UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES P. STRIFE OF SYSTEMS AND PRODUCTIVE DUALITY AN ESSAY IN PHILOSOPHY BY WILMON HENRY SHELDON STONE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN DARTMOUTH COLLEGE CAMBRIDGE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS COPYRIGHT, 1918 HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS PREFACE XTOTWITHSTANDING the length of the investigation i- ^1 which occupies them, the following pages offer a simple enough result. Their burden is but one idea, albeit an idea with a positive and a negative side. The positive side we discover when we learn that throughout the range of human thought and deed there recurs, in a million different shapes, OT one and the same problem, viz., to maintain the integrity S of a given thing, person, principle, institution, in the modi- fications which the environment imposes upon it. In the H dialect of technical philosophy this is called the problem of j harmonizing the principle of external relations with that of internal relations; it might with equal truth be styled the reconciliation of Platonism and pragmatism, of idealism and realism, of " static " and " dynamic " views, or a dozen other names. For it is at the bottom of all those contro- 5 versies waged by philosophers in the long history of their | discipline. Speaking most broadly, the difficulties of think- ; ing and living do not lie in the creation of novel forms, in ^ discovery and invention; these arise spontaneously yet ^ inevitably if they are allowed to do so. Reality creates with- out trouble or effort; what prevents man from understand- ing this and from doing the like himself, is his perennial tendency to oppose the old to the new, the static to the dynamic, abstract to concrete, system to opportunity. To see the independent right of each, as well as their mutual consistency and support, is in fact to know the creative principle itself. Without such knowledge, every fertile dis- covery, every new plan of life, is but a prick to further strife; with it, one may understand how the parts of the universe deploy into one another and give rise to ever-increasing 31S093 iv PREFACE novelties. The deepest trait of reality, in short, that which makes it the moving, productive thing it is, is just this mar- riage of two principles whose apparent hostility has con- stituted the continual frustration of man's effort to map the universe. But though the knowledge of the creative principle is requisite for an understanding of the specific structure of reality, and though it will explain more of that structure than the present volume can show, such knowledge is not enough for the purposes of human thought and practice. Herein lies the negative side of the above. Another sort of knowledge must be added; it is afforded by the special sciences and by practical experience. While the human mind remains liable to mistakes in reasoning and to pre- conceived opinion, men can operate successfully with the fundamental principle only after they have empirically ascertained the details to which it is to apply. Without such acquaintance, the general rule is as likely to mislead as to enlighten. The particular working of the rule cannot usually be known before the occasion presents itself; and when it does so, we need both an open-minded empiricism and a resolute will to ensure the desirable application. The rival claims of individual and society, of religion and science, of dogma and free thought, of discipline and liberty, must indeed be adjusted by the aid of the first principle cannot otherwise be adjusted; but the adjustment may not be carried through without expert knowledge also of the conditions in each particular issue. The writer expresses his thanks to the Editors of the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods for permission to reprint in Chapter I, parts of an article in that Journal, vol. xii, pp. 5-16. W. H. S. CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE THE GREAT PROBLEM 3 The natural task of every one, to find the best means of lifting the whole load of man how discover such means ? needs of man considered grouped into cognitive and practical, long-run and immediate long-run cognitive the most inclusive needs, nearest to initial task attempt to satisfy these is philosophy phi- losophy would map the universe on broad lines, both for the sake of knowledge and as a practical guide its choice imperative upon those who are free why so often rejected material and method of philosophical inquiry. CHAPTER II THE PHILOSOPHIC DISEASE, AND RESTATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM 23 We turn for results to present-day philosophy but it has no consensus of experts attempts to explain away the failure some radical fallacy or malady in the human mind is indicated, to remove which must be our utmost endeavour studying the chief types of system we must seek the source of opposition the diagnosis and cure of the disease would automatically furnish the solution of our initial task. CHAPTER IH THE TYPE SUBJECTIVISM 38 No types unmixed, but all influential subjectivism defined emotional and practical grounds for it the logical basis: phi- losophy's puzzles vanish when all is reduced to mind differ- entia of subjectivism from idealism and absolutism it does not vi CONTENTS make objects identical with minds nor created by them reductio ad absurdum of realism a verbal anathema subjectivity no better explanation of law than objectivity the subject no more self-evident than the object real case rests on internal relations and is irrefutable soundness of the two premises the type quite true and barren. CHAPTER IV OBJECTIVISM 67 Distinguished from other forms of realism practical and emo- tional motives reductio ad absurdum of subjectivism a verbal anathema justice of solipsism critical point of type i found in actually unperceived objects and the percipient brain sub- jectivism forced to resort to potentialities but not refuted by realism objectivism's positive argument equally irrefutable and fruitless. CHAPTER V THE SOLVENT: PURE EXPERIENCE 84 The above reforms have not banished the old puzzles, but added a new source of dispute, epistemology ensuing deadlock or endless tilt representative and presentative theories both sides thin and infertile attempt to break the deadlock by " pure experience " distinguished from radical empiricism a negative view too pure to solve problems timid, more inane than the first two, yet logically irreproachable more fertile, perhaps, will be a combining view, as in the next type. CHAPTER VI GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 105 Distinguished from the wider term idealism alleged fertility and real asymmetry powerful emotional and practical needs involved personality, society, art, Deity traits of the Great Subject the three kinds of this type argument from fertility and deduction of categories Natorp's, Miinsterberg's, and Baldwin's systems infertility of the hypothesis of mind formality of the categories deduced the Great Self is a Great CONTENTS Vll Eunuch objection to all transcendentalism psychological evidence for a Great Self Psychologismus and theory of judg- ment truth and barrenness of the psychological argument socipsism as true and futile as solipsism services and defects of idealism revolt to the opposite extreme. CHAPTER VII GREAT OBJECTIVISM 172 Dethronement of mind and reversal of subjectivism's argument to give objective monism motive of science: exactness, empir- icism and independence deduction of mind fission into three types, analogous to the last three antinomy of consciousness epistemological monism solves no problems introspection not ruined idealism partly to blame here positive definitions of mind. Montague's "potentiality" does not account for its actuality Holt's cross-section view representation defined unity of consciousness not explained error also a crux, and memory and foresight same critical points for dynamic or biological definitions materialism a narrower form of the type. CHAPTER VIII INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUTTIONISM 222 Motives of the first argument for permanent terms and beings external relations endless tilt with internal relations neither demonstrable, both true individual vs. universal the same sort of issue change and freedom vs. the universals re- action to radical empiricism democracy vs. aristocracy universals vs. changing particulars utility and reality of abstractions modern superstitious dislike of forces, faculties, etc. truth of poetry critical point of the dynamic view transition to pragmatism its theses and critical point its defect and its unique service abandon the study of instru- ments and consider reality directly intuitionism and mysti- cism do so their broad human appeal kinds of intuition its objective attitude and concreteness Bergson on time, novelty, freedom his dialectic and exclusions mysticism on the inscrutability of God needlessness of the exclusions why the ecstasy is called indescribable futility of the argument from dialectic, and barrenness of all partisan types. Vlll CONTENTS CHAPTER DC THE RATIONALISTIC SYNTHESIS 317 A type of higher dimension now demanded instinctive motives leading to synthesis appearance of finality how there come to be different sorts of synthesis absolutism rationalistic in no abstract sense evidence for it seemingly empirical, really a priori union of external and internal relations consequent dualism internal rupture of the system the dialectic un- solved truth, critical point, and significance of the system. CHAPTER X THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 346 Common sense and practical judgment as ultimate authority not excluding reason, but guiding it a broad, virile attitude religious dogma the highest form of it old categories respected historic cases: partial, Eclecticism, Scottish school, and Kant; full, the system of Thomism Kant not a synthetist but a com- promiser Thomism's manifoldness and asymmetry central place of causation, the great practical category significant structure of articles in the Summa Theologica particular syntheses accomplished kernel of whole position, authority credentials of authority examined it is necessary to living has it rational ground ? Yes, but reason has its own dogmas, as have also sense and memory but is religious dogma to be ac- cepted on authority ? credentials of faith the ipse dixit form of authority personal testimony always of some weight but not usually of enough to be infallible the Catholics give a long array of reasons for accepting the Faith yet the will must supervene upon these, and the grace of God upon the will thus authority, vouchsafed to a practical attitude, stands alone at the end yet dogmas, however true, need explanation as indeed do all the categories of common sense herein Thomism contains a fundamental and needless exclusion. CONTENTS IX CHAPTER XI THE DIAGNOSIS or THE DISEASE 407 Remarks on further types Leibnitz's aesthetic synthesis the general trouble with the types, exclusiveness grounded in a misunderstanding apparent contradiction of counterpart categories while yet both are true due to opposition of two basal principles, externality and internality of relations inter- nality has appeared un verifiable : may it be denied ? pluralism considered indefinables must be rejected, for we cannot rest in mysteries internality an axiom understanding rests on internality, belief on externality conflict of these is the germ of the malady absolutism alone has seen this " isolation of problems " offers no escape old issues cannot be dismissed, as they revive in a new form why not skepticism then ? only way is to take up the dialectic old antinomies all turn upon the conflict of independence and interdependence true in the field of action as well as theory practical forms of externality and internality in politics, art, morals, religion, science, etc. CHAPTER XII THE REMEDY 453 To solve the contradictions is to know the very nature of reality root of the conflict lies in that smallest of notions, the negative the germ is the subtlest possible issue reduced to alleged inconsistency of sameness and difference these do not deny each other the error is arbitrary yet it pervades most fields of life being a negative judgment it should have a ground, but it has none externality and internality true, each by itself and both together dualism and monism both correct, but duality the deeper trait of reality reality is fredy dual solution of the theoretical antinomies the practical need another principle. X CONTENTS CHAPTER XIII THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 493 Our dualism implies a second principle besides free duality the counterpart, uniting what the other divides explaining creation and necessary connection the self-repeater produces genuine novelty this is the type of all explanation and productiveness a reductio ad absurdum met how one fact may imply others explanation proceeds from two, never from one deduction of the category of universal of infinite of number of cer- tain attributes of space solution of certain practical issues depends partly on human will two chief sources of ill, perverse will and niggardly reality the solutions have two requisites, expert knowledge of particular fields, and philosophy need of both aristocracy and democracy consequences to particular social issues today to moral issues definition of moral con- duct morality may be social or individual fertility the criterion summary characterization of our whole doctrine the duality of reality is an asymmetrical one: independence prior to, though not more real or necessary than, interdependence; individual character must precede social usefulness. STRIFE OF SYSTEMS AND PRODUCTIVE DUALITY CHAPTER I THE GREAT PROBLEM modern man prides himself upon the progress -i- achieved by the race; and perhaps justly. Material progress that is obvious : intellectual and moral progress also are not hard to verify. Instead of praying for rain, we irrigate; instead of the ascetic in his cell we see the social- settlement worker; the foreign relief committee replaces the theological disputant; education is thrown open to all. Despite occasional backsliding, science is ousting super- stition; practical reform succeeds the hell-fire sermon; democracy overcomes special privilege and oppression of the poor. The thoughtful citizen, reflecting upon these things, is inclined to self-congratulation and confidence in the future. But of course there is another side of the picture, and before its contemplation the congratulatory mood evapo- rates. Men have plenty of unsatisfied needs ; how bitter and desperate some of those needs are, their possessors well know. Sickness still preys upon the race; insanity and crime do not decrease; sex-morality is scarcely well-defined; education if more universal is less liberal; dire poverty dogs excessive wealth; and for even those who succeed, the pace of living is terribly fast. Compare the actual with the ideal, and you find disease widespread, society corrupt, and ignorance dense. It needed no European war to shock the smug optimism which had come to pervade our thought and speech; a little realization of the facts of human existence 4 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY would have sufficed. Come war, come peace, come bank- ruptcy or prosperity, German victory or defeat, the ills of the common lot are grave enough to preclude all compla- cency. As long as they sting and threaten humanity, how shall any intelligent man be contented or idle ? If he but raises his head to see it, then, a problem, a task, confronts every one that is born into the world; no less a task than the lifting, so far as he is able, of man's whole load. It is more clearly visible today than ever before which is perhaps the truest indication of our advance. In the old days, when caste and strife were the accepted rule, such a task had hardly emerged into the light; but in this era of altruism, failure to feel its call may fairly be con- sidered blameworthy. To the humanitarian spirit, when once aroused, every deed and every thought must find in such a goal its ultimate ground. How, declares that spirit, can anybody for a moment rest satisfied when he is not con- tributing, directly or indirectly, toward the diminution of the great sum-total of human suffering ? Vague and general as is this mighty task of amelioration, in imperativeness it has no equal. It is our first commandment, our initial problem; the natural calling of every man. It is the source from which springs every particular duty, from which must be defined and adjudged every special end or aim of each one of us. How should the individual set about so colossal a work ? First, of course, he must know what it comprises. What, then, are the needs of men ? Here one's zeal suffers a check ; for they are legion, and more than legion. Food, clothes, money, health, repute, law and order, education, sight and sound of beauty, religion how many more ? And each of these covers a thousand different wants. No one has the power to embrace all of these ends. Is there not some way THE GREAT PROBLEM 5 of ordering them, that we may see and make the highest or most inclusive choice possible ? For we must approximate the whole task if we can. Most men, to be sure, will select but one of the list, according to personal preference, native endowment, or even chance and this is good; but it is better, if one can do so, to base the choice on the relative importance or comprehensiveness of the various needs. Let us then ask if there is not some supreme choice, some one deepest need; perhaps one whose fulfilment will help to fulfil the rest. Many would agree that there is, but they differ as to its identity. In fact, each reformer has his panacea. In our age, " social reform " is probably the most insistent cry; though it is not easy to be certain amid so many voices. " Christian Science " is a call which to a growing circle names the one thing needful; and it is more influential among us than its despisers like to admit. A few decades ago, natural science was hailed as the sure path of progress; to a large minority, it is so yet. To a goodly number, the cure of all ills is still, as it was in earlier centuries, the Christian Church. And so on, from the single tax to Hindu mysticism. At different times the panaceas are different; they vary also according to the temper of the race. The founder of Christianity said " Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you "; yes, all will agree to this, but each interprets " the kingdom " by his own formula. Now it is clear that most of these cure-alls have a re- stricted efficacy. If the social order were perfected, bodily health would not be ensured; for medical science depends upon medical research. Nor would scientific progress be guaranteed, nor toleration of new ideas, or of old ones. Or would socialism foster the religious sense ? True, these 6 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY things are not by social adjustment hindered ; they are even encouraged, since the energy men now spend in wresting a living from others would be set free. But that only means that a perfected social order is a very desirable, even a neces- sary, end. The same is true of bodily health. If we never needed the doctors, we should be well off indeed ; as well off, perhaps, as if we never needed the lawyers or the police. Nevertheless bodily health will scarcely be regarded as that single end which, being attained, entails the remainder. May we not even say the like of religion ? For religion at least, as the term is usually interpreted is disconnected with bodily welfare and the conduct of the State. Herein, no doubt, the " Christian Scientists " are a partial excep- tion. They claim to confer bodily health, mental vigour, even financial success. Nevertheless, they offer no industrial program, nor do they stimulate research in natural science, or artistic production. There is, in fact, a degree of hostility between the " Christian " and the " natural " species of scientist. It might of course be that in the end the religious would satisfy the scientific need; but it would demand so much reinterpretation, it would have to be so utterly trans- formed from what it is now conceived to be, that the path of progress cannot be said to lie in adopting it as our supreme goal. And this is true likewise of natural science, of social reform, or any other movement of our time. They display a mutual exclusion, an inadequacy before one another's prob- lems. Natural science does little or nothing to gratify the religious needs or the aesthetic sense ; it is rather unfavour- able to them. Right as it has shown itself in so many ways, there is no surety that its methods are adapted to the re- ligious quest ; and it is well known that in its presence the artistic faculties tend to wither and droop. And who would allege that art or religion can take the place of scientific THE GREAT PROBLEM 7 investigation? So we might continue, finding none of the familiar ends sufficiently comprehensive to render it the one superlative choice. Shall we then give up the attempt to systematize these needs of man, and let each individual choose his task, specialize in it, exclude the rest ? Surely division of labour is profitable. And, as we have already said, this is what the majority of men do. One selects his vocation if a physi- cian, perhaps, by temperament, if a banker, by opportunity, if an undertaker, doubtless by compulsion and for the average man, hampered by the need of a living, this is effec- tive service of the community. At any rate, it is all that he can do. But there is, for those who can afford to pursue it, another way, and in itself a better way. One may forget one's inclination, draw off temporarily from the turmoil of interests, and study those needs of humanity, analyzing them, reclassifying, seeking earnestly for some more inclu- sive project hidden in them, which will by its completeness proclaim itself man's highest choice. The instinct for a panacea will hardly be suppressed; and after all, that in- stinct is but one's sense of obligation to perform the whole of his appointed task. For it is the utmost possible degree of advantage to humanity which the initial problem puts before us as a goal. It would be a grievous folly to fail of this for lack of trying. A little scrutiny will show, we believe, that this con- glomerate of ends which makes up man's original task, can be reduced to a fairly definite enterprise. All the things needed of men may be grouped under two heads, viz., goods of contemplation and goods of practical well-being. The goods of contemplation are those which give us the joys of knowledge, of the sight of beauty, or other aesthetic experience ; those of practical well-being take the 8 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY form of health, wealth, clothing, reputation, social order, etc. The distinction between these two is a familiar one; it is like that between pure and applied science. To be sure, we cannot here draw a sharp line; each involves, perhaps, something of the other. The practical statesman should not be ignorant of political history and theory ; nor the architect of mechanics and geometry. The two kinds of good may not be separate, but they are distinct. Either may be pur- sued as a predominant aim, in comparative independence of the other. The physicist does not usually build engines, nor the merchant prince indulge in economic theory. Such is the great line of cleavage, running through all our human needs. What then is the relation of the two kinds ? Clearly there is no intrinsic opposition. The value of each would be en- riched by the addition of the other. It is to the scientist good for its own sake to know the properties of electricity; but the utility of that knowledge in no way diminishes, but rather enhances, the