 boast of yours : ' Grant us the variations, and we will 
 explain their subsequent history.' ' Science ' you call it. 
 It is good science to give yourself up wholeheartedly to a 
 working hypothesis to see how far it will take you. But 
 it is bad science, and bad manners to boot, having 
 planted yourself down upon what you are pleased to call 
 ' first principles,' to seek thence to shout all rival methods 
 down, as if it were a priori demonstrable that there must 
 be one path, and one path only, to the top of the 
 mountain. ' By-product ' indeed. To credit an inscrutable 
 chance, or, if you will, an Unknowable God, with whatever 
 exceptions your so-called ' laws ' are forced to tolerate is 
 an artifice worthy of the ' age of miracles ' ; and Hume, as 
 you are wont to assure us, has shown that miracles 
 are nonsense." 
 
 § 35. So much, then, for the slur of irrationality which 
 evolutionary utilitarianism would cast upon the theory 
 that those ideals of the moral consciousness which seem 
 the highest are the highest for us as moral beings. ' He 
 that is without sin,' we are tempted to say, ' let him first 
 cast a stone.' And, as for the allegation that intuitionism 
 tends to divorce foretaste from forecast, the reply is obvious, 
 There may be a bad kind of intuitionism ; but that is not 
 the kind we are now defending. Foretaste and forecast, 
 according to the view we are concerned to uphold, must 
 severally and alike be allotted their natural and proper 
 place in one system of normative Ethics ; only the place 
 of foretaste is naturally and properly the higher. 
 
 Let us put the matter in a slightly different way. 
 Let us, in order as far as possible to satisfy the rationalist, 
 substitute for foretaste, with its suggestion of something 
 alien to thought, namely feeling, its logical counterpart 
 and equivalent, the concept of a self-justifying moral end 
 or norm. Our contention may now be restated thus. 
 Ethics as Ethics is restricted to the normative form. Its 
 supreme principle of explanation must be an ' ought ' — or, 
 if you will, that a certain ' ought ' is, and that it is, and can 
 be, for us nothing else but an ' ought' " Ethics, then," you 
 
278 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 say, " finally bases itself upon an appeal to authority." 
 Yes, but not in your sense of ' authority.' The authority 
 in question is not external to the moral subject. It is just 
 his personal self — or rather that part of himself which 
 appears supreme in a moral context, and in no context 
 of experience appears anything but supreme for all the 
 purposes of morality. 
 
 " But we are speaking of different things," perhaps you 
 urge. " You are describing Ethics the art. I, as a 
 rational utilitarian, am seeking to establish Ethics as a 
 science." The answer is that normative Ethics is at once 
 art and science. As an art which tries to produce 
 morality it posits the general object of moral conviction, 
 ' right for right's sake,' as the end to which its precepts 
 must finally conduce. As a science which tries to explain 
 morality it refers everything back to this same object 
 conceived as ultimate self-explaining matter of fact. Thus 
 the conformity of the practical and the rational sides of 
 the moral life is from first to last secured, Both stand or 
 fall together. Present worth and ideal worth, Validity as 
 felt and actively sought after and Validity as contemplated 
 by reflection, coincide at the apex of a system which finds 
 its architectonic principle in the intuition of moral goodness 
 as good, and as good for no other reason than that it is 
 itself. 
 
 §36. " But," says the critic of Validity, by this time (let 
 us hope) driven to his last ditch, " Ethics after all has its 
 limits. It is not life. Much less is it nature. Suppose 
 I grant you that Ethics as Ethics is essentially normative. 
 Is not normativeness as such, however, ex analogia hominis 
 magis quam universil A certain form may be helpful, 
 or even practically indispensable, when you are ' con- 
 structing ' out of a certain kind of appearance. But 
 what of the kinds of appearance in relation to which 
 it does not help ? And, above all, what of Reality ? 
 Though the microcosm take itself ever so seriously, 
 is it quite prepared to absorb, or transcend, the macro- 
 cosm ? " 
 
 Well, as to life, regarded as more or less self-organised 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 279 
 
 and self-organisable experience, there is surely no 
 repudiation of the normativeness of Ethics to be feared 
 from this quarter. Taken at its widest, life (in this sense) 
 is teleological ; and the theory which seeks to import 
 method into the work of self- organisation cannot but 
 shape itself accordingly. As consciously experiencing, 
 that is, experimenting, beings we take the validity of life 
 for granted. Life for us may be sweet or stern ; but, 
 if we ' will to live,' we are committed to the postulate 
 that, despite all drawbacks, life on the whole is something 
 good and sufficient ' in itself.' Now, unless the moral 
 life as such is to count amongst life's drawbacks — a view 
 we are wont to contradict by shutting up the persons 
 who hold it in prison or the asylum — it must partake 
 in the teleological character of the more comprehensive 
 system. And, as a matter of fact, the place assigned 
 to morals in such a system by the common opinion is 
 very high. Indeed, we have already had occasion to 
 protest against a prevalent notion which would actually 
 lead to the identification of Ethics with the general 
 science and art of conscious living, or at all events with 
 that group of allied normative disciplines which together 
 set before themselves the ideal of ' the higher life.' In 
 which ideal the very aspiration of natural science towards 
 'truth for truth's sake' constitutes an integral element. 
 If the 'man of science' is not aware of the fundamental 
 normativeness of his intellectual interest, and hence of 
 the object thereto corresponding, it must simply be that 
 in regard to the higher logic he is as Mons. Jourdain was 
 in regard to prose, and ' escapes his own notice ' as a 
 ' constructor ' of experience. 
 
 As to ' Nature ' and the universe, there would seem 
 to be prima facie reason for taking a teleological view 
 of the aggregate of ' mental ' and ' material ' appearances, 
 and to be prima facie reason against so doing. As 
 empiricists we do not pretend to the possession of any 
 a priori clue. We abstract from amongst the manifold 
 appearances one kind of appearance that for us is, 
 because it seems, supremely worthy of our interest and 
 
280 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 attention ; and we boldly say — ' that is the truth.' The 
 object of the view we elect to hold is ideal rather than 
 real because it transcends the me-now — because it has 
 yet to be fully realised in actual experience, our 
 experience. If, then, at our own risk we accept the 
 responsibility of believing that this is both for us and 
 in itself predominantly a universe in which spirit is 
 realising itself, and realising itself in part through us, that 
 is, by means of, and in some sense conditionally on, our 
 voluntary co-operation, teleology is for us the last word 
 in Metaphysics no less than in Ethics. Or if not, not. 
 Meanwhile, as professed experimentalists, let us at any 
 rate be practical, even to the extent of theorising to 
 some ultimately practical purpose. If Ethics naturally 
 takes shape round a notion of ideal moral goodness as 
 bearing the signs of readability upon its face ; if Ethics, 
 Logic, Art, Religion, so far as they are ' organised interests ' 
 capable of standing by themselves, display each a similar 
 fundamental character of normativeness ; and if the 
 normativeness of one and all is identical in so far as it 
 insists on the pursuit of the seeming Highest ' for its own 
 pure sake ' ; then, at all events our teleological, anthro- 
 pomorphic, personal, rendering of the universe is likely to 
 react on all these interests with advantage — to con- 
 tribute something of its own towards a general heighten- 
 ing and deepening. And what is left outside ? A 
 few stubborn animal passions, a dim sense of fatal 
 arbitrary drivenness. And are these poor fossils and 
 wrecks of time to serve, to the exclusion of maturer 
 forms of experience, as determinants of the human reason 
 and will? Shall they — 'must 5 they — dictate to us a 
 philosophy of life and nature, whereof the bare theoretic 
 contemplation renders our whole disposition towards 
 practice less strenuous, less intense, less susceptible to 
 the hint of immense possibilities in us and about us ? 
 " But no," you say. " The effect of materialism on 
 practice is nothing of the kind. It fires, it exalts 
 abidingly." — Then we two are made differently. Let us 
 go our several ways in peace. Perhaps after all, as Uncle 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 281 
 
 Toby said to the fly, ' there is room in the world alike 
 for me and thee.' 
 
 VII. Final Suggestions in Favour of a Com- 
 bined Use of the Two Standpoints in 
 Empirical Ethics 
 
 § 37. "And what of synthesis?" — says the weary 
 reader. " At the outset you looked forward to a relative 
 unification of the two rival principles of ethical explanation. 
 Nor have you shown, or indeed tried to show, that 
 mere Validity can suffice us as a standpoint any more 
 than mere Origin. Besides, the study of origins is an 
 established industry ; and established industries die hard. 
 Others ere now have made it pretty hot for naturalism 
 and evolutionism. But, like Brer Terrapin in the prairie 
 fire, they display a wonderful ability to 'sit and take 
 it' Can you not manage, then, to allot them a corner 
 of their own in your ethical laboratory ? Is there no 
 specific function, even though it be a subordinate one, 
 for them to fulfil ? " 
 
 Well frankly, as regards naturalism, there can be, from 
 our point of view, no parleying whatever with it. As a 
 philosophy it is contemptible. As a mood it is cheerless 
 and paralysing. And in any case it is always, in preten- 
 sion at least, a metaphysic, and therefore at once some- 
 thing more and something less than a method of em- 
 pirical Ethics. 
 
 But, though naturalism as a philosophy cannot by 
 rights yield us an ethical standpoint, as a mood it can to 
 some extent do this, the standpoint it favours being that 
 of a narrow and sordid opportunism. Such an opportunism 
 puts the objective condition ' this is what I can do ' before 
 the subjective condition ' this is what I ought to do.' Nay, 
 its tendency is to neglect the latter altogether as causally 
 inoperative, as mere ' echo.' Thus suppose it to appear 
 expedient on grounds of hygiene that extra - nuptial 
 relations between the sexes should be permitted in times 
 when early marriage is discouraged by custom, or when 
 
282 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 in a monogamous society one sex considerably outnumbers 
 the other. Opportunism would pay no heed to objections 
 founded on simple regard for the principle of purity. It 
 assumes that the normal conscience will sooner or later, 
 and sooner rather than later, ' come round.' Or suppose 
 that political economy seem to recommend the suppression 
 of certain bouches inuliles, say the quiet putting away of 
 the mentally afflicted or the incurably diseased. Oppor- 
 tunism would be for carrying out the change in the teeth 
 of all ' sentimental ' insistence on the value of the 
 individual human life as such. According to this theory, 
 or rather mood — for the real strength of naturalism 
 depends, not on its logic, but on the success of its appeal 
 to the imagination of the unimaginative — the subjective 
 ' necessity ' of moral principles is little else than a sham. 
 And what is true of them — so it is urged — is equally true 
 of moral principle in general. Exaggeration enters into 
 the very marrow of the moral sense. By asking of us 
 what otherwise — that is by ' reason ' and ' experience ' — 
 we might know to be extravagant and impossible, it seeks 
 to cheat us into a more strenuous performance of our 
 tasks. But ' noble lies ' are for the sightbound self- 
 hypnotising masses. The rod of enlightened authority 
 and empire is a moral scepticism tempered by statistics. 
 
 Well, there is no refuting a mood. We can but give 
 it the cold shoulder. Meanwhile, so far as it pretends to 
 base itself on ' reason ' and ' experience,' these, if the fore- 
 going argument is to be trusted, bear witness to precisely 
 the opposite effect. 
 
 §38. With evolutionism however, it is quite otherwise. 
 Useful work can be found for it to do. If it eschew 
 metaphysics, and attend to its proper business, the 
 historical description and explanation of vital function, it 
 is a weapon in the hands of the moral philosopher only 
 second in importance to the commission which bids him 
 use that weapon rightly. 
 
 For ultimately, indeed, that is, when rationalised to its 
 utmost, Ethics, we have decided, must be normative. It 
 must put Validity before Origin, foretaste before forecast. 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 283 
 
 A general standard of evaluation is given by the moral 
 consciousness in something which ethical thought can but 
 inadequately designate as spirituality of personal motive 
 in regard to social conduct. This may to some extent 
 be susceptible of interpretation from a higher ' level.' 
 The sympathetic metaphysician may discern therein an 
 ' aspect ' — a specific rendering — of the ideal of spiritual 
 wholeness, of personal self-realisation, or what not. 
 Ethically, however, it is just what it is to the moral 
 intuition. It is a criterion of relative excellence which 
 the good man feelingly — or, in a broad, but quite legitimate, 
 sense of the word ' knowledge,' knowingly — has and can 
 use. Given two or more possible courses of social conduct 
 involving principles that appear qualitatively different, he 
 can choose with certainty — moral certainty — between 
 them, once he has accepted it as the ' maxim of his will ' : 
 Attend to the spiritualities, and the temporalities may be 
 trusted to look after themselves. 
 
 Alternative courses of seemingly possible social conduct 
 must, however, be given. Our ethical imperatives must 
 always be relative to certain preferables. How, then, are 
 such alternatives given ? By forecast. 
 
 Forecast is the anticipation of a certain sort of 
 consequence. Foretaste as foretaste likewise anticipates 
 consequences in a sense. But the latter are — that is, are 
 apprehended as — necessary and assured consequences. 
 They are consequences in that they have yet to be willed 
 out from ideality into reality. But such a change, viewed 
 from the present standpoint of the agent, can affect but 
 the degree, and not the kind, of the experience they 
 embody. Whether thought of as ideal, or as realised, 
 they are good for the moral subject about to act with 
 one and the same quality of goodness. Forecast, on the 
 other hand, deals with what for the agent must always 
 appear as contingent and debatable consequences — with 
 this or that means as opposed to the end. It has to 
 guarantee though always doubtfully yet as best it can the 
 actual possibility of the ethically preferable course of 
 conduct, before mere wish can ripen into resolve. The 
 
284 R- R- MARETT v 
 
 good man must always seek to do that which, in the 
 broadest sense of the phrase, is ' best under the circum- 
 stances.' An Ethics that is empirically normative cannot 
 but regard this as the only intelligible ' best.' The 
 general subjective necessity ' this is what I ought to do,' 
 though prior in the logic of Ethics, that is, prior for us as 
 beings who have to build on the ' fact ' of our moral 
 freedom, can have neither meaning nor function apart 
 from the general objective ratification ' this is what I can 
 do.' To forecast which latter condition as rightly as may 
 be possible constitutes an important branch of the work 
 of such an evolutionism as concerns itself with the com- 
 parative history of man's attempts to adapt himself to 
 his environment. 
 
 § 39. Meanwhile the present essay does not profess to 
 be a methodology of Ethics, but at most to serve in some 
 sort as an introduction thereto. It will suffice, therefore, 
 if we indicate quite broadly how Validity and Origin, 
 intuitionism and evolutionism, as distinct principles and 
 methods operating in conjunction, are to import logical 
 system into Ethics in the highest attainable degree. 
 
 This, then, at least is plain — that Ethics cannot be 
 organised on the model of a despot's court, the ' ought ' 
 sitting enthroned upon a dais, whilst below and respect- 
 fully remote stands this and that attendant ' can.' An 
 Ethics that bases itself on experience — as we under- 
 stand experience — cannot afford to show the slightest 
 sympathy with the dualistic view that disjoins the a priori 
 from the a posteriori. On the contrary, it must seek to 
 explain and justify the experience of the normal moral 
 subject, who does somehow manage to combine the affirma- 
 tion of an architectonic end with a due consideration for 
 practicable ways and means. Thus the general body of 
 ethical doctrine must present as free and full as possible a 
 commingling of what we have for the sake of clearness 
 distinguished as the ' subjective ' and ' objective ' elements 
 or determinants. If ' ought ' and ' can ' are not to be made 
 to join hands and work together for a common object 
 there is an end of Ethics. But Ethics is, and will not be 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 285 
 
 ended, so long as there are thinkers who are content to 
 try to make the best of what they have got, and to 
 observe experience from within instead of raising futile 
 questions as to what it would look like could one get 
 outside. 
 
 Now the strength of a science is rightly held to reside 
 in its axiomata media. And so we may say that it is by 
 its power of firmly establishing its secondary principles 
 that the soundness of ethical method is to be tried and 
 tested. How, then, are ' ought ' and ' can ' — the subjective 
 and objective factors — to co-operate to produce such 
 secondary principles ? How, for instance, is a catalogue 
 raisonne of particular virtues to be drawn up that shall 
 without inconsistency present them as embodiments of 
 the end and yet likewise as generalised possibilities of 
 conduct ? 
 
 By a compromise, we answer — a compromise based 
 on a clear recognition of their mutual relativeness and 
 dependency ; though even so the best of the bargain, in 
 the shape of an appreciable balance of authoritativeness, 
 cannot but fall to ' ought ' as against ' can ' — to Validity 
 as against Origin. Each left to itself would initiate and 
 pursue a method of its own, Validity an analytic, deduc- 
 tive, and Origin a comparative, inductive, method. But 
 each, unsupported and uncontrolled by the other, is bound, 
 as it seems at least to the empiricist, to stultify itself by 
 onesidedness and extravagance, Validity by engendering 
 mere quixotism, and Origin mere opportunism. Hence, 
 though each may occupy its own sanctum in the ethical 
 laboratory, employing groups of specialists who have no 
 time to interest themselves in the details of one another's 
 work, the true and scientific account of the laws and 
 principles of Ethics must always take the form of a joint 
 report subscribed to by the heads of both departments. 
 Nay, it were obviously best that the minutest specialist 
 on either side, in order to avoid becoming the slave — 
 the ' ideopath/ so to speak — of his chosen method, should 
 be generally acquainted with the relations of his working 
 assumptions to those of the other branch, that is, with 
 
286 R. R. MARETT v 
 
 the methodology of Ethics as a whole, and thus be able 
 in a broad way to make the ' professional equation ' as he 
 goes. 
 
 Analytic Ethics prevails over Comparative Ethics 
 simply by reason of its greater affirmativeness both as art 
 and science. And its right to be the more affirmative is 
 grounded on the ' fact ' that for the actual moral subject of 
 to-day, both when he is acting, and when in his theoretical 
 mood he asks himself, ' Is this really and truly so for me 
 as a typical moral subject trying to understand himself 
 and his position,' the nature of moral principle is more 
 closely bound up with the subjective, ' intersubjective,' 
 if you will, since typical, but still subjective, than with 
 the objective, element therein contained. In other words, 
 the ' laws ' of Ethics ultimately are, in their theoretical no 
 less than in their practical aspect, authoritative pro- 
 nouncements rather than observed uniformities. Doubt- 
 less the conditions which determine the nature of morality 
 as a product are phenomenally of two kinds. There 
 are determinations from within morality itself, and there 
 are determinations from without. But the one kind 
 which consists in the evaluatory selections of a will moved 
 by the intuition of morality as worth realising in itself 
 and for itself (that is, apart from any consequence save 
 itself) appears to Empirical Psychology, in its introspective 
 and historical capacities taken together, to cause more, 
 and to explain more, than the other kind, which is com- 
 posed of whatever influences control and limit the action 
 of such a will without apparently sharing in its inner guid- 
 ing purpose. These latter conditions that are ethically 
 ' objective ' (in the sense of ' external ' — not, of course, in 
 the metaphysical sense of ' determinate,' which may or 
 may not be an adequate expression for Nature as a whole) 
 have doubtless to be reckoned with. The constructive 
 affirmations of any intuitionism are always open to 
 criticism on the score of objective impracticability, when 
 such impracticability is the verdict of a strong induction. 
 But the impracticabilities of morals are on the whole 
 internal rather than physical or physiological. It is chiefly 
 
v ORIGIN AND VALIDITY IN ETHICS 287 
 
 because we do not will, and do not will to will, the seem- 
 ing Highest strongly enough, not because we otherwise 
 cannot, that — as a matter of ' fact ' — our characters and 
 conduct are found morally wanting. Broadly speaking 
 in regard to the very general policies of action repre- 
 sented by the particular virtues, we can, and mostly do, 
 realise them all in some degree. Ethically, however, the 
 important question we have to ask ourselves is : How 
 can we do so in the highest degree — that is, so as to 
 give each virtue that place in the system of our life 
 which its relative value warrants ? Thus I can practice 
 nationalism and I can practice humanitarianism. Prob- 
 ably the ' best under the circumstances ' permits of 
 both. But which for the general purposes of my moral 
 self-realisation is to count for more ? When all has been 
 said on both sides, it is to Validity rather than to Origin 
 — to intuitionism rather than to evolutionary utilitarianism 
 — that the good man will go for the ' rational ' solution. 
 
 § 40. We have sought to keep true to empiricism. If 
 our conclusions favour a reflective and critical intuitionism, 
 at least they are conclusions that profess to be founded 
 on simple matter of ' fact' The ground on which we 
 take our stand is wholly psychological. We allege no 
 more than a psychological, and hence phenomenological, 
 ■ ought' The real ' ought ' is for your Will. We (at a 
 certain personal risk of our own — for example, the risk 
 of being thought illogical or foolish) have selected a 
 certain view of moral experience because it seems to be 
 for man (as we seem to know him both in ourselves and 
 otherwise) supremely worthy of attention at the ' level ' 
 of Ethics. You must attend to it at your own personal 
 risk. If, by attending to it rather than to anything else 
 in pari materia, you reach a Better (which is not 
 necessarily a physical or biological Better, for all that 
 it turns out to be not incompatible with physical and 
 biological conditions !), then what the pair of us believe 
 is true — true, at any rate, until something even truer 
 emerges from the ' visible darkness ' that is both in us 
 and about us. 
 
VI 
 
 ART AND PERSONALITY 1 
 
 By Henry Sturt 
 
 I. Scope and Method 
 
 i . Art is a characteristic function of personality. 
 
 2. Artistic consciousness should be studied in its creative rather than its 
 
 receptive form, 
 
 3. and in artists that are familiar rather than those that are remote. 
 
 II. The Solidarity of the Higher Life 
 
 4. An artist's most important quality is enthusiasm, 
 
 5. which must be directed upon objects external to himself ; 
 
 6. these being men, or things with human qualities. 
 
 7. The personal element is traceable even in (a) architecture, 
 
 8. (£) nature-painting, 
 
 9. and (c) music. 
 
 10. Though art implies emotion, it is not to be defined as the expression of 
 
 emotion, either self-regarding, 
 
 11. or reflective. 
 
 12. Though art has to do with pleasure, it is not to be defined as a form of 
 
 pleasure-seeking, either coarse or refined. 
 
 13. Art is not self-reduplication, though it is self-expression. 
 
 14. Unselfish appreciation of persons is the mainspring of knowledge and 
 
 morality also, though both are specifically distinct from art ; 
 
 15. it unifies our higher life both on its subjective and its objective side ; 
 
 and is a strong vital experience. 
 
 III. The Separateness of Art 
 
 16. Art is separate from morality and knowledge formally 
 
 17. and materially, (a) as a subjective experience, 
 
 18. (b) in regard to the objects for which it is felt, which are persons. 
 
 19. The separateness of art is obscured by the transference of artistic terms 
 
 and forms to what is outside art. 
 
 20. Knowledge and morality are in like manner separate. 
 
 21. It is not a vicious circle to define art as the appreciation of art in others. 
 
 22. The separateness of our higher interests may be transcended. 
 
 1 An abridgement of an earlier draft of this essay is printed in the Proceedings 
 of the Aristotelian Society, N.S. vol. i. 
 
 288 
 
vi ART AND PERSONALITY 289 
 
 IV. Artistic Valuation 
 
 23. The questions connected with artistic valuation are (a) what is valued, 
 
 (b) by whom, (if) for whom, (d) on what ground, (e) with what authority. 
 
 24. (a) What is valued is the work as manifesting consciousness, which must 
 
 be of the artistic kind. 
 
 25. (b) It is the artist, primarily, who values ; secondarily, the critic. 
 
 26. (c) It is the artist, primarily, for whom the work has value ; but it is 
 
 essential that he should wish others to enjoy it. 
 
 27. (d) The ground of the valuation is an immediate personal experience. 
 
 28. This is intuitionism, but the intuition it affirms (a) is not merely intel- 
 
 lectual, (/3) is connected with all the rest of our personal and social 
 life, (y) is flexible ; 
 
 29. and its method is empirical, though mere empiricism can never do 
 
 justice to the personal affirmation in artistic judgments. 
 
 30. (e) Not all erroneous artistic valuations have a definite principle to 
 
 oppose to us ; 
 
 3 1 . but the need of a superhuman authority to back the true valuation is felt 
 
 (a) in combating decadents who deny the value of life, 
 
 32. (£}) in fighting for artistic progress. 
 
 33. I agree with popular opinion in affirming the right of private judgment ; 
 
 34. disagree in denying the accessibility of an objective criterion. 
 
 I. Scope and Method 
 
 § 1. THOUGH English literature is rich in writings on art 
 — Ruskin alone would redeem us from poverty — we have 
 not much that treats of it in a purely speculative way. 
 Ruskin's glowing pages are full of artistic truths, truths of 
 wide sweep and truths of finest detail ; but he never stood 
 away and viewed the subject as a whole from a detached 
 position. He gives us plenty of philosophic material, but 
 no philosophy of art. 
 
 The object of the present essay is to study artistic 
 experience philosophically ; above all, to contribute to the 
 knowledge of personality by considering in very general 
 terms what it is and does in the sphere of art. Such an 
 investigation is in any case worth making, and especially 
 so if we believe that art is not only a function, but a 
 characteristic function, of personality ; that is, a function 
 parallel in its nature to the functions we call morality and 
 knowledge. I think that careful study would convince us 
 that art is not a by-path or anomalous province ; but 
 that the human spirit exhibits the unity of its nature 
 throughout its experiences, artistic, moral, and epistemonic. 
 
 U 
 
290 HENRY STURT vi 
 
 Granted this, the study of art must throw great light upon 
 the other functions. Particularly in regard to ethics it is 
 hardly too much to say that any one who is beset by 
 false notions about art will never interpret moral 
 experience truly. 
 
 This is how, in the first instance, I would justify my 
 title " Art and Personality." The results of the argument 
 will justify it further. We shall see, firstly, that the 
 supreme artistic interest, the mainspring of artistic cona- 
 tion, is an affectionate admiration for human persons ; 
 secondly that art illustrates both the solidarity and the 
 separateness of the main elements of our personal life ; 
 thirdly, that artistic value is, for us, entirely an affirmation 
 of personal experience. Lastly, the title of the essay is 
 meant to indicate the limitations of its scope, which 
 neglects the social and historical sides of art. Another 
 essay on " Art and Society " might well be written 
 without overlapping the present one. And a glance of 
 the chapter-headings of JDr. _Hjrn's excellent Origins of 
 Art will show how wide a field of history I leave 
 untouched. In art-philosophy, as in ethics, we can learn 
 much by studying individuals as we meet them in daily 
 life, abstracting temporarily from their historical ante- 
 cedents and social medium. 
 
 \ 2. Of the persons who may distinctively be termed 
 artistic there are two classes, artists and connoisseurs. 
 Which of the two shall we elect to study as the type 
 of artistic experience ? I think undoubtedly the former. 
 Here, at least, I have the support of Dr. Bosanquet, who 
 argues that in such theorising we should take the attitude 
 of " the mind of the maker." : Were we discussing 
 science instead of art there would hardly be need of 
 arguments to establish this point. What should we think 
 of the theorist who took as his type of the scientific mind, 
 not the explorer and creator, but the docile student ; or 
 quoted as the typical philosopher, not Aristotle, but 
 Simplicius ? In morals the point becomes so obvious that 
 it needs an effort to realise the force of the parallel. 
 
 1 " On the Nature of .Esthetic Emotion," in Mind for April, 1894, p. 155. 
 
vi ART AND PERSONALITY 291 
 
 There the connoisseur is one who says " video meliora 
 proboque " ; but such is not the man on whom we base 
 our theory of virtue. 
 
 We get the same result from introspection. That 
 definite and weil-known experience which we call artistic 
 comes to us more fully in making a work of our own than 
 in contemplating another man's. It would be strange 
 were the case otherwise. Through all the range of our 
 life our feelings are keenest when we are actualising them. 
 Aristotle was right with his ivepjela ea/xev — " it is in the 
 exercise of our faculties that our existence lies." Keenly 
 as we may feel in looking passively at a sunset, keenly as 
 we may enjoy the sunset in the " Fighting T6meraire," 
 we might be sure that if we painted the sunset we should 
 have a feeling of the distinctively artistic kind far more 
 rich and keen. 
 
 Yet, in ordinary discussions, the standpoint assumed 
 is almost always that of the receptive side ; and this 
 accounts for nine-tenths of the mistakes in art-philosophy. 
 One reason for assuming this standpoint is obvious. 
 Connoisseurs are many and artists are few, and there 
 is always a temptation to confuse the " average " with 
 the " typical." But there is perhaps a more philosophical 
 reason which we shall appreciate if we consider how the 
 experience of the looker-on compares with that of the 
 artist. The former is, so to speak, a creator at second- 
 hand. Turner, in painting the Temeraire, had the 
 creative experience at first-hand ; the intelligent admirer, 
 on the suggestion of the picture, goes through part of 
 what the painter felt. But, though the spectator's feeling 
 is feebler, it is purer. He is not troubled, like the artist, 
 by difficulties of technique. The popular preference for 
 the spectator's standpoint is instructive, if it shows us 
 that, to get to the essentials of art, we must think away 
 the merely technical element in the artist's experience. 
 
 The mention of technique leads on to a further 
 definition of my standpoint. It will have been noticed 
 that I have spoken more of the artist's mind than of the 
 work which he produces. It is mental facts that will 
 
292 HENRY STURT vi 
 
 mainly be kept in view in the following pages. The 
 " art " which I propose to study in connection with 
 personality is the direct expression of the consciousness 
 of the artist. 
 
 § 3. Of course it is in his works principally that the 
 artist's consciousness is revealed. But the observer must 
 use all helps to get at the underlying consciousness. He 
 must attend to what artists say about their work, and to 
 what they like or dislike in others. And thus, for his 
 investigations, no artists are so useful as those of whom 
 he can get personal knowledge. If he does not under- 
 stand the artists of his own day, the painters who paint 
 familiar beauties, the poets who treat the current themes 
 of vital interest, the musicians who interpret the emotions 
 of contemporary society, we shall not get much help from 
 artists of a different age and clime. 
 
 Neglect of these considerations accounts largely for 
 the unreality of so many cultured discussions on art. 
 An anecdote will illustrate my meaning. Not long ago 
 I heard a distinguished professor, who has never done 
 anything manual in his life, begin an art discussion with 
 
 the words " When I look at a Greek statue ." This 
 
 little phrase approves by implication many errors that 
 we should shun. " I look " implies the receptive attitude ; 
 that point has been dealt with. " Greek " is our present 
 concern. How can an Englishman expect to reach the 
 truth about art by beginning with the artistic conscious- 
 ness of Greeks twenty-five centuries away ? " Statue " 
 is hardly less mistaken. Statuary is an art-form which 
 does not appeal strongly to our age and country. So long 
 as our climate and habits remain what they are, it will 
 never emerge from its secondary position. The Greeks, 
 on the other hand, were always practising naked in the 
 palaestra. Their work shows that they cared as much 
 for the figure as the face. But to Englishmen the face 
 is nearly everything, except to the few who have studied 
 from the nude, which my professor had certainly never 
 done. So, instead of his conventional classicality, the 
 professor should have said : " When an English sculptor 
 
vi ART AND PERSONALITY 293 
 
 models a face." Even then he was wrong in not 
 beginning with the art he practised, literature. 
 
 II. The Solidarity of the Higher Life 
 
 § 4. Of all the qualities that go to make a true artist, 
 the most important is enthusiasm. The word itself has 
 had a chequered history. We all know of the early- 
 Victorian archbishop who addressed a band of outgoing 
 missionaries with the words, "Above all, avoid enthusiasm." 
 He was doubtless using the word in its older sense of 
 that neurotic exaltation, so notorious in later days among 
 American revivalists, 1 which is often the dangerous 
 enemy of reason and morality. But the enthusiasm I 
 mean is just that rational fervour which is essential to 
 the most perfect forms of intellectual and moral 
 experience. 
 
 The repressing and ignoring of enthusiasm was the 
 worst feature of the eighteenth century. Its recognition 
 is the most hopeful sign for the century just begun. 
 " Enthusiastic " is now almost a customary epithet for 
 artists, like " gallant " for soldiers. Even the ordinary 
 Britisher knows that without enthusiasm, or unselfish 
 devotion to art for its own beauty, no artist, however 
 skilful, can be noble ; and that with it the least skilful 
 can never be contemptible. The man of skill and no 
 devotion he despises as a manufacturer. 
 
 Using, as I do, enthusiasm in quite a common sense, 
 I have no fear that it will be seriously misunderstood. 
 But it is worth while to make its meaning plainer by 
 comparing it with some kindred terms. ' Admiration ' 
 and ' unselfish appreciation ' do not express the active 
 working fervour of the enthusiast. Admiration, more- 
 over, is too much limited to our feeling for men ; it 
 would hardly express our feeling for a cause. ' Devotion ' 
 is nearly synonymous ; but it has religious or, at least, 
 exalted associations which are not relevant to our 
 
 1 Cf. B. Sidis, Psychology of Suggestion, chap, xxxiii. , entitled "American 
 Mental Epidemics." 
 
294 HENRY STURT vi 
 
 present meaning. But all these terms share with 
 enthusiasm the connotation of a self-forgetful absorption 
 in a pursuit which is valued, not because it brings 
 pleasure or profit or renown, but because it is intrinsically 
 precious and noble. 
 
 The quality of enthusiasm belongs not to art only, but 
 also to the other activities, knowledge and morality, which 
 go with art to make up our higher life. The sphere of 
 the higher life might in fact be described as that in which 
 enthusiasm is possible. A cool propriety, a cool curiosity 
 never sufficed to make a saint or scientific genius. Art, 
 knowledge, and morality have each of them intrinsic value, 
 a value which, as we shall see in the last section of this 
 essay, is vouched for, primarily, by the affirmation of the 
 personal self. Enthusiasm is the affirmation of intrinsic 
 values on its passionate side. 
 
 § 5. We have so far, by an unreal though necessary 
 abstraction, considered enthusiasm subjectively, or as an 
 affection of the acting self. None the less, it is essential 
 to enthusiasm that it should be directed upon an object 
 outside the acting self. It is possible, indeed frequent, 
 for a man to view himself with pride, but not with 
 enthusiasm. In morals a man cannot turn from thinking 
 admiringly of another's virtue to thinking of his own with 
 the same admiration. The transition from the not-self to 
 the self involves an essential change of feeling. So it is 
 with the artistic form of enthusiasm. Art is the effort 
 to represent objects which the artist thinks beautiful, or, 
 at least, deserving of sympathetic interest. But they 
 must be objects which are not merely part of the agent's 
 own self. This would probably be admitted as a rule, 
 but there are cases on the boundary which might cause 
 difficulty. In literature there is the case of autobiography. 
 Can a man relate his own adventures and delineate his 
 own character with the same artistic spirit that he can 
 devote to another man's ? I think not. An autobiography 
 may be excellent as a historical record or as a human 
 document, like Benvenuto Cellini's ; but it is a mistake 
 for the writer to try to make it a work of art, except in 
 
VI ART AND PERSONALITY 295 
 
 the subordinate sense of taking pains with the arrangement 
 and style. Compare Thackeray's Barry Lyndon with a 
 book which perhaps suggested to him the idea of a 
 romance of scoundrelism, Casanova's Memoirs. One is 
 art, the other egoism. 
 
 In painting there is the similar case of the artist who 
 paints his own portrait. Here an objective attitude is 
 less difficult because the matter represented is not so 
 central to the acting self. It is possible for a man to be 
 interested in his physical appearance, not because it is his, 
 but because it is human. Still, there are many dangers 
 in self-portraiture. In Florence there is a famous gallery 
 reserved for portraits of artists by their own hands ; and 
 the most successful are those in which the artists have 
 looked at their own faces in a detached impersonal way 
 as interesting human lineaments, not unsuggestive of 
 human peculiarities and failings. 
 
 § 6. To learn what are the objects of artistic interest 
 we must go to the arts ; and, to begin with, not to the 
 most rudimentary, but to the most perfect of them. This, 
 men have agreed, is poetry. For there is most in it on 
 the whole, and to excel requires the highest powers. We 
 have only to take down from our shelves any of the great 
 poets, from Homer to Tennyson, to assure ourselves that 
 their supreme interest is Man. Turn over their pages 
 and you will find that human strength and beauty, love 
 and hope, pain and sorrow, effort and adventure, art and 
 skill are the substance of their song. In the preface to 
 Sordello Browning says, " My stress lay on the incidents 
 in the development of a soul ; little else is worth study." 
 On the whole, that is true. 
 
 A sympathetic interest in men is the mainspring even 
 of that rare and difficult form, the poetry of pessimism. 
 Pure pessimism, which is the same as pure misanthropy, 
 is seldom met with and is artistically worthless. The 
 only sort that is tolerable gives the impression that man 
 is a creature possessing many noble qualities, but basely 
 tormented by cruel circumstance. 
 
 So with the satirist. Juvenal and Swift would be 
 
296 HENRY STURT vi 
 
 execrable if we did not feel that their fury against men 
 is really a fury that men are not better. It is a cry for 
 reform cloked as a curse. 
 
 Nature, animate and inanimate, claims the poet's 
 interest in a less degree. In many cases, he cares for 
 it only as a background to human life. Where Nature 
 is an object of independent interest it is viewed, as it 
 were, sub specie humanitatis. Even in the nature that 
 is farthest from us, the poet sees human powers and 
 attributes ; grace in flowers, majesty in mountains, purity 
 in air and sky. 
 
 § 7. There are some branches of art in which my 
 thesis that artistic interest is interest in psychic life, 
 human or quasi -human, may be sustained with com- 
 parative ease. These are poetry, portrait -painting, and 
 portrait -sculpture. They may therefore be left aside, 
 and we will turn to other cases where, for various reasons, 
 the principle is less obvious. Such a case is architecture, 
 the interest of which I will try to analyse in detail. It is 
 a case where we are forced to take the spectator's stand- 
 point rather than the artist's. For there is usually a good 
 deal more artistic interest in a noble building than its 
 builder put there. 
 
 A considerable piece of architecture, one of our 
 cathedrals for example, stands midway between the 
 things of artistic value that are purely natural and those 
 which, like a painting, are purely artificial. We never 
 forget that human hands built it ; and yet from its huge 
 bulk, its assimilation by weathering to the visible quality 
 of rock and cliff, and the dependence of its structural 
 permanency on the crude natural strength and weight 
 of stone and timber, it takes a place in our thought 
 among the main features of its landscape. Thus its 
 interest has many sides, which it is worth while to 
 distinguish for the sake of showing how they are related 
 to humanity. 
 
 First, there is the interest of human association. 
 English people are worshipping in the building ; great and 
 good men of the past have served and worshipped there. 
 
vi ART AND PERSONALITY 297 
 
 Secondly, there is the interest of workmanship. The 
 architect and sculptor have put their thought into its 
 planning and decoration. These two interests are directly 
 personal. 
 
 Thirdly, there is the interest of nationality. The 
 building informs us not only of the craftsman's conscious- 
 ness, but of the nation's. The religious and secular 
 ideals of medieval England, its hopes and fears, its view 
 of Nature and of Man, its outlook upon the time and its 
 conceptions of a future life were expressed more 
 adequately in churches than in any other form. 
 
 Fourthly, there is the interest of organic character. 
 Let us consider what we mean by that hard -worked 
 philosophic term " organism." In part we only mean 
 that the thing denoted has life, whatever the qualities 
 of life may be. This meaning, obviously, is not in 
 question here. But also we mean that the thing 
 possesses a definite meaning and purpose which pervades 
 the parts, so that they are instrumental or " organic " to 
 it. The more thorough the pervasion of the meaning, 
 and the more elaborately the parts are shaped to express 
 it, the more organic the organism. To us the human 
 body, the instrument of personal life, is the supreme 
 organism, because the meaning which it subserves is to 
 us supreme. And thus we tend to view as quasi-personal 
 every totality which subserves meaning in a way 
 analogous to the human body. So it is with the 
 cathedral ; and with every building that has a worthy 
 meaning. Every material structure which is an object 
 of our unselfish interest, we tend to regard as possessing 
 an almost human individuality. That is why the sailor 
 speaks of his ship as " she." That also is why we often 
 resent alterations in a favourite building which a stranger 
 would recognise as improvements. 
 
 Fifthly, there is the interest of the vitality of the 
 parts. To a sympathetic vision the stones and beams 
 of the cathedral are severally instinct with life. The 
 strong straight pillars sustain the upper fabric with an air 
 of well-girt purpose ; the arches spring ; the timbers knit 
 
298 HENRY STURT vi 
 
 the roof ; the buttresses thrust sturdily against the 
 pressure of the roof; the spire soars into the sky. The 
 eye instinctively interprets these dead mechanic things 
 in terms of living power ; and those forms are grateful 
 to it which assist its instinctive interpretation. 1 
 
 The foregoing enumeration of aspects may not be 
 exhaustive. That is immaterial. Distinction of the 
 aspects of the artistic interest is less important than 
 apprehension of its unifying principle, which is interest 
 in a vital whole. The fourth and fifth aspects, which 
 imply each other, are the fundamental ones. The two 
 first are but enhancements. They cannot be mechanically 
 added to the core of interest, but must belong organically. 
 Take the first — association. The fact that Napoleon had 
 worshipped, or professed to worship, in a building could 
 lend it but an adventitious interest. To enhance its 
 artistic value, we should need the memory of some 
 God-fearing warrior, like Cromwell. 
 
 § 8. I have now to establish my position in regard 
 to nature-painting, including under that term the painting 
 of animals, still-life, and landscape. In regard to the first 
 of these, the matter needs little argument. It is easy 
 to see that what we value in the representation of 
 animals are excellences akin to human. The danger is 
 that we fall into the opposite error and suppose that we 
 care for animals, not as beasts, but as men in beasts' 
 clothing. Landseer illustrates both the better and the 
 worse possibilities of the animal -painter. Sometimes 
 his dogs are mere human caricatures. His best picture, 
 the Shepherds Chief Mourner, exemplifies the two con- 
 ditions of success. It is full of the purest appreciation 
 of dog-nature as such ; and it teaches us how to admire 
 in beasts a virtue akin to the highest in man. 
 
 Still -life and landscape go very closely together, so 
 that nearly all that applies to the latter applies to the 
 former. As landscape is far the more important, I reserve 
 the main argument for it. There is only one element 
 
 1 Cf. the excellent analysis of the artistic quality of a Doric column by T. 
 Lipps, Raumasthetik, chaps, i. and ii. 
 
vi ART AND PERSONALITY 299 
 
 which is more prominent in still-life. In the minute 
 study of flowers and leaves, for example, we have an 
 overpowering impression of looking into the work of an 
 artificer of the subtlest taste and inexhaustible resource 
 and skill. This is not the wire-drawn fancy of an 
 abstract thinker, but what occurs to the mind of the 
 straightforward sympathetic observer — " even Solomon 
 in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." An 
 equal impression of subtlety and power is got from the 
 lines and tints of scenery, such as that of mountains. 
 But there the sense of contact with an artificing conscious- 
 ness is weaker ; because, while man with stone and 
 metal can imitate the lily, mountains are beyond him. 
 
 Finally, then, of landscape, which has a claim to 
 fuller notice as having only reached maturity in our own 
 time. It is evident that no simple explanation of it 
 will suffice. A taste of ours that was weak in the 
 contemporaries of Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson must be 
 part of our latest gain in subtlety and power. 
 
 To put it broadly, the modern taste for landscape- 
 painting is based on sympathy with the life of Nature, 
 the same sympathy which drives many a traveller to 
 roam through strange and lonely places of the earth. 
 Here is a passage from that type of the wandering 
 nature-lover, George Kingsley, which is an example how 
 some men feel about islands and forests. " No landscape 
 seems perfect to my eyes unless they can see therein 
 a bit of the blue water — therefore I love an island. I 
 love the sigh and the sough of the wind in the black pine 
 forests of Germany ; I love the swish of the Northern 
 birch-trees in the fresh odorous early morning, when the 
 gale has just gone by, and the wet is sweeping in little 
 glittering showers off their lissom branches ; I love the 
 creak and groan and roar of the great oaks in a storm ; 
 and I love the lazy whispering murmur of the light green 
 limes in the lazy golden summer afternoon ; but, above 
 all the sounds of Nature, I love the voices of the sea, for 
 they speak to me in more varied tones, and I know that 
 they tell me more, though I know not what they tell me, 
 
300 HENRY STURT vi 
 
 than the voices of a million sibilant leaves — therefore 
 I love an island." 1 What the landscapist does is to 
 translate this sort of feeling into visual form. 
 
 Though this is the foundation of landscape -interest, 
 the influence of association is not small. Both the 
 main interest and this auxiliary have been magnificently 
 set forth by Ruskin. " Among the hours of his life to 
 which the writer looks back with peculiar gratitude, as 
 having been marked by more than ordinary fulness of 
 joy or clearness of teaching, is one passed, now some 
 years ago, near time of sunset, among the broken masses 
 of pine forest which skirt the course of the Ain, above 
 the village of Champagnole, in the Jura. It is a spot 
 which has all the solemnity, with none of the savageness, 
 of the Alps, where there is a sense of a great power 
 beginning to be manifested in the earth, and of a deep 
 and majestic concord in the rise of the long, low lines of 
 piny hills ; the first utterance of those mighty mountain 
 symphonies, soon to be more loudly lifted and wildly 
 broken along the battlements of the Alps. But their 
 strength is as yet restrained, and the far-reaching ridges 
 of pastoral mountain succeed each other, like the long 
 and sighing swell which moves over quiet waters from 
 some far-off stormy sea. And there is a deep tenderness 
 pervading that vast monotony. The destructive forces 
 and the stern expression of the central ranges are alike 
 withdrawn. No frost-ploughed, dust-encumbered paths of 
 ancient glacier fret the soft Jura pastures ; no splintered 
 heaps of ruin break the fair ranks of her forests ; no 
 pale, defiled, or furious rivers rend their rude and change- 
 ful ways among her rocks. Patiently, eddy by eddy, 
 the clear green streams wind along their well-known 
 beds ; and under the dark quietness of the undisturbed 
 pines, there spring up, year by year, such company of 
 joyful flowers as I know not the like of among all the 
 blessings of the earth. It was springtime, too ; and 
 all were coming forth in clusters crowded for very love ; 
 there was room enough for all, but they crushed their 
 
 1 Notes on Sport and Travel, p. 60. 
 
vi ART AND PERSONALITY 301 
 
 leaves into all manner of strange shapes only to be 
 nearer each other. There was the wood-anemone, star 
 after star, closing every now and then into nebulae ; and 
 there was the oxalis, troop by troop, like virginal pro- 
 cessions of the Mois de Marie, the dark vertical clefts 
 in the limestone choked up with them as with heavy 
 snow, and touched with ivy on the edges — ivy as light 
 and lovely as the vine ; and, ever and anon, a blue gush 
 of violets, and cowslip bells in sunny places ; and in 
 the more open ground, the vetch and comfrey, and 
 mezereon, and the small sapphire buds of the Polygala 
 Alpina, and the wild strawberry, just a blossom or two, 
 all showered amidst the golden softness of deep, warm, 
 amber-coloured moss. I came out presently on the edge 
 of the ravine : the solemn murmur of its waters rose 
 suddenly from beneath, mixed with the singing of the 
 thrushes among the pine boughs ; and, on the opposite 
 side of the valley, walled all along as it was by grey 
 cliffs of limestone, there was a hawk sailing slowly off 
 their brow, touching them nearly with his wings, and 
 with the shadows of the pines flickering upon his plumage 
 from above ; but with a fall of a hundred fathoms under 
 his breast, and the curling pools of the green river gliding 
 and glittering dizzily beneath him, their foam globes 
 moving with him as he flew. It would be difficult to 
 conceive a scene less dependent upon any other interest 
 than that of its own secluded and serious beauty ; but 
 the writer well remembers the sudden blankness and 
 chill which were cast upon it when he endeavoured, in 
 order more strictly to arrive at the sources of its impres- 
 siveness, to imagine it, for a moment, a scene in some 
 aboriginal forest of the New Continent. The flowers 
 in an instant lost their light ; the river its music ; x the 
 hills became oppressively desolate ; a heaviness in the 
 boughs of the darkened forest showed how much ot 
 their former power had been dependent upon a life which 
 was not theirs, how much of the glory of the imperishable, 
 or continually renewed, creation is reflected from things 
 
 1 Yet not all their light, nor all its music, as Ruskin admits in a note. 
 
3 02 HENRY STURT vi 
 
 more precious in their memories than it, in its renewing. 
 Those ever- springing flowers, and ever-flowing streams 
 had been dyed by the deep colours of human endurance, 
 valour, and virtue ; and the crests of the sable hills that 
 rose against the evening sky received a deeper worship, 
 because their far shadows fell eastward over the iron 
 wall of Joux, and the four-square keep of Granson." 1 
 
 After George Kingsley and Ruskin it is perhaps 
 superfluous to labour my main point further. I will take 
 these extracts as proving that the nature-lover does not 
 think of nature as merely material, but loves it as 
 possessing a quasi-personal life. 
 
 § 9. Music could hardly be discussed adequately till 
 after the consideration of the rival theory that art is the 
 expression of emotion, a theory which finds its strongest 
 illustrations in music. But the general application of 
 my view in regard to music may be indicated now. 
 
 We have in music to make a distinction which has 
 not been necessary in the other arts, that between 
 interpretation and composition. Each musical perform- 
 ance is, like an actor's interpretation of his part, a sort 
 of re-creation by the performer. It is here that most 
 of the enthusiasm of music is found, and here that it is 
 most directly intelligible. For to make a great musical 
 work live again in sound with all its wealth of human 
 feeling and ingenuity, is a task to stimulate interest to 
 the highest. But what we are mainly concerned with, 
 according to our standpoint, is the mind of the composer, 
 and we must determine in what sense the composer can 
 be said to be moved by interest in personal life. 
 
 According to general agreement, music is the most 
 spontaneous of the arts. A tune springs up within the 
 composer's mind, he cannot tell why or how. He cannot 
 usually say more than that it " comes to him." But if 
 music remained on this level of mere spontaneous 
 expression, we should never get anything more significant 
 artistically than thoughtless whistling. There must be 
 added serious effort and application. Part of the effort 
 
 1 Seven Lamps of Architecture, p. 162. 
 
vi ART AND PERSONALITY 303 
 
 may be due to any of the lower motives which induce 
 men to exert themselves. But part of it, I venture to 
 say, comes from enthusiasm for that beautiful world of 
 sound which is man's mysterious and delightful heritage ; 
 and a still greater part from interest in the varieties of 
 emotional thought which music is fitted to convey. 
 
 How the emotional thought in good music may be 
 interpreted, is to be learnt from the analyses which are 
 common in musical literature. Good examples are 
 Spitta's analyses of the Wohltemperiertes Clavier in his 
 Life of Bach, and Wagner's appreciations of Beethoven 
 in his Art-Work of the Future. By these eminent writers 
 the sentiment of Bach's and Beethoven's music is 
 interpreted in a great, almost heroic, way. But I will 
 content myself with a simple illustration. Most amateurs 
 know Heine's cycle of songs called Dichterliebe, set to 
 music by Schumann. The first song, " Im wunderschonen 
 Monat Mai," is a beautiful expression of happy love ; a 
 later song, " Ich grolle nicht," a magnificent expression of 
 a jilted lover's fury and despair. Now, there is no reason 
 to think that Schumann was actually convulsed by these 
 rapturous or bitter emotions when he was writing the 
 songs, any more than if he had treated the incidents by 
 painting. But there can be no doubt that he was 
 strongly interested in them. Man was to him worthy 
 of deeply sympathetic study, and his emotions, bright or 
 sombre, well worth the utmost effort of the musician to 
 enshrine in melody. 
 
 § 10. The narrow limits of an essay will not permit 
 the review even of the more important of the rival 
 theories of the essential nature of artistic interest. But 
 there are two at least which should be noticed, partly 
 for their intrinsic importance, partly because the discussion 
 of them will throw fresh light upon the position just laid 
 down. The first of these theories, or classes of theory, 
 connects art with emotion ; the second with pleasure. 
 
 It is true, of course, that art implies emotion ; every 
 vital action does so in more or less degree, and art more 
 than most. For, firstly, art is not the main business of 
 
304 HENRY STURT vi 
 
 life, but, like play, an indulgence out of our superfluity. 
 And therefore we are not fully fitted to produce or enjoy 
 art save when pleasurable emotion raises the tide of vital 
 feeling above its normal force. Secondly, the object 
 of artistic representation must awaken in us some kind 
 of emotion, bright or sombre. Otherwise it would be 
 one of those neutral uninteresting things which no one 
 cares to put into art. This we may call the present 
 emotional interest of the artistic object. And, thirdly, 
 the object has usually a remembered emotional interest. 
 The poet who writes drinking songs is usually one who has 
 had immediate personal acquaintance with the pleasures 
 of wine. It is generally admitted that a wide practical 
 experience of life is a necessary part of the equipment of 
 the literary artist. But all this is far from justifying what 
 is perhaps the dominant theory of art just now, that art 
 is definable as the expression of emotion. 
 
 One form of the theory, a coarse, uncritical form, may 
 be termed the Byronic fallacy. This fallacy assumes that 
 any one who is full of turbid feeling about himself is, so 
 far, qualified to be some sort of artist ; by preference, a 
 poet. One could hardly maintain that Byron himself held 
 this view, even at the epoch when he began to write Childe 
 Harold ; but it seems to have been current in the early 
 Victorian period among a certain class of his admirers. 
 " Demetrius Wiggle, sir, is the slave of passion," says the 
 friend of a Byronesque young man -about -town in one 
 of Thackeray's books. But, in reality, to feel deeply 
 miserable and discontented, to be in a turmoil of love 
 or hate or ambition, is, so far as these feelings are self- 
 regarding mental disturbances, not a help, but a hindrance 
 to poetry. 
 
 §11. Dr. Bosanquet's emotive theory of art 1 is of 
 course much more refined and philosophic than the 
 foregoing. At first, we must admit, there does not seem 
 to be much difference. He says : " I suggest as the 
 most fundamental and universal feature, from which all 
 the common characteristics of aesthetic emotion may be 
 
 1 " On the Nature of ^Esthetic Emotion " already quoted. 
 
vi ART AND PERSONALITY 305 
 
 deduced, the simple fact that it is expressed." Surely, 
 we must object, this is far too sweeping. At this rate, 
 Achilles expressing emotion by sulking in his tent or 
 dragging Hector by the heels was an artist. And indeed 
 we find presently that the object through which the 
 emotion is expressed is very important ; this object 
 must be "a presentation more or less individual." Dr„ 
 Bosanquet adopts, as expressing his own view, Aristotle's 
 analysis of tragedy, interpreted by Lessing and Bernays. 
 " There is a form of art called Tragedy which produces 
 pleasure by means of two painful emotions, pity and 
 fear. How this is possible is a problem that answers 
 itself when we consider the conditions of artistic expres- 
 sion or representation. By a typical portrayal of human 
 life in some story that forms an individual whole, the 
 feelings in question are divested of their personal reference, 
 and acquire a content drawn from what is serious and 
 noteworthy in humanity, and thus alone, it seems clearly 
 to be Aristotle's view, can their quintessence be fully 
 uttered and drawn out and find its pleasurable discharge 
 free from morbid elements of mere shock and personal 
 sensibility. The connection of pity and fear, which is the 
 centre of his doctrine, really indicates that fear, for art, 
 is a fear idealised by expression or objective embodiment, 
 while free utterance is not aided but lamed and obstructed 
 by any intrusion of the dumb shock of personal terror. 
 Thus then, and thus alone, can fear be made an aesthetic 
 emotion, a source of artistic enjoyment or the pleasure 
 of tragedy. It is not, and this is a fundamental point, 
 it is not merely that the emotion is 'refined,' in the 
 sense that its bodily resonance is rendered less intense. 
 A modified resonance will attend a modified emotion, 
 but the intensity of feeling is not a question of principle 
 in relation to its aesthetic character. The aesthetic 
 character lies in the dwelling on and drawing out the 
 feeling, in its fullest reference, by help of a definite 
 presentation which accents its nature." 
 
 My judgment on Dr. Bosanquet's doctrine as a whole 
 is that, starting from a principle which is quite wrong, it 
 
 x 
 
3 o6 HENRY STURT vi 
 
 works round to a view which is nearly right; his approxi- 
 mation to truth consisting in his growing recognition of 
 the importance of objective interest. But let me clear 
 up the difference between us by considering a particular 
 tragedy, Richard II, for example. In spite of what 
 he said earlier in his essay, when combating the hedonist 
 theory of art, as to the necessity of assuming the attitude 
 of the " mind of the maker," it is clear that in his account 
 of tragedy he assumes the attitude of the spectator. If 
 then, he seems to say, we met Richard II. in the flesh, 
 discrowned and miserable, we should feel an immediate 
 shock of painful emotion which would not be art. When 
 awakened, however, by the dignified scenic representation 
 of the hapless king these emotions become artistic. 
 
 Against this I would urge that as a preliminary we 
 must assume the attitude of the tragic artist ; for the 
 feeling of the spectator is only that of the artist at 
 second-hand. Then we shall see, I think, that what 
 Shakespeare was interested in, was not the emotions 
 of pity and fear, but the man Richard II. as delineated 
 by the Chronicle and vivified and ennobled by his own 
 poetic imagination. His artistic effort consisted in the 
 construction of a drama to exhibit the action of the king 
 under pathetic circumstances. The pity and fear of 
 the tragic artist and the spectators are secondary to their 
 interest in the persons of the play. Dr. Bosanquet holds 
 that the object is important because of the emotions ; 
 the truth is rather that the emotions are important 
 because of the object. 
 
 The argument of those who hold an emotive theory 
 of art is strongest in music. There the current opinion 
 is that the be-all and end-all of the process is the genera- 
 tion of a succession of emotions. This may approximate 
 to the truth as regards the hearer, but not as regards the 
 composer. And how fallacious it is as regards the per- 
 former may be known by watching good musicians. In- 
 terested they are, but not emotionally upset, either about 
 the content of the music or about their own concerns. I 
 once read an absurd remark that the piano-playing of a 
 
vi ART AND PERSONALITY 307 
 
 young girl full of feeling is more artistically satisfying 
 than that of a more skilful middle-aged performer. This 
 is the Byronic fallacy again. The playing of young people 
 is generally cold. They are full of feeling, but it is feeling 
 about themselves, the sort that has no immediate value 
 for art. The elder performer is much more likely to play 
 warmly because the years have trained him in sympathy. 
 