measure of its worth. The organization of a municipality is a large practical achievement; but it loses nothing of excellence if it is found to display artistic merit. No intolerance is demanded by the pursuit of either kind of good. However much of exclusive concentration the one may for a time demand of the pursuer, their duality is not in the end a hostility. Each calls for supplementation, so far as possible, by the other. And the very breadth of the initial problem constrains us to this supplementation. May we not, indeed, go further ? Is it not the case that one of these aims tends of itself to provide for the other ? Let us compare the parts they play in the life of man. Knowledge and practical welfare, supplementary though they are, are not quite on the same level. They are not coordinate; in the technical language of logic, their relation THE GREAT PROBLEM 9 is an asymmetrical one. In the order of time, practice comes first; and this is true both of the race and of the individual. The new-born human being acts instinctively, thinking and planning but little or not at all. And in history science did not appear, as a noticeable or predominant ami for its own sake, until after a period of successful struggle for material goods. To be sure, there was always with the adult per- haps even with the new-born some thought, some trace of a contemplative attitude, and with every thought there is, if you wish, some action; but the difference of emphasis in the different periods is too marked to be neglected. When- ever, indeed, we shall speak of knowledge or of practice, we must be understood to mean not either utterly without the other, but a condition of life in which one or the other largely predominates. Now as, in time, practice in the main pre- cedes contemplation, so in order of value the latter must be assigned the priority. Does this statement provoke a denial, on the ground that two so disparate values cannot well be compared ? Or again, because both being necessary to life, neither is more valuable than the other ? Let us then remember that when a man chooses one out of several call- ings, he compares, and compares intelligently, the most dis- similar values. Perhaps there are no two ideals, of however divergent character, that have not been at some time and by some one, intelligently compared. Nor do we cus- tomarily refuse to consider two equally necessary functions as of unequal value. The brain is generally regarded as having more value than the liver, though both are necessary to life. But even if such comparisons were not permissible, we do, nevertheless, find, in the case of knowledge and prac- tical well-being, a rational manner of adjudging their claims, in the fact that we can compare the results to which they lead. The great apparent progress that man has made, has 10 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY been accomplished largely by the application of science; and the theoretical side here came first. When it is a ques- tion of progress, a high degree of satisfaction of the needs of thought is prerequisite; practical comfort, beyond a certain elementary amount, is no conditio sine qua non. The grati- fication of intellectual wants does not suffice of itself to ameliorate the lot of man, beyond a certain degree; but it achieves something toward that end, and it makes possible a practical application which is its fitting crown. On the other hand, practical well-being by itself degenerates into animal content or stupidity. It is not that its measure of satisfaction is less than that which comes from pure intel- lectual cultivation. Many would say so, but we need not insist upon the point. It is rather that it contains in itself no stimulus to advance. To know, is to see the desirability of practice as well as theory ; to be well-off is not necessarily to see anything beyond the immediate satisfactions. Knowl- edge thus has a twofold value as against practice's onefold. It provides for, and urges to, if it does not ensure, another value besides its own. We should then conclude that if we are forced to choose between a life devoted to knowledge and one devoted to more directly practical pursuits, the former is, other things being equal, the better choice. How- ever incomplete in view of the whole human problem it may be, it gives a greater prospect for the future. It comes nearer to being that best, all-inclusive purpose of securing both the classes of good. Of the two needs into which the general human problem is divided, it is the higher; for it tends to include both. And no doubt each of us must make a choice. Limitation of time and energy, even in the most favourable cases, pre- vents our assuming the whole task. Now some can choose with relative freedom, and on objective grounds, while THE GREAT PROBLEM 1 1 others cannot choose freely. The majority of men are so constrained by lack of opportunity in more than one or two directions, by the immediate necessity of earning a liveli- hood, or by strong temperamental bent, that they are unable to take the objective attitude. But some, by grace of for- tune, can do so; and upon these the choice of the larger problem, the advance of knowledge, seems incumbent. It is of course obvious that such a choice cannot be quite exclu- sive; the purest of mathematicians must to some degree attend to his practical affairs. Nevertheless, one may make the cognitive end predominate over the practical to an extraordinary degree, without serious damage; and on the whole, when this is possible, it seems the nearest duty. The absolute need, the general human problem, at first a vague conglomerate, has thus developed into the need of knowl- edge, both for its own sake and for the sake of utility; and this completes the first step in the development whereby the initial problem is reduced to precision. But another step is necessary. " Knowledge " and " prac- tical welfare " are ambiguous terms; each of them is of two kinds. Of practical welfare, we may distinguish the more immediate and the more remote. Such are, for instance, the well-being of the so-called " practical " man who is satisfied to obtain the material and social comforts of life for himself and his family, and that of the statesman who plans a future which he and his may scarcely live to enjoy. No doubt a union of these is the ideal. But here, as above, human limitations impose a choice; for every one who seeks prac- tical welfare in preference to knowledge, the one or the other of these must be the predominant aim. And if one must choose, then the more remote ends are, on the whole, the more desirable ones. For the contrast is roughly that between far-sightedness and the lack of it. The greater 12 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY practical benefactors of humanity, the moral and religious leaders who have held the passions of men in check, have in their wisdom preferred the future good to the present advantage. The relation between these two kinds of well- being is then an asymmetrical one, analogous to that be- tween knowledge and practice. While each condition is admirable, and, if circumstances did but permit, even man- datory, they are not equally weighted motives; the more remote inclines the scale. But here, as in the preceding choice, no complete exclusion is possible ; it is a matter of predominance. This serves to introduce to us a similar partition within the sphere of knowledge. The field of intellectual pursuits comprises two divisions, one of which contains the special branches which study particular parts or aspects of the world, while the other includes that discipline which would group those branches together, correlate them, in order to know if there be a plan of the universe as a whole. The former division is that of the sciences, viz., biology, physics, psychology, economics, etc.; the latter can have no other name but philosophy. The former furnishes the more easily accessible knowledge, the latter the larger, less easily verifiable information. The former is more capable of being put at once to advantageous use, the latter can be applied on the practical side perhaps only to aims of the longest range and the widest bearings. And if mankind were not sophisticated today by a sense of the difficulty of the latter problem, the errors and often the intolerance of its past dev- otees, it would not hesitate to acknowledge that the problem of philosophy is the higher in value. The very nature of the problem dictates this conclusion. If the universe were built upon some well-defined scheme, if there were principles which, under suitable cooperation, we could count upon to THE GREAT PROBLEM 13 retrieve us from our too frequent discomfiture then it would be of supreme utility to know that scheme and those principles. Or, if there be no such planful structure and behaviour, it is as desirable to know that fact ; for then we may with the better right adopt the easier task of satisfying our immediate wants. But it is not alone in respect to prac- tical application that philosophical knowledge seems higher than scientific. From the merely intellectual point of view, also, it assumes the greater value. It represents the con- summation of a progress in which each science is a stage. It answers an instinctive question which no extent of knowl- edge in this or that particular science, or in all together, is adequate to answer; which no amount of "positivism," dogmatism, or skepticism can long stifle. Man is so made that he gets the greater intellectual satisfaction from the broader view, as one loves to ascend a tower in order to command a wider horizon. Of the two needs, then, into which the cognitive need divides, the philosophic is the more inclusive and the higher. Now, once more, a choice must be made. Though neither interest need be excluded, one must predominate. From what has been said it follows that in view of the great hu- man problem, philosophical rather than scientific knowledge must be the chosen end. Its pursuit approximates more nearly to that problem. As the far-reaching practical aims are higher than the immediate, so is philosophy, to the con- templative side of man, more satisfactory than science. But it is also higher than the farthest-reaching practical aims. Philosophy, if successful in its endeavour, is knowl- edge, and knowledge, unlike practice, ministers to more than its own instinct. It naturally succors the aims of practical well-being. Were this not the case, philosophy might in- deed be preferred to the pursuit of such welfare, but it would 14 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY not be objectively a higher aim. It is the self-transcending quality of knowledge and contemplation, their greater in- clusiveness, to which the superlative worth of philosophy is due. And with this we have completed the second, and for our present purpose final, step in the development of the initial problem. There is then one, and only one, of all our human wants, whose satisfaction goes far toward satisfying the rest ; that is, the need of a knowledge of the character, on broadest lines, of our universe. Such a knowledge, gratifying most fully the contemplative instinct, tends also to promote the deeper sort of gratification of the other great instinct, that for practical welfare. This end is the most inclusive single end we know. It is, in fact, but the original problem, the great human problem from which we started; but it is that problem made more precise and accessible to human effort. Or better, it is the closest approximation thereto which any one who must make a choice can adopt. And consequently its place among human problems and needs is very high, even the highest. It is no subjective whim, but an imperious and universal requirement where such a choice is practically possible. As we have already said, if men were not sophisticated, they would quickly admit our contention. But they are so, in regard to their own most vital interests; indeed, the mul- titude have always been so. There is, we believe, a slow improvement in this regard, but philistinism is still wide- spread. And there are certain reasons for aversion to the supreme problem which we must consider frankly; for, though unsound, they have an appearance of justice. But before meeting those reasons, it is indispensable that we appreciate the naturalness, the inevitableness, of the philosophic problem. THE GREAT PROBLEM 15 Suppose a ship foundered, and the crew struggling to keep afloat; some go down, some find a bit of plank to cling to, some keep up by swimming, some perhaps ground on a shoal, etc. Is it not the plain duty of those who obtain a respite to look about, to essay some chart, to discover, if possible, a shore ? Of course this obligation does not lie upon those who must struggle or perish at once. But upon such as have the chance to investigate, it is binding. Now this case is not unlike the life of man, with his struggle for existence and his ills that flesh is heir to. And more- over, he is endowed with a natural curiosity for this same survey. There is no doubt that if we could, with only a moderate amount of trouble, ascertain the plan of the uni- verse, such knowledge would be sought and prized before all other possessions. Those who teach philosophy in our uni- versities can bear witness that the best of the young minds have this feeling. It is, indeed, difficult to comprehend how any thoughtful youth, as yet untaught by man's failures, can fail to hear the problem's call. It is harder yet to under- stand how some of our teachers can think to educate their pupils while ignoring it. Such an attitude is abnormal; it is a stupor, an apathy toward the concerns of the race. The animals seek only immediate goods, and the philistine, un- mindful of the human need, approximates the animal. He is not quite human. Yet what is the state of affairs among us ? We are not astonished, when a scientific man, a preacher, a social reformer, boasts of abjuring metaphysics, philosophy, theology, or any of these higher and more in- clusive disciplines; we do not rebuke him. How dull, then, has become our sense of humanity's needs ! It should be a matter of the deepest shame. That we are not amazed when educated men betray a lack of philosophic interest reveals a fundamental pessimism ; else why should we expect so little of our nature ? 1 6 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY But it is not merely sluggishness that ails us. It is also fear: not physical, but social fear. We are afraid of being thought eccentric, of differing from the mass of our fellows. Two causes work together here : first, the present age insists upon visible and tangible results, and second, our social sense has of late grown to immense proportions. Indeed, if there is one truth which may be called peculiarly modern, it is the truth that man is a socius. Hence we are probably more afraid today than ever before of disagreeing with the common valuations, of standing apart for the pursuit of goods which, however fundamental, appear remote. Leader- ship, independence these are not the virtues of de- mocracy. In an age when the novelist, the poet, the painter, the political orator, apostrophize the tastes and needs of the average man, the beauty of the commonplace, it seems pre- tentious to point out a higher way. " Philosophy," too, is a rather pompous name; " metaphysics " suggests the aloof and abstruse. Even the professors of these studies do not feel quite comfortable when they utter the words. Never- theless, it is in this case cowardly to seek the easy level ; and the one who, fearing loneliness, prefers the more generally respected human tasks, is not free from a certain priggish- ness. For every age has its pet hypocrisies, and our own is perhaps the self -righteousness of the crowd. To the sober-minded or the independent ones there is a graver hindrance. They know of the failures of philosophy. It has fallen far short of solving its problem and that, too, after centuries of labour. Not torpor, but discourage- ment, is their worm. The mistakes, the shiftings, the dis- agreements, have taken the heart out of them. They are brave enough to stand apart from the multitude in their search for the highest good if only they could see some likelihood of attainment! But history seems almost to THE GREAT PROBLEM 17 show that the task is beyond human powers. And men, they go on to persuade themselves, were not meant to obtain knowledge of the total scheme as yet: they must toil on, building up bit by bit the sure fabric of science. The whole is known only by the parts; induction is the one safe method. Now this pronouncement, to the already wavering mind, is crushing. It has just truth enough to sound like the wisdom of maturity overcoming youth's misdirected zeal. The inductive process, mounting step by step, is usually safe and sane; but, as scientists ought to know, it is not the only method of knowledge. If the whole could not be known before all the parts were examined, there would be no science at all; we have not verified our chemistry for every drop of water or every particle of carbon. We need to have, cer- tainly, a deal of empirical knowledge before we can phi- losophize; but no rule of induction forbids prudent gen- eralization. It is not inherently irrational to know the scheme as a whole before all the parts are known. It is sometimes better to jump across a ditch than to crawl pa- tiently through it on hands and knees. No, it is by no means illogical that we should have a fair acquaintance with the whole. The real force of the argument lies in the historical evidence ; it is the disagreements that pierce the soul of the aspirant. And no doubt the wound is a serious one. Yet, sincere as are the motives of those men who suffer it, the fault lies in their own lukewarmness. There is possible an aspiration so intense that nothing but absolute demon- stration can destroy it and the very disagreements of thinking men about such a demonstration prove that it has not been given. In view of the great human need of prac- tical salvation, discouragement then become a weakness of the will. But men continue to arise who are not affected by it; and in no diminishing number even today. Yet it must 1 8 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY be admitted that, though the philosophic instinct must not, nay, cannot, wholly be stifled, there is something intolerable in the perpetual search which never finds. Somehow the situation must be righted. And in the sequel we shall set ourselves to that undertaking. These being to adopt a Catholic term the motives of our faith, we proceed to state more specifically the nature of that investigation which we feel driven to perform. What we aim to discover is something of the plan of the whole uni- verse some survey, some understanding of its structure and laws which, desirable as it would be for its own sake, would possess the additional value of enabling us to adjust ourselves most successfully to our great environment. Men have always had this dream: they have conceived answers also. Some have said that the universe is the work of a per- sonal God to make our peace with whom is to ensure ultimate salvation, to know whose ways and purposes is the highest intellectual enjoyment and artistic ecstasy. Others, repudiating this hopeful creed, insist that we are creatures of the dust, having but one life to live. Between these two extremes are found all varieties of conception. Which of these is the true view, or failing certainty, the most probable view ? Such is the general nature of our question. And what of the method ? What facts have we to build upon ? Religion, literature, the sciences these are at hand. In an undertaking of this magnitude we need them all; we must profit by all the failures and successes of the past which are open to us. We must expect then to pay regard to what the sciences have to say, to the affirmations of re- ligion, the insights of the poet, and to the practical expe- rience of men. In view however of certain current prejudices, we must issue some warnings. THE GREAT PROBLEM 19 We cannot begin, as some philosophers have counselled, by an unquestioning adhesion to natural science, and natural science alone. It may be that scientific method has done more for humanity than any other instrument. And cer- tainly it would be foolish to neglect facts which science has brought to light. But exclusive devotion to this one human discipline, as Spinoza, Comte, Spencer, Avenarius, and in our own day Mr. Russell, have demanded, savours too much of a priori dogmatism. The very differences in the results proffered by these thinkers should make us suspicious. And in any case, natural science has not won its credentials in the more interesting fields of inquiry, such as the study of the human mind and the objects of religion. There it gives little that can be called the consensus of experts; many physicists and biologists believe that psychology is but a physiology of the nervous system, and that religion is super- stition, while other scientists deny both of these views. Psychologists differ also as to their own results and methods. Moreover, the teachings of physical science vary consider- ably from age to age. The theory of light is a capital instance; the Newtonian mechanics is by some now con- sidered inadequate, and the new theory of " relativity " seems almost to contradict it. There is reason to expect that the science of 2500 A.D. will regard our own knowledge as we regard the mediaeval beliefs. On the other hand, the great works of art retain their value undiminished. We do not outgrow Homer, Dante, Goethe. And in spite of an intellectual minority, it is doubtful if religious belief is wavering or decreasing. One cannot, at the beginning of the investigation, deny that these branches employ a dis- tinct organon of truth incommensurable with that employed in natural science, yet in its own way quite as valid. It would be stupid to disdain a helping hand simply because 20 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY that hand is not manicured by the latest methods. The religious experience, with its persuasion of immediate con- tact with the Deity, is as genuinely an experience as is the laboratory experiment; and possibly it is attested by as many independent witnesses. Yet such an experience can of course be blindly accepted no more than any other. Every sort of testimony must be granted a respectful hear- ing, but none must be allowed to elbow out the others. In fact the very nature of our problem compels this tolerance ; for we have seen that it is the search for a broader view than any other human discipline directly affords. Philosophy, in the words of a contemporary writer, is " needed in order to enforce breadth of outlook and catholicity of judgment. It stands for the general human values as against excessive pretensions, whether in science, in religion, or in practical life, for the past and future as against the present, for com- prehensiveness and leisure as against narrowness and haste." (Norman Kemp-Smith, Journal of Philosophy, 1912, p. 703.) The sentence just quoted suggests a second caution. The philosopher must, at the beginning of his inquiry, refrain from exercising certain virtues which appeal most to a vigorous age and race. He cannot, like the scientist or the saint, show forth at the outset his independence. He can- not start with a message of his own ; his aggressiveness must be postponed. His attitude toward science, art, religion, and practical experience must at first be a passive one. His is not a rival study among other studies, in which one may early begin to specialize, ignoring the rest and outshining them. As his problem includes the problems of the other fields, so to a great extent his results depend upon their re- sults. It is the largest problem just because it waits upon these others; " metaphysics " is rightly named. Like the THE GREAT PROBLEM 21 human infant, it is by itself the most helpless of all. Its function does not appear until it has been led and taught of others. Only after it has received, correlated, compared, digested, the products of pious experience, of the laboratory experiment, of artistic intuition, of practical common sense, only then does its turn come, to teach a lesson which no other study can convey. A philosophical system which has not built itself upon such facts as the conservation of energy, wave-motion, the propagation of life, the mystic's intuition of God, the laws of musical form, would be no adequate system. As well might a babe try to administer a state. To be sure, such a summation of knowledge can hardly at the present time be perfected ; but this is not fatal. We trust much of our present perception; our present science, our present practical good sense imperfect as all these are ; and on the whole succeed in living thereby. Even so our philosophy, though never finished, might yield a very great measure of satisfaction and usefulness. The map of the world was always of some value to men, though it grew more accurate as men explored further. But that map depends on the reports brought in by individual travellers, and phi- losophy is the map-maker who, himself no great traveller, sits at home plotting quietly with rule and compass. Or perhaps a biological metaphor better describes the situation, and we may refer to Menenius Agrippa's fable of the Belly and the Members. When the members rebelled at the in- action of the belly, which passively received the food they by their labour secured for it, the organism went wrong: then only appeared the indispensableness of that recipient function in digesting the food and giving them their power to work. Even so it is with philosophy: its function is to direct, by digesting the knowledge brought to it, the en- ergies of men in their effort to cope with the demands of the environment. 