 In the other arts I am on ground which is plainly 
 much stronger. If we watch a good painter working at a 
 portrait we do not see that he is labouring under strong 
 emotion ; we are astonished at his technical mastery and 
 insight into character. The nearer we get to the mere 
 expression of emotion, as in the antics of boys who have 
 been promised a holiday, the further we get from art. 
 
 § 12. Pleasure, like emotion, is obviously connected 
 very closely with art. Art is not a means of self- or race- 
 preservation, at least in its modern form, whatever anthro- 
 pologists may tell us of its origin. It would therefore not 
 be pursued unless it brought pleasure on the whole. But 
 when this is admitted we are very far from admitting that 
 art is definable as a kind of pleasure-seeking. Such a 
 definition would miss out the characteristic feature of the 
 thing defined. Nor would it be true in many individual 
 cases. For if we interrogated an artist of the higher class 
 on the subject we should probably find that, though he 
 valued his art as infinitely precious, he did not regard it as 
 an unmixed source of pleasure. In particular, the early 
 struggles of a serious artist are generally somewhat 
 distressing both to the sufferer and his near relations. 
 There is an intense interest in the artistic object, with a 
 constant failure to embody it in adequate artistic repre- 
 sentation, resulting in painful fluctuations of spirits and 
 temper. Hence the sympathy of the St. Ives fisherwife 
 for the students painting on the foreshore : " What a pity 
 them poor artises do get so set on it." 
 
 Some years ago the hedonist theory of art would have 
 needed a formal refutation. But it is not held now with 
 the same tenacity, except by those who insist on solving 
 all philosophical problems by a reference to biology. No 
 
308 HENRY STURT vi 
 
 biological philosopher ever begins an analysis of human 
 experience at a higher point than the mammalia. Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer indeed starts his Data of Ethics with 
 remarks on infusoria and mollusca. Conformably to this 
 tendency, what we may term the Bauble-Theory connects 
 human art with the taste of bower-birds in decorating their 
 nests with scraps of bright colour, and with the gratification 
 of the pea-hen in the magnificence of her spouse's tail. 
 Coming down to man the bauble - theory puts the 
 beginning of art in the sensuous pleasure which primitive 
 man feels in bright colours, simple harmonies and allitera- 
 tive or rhyming jingles of words. The truth is that such 
 sensuously pleasant things cannot be more than the 
 material or vehicle of art ; its essence cannot lie in them. 
 Grant Allen's Physiological ^Esthetics, excellent so far as 
 it goes, does not really touch the central matter of art at 
 all. It would be equally possible to write a Physiological 
 Ethics or Physiological Theory of Knowledge which should 
 circle round among the external conditions of morality 
 and knowledge without telling us anything about their 
 inner reality. 
 
 The gist of the matter comes to light when we 
 consider that only some pleasant objects are suitable for 
 art, those namely that we can enjoy consistently with 
 an unselfish interest in their permanence and welfare. 
 Things that we can only enjoy in a self-regarding way, 
 such as food, can with difficulty be treated artistically. 
 A picture of the most sumptuously spread dinner-table 
 would not be admissible as fine art. The Dutch kitchen- 
 pictures of fruit, vegetables, and game, those of Mieris 
 for example, though painted with an unselfish interest 
 in the forms and colours of the objects, suffer decidedly 
 from their material associations. It is the pleasures of 
 sight and hearing that are specially artistic because they 
 can be enjoyed consistently with self-detached interest 
 in the object for its own sake, and are not diminished 
 by being shared with others. Selfish pleasure is the 
 death of art. 
 
 It may have been noticed that I have so far not used 
 
vi ART AND PERSONALITY 309 
 
 the current term " aesthetic " in regard to art-experience. 
 As a synonym for " artistic " I think it highly objection- 
 able, because it suggests the reduction of the appreciation 
 of beauty to a form of perception. But it may be 
 usefully employed to describe those sensations and 
 pleasures which, in virtue of their refined quality, are 
 capable of being used for art. If we use aesthetic in this 
 sense we ought to note that no experience, however 
 aesthetically refined, rises to the level of art unless it 
 contains the element of objective interest. I have read 
 of some character in fiction who invented a scent-organ, 
 consisting of rows of bottles filled with various scents, 
 and a mechanical arrangement like a key -board for 
 opening the stoppers. Was the pleasure got from this 
 instrument artistic ? Probably not. We cannot of 
 course be certain that to a man of exceptional disposition 
 scents may not suggest as much objective content as 
 musical sounds to other people. But if not, his 
 experience is merely aesthetic. The scent of a rose has 
 great artistic value because it enhances an artistic interest 
 which is already there. Without the flower, the perfume 
 avails nothing for art. 
 
 § 13. Both the emotive and the hedonist theories of 
 art are supported by a tendency which has had a baleful 
 influence on speculation, far outside the sphere of art- 
 philosophy — the tendency of subjective idealism. The 
 two theories have their common point in the ignoring 
 of the object and the endeavour to seek the source of 
 the art-interest entirely within the subject. The same 
 tendency in another form is countenanced by Hegel 
 when he raises the question, " What is man's need to 
 produce works of art?" 1 and answers that it is self- 
 reduplication. As a thinking consciousness, man, says 
 Hegel, " draws out of himself and makes explicit for 
 himself that which he is." " Man as mind reduplicates 
 himself." " He has the impulse ... to produce himself, 
 and therein at the same time to recognise himself. This 
 purpose he achieves by the modification of external things 
 
 1 Introduction to Philosophy of Fine Art, trans, by Bosanquet, p/57. 
 
310 HENRY STURT vi 
 
 upon which he impresses the seal of his inner being, and 
 then finds repeated in them his own characteristics. Man 
 does this in order as a free subject to strip the outer 
 world of its stubborn foreignness, and to enjoy in the 
 shape and fashion of things a mere external reality of 
 himself." " The universal need for expression in art lies, 
 therefore, in man's rational impulse to exalt the inner 
 and outer world into a spiritual consciousness for himself, 
 as an object in which he recognises his own self." And 
 this process is termed a " reduplication of himself." 
 Professed interpreters of Hegel may question what part 
 self-reduplication plays in his art-theory as a whole ; but 
 the foregoing extracts from the Introduction are enough 
 to bring home to him at least a subjective -idealising 
 tendency, a tendency which cannot fail to lead astray. 
 Man needs art because it is a form of objective interest 
 which is essential to his higher life. The objects are 
 akin to himself ; but they are not himself, nor does he 
 try to make them so. 
 
 Had Hegel's expressions not been worded so as to 
 exclude the objective interest of art (as they apparently 
 do), we might have taken them as merely emphasising 
 its subjective side which is no less essential than the 
 objective. For though art is not self-reduplication, it 
 might fairly be described as self-expression. The artist's 
 work is always his work ; the appreciation which it 
 embodies is his appreciation. When the artist has his 
 completed work, the poem or the picture, before him, he 
 sees that it embodies not only the beauty which interested 
 him to make the work, but also his interest in the beauty. 
 Hegel's preoccupation with the subjective element must 
 not drive us into exclusive preoccupation with the 
 objective. 
 
 § 14. The admiring appreciation of personal life, which 
 is the mainspring of art, is the mainspring of knowledge 
 and morality also. There is not room here to justify the 
 parallelism in detail ; but it is important to forestall the 
 notion that art is an anomalous province of our life. Of 
 both knowledge and morality it may be said that they are 
 
vi ART AND PERSONALITY 311 
 
 unselfishly enthusiastic, and that the objects of their 
 enthusiasm are persons, or things with personal qualities. 
 
 The value of enthusiasm in knowledge-seeking is 
 tolerably well seen now. No one can fail to acknowledge 
 it who remembers that knowing is, primarily, a creative 
 process. This last point, truly, is often overlooked. 
 When knowledge is thought of as a cut-and-dried system 
 stored in literary warehouses the man of knowledge is 
 identified with the book-worm. But we should rather 
 think of the student as an ardent creator ; a maker, not a 
 manipulator, of theories. Knowledge must be dis- 
 tinguished from erudition. 
 
 Another distinction will vindicate the unselfish character 
 of knowledge. Many things which people need to know 
 cannot be dignified by that lofty term, the fluctuations of 
 the tallow-market for example. Knowledge must be 
 distinguished from information. A vast mass of 
 materially useful information about food and clothing and 
 travelling and so on is only learnt by people because it is 
 useful, and is forgotten as soon as it becomes useless. 
 We shall have later (in § 24) to make a similar distinction 
 between art and manufacture. What really deserves the 
 name of knowledge is a content which is worth knowing 
 for itself; a content which fascinates our interest because 
 of the intellectual force which it embodies. 
 
 What the objects are which excite the enthusiasm of 
 knowledge may be ascertained by the rough-and-ready 
 method of taking down a volume of the Encyclopedia 
 Britannica and turning over the leaves. You will find that 
 the greater part of it, and the most interesting part of it, 
 deals with mankind's proper study, man. The natural 
 sciences, which are falsely supposed to be more " scientific " 
 than the human, are apparently, but only apparently, an 
 exception. For the universal or generic judgment of 
 science should be interpreted teleologically, i.e. as 
 expressing purpose or system in its content. And 
 purpose and system are conceptions which are fully 
 intelligible only in reference to the conduct of personal 
 agents. The interpretation of personal conduct is really 
 
312 HENRY STURT vi 
 
 the most characteristic form of knowlege. In nature we 
 are interested from a two-fold motive. Where it is alive 
 it has a claim on us merely from its vitality. Bits of life 
 are always interesting to a living mind. To the mature 
 intellect it is interesting because we trace in it subtle far- 
 reaching design. 
 
 On the essential part which the enthusiasm of 
 humanity plays in moral experience I must be even 
 briefer ; the more so as I hope to deal with the matter 
 some day in another place. Perhaps it is enough now to 
 appeal to the consensus of Christian moralists, who, using 
 the term charity, make this enthusiasm the basis of 
 all virtue. 
 
 All this must not be understood to mean that art is 
 identical with, or merely another form of, knowledge and 
 morality. There is, as just explained, a generic kinship 
 between them ; but, beyond that, there is a specific 
 difference which is irreducible and also indefinable. They 
 are three distinct ways of appreciating our fellow-men. 
 Taken together, they may be said to constitute our 
 Higher Life. 
 
 § 15. Unselfish appreciation of men, which in its 
 stronger form is enthusiasm, is thus the quality which gives 
 to our higher pursuits a common generic character. But, 
 more than that, it is the interfusion of the same quality 
 which gives to objects the capacity of being interesting. 
 For it is certain that interesting objects have a definite 
 common quality. Enthusiasm does not operate in vacuo, 
 or attach itself to any object at random. People often 
 speak as if it did ; but this presupposes an unreal 
 detachment of the subject from its object, parallel, it may 
 be remarked, to that liberum arbitrium indifferentice which 
 so grievously caricatures the true freedom of the will. 
 Enthusiasm is only felt for appropriate objects. 
 
 If we study the persons for whom we feel it reasonable 
 to be enthusiastic, we shall see that they are themselves 
 persons of enthusiasm. Fundamentally, enthusiasm is 
 what differentiates the man from the Yahoo. The student 
 of our Saxon Heptarchy, who has never read beyond 
 
vi ART AND PERSONALITY 313 
 
 Milton's history, will think disgustedly of those troubled 
 times as " the righting of kites and crows," because he can 
 see nothing in them but endless jarring selfishness ; to 
 the modern historian they are interesting, because he 
 recognises in them the " Making of England," the seed- 
 time of a noble culture. 
 
 In regard to objects below the human level a good 
 deal was said to the present purpose when it was proved 
 that their artistically interesting qualities are personal, or 
 at least, vital. It is only necessary to carry the same 
 line of argument a step farther. Let us raise the question, 
 What is it that makes living creatures valuable ? Our 
 modern sense of the value of life is certainly not primitive, V- 
 Uncultured men destroy life with no compunction on the 
 slightest grounds. What is at the bottom, not only of 
 modern humanitarianism, but also of that interest in living 
 forms, which moves the great throng of naturalists ? I 
 cannot see that the mere fact of animation gives much 
 claim. If a creature has no beauty or intricacy of plan, 
 or is not closely connected with higher creatures, it is 
 nothing. As a fact, perhaps no form of life fulfils these 
 conditions of exclusion. But some come so near it that 
 not one man in a hundred thousand takes interest in 
 them. Compare, for example, the popularity of birds 
 with the neglect of spiders, and you will find an example 
 of my principle. Birds are not enthusiasts ; but they 
 look as if an enthusiast had made them. We enjoy their 
 beauty like children charmed by a picture and careless of *" 
 the painter. 
 
 A characteristic of art and of its allied experiences 
 which might be deduced from what has been already said 
 is its strength of vital feeling. It would be a plain 
 contradiction to think of enthusiasm as languid and 
 decadent ; and the same is true of its objects. The 
 higher life is strong and the objects of its interest are full 
 of strong life. Men, beasts and plants, mountains and 
 streams, clouds and air must, in order that the artist 
 may love them, be full of such life as is allowed them. 
 Beauty is a kind of high vitality ; ugliness belongs to 
 
314 HENRY STURT vi 
 
 death, decay, and disease, or the disorder that leads to 
 them. 
 
 III. The Separateness of Art 
 
 § 16. So far we have been considering facts which 
 show the ' altogetherness ' of the elements of the higher 
 life ; we come now to facts which show their separateness. 
 Not that the facts are inconsistent or that we are reduced 
 to an ' antinomy.' I only mean that while at some times 
 and in some respects we feel a unity conjoining art, 
 knowledge, and morality, otherwise we feel that they are 
 separate from each other. 
 
 The separateness has in the first place what may be 
 called a formal or outward aspect. Art is a discontinuous 
 interest both in our experiencing of it and also in regard 
 to the objects of the interest. The former kind of dis- 
 continuity is too generally recognised to require proof. 
 Art lies outside the vital needs of our existence and 
 therefore must always be an episode. In regard to the 
 object also the artistic interest is episodic in a way that 
 morality and knowledge can never be. True moral 
 interest, such as admiration for a noble action, implies a 
 reference to the character of the doer of the action, in 
 other words, a reference to a system that is both continuous 
 and extensive. True epistemonic interest is not an interest 
 in detached facts, but in facts which bear on some big 
 system, preferably that supreme, enveloping system 
 which we call reality. We cannot pick up a piece of 
 knowledge or of moral interest and then drop it and have 
 done with it. This, however, is the case in art. A painter 
 sees a pretty child in the street, gets it for a model, 
 paints it with all his might, sells the picture and, possibly, 
 never thinks of the child again, save in that isolated 
 regard. 
 
 In the products of art both the subjective and the 
 objective discontinuity are exemplified. The picture 
 embodies a mood of the artist ; and also an aspect of the 
 model. Both mood and aspect are, as it were, snap- 
 
vi ART AND PERSONALITY 315 
 
 shotted in one self-justifying presentation. Hence the 
 self-containedness of the artistic product. Every one 
 knows that the good picture need not be in the least 
 useful, or teach a moral lesson, or be strictly veracious. 
 But its independence within its own sphere needs 
 emphasising too. We do not very greatly care if we 
 cannot harmonise the various plays of Shakespeare, we do 
 not care, that is, if the consistency of characters which appear 
 in more than one play be not maintained ; or if different 
 plays exhibit inconsistent views of life on the poet's part. 
 It is true that this self-containedness is not absolute. 
 We should get more pleasure from the whole series of 
 Shakespeare's plays if we could view them, not merely as 
 detached efforts, but as the expression of a continuously 
 developing poetic genius. But in the main the single 
 poem, picture, or symphony stands alone. Its main 
 interest lies within its four corners. It shines by its own 
 light ; not borrowing much light, or reflecting it. 
 
 It would have been possible, had not the empirical 
 proof seemed more solid, to have appealed earlier in this 
 essay (in 8 6) to the discontinuity of the artistic interest in 
 aid of my thesis that its object must be humanity. A con- 
 tinuous interest might be thought to be interesting from its 
 continuity alone. It might be argued that the claim of 
 geometry does lie in the fact that it is an immense 
 complex system which the most diligent explorer can 
 never exhaust ; and an attempt (though I think a 
 fallacious attempt) might be made in this way to show 
 that we can be enthusiastic without being enthusiastic 
 over man. But take away this element of continuity and 
 by what can we explain the claim of art but by its 
 embodiment of human nature ? Where else can this 
 perennial fount of unselfish interest be supposed to lie ? 
 
 §17. But this formal characteristic of discontinuity 
 does not give the essential difference of art from its kindred 
 pursuits. That difference really consists in the felt quality 
 of the artistic experience and in the quality of the objects 
 for which it is felt. Art, knowledge, and morality are 
 different ways of feeling appreciation for our fellowmen. 
 
316 HENRY STURT vi 
 
 Art is a kind of felt experience whose quality is definite, 
 irreducible, and indefinable. In support of this, an appeal 
 can only be made to self-observation. Let us suppose 
 ourselves interested in some great and good man, Cardinal 
 Newman, for example. Then our interest may be either 
 moral, and move us to exhibit our admiration in conduct ; 
 or it may be epistemonic and move us to explore his 
 character with a scientific curiosity ; or it may be artistic 
 and move us to paint his portrait or make him the hero 
 of a poem or tale. My argument is that, in the main, we 
 should have a different kind of experience in each case. 
 
 The chief objection to this would come from those who 
 take a view of art which seems to me to be quite mistaken. 
 Put shortly, this view is that the artistic attitude is to say 
 " How fine ! " and do nothing. It is easy to see how this 
 notion arises. In the first place artistic experience is 
 supposed to be typified, not by the artist, but by the 
 non- performing connoisseur. This is a common and 
 excusable error. But then, by a fatal and easy extension, 
 any sort of non-performing admirer is credited with an 
 artistic experience, and the video -meliora-proboque 
 debauchee is said to look at morality in an ' artistic ' way. 
 This is not art but morality-and-water ; a barren velleity 
 towards virtue. 
 
 § 1 8. On the objective side, the separateness comes 
 out very plainly. Defining excellent persons as those 
 who have strong unselfish appreciations, we may say that 
 the artist's main interest is in excellent persons. But 
 it is also true that not all excellent persons interest him 
 to an equal degree. The artistic sort are more interesting 
 than the other two. 
 
 This point may be brought out in a concrete form by 
 asking : What kind of face is the painter most attracted 
 by ? This may sound a hopelessly vague question ; but 
 we must try to think of the typical artist in his most 
 characteristic moods. In all such fluctuating matters 
 one may discover a centre of gravity, so to speak. 
 Allowing, then, for varieties of mood and idiosyncrasy 
 I think it true to say that the most interesting sort 
 
vi ART AND PERSONALITY 317 
 
 of face to paint is that of an artistic person ; not 
 necessarily that of an artist, but of some one with 
 strong artistic appreciations. The faces of men notable 
 for other excellences have interest too ; but not so much. 
 Moreover, it is rare to find the other excellences, when 
 they reach any considerable pitch, entirely disjoined from 
 the artistic. Certainly it is not prettiness which makes 
 a face paintable. The portraits in the Royal Academy 
 which we gaze at are those of persons full of character, 
 statesmen, warriors, philanthropists, men of science, 
 literature, and art. The ladies who are mere beauties 
 we pass with an indulgent smile. 
 
 The same fact comes home to us more strikingly from 
 the negative side. There are people of our acquaintance 
 neither stupid nor morally objectionable who impress us 
 as alien to art. Their faces, figures, and dresses offer no 
 material for painting ; their conversation and way of 
 life have no suggestions for poetry or romance. Their 
 houses are oppressive with commonplace ; and an artist 
 would find it very hard to work in them. Now, if we 
 consider why these people are not artistically interesting 
 we shall find it is because they are themselves not 
 interested in art. They do not really care for romantic 
 fiction, or poetry, or pictures, or noble music. They 
 may recite or clatter on the piano ; but it is all super- 
 ficial. Their houses may contain fine furniture, or even 
 costly china locked up in glass cabinets ; but there are 
 none of those personal touches which show that the 
 owners have a genuine sensibility to the beautiful. 
 
 We need not delay long over considering the separate- 
 ness in regard to things. Most interesting things attract 
 us both from an epistemonic and an artistic point of view. 
 Flowers, for instance, are attractive both to the painter 
 and the morphological botanist, though for quite different 
 reasons. But we do not always get this combination. 
 Few things are more interesting to the understanding 
 than the inner histology of the human frame ; nothing 
 is more hopelessly impossible for purposes of art. The 
 subjective ground of this objective quality lies in the 
 
318 HENRY STURT vi 
 
 fact that the human inside is a thing which we could 
 neither synthesise nor analyse with the distinctive artistic 
 experience. 
 
 § 19. We may now touch on some causes which 
 hinder the general recognition of the separateness of 
 the artistic experience. One of them is that mis- 
 conception of the artistic attitude as the attitude of 
 the non- performing admiration, which was mentioned 
 recently. 
 
 Another cause, trivial-seeming yet powerful, is language 
 — the application of artistic terms to non-artistic things. 
 It is common to hear men speak of a pretty checkmate 
 or a beautiful operation in surgery. (" ' Lovely sight 
 if Slasher does it,' remarked Mr. Bob Sawyer.") But 
 such things are not really beautiful in the sense that 
 a picture is beautiful. The good checkmate or good 
 operation are doubtless, owing to their neatness and 
 effectiveness, as satisfying in their own way as the 
 good picture ; but the satisfaction is not of the same 
 kind. People who overlook this will talk of the artistic 
 satisfaction to be got from checkmates and operations. 
 But the use of the artistic word has no more real 
 appropriateness than the common cook's term "beautiful" 
 to describe a nice pudding. 
 
 Another cause is the transference of art-forms to the 
 service of interests which are not only external to art 
 but external to the higher life altogether. Some of these 
 interests are base, and then we feel that the forms are 
 degraded in a painful way. Usually the interests are 
 well enough in their own sphere. As examples may be 
 cited many of the popular pictures of war or hunting. 
 Such pictures may possess artistic merit. But often 
 there is no more art in them than in a photograph of a 
 prize-fight. 
 
 The case is rather different where art-forms are used 
 for moral or epistemonic purposes. This is not infrequent 
 in modern days; there are examples in Browning. Much 
 of the interest of The Ring and the Book is ethical or 
 psychological rather than artistic. To say this implies 
 
vi ART AND PERSONALITY 319 
 
 no complaint against Browning. Any great thinker has 
 a right to give his message in any form he finds most 
 convenient. It is our own fault if the boundaries of art 
 are confused in our minds thereby. * The same trans- 
 ference of form is seen in painting. For example may 
 be mentioned a recent Academy picture of Mr. Gow's, 
 The Great Nile Dam at Assouan, which shows us a piece 
 of the half- finished wall, railway trucks laden with 
 Portland cement, some natives mixing mortar, the 
 eminent English contractor under an umbrella standing 
 with a little group round an engineer who traces plans 
 with a walking-stick in the sand. All most interesting ; 
 but not art in the same sense that Mr. Watts' pictures 
 are art. 
 
 And finally, there is the fact that the separateness 
 is not absolute. In art there is always some admixture 
 of knowledge and morals ; and in the highest art a great 
 deal. We shall have to consider this further by 
 and by. 
 
 8 20. We find the same separateness in the case of 
 knowledge. To the man of knowledge what is mainly 
 interesting is the minds and experience of intellectual 
 men ; or, to speak more precisely, of men in general on 
 their distinctively intellectual side. For, whereas art is 
 somewhat aside from the main business of life, knowledge 
 is diffused through the whole of it. In this connection 
 I mean by the man of knowledge not only the profes- 
 sional scientist who, like Sir Isaac Newton, lives to 
 explore and think ; but also the man of intellectual 
 power who, throughout the conduct of his life, shows 
 an unselfish love of intellectual construction and com- 
 prehension. 
 
 So also with morality. The interest of the virtuous 
 man is centred in virtuous men. It is true that other 
 excellences of character awake in us something of the 
 same sort of admiration as moral goodness, 1 but in a 
 much inferior degree. There are phrases current which 
 might lead one to suppose that the greatest saints think 
 
 1 Cf. my article entitled "Duty" in International Journal of 'Ethics for April, 1897. 
 
320 HENRY STURT vi 
 
 less of virtuous men than of sinners. This is not so. 
 Sinners are interesting in so far as they are not hopeless, 
 but still have the makings of good men. Once they are 
 finally judged and relegated to hell, no one imagines that 
 the saints care anything about them. 
 
 § 21. I must now meet an objection which has 
 perhaps been in the reader's mind some time, since I 
 said (in § 15) that the proper objects of enthusiasm are 
 enthusiastic people. The objection will be that I have 
 made each man's artistic, intellectual, and moral qualities 
 to depend on his appreciation of the same qualities in 
 others, and that thus a vicious circle is made. The 
 answer is that the circle is only apparent. In each case 
 the quality has a substantive existence in the mind of 
 its possessor. A has certain definite mental contents 
 which we call art or knowledge or moral goodness ; they 
 are not less definite and real, and not less his own because 
 he could not have them without knowing B, C, D and 
 others who possess the like. We may illustrate from the 
 case of love. A loves B ; and the chief quality which 
 makes B lovable is that he is of a loving disposition, 
 manifested in particular towards A. And so from B's 
 point of view. The two loves are mutually dependent ; 
 but the relation of mutual dependence does not destroy 
 their several reality. 
 
 All this would have an important bearing on the 
 social aspect of art and the rest of the higher life, if that 
 were the matter of our discussion. Society is not merely 
 the field in which we exercise the qualities of the higher 
 life ; the qualities themselves are essentially social. And 
 thus we see how mistaken it would be to try, as 
 Henry Sidgwick once did, 1 to determine the Ultimate 
 Good by considering what a man would choose who 
 found himself solitary in a universe. 
 
 § 22. I said just now (in § 19) that the separation 
 between the departments of our higher life is not absolute. 
 In the first place they are connected at the root. If we 
 cast our thoughts over any of our artistic actions we see 
 
 1 Methods of Ethics, ist ed. p. 374. 
 
vi ART AND PERSONALITY 321 
 
 that in them we exercise not only the special artistic 
 faculty, but also a kind of consciousness which, if not 
 moral, is at least akin to morality ; and moreover a kind 
 of intelligence which if not identical with knowledge is, at 
 least, akin to it. 1 
 
 But, notwithstanding this basic connection, each of 
 these interests in its ordinary definite form is mainly 
 concerned with itself. If we try to combine two of them, 
 we run the risk of spoiling both. To enter upon an 
 artistic task in a spirit of moral zeal generally impairs the 
 artistic result. To quote an obvious example, novels with 
 a moral purpose are generally bad fiction without being 
 good sermons. And so with an attempted combination 
 of art and knowledge. Any one who has tried to write 
 philosophy with much attention to style knows how 
 carefully the style-interest must be kept subordinate. 
 Otherwise phrase-making will get the upper hand and 
 truth succumb. And yet we can imagine this natural 
 limitation transcended. We can imagine, perhaps on rare 
 occasions meet with, objects which engage all our higher 
 interests at once ; we can imagine occasions when we 
 could put forth all our higher faculties in harmonious 
 co-operation. The possibility of such a transcendence 
 helps to prevent that recognition of the usual separateness 
 of the higher interests which it is the object of this 
 section of my essay to demonstrate. 
 
 IV. Artistic Valuation 
 
 § 23. We come now to the questions connected with 
 artistic valuation. I wish to draw out the full philosophic 
 import of the judgment that a given work of art has 
 artistic value. Five main questions at least may be 
 raised : (a) What is it exactly that is pronounced 
 valuable? Is it the work merely? Or is it the work as 
 the expression of a consciousness ? (b) By whom is the 
 
 1 For this reason I coined in § i a new term ' epistemonic ' as the adjective 
 of knowledge ; since there is an element in both art and morals which might be 
 called ' cognitive ' or ' intellectual. ' 
 
322 HENRY STURT vi 
 
 judgment pronounced ? To whom are we to look for the 
 judgment? And whose judgment is the most trust- 
 worthy? (c) For whom is the work valuable? A thing of 
 value which is valuable for no one in particular is of course 
 a false abstraction. The valuable thing must be felt as 
 valuable for some one; and for some one more than for others. 
 We have to ask : For whom ? (d) The judger who pro- 
 nounces the work valuable must have a standing-ground for 
 his judgment. The ascertainment of this ground is the 
 most important point of the whole inquiry into value. 
 (e) What authority has our judgment of value? On 
 what do we rely in meeting those who reject it in theory 
 or oppose it in practice ? What guarantee have we of the 
 permanence of the judgment ? 
 
 These are the main questions about value, and we 
 shall find that the answers must all be made from the 
 personal point of view. 
 
 It is to be noted that I am only propounding 
 philosophic questions about artistic value as opposed to 
 others which might be called professional. If a painting- 
 master were asked by a pupil why he thought a picture 
 good he would probably specify various merits of 
 technique or composition. He would be quite right from 
 his own point of view. But these professional matters 
 are external to that inner reality with which we are 
 concerned now. 
 
 § 24. (a) One frequently hears it said that a cardinal 
 difference between a moral act and a work of art is that 
 the former has no value apart from the fact that it 
 manifests the character of the doer, whereas in the latter 
 the doer's character is indifferent. As we have seen 
 (in § 16) there are facts which lend colour to this 
 statement. But, in the main, it is false. An effect of 
 colour or music which is the outcome of chance is never 
 the same to us as one which is the work of human 
 thought. What we should value in the work of art is 
 the consciousness of the artist manifested therein. If we 
 fail in doing this we fail in the duties of the critic. 
 Perhaps these duties in their fulness are too onerous for 
 
vj ART AND PERSONALITY 323 
 
 human nature. We cannot usually trouble about the 
 consciousness of the tailor who makes our coat (though 
 the higher political economy tells us that we should), and 
 we do not usually trouble about the consciousness of the 
 painter of the average pictures on the walls of the Royal 
 Academy. But it is only the limitation of our knowledge 
 and the dulness of our sympathy and imagination which 
 keep us from feeling the artist's personality behind 
 his work. 
 
 The consciousness which the work manifests must be 
 of the distinctively artistic kind. That means in the first 
 place that it must be vivid, free, creative. Here we have 
 the mark to distinguish art from manufacture. The 
 manufacturer is not a creator but a copier, a reproducer 
 of the thoughts of others, or of his own when they have 
 got stale. He works up to a standard externally 
 prescribed, and lives upon a lower and colder plane of 
 consciousness. Here the parallel is close between art and 
 morals. Mechanical conformity is death to both. It is 
 the chief artistic danger of modern society with its vast 
 swamping industrial organisations, that crafts tend to be 
 carried on less and less in the true artistic spirit. 
 
 In the second place, to say that the consciousness 
 must be distinctively artistic means that it is not to be 
 confused with the kindred experiences of knowledge and 
 morality, or to be valued because of moral and epistemonic 
 elements in it. The arguments of the previous section of 
 this essay were intended to obviate the possibility of such 
 a confusion. Each experience has its own quality and 
 its value lies in the perfection of the quality. The 
 interests of art, knowledge and morality are autotelic 
 interests. What the quality of art is, cannot be defined, 
 though it may be indicated by description. It is an 
 irreducible fact at which definition stops. All we can 
 say of it is that it is a distinct mode of appreciating 
 men. 
 
 In this relative independence of art we find the meaning 
 of that much-abused shibboleth " Art for art's sake." 
 Some who could not or did not want to understand how 
 
3 2 4 HENRY STURT vi 
 
 art is akin to the other higher interests have talked as 
 though an artist were all the better for being a reprobate 
 and a dunce. That heresy is far from extinct, though it 
 does not enjoy the favour of a dozen years ago. 
 
 §25. (b) Now, who is to say when the work of art 
 embodies vivid consciousness of the true artistic kind ? 
 Obviously, there is no one who has such an opportunity 
 of knowing as the artist himself. The case is the same 
 as in morals. No one is in such a position as the agent 
 to tell the spirit of his action, if he would only do so. 
 
 There are, however, well-known causes which impair 
 our confidence in the artist's judgment of his own work. 
 For one, there is personal vanity. The artist feels vaguely 
 that he must have produced a great work, because he is 
 sure that he is a great man. Another cause is pre- 
 occupation with technique. There are many effects, not 
 very important in themselves, which the artist is apt to 
 prize because they are difficult to accomplish. This is 
 particularly common in music and painting. In times of 
 decadence this secondary technical interest is sometimes 
 all that survives. For these reasons we are perhaps more 
 inclined to rely on the judgment of the artist, not at the 
 time of his doing the work, but when he looks back on it 
 after a lapse of time. His consciousness is clearer then. 
 But we must also remember that it is feebler, and that 
 new prejudices may arise to obscure old truth. 
 
 So far as the critic is worthy of attention on a question 
 of value, he must take the position of an artist-at-second- 
 hand, i.e. he must by an exercise of sympathetic 
 imagination go through the creative process of the artist's 
 consciousness. The insight of any critic is limited ; 
 though there are people of little creative force who have 
 the power of re-creation in an extraordinary degree. But 
 we trust it because of its comparative immunity from 
 personal prepossessions. Still more do we trust the 
 verdict of many critics, succeeding each other through 
 ages. This is our nearest approach to infallibility. The 
 ground of our confidence is not merely the number of the 
 voices, but rather our conviction of the organic unity of 
 
vi ART AND PERSONALITY 325 
 
 human nature. The contemporaries of Sophocles judged 
 the Antigone beautiful for reasons organically connected 
 with Greek life ; and successive generations have ratified 
 their verdict. We now regard it as true for all ages 
 because the long consensus of opinion shows that the play 
 appeals to sentiments which are not merely Greek but 
 fundamentally human ; and we are sure that the founda- 
 tions of human nature will not change. 
 
 §26. (c) A valuable experience is, of course, valuable 
 for some person. Primarily, the person for whom art is 
 valuable is the artist himself. If any one asked : For 
 whom was Shakespeare's artistic life a good ? the answer 
 would be : In the first place, for Shakespeare. And this 
 is not an exceptional rule for exceptional men, but merely 
 the common rule for the valuation of human life. We 
 cannot say of the rank and file of humanity that A's life 
 is valuable because it furthers the lives of B, C, and D, and 
 so on. Nor can we say it of the chiefs. 
 
 But to this a necessary supplement must be made. 
 It is essential to the artist's character as a lover of men 
 that he should feel such an interest in human life as is 
 inconsistent with the selfishness of keeping his creative 
 gift to himself. He must at least intend that his work 
 shall be enjoyed by society. Apart from this, the saying 
 " Art for the artist " might be misunderstood in a sense 
 contrary to the whole tenor of my argument. In 
 Huysmans' novel A Rebours the hero shuts himself 
 hermetically from all contact with the world, and lives 
 entirely for the enjoyment of his aesthetic feelings. That 
 is just the sort of life I do not regard as typically artistic. 
 Artistic experience with its outcome of performance is 
 good for the artist in the same way that a saintly life is 
 good for the saint. It is the expression of an enthusiasm 
 whose blessedness it is to spend and be spent in the 
 following of a high ideal. 
 
 " Art for the artist " should reconcile us to those 
 apparently painful cases where artistic work is lost without 
 contributing commensurately to the common enjoyment. 
 The case is more frequent still in morals. How often does 
 
326 HENRY STURT vi 
 
 moral effort fall unheeded to the ground ! And yet it 
 was good for the doer that he did it. 
 
 §27. (d) We come now to the most important question 
 of all : On what ground does the judger stand when he 
 judges a work of art excellent ? Here we touch upon 
 the ultimate basis of artistic value, indeed of all value 
 whatever. The answer is that he stands upon the ground 
 of immediate personal experience ; he judges the work 
 excellent because he feels or intuitively perceives it to be 
 excellent. 
 
 Our previous discussions have shown that this affirma- 
 tion may be analysed further. Let us make the analysis 
 by representing to ourselves a concrete case of such a 
 judgment. Of course it must be an artist judging his 
 own finished work. Now the work has value because of 
 the human character embodied therein ; character, as we 
 have seen, primarily of the artistic kind. This human 
 character in the work belongs partly to his object, partly 
 comes from himself. If this sound obscure, let us make 
 the example still more definite. Let the artist be a painter 
 and his work a portrait. Then the human character seen 
 in the painting by the painter is partly that of his model ; 
 and partly it is his own ; for the portrait is his work, his 
 interpretation. The portrait in fact has an objective and 
 a subjective side. Both sides are known to be excellent 
 by immediate experience. But, for the subjective, feeling 
 is the more appropriate term ; and for the objective, 
 intuition. When the artist was doing his best to paint 
 that portrait he felt that his action was excellent or noble 
 or valuable. And he recognised by intuitioti the excellence 
 of the character revealed in the model's face. The ground 
 of our judgment of moral value is the same. We ask : 
 Why did you judge it good to nurse your friend through 
 his fever ? and the agent will answer : I knew by feeling or 
 intuition that it was good. On analysis we shall find that 
 this judgment involves both a recognition of the excellence 
 of the agent's friend, and also a recognition of the goodness 
 of his own purpose in tending the sick man. Beyond 
 this point analysis cannot take us. I have only to add the 
 
vi ART AND PERSONALITY 327 
 
 caution that the objective and the subjective sides, separable 
 in abstract statement, are not separable in reality. You 
 cannot appreciate without appreciating somebody ; and 
 conversely (if the tautology may be forgiven) you cannot 
 appreciate somebody without feeling appreciation. That 
 is only one more example of the essential subjective- 
 objective two-sidedness of our conscious life. 
 
 §28. It will be evident to the reader that the fore- 
 going account of the basis of artistic valuation is a form 
 of intuitionism. But there are, I venture to think, 
 advantages in this particular form which are not shared 
 by others. 
 
 (a) Intuitions, in general, are commonly described too 
 much in intellectual terms. This is specially noticeable 
 of moral intuitions. According to the common account, 
 a man does an act and his conscience, supervening, tells 
 him it is right. He sees another do it, and his intuitive 
 faculty is similarly on hand to give him information. 
 In opposition to this I would urge that there is no such 
 separateness in the judging faculty. A nurses his friend 
 B through typhus. He has a feeling that it is good to 
 do so, a feeling impelling him to the action. When, 
 in the accepted phrase, his conscience tells him he is 
 right, that is only his feeling-experience become self- 
 conscious and articulate. So with the objective side of 
 the action. It is A's love for B that causes A to face 
 danger on B's behalf. The intuitive faculty does not 
 thereupon step in from outside and pronounce that B 
 is lovable. A's intuition is simply his love for B come 
 to self-consciousness. I have taken the examples from 
 morals rather than from art because ethical intuitionism 
 is the more developed. But the account of the matter 
 would be on parallel lines if A were painting B's portrait 
 instead of nursing him. Another way of putting the 
 matter would be to say that the artistic intuition is a 
 function of the whole self, rather than a separate faculty 
 in the self. 
 
 (/3) This leads on to the next point in which my 
 view of the artistic intuition may claim an advantage, 
 
328 HENRY STURT V1 
 
 i.e. that art is not left in isolation, but is brought into 
 the vital system of the individual and of society. Nothing 
 is more unsatisfactory from a logical point of view, than 
 an intuition which comes from no one knows where and 
 issues orders no one knows why. Now we cannot in the 
 strict sense explain the origin of the artistic intuition any 
 more than the origin of any other primary function of 
 our nature. But if, as I believe, civilisation is mainly 
 founded on those kinds of unselfish human interest 
 which we call knowledge and morality, it is easily 
 intelligible that we should have a parallel interest, which 
 we call art, closely akin and lending powerful support 
 to the other two. It is intelligible, too, that moral 
 goodness, intellectual power, high vitality, and strength 
 should be approved by the intuition. For these are 
 prime elements of welfare in the individual and the 
 social system. They are conditions and consequences 
 at least, if nothing more, of an artistic disposition. 
 
 (7) There is, on my view, no difficulty in explaining 
 the variations of the intuition in different men, different 
 epochs, different societies. A lack of flexibility is the 
 most notorious fault of the common intuitionism. But let 
 the basis of art be an interest in men, and then, plainly, 
 artists will appreciate those forms of human excellence 
 which actually come before them. " But," it will be 
 asked, " is there not now too much flexibility ? Have 
 you not in making your intuition so flexible, destroyed 
 its unity ? " My answer is that there is unity in the 
 intuition so long as there is substantial unity on the 
 subjective or feeling side of it, and substantial unity in 
 the objects which it approves of. Suppose that we come 
 upon a strange artist who is producing work which he 
 affirms to be art. The work may not be quite like any 
 other work in the world, but it is art so long as he feels in 
 doing it as true artists feel, and so long as his object 
 is akin to the objects that true artists admire. 
 
 % 29. But though I believe in intuitionism I do not 
 believe in the intuitional method as commonly understood. 
 We know Bentham's amusing account of that method as 
 
vi ART AND PERSONALITY 329 
 
 applied to morals. " The various systems that have been 
 formed concerning the standard of right and wrong may 
 all be reduced to the principle of sympathy and antipathy. 
 One account may serve for all of them. They consist 
 all of them in so many contrivances for avoiding the 
 obligation of appealing to any external standard, and for 
 prevailing upon the reader to accept of the author's 
 sentiment or opinion as a reason for itself. The phrases 
 different, but the principle the same. It is curious 
 enough to observe the variety of inventions men have 
 hit upon, and the variety of phrases they have brought 
 forward, in order to conceal from the world and, if possible, 
 from themselves, this very general and therefore very 
 pardonable self-sufficiency. One man says he has a 
 thing made on purpose to tell him what is right and 
 what is wrong, and that it is called a moral sense ; and 
 then he goes to work at his ease, and says such a thing 
 is right, and such a thing is wrong — why ? ' because my 
 moral sense tells me it is.' Another man comes and 
 alters the phrase, leaving out moral and putting in 
 common in the room of it," 1 and so on. There is a 
 strong element of caricature in this witty diatribe of 
 Bentham's ; but he is right in his main point, that a 
 purely introspective attempt to determine the content 
 of an intuition runs the risk of consecrating what merely 
 favours our private advantage or prejudice. There is 
 nothing to be gained by tying oneself down to the intro- 
 spective method. If an intuition is generally diffused 
 among men we can ascertain it by studying their conduct. 
 If human enthusiasm be the true motive of art, then a 
 study of artists will disclose the fact. In any case, this 
 is the standpoint adopted in the present essay — in- 
 tuitionism with the method of empiricism. 
 
 But we should be quite ignoring the distinctive 
 character of artistic experience if we thought we could 
 ascertain what is right in art by mere statistical inquiry. 
 We should be neglecting the personal affirmation of 
 value implicit in every genuine artistic judgment. This 
 
 1 Introduction to tht Principles of Morals and Legislation, chap. ii. 
 
330 HENRY STURT vi 
 
 may be illustrated by contrasting with art a kind of 
 judgment in which no value is involved. Let the 
 judgment in question be one concerning fashion in 
 dress. " Crinolines are becoming fashionable again," 
 says an eminent modiste, and we assent or dissent on 
 purely statistical grounds. " Crinolines are beautiful." 
 This we cannot accept or deny without a much deeper 
 affirmation. 
 
 §30. {e) We come now to the last of the questions 
 connected with artistic valuation, its authority. We 
 saw that the valuation is made by a personal affirmation. 
 When we meet with people who reject our valuation, 
 is it merely one ipse dixit against another? Having 
 regard to the amount of Bad Taste around us, one 
 might expect that we should have to combat a large 
 number of recalcitrants. But we shall see that this 
 is not the case when we come to analyse the matter. 
 What is comprehensively called bad taste might in 
 many cases be more appropriately termed rudimentary 
 taste. We cannot blame a savage for preferring the 
 music of the tom-tom to that of the piano. The latter 
 instrument has simply not come within his artistic range. 
 And on most points of art a great number, perhaps 
 the majority, of our friends are in an analogous position. 
 The stigma of bad taste should only be fixed on those 
 who choose the worse when they might easily have chosen 
 the better. As causes of ordinary bad taste we may 
 enumerate Fossilism, that is, a stupid adherence to 
 artistic forms that may have been very well in their day, 
 but should now be abandoned for others more adequate ; 
 Vulgarity, which leads us to prefer forms conducive to 
 self-glorification ; Crankiness, or the undue insistence on 
 some element which has only a subordinate value. None 
 of these kinds of bad taste has any special philosophical 
 significance. Their valuation is at bottom the standard 
 valuation stunted or distorted. They have no strength 
 of conviction, no principle to oppose to us. 
 
 § 31. The case is different with the Decadent. It 
 is true that he proffers no positive principle ; but he is 
 
vi ART AND PERSONALITY 331 
 
 great in his denials. We believe in life ; he disbelieves 
 in it, despises it. If we traced this disbelief to its source, 
 we should find that it arises from want of affection for 
 his fellow-men. 
 
 From this decay of the root of interest in him we 
 may deduce the characteristics of the decadent. In 
 art he is, according to a well-known and well-approved 
 definition, a worker who thinks more of the parts than 
 of the whole. As some one has said of Mr. Swinburne, 
 he cares not for life but for style. In criticism, where 
 he abounds, he is a seeker after subtlety, an amateur 
 of filigree, a worshipper of la nuance. To him the 
 dexterity of the word-artist, who captures a just-perceptible 
 meaning floating on the boundary of thought, is more 
 precious than the first-hand statement of a fundamental 
 truth. Superficially, decadence is the comminution 
 of values. 
 
 But there is a deeper meaning in him. Let us see 
 if we can trace it in a concrete example. The following 
 may be quoted as a typical decadent appreciation of litera- 
 ture : * — "He was indifferent or contemptuous towards 
 the writers of the Latin Augustan age ; Virgil seemed 
 to him thin and mechanical, Horace a detestable clown ; 
 the fat redundancy of Cicero and the dry constipation of 
 Csesar alike disgusted him ; Sallust, Livy, Juvenal, even 
 Tacitus and Plautus, though for these he had words of 
 praise, seemed to him for the most part merely the 
 delights of pseudo- literary readers." After some slight 
 commending of Lucan and high admiration of Petronius, 
 the appreciation goes on : " But the special odour which 
 the Christians had by the fourth century imparted to 
 decomposing pagan Latin was delightful to him in 
 such authors as Commodian of Gaza, 2 whose tawny, 
 sombre, and tortuous style he even preferred to Claudian's 
 sonorous blasts, in which the trumpet of paganism was 
 last heard in the world. He was also able to maintain 
 interest in Prudentius, Sedulius and a host of unknown 
 
 1 Havelock Ellis, Affirmations, p. 181. 
 2 A writer of relisrious acrostics. 
 
332 HENRY STURT vi 
 
 Christians who combined Catholic fervour with a Latinity 
 which had become, as it were, completely putrid, leaving 
 but a few shreds of torn flesh for the Christians to 
 ' marinate in the brine of their new tongue.' " 
 
 In such a statement of literary preferences, to which 
 any number of parallels might be found, we may discern 
 that, if it were possible for the decadent to have a 
 substantive principle, it would be the Excellence of Death. 
 The praise of death with its allied phenomena of suicide, 
 pessimism, and the glorification of sin is always prominent 
 in decadence. 1 No writer can literally and seriously 
 affirm the excellence of death, any more than he can 
 affirm the excellence of silence ; but the decadent, moth- 
 like, is always fluttering round it. 
 
 In the present age, when conditions on the whole are 
 favourable to the higher life, the decadent's contempt for 
 life is not formidable. Natural selection is always refuting 
 him. But we should feel him sorely at a time when the 
 struggle was all up-hill, as in the centuries when the 
 ancient civilisation was decaying. The decadent may be 
 inconsistent and despicable, but we cannot afford to 
 pass him with a sneer. To oppose him effectually we 
 must be convinced that there is a supra-mundane authority 
 behind our private affirmation, behind the consensus of 
 society and the brute force of evolution. We must be 
 convinced that our artistic affirmation harmonises with the 
 spirit of the universe. 
 
 | 32. The same feeling is felt much more strongly 
 and with more need on occasions when men are struggling 
 for artistic reform. Artistic reform consists in a fresh 
 burst of enthusiasm for man and nature prompted by the 
 perception of valuable elements of life and character 
 hitherto overlooked, or blocked out from view by vicious 
 tradition. A typical example is found in the English 
 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. To call attention to new 
 artistic truth means a militant revolt against the en- 
 trenched representatives of the established order. This is 
 no light matter, as the Pre-Raphaelites found ; though we 
 
 1 See L. Proal, Le crime et le suicide passio?inels, p. 361 sqq. 
 
vi ART AND PERSONALITY 333 
 
 who enjoy the fruits of victory can seldom realise how 
 serious such a struggle was to the men who fought in it. 
 The ardour and perseverance to carry it through are not 
 intelligible without the conviction which would be religious 
 if it became articulate. In the struggle for moral progress 
 it is keenly felt and loudly expressed. We can hardly 
 conceive a moral reformer who did not say that God was 
 on his side. The artistic reformer does not take that 
 tone, because the matter is not enough to justify so 
 tremendous an appeal. 
 
 § 33. It is necessary in conclusion to define the 
 relation of my theory of valuation to two points on which 
 popular opinion has expressed itself forcibly, the right of 
 private judgment, and the accessibility of an objective 
 criterion. On the first point I appear to harmonise with 
 popular opinion ; on the second to disagree, though the 
 disagreement is, I hope, superficial. 
 
 Space is lacking to analyse fully the notion of private 
 judgment ; but evidently the insistence on it is important 
 mainly in questions of value. In the settlement of 
 questions of fact, on the other hand, we have to rely 
 largely on those who are better informed than ourselves ; 
 nor are we any the worse for doing so. It is for liberty 
 of judgment in matters of value, more especially of moral 
 value, that Teutonic Europe has fought so passionately 
 and stands so jealously on guard. What it is that is 
 claimed in this sphere may again be easily misunderstood. 
 It is not that each man claims to be his own infallible 
 Pope. For the strongest upholder of private judgment 
 will admit that it is constantly mistaken. The claim is 
 that things which are declared to be valuable in the way of 
 art, knowledge, or morality must be valued by the 
 individual with his free personal affirmation. 
 
 When we come to think of it, this is not a claim to 
 make a judgment of value in one way rather than in 
 another way ; the judgment of intrinsic value can only 
 be made as a free personal affirmation, if it is to be made 
 at all. For it is essential to that kind of judgment 
 that it should be enthusiastic, and enthusiasm cannot be 
 
334 HENRY STURT vi 
 
 felt vicariously. The phrase " liberty of conscience " really 
 means " liberty to have a conscience," since a conscience 
 fettered ceases to be a conscience. So in art. We 
 cannot commission another to make our artistic judg- 
 ment for us, however artistic he may be. To put the 
 matter in an aphorism which will cover the whole range 
 of intrinsic value : I can let another measure and weigh 
 for me ; I cannot let him love for me. 
 
 § 34. The popular demand for an objective criterion is 
 strong ; but it is not at all clear, and has led to the 
 formulation of some impossible theories, such as that the 
 artistically valuable may be ascertained by reference to 
 Eternal Laws, or Types, of Beauty. It is hardly necessary 
 to enter upon a refutation of these theories, which have no 
 longer much scientific support. But it may be remarked 
 (a) that they are inconsistent with the claim to private 
 judgment ; (b) that no one can ever tell the world what 
 these laws or types are ; they are blank forms, like Kant's 
 categorical imperative ; (c) that even if the laws or 
 types in their full content were laid before us, we could 
 never determine artistic value by the mere process of 
 comparing artistic works with them, as a tradesman 
 compares his own yard-measure or pint-measure with 
 the standard of the government inspector. Such 
 a mechanical comparison would grossly misrepresent the 
 genuine artistic judgment. 
 
 And yet it is easy to see how the belief in an objective 
 criterion has arisen. One source of it is the feeling, of 
 which I have recently spoken, that good art has a 
 superhuman backing. It is easy to step from this to the 
 doctrine that you can determine by religion what good 
 art is. This step is unwarrantable. For though we 
 might say in Aristotelian phrase that, in the order of being, 
 art is based on religion ; yet, in the order of our 
 knowledge, religion is based on art and on the parallel 
 functions of our personal life. 
 
 Another source is the practical disciplinary need of 
 having a recognised standard wherewith to put down 
 offenders against artistic good sense. We see the same 
 
vi ART AND PERSONALITY 335 
 
 thing in morals, where those in lawful authority cannot 
 always be debating with anarchists on first principles. 
 But this practical need must not make us forget that the 
 recognised standard is but a systematisation of personal 
 affirmations. We must not confuse it with the chimera 
 of an objective criterion. 
 
VII 
 
 THE FUTURE OF ETHICS: EFFORT OR 
 ABSTENTION ? 
 
 By F. W. Bussell 
 
 i. Ethics as the borderland of Philosophy ; not properly within the domain 
 of Pure Reason. 
 
 2. Depends on prejudices, and deals with the singular and not the uniform. 
 
 3. Yet it should be examined by Critical Philosophy although in all time 
 
 Rational Ethics = Abstention. Ethical Law (unlike the Natural sphere) 
 is only realised through voluntary effort of individuals. The Ethical 
 agent (if he debates at all) makes a heroic wager. The final motive 
 is " loyalty to a cause not yet won." 
 
 4. Present state of Ethics in Europe, confronted with the certainties of 
 
 Science : is there room for appeal ? Becomes despairing and senti- 
 mental, or Quietistic. 
 
 5. Ethics (in a wide sense, as the conduct of life according to a certain 
 
 standard) proceeds on certain assumptions which are necessary before 
 any practical maxim can be accepted. 
 
 6. These assumptions are peculiar to European Ethics ; where the criterion 
 
 is popular, and the emphasis is on the moral life and on ordinary duties. 
 The Western aristocracy, as one of effort and endeavour, not of know- 
 ledge or asceticism. 
 
 7. How arises this conviction of the dignity of the Moral Life ? Not from 
 
 the study of Nature, which contradicts it, but from the sense of the Value 
 of the Individual; and from the certainty of Personal life, — our only sure 
 experience, though beyond the reach of absolute proof. 
 
 8. Ethics as a Realm of Faith. 
 
 9. Necessary assumptions of the Ethical philosopher. 
 
 II 
 
 Ethical systems have been mainly negative. In Greece, tend to be 
 anti-social ; where active, due to personal influences (Pythagoras and 
 Socrates). 
 
 Reflection fails to give any sufficient reason for the common behaviour of 
 men, and to confirm their convictions or prejudice, in favour of the life 
 11ft 
 
vii THE FUTURE OF ETHICS 337 
 
 of striving. Quietism, and abstention due in a great measure to the 
 Greek passion for Unity, in speculative matters. 
 
 12. Undue emphasis in search for Unity upon Nature (where man has 
 
 nothing to learn except maxims of prudence and experience), instead of 
 upon History (Narcissus). Judaso-Christian ideal transforms Europe ; 
 because interest centres on the individual soul ; and (in consequence, 
 not in spite of this) devotion to a visible commonwealth arises. 
 
 13. Abstention is the result of independent (or Naturalistic) Ethics, and the 
 
 peculiar tone of European Ethics is due to various forces in the early 
 centuries of our era. Ethics seeks to attain independence after the 
 Reformation (mainly behind current practice, and with almost exclusive 
 emphasis on self-interest). 
 
 14. Problem of Disinterestedness is in forefront of Ethics ever since. 
 
 15. Two divergent tendencies have marked nineteenth century; one to 
 
 Quietism, viz. Science ; the other to Effort ; Benevolence and Social 
 Reform, Decay of the Empire of abstractions. 
 
 16. All modern movements aim at the immediate benefit of the individual 
 
 (whatever form they seem to take), his freedom and his comfort. No 
 serious fear of abandonment, of self-determination. Emphasis on 
 Personal Relations. Individualism alone can lead to Collectivism. 
 
 17. We fight to-day against a threatened return to Oriental monism in what- 
 
 ever field. Le mysticisme c'est l'ennemi ; for it is fatal not merely to 
 action, but in the end to thought itself. 
 