22 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY If the scientists, the reformers, the pious souls, appear to do the work while philosophy lazily absorbs their product, let us then remember that good digestion is the surest pledge of health. It is of course difficult to keep one's faith in a method which moves slowly and gives general rather than detailed profits. The life which is ultimately the most suc- cessful is not necessarily at a given moment the most pros- perous. But while philosophy is not always of avail for the minor exigencies of conduct as a man need not be an ath- lete in order to brush his hair it does aim to offer, in the end, the largest utility in directing the whole current of our lives and of human destiny. And it is a task which we can- not in honour neglect. To that task we now turn. CHAPTER II THE PHILOSOPHIC DISEASE, AND RESTATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM THE inevitable and the supreme problem for us men is the philosophic problem. It is, to be sure, a vast and difficult one, recording many failures; but we have at our disposal the wealth of science, religion, art, and practical life, and there seems no reason against eventual solution. With good hope we may start on our quest. But the inno- cence and the promise of the start are soon lost, and our present business is to note the manner of the loss. At first the prospect is bright enough. For more than two thousand years, what may fairly be called the pick of human intellect has worked over this task. Religion indeed has been offering its fruits to man since prehistoric time, litera- ture almost as long, science less so, though with accelerating productiveness; for upwards of twenty centuries, at the least, men have garnered the treasures which religion, or science, or art, or practical sense, have revealed, and have laboured to piece them together into some sort of general scheme. The counsel we adopted in our first chapter is the one which has been adopted by some of the most illustrious men who have lived; Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibnitz, and many others famous and influential in their day, have toiled, to the utmost of their mighty en- ergies, in pursuit of the very end we have signalized. Hereby our purpose is given aid and comfort. All we have to do, then, is to peruse the result of their toil. The map of the 23 24 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY universe should be ready at hand. The professional phi- losophy of the present day, representing the outgrowth and consummation of the thought of ages, should provide the object we seek. To be sure, it is not entirely impossible that certain obsolete views may possess truths which the present age is temperamentally inclined to overlook. We should not assume that the only true view is the up-to-date view; such an attitude savours too much of the idols of the market- place. But on the whole the later results are likely to be the truer; so speaks the historical spirit. Our immediate topic, then, must be the study of the chief modern systems. Some disappointment, however, will be expected by the prudent. The problem is so enormous that a complete solu- tion can hardly have been accomplished as yet. Nor is it only the multitude of questions to be answered, that pro- tracts the solution; it is also the quality of the subject-mat- ter. That subject-matter is to the last degree evanescent. The natural sciences have their material, the sense-data of experiment, before the eye and hand ; but the order of the universe extends far beyond the scope of the tangible. God, mind, logical principles these are not for touch or sight. Mathematics, too, can by aid of visible symbols treat with cogent demonstration its own abstractions, whereas phi- losophy occupies itself with the concrete reality, to which symbolism is perhaps never quite adequate. Philosophic subject-matter is thus so comprehensive as to appear to lose the definiteness of the scientific data, and yet so concrete as to forego the advantages of abstract mathematical treat- ment. But, on the other hand, philosophy is not permitted to throw over wholly the methods of exact observation and reasoning in favor of unthinking faith, religious dogma, or artistic intuition; for these contemn the very impulse which gave birth to philosophy itself the craving to understand. PHILOSOPHIC DISEASE 25 Such are some of the intrinsic obstacles to the desired solu- tion: must we not perforce be content with a rather modest result ? " How should a complete chart of the universe descend into the twilight of an animal mind, served by quite special senses, swayed by profound passions, subject to the epidemic delusions of the race, and lost in the perhaps infinite world that bred it?" (Santayana, Journal of Phi- losophy, xii, p. 565). Nevertheless, persistent thought does gradually clear up any field however obscure, as eyes growing accustomed to the dark discern the outlines of objects. For there is some light for the mind's eye to profit by; the universe is before us, and we should be able to find out progressively more and more about it. There is no reason why the strongest minds, able to profit by the work of their predecessors, should not, however slowly, make some definite advance. And when we remember that since the days of Socrates, the coopera- tive method called discussion oral or written has been in vogue, with its prospect of mutual correction, some degree of confidence returns. There is no reason for losing heart, even in face of the heavy handicap by which at the outset we are penalized. Expecting not too much, then, but still expecting some- thing, we ask: what are the main results reached by the philosophers ? A superficial inspection reveals a goodly number of them, many displaying remarkable acumen, many dull and barbarously expressed, many profoundly interesting. But what is our amazement when, looking a bit deeper, we find that each system denies the fundamental principles of the rest ! And it must be confessed that a still more thorough examination does not remove this impres- sion. Let any professional philosopher be asked to name one doctrine that is by his compeers generally accepted. If 26 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY he is disingenuous enough to name one, it will be found that others name a different one. " Each contradicted the other fundamentally upon matters of universal concern " says a popular novelist of our time (H. G. Wells, Marriage, pp. 408-409) of two current thinkers; and the remark is of gen- eral application. The very fact that these statements of ours may be denied, bears them out. There is no stock of funded truth in philosophy. Unlike science, unlike practice, it has no consensus of experts. This is, if we stop to consider it, a most astonishing thing. And it is quite natural that it is not so well appreciated by philosophers as by laymen; for the onlooker best sees the game, and the metaphysical disputant is too much in earnest with his own system to perceive the humour and the sadness of the whole situation. If only he could forget his own inter- ests, and once get a realizing sense of this thoroughgoing dissension ! But such a state of affairs is not merely astound- ing; it is terrible. The naive hope of discovering the scheme of the world withers; skepticism enters, and we sink back through dismay to despair, and finally to that unconcern with ultimate things which characterizes the Philistine and approximates the mental state of the dog or the horse. Such is the defeat of the great thinkers. It is not simply that they have failed to keep in touch with our practical welfare; they have failed to satisfy the impulse to knowledge. The pur- pose which was in its inception highest and most promising of all, has proved in its fruits most worthless. Now the only course open to a sincere mind is to examine this situation in the utmost endeavour to find a way out. Can it be true that things are as bad as this ? Surely not, says our instinct of hope. That there is a quite unsettled strife is a patent enough fact; no documents are needed to prove it. But is its signifi- PHILOSOPHIC DISEASE 27 cance so ominous, after all ? Perhaps disagreement is not an unmixed evil, or perhaps it is one of those ills which, like bodily filth, we have always with us and should not mention or rather should resolutely explain away, hail as a glory, or what not. Or, again, perhaps it is a gradually diminishing evil. Let us examine these consoling suggestions. To be sure, philosophers do not agree, but is agreement to be desired at all hazards ? There have been many super- stitions, dogmas, popular errors, agreed to by all. In fact, agreement would be stagnation. In one sense of course this is true. Doubt stimulates discovery; disbelief leads to stronger proof, or to the abandonment of delusions. But though disagreement is often of value, even a sine qua non, it does not follow that there should be no agreement at all. Such a claim would repeat the old fallacy that because pur- suit of truth is good, no particular truths ought ever to be found. As well urge that because exercise is good, one should never rest. The field of fact is indefinitely large, and no matter how much is certainly known, there is no motive for idleness. Room enough remains for further discoveries. But that nothing of the deeper matters should be known, that there should be only disagreement, is clearly an evil. Philosophy then becomes even as James' man who runs to leap the ditch, and reaching the edge, forever stops and returns for a fresh run. Still, it may be answered, other fields beside philosophy have their quota of dissension, while yet held worthy of our respect. What of the perennial strife of religious sects, or of political parties in any one nation ? Is there, in fact, any one form of government that is universally agreed, by men of experience and cultivation, to be the best ? Is there any one fairly definite system of morals generally accepted ? Is there any one religion that commands the assent of mankind 28 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY as a whole ? And men have been working over religion and government as long as over philosophy even longer. Yet the failure to come to a final decision is not taken as ground for despair, for giving up religion or government, or as evidence of any peculiar weakness. On the one hand, however, the case is quite different from that in philosophy. In any given nation or community there is a fairly workable system of government or morals adopted as at least the one best suited for that community. Indeed, there must be a certain amount of agreement else anarchy follows. Moreover, in what are considered the more advanced nations or if you like, the larger, more powerful nations certain broad principles have gradually emerged: viz., government by representation of the people, suffrage, mutual protection, and all the common morality of " live and let live." Although savages' morality and gov- ernment differ profoundly from such a resultant, the latter may fairly be considered the view of the expert, the former of the inexpert judgment. It is only when men approach the question of the ultimate ideal government, the ultimate morality, etc., that irreconcilable opposition seems to break out. In religion, to be sure, it is always present. But this is just because of the semi-philosophic character of religion. In short, it is when, and only when, the deepest problems, the philosophical problems, begin to appear, that strife is regnant. No: the ills of philosophy are unique, and greater than we have a right to expect. But are they as it were a grave disease, or only in the na- ture of a temporary weakness ? Recall the difficulty of the problem. How elusive did we find its subject-matter to be! On this quicksilver the mind cannot lay its finger; balked of direct touch, the reason faints and is weary; emotion steps in, bidding us choose a theory that we like. Perhaps only a PHILOSOPHIC DISEASE 29 philosopher has the opportunity to appreciate the extent to which this is the case. It is not so much that each thinker loves his system because it is his own. Something of this vainglory lies in all of us, of course; but one who would choose such a profession is not likely to be swayed much by vainglory. No, it is the very seriousness of the problem that weights the emotional factor. Such and such a doctrine, one feels, imperils humanity's deepest needs, its dearest convic- tions: no parley with it! The religious inquisitor, the Puri- tan witch-hanger, are not without their analogues in the milder realm of philosophic strife. Caricature of an oppo- nent's view for purposes of ridicule is one of the commoner methods; justified indeed to the ridiculer's conscience by the gravity of the issue. But this, it will be admitted, is only our present human weakness, and is nothing to cause a deep discouragement. On the whole the illegitimate in- fluence of emotion is probably decreasing, and the earnest efforts that are now being made to define our terms clearly, to promote mutual understanding and impartiality, augur well for the future. And if these subjective hindrances were not enough to account for the dissensions, there remains the objective one of the infinity of the problem itself. How can we be certain of anything until we are certain of the Whole Plan ? Something new might come up to modify our con- clusions. And while yet the Whole is not known, different thinkers will emphasize different aspects or parts and hence difference of opinion must arise ; though it may cease to be disagreement when men recognize that truth is many-sided. Now we must admit that all these sources of dissension are only too obviously potent. It is also probably true that the subjective ones have diminished since the time of Hindu and Greek philosophy. As thought develops from age to 30 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY age there is less personal animus, there is clearer definition of terms, and more exact reasoning. But these very arguments defeat their own purpose. If the causes they allege were the main causes of strife, then on the whole, strife would have diminished. For there seems no reasonable doubt that thinkers have progressed in clarity. Yet we have today not a whit more precipitate of truth, not a jot more agreement among the savants, than in the earlier days. They are not even agreed that truth is many-sided, and is therefore toler- ant of different views. Some say this (the absolute idealists) , but they are now being attacked on every hand. The strife has not diminished ; it has if anything increased. Formerly, materialism fought with spiritualism; today realism, ideal- ism, pragmatism, intuitionism, wrestle with one another. Every new view is a new combatant. It is true that one school may prevail in numbers for a time. Idealism was the fashionable philosophy some few years ago; driven from its German home it grew mighty in England and America. At the present, however, realism is gaining more adherents; whether it or pragmatism will command a majority, who knows ? Such temporary majorities have often arisen ; but refutation soon followed. On the whole, the most dominant of all has probably been Thomism both in numbers and length of time for it is still hale and hearty. But Prot- estant philosophers, with a few exceptions, consider it quite outworn; in fact, they hardly know it at first hand, as a glance at the curricula of our universities will show. As far as any tendency toward agreement goes, we find only agreement within a school, not between the schools. Nor is the infinite magnitude of the problem sufficient to account for the lack of unanimity. Progress may be made along an infinite line; the equation of such a line may be found; the infinite is not as such inaccessible to knowledge. PHILOSOPHIC DISEASE 31 The problem of each science is infinite, yet its solution is progressively approximated. Just those philosophers, too, who say that any partial account of the universe is erroneous, claim that we can know much of the character of the Whole viz., it is " experience," it is an " individual," " co- herent," etc. In truth, no philosopher does believe that agreement is impossible or undesirable; for he tries most strenuously to get others to agree with his own system. The only one who foregoes unison is the skeptic, and he has given up the problem. If, in short, the strife were due only to the weakness of the human mind before its great problem, some result would almost certainly have taken shape after the labours of more than two thousand years. The theories would not all have neutralized one another. The trouble seems, indeed, to be a very grave one; we cannot invoke our inadequacy, but are pointed to some mysterious influence which corrupts our thought. Yet we should not accept so dark a view until we have tried every conceivable avenue of escape. One more such has been pointed out: may not philosophy be properly a matter of will or temperament ? In a measure perhaps the universe is subjective, each man's world being what he by his personal reaction makes it. Should we not therefore ex- pect disagreement ? This opinion is found in many quarters and under many disguises, from certain of the mind- cure to the humanistic and Fichtean schools ; though prob- ably no one has ever held it pure. It is too patent a fact that we must to some degree take account of external conditions, even though the degree be vanishing. But no doubt there is, psychologically, a great deal of truth in this view. We do believe at the dictate of our temperament; we do "believe upon instinct, and find reasons afterward " (F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, Preface, p. ii); we do interpret the 32 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY universe after the pattern of what we devoutly wish. The coldest reasoner, the bitterest enemy of emotion, is as much the slave of temperament as the religious fanatic; he is driven by a concentrated passion for truthfulness. We need not be troubled to deny the psychological correctness of the temperament-theory. For that matter, we believe, with Professor Dewey, that when philosophers admit it, the dawn of a new era will be upon them. But all that does not spell consolation to us. For, among our many ultimate cravings, is one for consistency; and that craving will not permit us to say, " the world is x " with one man, and " the world is not x " with another. Temperamental interpretations of fact cannot claim to be truth while they deny one another. Or let us even suppose this objection overcome ; the fact remains that other philosophers deny the temperament- view. It is only one among others, denying them and denied by them. To resort to it is but to perpetuate the conflict. But is it not just the very best way of settlement, to enter the lists and fight for one view ? Why not say that one out of all these conflicting systems is right or nearly so and the others wrong ? This, as history shows, is the sever- est temptation of the thinker. It appeals to the vigorous mind, to ideals derived from long tradition, to the motive of battle and domination. But let those who adopt this posi- tion and they are the majority pause to reflect on its import. Is it not almost the same as saying that the greater number of philosophers are relatively lacking in intelli- gence ? There appears no reason except that they do not agree with the protagonists in question why any one school of philosophers should be considered duller than the others. It is very unlikely that the stupidities which the refuters wrest from their opponents' views are really com- mitted by such intelligent men. It is far more probable that PHILOSOPHIC DISEASE 33 the ref uters do not fully understand the views they attack. And when we observe that the refutees in turn adopt the same methods, there seems less reason for preference than ever. There is of course no question but that the difficulty of philosophic thinking is responsible for a great deal of mis- understanding; what is improbable is that the misunder- standings should lie so exclusively on one side rather than another. If all schools of thought but one are fundamentally in error as nearly everybody thinks in every age would it not be a miracle that one should escape the common lot ? But the most convincing evidence that it is not so is that today, when philosophic interest is livelier than ever before, when discussion is if not keener, at least more widespread than in any preceding age, the refutations are but increased, and the fundamental differences emphasized. Indeed, we ourselves believe that philosophical inquiries are more thorough nowadays than they have ever been; but that only means that each philosopher cuts under the others with a sharper sword. The chances of error should be at a mini- mum, but the mutual refutations are not at a minimum; rather a maximum. May we trump up a last desperate excuse out of the rela- tion of philosophy to science ? It has been alleged (James, Some Problems in Philosophy, ch. I) that philosophy is but a name for the unsolved problems of science. Psychology, for instance, used to be thought a part of philosophy, but when it learned to verify its theories by experiment it broke away and became a science. Physics and chemistry had already found their own methods and done so; earlier still, mathe- matics. With Aristotle, all these were still undeveloped, still branches of the philosophic tree ; and where tradition is strong the titles " mental " and " natural " philosophy are even retained today. If philosophy is the residue of unveri- 34 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY fied theories, how could it give established doctrines ? But the reply is obvious, from what we said in Chapter I. Phi- losophy is not simply inchoate science. It contains prob- lems which do not seem open to scientific treatment. The relation between science and