 I 
 
 § i. This Essay endeavours to call attention to the 
 somewhat anomalous position of ethical study in Europe. 
 Two points especially seem worthy of note : (1) that Ethics, 
 regarded in a broad sense as the ' science of conduct,' 
 demands a larger basis of hypothesis than any other 
 science ; and (2) that the ideal, whether of social work or 
 self-realisation, whether the extreme of Altruism or 
 Individualism, is denied both by the earlier and still 
 powerful systems of the East, and by the most modern 
 " reformers " of ethical theory in our own continent. 
 From the confessed obligation of personal effort and 
 of social service acknowledged alike by Christian and 
 Positivist from a religious or a secular standpoint, a 
 reaction threatens us, in which participate philosophic 
 temperaments so different as Schopenhauer, Von Hart- 
 mann, Renan, F. H. Bradley, Nietzsche, and last, but 
 not least aggressive, Mr. A. E. Taylor. 1 And first, there 
 are peculiar difficulties in the way of those who claim for 
 
 1 Problem of Conduct, Macmillan, 1901. 
 Z 
 
338 F. W. BUSSELL vn 
 
 Ethics a secure place among the Sciences. Theology can 
 no longer be termed, in the strict sense, scientific ; although 
 the criticism of theologians may be conducted scientifically, 
 and in scientific language. The mediaeval Schoolmen, 
 rationalists at heart, following the Alexandrine lead and 
 possibly mistaking it, endeavoured to lay down rules for the 
 advance from the lower and precarious region of Faith to 
 the certainty of Knowledge ; just as the Mystic, emotional 
 and ecstatic though his aim, gravely enumerates the 
 mile-stones which the traveller must pass on the road to 
 perfection, and employs all the artifice of the intellect to 
 silence the intellect itself. This reign of uniform (and 
 regular) law prevailed in theologies both of formula and 
 fruition ; and no sympathy was felt for the guilty impostor 
 who ventured to approach and to appropriate the Summum 
 Bonum by the hasty short-cut of an unauthenticated 
 method. The Reformation put an end to this tiresome 
 and exacting rigour ; and like the political development 
 which ran parallel, it has issued in the freedom of the 
 individual, solely accountable, in the matters of highest 
 import, to the inner voice. We may note a similar 
 disintegrating tendency in the purely moral sphere. We 
 are all keenly alive to the distressing insecurity of the 
 domain of Ethics. It is a debatable region or border- 
 land of Philosophy. It may indeed be questioned if, in 
 the strict sense, it is a province of Philosophy at all. So 
 far as concerns the inquiry into past systems, the criticism 
 of rival doctrines, the examination into empirical psych- 
 ology, — it must assuredly be considered a legitimate 
 department of the all-embracing Master-Science, which 
 " deems nothing that is human foreign " to its survey. But 
 from the practical side, Ethical treatises are dynamically 
 ineffective ; while from the theoretical, they do not belong 
 to the domain of pure Reason. Viewed as constructive, 
 Ethics is heavily weighted with prejudice and prepossession, 
 derived mainly from tradition and religious influence ; as 
 historic or statistical, it may be impartial but can hardly 
 be normative ; but as concerned now with the present 
 condition and future prospect of individual and race, it 
 
vii THE FUTURE OF ETHICS 339 
 
 must needs fall below the calm impassivity of a theoretic 
 science. It seeks to impose what may be termed the 
 categories of impulse, and sentiment upon an outer world, 
 which seems to repudiate their sanction. It is not easily 
 open to the reception of truth from without ; it seeks, 
 hesitating and uncertain about its own data, to fix a 
 precarious sphere of influence for them in a world, which 
 if not actively malevolent and antagonistic is at least 
 blind and unheeding. 1 
 
 § 2. Philosophy attempts to interpret the relations of 
 the individual finite consciousness (or rather, that 
 consciousness which "believes itself" to be individual, 
 continuous, and finite) to an existent outer order, or to an 
 outer order which is " believed to exist." To be without 
 bias or scruple or prejudice in recording one's experience 
 is to have a sound, wholesome, candid, and philosophic 
 temper. In ethics this colourless receptivity is impossible. 
 Pure Thought cannot be here supreme. In no other sphere 
 of inquiry are the reason's axioms so plainly postulates, 
 which it is bound to shield from profane inspection. In 
 self-defence it takes shelter behind common instinct, 
 emotion, and tradition. It is forced to appeal to a 
 universal impulse or ' intuition,' and it confesses that 
 the moral sanctions depend on a sentiment which is only 
 cogent because it is everywhere found as a fact of uni- 
 versal experience ; not because its arguments are intellec- 
 tually irresistible. In all sciences, it is these early steps 
 which are faltering and insecure ; but Ethics, in particular, 
 owes everything to a set of initial assumptions and hypo- 
 theses, which must to all time remain " matters of Faith." 
 Yet these cannot (legitimately) be dethroned or reduced in 
 number without weakening the whole fabric of convention 
 
 1 Maeterlinck: " Kingdom of Matter" : Fortnightly Review, Oct. i goo. "We 
 have learnt at last that the moral world is a world wherein man is alone ; a world, 
 contained in ourselves that bears no relation to Matter, and exercises no influence 
 on it, unless it be of the most hazardous and exceptional kind. But none the less 
 real therefore is this world, or less infinite ! If words break down when they try- 
 to tell of it, the reason is only that words are after all mere fragments of Matter, 
 seeking to enter a sphere where Matter holds no dominion." — This is very French 
 in tone and somewhat exaggerated, but it expresses well the sense of the chasm 
 that cannot be bridged between 'is' and 'ought,' between Fact and Ideal, 
 between pure Science and Faith. 
 
340 F. W. BUSSELL vn 
 
 and society. Reason has always claimed to use the 
 emotions, and to guide the passions ; but it has usually 
 succeeded in controlling the latter only by expelling the 
 former; and has settled down into that theoretical lethargy 
 which refuses encounter with everyday life. The philo- 
 sopher in the Thecetetus is sure that he can define ideal 
 or typical man, but fails to distinguish his next-door 
 neighbour. But in Ethics, truly conceived, what is of 
 moment is not this typical character, the uniform or 
 general law, but the singular, the special. Ethics must, if 
 applied to practice in however slender a degree, be as 
 empirical as character ; — built up from guesses and 
 hazards, accommodated to a manifold variety of individual 
 character and circumstance. No two situations are alike ; 
 and it may be questioned whether wide sweeping dicta 
 (such as Kant's maxim of Universality) are ever consciously 
 applied to solve the problem in any given case. The day 
 for the empty dignity of such utterances is past. Morality, 
 still swaying under the blow dealt by a Calvinistic 
 Naturalism, seeks to build up its shattered palace on the 
 concrete, and refuses to be consoled by any poetic appeals 
 or abstractions of a Justice, a Retribution, which is no 
 longer actual, nor personified. Thrown back on its own 
 inward experiences, the inquiring Soul finds no countenance 
 in the natural order for its sympathetic scruples ; no aid 
 in discredited authority. 
 
 Reconstruction must be mainly empirical, and can 
 never again become systematic. Any future scheme 
 which claims to be comprehensive must be either merely 
 casuistic (an attempt to drain an unfathomable ocean), 
 or historic ; and this method, so far as the ultimate 
 sanction of right and wrong is concerned, however 
 instructive, is never frankly conclusive. In fine: (i) the 
 moral agent can never be purely rational, but breathes 
 an atmosphere clouded by passion, emotion, and hypo- 
 thesis and illumined fitfully by the wandering flashes 
 of the Ideal ; and (2) as dealing with the contingent and 
 not with the certain, with the singular not with the 
 typical, he has, if he act at all, to contradict every 
 
vii THE FUTURE OF ETHICS 341 
 
 precept of philosophic apathy, and merely compromise 
 with probabilities. 
 
 Ethics then is mixt or " half-bred " philosophy, and 
 cannot be pursued as a science by the Pure Reason. 
 And this, not only because it is based on certain 
 hypotheses, and these in fact if not in name religious 
 assumptions, but also because it is concerned with the 
 application of Law to individual cases ; x on that best but 
 peculiar kind of Law, which, though it is regarded as 
 supreme, as ' categorical imperative,' is yet our own 
 creation ; depends entirely on our own efforts, for, 
 unlike an edict of Nature or Science which precedes 
 and constrains, it awaits our recognition and our en- 
 deavour, before it can come into being. It wins respect 
 and allegiance, like Mill's Deity, by its pathetic weakness. 
 Now it is more than doubtful if the Pure Reason can 
 afford to recognise the Individual, 2 and Ethics (save as 
 the very meagrest and emptiest list of general principles) 
 deals with nothing else. Every individual, as such, is 
 unique. Every ethical situation indeed can be brought 
 nominally under a known law, but the larger half 
 remains outside rebelliously and forms an exception ; and 
 it is for this reason that, while in modern life moral 
 relations have multiplied an alarming degree of complexity, 
 and the solving of moral problems has increased in diffi- 
 culty, — the general equipment of undoubted maxims is so 
 scanty and impoverished, that it may with safety be said 
 that this domain has received no new complement for 
 two thousand years. And this is clear from the most 
 superficial study of modern Moralists ; for example, Kant's 
 famous maxim is clearly implicit in every ancient writer ; 
 and besides wavers between a truism and an untruth ; for 
 from the point of view of Moral Law, it is superfluous 
 advice ; from the point of view of the individual (who is 
 always unique and exceptional) it is as certainly wrong. 
 
 1 Where the law is subordinated to the individual interest — the reverse of the 
 Natural Realm. 
 
 2 All Science proceeds by eliminating the special and the characteristic, and 
 subsumes what seems like exception or spontaneity under some higher or more 
 general law. 
 
342 F. W. BUSSELL vn 
 
 § 3. It would be calamitous, however, if the foundation 
 of Ethics and its practical application ceased to be studied 
 by ' pure ' philosophers. In ancient times, when the 
 pursuit of wisdom was practical, and implied adherence to 
 a definite rule of life (somewhat after the fashion of a 
 monastic order in the Middle Ages), there was a constant 
 temptation to the student to revert to theology, either 
 popular or esoteric, for sanctions which abstract principles 
 of the Unity of Being, or the sympathy of all Creatures, 
 could not supply. Philosophy never existed then, as an 
 impartial search after Truth, — it was always in some 
 sense a pursuit of personal Happiness. Each School 
 received a " fast dye " from the temperament of its 
 founder, and the most fertile epoch revived inspiration 
 from an exemplary life, and not from a coherent body of 
 dogma. Personal bias and instinctive sympathy or 
 repulsion decided the young adept in his choice — 
 Plotinus, in his tovtov e^rovv, after his first lecture from 
 Ammonius Saccas, lays stress upon the fulness of definition 
 already in the mind of the inquirer. To-day such 
 universal or practical functions in the guidance of youth 
 have been undertaken or usurped by the State (in a more 
 exacting sense of its responsibility), or by a Church, whose 
 theology is not in the strict sense a Science, while its 
 practical usefulness would always remain independent of 
 its doctrinal postulates. But it will appear the consistent 
 duty of a Critical Philosophy to examine, to question, and 
 to confirm from its own realm of experience, the general 
 principles which we accept traditionally, on authority, or 
 instinctively, from some dim notion of noblesse oblige, 
 or from some correspondence in sympathy between our 
 heart and an actual School or teacher (as in Plotinus' 
 case), or indeed emotionally, as in the case of most active 
 reformers of Society : — who in all time have acted so far 
 in advance of any rational justification that like Plato's 
 sage or lover, they have been mostly called insane. All 
 Ethics must in the end depend upon the inward motive, 
 and the ulterior sanction ; 1 critical philosophy is scarcely 
 
 1 This will remind us of a parallel in the theological field, of the new Ritschlian 
 
vii THE FUTURE OF ETHICS 343 
 
 fitted to provide the one, or to discover the latter. The 
 history of Ethics will show us how much fuller and richer 
 in content is the half-conscious moral life of the citizen 
 or the parent, since the dawn of history, than the 
 speculation, which sets out to explain, or professes to 
 guide it. How vague, how meagre, are early Greek 
 ethics ! how infinitely poorer and more fragmentary and 
 disjointed than the actual life of any individual, taken at 
 random from the cities of Ionia, where, as human nature 
 is at bottom unchanging, we might reasonably expect to 
 find the same types as in the moral or social world of to- 
 day. Even in the more barbaric times or regions, we 
 wonder not so much at the flickering incoherence of 
 savage life, confronted with the dangers of Nature and 
 the problems of existence, but at its steadfast hold on 
 certain definite laws of conduct, and its noble devotion, at 
 all costs and hazards, to this convention. The philo- 
 sophical expression or explanation of morality has always 
 lagged behind the fulness of the realised life. Morality 
 concerned with the Good which is not yet, but may be, 
 through our endeavour, dwells in a chiaroscuro realm 
 of Faith and Instinct ; where that clear light never 
 penetrates that is wont to display in unmistakable out- 
 lines the realm of Truth or of Power, of mathematical and 
 physical law. Into these, antique and somehow pre-exist- 
 ent to our thought, we enter only to obey, or control by 
 obeying. But in the domain of ethics, we create the law ; 
 we realise, or we condemn to nothingness, by our inaction 
 or our neglect. We are amazed by the feebleness of its 
 sanction or its authority. We find it strange that Kant, 
 in an exoteric expression of naive wonder, should confuse 
 it with the might of Nature's unalterable sequences. 
 Heroism is irreducible to terms of Reason. The limits of 
 omnipotence seemed to J. S. Mill to constitute the 
 strongest claim on the efforts and the co-operation of 
 good men ; the heroic soul is conscious of the same 
 attraction in the field of ethics. Its decision is a bold 
 
 emphasis on the First Cause and Final Purpose of the World, — both alike hidden 
 from the Speculative Reason. 
 
344 F. W. BUSSELL vn 
 
 wager in the face of probabilities ; and it has been well 
 said that to be moral involves a more exacting or more 
 childlike faith than to be religious. 
 
 § 4. The Ethical philosopher when he does more than 
 arrange and tabulate the moral virtues, finds himself 
 compelled to preach or to be mute. At each sentence or 
 maxim, resting on the precarious base of a vast hypo- 
 thesis, of a " moral purpose in the universe, to which I am 
 bound by allegiance," — he dreads the Sophist in his audi- 
 ence and expects those eternal questions, How do you 
 know ? and why am I obliged to follow ? which await all 
 moral dogmatism, and can never receive a valid answer 
 from theoretical Reason alone. It is for this cause that 
 all thinkers, when engaged in studying the motive, and the 
 Sanction of right action, either lapse into that mystical 
 language which is a sure sign of the default of clear thought, 
 or under cover of a system of Egoism or Utilitarianism 
 insidiously secrete, as part of the stock-in-trade, those 
 principles of disinterestedness or public service, which we 
 blush to examine (as part I had almost said of our private 
 physical equipment), but for which we find it impossible to 
 account. This has been the fate of all English and Scotch 
 Moralism. The result does credit to the heart, but perhaps 
 neither to the candour or the acumen of the Briton. 
 Abroad, a feminine and sentimental appeal to " unphilo- 
 sophical " emotions characterises French ethics, wherever 
 it has been able to penetrate to really ultimate problems ; 
 whilst pantheistic Germany seeks to found upon a 
 mystical Monism a definite duty for the individual, whose 
 separate existence, though the only immediate datum of 
 experience, it treats as illusory. It makes no kind of 
 difference whether this tendency is religious, as in Fichte's 
 devout and latest writings, or definitely anti-religious, as 
 in Schopenhauer, Von Hartmann, and Haeckel. 1 
 
 1 Andrew Seth, preface to Man's Place in the Cosmos (pp. vi and vii). 
 "Humanism as opposed to Naturalism" (as the aim of the volume) "might 
 be described as Ethicism, in opposition to a too narrow Intellectual ism. Man 
 as rational, and in virtue of self-conscious reason, the free shaper of his own 
 destiny, — furnishes us, I contend, with our only indefeasible standard of value, 
 and our clearest light as to the nature of the Divine. He does what Science, 
 occupied only with the laws of events, and speculative Metaphysics, when it 
 
vii THE FUTURE OF ETHICS 345 
 
 The dominant note in these followers of Spinoza is 
 the call to abandon the present real in favour of a meta- 
 physical phantom, which to the man of average sense 
 seems to possess none of the qualities usually associated 
 with the idea of True Being. The mystical goal may be 
 either the Divine Life or Humanity, in its present con- 
 dition, or in its future destiny, — but in either case the 
 sacrifice of the known for the unknown is demanded ; 
 and thus the development of ethical thought, like all 
 scientific thought to-day, follows the mystical path, and 
 founds itself on an assumption of Unity, for which 
 experience empiricism must ever desiderate even probable 
 arguments ; — on a denial of individual worth, which how- 
 ever deceptive, is the sole certainty of our consciousness. 
 The whole question of ethics needs to be restated. In 
 terms of Idealism ? Certainly, in no other way can we 
 escape mere fragmentary pieces of good business-advice. 
 But of an Idealism, which refuses to consider the world, 
 whether as fact or design, except as subordinate to the 
 consciousness. " What ! " it may be urged, " revert to 
 the assumptions of an ' anthropocentric ' vanity ? " I 
 answer, they will be found to be less exacting by pure 
 Reason than those of Monism, debased into sentimental 
 altruism. And, what is even more important (for we are 
 dealing with a doubtful department, an " offshoot " of 
 philosophy), they alone can satisfy the moral conscious- 
 ness and the practical needs of life. 
 
 § 5. Most of the problems which disquiet reflection 
 
 surrenders itself to the exclusive guidance of the Intellect, alike find unintelligible, 
 and are forced to pronounce impossible — he acts." 
 
 Again : " Inexplicable in a sense as man's personal agency is — nay, the one 
 perpetual miracle, — it is nevertheless our surest datum, and our only clue to the 
 mystery of existence." 
 
 For the precisely opposite view, consult the veteran Haeckel ( The Riddle of 
 the Universe). "The Monism of the Cosmos which we establish on the clear 
 law of Substance, — proclaiming the absolute dominion of the great eternal iron 
 laws throughout the Universe. It thus shatters at the same time the three central 
 dogmas of the Dualistic Philosophy — the Personality of God, the Immortality of the 
 Soul, and the Freedom of the Will. Upon the vast field of ruin rises, majestic 
 and brilliant, the new Sun of our Realistic Monism, which reveals to us the 
 wonderful temple of Nature in all its beauty. For the sincere cult of the True, 
 the Good, and the Beautiful (which is the heart of our new monistic Religion) — 
 we find ample compensation for the anthropistic ideals of God, freedom, And 
 immortality, which we have lost. " 
 
346 ' F. W. BUSSELL vn 
 
 have to be tacitly abandoned or considered as solved 
 before the simplest point in ethics can be discussed. 
 Philosophy regards life from an exactly opposite position 
 to common sense ; it surveys it as if from the other end 
 of the telescope ; the ordinary and familiar becomes the 
 most abstruse of mysteries, the exceptional and startling 
 shrink into the simplest and most easily explained. But 
 Ethics being most akin to the common sense of practical 
 men, has to assume quite as much, and is equally unable 
 to explain its hypotheses, — unless it appeals to the ambigu- 
 ous and oracular decisions of Logic or Metaphysic. There 
 are many rival schools in the present day : those who 
 deny that Ethics can be studied apart from Metaphysical 
 presupposition ; those who pronounce Ethics entirely 
 independent ; and those who maintain that the Meta- 
 physical realm can only be entered through the Ethical, 
 and to complete the possible alliances, those who believe 
 the key lies in the investigation of Nature. Into the 
 merits of their controversy it is not my intention to enter. 
 I only desire to point out that there is an almost universal 
 agreement that moral studies are scarcely complete in 
 themselves, though the precise degree of their dependence 
 is a subject of much discussion. It is doubtful if in any 
 domain of wisdom these hypotheses receive final and 
 adequate proof. In the field of ethics no such attempt 
 is made ; latent in every assertion or counsel or maxim 
 they are accepted as indispensable ; and, nearest to 
 Common Thought just in this department, Philosophy 
 is here also much beholden to ordinary consciousness 
 for certain necessary ' forms ' of belief, which are the 
 atmosphere enfolding every moral action. Not without 
 reason in intellectual Greece, did ethical inquiry come 
 late and reluctantly to birth ; while in China it never 
 advanced beyond the childhood of detached maxims of 
 utility, and vaguely authoritative gnomes ; — and to com- 
 plete the metaphor, in India, never young, morals have 
 never quitted the single and servile precept of absolute 
 Quietism. 
 
 § 6. But to return to the assumption of Occidental 
 
vii THE FUTURE OF ETHICS 347 
 
 Ethics. We are constantly reminded by the contrast 
 of other and more ancient systems of one cardinal 
 assumption, which will be found to underlie all Western 
 Thought. The West European mind — the fruit of the 
 conjunction of Hellenism and Judaism under the long 
 tutelage of Rome — entertains a prejudice (which, as 
 quite beyond rational proof, I can only call instinctive) 
 in favour of action, striving, conflict, and social endeavour 
 for a common good. 
 
 But the civilised races, who form as Christendom a 
 united whole against Barbarism, and can sink their 
 differences and deny their religious scepticism in face of 
 a general peril, are in a minority ; they compose but one- 
 third of the whole human family. 1 And the belief in the 
 
 1 Letters front John Chinaman (1901). " Our civilisation is the oldest in the 
 world. It does not follow that it is the best ; but neither, I submit, does it 
 follow that it is the worst. Such antiquity is, at any rate, a proof that our 
 institutions have presented to us a stability for which we search in vain among 
 the nations of Europe. Not only is our civilisation stable — it also embodies, as 
 we think, a moral order ; while in yours we detect only an economic chaos. . . . 
 We measure the degree of civilisation, not by accumulation of the means of living, 
 but by the character and nature of the life lived. Where there are no humane 
 and stable relations, no reverence for the past, no respect even for the present, 
 but only a cupidinous ravishment of the future — there we think there is no true 
 Society. . . . Admitting that we are not what you call a progressive people, we 
 yet perceive that progress may be bought too dear." 
 
 After enumerating the natural and human details which to the Chinese seem 
 to bring highest moments of emotion in life, — "A rose in a moonlit garden, the 
 shadow of trees on the turf . . . the pathos of life and death, the long embrace, 
 the hand stretched out in vain, the moment that glides forever away with its 
 freight of music and light, into the shadow and mist of the haunted past, all that 
 we have, all that eludes, the bird on the wing, a perfume escapes on the gale — 
 to all these things we are trained to respond, and the response is what is called 
 Literature. This we have ; this you cannot give us ; but this you may so easily 
 take away. 
 
 " Amid the roar of looms it cannot be heard ; it cannot be seen in the smoke of 
 factories ; it is hidden by the wear and the whirl of Western life. And when I 
 look at your business men, the men whom you most admire, when I see them day 
 after day, year after year, toiling in the mill of their forced and undelighted 
 labours ; when I see them importing the anxieties of the day into their scant and 
 grudging leisure, and wearing themselves out less by toil than by carking and 
 illiberal cares ; — I reflect (I confess, with satisfaction) on the simpler routine of our 
 ancient industry, and prize above your new and dangerous routes, the beaten track 
 so familiar to our accustomed feet, that we have time even while we pace it, to 
 turn our gaze up to the eternal stars." 
 
 Here once more is the ideal of the East held up for our guidance by a dis- 
 illusioned Occidental, who impersonates a Chinese proselytiser or at least apologist 
 while using the poetry of Maeterlinck and the romantic pathos of Parker. In the 
 eighteenth century, China seemed to political reformers in Europe (and with much 
 truth) tounite the'resolim dissociabiles, ImperiumetLibertas,' inaconstitutionwhich 
 was frankly patriarchal, and a social uniformity which knew no class distinctions. 
 To the Idealist of the nineteenth century and still more to the Pessimist, the 
 
348 F. W. BUSSELL 
 
 VII 
 
 value of the progressive life as the highest is denied by 
 the rest ; just as the dignity of manual labour, first taught 
 by the mediaeval monks, is peculiar to us. With very 
 imperfect historical data the philosophers in the years 
 succeeding the French Revolution, thinking that somehow 
 they had arrived at the culminating epoch of our race, 
 hurriedly set forth the comparative table of human 
 records ; and, on the obsolete computation of four thousand 
 years before our era, founded a scheme of the Progress of 
 Reason, and placed their own time at the dawning of the 
 last and happiest period. No one is so audacious to-day 
 as to prophesy the unerring fulfilment of man's hopes, or 
 the approaching realisation of an earthly paradise. We 
 are aware of the infinite spaces of history in the past ; 
 we confront, in the future, some accidental comet which 
 will whirl into fiery oblivion the petty systems and 
 commotions of our Planet ; and nearer at hand, we 
 recognise a serious menace to our Western ideals in those 
 teeming multitudes, who seem impervious to their influence. 
 Whatever is written about ethics or the human destiny 
 must be tempered by this wholesome reflection : that we 
 are in a minority, and that our view of the world is not 
 certain to triumph. And bound up in this view lies our 
 earliest assumption: that the life of action in and for society 
 is the highest, just because it is the only one possible for 
 all ; for the final standard must be within the reach of 
 every one. But it needs but a superficial knowledge to 
 discover how exceptional we are in this sober emphasis 
 on ordinary duties. Nowhere but in West Europe and 
 
 truest and profoundest lessons in philosophy were to be learnt at the feet of the 
 Pundit of India, in the ascetic renunciation which marks both Brahmanism and 
 the system of Gautama. Even at the close of the century, virtue and contentment 
 and a magical authority over natural forces are fitter to live in the single unexplored 
 region of the earth ; in Tibet, whither have fled at the visions of Fortunate Isles, 
 Hyperboreans, and 'blameless Ethiopians.' But this persistent attempt to dis- 
 cover perfection in some almost inaccessible fastness, either of region or of 
 philosophy, is a sign of protest against the mechanical complications and the 
 anxious uneasiness of our Western life. Nietzsche, Maxim Gorki, and Mr. Taylor 
 (Problem of Conduct), may be combined as having from another point of view 
 condemned the fundamental axioms of our Western ideas of progress and 
 civilisation. (For Gorki, on whom has fallen the mantle and a double 
 portion of Nietzsche's rebellious spirit, cf. Dr. Dillon in Co7itemporary Review, 
 February 1902.) 
 
vii THE FUTURE OF ETHICS 349 
 
 its offshoot America is goodness and moral worth the 
 criterion ; elsewhere knowledge and supposed spiritual 
 gifts, or brute courage, constitute an unquestioned primacy ; 
 and we may ask whether the undoubted survival of 
 aristocratic modes of thought and popular confidence in 
 familiar names, is not due to this trustfulness in the power 
 of the motto ' Noblesse oblige.' Knowledge, ever since 
 Socrates' fatally ambiguous use of (fypovijats, has elsewhere 
 become identified with the Highest Morality ; and a 
 privileged caste has been set apart with the approbation 
 of the mob, not for a disinterested guidance of ordinary 
 affairs (which we expect and receive from a Western 
 aristocracy) but for an idle or contemptuous contemplation 
 of their own perfection and the passing show of a universe 
 which has no meaning, and of the vain efforts of others 
 to reach the goal of tranquillity. The Yogi or Sanyasi is 
 respected by the people, not because he helps but because 
 he despises them. Now our Western system is in the 
 true sense open to all; for it alone can provide a sanction 
 for the humblest endeavour, and give a meaning and attach 
 a value to the simplest act. Here there is no false 
 aristocracy (either of caste or cleverness), no doctrine of 
 reserve ; and in the final issue, our philosophies and our 
 religions stand or fall by the verdict of the vulgar. 
 
 § 7. But in face of this dissent among older civilisa- 
 tions it is worth while to inquire whence comes this firm 
 conviction as to the value of the Moral Life. It is 
 certainly not derived from a contemplation of Nature. 
 
 So careful of the type she seems, 
 So careless of the single life. 
 
 Morality exactly reverses this ; for Duty before demand- 
 ing the self-surrender of an individual to the Common 
 Good, must assure and convince him, however dimly, of 
 his own dignity and worth. In spite of an abortive 
 attempt to unite the physical and the moral realm in 
 evolutionary Ethics, it is sufficient here to assert as 
 obvious that ' Nature ' gives no such sanction, provides 
 no such example. At a certain point natural philosophers, 
 justly alarmed for the interests of morality, overstep the 
 
350 F. W. BUSSELL vn 
 
 inductive method, refuse to be guided by fact, and take 
 refuge from a destructive scepticism in emotional appeal. 
 The two realms ' idly confront ' one another, as did Plato's 
 ideal and real worlds ; and an impassable gulf stretches 
 between them, which no introduction of sentiment into 
 physics, or mechanism into morals can ever bridge. 1 
 Ethics cannot be studied (as Stoics studied theology) as a 
 mere episode to physics, as a subordinate department in 
 a larger survey. The student of physics must perforce 
 abandon in the natural world for a moment that ' anthro- 
 pocentric ' and prepossessed attitude, but he will resume it 
 again as a necessary condition of his practical life. Only 
 because each man believes he is an end in himself, can he 
 treat others as if they likewise were ends in themselves, 
 and not things or chattels, but persons. This may be, 
 like its complementary postulate of Freedom, like the 
 existence of the material world, an illusion ; but it is one 
 from which we cannot escape, and which is implied in 
 our most trivial act. Anarchism and Extreme Socialism 
 wade to the Millennium through the murder of the Superflu- 
 ous, whether monarch or infant weakling. As we see the 
 world outside only in terms of ourselves ; as we have no 
 conception of what it is in itself, or how it would appear 
 to beings with other senses ; as we have to be satisfied 
 with this relativity of all Truth ; so in the field of practice ; 
 let us be content to accept this belief in the value and 
 equality of the individual person as the final foundation 
 of our conduct ; hypothesis indeed, yet unassailable, for 
 without it Ethics is impossible. 
 
 § 8. We must presume then that the life of striving, 
 of conscious advance and progress has some ulterior sanc- 
 tion, some as yet hidden significance ; that to be merged 
 in contemplation of the Eternal order is an unprofitable 
 counsel of despair ; that the ' single life,' with its pressing 
 and immediate duties, has some import ; and that the 
 social fabric is maintained by recognising and conciliating 
 individual rights, that social fabric, which can only be 
 
 1 Notice the confusion in Professor Huxley's mind in his strangely illogical 
 essay on Evolution and Ethics. 
 
vii THE FUTURE OF ETHICS 351 
 
 termed an end in itself because it exists only for persons. 
 But here is a still deeper problem. Are we entitled to 
 speak of a person at all ? meaning thereby a seat and 
 centre of activity, free and spontaneous, at least in the 
 final decision of its tribunal introducing from time to time 
 a new element, a new and incalculable force into the 
 tangled but continuous and unbroken skein of natural 
 causes ? This is without question the greatest problem of 
 our time ; and yet from the point of view of ethics, it has 
 a merely academic interest. Whether, as Lotze suggests, 
 a leading monad bears sway as some limited but 
 responsible monarch among lesser centres of conscious- 
 ness ; whether the Soul be undiscoverable to closest 
 scrutiny, and our sense of permanent identity a vexatious 
 hallucination ; whether the old traditional dualism of 
 Spirit and body must be modified or retained ; — all this 
 can be of account only in the theoretic domain of 
 psychologic Ethics ; it cannot enter, as a perplexing 
 problem, the practical region. We still use the old 
 language of blame and praise, of moral responsibility, of 
 conscience, and of duty ; and we are obliged to acknow- 
 ledge that when questions remain balanced by equal 
 arguments, we are at liberty to take the line of greatest 
 attraction in making our choice. It is a feat of sheer 
 legerdemain when a moral appeal is tacked on incon- 
 sistently to some disproof of free-will. We have to 
 reckon with the abiding sense of the community ; and in 
 apportioning our justice in the public courts, or over the 
 private conscience, we start from the hypothesis of this 
 stable point at least, — the reality of the self, and the 
 persistence of the ego, amid apparent change. We need 
 not be ashamed, especially in this doubtful province of 
 philosophy, of seeming to shirk ultimate problems. Ethics 
 is the realm of Faith ; and as time goes on, we seem to 
 increase rather than diminish the indispensable articles of 
 our creed ; — but the additional weight is no argument for 
 surrendering one of them, for they grow consistent in 
 their very paradox. 
 
 8 9. The weight of hypothesis which the Ethical agent 
 
352 F. W. BUSSELL v .i 
 
 has to carry in the simplest moral act may be now 
 definitely described under the following heads. He must 
 assume (i) that the world has a meaning or is capable of 
 bearing one, and this through his personal efforts ; (2) 
 that these efforts are to some extent voluntary, 
 spontaneous, and effective, and that indifference is a 
 shirking of responsibility ; (3) that social or racial 
 progress is a fitting object for dutiful striving in 
 co-operation, but that this cause can only be advanced by 
 recognising the unique value and permanent import of the 
 individual as opposed to any abstraction called the type ; 
 (4) that from this point of view and from no other 
 (whether mental, racial, or physical), men are equal, on the 
 side of moral personality; (5) that it is a mere poetic 
 allegory (and perhaps not wholly a harmless one) to speak 
 of the progress or education of the Human Race, since to 
 bear a real meaning, there must be in the subject a 
 continuity of conscious experience ; (6) that as the 
 ultimate stimulus in Ethics is an inspiriting sense of 
 freedom to do good, and as the supreme motive will 
 always be, sense of loyalty to a cause not yet won, — the 
 result of his action to the single-minded devotee will be 
 Happiness ; (7) finally, that as the aim of all conscious 
 effort must be satisfaction felt by some one, and not 
 the fulfilment or (if I may be allowed the paradox) the 
 selfish gratification of some impersonal Law, 1 Happiness 
 must be the goal, and Duty (or the recognition of Law) 
 but a means to this end. 
 
 The sole ultimate test of the truth of a system, of its 
 value, or its endurance, is and always must be the warmth 
 and sympathetic acceptance of the conscious personality, 
 who realises by his efforts an otherwise idle or empty 
 Ideal. Altruism is accepted as a philosophical norm of 
 conduct, not because it is rationally justifiable (which 
 perhaps it is not), but because in experience it excites the 
 highest feelings of satisfaction and joy, and " brings a man 
 
 1 " In what way," asks William James in his Will to Believe (p. 196), "is 
 this fact of wrongness made more acceptable or intelligible when we imagine it to 
 consist rather in the laceration of an a priori ideal order than in the disappoint- 
 ment of a living God?" 
 
vii THE FUTURE OF ETHICS 353 
 
 peace at the last." " Love " is the religious term accepted, 
 as implying the passing away of timorous or calculating 
 obedience to a law, as external restraint is the dictate of 
 an inconsiderate and irresponsible Superior. It would be 
 difficult to disprove that we have a perfect right to evade 
 such a decree, like physical laws, if we can. " Love " 
 secures the peculiar and inward approbation of the Law, 
 as in some measure connected with our own interests ; and 
 this approbation is the ultimate fact of interest and 
 importance in Morals. This connection is almost 
 invariably a pure matter of Faith ; but it is absolutely 
 needful to postulate it, as I cannot believe that lasting 
 approbation — sufficient, at least, to induce practice — can 
 ever be bestowed upon that which in the end disregards 
 the private and eternal interest of the approver. 
 
 II 
 
 §10. If we were to divide man's life somewhat 
 roughly into its passive and active halves, we might 
 call the former Ethics, the latter Politics. No casual 
 student of the history of moralising can fail to see 
 that the negative side is the more prominent ; — the extent 
 of the subordination of the part to the whole, of the 
 forgiveness and forbearance due to an erring brother ; or 
 the precise limits which a sense of uniform and impartial 
 justice places on the caprice or the desires of the 
 individual. Scanty are the positive maxims either in 
 antiquity or more modern times ; and if a wide and 
 effective theory of life has ever taken place among 
 philosophic systems, it will generally be found to owe 
 little to philosophy, much to some supposed Divine 
 legislation, which insisting on the virtues of docile 
 obedience and Faith, permits no individual scrutiny or 
 casuistry, and perhaps for this very reason claims and 
 obtains a peculiar reverence in the strife of perplexed 
 disputants. If we consider what are the points worth 
 recording in the Hellenic systems, or the most striking 
 features in the life of their founders, we shall see how 
 
 2 A 
 
354 F - w - BUSSELL vn 
 
 small was the encouragement or explanation given to 
 active life in Society, either by precept or example. At a 
 very early period their reflection had convinced them that 
 ordinary civic duties were incompatible with the cultivation 
 of the (supposed) highest gifts of man's nature. The 
 " common good," naively understood, even in the earliest 
 times, to be the end at which all must aim, is never 
 reconciled to the single interest. A gulf separates the 
 two worlds, the starry heavens of Anaxagoras, the world- 
 order of Diogenes the /cocr/xo7roA.fcT^9, from that precise 
 part of the brotherhood of man in which their lot had 
 been cast. For fellows they looked about for some 
 worthier associates; the undiscovered sage; or the initiates 
 of a sect or a school ; or the Divine thought, that 
 universal and impersonal Reason (of which both God and 
 men partook) ; or the forces of Nature, as the river that 
 said " Hail Pythagoras ! " — in that despairing universalism 
 which degraded man to an exact equality with the other 
 animals ; — not only in the Italian schools of " totem and 
 taboo," but in the cold intellectualism of the Academy, or 
 in the credulous scepticism of a Celsus. Plato makes the 
 official and public duties an unpleasing though needful 
 deviation from the routine of that speculative meditation 
 which might so soon degenerate into mystical reverie. 
 The reward for this distasteful mixing in affairs was an 
 undisturbed leisure for tasks which if not pure Mathematics, 
 were astonishingly vague, and must have been something 
 between Euclid and a Rosary. Cicero, his constant 
 imitator, with a significant innovation, places the recom- 
 pense of Scipio's unselfish patriotism in a home beyond 
 the stars, where he can watch and comprehend the 
 mechanism of the world. Aristotle's interest, like Renan's 
 in public matters, is that of the Student, not the Reformer; 
 and the quietistic tendencies of the later Schools are too 
 well known to need special mention here ; no one (it is to be 
 hoped) being misled by the Stoics' parrot-like iteration (as 
 a mere academic commonplace) iroXnevaeaOaL top cro(f)6v. 
 Where a positive influence is exerted, it is due to 
 character and personality. Pythagoras, though anchoritic 
 
vii THE FUTURE OF ETHICS 355 
 
 in his tendencies, founds a monastic brotherhood, and 
 secretly guides the politics of the Italian commonwealths. 
 Socrates gives a certain positive content to this empty- 
 though luminous disc of philosophic morality ; Epicurus 
 overcomes the gross or selfish axioms of his creed in the 
 simplicity of his life and the warmth of his friendship. 
 
 § 11. The common conviction of mankind (when not 
 too highly civilised) is in favour of social life, with its 
 good-natured " give and take " ; but ancient inquirers who 
 set out to explore the reasons for this conviction were so 
 far from discovering them that they end by denying. 
 Aristotle, casting into the mould of a technical definition 
 this belief (shall we call it innate presupposition ?) in man 
 as %wov irokLTLKov, is yet much more enamoured of the 
 peculiar differentia which makes man, above all things, %£>ov 
 decoprjTifcov. Whether we are to believe the perpetual legends 
 of the intercourse of Greek leaders with a foreign or 
 Oriental influence — -with Egyptian Priests at Naucratis, 
 Memphis and Meroe, with Magi, Scythians or Gymno- 
 sophists — it is perfectly clear that Greek ethical study led 
 from the outset far away from civil life and the healthy 
 turmoil and democratic play of equal forces ; that the 
 peculiar temper, inculcated on the proficient, was one of 
 calm and resignation, either defiant and paradoxic, as 
 among Cynics and certain of the Stoics, or that pure 
 negative pessimism, which found its last word in the avkj^ov 
 teal airkyov of the Roman period. Even in the Schools 
 which accepted as " goods " the friendliness and good word 
 of fellow-citizens and the ample equipment of a comfort- 
 able life, which pursued some definite end not only of 
 vague and ascetic moral culture, but some positive branch 
 of study — even in these the ideal sage was rather the 
 member of an invisible kingdom of Reason than an 
 interested or responsible member of a corporation. No 
 subjects were more frequently discussed than whether the 
 wise man should marry, bring up children, take part in 
 political life ; and this very fact shows that reflection 
 could not (even among a wholesome people like the 
 Greeks) give a sufficient reason for the common behaviour 
 
356 F. W. BUSSELL vn 
 
 and conviction of ordinary men ; and that starting from 
 an impulse to discover and confirm, it only succeeded 
 in undermining every possible sanction altogether. What 
 accounts for this peculiar phenomenon ? One fact 
 there is without doubt : — the Greek passion for Oneness — 
 as noticeable in their theoretic or ideal aspirations, as their 
 childlike delight in multiplicity and variegation in practical 
 life. A single transmutable yet identical Substance (or 
 (frvais) in the world ; an Idea, which binds into a stable 
 faggot the feeble manifold of the particular instance, and 
 this aga'in subsumed under a more comprehensive idea 
 until at last Unity is reached ; a rigid crystalline globe, 
 in which not only the individual life becomes illusion, 
 but even the familiar experience of motion and of change ; 
 a kingdom of No^-ra, which is almost one with the 
 individual thinking spirit as 6p66s \6<yo<;, cppovrja-c;, and 
 which is reached first by divesting the object thought, 
 of all garments belonging to its position in time and 
 space, of all specific differentiae or idiosyncrasies, until the 
 clear but attenuated outline of its inner essence comes to 
 view ; next, by a parallel process of de-qualification in 
 the subject, wherein the thinking mind abandons, so as 
 to attain truth, the cold dualism of knowledge for the 
 warm glow of immediate union, or at least of inter- 
 penetration : — such are the forms of this Hellenic Monism. 
 Epicurus alone, nearest to common life and thought in 
 spite of his pretentious style, 1 is the sole representative 
 who absolutely and of set purpose discards all pretence to 
 Unity, to give free play to the individual caprice. As he 
 pertinently remarks, " It would be a slight service to set 
 free the mind from terror of divine forces, to fetter it anew 
 in a grosser servitude to inexorable physical Law. For 
 you may have hopes of conciliating the one, but the other 
 you cannot escape." 
 
 8 1 2. And we must also observe that owing to the 
 desire for a comprehensive but vague unity 2 either of Law, 
 
 1 For the ffa<prjs of Diogenes Laertius must be ironical. 
 
 2 To a Soul possessed of this craving for unity, rest is impossible until the final 
 goal is reached. The State, the Fatherland, is but a phase, and gives way to a 
 KoiXfi6iro\is or to Nature. The eighteenth century is much to blame ; one of 
 
vii THE FUTURE OF ETHICS 357 
 
 or Force, or Reason, the Greek ethical student threw 
 himself into the arms of Nature, and refused to recognise 
 that in history alone can man find himself mirrored. 
 Man's place in the great commonwealth of natural order, 
 his peculiar function and differentia — this was the object 
 of their search. Now the essence of Nature (as conceived 
 by the Greeks) is to be unchanging through change, to 
 exhibit no conscious progress towards a goal, to be 
 indifferent to historical development. The desire of the 
 Schools is not to found an ethics of casuistry to help the 
 doubting in critical circumstance, but to discover a "typical" 
 excellence or perfection, towards which all who are capable 
 should strive. Reason unfalteringly proclaimed that the 
 exercise and the discipline of her own powers was alone 
 a suitable task ; and the rarefied and shadowy form of the 
 abnegating Sage hovers mournfully over the entire period, 
 as the supreme UapdSeiy/jia for imitation, though they 
 allowed with regrets that it had never been realised. 
 Gazing like Narcissus into the vague mysteries of a 
 physical or spiritual universe, and seeing therein a faint 
 semblance of themselves (though lacking all realness or 
 positive content), pining for this image, perversely shun- 
 ning the companionship of grosser mortals, they ended 
 by taking the " salto mortale " into the chilly waters, 
 finding alas ! unlike Hylas, no Naiads beneath the 
 surface to welcome them. I have elsewhere pointed 
 out 1 the peculiar momentousness of the succession of 
 the Judaeo-Christian ideal of life to the Classical. On 
 this modern Europe has founded her principles and her 
 institutions, with her signal and vigorous hold on social 
 life, on present duties, on the duty and the happiness 
 of effort in whatever direction. Many before Nietzsche 
 (who cannot be styled an original thinker) have complained 
 
 its children, Michelet, perhaps sunk deepest in superstitious veneration for abstract 
 norms, writes in his book (Nos Fils, Introd. xii) : "II faut que le jeune ame ait 
 un substantiel aliment. II y faut une chose vivante. Quelle chose ? La Patrie, 
 son ame, son histoire, La tradition nationale, La Nature, Universelle Patrie. 
 Voila une nourriture qui rejouira remplira le cceur de l'enfant." One of the most 
 hopeful features of the new century is the general discredit that has come over 
 these mischievous assurances of a vague and sentimental Realism. 
 1 School of Plato, Book iii. "Judaism." 
 
358 F. W. BUSSELL vn 
 
 of the feminine character of Christian morality. The 
 virtues seem at first sight all negative and ascetic ; pas- 
 sivity is the end or TeXo9 in the religious life of grace, 
 and in daily patient intercourse with a scoffing and 
 unbelieving world. The hermit -life rather than the 
 cenobitic was the higher ideal of the first three centuries. 
 But hardly suspected under bishops and clergy, a busy 
 but silent transformation of a decadent age was proceed- 
 ing ; and may we not ask if Greek and Indian examples 
 of fortitude, constancy, and retirement were not largely 
 influential ? With the earliest promise of probable power 
 in the secular sphere, with the conviction of the delay in the 
 Second Advent, the ideal insensibly changes. Through- 
 out the Middle Ages (though the devout mystic may 
 possibly regret the degeneracy) we may trace the new 
 value and ennoblement of ordinary duties and of busi- 
 ness, the consecration of matter and of effort. While 
 still recognising a hierarchy of ideals, the Church did 
 not deny the worth of the lower ; while believing that 
 humble Faith could be transcended in knowledge or 
 lost in the actual Vision, she still paid honour to simple 
 and ignorant goodness. Now this strenuous interference 
 in active life and government (sometimes deprecated by 
 the secular spirit, always regretted by the devotional) is 
 due to a fundamental article in the new creed, " that the 
 Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath." 
 It contradicts the Realism which rendered nugatory much 
 of Greek thought and much of mediaeval rationalism. A 
 new form of teleology (not unlike the Socratic) had held 
 the world of Nature to be for man's use, his trial, discipline, 
 and development. The entire emphasis is removed from 
 this indifferent background of our efforts to the fortunes of 
 the individual Soul, or the Divine edicts concerning it. 
 At first, interest is mainly concerned with a transcendental 
 doctrine of pre-natal sin and its consequence, and a Divine 
 fiat of mercy or of reprobation. It soon centres round 
 the prosperity of a visible state, with sure foundations, 
 and a goal well within view. Instead of the ' cosmic 
 emotion ' of Greece in face of the marvel of the General 
 
vii THE FUTURE OF ETHICS 359 
 
 Order, arises a belief in the progress of a tangible kingdom, 
 ruled by an absent head through an inspired vicegerent. 
 This thought inspired most of the self-devotion of those 
 ages, for if you preach Unity you will not get it, and the 
 average man will only work loyally for a cause to which 
 he knows himself to be superior. The clue to the meaning 
 of man and a justification of his efforts here, is found not 
 in Nature, but in history. Now Judaism and Christianity 
 are the only two religions in which the historical element 
 predominates over the transcendental and the dogmatic ; 
 and in consequence the only ones in which the individual 
 finds a significance and a place, and an assurance of his 
 abiding value. 1 
 
 § 13. In this brief survey of ethical thought down to 
 the opening promises of modern philosophy, we have seen 
 how the independent study of ethics has tended to throw 
 back the student on himself, alienate him from the common 
 life, the world of society or particulars, and concentrate 
 his attention on a typical and in effect unattainable 
 perfection, derived from an idealistic view of the Universe ; 
 sometimes gladdening his solitariness with hopes of higher 
 companionship, but always encouraging him to wait in 
 passive expectancy the coming of heavenly visitants. 
 Meantime, the unreflecting or the docile, have been 
 content to go about their ordinary duties, secure in certain 
 axioms (unexamined though they be), derived from ex- 
 perience of life, from tradition, from public opinion, or 
 from early training, based on a revelation which they 
 believed Divine. The Feud of the vulgar with philosophy 
 was at least justified so far as they saw in these studies 
 a pretext for abstention, and for an idleness that was 
 often dissolute and indecent ; which shocked and derided 
 rather than confirmed those common prejudices, emotions, 
 
 1 Deussen, writing on Indian Philosophy, has remarked: "As surely as the 
 Will and not the Intellect is the centre of a man's nature, so surely must the 
 pre-eminence be assigned to Christianity, in that its demand for a renewal of 
 the Will is peculiarly vital and essential. But as certainly as man is not mere 
 Will but Intellect besides, so certainly will that Christian renewal of the Will 
 reveal itself on the other side as a renewal of knowledge, just as the Upanishads 
 teach." Thus in the New Testament and the Sacred Books of the East, " these 
 two noblest products of the religious consciousness of mankind," he reconciles 
 Oewpia. and Tpd^is, and Aquinas and Duns Scotus. 
 
360 F. W. BUSSELL vn 
 
 and sentiments, upon which was based even the most rudi- 
 mentary of Greek commonwealths. The union of Ethics 
 (as the negative side) with Politics (as the art of practical 
 life in Society) was the result of various forces at work 
 in the early centuries of our era. The apparent quiescence 
 of early Christian Society was but a period of feigning of 
 idleness, a reserving of energy, or a new storing of power. 
 The union of the two spheres of the Secular and the 
 Sacred under a single authority brought in for a time a 
 conciliation of interests, the common good and the unit's 
 welfare. The Roman Church might elevate the contem- 
 plative virtues, following Aristotle, as a counsel of perfection ; 
 but it never neglected to guide, indeed to interfere with 
 life in its minutest detail. 1 But with the division of 
 provinces in the growing spirit of independence — a division 
 which we unhesitatingly assert to be a final, conclusive, 
 and salutary conquest of the human mind — came a new 
 attempt to discover an independent (naturalistic or 
 egoistic) basis of moral conduct ; and to free from an 
 irksome villeinage, not merely science, but conduct. 
 Beginning once more in vacuo, the early attempts at 
 systematising moral behaviour astonish us by their crude- 
 ness, their inferiority to current practice, their niggard 
 calculation of self-interest, their ignorance of human 
 nature. These philosophers, weighted (like Huxley in 
 more modern times) with the doctrine of Original Sin, 
 could conceive of no good in human nature. Each man 
 was a " child of wrath " ; a grasping yet pusillanimous 
 savage, whose quarrelsomeness threatened the race with 
 extinction, had not a covenant of fear, to impose bounds 
 on this fatal liberty, been framed in some mythical age. 
 Self-interest could be the sole motive for action ; and 
 government, religion, and the control of public opinion, 
 were but outward restraints, necessary indeed to the 
 welfare of the majority called the State, but awakening 
 
 1 Heine (Religion and Philosophy in Germany) and most historians of 
 philosophy are extraordinarily at fault in estimating mediaeval aims and tendencies. 
 To take Aquinas and Bonaventura as types of the whole age is as great a mistake 
 as to take Huysmans or (on another level) d'Annunzio as specimens of the aspira- 
 tions of all French or all the Italians. 
 
vii THE FUTURE OF ETHICS 361 
 
 no sympathetic echo, certainly no loyal devotion, in the 
 heart of the individual. They owed their origin to that 
 defect of human nature (or the universal order) which 
 prevented in the conflict of equal * and unyielding interests 
 the attainment of personal happiness in supreme selfishness 
 and irresponsibility. While Law, civil and ecclesiastical, 
 while government, arbitrary or democratic, with the whole 
 machine of social intercourse, pursued the even and 
 unreflecting tenor of their way, and allowed no doubts 
 or sophistries to interfere with the orderliness of civilised 
 society, — the Philosopher, ignorant or careless alike of his 
 own inner psychology or of man's historic development, 
 stood helpless and discouraged when confronted with the 
 simplest moral action. He searches for the spring of 
 action amid the most universal and brutish of our natural 
 instincts (that of self-preservation at all costs). Failing 
 to discover it, he was in the end compelled to call in the 
 aid of an inexplicable and arbitrary moral law imposed 
 by Divine Legislation, whose sanctions (especially after 
 the failure and abandonment of religious persecution) 
 remained ambiguous, or were relegated to the somewhat 
 uncertain sphere of a future life. So impotent were the 
 pretentions of Ethics to independence at that period. It 
 is far from my purpose to refuse to Philosophy an ultimate 
 and honourable alliance with a religious view of the world, 
 but it is mere weakness to take refuge so hurriedly in 
 the Divine. 
 
 §14. The Greeks, starting with the obvious definition 
 of man as %a>ov ttoXctlkov, had nevertheless tended to centre 
 interest on the equally unmistakable fact that he was 
 £gW \ojikov. It was found impossible to reconcile the 
 two domains, and the wise man looked elsewhere for the 
 perfect employment of his highest faculties (ev&ai/j,ovla) 
 than in the narrow duties of domestic and social life. The 
 best of men, the sincerest of philosophers, when at length 
 
 1 The early post- Reformation speculators were very proud of having upset 
 the hierarchical House of Lords, called Mediaeval Feudalism. Interest centred 
 on the fiction of pre-social man, " naked and unashamed." Postulating for him 
 a liberty and an equality which they were at no pains to define, they led directly to 
 the horrors of the French Revolution. 
 
362 F. W. BUSSELL vn 
 
 invested with a power nominally absolute, was unable to 
 effect any improvement in mankind, or indeed exert any 
 influence on the fabric of Society. The reign of Marcus 
 Aurelius, disastrous to the Romans, was, however, useful 
 to posterity, as warning against excessive hopes in 
 philosophic or scientific moralism to-day, or in the results 
 of academic or idealistic legislation. Whatever the cause, 
 the schism was complete ; and philosophy, though it 
 claims to be a practical rule of living, had to leave the 
 real business to the equity and opportunism of Roman 
 administration. In the Christian period, in spite of the 
 practical efficacy of the Catholic Church in the sphere of 
 conduct, it must be confessed that in theory the significance 
 and value of this world was subordinated to the future 
 kingdom of recompense. The rationalism of the School- 
 men, exerted with startling audacity in the region of 
 Theosophy and the deepest mysteries of the Divine 
 essence, never applied itself to a thoughtful survey of 
 human nature, its springs of action, and capability of 
 perfection, but contented itself with an empty and formal 
 classification of qualities and virtues. Thus, as we have 
 seen, into this unknown region of our own heart the early 
 independent philosophers of modern times penetrated with 
 the burden of original sin on their shoulders, and saw in 
 man — apart from the divine grace (as some still supposed) 
 or the restraining influence of external law, "the interest 
 of the many weak " — nothing but a beast of prey. The 
 Church, rich in acts of mercy, and in striking examples 
 of the highest unselfishness, had nevertheless no theory to 
 account for the more generous emotions (let us hope a 
 fairly large portion of our life) except on the hypothesis 
 of self-interest, the attainment of a deferred annuity or 
 an eternal reward. Practice, here as often in advance of 
 thought (because love and loyalty, the true marks of life, 
 cannot be expressed in terms of thought) — exposed to 
 the notice of the speculator an entire class of behaviour, 
 for which he had no name in his lists but " benevolence " ; 
 and yet on this the interest of Society was more and more 
 concentrating. Of the immediate unreflecting pleasure of 
 
vn THE FUTURE OF ETHICS 363 
 
 an unselfish action, without this deliberate rational calcula- 
 tion of its effects in a transcendental realm, philosophers 
 before Shaftesbury must have had ample experience, but 
 did as a matter of fact fail to understand the significance. 
 And as since that time the Problem of disinterestedness 
 has stood in the forefront of all ethical discussion, it is 
 there that the real puzzle lies, the true difficulty of a 
 rational presentation of ethics. 
 
 When the French Revolution, born of the brutish 
 axiom of pure self-interest, suddenly (like modern scientific 
 sentimentalism) called upon its votaries to sacrifice them- 
 selves to an abstraction, it could indeed readily count upon 
 a firm loyalty and devotion to principles if no longer to 
 persons. But it could not account for this without paradox, 
 nor explain it without contravening the sacred laws of the 
 " Age of Reason." Reason indeed, as Mr. Kidd has 
 pointed out, would rather seem to summon us from the 
 vain prospect of a terrestrial paradise for some remote 
 race, to the " cultivation of our own garden " — the single 
 remembered adage of Voltaire's Candide. 
 
 §15. The Nineteenth Century, which we can no 
 longer call ' present ' or ' our own,' belonging, as it does, to 
 impartial history and criticism, is marked by two some- 
 what opposite tendencies which closely considered are 
 irreconcilable: (1) the practical benevolence, first issuing 
 in a readjustment of imaginary civic rights, as might be 
 expected from the visionary idealism of the followers of 
 the French Revolution, and now turning to the more 
 useful problem of the substantial betterment of the 
 worker's lot, not only as a matter of compulsory education, 
 or sanitation by means of Act of Parliament, but as a 
 personal and sympathetic familiarity with individuals in 
 the suffering class ; (2) the much-eulogised advance in 
 human Science, 1 both in destroying the boundaries of 
 nations and their mutual exclusiveness, in eliminating the 
 marvellous or the unknown (one of the chief sources of 
 hope in our life) not only from this shrunken planet but 
 
 1 "Science" (says Haeckel, Riddle of the Universe) "has made modern life 
 cheerful and comfortable." 
 
364 F. W. BUSSELL vn 
 
 even from stellar space, and in manifesting the reign of a 
 law and a certainty or a fatalism — which by no stretch of 
 fancy can be called moral or retributive — dominant and 
 supreme in every part of our body or mind, in the lot of 
 nations, in the destiny of the poor. The former makes 
 for practical effort, the latter for quietism and abstention. 
 The one rests on the conviction of the abiding value of 
 the individual, however difficult to explain, justify or 
 define, and the relativity of all else; the other, whether 
 from the side of religious or physical Monism, 1 preaches 
 that complete or implicit mysticism, which denying the 
 individual as an illusion, and glozing over his sufferings in 
 advancing the world -purpose for some inscrutable end, 
 proclaims the tyranny of the triumphant One. 2 The 
 practical tendency, clinging fast to religious dogma or at 
 least to that spirit of endeavour which it seems to beget, 
 gives especial attention to the weaker of mankind, and 
 repairing the more obvious unfairness of lot by charity, 
 saves the infirm, and combats Natural Selection at every 
 point. The other, with eyes fixed on the unity of the 
 
 1 And the two species are very hard to distinguish, as may be seen in the 
 vacillations of Stoicism. 
 
 2 It is worth noticing that a protest against this dominion of abstractions to 
 which Europe, freed from arbitrariness of kings and priests, is bidden to bow, — 
 reaches us from a pioneer of anarchy, the opposite of Socialism, in rejecting 
 Realism for the concrete. "MaxStirner" (says the eloquent Vernon Lee) "builds 
 up his system . . . upon the notion that the Geist, the intellect that forms 
 conceptions, is a colossal cheat, for ever robbing the individual of its due, and 
 marring life by imaginary obstacles. . . . Against this kingdom of Delusion the 
 human individual — der Einzige — has been since the beginning of time slowly 
 and painfully fighting his way ; never attaining to any kind of freedom, but merely 
 exchanging one form of slavery for another, slavery to the Religious delusion for 
 slavery to the Metaphysical delusion, slavery to Divine right for slavery to civil 
 liberty, slavery to dogma, commandment, heaven and hell, for slavery to 
 sentiment, humanity, progress — all equally mere words, conceits, figments, by 
 which the wretched individual has allowed himself to be coerced and martyrised.; 
 the wretched Individual who alone is a Reality." We may discount, to be sure, 
 the violence of Stirner, or the Thrasymachean unscrupulousness of Nietzsche ; in 
 the somewhat anaemic Europe of to-day, we are not likely to see an outburst of 
 those simpler and barbaric sentiments of rapine. It is not the anarchy of Force 
 but of Quiescence, not Kropotkin but Tolstoi, that is the danger. That the 
 leisured and (presumably) educated classes should look down on politics is perhaps 
 natural but alarming. "Duty in anything but a negative form is incompatible 
 with Happiness." — Before an inalterable and undeviating Evolution (whence and 
 whether we know not), whether of physical power or of a Universe of thought 
 (Wundt, Ethics, pp. 178-180), any real effort is superfluous. If we do'not bow 
 to the Universal will, we stand outside the course of events, and deludejburselves 
 with the pleasing luxury of defiance (as the Stoic did, for all his pussy-cat 
 resignation). 
 
vii THE FUTURE OF ETHICS 365 
 
 Universe, or the outward prosperity of a Society, advo- 
 cates, in its more candid moments, " Social Surgery," and 
 demands to control and appraise the output of human 
 material as much as the amount and value of any other 
 commodity. It does not require the violent language of 
 Anarchy to assure us that the weak individuals who yet 
 form the strong majority will never submit to this. The 
 European mind has been for six hundred years striving 
 to overthrow the Heteronomy of Dogma and Deduction, 
 and find out some more estimable substitute than un- 
 questioning passive obedience — non-resistance in politics, 
 and confidence in a father confessor's guidance in spiritual 
 matters. The individual in the very moment of victory 
 is certainly not going on his travels to discover a new and 
 more exacting master. Around the mediaeval objects of 
 popular reverence, the Sovereign, the Emperor, the 
 Director, there hovered all the radiance of Divine 
 sanction. Law was personified, and (as Epicurus saw) a 
 person is adaptable, and may be mollified or exchanged. 1 
 The popular suffrage was won by the appeal to democratic 
 instinct, which deluded the commonalty into willing 
 obedience even in the case of the French soldier of the 
 Revolution, because the highest offices in Church and 
 State, nay the Empire itself, were open to all. 2 But even 
 the cleverness and the imagination of Comte cannot invest 
 the Race, Humanity, with any of this lost charm. As a 
 stimulant to action it is ineffective ; as a substitute for 
 religious feeling it is absurd. 
 