faith, the estimation of artis- tic judgment, of the validity of reasoning and immediate experience these are problems of a different sort. They make up that very core of philosophy, metaphysics. And these are some of those which, worked over quite as long and faithfully as the scientific questions, have not as yet shown the slightest sign of fixed solution. Philosophy has in fact ever exhibited a distinction in kind from those disciplines which once in ignorance took shelter under its wings. And it is in philosophy alone that we find the undiminishing controversy. Not that philosophy has failed to make a certain kind of progress. Since the days of the early Hindu or the Greek systems, it has learned much. Old errors have been dis- lodged, typical views have been better articulated. Even the beginner in philosophy avoids certain mistakes made by Plato and Aristotle. Many of the older doctrines have been revived and more consistently defended so also have the opposing doctrines. New views, too, have appeared at fre- quent intervals refuting and being refuted. The con- stituents of the great equation are more numerous and better factored. But withal they cancel out. In fine, what is the situation ? After a history of almost unexampled length, philosophy has less of positive informa- tion and more of controversy to show, than any other human discipline. Soaring to the greatest heights, it falls below the level of common knowledge ; philosophers are not even sure that there is an external world. Religious quarrels, in tenser though they may be, are not so manifold or so mutually PHILOSOPHIC DISEASE 35 undermining. No philosophic schools present as broad fronts of unanimity as the several Christian churches, as the Buddhist sects, or the Mohammedans. The lack of results is, no doubt, partly due to the vastness of the problem, partly to variety of human temperament, to careless think- ing, to lack of scientific method, to the intangibility of the material. But none of these, nor all together, suffice to account for the extraordinary, indeed the complete, dearth of established opinion. We do not see how to avoid the con- clusion that some specific virus is at work, some poison which prevents philosophy from assimilating its food. Badly off indeed we are: man's best endeavour to solve the chief problem of his life has been frustrated. But that problem presses irresistibly upon those who have felt its call. We are constrained to seek out the thought- poison, and finding, to remove it. It would be useless to begin as many have tried by wiping the slate clean and setting forth some new system. Perhaps that course would be pleasanter; but unless it revealed some principle by which the mutual opposition is forestalled it would profit us little. It is no help to the sick man to eat more food if he cannot digest what he has. We must for the present defer the luxury of a positive investigation of reality itself. There is nothing for it but to examine the chief systems, with a view to diagnosing the nature of the disease that infects them all. This is no novel plan. Philosophers in the past have felt the disgrace of endless discord and have again and again essayed reforms. Thus did Protagoras, Socrates, Occam, Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Kant, and many more. Might not a cynic even say that philosophy is naught but a series of New Year's resolutions ? Certainly there are few systems which are not intended by their authors to be a reform of all 36 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY that has gone before; the one medicine that will cure the bedridden patient. And for a time convalescence seemed on the way; then occurred the relapse. What in each reform renders it the prey of the same malady ? We are to examine, then, the principal systems of phi- losophy. Now these are not haphazard or whimsical, but fall into rather definite types. The types appear quite diver- gent; they recur often, in a dress adapted to the time and place of their appearance. Minor differences, answers to some particular puzzle of life or thought, are found to depend on the acceptance of one or another of such major divaga- tions. It is the types, accordingly, which we must analyze; paying especial attention to their mutual refutations. And at this juncture a tiny ray of hope enters. Unsub- stantial as the rainbow it may be, but it has its value as a cheering suggestion. If these typical systems recur so often, does it not seem as if they were probably in the main true ? If they are so, then the success of our undertaking would mean a double service. In removing the virus from the sys- tems, we should at the same time be restoring them to the ranks of truth. The medicine we inject into the poisoned system would be a positive, life-giving principle. With one stroke the stock of funded truth would be enormously en- larged, as certain gases at their freezing point are by a slight knock instantly liquified.* And best of all, the principle if there be one which removes the mutual contradiction of the systems, would itself probably be an important char- acter of reality. How otherwise could we make use of it ? As the failure of the past to discover that principle would have been the cause of philosophy's troubles, so the dis- covery of the principle itself would be a contribution of supreme value as positive knowledge. By virtue of its func- * Schopenhauer, I think, somewhere uses this comparison. PHILOSOPHIC DISEASE 37 tion as uniter of the many sides of the truth, it might claim to be the crowning principle of the universe so far, at least, as our present knowledge can go. But this is only a hope. For the present our work must take its place as one more attempt at reform added to the long, long list, running the gauntlet of the refutations which ruined them, with all the antecedent probability against its success, and certain to be denied, if indeed it is noticed at all. But let us remember that we have nothing to lose by the endeavour, and like Luther, we " cannot do otherwise." CHAPTER III THE TYPE SUBJECTIVISM IN the examination of typical systems which we now begin, certain cautions are necessary. First, it is probable that none of those we shall exhibit has ever been exactly held. A simon-pure idealist, or an empiri- cist with no taint of a priori dogmatism, may never have existed. The names that have survived in philosophy Berkeley, Leibnitz, Fichte, etc. are hardly to be considered as embodiments of only one type. A thinker's greatness may perhaps be estimated by the rigour of his adherence to a single one, or by the number of them which he is able to combine; but in neither respect do we find any perfect case. Each system includes something of several types, as every projectile is acted upon by many forces. Yet the main direc- tion of a rifle-bullet is forward, and of a falling apple down- ward ; and even so, in a given system one type is generally found decidedly outweighing the rest. The views we shall mention have been, then, no more than approximated in the history of philosophy. We claim only that they are influential and representative. Secondly, a large choice is offered, and many ways of classifying them are possible. We need only a scheme which is useful for our project, viz., one which will lay bare the root of the disagreements. For this reason we shall treat the types as rivals: each one will be juxtaposed, so far as possible, with an opponent type. But no exhaustive prin- ciple of classification seems to be necessary; for we aim at 38 THE TYPE SUBJECTIVISM 39 characteristic instances rather than all instances. Still, though completeness is not necessary, we do intend to take up an obvious majority. Thirdly, it is likely to appear, to the respective devotees of the system, that their views are not justly stated. In one or two instances at least the arguments we shall give are not those used by the originators of the type in question. The reason for this is that such types seem not always to have been most favourably presented ; they could have been de- fended better than they were. A type is not always best understood by its own advocates. It is for our purpose more important to lay bare the great tendencies or motives which have worked in human thought, than to pursue historical accuracy though of course we must not stray too far therefrom. As the modern systems have the presumption of supe- riority, we choose our first topic from the welter of present- day doctrines. These are preoccupied with the study of the human mind ; they view the whole universe as it bears upon that particular corner. The most natural beginning is there- fore with a type which we shall call subjectivism] a system whose main thesis, roughly put, is that all the world is a phase of consciousness. This doctrine is ? indeed, bound up with a rival doctrine, which is built upon the flat denial of the thesis; and we cannot fully estimate the former in ad- vance of the latter. But we can judge the arguments in favour of it, and even certain ones against it, pretty well by themselves, and that shall be the purpose of this chapter. In setting forth the motives which urge men toward sub- jectivism, we must include emotional and practical as well as intellectual reasons. Temperament, as we have already seen, is ever a determinant of our tenets. Couched in logical terms, this means that everyone has at the back of his mind 40 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY a certain major premise, viz., " whatever is in the end good is in the end true or real " a premise no more, and no less, capable of proof than reason's premise " whatever is implied in sense-experience and is consistent therewith, is real or true." No man can free himself from the influence of these fundamental dogmas; and no man's philosophy can be jus- tified or condemned until his dogmas i. e., his axioms are known. " Mankind," said James, " is made on too uni- form a pattern for any of us to escape successfully from acts of faith. We have a lively vision of what a certain view of the universe would mean for us. We kindle or we shudder at the thought, and our feeling runs through our whole logical nature and animates its workings. It can't be that, we feel; it must be this. It must be what it ought to be, and it ought to be this; and then we seek for every reason, good or bad, to make this which so deeply ought to be, seem objectively the probable thing. We show the arguments against it to be insufficient, so that it may be true ; we represent its appeal to be to our whole nature's loyalty and not to any emaciated faculty of syllogistic proof. We reinforce it by remembering the enlargement of our world by music, by thinking of the promises of sunsets and the impulses from the vernal woods. And the essence of the whole experience, when the individual swept through it says finally ' I believe,' is the intense con- creteness of his vision, the individuality of the hypothesis before him, and the complexity of the various concrete motives and perceptions that issue in his final state." (The Meaning of Truth, pp. 257-258.) In fact, we may go further. One's philosophy is inter- woven specifically however far beneath the surface with the rest of one's life; how completely, we hope to show ere we finish our task. For we shall learn that the battles of philosophy reflect, and are reflected by, the nature of the THE TYPE SUBJECTIVISM 4! battles of man against man and of man against nature. The instincts of the intellect grow out of and into the impulses of the will and the insights of the emotional nature. The practical and affective motives toward subjectivism are simple. Our impulse to self -expansion, perhaps the most powerful in our nature, urges us from the practical side. We all want to grow and be large; even physically, few men would prefer to be small or middle-sized. Every one has in him that conative tendency, which carried to its logical conclusion would make him contain the whole universe. Ac- quisition of property, of reputation, of learning, are subor- dinate instances of this. While no subjectivist philosopher might be aware that he was marshalling his deductions in order to gratify this passion of self -extension, it seems hardly likely that men would have defended so remarkable a view, did it not coincide with this ineradicable desire. For it is not an easy or natural view intellectually witness its late appearance in history. A considerable development of reflective power seems to be its prerequisite. The affective motives are revealed in certain not wholly uncommon moods like the following: "... a curious ex- perience befell me. It was as if everything that had seemed to me external and around me were suddenly within me. The whole world seemed to be within me. It was within me that the trees waved their green branches, it was within me that the skylark was singing, it was within me that the hot sun shone, and that the shade was cool. ... I felt in all my being the delicious fragrance of the earth and the grass and the plants and the rich brown soil " (F. Reid, Following Darkness, London, 1912, p. 42). Probably almost every one has had his moments of subjectivism, when Hamlet's dictum, " there is nothing good or bad in this world, but thinking makes it so," seems axiomatic of reality at large. 42 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY More obvious, perhaps, and more creditable to subjec- tivism, is the appearance of giving aid to religion. If all is mind, then all is spirit; and if all is spirit, is it not but a step to affirm immortality, God, the angels, and the other appara- tus of religion ? It was none other than Bishop Berkeley who founded modern subjectivism; and who referred to himself as " a man who has written something with a design to promote Useful Knowledge and Religion in the world." (Letter of dedication, prefixed to Principles of Human Knowl- edge, Open Court ed., p. i.) To a certain extent, we cannot doubt, the type has borrowed a garment of sanctity from religion. Like its big brother idealism it has been defended by men whose philosophy has a spiritual cast. Besides Berkeley, we may instance the priest Malebranche, Kant, Schopenhauer, and if we are correctly informed, several of the Hindu religious systems ; and in our own day Professor Royce, himself not strictly a subjectivist, yet occasionally using its favourite arguments. It certainly seems probable, that many of those who like subjectivism like it because it appears to promote the interests of the spirit. Intellectual ingenuity would perhaps in the end create such a type ; but in the absence of feelings and desires point- ing that way would hardly have concocted the elaborate defence which it has worked out. To this defence we now turn. The intellectual motive may thus be formulated: if we can show that the universe is a phase of ourselves, we escape the distracting conflicts which have beset man's previous attempts to construe it. For this is a simple, purifying sort of view. Being unitary, it gets rid of that dualism of mind and body which, since Descartes, occasioned so many puzzles. Reducing matter as it does to a function of mind, it gives the quietus to those ancient paradoxes of infinite THE TYPE SUBJECTIVISM 43 divisibility, time's beginning, motion, etc. The issue of monism vs. pluralism also disappears. In short, subjec- tivism appears as a reform which breaks up the old quarrels of philosophy and replaces the endless bickering by an appeal to the deepest need of man, the spiritual. What then more precisely is the doctrine which performs such a service ? We may sharpen its outlines by contrast. Subjectivism is monistic ; but it is to be distinguished from allied monisms. Idealism, for instance, which is confessedly monistic, need not be subjective; acknowledged idealists deny the reduction of the world to a phase of one's own particular mind. Speaking of bodies, an eminent idealist writes " their true existence is not that which is present inmy mind, but rather, as perhaps we should say, present to it." (Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 2d ed., p. 301.) "Hence the Universe and its objects must not be called states of my soul " (ibid.}. Another famous idealist explains that the world is not " meine Vorstellung " in a subjective sense (H. Rickert, Der Gegenstand der Erkenntniss, pp. 70, 132). The differentia of idealism from subjectivism is the belief in a Great Mind who is more than any one of us, or perhaps all of us; subjectivism fixes upon the private mind as the last term of metaphysics. The idealist holds the world to be a phase of this Great Mind, but not, like the subjectivist, of the particular person's mind ; for the latter has no principle in his philosophy by which to infer a universal spirit. Doubtless, idealists often speak like sub jectivists ; but their view includes more. And of course it is true that the word idealism is currently used to cover both of the two views here distinguished; but this is an inaccuracy, and as we shall see when we come to treat idealism in Chapter IV, one of consequence. Who has refuted subjectivism has not thereby refuted idealism as here understood. Historical 44 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY instances approximating the type subjectivism are Berke- ley's doctrine " esse is percipi," Schopenhauer's " Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung," and a considerable portion of the Kantian system. Probably no one holds it very strictly today, although it must be hovering rather close, to judge from the number of refutations of it from realistic pens; refutations which, by the way, seem not to have observed its distinction from idealism. It is a narrow view, to be sure, because it singles out one element of reality and states all the rest as function of that; but the same might be said of many views which have been deemed respectable. So ma- terialism did, so nominalism and Platonism; and so at this time is doing the recent school of realism which reduces mind to a function of objects. Its one-sidedness should not then deny it a considerate hearing. And even that is per- haps not so great. Subjectivism, in one sense urging that consciousness is everything, in another denies it. If external objects are the contents of mind and nothing more, yet the contents are not each in and for itself, the mind, and we have not, after all, pure monism. My purse may contain money, and money might be denned as that which belongs in purses, but the money is not the purse. The qualities of the mind's contents remain what they are, even though they play in the field of mind alone. What subjectivism seeks is not the exclusive reality of just mere mind with nothing in it; but rather the inclusive reality of minds as genera, with species, varieties, and so on, under them. And even though sub- jectivists now and again in the heat of argument boil over to this extreme and declare that apples, trees, or stones are made of mental stuff, they thereby unwittingly exaggerate their position. Subjectivism also does not necessarily mean that my mind, acting upon objects, makes them what they are. The THE TYPE SUBJECTIVISM 45 phrase " mind creates its object," or something similar, is occasionally used to describe the doctrine. Even Kant was guilty of this excess (Critique of Pure Reason, Miiller's tr., p. 102) . Certain individuals may have accepted the phrase ; but " create " is a very ambiguous word, usually interpreted in one sense by subjectivism and in another by its opponents. We cannot rightly take it to mean conjure into existence. The subjectivist believes that the history of events is part of the mind's history, but he does not have to believe that the mind causes its contents to exist, any more than the con- tents cause mind to exist. Nor is the mind conceived to act upon an already present object so as to change its make-up and thereby to know it. Certain thinkers, again, might hold that view, but they could be subjectivists without so doing. And it may be doubted that any one today does entertain so unwise a belief, since it renders knowledge an absurdity. For if the mind alters what it knows in knowing it, the original object itself is not known. This is the familiar Kantian dilemma of the thing-in-itself. But it is a quite gratuitous addition to that doctrine. The core of the type before us is, we think, that real objects are content of the mind. In so far as that makes it convenient to say that they are mental, mental they may be called; but, as already ex- plained, there is always something irreducible, which indi- viduates the particular object, making a rock a rock and a horse a horse, and prevents it from being wholly identical with the mind itself. What is meant is perhaps best expressed by the spatial analogy of the word "content"; a term which of course is amenable to further definition, like the terms of most types, but which nevertheless has a distinct significa- tion of its own, not to be confused with the relation of com- plete identity. We here adopt it because it suggests a certain intimacy of relation and logical dependence. 46 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY Such is the type we are to examine, conceived as object of the intellect. The defence of it consists of a negative and a positive part: the former works by rebuttal of opponents, concluding that there is naught independent, and therefore logically outside, of one's mind; the latter endeavours by analysis to demonstrate that everything is content of the mind. The negative argument is based upon a train of thought dating back at least to Zeno the Eleatic. It reasons that external objects have properties that are mutually contra- dictory; hence they cannot have that independent, sub- stantial reality which we naively ascribe to them. They are then to be considered subjective alone. Historically, these contradictions were pointed out in Zeno's paradoxes of motion, space, number, etc.; in Plato's criticism of par- ticular objects (Republic, 5. 479), and in many other authors; culminating in the Hegelian declaration that all things but the Whole are self-contradictory. Such mode of argument has been used, now for one purpose, now for an- other, from the Eleatics to Professor Bergson. The " dia- lectic," as it is called, marks one of philosophy's perpetual sores; whoever wishes to discredit an opponent may point him to that unhealed spot. Many, of course, deny that there is such a sore; for these the scene of the dialectic is transferred from the external world to the philosophical world inasmuch as their view is disputed. However, this shall be dwelt upon later ; we are now treating only the ap- plication to subjectivism. The two thinkers who have most effectively plied the dialectic whip to drive us to this type, are Berkeley and Kant. Berkeley found that material sub- stance was an abstraction, containing the most glaring con- tradictions, and therefore to be discarded (Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, and 5, 9); Kant found THE TYPE SUBJECTIVISM 47 in the famous " antinomies," that this external world of ours implied conflicting attributes infinite and finite divisibility, a first cause and no first cause, etc. wherefore its externality must be denied. In judging the force of this position, we may well enough admit the truth of the dialectic. Our interest lies in the question, does it send us to subjectivism ? And we answer it by asking, of what avail is it to relegate self-contradictory things to the realm of mind ? The contents of the mind, the things we see and touch and infer, are just as inevitable to us, whether called physical or mental, external or internal. What is the profit in rubbing out the whole external world when the contradictions are (as Kant himself admitted) due to our minds, and therefore present in the internal world ? The disease is but communicated from the victim who is slain to the victim who slays. Reason in losing objectivity loses its own integrity. It is as if one tried to cure his indi- gestion by never eating. And with the discovery that the contradictions are native to the mind, comes a suspicion of the reasoning which the mind performs, and of this very argument itself. It does not, in fact, matter a whit where the antinomies are put, so long as they are not solved. They carry their poison wherever they go. Subjectivism may or may not be true, but it is not demonstrated by this method. This establishing of itself by convicting its opponent of sin, this puritanic argument from damnation, we shall find all too frequent in philosophical society; but it has no logical force. The first argument for subjectivism then leaves us where we were before; the dialectic has proved or disproved naught, and the balance of the opponents is yet even. A second attempt to prove subjectivism by denying its opposite is apparently of Kantian origin, though not far removed from a well-known Platonic dictum. Seemingly 48 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY positive, it is shown by a little scrutiny to be negative. It proceeds thus: we accept the truth of laws or general prin- ciples, such as Newton's laws in mechanics, or the two prin- ciples of thermodynamics. We believe these laws will hold in the future ; yet we have not observed that future. How can we be sure thus, in advance of observation ? Now if it were the case that the very constitution of our minds made us interpret all we observe under the form of laws, we could be sure that all events would appear under that form. Let us then call law a form of the mind. This will account for our ability to know in advance, to predict; and nothing else will do so. For the only other possible explanation is, that the nature of objects is permanent and law-abiding; and previous to observation we could not be sure of this. The idea has seemed very brilliant, and whether or not Kant really held it has probably converted many of his readers to subjectivism, and through that to idealism. As here stated, it must not be confused with the idealists' argu- ment, which sometimes includes it; that doctrine accepts a universal mind, while the above may be held without any- thing more than our several particular minds. Its emphasis on the subject, man, cannot fail to be satisfactory to man; and perhaps this in part accounts for the rapid growth in favour, of the Kantian philosophy. It looks positive and constructive, and not at all an argument by exclusion. What then are its merits and defects ? First, it does not apply to anything but laws or universals. Particular ob- jects and events remain outside the mind, under the title " things-in-themselves." But is it not as far as it goes sound ? Now notice that its point lies mainly in the nega- tive part, that nothing else but subjectivity accounts for a priori knowledge. This was in fact emphasized by Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Aesthetic, 1, 3; THE TYPE SUBJECTIVISM 49 11, 3; Transcendental Analytic, ch. II, I). Is it then shown that the hypothesis of objective laws and univer- sals will not account for it ? No; it is only urged that we could not by observation verify that hypothesis. Of course not by observation, we reply; but would that hypothesis not account for the fact of a priori knowledge just as well as the other hypothesis of subjectivity ? Neither hypothesis can be verified by observation; that the unalterable constitution of our mind makes us think in terms of space, time, laws, etc., is no more accessible to observation than are objective universals. How do we know that the mind may not change ? Kant himself as- serted that time was a mental form, and thence it would seem to follow that mind cannot change; but in fact, this begs the question. To make time subjective is as much as to assume outright that mind cannot change. It needs proof; and there is no evidence given to show that time in particular is subjective, besides the above argument for sub- jectivity. In short, the subjectivity-hypothesis is no better than the objectivity-hypothesis. Kant arbitrarily excluded the latter. Either would explain the point in question; neither has an advantage over the other. The balance is again even ; the argument is indifferent. This indifference to subjectivity has apparently been felt by many idealists; for they do not seem as a rule to lay much stress on the above train of reasoning. They tend rather to interpret Kant as urging that universal principles are true and valid, yet not commensurable with the partic- ulars of sense-observation; and hence as able to live only in a world of reason. But reason is here used, as we shall later see, in an objective sense, i. e., to mean a Great Reason rather than one of our private minds. This is the Platonic argument, which is not relevant to subjectivism. Neverthe- 50 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY less it must be admitted that there is a temptation even to the idealist, to regard a universal as in some way the creation of the particular mind (Royce, Encyclopaedia of Philosophi- cal Sciences, vol. I, p. 107, almost writes thus). Thus we find it urged that the concepts of science are limits approximated by the facts of sense-observation, and consequently never realized therein (Cassirer, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbe- griff, pp. 169, ifi,etal.; A. E. Taylor, reviewing the same in Mind, 1911, p. 440) : hence, it is argued, they must be differ- ent in kind and spring from a different source, viz., our rea- son. Another form of the same view is the semi-popular one of Pearson and Mach, that concepts are mental shorthand, subjective formulae, because they are not adequately realized in the external world. Why that which is non-physical should be subjective is never explained. In fact, as with any of the great philosophic types, this whole position is found to percolate in many directions through the mass of pseudo- philosophic opinion. But our accusation of irrelevancy re- mains : subjectivity is no better explanation of the validity of law than is objectivity, and no more verifiable. At the same time, subjectivism is not itself refuted by its failure to refute the opponent. The scales so far are level; either view might be perfectly correct. Subjectivism's dog- matic exclusion of the alternative lays it open to attack by the same method. It rests on no positive proof, but on an arbitrary denial; and such a negative attitude arouses in the adversary a temper favourable to an equally negative dogmatism in the opposite direction. We pass to the positive argument for subjectivism. There is, first, a specious reason ; which though not claiming to be a proof of it inclines one to favour the subjective theory. This has its prototype in the Cartesian Cogito ergo sum, and answers to a prevailing inclination in modem philosophy to THE TYPE SUBJECTIVISM 51 regard the thinker's own existence as more certain to him than anything else. Even the realistic Bergson begins his magnum opus with this doctrine. We say prevailing, be- cause the present almost exclusive interest in subjective problems rather implies a conviction of the basal position of the subject in the universe, as a " bed-rock " of certainty. However that may be, the argument of Descartes is spe- cious; it proves something, but not what it pretends to prove. I doubt, therefore I exist; but of course the only certainty here is that doubting (whatever that may turn out to be when analyzed) occurs. Doubting might be some say now that it is a clash of bodily tendencies, forces, or what not; or it might be a phase of the history of an irre- ducible mind. Either interpretation, objective or subjec- tive, is possible. It is not because doubting is a mental or subjective process that its occurrence is undeniable, but because its presence is clear and distinct. And indeed we find Descartes himself later appealing to the quite objective " lumen naturale " as the best evidence of any truth. If the subjective as such were more clear and distinct than the objective, psychology would be farther advanced than it is today. It is the objective sciences that have made progress. The real evidence for subjectivism is not based upon any prerogatives, but begins by granting external objects as just a title to reality as minds. Its closest approximation is found in Berkeley and Schopenhauer. But we should not rest it, as Berkeley did, upon nominalism. For one might contend as Kant's doctrine does that abstract con- cepts are clearly before the mind, and be a subjectivist still; and equally might one, like Hobbes, deny abstract ideas and be a realist. Nor would it refute realism to show that the abstract concept " material substance " is in itself meaning- less, unless it were previously shown that things are what 52 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY they mean to us. Some such major premise as this last, clearly underlies subjectivism's positive argument; we prefer therefore to state the case in the following form : Every object or entity identically is at least in part the relations it assumes to something else. But every entity assumes the relation of being content-of-consciousness ; therefore every object identically is such content. In this conclusion we drop the " at least in part" because if any part of the object is left over, that too by the premises becomes " content," until all is swallowed up. Generally and abstractly, the first premise means that whatever enters into a relation is really qualified' by doing so; the relation in turn enters into the thing's very soul and becomes an essential part of it; they are to a A extent one. So the stone, attracted by the earth, becomes a heavy body; the relation to earth affects the body. This premise is in- voked and denied again and again by philosophic partisans, and, as we shall find, plays a fundamental r61e. We shall follow usage and call it the principle of internal relations, or more briefly, of internality; its contrary is called the principle of external relations or externality. In the same way the second premise means that every thing, or object, or entity of any sort can be shown to come into the net of a subject's consciousness. It may be ob- ject of sensation, or perception, or mere thought; it may be present object, or past object, or future object of our consciousness; but always it stands in some connection therewith. The meaning of the premises and conclusion becomes clearer when we seek their justification. The principle of internal relations is a very frequent as- sumption, in the conduct of life and in certain sciences. In life, we judge a man's personality by his conduct towards THE TYPE SUBJECTIVISM 53 other men, animals, and even inanimate things. His rela- tions of friendship or enmity, cooperation or indifference or frustration, his disposal of his goods all these, we say, constitute his character; and that means that they are him- self. The latest school of psychological theory considers an animal's individual consciousness to be the behaviour of its body which is to say, the relationships that body takes on, toward physical things of grasping, arranging, de- vouring, rejecting, and so on through the complex history of an animal's life. An electron is defined by the physicist, or an element by the chemist, by the spatial and temporal relations it assumes to other bodies. In fact all description of things, or judgment about them, really identifies those things with their relations toward other things. Put ab- stractly, we may express it thus : when an object A assumes relation R to another object B, we say A is R to B, as in " the pen is on the table " or " the paper is seen by me," and it seems unnatural not to interpret " is " to mean a degree of identity between subject and predicate. If I say " I am John Jones " I am understood to identify the subject and predicate ; and the refusal to interpret other predication likewise looks artificial and strained. This is perhaps only an inductive generalization, based upon observation of the actual thought-process ; but it seems so general and compelling that we may well judge it to fore- stall any investigation of the particular field concerned. It is however met by a strong opposition. The universality of the principle of internal relations is denied. We are told that not all statements take the form " something is so and so "; but rather that some at least if not all should be ex- pressed " something has the relation R to so and so." The latter view we may call the relational theory of judgment, the former the predicative; they stand upon, and defend, the 54 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY internal and external theories respectively. The relational theory claims that the form " A has R to B " is not reducible to the form " A is C "; that there is not identity between A and KB; that the relation is not " internal " to A but ex- ternal to it, added to it without changing it or becoming part of it. It supports this claim by analysis of certain scientific ideals (those of the more abstract side, e. g., math- ematics), finding that they demand ultimate elements or indefinables which are constant and which, entering un- changed into certain relations to one another, generate the subject-matter of the science. This Herbartian view which at present pays little respect to its German protagonist must however be based, not on the emulation of any science, however successful that science may be in its own limited domain, but on philosophical analysis; and such analysis is provided. Those who deny the principle of inter- nal relations usually allege that there are propositions to whose meaning the predicative theory is inadequate. " A shilling is less than a pound." The relation " less than " cannot be adequately described as a quality residing in the shilling; for it refers to " a pound " which is (conceptually) outside the shilling. What is (logically speaking) outside cannot be considered identical with, or a part of the latter. Now this argument like Kant's dictum with regard to time really assumes what it wants to prove. Why can- not the full nature of the shilling involve the pound as a part of itself ? Why cannot the full nature of each thing in the world imply everything else ? The internalist declares that it does so; the externalist denies it, misled, it would seem, by the spatial connotations of " outside " and " part of." In doing this, the externalist has begged his point. There is no reason whatever, urges the internalist, why one thing should not be in part identical with things other than itself THE TYPE SUBJECTIVISM 55 or with relations including those things. Certainly we often speak of two objects of the same identical colour. But of course the externalist will not admit that there is any identity between two distinct things. The red of two roses is not to him (however alike be the shades) identical ; they only have the relation of similarity. Yet who has the better of this dispute ? What necessity can be urged, by which we should choose either description and reject the other ? The externalist, however, has other strings to his bow. He can show that predication itself is a relation ; that an attri- bute, even if considered in part identical with its substance, only has the relation " identity " to that substance. He translates even identity itself into relational terms. He calls to his aid modern logic, which treats " is " as the " illative relation " rather than as an indication that the predicate and the subject are partially one. Now there could be no argument better suited for the internalist's position. Ob- viously, identity, sameness, oneness, may be called relations if we wish. Every instance of predication can be stated in accord with the relational view. " The rose is red " can be put " the rose has a certain relation (partial identity) to red." No internalist need deny that; but he can also turn it the other way. He can translate the relational-termi- nology back into the original identity-terminology. And one way of stating it may be useful for one purpose, the other way for another. But the fact that we can use propositions with " is " in logical inference is due as much to the rela- tion's being that of identity, as it is to its being a relation at all. Indeed, there is no proposition that cannot be stated in the " A is B " form. That does not mean, of course, that we do not often infer by other relations than identity. " A implies B " and " B implies C " give, in the calculus of re- 56 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY lations, " A implies C" But " A implies C " serves its pur- pose in this chain only because the relation of implying C is true of A; and the being true of A may for aught yet seen to the contrary be expressed by the form " A is implier of B," i. e., there is a degree of identity between these two. The identity-form is never ruled out. To be sure there are many kinds of reasoning which cannot adequately be put into syllogistic form. But they must all sooner or later be put in prepositional form; and this restores the applica- bility of the internalist view at the end. What comes in at the end of a process may be important after all; is not the reading and understanding of the sentences we write as im- portant as the writing ? The indispensability of relations need not lead the externalist to deny the identity- view. We cannot then, so far, agree that the externalist is able to refute his opponent, or vice versa. A reductio ad absurdum of the internalistic view has also been used. If X's relation to Y is truly part of X, then X when related to F has grown by that part and is different from X when not so related. In the case of some one becom- ing aware of a tree, the tree, entering into the relation of being known, is thereby changed. Hence the tree which is known is not the original tree but a new one ! This reductio seems to be simply a mistake. Denote the relation called " being known " by R, " tree " by A, " some one " by B. Then A, becoming known, assumes the relation R to B. Before, it did not have that relation, and was only A . When known, it is enriched by the attribute RB as well. Some- thing has been added; the former A was a part only, the later A joins on a new part, RB. A, fully understood, in- cludes all the relations into which it enters. The original A does not cease to be itself when it becomes a part of the whole, of which the RB is another part. What is known - THE TYPE SUBJECTIVISM 57 i. e., what enters into the relation R, is that original, and that original only; it is not the RB that is known, though RB is for a later reflective judgment to be identified with A. RB is the knowing of A; an element in the total situa- tion ARB. Now there are dialectical objections to these statements, and we confess that they are very serious ones, and shall hereafter occupy ourselves with them; but they are not accepted by externalists, and consequently the latter should not, it appears, allege the above redwtio. These considerations, if they are correct, show that the principle of internal relations has strong reasons in its favour and as yet none against it. The full bearing of the principle cannot now be seen; it will engage our attention in the ex- amination of some later types. But no ground has been forthcoming, in the arguments usually directed against it, from which to deny it. The relational view of propositions has simply looked like another reading of the same material, no truer or falser than the internalist view. Neither refutes the other. The first premise of subjectivism may then pass for the present as sound, though liable of course to correc- tion from future discussion concerned with other types. The second premise of subjectivism's positive argument claims that every object in the universe is object for a sub- ject; i. e., is, in the last analysis, really related to some par- ticular mind by what is called the cognitive relation. Notice that this premise alone would not suffice though often it is taken by hostile critics to be the whole of the type in question. Every object under the sun might always be known by some one great man, or dog, or cat, without being definable as essentially known by him or it. It is the first premise that justifies that definition; for it says that things are the relations into which they enter. If we had not the first premise, subjectivism would be a tautology, however 58 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY universally the second premise held. It would say only, " everything is known, and being known, is related to mind "; but objects need not then be what they are known as. Hence subjectivism needs the principle of internal rela- tions. But whereas absolute idealism uses that principle too (up to a certain point) it does not in propria persona add the second premise, that all things are most fundamentally viewed as related to a mind. It does not lay superlative stress on that particular relation, the cognitive one, and in- cline the centre of gravity to the subjective side. It gets its " Absolute Mind," as will later be seen, by a different method. Subjectivism renders the universe asymmetrical, absolute idealism renders it symmetrical. Subjectivism moves the universe over into the particular mind; absolu- tism, letting it stand where it is, equates the universe to an absolute mind. Subjectivism is allied to idealism through its first premise, but its differentia lies in the second. For it is that differentia which enables it to claim that reality is content of the mind, not external to it. If A (the object) is related by R (cognition) to B (my mind) then A is definable as RB, and A appears as function, phase, or content of B; and thus everything that is appears as B or content of B. The word " content " signifies that the independent external object A has disappeared and all that is left in the world is that mind and functions of it. Of course the relation R re- mains irreducible to B, and thus subjectivism is not a blank monism. A universal mouth might regard all the world as its food, but that food is not the mouth. Or again we may think of a pedestal and its base ; the support is the base but the base is not the column. And equally of course, the word " content " involves a spatial metaphor which is not to be taken literally. This we mentioned at the outset, in com- menting upon the monism of the type. There never was a THE TYPE SUBJECTIVISM 59 mere monism since Parmenides, except in the minds of pluralists, and such a type would not be worth studying. The unique feature of subjectivism is the reduction of reality not merely to mental tissue and substance, but to that and its functions or contents as well. Most arguments that have been used to prove the theory have dwelt upon this second premise; as it is the more specific premise, that is natural enough. We now give the main positive ones. But we must give warning that their validity cannot be fully appraised until we state the at- tempts of the next type (objectivism) to refute them. All the qualities of perceived objects which we treat as external, size, colour, hardness, etc., may be regarded as sense-qualities, and all the properties, utility, beauty, effi- cacy, etc., as essentially thought-objects; and both kinds as subjective. We consider (i) secondary qualities, (2) primary qualities, (3) other properties. (i) Much has been written of late in defence of the objec- tive reality of colours, tastes, etc. ; this for the present we defer, promising to consider under the next type the chief arguments proffered thereupon. Our immediate concern is the argument for subjectivity. Physical science seems to have shown that colours, sounds, etc., depend upon the reception of certain impacts or wave-motions in the bodily organism. The effect of these wave-motions on eye, ear, etc., seems