 § 16. It is above all necessary to remember that any 
 ethical system must be founded upon consideration for 
 the individual. All the modern movements bound up in 
 the general terms, Trades Unionism and Socialistic Legis- 
 lation, are (so far as they are demanded by the working 
 classes) frankly egoistic ; recognising co-operation as 
 
 1 Thus Despotism has always found a corrective in assassination, and is more 
 sensitive than any other form of government to public opinion, if it once finds 
 expression. 
 
 * So are political offices to-day, in the Democratic regimen which defeats and 
 denies itself. The only cure for the complementary evils of professional statesmen 
 and pessimistic abstention is a hard-working and gratuitous aristocracy. 
 
366 F. W. BUSSELL vn 
 
 essential, but subordinate to the attainment of individual 
 desires, and as a means not as an end. Calvinism which 
 enslaved the will to a divine and inscrutable edict, out of 
 the plane of human reason and justice, was repelled with 
 no less indignation by the new movement than the doctrine 
 of passive obedience to a luxurious king's caprice. How- 
 ever decorated by appeals to abstract Right and Justice, 
 the writings of the Labour leaders aim clearly at one 
 thing — the equal division of external goods, to which, by 
 the way, the Greek schools subsequent to Aristotle united 
 to deny the title good altogether. Disappointed alike 
 with the failure of Machinery and the Franchise to increase 
 the general distribution of comforts, and to put an end to 
 the subservience of the million to the luxury of a few, 
 they entertain a justifiable ambition ; but it is difficult to 
 impart ethical notions into this challenge, except those of 
 a candid and thorough-going Eudsemonism. 1 Universal 
 Eudaemonism indeed, as Wundt would call it, but only so 
 because in Utilitarianism alone is there secure fruition of 
 personal happiness. The prospect of the extinction of 
 competition in European Society cannot be seriously 
 regarded. The voluntary abandonment of self-determina- 
 tion may take place under stress of national circumstances 
 (the case of France under Napoleon III. will recur) — or 
 of individual privation. Something of the sort we see in 
 those combinations of Socialism which often demand 
 more patient self-sacrifice of the unit than they can repay 
 by any tangible benefit. But in Europe, at least in the 
 Germanic and progressive part, the whole temper of the 
 people is against State control in private affairs, and the 
 same irksomeness which will eventually expel Militarism, 
 would make short work of its would-be successor. 
 Founded amid the wild forests which the Germania of 
 Tacitus describes to us, and gradually spreading over the 
 homes of now decadent Classical civilisation, the Germanic 
 individualism is loyal to Sovereign and State, because of 
 
 1 If the undeviating Law of Natural Selection, or the equally compelling 
 edicts of Social Legislation, could bring the much-needed reforms, the individual 
 need not exert himself, as success would be certain, and his efforts superfluous. 
 
vii THE FUTURE OF ETHICS 367 
 
 the principle of noblesse oblige: just because it is not a 
 compulsory but a willing homage. If the practice of war 
 is demanding the greater freedom and spontaneity of the 
 single soldier, in the political and ethical world there 
 seems to be a similar recognition of the need of an initial 
 (not a subsequent) independence of system and formula. 
 The uniting bond between the (often) lawless caprice or 
 egoism of the one, and the general order and welfare of 
 the whole, must be a respect and an affection for persons, 
 and not a cold and distant homage to abstract principles. 1 
 § 17. To return, in conclusion, to our original contrast 
 of Oriental and Occidental modes of thought. Immersed 
 in unconscious resignation to a spiritual, physical, or 
 political unity, the Eastern rouses himself to reflection 
 only to sink back into apathy, from a sense of impotence. 
 The vague Pessimism which more or less strongly 
 tinged their systems in very remote times, spread into 
 Hellenic culture, and is revived to-day in reaction against 
 hasty Optimism, — is the result of their power to criticise 
 but not to alter. The illusion of freedom is all that 
 separates us from the unreflecting happiness of animal life ; 
 and the Sage cannot be consoled by the thought that his 
 soul is part of the universal Divine essence. All mysticism, 
 East or West, tends to diminish on close survey the part 
 which is truly Divine ; passions, anger, practical impulses, 
 virtues, discursive understanding, and at last reason itself 
 and thought (tyikr) vorjais) are successively sacrificed as 
 unworthy of this lofty origin ; and the single link is the 
 mysterious point " Synderesis," just the background of 
 
 1 It must be confessed that while philosophy in England has spoken forcibly 
 in favour of this ultimate axiom, spontaneity, and has regarded with disapproval 
 the extension of State control, German thinkers have, on the other hand, been 
 too much enamoured of the whole to care for the parts. But the unification of 
 Germany and the influence of Hegel, " last of the Schoolmen," will account just 
 now for the prevalence of this Realism, which certainly will not last, in prejudice 
 to the character and temperament of the nation. 
 
 Germany (once the home of individuality, but owing to its long divorce from 
 practical life, for a long period a nation of dreamers) speaks with mystical pride 
 of such subordination of unit to whole, of detached fragment to whole mass, but 
 it is akin to the whole temper and common sense of English philosophy, which 
 here at least, in the department of positive Ethics, is entitled to credit both of 
 originality and (compared to continental velleities) of a certain measure cf 
 achievement. 
 
368 F. W. BUSSELL vn 
 
 our thought, the unfathomable depth of our consciousness, 
 which, even if it be the apex and throne of our being, can 
 be reached only by ceasing to think as well as ceasing to 
 act. Spinozism (and indeed all Monism) is the supreme 
 achievement and the necessary goal of pure Reason, intent 
 on the mysteries of life and compelled, by virtue of its 
 own nature, to refuse all repose until it can rest or dissolve 
 in a final and absolute vacuity. Mysticism, in the same 
 way, whether pessimistic or devotional or merely physical, 
 is the unfailing last term of such a survey, though it claims 
 to be purely intellectual. From the Western point of 
 view (which, I repeat, is only a prepossession of our mind, 
 and cannot be explained or defended with complete 
 success), " le Mysticisme c'est l'ennemi." Ethics, re- 
 garded in the widest sense as the Science of the conduct 
 of life in Society, cannot look with equanimity at the 
 removal of all possible motive or stimulant to action. 
 As it confronted with defiance the arbitrary decrees of 
 Calvinism or the selfishness of a dissolute Court, so it 
 finds its duty to-day in combating, in the interests of 
 Practice, the tendencies of modern scientific, political, 
 humanitarian, religious Unification. The result is the 
 same in all such systems, whether the unity, of which we 
 are transient and unimportant manifestations, be a natural 
 Substance or a physical Law, or a Communistic State, or 
 the Life of the Race, or in Idealism, a single Spirit behind 
 the seeming variety of individual experience and thought. 
 In the two extreme views we are either the result of the 
 Law of substance, or the " organ of a reason " which is 
 not our own. In neither case are we what we thought 
 we were. But upon the prejudices and postulates of our 
 genuinely different soul-life has been built the structure 
 of European ethics and society, and we shall be obliged 
 in the end to revert to that region of Faith, wherein lies 
 the spring of benevolent activities, and desert the supposed 
 discoveries of Pure Reason ; for therein lies stagnation 
 and lethargy not merely of action but in the end of 
 thought itself. 
 
VIII 
 PERSONALITY: HUMAN AND DIVINE 
 
 By H. Rashdall 
 
 i. The Idealist position assumed. 
 
 2. What is meant by the term ' Personality ' besides consciousness ? 
 
 3. (a) A thinking, not merely a feeling, consciousness ; (t>) a certain per- 
 
 manence. 
 
 4. (c) The person distinguishes himself from the objects of his thought, 
 
 {d) and from other selves : Individuality. 
 
 5. (1?) The person has a will or is active. 
 
 6. It is difficult to deny any of these characteristics in their most rudi- 
 
 mentary form to the lowest or at least to the higher animal intelligences 
 (cf. the case of children). Personality is a matter of degree. 
 
 7. Morality might establish a sharper distinction, but it is impossible to 
 
 pronounce absolutely where this begins. 
 
 8. Yet these requirements are not fully satisfied even by man : human per- 
 
 sonality is imperfect. If satisfied at all, they must be satisfied only by 
 God. 
 
 9. Belief in God assumed on idealistic grounds. Not merely a Universal 
 
 Thinker but a Will. 
 
 10. Objections to the idea of Personality in God. (a) ' No subject without 
 
 an object ' ; but this does not necessarily imply that the objects from 
 which the subject distinguishes himself are other than the changing 
 states of himself, willed by himself. 
 
 11. (d) A 'higher unity' is demanded; but this is unintelligible if it is 
 
 meant that the distinction between subject and object is to be effaced. 
 
 12. (c) Some deny that God is Will as well as Thought; but the idea of Causality 
 
 includes final causality, and demands ' activity ' in the universal Mind. 
 
 13. (d) The ascription of Personality to God does not (as may be objected) 
 
 involve Pluralism or independent, unoriginated souls. 
 
 14. (e) It is contended that God must be thought of as including finite spirits. 
 
 This idea arises from the assumption that the principium individuationis 
 of a being that exists for himself is the same as that of a thing which 
 exists only for other. Our inability to distinguish between two minds 
 whose content is identical does not prove that they are one and not two. 
 
 1 5. Reality of the Self vindicated. God may know other selves without being 
 
 such selves. 
 
 16. How the knowledge of other selves, as they are for themselves, is possible. 
 
 Confusion between the content of thought which is a universal, and there 
 2 B 
 
370 H. RASHDALL vm 
 
 fore ' common ' to many minds, and the actual thinking consciousness 
 which thinks. 
 
 17. Is God finite or infinite? 
 
 18. The question of Time. 
 
 19. God is not the Absolute. The Absolute is a society which includes God 
 
 and all other spirits. 
 
 § 1. I PROPOSE in the present paper to inquire what is the 
 real meaning of the term Personality, and then to ask in 
 what sense that term may be applied firstly to individual 
 human beings and then to God. 
 
 In discussing a subject which really forms the apex as 
 it were of the whole metaphysical pyramid, it is necessary 
 to assume a good deal. One cannot begin at the bottom 
 of the pyramid, but must assume that our foundations 
 are already laid, and even that we are much nearer the 
 top than the bottom of our theoretical structure. I shall 
 assume in short the position of an Idealist. 1 I shall 
 assume that we have followed and accepted the line of 
 argument which goes to prove that there is no such thing 
 as matter apart from mind, that what we commonly call 
 things are not self-subsistent realities, but are only real 
 when taken in their connection with mind — that they 
 exist for mind, not for themselves. 
 
 § 2. If this position be accepted, it must carry with it, 
 it would prima facie appear, the existence of the souls, 
 spirits, or selves, which know or experience the things. 
 I must not stay to meet the argument by which writers 
 like Mr. Bradley attack the ascription of absolute reality 
 to individual souls. Anything that I can say on that 
 subject may be most fitly reserved for a later stage of the 
 argument. I put aside for the present the question 
 whether personality carries with it the idea of reality. 
 Even by those who decline to consider persons as 
 absolutely real, it is not denied that persons do in a sense 
 exist. What is meant, then, by saying that persons exist ? 
 What is the differentia of a person ? First and most 
 obviously personality implies consciousness. The main 
 question indeed that may be raised about Personality is 
 
 1 I have attempted a very brief and popular outline of the idealistic creed, as 
 I understand it, in its theological bearings in a recently published volume of 
 essays entitled Conientio Veritatis, by Six Oxford Tutors. 
 
viii PERSONALITY: HUMAN AND DIVINE 371 
 
 " What more besides consciousness is implied in it ? " 
 Worms are commonly supposed to be conscious, but they 
 are not ordinarily called persons. How does the mind 
 of a man differ from that of a worm ? 
 
 § 3. (a) I suppose it will be universally admitted that 
 a person is a thinking consciousness, not a merely feeling 
 consciousness. Personality implies thought, not mere 
 sensibility. 
 
 (b) And this carries with it the further implication of a 
 certain permanence. If such a thing as a purely feeling 
 consciousness exists, its life must be supposed to consist in 
 a succession of experiences, each of which only occupies 
 consciousness when it is present, and is quite unconnected, 
 for that being, with the consciousness of any other moment. 
 The feeling of one moment might indeed produce effects 
 which will alter or modify the feeling of another moment, 
 but the consciousness of that second moment is not 
 aware of this connection with preceding moments. A 
 personal consciousness puts together and presents to itself 
 and brings into relation with one another experiences of 
 diverse moments. A certain degree of permanence is the 
 second idea that we associate with personality. 
 
 § 4. (V) And this permanence of the consciousness 
 amid changing experiences further carries with it another 
 characteristic. The person distinguishes himself from the 
 objects of his thought, although the ultimate esse of these 
 objects must, if we are really faithful to idealism, be 
 experiences actual or possible of that same consciousness 
 or of some other consciousness. 
 
 (d) Among these objects of thought which a person 
 knows are, however, not merely things which exist for 
 consciousness only, that is, exist for other (as the phrase 
 is) but also other selves which are not known merely as 
 objects for this person's thought, but as beings which 
 exist for themselves. Many difficult and interesting 
 questions may be raised about our knowledge of other 
 minds, but these cannot be dealt with now. It is enough 
 to say that the consciousness which is personal distinguishes 
 itself from other consciousnesses and particularly from 
 
372 H. RASHDALL vni 
 
 other persons. Individuality is an essential element in our 
 idea of personality. 
 
 | 5. (e) So far there will be perhaps little dispute. I 
 am possibly asserting something less universally admitted 
 when I say that the most essential of all attributes of 
 personality has yet to be mentioned. The person is not 
 merely a feeling but a willing or originating consciousness. 
 The self is conscious of being an ap^rj ] — whether in the 
 sense of the Libertarian or in the sense of the Determinist 
 who believes in " self-determination," need not be discussed 
 here. Of course, willing implies and is essentially con- 
 nected with both thought and feeling, but it is not the 
 same thing. There cannot be will without thought or 
 feeling ; equally little can we form any distinct idea of 
 what thought would be without will. For us at least 
 there is no thought without attention : and attention is 
 an act of the will. As Mr. Bosanquet puts it, " When- 
 ever we are awake we are thinking, whenever we are 
 awake we are willing." And the willing and the thinking 
 are most intimately connected. Thought is an act, and 
 we do not perform that act any more than any other act 
 without a motive, and that implies feeling. 
 
 Our idea of a person is then the idea of a consciousness 
 which thinks, which has a certain permanence, which 
 distinguishes itself from its own successive experiences 
 and from all other consciousness — lastly, and most 
 important of all, which acts. A person is a conscious, 
 permanent, self-distinguishing, individual, active being. 
 
 § 6. What consciousnesses then possess personality ? 
 It is generally admitted that human beings possess person- 
 ality, if any. But what minds do not possess personality ? 
 Most people would incontinently deny it to a worm, 
 though they are fairly satisfied that worms have some 
 kind of consciousness. And yet I confess I cannot attach 
 "much meaning to the idea of a consciousness which feels 
 but does not know at all — even for a second — what it 
 
 1 For the defence of this proposition from the psychological point of view 
 I may content myself with referring to Dr. Stout's "Analytical Psychology," 
 passim. 
 
vin PERSONALITY: HUMAN AND DIVINE 373 
 
 feels ; if it does know, however dimly, if its feeling has 
 any content, here, it would seem, there must be rudimentary 
 thought. Worms admittedly wriggle : if they have the 
 slightest awareness of this wriggling, there would seem 
 to be a rudimentary idea of space, though no doubt they 
 are quite incapable of grasping the truth that space 
 excludes enclosure by two straight lines. Again, feeling 
 must occupy a certain time or it would not be feeling 
 at all. An atomic " now " could not even be felt. Mere 
 feeling by itself, therefore, would seem to imply a certain 
 continuity of consciousness, a sense of transition from one 
 feeling to another, a rudimentary permanence. 1 
 
 And still more confidently may we assert that not 
 even from the lowest forms of animal consciousness can 
 we exclude the idea of impulse, activity, conation, as the 
 psychologists call it. In his brilliant Gifford Lectures we 
 even find Professor Ward sanctioning to some extent the 
 attempt to make activity a more fundamental and earlier- 
 developed characteristic of animal life than thought, and 
 (to me more questionably) to attribute teleological activity, 
 and with it apparently consciousness, to plant-life. What- 
 ever may be thought of these speculations, animals at all 
 events have impulses, and it is impossible to draw any 
 sharp line between the type of impulse which we call 
 instinct, in which we assume that there is no consciousness 
 of the end aimed at, and the reflective resolution of the 
 full-grown man who presents to himself a desired object 
 and deliberately adopts it as his end. Without some 
 consciousness — I will not say of an end but at least of 
 the act towards which there is an impulse — even instinct 
 would not be instinct, and between the blindest of instincts 
 and the most deliberate of volitions there are probably 
 impulses of every degree of reflectiveness. 
 
 But whatever difficulties may be felt with regard to the 
 worm or the jelly-fish, when we come to the higher animals 
 
 1 " Every feeling of pleasure or of dislike, every kind of self-enjoyment, does in 
 our view contain the primary basis of personality, that immediate self-existence 
 which all later developments of self-consciousness may indeed make plainer to 
 thought by contrasts and comparisons, thus also intensifying its value, but which 
 is not in the first place produced by them." — Lotze, Microcosmus, Bk. ix. 
 chap. iv. , E.T. ii. 679. 
 
374 H. RASHDALL vm 
 
 at all events, it is clear to me that it is wholly arbitrary to 
 deny to the higher animals in some rudimentary form 
 each and every one of the characteristics which we have 
 held to constitute Personality. And yet where shall we 
 say that Personality begins ? It is impossible — in all 
 probability with the amplest knowledge it would still be 
 impossible — to say where personality begins in the evolu- 
 tion of animal life, just as it is impossible to say where it 
 begins in the life- history of the individual man. The 
 newly born infant is no more of a person than a worm, 
 except Svvd/jiei. Yet it is impossible at any period in the 
 life of the child to say to it " To-day thou art a person ; 
 yesterday thou wast not." Personality in short is a 
 matter of degree. 
 
 § 7. We may no doubt find a more definite test of 
 personality, if we add to our other differentia one which 
 undoubtedly has a good right to be included in it, the 
 capacity for Morality. Here we should have little diffi- 
 culty in saying definitely that there are some types of 
 consciousness which are below personality altogether. 
 We may, indeed, see germs of Morality in the sociality 
 of animals ; but we do not commonly consider Morality 
 to begin till we reach the stage in which there is definite 
 choice between conflicting impulses. In the lower animals 
 it is commonly assumed that every impulse necessarily 
 determines action while it is there, or until its place is 
 taken by another, which then becomes similarly irresistible. 
 But still it would be difficult to say that in the highest 
 stages of animal life this dispossession of one impulse by 
 another is effected entirely without comparison between 
 the ideal satisfaction of the two impulses ; and it is diffi- 
 cult to say at what point in the evolution either of the 
 individual or of the race the choice between the conflicting 
 impulses — between, for instance, a race-preserving action 
 and a self-preserving one — becomes sufficiently deliberate 
 to constitute Morality. If we place the beginning of 
 Morality high, we must admit that there is something 
 very like Morality below that limit. If we place it low, 
 we shall have to admit that the germinal Morality of the 
 
viii PERSONALITY: HUMAN AND DIVINE 375 
 
 savage is very unlike the developed Morality of the 
 civilised adult. And even in civilised adults the capacity 
 for Morality varies so enormously that it is quite an 
 arguable position to maintain that in some men it is non- 
 existent or wholly undeveloped. 
 
 § 8. There is no reason to believe that what we have 
 laid down as the essential characteristics of personality 
 are fully satisfied by any form of consciousness below the 
 human, though to no consciousness can one deny some 
 approximation to most of them. But are they fully 
 satisfied even by the human Self? Certainly Socrates 
 was more of a person than a savage. But does even 
 Socrates fully satisfy the demands of personality ? Apply 
 the test which discriminates the thinking consciousness 
 from the merely sensitive consciousness. It is of the 
 essence of the thinking consciousness that it should bind 
 together the successive moments of experience, that it 
 should look before and after, that it should know the past 
 and the future as well as the present. Did Socrates know 
 his own past — his own even, to say nothing of others' 
 past — as well as he knew his present ? There is every 
 reason to believe that Socrates had forgotten much of his 
 early experience — some things probably (to avoid cavil) 
 which he might have remembered with advantage. Large 
 masses of his youthful experience had simply dropped 
 out ; they were as little recognised by him as belonging 
 to the same self of which he was now conscious as though 
 they had been the experiences of some other person. This 
 falls short of the perfect ideal of personality. Take the 
 test of moral choice. Socrates had a rational will, pur- 
 suing ends in which his Reason discerned value. But it 
 would be too much to say that a passion for " scoring off" 
 Sophists never mastered his judgment, and betrayed him 
 into remarks which upon reflection even he himself would 
 have recognised as not conducive to the discovery of truth 
 or to the attainment of his own true good. Thus the most 
 developed human consciousness seems to fall short of the 
 ideal which every human consciousness suggests to us. 
 An imperfect personality is the most that we can attribute 
 
376 H. RASHDALL vm 
 
 even to the most richly endowed of human souls. If a 
 person ru> aKpi^eo-rdrw \6<ya) is to exist, such personality 
 must be found not in man but in some superior being — 
 as far as our knowledge goes, only, if at all, in God. 
 
 8 9. But does any such consciousness as is commonly 
 understood to be implied by the term God really exist ? 
 Here once more I must assume an argument which I 
 have not leisure to develop. I must assume that my 
 readers are familiar with the argument by which Idealists 
 lead up to this idea of a Universal Self- consciousness. 
 The world, as Idealism holds itself to have proved, must 
 exist in a mind. Yet if Science is to be justified, it is 
 clear that its only esse cannot be in such minds as our own. 
 My own Reason, making inferences from my own ex- 
 perience, assures me that the world was when I was not — 
 when no human or sub-human ancestor of mine was there 
 to contemplate the molten planet or the contracting nebula. 
 I cannot understand my present experience without making 
 that assumption. There must then have been a conscious- 
 ness for which the world always existed. The very fact 
 that I know there are things which I do not know, and 
 that what I know I know but imperfectly, proves the 
 existence of a Universal Knower if to be (when applied 
 to a thing) = to be experienced. Idealism then proves 
 the existence of a Universal Thinker. And analogy 
 would lead us to believe that we must attribute to the 
 Universal Thinker in perfection all those characteristics 
 which are implied by Personality, and which yet no 
 human person ever completely satisfied. Just the same 
 line of thought which infers that God knows perfectly the 
 world which we know imperfectly points to the belief that 
 He possesses perfectly the personality which we possess 
 imperfectly — that He is a being who thinks, who persists 
 throughout his successive experiences, who knows those 
 past experiences as well as the present, who distinguishes 
 Himself from the objects of his thought, who in particular 
 distinguishes Himself from all other consciousnesses, and, 
 finally, who wills, and wills in accordance with the con- 
 ception of an ideal end or good. I need hardly discuss 
 
vni PERSONALITY: HUMAN AND DIVINE ^77 
 
 elaborately what God wills : by any one who admits the 
 idea of volition into his own conception of God at all it 
 will hardly be questioned that, if God wills, He must will 
 all, or at least (let us say for the present) everything that 
 is not willed by some lesser will. We are conscious of 
 objects which we know and will, and of others which we 
 know but do not will. God must will the object of his 
 own thought — i.e. the world. 
 
 § io. Why is the conception of Personality in God such 
 a stumbling-block ? Fully to state and meet these objec- 
 tions would be a Philosophy. I can only aim at suggest- 
 ing the bare headings (as it were) of some chapters which 
 such a Philosophy would contain. 
 
 {a) The first head of objection runs thus. To think 
 of God simply as a spirit or soul or self, distinguishable 
 from the world, is to forget that the human self knows 
 itself only at the same time and by the same act wherein 
 it knows the not-self. A self which knows nothing is a 
 mere abstraction. God therefore must not be thought of 
 as apart from the world. The world is as necessary to 
 God as God is to the world. I should quite admit that 
 the divine, like the human, Thinker must think objects : 
 but then I should contend that these objects must not be 
 understood as anything existing independently of the 
 knowing Ego. The self must distinguish itself from 
 something ; but that something need only be the changing 
 states of itself. 1 Further, I should insist that all these 
 experiences or objects of the divine thought must be 
 conceived of as willed, no less than thought, and therefore 
 are not to be distinguished from God's own being in the 
 way in which the involuntary and often painful experiences 
 of ourselves have to be distinguished from the self which 
 knows them. To think of the world (with some Idealists) 
 as though it were an eternal complement to God — a sort 
 of Siamese twin to which He is eternally and inseparably 
 annexed but which is something other than the content of 
 
 1 I am dealing here only with the world of things. Objections might no 
 doubt be raised to the idea of a Universe in which one Self and his thoughts 
 were the sole Reality. 
 
378 H. RASHDALL vm 
 
 his Will — is to forget our Idealism, and still more to forget 
 our " Monism." The Dualism is no less Dualism because 
 we are told that the subject is as necessary to the object 
 as the object to the subject, if the object be thought of 
 as something which exists quite independently of being 
 willed by the Mind which is compelled to know it but 
 which may yet (for anything that such a Philosophy has 
 to say to the contrary) be constrained to pronounce it 
 very bad. Such a view is none the less Dualism because 
 the object is understood to be an " object of thought " 
 and not the " matter " of the materialist. To say that 
 the subject is necessary to the object does not get rid 
 of the two principles : Ahriman was, I suppose, in the 
 Zoroastrian Philosophy regarded as necessary to Ormuzd. 
 Such a mode of thought really ends (as many of Green's 
 disciples have shown) in a naturalism which for all practical 
 purposes is indistinguishable from materialism. When 
 God ceases to be thought of as active power, He soon 
 comes to be regarded as merely an abstraction : if He is 
 still spoken of as " thought," that is merely an abstract 
 way of representing all the true thought of all the indi- 
 vidual thinkers in the Universe as if they were all held 
 together in a system by an actual consciousness. How- 
 ever abhorrent this tendency would have been to the 
 essentially religious mind of such a man as Green, that is 
 the natural development of a Philosophy which really 
 banishes the idea of activity not merely from its idea of 
 God but in truth from its conception of the Universe 
 as a whole. 
 
 § i i. (b) But some will insist, not merely that God 
 must have a world to know, but that neither God nor the 
 world, nor the two taken together, can be regarded as the 
 Absolute being. God -j- His thoughts, Subject + object 
 does not satisfy our demand for Unity. The Absolute 
 must be both subject and object. It must be that which 
 it knows. It must " transcend " the distinction between 
 subject and object. It must be both at once or a third 
 thing that is neither. To this I answer : " If all that is 
 meant is that what God knows (putting aside for the 
 
vni PERSONALITY: HUMAN AND DIVINE 379 
 
 present other spirits and their experiences) must be in a 
 sense part of Himself, within His own being, I admit that 
 that is so (if what He thinks is also what He wills) but 
 I should contend that such an admission does not get 
 rid of the distinction between subject and object, nor is 
 it inconsistent with personality. If what is meant is that 
 there is a kind of third being unlike the only two kinds 
 of being which we have any reason to believe in — neither 
 thinker nor thought, neither subject nor object, neither 
 that which exists for self nor that which exists for other, 
 I answer that the supposition is wholly gratuitous : and 
 that it is, indeed, one to which no real meaning can be 
 attached. It is open to all the objections which have 
 been so copiously hurled at the Kantian ' Noumena,' at 
 the Spencerian ' Unknowable,' at the crude ' matter ' of 
 the ' naive Realist' We don't really solve difficulties by 
 chucking contradictions l into the Absolute and saying 
 1 Be ye reconciled there, for we are quite sure ye cannot 
 be reconciled here.' Mr. Bradley's Philosophy of the 
 Absolute, however brilliant his genius, however invaluable 
 the stimulus which he has given to metaphysical thought 
 in the attempt to construct it, is (I venture to suggest) an 
 attempt to fuse two wholly contradictory and irreconcil- 
 able lines of thought — the idealistic and the Spinozistic. 
 The idea that thought (or thinker) can be an attribute or 
 adjective of something which is neither thought nor 
 thinker, is wholly inadmissible to one who sees, as clearly 
 as does Mr. Bradley, that nothing exists but experience. 
 