somehow to determine the appearance and char- acter of the sense-quality, the colour or sound. That quality may be " psychical " while the effect in the sense-organ is " physical," or the two may be identical in essence; in either case the quale of the red, the sweet, or the cool is in some way determined by, or a function of, the organism. It does not matter how inscrutable or irreducible we may be- lieve such a quality to be ; it is still to some degree dependent 60 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY upon the external stimuli being received in our own bodies. And further there is no scientific evidence, so far as we know, that the atomic particles or the media of light, heat, etc., are coloured or sweet or warm; whereas those qualities are sometimes felt without external stimuli and merely from the the activity of our sense-organs as when we press the eyeball or have auditory hallucinations. The conclusion seems beyond a reasonable doubt that the secondary quali- ties reside in our bodies alone. A great deal of what we see and feel of the outer world is then, a datum of our own bodies. This, however, is not enough to prove the case, for the body is not the mind; and therefore the colours, sounds, etc., of our environment are not yet shown to be mental con- tent. But it does so strikingly suggest it so close is the intimacy of mind and body that these considerations have been deemed the " entering wedge " of subjectivism. And no doubt many have been persuaded by them to be subjectivists. Nevertheless the argument is not sufficient. The body is to the mind just as much physical external reality as anything else; it is no more " psychical matter of fact " than a stone. A further step is needed, viz., the ad- mission that the bodily data are essentially in the cognitive relation, are known, are objects of awareness. That step we may of course take; for a colour that does not look coloured is no colour. This is indeed the gist of the matter; subjec- tivism does not truly need the doctrine that secondary quali- ties depend on the body. Nevertheless, men might not easily have noticed that all perceived objects are thus de- pendent upon mind, had not the sense-organs, with their suggestion of subjectivity, seemed to affect the very char- acter of the objects. For men do not commonly notice a factor's presence unless it initiates some change. We THE TYPE SUBJECTIVISM 6 1 should not notice the presence of light, did it not by im- pinging upon bodies give forth effects or colours not seen in free space; nor is a gas visible unless it changes the hue of the visual field. It is then not necessary to the truth of subjectivism that the objective motions be endowed by the perceiving sense-organ when they appear before it, with dis- tinctive secondary qualities. The mind may very well be essential to objects without contributing some positive quality to their constitution; mind, in short, need not be conceived as in any way creating the objects. This we al- ready saw in our definition of the present type. If the objects appear unaltered to the mind, they appear just as much, and the mind is just as essential. The proof, then, of the subjectivity of the secondary qualities, is drawn from the fact that they are objects of consciousness ; and that it is meaningless to think of them as outside that relation. To be red is to look the way a red object looks, to be loud is to sound the way a loud noise sounds, to be cool is to feel the way a cool body feels. The subjective implication is inevitable. (2) Primary qualities, as Berkeley saw, are open to the same treatment as secondary. Size, shape, motion are, when seen, related to consciousness, and if we try to define them, we must do so in terms of their appearance to us. It may be that Berkeley himself was too much inclined to dwell on the alterability of these data by the subject's point of view; but in the beginning, and in the light of his purpose to persuade the vulgar, this would be natural. Berkeley's theory of vision is not necessary to subjectivism. (3) The same reasoning holds of all properties of objects of which we are aware by thought. Consider a tree. Its size, shape, colour, texture, etc., are percepta] its past growth is object of necessary inference; the laws which it 62 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY obeys are necessities of thought based upon sense-observa- tion; and so on. There is not a namable characteristic that is not definable as a function of thought or sense. The various qualia of these characteristics, their specific dif- ferences, are indeed not accounted for by such definition; but that objection raises a very different issue. Subjec- tivism may be quite true without accounting for every de- tail. Its realistic opponents believe that their own realism is true, but they do not claim that it alone accounts for the manifold details of the world. In fact, we shall later see that it is not of the slightest assistance in that regard. Only a thoroughgoing pragmatist, if anybody at all, is entitled to urge that such an inadequacy implies untruth ; and prag- matism is a type to be later examined. The one thing need- ful is that all objects and all phases of objects are when defined, or described, stated wholly in terms of sense-data or thought-data. The gravamen of Berkeley's position has been said to lie in the question, what is the meaning of the term existence itself ? If you say what it means, you will say what it signifies to you. Now an adversary might not allow that question: he might say that it tacitly begs the issue, that its appearance of rigorous logic, its analysis of implied meaning, contains the assumption that things are what they are to me. This assumption was made, and should have been acknowledged; it is nothing less than our first premise above. But the applicability of that premise consists in the fact that existence does have a significance for me. As there is no shade of meaning in the English language which could not be expressed, however circuitously, in the French, so there is nothing about existence, or externality, or inde- pendence which cannot be stated in the language of sub- jectivism. Existence means some sort of presentation; THE TYPE SUBJECTIVISM 63 independence may mean permanence through the changes of the subject, or being a surd irreducible to, but felt by, the subject, or being the cause of the subject's states, according to one's view; but all of these signify some relation whose formality does not prohibit its truth. So far as we know these abstract considerations have never been met by the enemy, unless, as we shall soon see, with the argument of damnation. But the positive case for subjectivism is not maledictory; it follows a simple, impersonal logic. In its abstractness and its simplicity lies its strength. But does this positive argument yet cover all cases ? There were objects before I was born, there are objects I shall never see, nor perhaps even dream of; yes, even the slip of paper before me really contains a great deal more than I shall ever know. Subjectivism meets all these doubts with the same query. How do you know there were objects before I was born ? By certain compulsory reasonings. But these reasonings are none the less present to a subject, for all their compulsoriness. Is the past event then naught but a mental construction ? Now here the enemy seeks to damn subjectivism; for " mental construction " savours of blasphemy. We have said that the present type does not assert that mind creates anything. The past event is object of an inference forced upon mind. But did it not exist before that inference was made ? Quite so. But still the old question comes; what does that past existence mean ? It is that which we have to take account of, that which makes the present what it is, and is thereby related to our present experience. " Related " is here used as vaguely, abstractly, as you please, but none the less truly. Or put the objection thus: what was the past event then when it had no " mean- ing " ? We can still follow Berkeley in answering: " It was that which if known would be known as so and so " which 64 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY answer is relative to some intelligence. The objector will always retaliate by pointing out something more in the object than our definition has yet included ; but every defi- nite more can be included as fast as it is named. This pro- cedure applies to every object that can be distinguished, and to every phase, state, or property of every object. All the objections of this class, in fact, may be reduced to the one characteristic objection that there is something of a non- mental nature, something numerically distinct from any mind. The enemy raise up instances, such as past time, or hitherto unknown attributes of things, whose very essence seems to place them beyond relation to the mind. No such extreme cases are needed; the simplest present thing has the same remoteness. It is never seen just at the moment when the light-rays left it, and the message of those rays is liable to a thousand distorting influences. But all this passes subjectivism by. All this does not deny that these external things are definable as in relation to some mind. Numerical distinction between object and subject is quite irrelevant; for it is no more requisite that objects should themselves be minds than that the food in a man's mouth should consist of teeth and tongues. Yet these considerations are, to many thinkers, uncon- vincing. So far as one may judge from the written word, this is due to either or both of two reasons: when, that is, it is not due simply to temperamental blindness. The first reason is the inability of the subjectivist platform, by itself, to suggest a solution of specific problems; the second is, the ^\ presence of a correlative and opposing type, which has good arguments in its favour. This second reason constitutes a distinct chapter in human thought, and shall presently be discussed; the first affords us an opportunity to point out something of the defect of the type, which we now take. THE TYPE SUBJECTIVISM 65 Subjectivism does not provide a means of distinguishing between what is real and what is imaginary. It subsumes all under the utterly general rubric " related to some mind." The scheme would seem to be too simple and abstract to explain the complexities of the world. Subjectivism de- livers a truth, but at the cost of fertility and interest. We have sought a plan of the universe, which shall mark out differences, the distinctions of high and low, better and worse, true and false; and we are told " all is related to mind." Has this information any substance ? Are we not asking for bread and given a stone ? It is hardly possible to deny it. Indignation is the natural outcome, and we revolt to the other side; the opposing type, realism, is now in order. But indignation, even when righteous, may pre- vent a man from seeing certain real merits of the sinner. Subjectivism may well be true, without accounting for everything. An abstract view is a false view, say the abso- lute idealists; yet even they do not claim to account for the concrete detail of reality. But, as they also urge, it is enough that a view be on the whole true and consistent with the known details. And this is the case with subjectivism. There is no generally admitted distinction, such as that be- tween real and unreal, which is inconsistent with it. The difference between fact and fancy may be formulated as that between a large consistent body of experience and a momentary datum, out of harmony with the rest. Or it might be put as the difference between God's thoughts and our thoughts or in any of a hundred ways. The nature of the distinction is to be decided by a separate investigation; it is quite irrelevant to the truth of subjectivism. This in- difference is at once the type's merit and defect; it is true but fruitless. In alleging the infertility of subjectivism, we have singled out for mention this particular pair of categories real and 66 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY imaginary for an important reason. It will appear as we proceed that each type of philosophy, like each individual man, has its pet vice. There is a critical point, up to which it is palpably true, and beyond which it is palpably unprof- itable, though no less true. We here get our first glimpse of this curious phenomenon. The crux of subjectivism is the differentiation of reality into two fields, the mental and the objective. Or, since subjectivism originally possesses the mental field, we may designate the objective side as the critical point. It does not deny the reality of the objects, but it cannot account for that reality from subjective motives alone. The recalcitrant category can always, with suitable additions, be defined in the language of the type - as a rope will lend itself to the shape of any body. Never- theless, the rope would give small clew to the composition of that body and its internal diversity; nor does the formula " content of the mind " explain how it is that some contents are fact and others imaginary. More of this later: we but hint at a trait whose significance will grow as we proceed. The objections which are today being hurled with crush- ing force against the type, are best understood in connection with the type opposed and correlative to it. For there is a system so connected with subjectivism that, it would seem, the truth of either implies the falsity of the other. Already, in fact, we have found our first type supporting itself upon the denial of this second; it now behooves us to see the second supporting itself upon the denial of the first. Only after we have considered the positive theses of both, and their mutual rebuttals, shall we be in a position to assess their claims to truth, and to the satisfaction of the practical and affective needs which have confirmed them in the hearts of men. To this second type, then, the opposite of the first, we turn. CHAPTER IV OBJECTIVISM AT our title one may feel surprise; we adopt it in the interest of truthfulness. This second type as often occurs in human history has been misnamed, and the misnomer is prejudicial to a fair estimation. " Realism," it is commonly called; but the term covers, as we shall see, at least three quite distinct philosophies,* besides its mis- leading connotation. As used in modern times, " realism " is not characterized by standing for the reality of anything denied by other views. Taken as it frequently is, to aver the reality of the external world, it involves a gross absurd- ity. Imagine our debt of gratitude to a system which, after twenty centuries of unremitting investigation of reality, at last demonstrated that there is a reality to investigate! What the doctrine in question really defends is, that those external objects are not reducible to subjective terms; it is the character and the definition, not the actuality of them, that is under discussion. Since the whole point of the present type is that it is correlative and hostile to subjectivism, it is better dubbed objectivism. At the same time, the correlation is not symmetrical. The first type puts the centre of gravity of the universe far over on one side the mental; the second replies, not by put- ting it equally far on the other side, but by striving to main- tain an even balance between two ultimate and independent terms, subject and object. It is dualistic or common-sense * Platonic realism, dualistic realism, and " new " realism. 67 68 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY realism that we are here discussing, and not the extreme realism of the present day, which would reduce the conscious subject itself wholly to objective terms. It may be a little unsatisfactory to the symmetry-loving intellect to find the issue thus askew; but the lop-sidedness is due to the fact that the modern interests of man centre about himself. In another age and another race, the skewness might be in another direction, or might be supplanted by an even balance. The particular bone about which the contention rages is, however, relatively indifferent; it is the nature of the controversy itself that concerns us. We pass then to the examination of objectivism, or dualistic realism; the doctrine that there are objects which are other than contents of mind. First come practical and emotional motives. If we all desire self-expansion, as subjectivism implied, it is no less true that we grow by humbling ourselves. We obediently adapt ourselves to the weather, to the demands of society, to the laws of bodily health; we study the apparent caprice of Nature; in short, we adopt a realistic attitude. Knowl- edge is power; and the one who gets knowledge must for the moment suppress the aggressive instincts and passively observe Nature's ways. This is only common sense; for common sense is realistic. The scientific impulse, too, works in the same direction. The experimenter has been called a questioner of Nature; and a questioner questions not him- self but another. The scientific discoverer does not draw forth from his mind what he discovers, nor deduce it from his inner consciousness; he waits to see. He treats reality as if it were independent of himself; that is why realists are fond of appealing to science. There is also a profound emo- tional reason for dualistic realism: the religious one. To worship something, is the craving of most men; and worship OBJECTIVISM 69 is of a power not ourselves. Even if we identify this power with our own deeper self, we must assume a realistic disposi- tion towards it; we must in humility ascertain what it imposes upon our conduct and regulate our lives by the standards it sets. If subjectivism seems to exalt the spiritual above the material, objectivism at least may claim to pro- mote more effectively the true religious attitude. When the two foes, religion and science, unite with common sense to urge a doctrine, that doctrine must be precious indeed to the heart of man. The reasoned defence of objectivism is analogous to that of its counterpart. We shall then give it under two heads: the negative, or refutation of subjectivism, and the positive argument. The negative case is a series of reductiones ad absurda. In the first place, it is alleged that subjectivism would make perceived objects numerically identical with the content of perception. Objectivism here brings up the familiar in- stances of the straight stick which in water looks crooked, the rails which converge in the distance, and the vision of the defunct star. In these cases the content of our perception is obviously quite other than the object which is perceived. Subjectivism has an answer ready: viz., that the evidence which leads us to believe that we do not see the object cor- rectly, as well as that real object itself, is content of the mind. For the most part that content is gained by infer- ence, memory, and other experience than direct perception, but it is just as subjective. Here appears what we already urged: anything whatever can be put in subjective terms. This first rebuttal is as if one said " It is not true that every object on earth has a northerly portion, for the southerly portion is not northerly." But even the southerly portion has its own northerly side. The real force of the objection 70 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY lies not in the argument for a different thing external to the mind, but in the inadequacy of subjectivism to account for the distinction between a real object and an imaginary or erroneous one. The seen crooked stick is other than the inferred straight stick. All may be considered subjective; but the formula is so general as not to explain the two kinds of subjectivity which are named real and unreal. An objection which looks more fundamental is based upon certain logical motives. (Cf. E. B. Holt, Concept of Consciousness, p. 10). Definitions, it is asserted, must always proceed by reduction of the complex to the simple. E. g., water is 2H + O, sulphuric acid is 2H + S + 4.0, and so on. Herein is revealed a deep-lying asymmetry of thought; for definition cannot work in the reverse direction. We do not say, hydrogen is that which makes up water, sulphuric acid, air, alcohol, etc. Now consciousness is a very complex thing; much more so than the objects it is aware of, stones, animals, clouds, the sea, et al. These objects then should not be defined in terms of the subject; the converse rather is true. This claim raises certain questions which can only later be discussed. The relative complexity of consciousness and its objects is no easy matter to decide. But the truth of subjectivism does not depend on the decision. There has been some misunderstanding here. The recent foes of idealism have asserted that that view (which they have identified with subjectivism) regards a mind as a simple " end-term " a sort of unanalyzable substance or tertium quid, a je ne sais quoi, as Descartes used to say, etc. This may or may not be a just accusation. Certainly idealists have written many volumes in describing this tertium quid. But even if it were true, that mind is more complex than its objects, that doctrine is not so ruinous as it appears. Let OBJECTIVISM 71 mind be regarded as a certain very intricate grouping, or " polyadic " relation, of objects and bodily reactions. The uniqueness, the irreducibility, of that relation itself which combines the terms and makes them all into the one cate- gory, consciousness, is quite unaffected. The relation itself is as simple and ultimate as anything in the world. If the polyad of consciousness be itself split up into other polyads, the combination of the latter relations which constitutes the former is still unique. This particularity cannot be re- moved; as indeed we shall later see again, in discussing the problem of individuality. There is always a legitimate sense in which a complex entity may be called simple. Now it is enough for the purpose of subjectivism that every object be proved related to that simple uniting relation. And this proof, of course, we regard as having been given already. The asymmetry of definitions, then, and the complexity of consciousness, cannot deny our right to define objects in terms of that entity. Other well-known strictures are more severe. They take the form of fixing absurd consequences upon subjectivism; being caricatures, they are truly not arguments but ana- themas. Arranging them in what seems to us the order of severity, we shall begin with one which would bring out the absurdity by accepting the first premise but denying the exclusive propriety of the second. Admitting that every- thing may be identified with its relations, it suggests that we substitute some other relation, in the second premise, than the cognitive one. Thus : every horse walks on the ground. Or at least a colt born on shipboard which dies ere it reaches land would walk on the ground if it continued alive and well. Therefore horse is essentially related to the ground, a function of the ground, or, to use the same terms as we use of mind, the content of the ground. But this is nonsense, hence, etc. 72 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY The subjectivist need not be abashed. One hates to be ridiculed ; yet what is considered ridiculous in one age is not always so deemed in another. If progress consists in learn- ing that certain serious dogmas of the past are foolish, it also teaches us that what was once laughed at may become sober truth: witness certain episodes in the history of science. For our part, we unhesitatingly admit that anything can be regarded as a function of anything else, provided " func- tion " is taken broadly enough. Here lies no question of truth or error, but one of utility. And it is the imper- tinence rather than the falsity of most of these relational definitions that renders them absurd. Their truth is not impugned. The same confusion lurks in those " refutations " which appeal to common sense. These have many forms, but their substance is little more than the protest of Dr. Johnson, when he kicked the stone to refute Berkeley. Subjectivism, they declare, paints everything the colour of dreams; if it is true we can never get out of our own skins; etc., etc. This is of course but caricature. It would not be taken seriously if the emotions were not engaged. For it simply pronounces a formal curse upon subjectivism's ways. The curse is not injurious; for when everything is called dream, dream is not stigma, and our inability to pass beyond our own (mental) skins need not limit the perambulation of our (mental) organisms. As well say that man, shut up behind eyes, ears, etc., can never travel abroad. The criticism usually most dreaded is what is called solipsism. If all is a function of my mind, other persons are functions of it; yes, God himself (to a believer) is a function of me. So great is the fear of this consequence that the sub- jectivist here generally renounces his position. Even the conscientious Berkeley in substance did so; Schopenhauer, OBJECTIVISM 73 frank enough to admit that solipsism is an impregnable fortress, spoke mysteriously of passing around it (World as Will and Idea, bk. 2 (tr. Haldane and Kemp), p. 136). It is obvious that considerations of value here come into play: the whole criticism is really an appeal to emotion. We love other persons, we need them, and we do as a matter of fact act upon the assumption of their reality. And the present age is probably more alive to this than any other. The spread of democratic feeling renders the very word solus as much feared, as excommunication in the palmy days of the Church. But we may easily imagine some Asiatic despot of olden times to whose habit of mind solipsism would be suit- able. And in any case we must not unquestioningly take the prevailing temper of the age for the truth; for though a presumption in favour of truth is undeniable, we must re- member that every time has its pet superstitions as well as its favourite insights. And further, it is just possible that solipsism itself has been misunderstood. We must examine the doctrine before we allow it to intimidate us; for if subjectivism is correct and if solipsism is a consequence of it, solipsism cannot be rejected. It constitutes a test of the good faith of subjectivism. We have seen that it does not take away the reality of physical objects, to consider them dependent upon a per- ceiving mind. In what way that is relevant, now, do persons differ from such objects ? Are they any more outside the mind ? It must be here remembered that " outside " means " irreducible to, or other than, the content of." " Outside " cannot then have degrees. Physical objects are no more, and no less, other than my mind, than are my fellows. It is not by greater externality to me that the latter are dif- ferentiated from physical objects, but by the comprehensive- ness of their nature, their qualities, their value. These 74 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY attributes, however, are quite irrelevant to the question of externality. A friend may be conceived as dependent upon my mind in a certain way without thereby having less value or dignity or richness of content than my mind has. A very weighty matter may hang from a small hook. As realistic critics are wont to urge, the same logic applies to the rela- tion of other persons with my mind, that holds of external physical things in the same connection. And it is this very fact that renders solipsism quite unobjectionable. Such de- pendence as subjectivism urges, militates in no way against the reality, the value, or the character of the dependent object. As the world of Nature is no less sublime for being hooked on to my mind, so is the social world no less what it is, for being encircled by the mental net. Nor would the Deity himself lose one whit in value if thus attached to the smallest of his creatures. It seems as if we must venture to consider the attempts to refute solipsism as misconceived. And among the refuters, idealists perhaps outnumber all others; the denial of this view being indeed one of the differentiae of idealism from subjectivism. They have of course a perfect right to try to demonstrate the existence of other selves than one's own. It does not, to be sure, seem conclusive on this point to say that we directly experience other minds in the felt struggle of wills, or in social cooperation. For if direct experience is made the ground, there appears no reason why we are not immediately aware of another self in an automatic mannikin which, clumsily managed, kicks us. No doubt the carefully articulated doctrines of Royce and Baldwin, based on the psychological genesis of the consciousness of self, deserve thorough study; but at present they must be shelved until later. Meanwhile, they do not in the least refute solipsism. For that doctrine admits all the other selves you please, but OBJECTIVISM 75 adds that all can be read as content of one single subject, my own self. Another attempt to refute solipsism avows that it should go further, and narrow down my own mind to the present momentary experience. For we live in time; the past is not, nor the future; the only actual thing is the present event, and I am truly but my present conscious state. How then could the great universe hang from this tiny eyelet ? But we might as well ask, how can the little human eye embrace the sidereal distances ? It is not the smallness of the mind that would deny its supporting power. It may be cut down as far as you please; to a " specious present " of two seconds or to an infinitesimal instant whatever that may be. It is as big as it is, and it is really here; an iron hook holds a twenty-ton mass as well, if the hook is written down a com- pound of invisible atoms. This argument holds no real penalty; like subjectivism's own arguments from damnation, it has no terrors when firmly grasped. Nor need we fear the objection that replies to solipsism by asking: which self do you choose on which to hang the world ? One self is just as good as any other. If one is chosen, the choice must be arbitrary, and therefore an op- ponent may choose a different instance, and join issue; for both cannot be true. This argument is at bottom an appeal to Hegelian dialectic. For if A is described in terms of a relation to B and at the same time B in terms of a relation to A , each description may be true,, and there need be no in- consistency short of that dialectic upon which absolute idealism impales everything. Such dialectic must later be met; the point here is that for any thinker who does not resort to it the mutual relativity of the diverse selves is not an obstacle to solipsism. Any material structure whose parts support one another offers an analogy: e. g., an arch or 76 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY catenary. The truth of no one description interferes with the truth of another. With this we may leave the topic of reducing subjectivism to the absurd. The last criticism of type i which we shall mention, forms a transition to the positive case for objectivism. The sub- jective account seems rather strained, when we try to fit it to past events, unperceived objects, and the like. The ten- millionth decimal of TT, the emotions of a castaway dying alone, can scarcely be equated to any content of my mind. Impressively remote as such instances are, does not sub- jectivism fail to touch their centre, with its formula " they are what you would experience if you were situated thus and so " ? These inaccessible contents now are, or have been; hypothetical phrases, however skillful, never succeed in indicating actual existence. This is true, indeed, urges the realist, with regard to present perceived objects; for this table before me contains much that I shall never know. But the inadequacy of the subjective formula is more ob- vious with instances which our immediate experience does not compass. The crucial example of this sort, is perhaps, at the other extreme of remoteness, viz., the brain itself. Who has perceived his own brain ? Least of all himself; yet he credits it with reality. But, replies the subjectivist, he has thought of it; it is object-of -his- thought. Yes, but his thought depends upon the processes of that very brain ; the brain determines the thought. The brain's reality must then consist in more than being a thought-object. The ex- ternal, independent being of such things must surely be granted. And therewith subjectivism seems at last to break down. The objection is, we believe, the gravest which type i has to meet. In fact, the type here reaches that critical point of which we spoke in Chapter III. The conditional " would-if " OBJECTIVISM 77 may be true, so far as it goes, but how can it go far enough ? There appears to be a definite, positive character about things which does not take the subjective paint. To Berke- ley's question about the meaning of existence, objectivism now answers " existence means that which is beyond the relation to my mind." If subjectivism is to meet this new turn it must be transformed. As water heated to 512 Fahrenheit preserves it existence by adopting a new form, so subjectivism at this its critical point must resort to a novel point of view. And as the liquid becomes a gas, so the substance of subjectivism at this juncture assumes an airier texture. By what device is it enabled to do this ? By re- sorting to a new and subtler category : potentiality. Recall Mill's definition of matter as the " permanent possibility of sensation." Subjectivism says that an actual past event, when not really related to the mind by knowledge, is an in- stance of the potentiality of such relationship; a specific potentiality, too, such that the knowledge, if it comes, must be of a certain definite character. The lonely sailor's pangs, and the uncomputed decimal of IT, are to me definite poten- tial objects. And potentiality, as here used, we must re- member, is a positive concept. It means that certain terms await being known to my mind. They may never be known ; just so the pull of gravitation makes the slate tend to fall from the roof, though it may never actually fall. Perhaps we are told that this possibility would have no sense unless there were minds in whom it might be fulfilled, and there- fore the past existence of this earth as a molten mass could not, when there were no minds, be such a potentiality. That is a misunderstanding of the term " potentiality." The word designates a positive attribute: when certain condi- tions the presence of attentive minds are fulfilled, the cognitive relation will supervene. Such, at least, seems to 78 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY be a usage of the category common enough to justify our appropriation of it for this occasion. Now the actuality of the past event may always be truly described by this attri- bute. To be beyond relation to the mind, is to have poten- tial relation, rather than actual, to the mind. If there is anything about " existence " which " potential " does not plumb, that remainder in turn must be given an intelligible meaning; and that meaning must be stated in terms of actual or possible human experience. The molten earth of a million million years ago, and my own brain-cells now, are truly influences, potent in the stream of our present life, which would guide us, did we seek the information, up to the goal of belief in these objects of thought. Subjectivism does not deny the reality of them. It admits it, but straight- way adds, that they all have the attribute, potential relation to a mind. And let them determine the course of our thought never so stringently, they will hardly by that means escape relationship to our thought. The transcendent, the external, the independent, the remote all these are by the device of " potentiality " attached to the mind. How- ever thin be the thread which binds, it is as genuine a bond as the direct contact of observation. Thus subjectivism pre- serves its truth, as physical energy accomplishes its con- servation, by turning to the potential when threatened with destruction. Subjectivism, then, is not refuted by the case of the actual and unknown object. It is hit, and hit hard ; but though it staggers, it does not fall. Yet it keeps its feet only by cling- ing to an external support. Hereafter it must use the category of potentiality as its crutch; not a convenient instrument of progress, perhaps, but usable for purposes of locomotion. And if the foe says that potentiality is but a lame substitute for actuality, let us remember that since OBJECTIVISM 79 everything that reality means can be expressed by its aid, however awkwardly, subjectivism never fails to meet the demands of the real world for description. It may not to vary the figure always have its cash on hand, but the cheque on the bank of actual sense-experience is good enough. Nevertheless, subjectivism has reached its critical point in that it has to treat with these unknown objects in- directly and by a medium. Another possible way of treating reality has appeared, and a more economical way; for the objectivist need not trouble himself with the clumsy for- mula " possibility of experience." That phrase of course would not be clumsy if it aided us in understanding the character of past history, of our brain-cells, et al.; it is not its length but its infertility, that renders it void. Where we are concerned with objects which we can see and touch, the formula " reality is content of my mind " is in its way useful; for it tells us to get directly in touch with reality. But where the subject-matter of inquiry is beyond vision or thought, " potential " sight and inference is unprofitable. We do not wish to dwell upon a relationship to mind which does not reveal the character of those objects. Subjectivism, in fine, is unable to give any clew to the character of that world which extends far beyond human experience. Really subjective though that world is for subjectivism is true and irrefutable it is not its subjectivity that explains its make-up and behaviour. Another factor has intruded it- self, which must be invoked if we are to do that, viz., the character of the objects as they are in themselves, and neglecting though not denying their relation to minds. To insist upon this other factor is the positive contribu- tion of objectivism. Unable to slay its opponent, it may disentangle itself from the deadly struggle, get upon its own legs, and utter its message. We have now to hear what it says. 80 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY The affirmative argument has been used by many, viz., Kant (Refutation of Idealism, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Miiller, Supp. 21), G. E. Moore (Mind, 1903, 433-453), G. S. Fullerton (Introduction to Philosophy, ch. Ill), H. Liide- mann (Das Erkennen und die Welturtheile, pp. 88-89) an d others. It has two parts: (i) the object is other than the subject, (2) the object is independent of the subject. The first thesis is proved by adoption of the enemy's tac- tics. Give the subjectivist free play; offer no objection when he says that " every object is for a subject." Then reply: a relation may be read in either direction. If, in knowledge, object is a function of the subject, that truth implies the converse: the subject is a function of the object. All cannot be put within the subject, for the subject would then have no relation to anything and there could be no knowledge. Knowledge is of something. " If there is knowledge there must first be something to be known." (H. A. Prichard, Kant's Theory of Knowledge, p. 118). Hence the distinction, the otherness, between subject and object, is patent; the one term is as ultimate as the other. This first argument turns the tables on Berkeley, but it must be noticed that it is a moderate position. It does not overturn them, reducing all to a function of the object. It is not an attempt at monism, as subjectivism was; it meets the extreme by a temperate attitude. Two irreducible kinds of being, it insists there are: minds and objects or things. Being no radical position, it does not have to resort to so elaborate a defence as the two premises of subjectivism; it does not need to raise the question of " internal " or " external " relations. For if relations are internal, then subject is as much dependent on object, as object upon sub- ject, and if they are external, then object and subject are independent. The whole point of the plea is for dualism; OBJECTIVISM 8 1 it insists upon numerical distinction between subject and object. The second purpose is to prove the independence of the object which has generally been understood to mean that objects exist when or where there is no subject aware of them. That this is so, seems clear enough: science and common sense are based upon the belief in past history of the earth, unknown stars, and all such instances as we noticed under the last objection to subjectivism. Objects were before we knew them, and they endure through the interstices of our consciousness. It is not so much that this unknown existence is demonstrated, as that we dare not doubt it. It cannot be proved that the tree in the forest remains when no one sees it; that it does not remain, is not self-contradictory. It does not contradict anything that we observe, that the tree should vanish when we cease to be aware of it. It is simply that it would do violence to our assumption of the uniformity of Nature, the regularity of causation, and other fundamental axioms dear to the heart of reason. These axioms are, as our logic text-books teach us, incapable of demonstration, and consequently the falsity of what goes against them is incapable of demonstration. And as they are in this sense dogmatic, so is our belief in the reality of unknown objects dogmatic. Of course this does not mean that it is mistaken, or even doubtful. Objectivism is quite right in declaring the independence of many objects upon mind, in the sense that the former exist in the absence of any actual cognitive relation to the latter. But this sort of independence is not inconsistent with the truth of subjectivism: that we have already seen. The les- son which it really reads to its rival is that we cannot tell by means of the subjectivist formula what objects do perdure, or did precede our minds, and what the character of those 82 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY objects is or was. This is not a matter of independence, but of inability to answer a certain question, to satisfy search for information. When, then, the objectivist speaks of the independence of external things upon my consciousness, he cannot, if he is correctly interpreted, be refuted. And here we must notice an attempted rebuttal of his thesis which really shows the unassailable nature of that thesis. It runs somewhat as follows: objects cannot be inde- pendent of the subject, or the subject's idea. For if they could, then the relation between the nature of the object and the content of our idea of it would be one of indifference. The " mental state " that would go with the perception of a wild bull might just as well be the same as the one appro- priate to a glass of milk. If the object does not depend upon the idea, then the idea is never a sure indication of the object. But it is. Hence, etc. (Royce, World and Individual, I, pp. 134-136).' Of course the argument proves only that in correct knowl- edge, and granting already two things, object and idea, the former is determined by the latter. This assumption of correct knowledge however is equivalent to the assumption of an instance where object and idea correspond (whatever that may mean). Given correspondence, then each must determine the other. But the realist's position is that there need not be correct knowledge wherever there is an object. There may be error, or ignorance, or total absence of aware- ness. The alleged refutation of realism assumes the one particular instance where alone realism would grant the point, and argues from this to other instances where it would not grant the assumption. The fallacy here seems to be the converse fallacy of accident. Such in outline is the case for objectivism. It is now our task to appraise the respective merits of the two first types. OBJECTIVISM 83 It has so far seemed that they may very well both be true, if properly defined; but the battle between them has been, and today is, severe, and carried out with exquisite refine- ments not yet mentioned. Not easily could our brief adjudi- cation of their claims, as above set forth, be accepted by the present-day partisan. We must make up our minds to a more penetrating analysis of the quarrel. And this will repay us the more, because out of the bitter antagonism has grown a third type, whose function as peacemaker entitles it to a distinct place among the ever-recurring philosophical reforms. Our next topic is then the balancing of the first two and the consequent third type. CHAPTER V THE SOLVENT: PURE EXPERIENCE THE revolt of objectivism against the subjective phi- losophy leads to a reaction on the part of the latter, and this to a new reaction against the subjectivist, and so on indefinitely. The motives of revolt and reaction are both emotional and intellectual. Realism sees perfectly well that its rival's claim to reduce all to spirit is inconsequential. The kind of spirit into which the world turns when it is seen to be " content of mind " has as little of the spirituality for which religion yearns, as has that fine matter into which the materialist analyzes the soul. Nor does subjectivism gratify the in- stinct for self -expansion; am I any the greater because the world is content of my consciousness ? As well say that an angle of 30 becomes greater when it includes within its sides the sun and moon. And as for those fleeting moments of reverie when all the world is felt to be within me, they dis- solve before the activities of living and the scientific atti- tude; they may well be pathological. Subjectivism has not fulfilled its promise to the instincts of man. Nor has it done better for philosophy's age-long quarrels. We have seen that it solves no antinomies. On the contrary, it has added new difficulties. It has unearthed a new realm within phi- losophy; a realm whose dissensions are no less than those of the other parts viz., theory of knowledge; and one ap- parently disconnected with the outer world, the universe which religion contemplates and science investigates. Away 84 THE SOLVENT: PURE EXPERIENCE 85 with this specious and self-centred attitude! Let us betake ourselves to the open air where reside the real external objects. Realism studies not the self but the world. Sub- jectivism's map is but a thin line drawn across the paper; realism will fill in specific outlines, colours, contours, details that make it profitable. Such we may suppose are the objectivisms feelings. On the other hand, subjectivism sees quite as clearly that objectivism has garnered no more than itself, for the re- ligious needs. Where is the realistic proof (or even disproof) of God, or of any potent spirit ? Externality is not good enough to worship. Does realism's formula " independent and external to mind " contain a single germ of fruitfulness more than subjectivism's ? As the latter gave us no spirit that was worth taking, so this new phrase reveals no char- acter of that external world worth knowing. Is the external more fitted for scientific investigation than the internal object ? More interesting ? More stimulating to the spirit of research ? Not in the slightest degree. One may be a good scientist and at the same time a subjectivist: of Poincare, Pearson, Mach, and other philosophical scientists of our day, how many are realists ? And why is not the history of a mind's contents as interesting as the history of an external world ? In truth, it is not the question " of what is it the history ? " but " what are the events of that history ? " that furnishes the interest. And realism gives no clew to these events; it is every whit as formal and unproductive as its correlative type. In respect to such motives and needs, the balance seems to be pretty even. And indeed the same is true of the intel- lectual grounds of these types: there is a perfect deadlock between the arguments. This we have now to make plain. 