 § 1 2. (c) It is objected that we have no right to attribute 
 the idea of will to God. Of course there is much in our 
 experience of volition which belongs to our limitations — 
 sometimes even to our animal organisms. There is some- 
 times a disposition to find the essence of will in the sense 
 of effort — a mere matter of muscular sensation. But that 
 is not of the essence of will. Our volition (as we know 
 it) is the only experience which enables us to give concrete 
 embodiment to the purely a priori conception of Causality, 
 which includes both final cause and efficient cause. We 
 
 1 Not that in this case there is any real contradiction. 
 
380 H. RASHDALL vm 
 
 know why a thing happened when we know (i) that it 
 realised an end which Reason pronounces to have value, 
 and (2) what was the force or (knowing all the abuses to 
 which that word is liable), I will say, the real being which 
 turned that end from a mere idea into an actuality, i.e. 
 the actual experience of some soul. Doubtless my 
 definition involves a circle : for Causality or activity is 
 an ultimate category which cannot be defined. If Idealism 
 be true, this force or active reality must be some kind of 
 conscious being : such an active consciousness as we are 
 aware of in ourselves will supply us with at least some- 
 thing more than a merely symbolical expression for the 
 union of force or power or activity with a consciously 
 apprehended end. Even apart from this argument from 
 Causality, the mere fact that mind, as we know it, is 
 always will as well as thought, would be a sufficient ground 
 for inferring by analogy that, if God be the supreme 
 source of being or Mind, He too must be Will no less 
 than Thought. 
 
 §13. id) The idealistic argument, as here stated or rather 
 presupposed, leads us up to a view of the Universe which 
 finds all reality in souls and their experiences. It remains 
 to ask what is the relation between these souls or spirits. 
 To account for the world as a mere object of knowledge, 
 we have found it necessary to regard one of these spirits, 
 God, as omniscient and eternal, and therefore as sui 
 generis, incomparably superior to human intelligences with 
 their partial and limited knowledge and still more limited 
 capacities of action. We have found it necessary, more- 
 over, to regard Him as causative — as causing those ex- 
 periences of the other souls of which their own wills are 
 not the cause, and (since no human will is ever the whole 
 cause of anything) as co-operating in some sense with 
 whatever causality is exercised by human wills. What, 
 then, are we to say as to the relation between the supreme 
 volitional Intelligence and other volitional intelligences ? 
 Many will be disposed to think that the course of my 
 argument points in the direction of Pluralism — to the 
 hypothesis of many independent, underived intelligences, 
 
vm PERSONALITY: HUMAN AND DIVINE 381 
 
 coeternal and uncreated. I have no a priori objection 
 or prejudice whatever against such a view if there were 
 sufficient grounds for postulating it. But I do not think 
 that our argument necessitates any such consequence. In 
 the first place Pluralism fails to account for the unity of 
 the world, not merely for the experienced uniformity of 
 nature (which is a postulate of Science but no necessity 
 of thought) but for the mere fact of the likeness 
 between different minds, the fact that we all think 
 in the same categories, etc. This might, indeed, be 
 regarded as an ultimate fact which cannot be 
 accounted for, but it tends to make the unity of the 
 world not only hard to account for but hard to understand. 
 In the second place, our souls in all their experiences are 
 dependent upon modifications of a bodily organism which 
 from our point of view must be regarded as due to the 
 thought and will of God : the dependence upon God of 
 the bodily organism carries with it the dependence upon 
 Him also of the spirits to which such bodies are organic. 
 To suppose the souls independent of God would involve 
 (as it seems to me) either the monstrous idea of a purely 
 casual coincidence between the retreating brow and the 
 limited intelligence or a no less appalling and arbitrary 
 scheme of pre-established harmony. And thirdly, the 
 whole contrast between the known limits of human 
 knowledge and the inferred Omniscience of God prepares 
 us by analogy for a corresponding contrast between an 
 eternal or unoriginated mind and minds which are 
 originated and dependent. The mind whose knowledge 
 is partial and progressive may well have a beginning. 
 Experience gives us no evidence for pre-existence, and we 
 are not justified in going beyond experience except in so 
 far as is necessary to explain experience. Moreover, pre- 
 existence is a hypothesis which presupposes the waters of 
 Lethe or some similar Mythology. 1 I infer, then, that the 
 human mind, like all minds, is derived from the one 
 supreme Mind. As attempts to express this relation, I 
 
 1 I do not mean that such a conception is impossible or absurd, but that it is 
 gratuitous. 
 
382 H. RASHDALL vm 
 
 have no objection to the fashionable phrases " partial 
 communication to us of the divine thought," " partial 
 reproduction of the divine consciousness," " limited modes 
 of the universal self-consciousness," " emanations from the 
 divine Mind," and so on, provided they are not used to 
 evade the admission that the fact of such reproductions 
 occurring must be regarded as no less due to the divine 
 will than the first appearance and the gradual development 
 of the bodily organism by which those reproductions are 
 conditioned. But I do not know that such expressions 
 are any improvement upon the old biblical phrase that 
 man was created by God in his own image and after his 
 own likeness. 
 
 §14. (e) Leaving the question of origin, how are we 
 to conceive the relation between God and man when the 
 latter is once in being ? Having repudiated the pluralistic 
 tendency to make other souls independent of God, I must 
 go on to justify Pluralism as against Monism in its view 
 of the separateness and distinctness of the individual self- 
 consciousness from God when once in existence and so 
 long as it exists. The argument by which Monism makes 
 the human soul (in some one of innumerable different 
 meanings or shades of meaning) a part or an element of, 
 or aspect of, and therefore in some sense as identical with 
 the Divine, seems to me to be grounded upon one supreme 
 fallacy. I detect that fallacy in almost every line of 
 almost every Hegelian thinker (if I may say so with all 
 respect) whom I have read, 1 and of many who object 
 to that designation. That fallacy is the assumption 
 that what constitutes existence for others is the same 
 as what constitutes existence for self. 2 A thing is as 
 
 1 Of course this does not apply to the individualistic Hegelianism of Mr. 
 McTaggart which he has shown strong reason for believing was the Hegelianism 
 of Hegel. 
 
 2 This charge could, I believe, be illustrated over and over again out of 
 Professor Royce's The World and the Individual, the ablest attempt yet made 
 to think out the theory of a common Consciousness including individual selves. 
 The confusion is fostered by the author's tendency to speak of the self as a 
 " meaning." " I, the individual, am what I am by virtue of the fact that my 
 intention, my meaning, my wish, my desire, my hope, my life, stand in contrast 
 to those of any other individual " (loc. cit. p. 426). Here it is not clear whether 
 ' the meaning ' implies the meaning as forming the content of knowledge or the 
 
vni PERSONALITY: HUMAN AND DIVINE 383 
 
 it is known : its esse is to be known : what it is for the 
 experience of spirits, is its whole reality : it is that 
 and nothing more. But the esse of a person is to know 
 himself, to be for himself, to feel and to think for himself, 
 to act on his own knowledge, and to know that he acts. 
 In dealing with persons, therefore, there is an unfathom- 
 able gulf between knowledge and reality. What a person 
 is for himself is entirely unaffected by what he is for any 
 other, so long as he does not know what he is for that 
 other. No knowledge of that person by another, however 
 intimate, can ever efface the distinction between the mind 
 as it is for itself, and the mind as it is for another. The 
 essence of a person is not what he is for another, but what 
 he is for himself. It is there that his principium individua- 
 tionis is to be found — in what he is, when looked at from 
 the inside. All the fallacies of our anti- individualist 
 thinkers come from talking as though the essence of a 
 person lay in what can be known about him, and not in 
 his own knowledge, his own experience of himself. And 
 that, in turn, arises largely from the assumption that 
 knowledge, without feeling or will, is the whole of Reality. 
 Of course, I do not mean to deny that a man is made 
 what he is (in part) by his relations to other persons, 
 but no knowledge of these relations by any other than 
 himself is a knowledge which can constitute what he is 
 to himself. However much I know of another man, and 
 however much by the likeness of my own experience, 
 by the acuteness of the interpretation which I put upon 
 his acts and words, by the sympathy which I feel for 
 him — I may know of another's inner life, that life is for 
 
 -meaning as forming part of the individual's consciousness. If the former, there 
 is nothing intrinsically absurd in the supposition that two individuals should have 
 exactly the same meaning, and yet remain two. Or if they do not, there is no 
 difference between them, and the (even apparent) individuality of the individual 
 self disappears. In the latter case there will be as many meanings as there are 
 selves, no matter how much alike they may be. Professor Royce seems habitually 
 to ignore exactly the differentia of Consciousness. He constantly assumes that 
 to be in relation with another being is to be identical with that being (just as a 
 thing undoubtedly is constituted by its relations), that the individuality of the self 
 differs in nothing from the individuality of a star [I.e. p. 432), that the individuality 
 of the self lies in what it is for God. (" The self is in itself real. It possesses 
 individuality. And it possesses this individuality, as we have seen, in God and 
 for God," I.e. p. 433.) 
 
384 H. RASHDALL vin 
 
 ever a thing quite distinct from me the knower of it. 1 
 My toothache is for ever my toothache only, 2 and can 
 never become yours ; and so is my love for another 
 person, however passionately I may desire — to use that 
 metaphor of poets and rhetoricians which imposes upon 
 mystics, and even upon philosophers — to become one with 
 the object of my love : for that love would cease to be if 
 the aspiration were literally fulfilled. If per impossibile 
 two disembodied spirits, or selves, were to go through 
 exactly the same experiences — knew, felt, and willed 
 always alike — still they would be two, and not one. 3 The 
 fact that we should not be able to say anything about 
 the difference could not alter the fact ; for with persons 
 (once again) what they are for the knowledge of others 
 does not constitute the whole of their reality. But each 
 of them would know the difference between his own ex- 
 perience and his knowledge of the other's experience ; 
 and each of us, being a separate self, would know that 
 each of these two must know it, but we could not know 
 what it is except in so far as each of us might know that 
 
 1 I cannot here further analyse how we obtain this knowledge. 
 
 2 Mr. Bradley contends that the Absolute may feel all our pains and yet not 
 feel them as pain (like the discord in Music which only increases the harmony), 
 but then / do feel it as pain. Could any defence give away the case more hope- 
 lessly, or show more convincingly that I feel something which is not the Absolute's 
 feeling ? 
 
 3 If this is not self-evident, let me add the following argument. It is admitted 
 that two such spirits might have like but not identical experiences {i.e. experience 
 in which there was some identity but some difference) without ceasing to be two. 
 Let us suppose the content of the consciousness of each to become gradually 
 more and more like that of the other, including all the time the knowledge of the 
 other's existence. Can it be seriously contended that as the last remaining differ- 
 ence disappeared, that consciousness in A of not being B would suddenly disappear 
 too ? Of course it may be said that the consciousness of not being B is part of 
 the content of A's consciousness. If so, of course the case supposed could not 
 possibly arise, and the difficulty disappears. But still the difference between A 
 and B would be absolutely unrecognisable and indescribable for any other con- 
 sciousness, although such a consciousness might know that there were two beings 
 with such contents of consciousness identical but for the knowledge by each that 
 he was not the other. Or again let me take the case of two consciousnesses not 
 knowing of each other's existence, but having (as a third mind is aware) nearly 
 identical experiences. Let us suppose two very elementary minds, whose ex- 
 perience should be confined as nearly as is possible to present sensation. Let 
 us suppose the pain they suffer to become more and more alike. Will it be 
 gravely said that if for a moment the throbs which filled each consciousness 
 became the same {i.e. same in content, as known but not felt by the third mind), 
 that mind would have to pronounce that there were two throbs no longer, but 
 only one? 
 
viii PERSONALITY: HUMAN AND DIVINE 385 
 
 it is like, or analogous to, the difference between what he 
 is for himself, and what he knows of the self that seems 
 to be likest him. 
 
 §15. Mr. Bradley's objections to ascribing reality to the 
 Self really, I venture to think, spring in great part from the 
 same root. That the self includes the not-self as known to 
 me is true enough. So long as the "not-self" is a mere 
 thing, it has no reality apart from what it is to me and 
 other selves. What it is for me, is in a sense part of me. 
 When the not-self is a person, the knowledge of that self 
 is part of my experience, and so (if you like it) in a sense 
 part of me ; but that does not show that there is not a 
 something which he is for himself, which is no part at 
 all of me, and which is as real as I am. In so far as 
 I know what he is in his own self-knowledge, of course 
 there is an identity between what he is for me (part of 
 my ego) and what he is for himself (part of his ego), but 
 this identity is a mere abstraction, the identity of a Uni- 
 versal. Mr. Bradley cannot usually be accused of mistak- 
 ing such abstractions for reality. Of course if " real " is 
 to mean "out of all relation to anything outside itself," 
 then it is obvious on the face of it — without 500 pages 
 of argument — that nothing can be real except the whole. 
 But that is not the usual sense of " real," and if the words 
 be used in other than their usual sense, Mr. Bradley's 
 paradoxes sink into something not so very far removed 
 from platitudes. Undoubtedly the self is not what it is 
 apart from its relations to other selves ; but, unless those 
 relations to other selves as they are for other are the whole 
 of its being, the self may be real without being the whole 
 of Reality. It is only in the case of a thing that its 
 relations to some other mind as known to that other con- 
 stitute the whole of its reality. If "reality" be taken to 
 mean self-sufficing reality, a being underived from and 
 independent of all other beings, we may admit that such 
 reality cannot be ascribed to the finite self, and can only 
 be ascribed to the whole — to the whole kingdom of selves 
 taken in their relation to one another and to God, who is 
 one of the selves and the source of them. We do not 
 
 2 c 
 
386 H. RASHDALL vm 
 
 get to any fuller or deeper Reality by supposing an 
 existence in which God or the Absolute no longer dis- 
 tinguishes himself from the selves, or the selves from 
 God. Without any such unintelligible confusion there will 
 remain a very real sense in which the being of the 
 originated souls may be regarded as derived from, and 
 even if you like, therefore, in the sense of forming objects 
 of the divine thought, included in the Divine Being. But 
 if we use such language, we must make it plain that the 
 knowledge of the finite self by God does not exhaust its 
 being as is the case with the mere object. It is the 
 knowledge of them that is in God. God must know the 
 self as a self which has a consciousness, an experience, 
 a will which is its own — that is, as a being which is not 
 identical with the knowledge that He has of it. 
 
 In short, all the conclusions which are applicable to 
 each particular self in his relation to another seem to be 
 equally applicable to the relations between God and any 
 other Spirit. Undoubtedly God may, must have an 
 infinitely deeper and completer knowledge of every one 
 of us than any one of us has of another — nay, a pro- 
 founder knowledge of each of us than each of us has of 
 himself, for each of us forgets ; each of us knows his past 
 self only by means of abstractions — abstract generalities 
 which (as Mr. Bradley has taught us) are so far off from 
 the realities — the half-remembered half-forgotten colour 
 or sound, joy or sorrow which they symbolise ; still less 
 does he know all his yet unrealised capacities or poten- 
 tialities. Each of us is but imperfectly personal. God alone 
 (as Lotze maintained) fully realises the ideal of person- 
 ality ; and that higher personality — that complete know- 
 ledge of self- — must carry with it much more knowledge 
 of other selves than to us is possible. How God knows 
 what I feel without having actually felt the like, I do not 
 know: but there is nothing in the supposition so inherently 
 self-contradictory as there is in the idea that God feels what 
 I feel at this moment and yet that there is only one feeling 
 at this moment and not two. The only analogy that 
 seems available is the fact that I can know what I once 
 
vin PERSONALITY: HUMAN AND DIVINE 387 
 
 felt, though I feel it no longer. Doubtless God cannot be 
 thought of as attaining his knowledge of other selves by 
 the clumsy processes of inference or analogy by which 
 we so imperfectly enter into the consciousness of others : 
 doubtless pleasure, pain, colour, sound, volition must be 
 in God something different from what they are to us. 
 And yet even for God such a knowledge of other selves 
 must be in some way dependent upon a likeness (i.e. 
 partial identity of content) between his experience and 
 ours. God must be thought of as feeling pleasure — yes, 
 and (as far as I see) pain also, or something like pain, 
 as loving persons and hating evil, as willing the good 
 and so on. Say, if you will, that such terms applied to 
 God are mere symbols. But then so (I should contend), 
 in a sense, is " thought." God's thought can as little be 
 exactly what our thought is as our joys and sorrows can 
 be exactly what his are. Yet imperfect knowledge is 
 still knowledge, or we should have to confess that we 
 know nothing at all. And it is arbitrary out of the 
 three distinguishable but inseparable and mutually 
 dependent aspects or activities of self-conscious being 
 as known to us — will, thought, feeling — to select one, 
 namely thought (which by itself is a mere abstraction), 
 and to call that God. I need not further insist on the 
 arbitrariness of this procedure : the imperishable value 
 of Mr. Bradley's " Appearance and Reality " lies largely 
 in its exposure of it. God, if He is to be known at all, must 
 be known as a Trinity — Potentia, Sapientia, Bonitas or 
 Voluntas, as the Schoolmen (in this matter so much more 
 rational and intelligible than later theologians) consistently 
 maintained. 1 God must then, it would seem, know other 
 selves by the. analogy of what He is Himself ; He could 
 not (it is reasonable to infer) have created beings wholly 
 unlike Himself. His knowledge of other selves may be 
 perfect knowledge without his ever being or becoming 
 the selves which He knows. His being must, if this is 
 
 1 I only suggest an analogy between the traditional doctrine in its scholastic 
 and philosophical form and that which I suggest. To make them identical, we 
 must take Potentia to = Will, and include the element of feelinsf in Bonitas. 
 
388 H. RASHDALL vni 
 
 all that you mean by the phrase, " penetrate " their inmost 
 being. But to talk of one self-conscious being including 
 or containing in himself or being identical with other 
 selves is to use language which is (as it appears to me) 
 wholly meaningless and self-contradictory, for the essence 
 of being a self is to distinguish oneself from other selves. 
 Such theories are just one instance of that all-fertile source 
 of philosophical error — the misapplication of spacial meta- 
 phors. Minds are not Chinese boxes which can be put 
 ' inside ' one another. And if it be answered that the 
 higher Unity that is to transcend the difference between 
 God and other selves, between selves and things, must 
 therefore not be a self, I answer that we know of no form 
 of ultimately real being except the self. To talk of other 
 " beings " which are not selves is as unmeaning as to talk 
 about beings which do not exist. That being which is 
 noX. for a self is a self; and it is only in a restricted and 
 popular and not in a strictly philosophical sense that 'being' 
 can be attributed to that which merely is for other. The 
 real is that which is for itself, and every spirit or con- 
 sciousness (in its measure and degree) is for itself. 
 
 § 1 6. Is the question raised "How can one Self know 
 another self not merely as it is for other but as it is for 
 itself?" It might be enough to plead that the difficulty is 
 not made one whit less difficult by the theory of a universal 
 Consciousness which includes all particular selves. Even 
 if this theory helped to explain how the Universal 
 self knows the particular self and the particular self the 
 Universal self, it would not explain how one particular 
 self knows another particular self. You may say that 
 each particular self really is each other particular self, and 
 is therefore inside it and not outside it. But then how 
 does one self appear to be outside the other ? Where is 
 the distinction between them ? And why does not one 
 self not know all about each and every other self as it 
 is for itself? I cannot really profess much sympathy 
 with the supposed difficulty about explaining how we 
 know other Selves. It seems to me an ultimate part of 
 our experience that from our self-knowledge we do by 
 
viii PERSONALITY: HUMAN AND DIVINE 389 
 
 inference infer the existence of other selves which are for 
 themselves as well as for us ; and Philosophy has nothing 
 to do but to record and systematise the way we actually 
 think. In my thought the idea of a being which is for 
 itself as well as for me is quite clearly distinguishable 
 from that of a being which is only for me. The fact that 
 I think it, is the only possible argument to show that it 
 can be thought. Of course it is possible to deny the 
 validity of the inferences by which I reach this result. 
 I do not propose to discuss this question further, but will 
 only say that Solipsism can be made just as plausible 
 from one philosophical point of view as from another : 
 like Scepticism it admits of no decisive refutation, but 
 carries no conviction. The only philosophies that can 
 justly be taunted with a tendency towards Solipsism are 
 the systems which fail to distinguish between know- 
 ledge and other aspects of being, especially feeling ; and 
 under this category may be placed not only the Sensation- 
 alism which merges knowledge in feeling, but also the 
 Intellectualism which merges feeling in knowledge. If I 
 cannot distinguish between my feeling and my knowledge 
 that I feel, naturally I cannot know that another feels ; 
 and when we have abstracted from my total consciousness 
 the feeling -element, the knowledge -element taken by 
 itself can be very plausibly identified with the mere 
 abstract content of knowledge, which is no doubt 
 precisely the same for any number of Selves who think 
 the same thing, and therefore the same for God and for 
 the other minds whom God knows but is not. It may be 
 plausibly identified with it, but it is not really the same 
 thing. For there will still remain the difference between 
 the content of my knowledge and the actual knowing 
 consciousness. The knowledge taken apart from the 
 feeling and the willing is no doubt an abstraction ; it is 
 only an aspect of the single Ego that feels, wills, and 
 knows. The confusion has arisen largely from the 
 ambiguity of the word "thought." Thought may mean 
 " the content that is thought," or it may mean " the 
 consciousness which thinks." The content of two people's 
 
390 H. RASHDALL vin 
 
 thought may be the same : but the consciousness that 
 thinks in the two cases is different. Every experience as 
 such is unique : the content abstracted from the experi- 
 ence itself is always a universal, and may therefore be 
 common to any number of such experiences as well as to 
 minds which share the knowledge without having had 
 similar experiences. 1 And it is not only the content of 
 another's experience that I can know, but the fact that 
 there is a real self which has that experience. Even in 
 the case of selves with precisely similar experiences, I 
 can know that there were one, two, or more of such 
 beings. But it is not my knowledge of each self that 
 makes it a self; neither does my inability to recognise 
 any but a numerical difference between them telescope 
 them into one. The difficulty has been largely manu- 
 factured by the habit of philosophers of speaking of all 
 that I know as a " non-ego " without taking any account 
 of the difference between the " non-ego " which is an 
 " ego " and the " non-ego " which is only what I or other 
 minds know about it. 
 
 §17. Do you say that all this makes God finite ? Be it 
 so, if you will. Everything that is real is in that sense 
 finite. God is certainly limited by all other beings in the 
 Universe, that is to say, by other selves, in so far as He 
 is not those selves. He is not limited, as I hold, by 
 anything which does not ultimately proceed from his own 
 Nature or Will or Power. That power is doubtless 
 limited, and in the frank recognition of this limitation of 
 
 3 Often of course, as Mr. Bradley has shown so impressively, this generalised 
 content reproduces or represents but very imperfectly the actual experience — even 
 in the case of the thinker's own past experiences. That is particularly of course 
 with pleasures and pains, the memory of which is not necessarily pleasant or 
 painful at all. Yet it is an exaggeration to say that we cannot know in any 
 degree what a past pleasure or pain was like, and equally so that we know nothing 
 of what other people's pleasures and pains are to them. Pleasure and pain them- 
 selves belong to the uniqueness of consciousness : their generalised content may 
 be known to many minds, and the fact that no pleasure necessarily enters into the 
 idea of a pleasure, and that (still more certainly) no pain into the idea of a pain is 
 an impressive exhibition of the difference between knowledge and reality. The 
 champions of an inclusive consciousness have never found a difficulty in the 
 uniqueness of two exactly similar experiences of the same person (experiences of 
 which the content is the same) because of the difference in the time-relations of 
 the two : but there is nothing in the nature of time to exclude the simultaneous 
 existence of two or more unique experiences. 
 
vni PERSONALITY: HUMAN AND DIVINE 391 
 
 power lies the only solution of the problem of Evil which 
 does not either destroy the goodness of God or destroy 
 moral distinctions altogether. He is limited by his own 
 eternal, if you like " necessary " nature — a nature which 
 wills eternally the best which that nature has in it to 
 create. The limitation is therefore what Theologians have 
 often called a self-limitation : provided only that this limita- 
 tion must not be regarded as an arbitrary self-limitation, 
 but as arising from the presence of that idea of the best 
 that is eternally present to a will whose potentialities are 
 limited — that idea of the best which to Platonising 
 Fathers and Schoolmen became the Second Person of the 
 Holy Trinity. The truth of the world is then neither 
 Monism, in the pantheising sense of the word, nor 
 Pluralism : the world is neither a single Being, nor many 
 co-ordinate and independent Beings, but a One Mind who 
 gives rise to many. We may of course, if we choose, 
 describe the whole collection of these beings as One 
 Reality, with enough capital letters to express the unction 
 which that numeral appears to carry with it for some 
 minds ; but after all the Reality, whether eternally or 
 only at one particular stage of its development, is a 
 community of Persons. 
 
 § 1 8. The embarrassment of my language at this point 
 will make it plain that I am getting myself entangled 
 in another question more difficult, and more momentous 
 even in its ultimate implications, than the question of 
 Personality — that is, the question of Time. Is Time 
 objective or subjective ? Is the Absolute in time, or is 
 time in the Absolute ? A hasty or unconsidered treat- 
 ment of such questions would be useless. I have 
 endeavoured, while assuming that the individual self 
 is in time, to avoid language which is necessarily in- 
 consistent with the position that God is " out of time." 
 I will only add here that a full investigation of this 
 question might lead us to the conclusion, that, just as we 
 have seen reason to insist that any sense in which the 
 divine knowledge penetrates the individual consciousness 
 must be a sense which leaves to the individual his full 
 
392 H. RASHDALL vm 
 
 individuality, personality, reality, so any sense in which 
 we might find it necessary to admit that the divine 
 knowledge transcends the distinctions of past, present, 
 and future, any sense in which God is (to use the 
 medieval expression) supra tempus must be a sense which 
 is compatible with leaving to the time-consciousness in 
 which individuals undoubtedly live, true reality likewise, 
 though there may and must undoubtedly be aspects of 
 this reality which we do not fully understand. 
 
 § 19. The indisposition to admit that souls have an 
 existence which is not merged in that of God, seems to 
 arise largely from the fact that philosophers have imposed 
 upon themselves and others by the trick of simply assuming 
 (without proof) an identity between God and the philo- 
 sophical " Absolute," and then arguing that if any of the 
 attributes ascribed by theology or religion or common- 
 sense to God are inconsistent with what is implied in the 
 conception of " the Absolute," no such being as the God 
 of Religion can exist. Personality is undoubtedly incon- 
 sistent with the idea of the Absolute or Infinite Being, 
 and therefore it is assumed that God is not personal. 
 The arguments of Idealism really, as it seems to me, go 
 to prove that over and above our souls there does exist 
 such a Being as Theologians, except when they have 
 unintelligently aped the language of philosophies not 
 their own, have commonly understood by God. The 
 Absolute, therefore, if we must have a phrase which 
 might well be dispensed with, consists of God and the 
 souls, including, of course, all that God and those souls 
 know or experience. The Absolute is not a simple 
 aggregate formed of these spirits, as each of them is if 
 taken apart from the rest, but a society in which each 
 must be taken with all its relations to the rest — as being 
 what it is for itself together with what it is for other. 
 This leaves quite open the question what is the nature 
 of those relations. It will be quite as true that ' the 
 Absolute is a society ' in our view as it is in the view of 
 the Pluralists who make souls coeternal with God, or as 
 in the view of Mr. McTaggart, who makes Reality consist 
 
viii PERSONALITY: HUMAN AND DIVINE 393 
 
 of eternal souls without God. 1 Only in our view God 
 at a certain point of time caused the souls to exist ; or 
 (if we please) by an eternal act causes that at a certain 
 time they shall appear in the time-series. The Absolute, 
 we may say, becomes a Society ; or, if we like to think 
 of everything that is to be as having an existence already 
 in some sense in the Absolute, we may say that the 
 Absolute eternally is a God who persists throughout time 
 (or, if it be so, a God who is supra teinpus) together with 
 selves who are eternally present to the mind of God, but 
 who begin to have their real being, in accordance with 
 His will, at particular moments of time. 
 
 1 I have very much sympathy with Mr. McTaggart's criticism of the usual 
 Hegelian idea of God as a consciousness including other consciousnesses. (See 
 especially Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, pp. 60, 61.) I must not attempt to 
 examine his position now, but will briefly indicate where it seems to me defective. 
 Besides all the difficulties involved in the idea of pre-existent souls, it is open to 
 this objection. Mr. McTaggart (whatever we may say of the " Pluralists ") feels 
 that the world must be a Unity, that it consists not merely of souls but of related 
 and interconnected souls which form a system. But a system for whom ? The 
 idea of a system which is not " for " any mind at all is not open to an Idealist ; 
 and the idea of a world each part of which is known to some mind but is not 
 known as a whole to any one mind is almost equally difficult. Where then, in 
 his view, is the Mind that knows the whole, i.e. the whole system of souls with 
 the content of each ? The difficulty could only be met by making out that each 
 soul is omniscient, and perhaps this is really Mr. McTaggart's meaning. If so, 
 the difficulty of making each soul as an extra-temporal reality omniscient, while 
 as occupying a position in the time-series it is all the time ignorant of much, is one 
 which needs no pointing out. In short, I hold that the ordinary idealistical 
 arguments for a Mind which knows and wills the whole are not invalidated by 
 Mr. McTaggart's criticism ; while I can only cordially accept his extraordinarily 
 able and convincing criticism of the position that the supreme mind is the whole. 
 
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