86 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY Objectivism forever repeats the accusation that subjec- tivism overlooks the distinction between the mental and the external ; subjectivism forever replies that there is a deeper unity beneath the distinction. The one distinguishes within an identity, the other identifies through the distinction. Granting, perhaps, that all is at last reduced to mental content, realism points out that this content still implies an objective reference. To distinguish illusion or fancy from reality, we must admit that some contents, subjective though they are, at least refer to an external object, while others have no such reference. This object as it is in itself is the reality; it must be distinguished from the object as it appears to us, i. e., the content-of-the-mind. Our knowl- edge, then, does not directly touch objects as they are in themselves ; we have before us only mental content. Things themselves are not presented but represented; and thus arise the " representative " theory of knowledge and the doctrine of the thing-in-itself. That theory is but the con- sequence of the distinction between content-of-mind and external reality. And encouraged by this creation, objec- tivism seeks out new arguments from those ambiguous phenomena, the secondary qualities, from colour-blindness, from memory, from illusions, etc. These all emphasize the difference between subject and object. Smells, tastes, sounds and colours are not in the objects themselves. They might be; there is no contradiction in it, but the evidence of science makes the supposition unnecessary. The colour- blind man sees gray where there is red. We remember the date of our graduation from school but the event is no longer, like the memory, a present fact. Sometimes too we remember what never was. And we see the moon colossal on the horizon, the fly on the window as a bird in the dis- tance, and in many other ways falsely perceive. All these THE SOLVENT: PURE EXPERIENCE 87 cases point to the disparity of our mental state with the reality. Perhaps a more striking one is that suggested by Professor Pearson's note (Grammar of Science, 3d ed., p. 394). If a man per impossible flew away from the earth with a velocity exceeding that of light, he would see events on earth transpiring backward. This picture certainly would not be his own imagination, but a deliverance of vision. Yet it could not be called anything but subjective; for time is irrevocable. Must the subjectivist not then admit that the representative theory of knowledge is correct, and objectivism justified ? Subjectivism, however, finds it easy to reduce this differ- ence to the absurd. If the mind and its object are really distinct, you have two ultimate substances, even as had the Cartesians and the Occasionalists, and the other schools of the seventeenth-century philosophy ; and we know what per- plexities, disagreements, insoluble problems they got into. (This is rather a favourite argument today, by the way, with non-sub jectivists ; abolish the Cartesian dualism!) How can two so disparate things as res cogitans and res extensa affect each other as in voluntary movement of the arm or if they do not so, how is it they happen to be parallel ? The efforts of Spinoza and Leibnitz and their successors up to the present tune, to solve these difficult questions, have not resulted in any consensus. Above all, how can we explain knowledge, if objects are never directly present to consciousness ? Sooner or later we must attain the objects, or skepticism results. If we never have the objects themselves, how should we know that what we do have our thoughts, our sense-data are different from the objects ? Reason at least must be capable of knowing the things as they are in themselves. If we do not admit this, then the " thing-in-itself " becomes a meaningless 88 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY form of words. No: it is fatal to knowledge, to insist on thoroughgoing distinction between the content of my mind and the object it knows. Sometimes at least the two must coincide. The distinction must not exclude identity. All the distinctions, in fact, urged by dualism may be admitted; but along with them must go that immediate union of mind and its object without which there could be no knowledge at all. But do not the divergences preclude the identity between subjective state and objective fact ? No, we answer: the same colour so far as we can see may be found in two oranges, the same name may belong to two different men. There is nothing, short of dialectical arguments which we shall later consider, to show a priori that two things may not be identical in some ways and at the same time different in other ways. As two circles can intersect in part, so may the tree which I see be in part coincident with the image of it which I entertain. The shape of it may be identical in both instances, while the estimated distance from me is not the true distance, and while the colour of the leaves is but a product of my sense-organs. The dualities which the repre- sentative theory insists upon need not rule out the identity for which a direct, presentative theory stands. And even the dualities may be brought under the subjective formula. We need only to distinguish between one kind of mental content and another kind. In correct perception or thought or memory, we may say that the object is the content pres- ent here and now in the mind; in illusions, imaginations, and the like, we may say that the real object is a species of potential content of the mind : that which we should see if we but patiently awaited evidence. How this last is put, depends upon one's theory of error. Subjectivism may always return to its original device of employing potential- THE SOLVENT: PURE EXPERIENCE 89 ity. The distinction between object and mental state, upon which objectivism justly insists, becomes only a distinction between kinds of mental content. It may be described as that between what we perceive and what we infer for the inferred is what would be perceived by a perfect observer; or it may be straightway put in terms of actual and poten- tial. But ever the distinction is brought within the mind, and the exclusion of objects from mind is annulled. If the advantage does not, from the epistemological point of view, incline to either, no more does it from the meta- physical side. Subjectivism could not give any indication as to the contours of reality; it found its critical point in that very conception, reality, which it would define. For sub- jectivism, reducing external objects always to potentially mental objects, left untouched just that element of actuality upon which its opponent most insisted. Taxed with doing so, the subjectivist returned to the charge with the same weapons, and reduced this residue in turn to a further poten- tial object-of-mind; and indeed, however often he was taxed with inadequacy, he would once more make up the deficit in the same way. Ever something more lies before him, and as fast as he puts his net over it, still something more arises. Yet never is anything precisely named which cannot be brought under his formula. And the objectivist is in a like situation. He cannot explain how the two dif- ferent ultimate entities, object and idea, res extensa and res cogitans, come to fuse in direct knowledge. He must always find some distinction between idea and object else it will not be true that the one knows the other. If knowledge is bare identity of the two, it is no relation at all; it will not be I-knowing-the-object, but just I or just the object. And he can always find some distinction, for doubtless perfect union of idea and thing is never by man obtained. Yet he will 90 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY again be pointed to the identity of idea and object with- out which there could be no knowledge. As the subjec- tivist's critical point was the difference between idea and fact, so the objectivisms is the fusion, the identity, of them. Either when confronted with the critical attribute can de- clare that his own description may be added; but he can- not make his description destroy the truth of the other or account for it. Again the balance remains even between these deadly rivals. The issue, at bottom, centres around the sameness and the difference of the mind's contents and the real object. Both attributes are correct descriptions. But if the advocate of either one would deny the positive contention of the other, he is open to refutation. And it is because, owing to the in- herent partisanship of human nature, each antagonist does just this, that his doctrine must be followed by a revolt to the other side, which revolt must for the same reason lead to a counter-revolt, and so on. Thus the quarrel becomes self- perpetuating: it leads to an endless tilt. The resulting deadlock is exactly what we find in the philosophical discussions of our time. But this deadlock is not the whole of the phenomenon. Each view, however right in its positive contention, is, as James used to say, " thin "; it is infertile to explain any specific fact of the universe. At its critical point it becomes gaseous. Neither sheds any light upon those problems which concern man's more lasting interests; neither min- isters to those practical and emotional motives which secretly urge its advocate to espouse its cause. As we shall learn, when all the evidence from the study of the various types is in, these two traits of infertility and exclusive- ness are closely related; at present we only note their influence. THE SOLVENT: PURE EXPERIENCE 91 Our diagnosis is confirmed by the fact that no one, so far as we know, whether subjectivist or objectivist, has ever got beyond that issue itself to tell us anything that it involves about the structure and functioning of the real world. The original philosophical problem, which alone gave justifica- tion and significance to our whole inquiry, has disappeared from view. But this analysis will of course hardly be convincing to those who have staked their philosophical life upon one side of this issue. Probably the hardened epistemologist will accuse us of treating the whole affair too flippantly. We have made it a formal a priori sort of thing, whereas he will declare it to be an empirical question, soluble only by the " living detail " of fact. Of course neither side has yet triumphed, for there is no general consensus; but wait until more empirical evidence is collected! Unfortunately, we reply, we have waited some two thousand years; from the time of Protagoras until now. And as for empirical argu- ments, we admit that we know of none that have not been already mentioned. But further, according to the very nature of the problem, it seems that no evidence drawn from the specific properties of objects could be decisive. For it is not the question whether objects are long, or short, round, permanent, effective, or otherwise concretely qualified, but whether any of these attributes imply externality or inter- nality to the mind. The issue itself is, we must conclude, quite formal and barren. To those who are sincerely interested in the philosophical problem, the situation cannot be other than intolerable. Of course we may get used to anything as we are used to dis- ease and death; and one may say, why fret about the inevitable ? But men do endeavour to diminish the death- rate and to prevent sickness; and we are confronted by a 92 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY somewhat analogous task. We need not rehearse the motives which have led to our undertaking. Enough that some outlet must be discovered. Short of skepticism, there seem to be two possible escapes. One might either combine these two views or reject both, adopting some third view which has no dualism. The syn- thetic method we shall take up later; we now consider the simplifying mode of solution. It has been offered, not many decades since, as the one way out of the modern impasse. It goes by the name of the " Philosophy of Pure Expe- rience." This type is quite modern, for it is essentially a reform wherein philosophy has become self-conscious. It was offered by Avenarius and others with the avowed object of abolishing the above epistemological controversies (cf. Der Menschliche Weltbegriff, p. i). To the whole system of this difficult writer we do not attempt tg be just; a certain influential current which is found in it is our sole concern. This current has spread rapidly, combining in other writers with other currents, yet retaining a dominant role: as for instance in the writings of Professors Ward, James, Dewey, Petzoldt, and Mach. Roughly, it is the doctrine that the dualism of inner-outer, or subject-object, is philosophi- cally unjustified. Ultimately, reality is neither; it is " experience." Practical and emotional motives for this view are not obvious. The reason is that it tends, as we shall see, to obliterate distinctions. The self, matter, past history of a planet, men's thoughts all these are melted down, fused, into the one broth of " experience." The difficulties of dualism are to be avoided by our denying that the dualism is real; all is of one substance, " experience." Now practi- cal and affective motives use distinctions of good and bad; they seek specific gains and are directed towards specific THE SOLVENT: PURE EXPERIENCE 93 objects. The concept " pure experience " furnishes by its own power no clews to guide our discrimination; it does not indicate the relative advantage of this or that part of reality. It leaves that to the unfolding of experience in our particular lives; and doubtless rightly. But in thus leaving it, the concept shows its indifference to all particular instincts. It holds out no promise to the religious impulse, to the search for happiness, the instinct for self -expansion, the spirit of scientific research; whatever we find we find, and all alike are to be dubbed experience. It is as if it said " Experience is what you find when you consult your experience "; which amounts to no more than the command " Search! " The grounds of this third type are, as far as we can ascertain, wholly theoretical. We proceed, then, to define and examine those grounds. In the title " pure experience," the word " pure " indicates that reality in the last analysis is neither subjective nor objective. " Pure " is an eliminating term. However posi- tive reality still may be, its material is not to be described by any other universal characteristic than just " expe- rience." Its realistic opponents are wont to say that this last word carries a subjective sense; adherents of the view deny it. The doctrine resembles subjectivism, however, in one respect; it accepts implicitly what we have called the principle of internal relations. A thing, a mind, a quality, is to be estimated in the light of the context in which it lies; according to a rather favourite phrase, in the " warp and woof of experience." Since all the parts and particulars of this great garment of experience are thus thoroughly inter- penetrating, there can be no realities which are not some- how essentially related to that section of experience which is called mind. In this sense, to be sure, everything is subjec- tive. But the experience-type does not deem this statement 94 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY any more fundamental than its converse, that minds are essentially related to their objects; it would be as true to call it an objective as a subjective type. In point of fact neither appellation is true, for it regards each of our first two systems as one-sided and therefore false. Since all things are interrelated, any part or element is as such unreal; an abstraction from the continuous mass, not more actual than is the exact cubic foot of water in the rushing stream. Neither alternative then is correct; the present view, in- stead of combining both, tends to look exclusively at their mutual rebuttals and therefore cuts under both. Reality is not so much an amalgam of subject and object, preserving both, as a tertium quid, a matrix out of which either may be carved. And the matrix is neither one nor the other, but "nurein drittes" (Avenarius, Der Menschliche Weltbegriff, p. 2). Or we may say that subject and object are knots in the tree of reality, not separable, not independent, not ulti- mate: who can take the knot out of the living tree? (Cf. Avenarius, op. cit., p. 65, fine print; also p. 79, and p. 84. The type is then emphatically monistic; a pantheism wherein God is replaced by Experience. The monism is con- sciously adopted as a preventive of the Cartesian dualism and its attendant difficulties. (Cf. Ward's Naturalism and Agnosticism, ist ed., vol. II, part IV, lect. 14.) Its motive is thus an exclusive one. It does not allow the bifurcation of experience into object and subject to develop freely, and then find a means of synthesizing them. It precludes the bifurcation. Resembling absolute idealism in its organic conception of reality, it differs therefrom in not accepting this particular differentiation or including its two products. Hereby it tends to look like a blank, colourless affair, a negation, a worship of some mystical entity. But let us see. THE SOLVENT: PURE EXPERIENCE 95 Perhaps the initial difficulty of comprehending the position lies in our inveterate tendency to interpret the word " expe- rience " straightway into either " somebody's mental state " or " objects," physical or conceptual. Such meaning is however read in, not actually present in the facts. The interpreter is like a real estate agent who looks upon a piece of land as of so much financial value and cannot naively see it as just land. One of the defenders of the experience- philosophy thus meets the difficulty. " First of all, it will be asked: 'If experience has not conscious existence, if it be not partly made of " consciousness," of what then is it made ? Matter we know, and thought we know, but neutral and simple "pure experience" is something we know not at all. Say what it consists of, for it must consist of something or be willing to give it up ! ' " To this challenge the reply is easy. Although for fluency's sake I myself spoke early in this article of a stuff of pure experience, I have now to say that there is no general stuff of which experience at large is made. There are as many stuffs as there are ' natures ' in the things experienced. If you ask what any one bit of pure experience is made of, the answer is always the same : ' it is made of that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or what not.' Shadworth Hodgson's analysis here leaves nothing to be desired. Experience is only a col- lective name for all these sensible natures, and save for time and space (and, if you like, for ' being ') there appears no universal element of which all things are made." (James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 26-27.) As described by the above extract, the philosophy of ex- perience seems to mean two things, a negative and a posi- tive. The positive part consists of the inculcation of empiricism. To find out what reality is, consult it; and 96 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY describe it as it offers itself in experience. This is that part of the doctrine which is contributed by the second word of its title. On this side, the doctrine is fitly named Radical Empiricism ; it is not directed primarily against objectivism or subjectivism, but is a general plan or method of phi- losophizing. Such a plan, chronologically associated with the remainder of the present type, is from a logical, analyti- cal point of view quite distinct therefrom. The negative side, which bears upon the problems raised by our first two types, is alone here pertinent. Consequently we dismiss the radical-empiricism motive for the present, promising to take it up in a later chapter (Ch. VIII). Our sole concern now is with the first word of the title; the meaning of " pure." As to that, the case seems clear. " Inner " experience is a fiction. The hypothesis of " introjection," which believes in the inner feeling as over against the outer world, is a fallacious addition of philosophers. Not both inner and outer, but neither that is the supposition we are to make, which will purge away the corruptions of philosophy. " The term ' introjection ' we owe to a brilliant thinker but re- cently taken from us, the late Richard Avenarius of Zurich. The hypothesis to which it refers is familiar enough and as old apparently as human speech; it is substantially what Professor Tylor has called animism. But to Avenarius be- longs the merit of making the epistemological bearings of the primitive doctrine clearer than they were before. The essence of introjection consists in applying to the immediate experience of my fellow creatures conceptions which have no counterpart in my own. I find myself in direct relation with my environment and only what I find for myself can I logically assume for another. But of another, common thought and language lead me to assume not merely that his experience is distinct from mine, but that it is in him in THE SOLVENT: PURE EXPERIENCE 97 the form of sensations, perceptions, and other ' internal states.' Of the seen in my environment I say there is a per- ception in him. Thus while my environment is an external world for me, his experience is for me an internal world in him. This is introjection. And since I am led to apply this conception to all my fellow creatures and it is applied by all my fellow men to me, I naturally apply it also to myself. Thus it comes about that instead of construing others' experience exactly and precisely on lines of our own the duality of subject and object we are induced to miscon- strue our own experience on the lines of a false but highly plausible assumption as to others' experience, which actually contradicts our own. To this contradiction, latent in com- mon thought and language, we may fairly attribute the impasse to which the problem of external perception has been reduced." (J. Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, ist ed., vol. II, p. 172). As this passage illustrates, the type in question directs most of its effort against subjectivism ; but that is probably due to the conditions of the present day. Any external object unexperienced and in no way connected with expe- rience would doubtless be denied as sternly as the shut-in feeling of our fellow men. For if this were not so, there would be no justice in their use of the word " experience " rather than the word " object " or " thing " or " reality." And we have now to see that this exclusion of introjection does not in the least solve the epistemological puzzle, nor even provide a guiding thread for the discovery of a solu- tion of that or any other philosophical problem. It does not succeed in abolishing the dualism of inner vs. outer, and has no more fertility than subjectivism or objectivism had. Like them it has its critical point, viz., the duality: like them it is perfectly true and unfruitful. 98 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY As regards the " fallacy of introjection," it is easy to see that however neutrally we define " feeling " or " idea " or other alleged mental state, it remains distinct in kind from x an apple, or a stick, or other object. Experience itself leads us to distinguish objects into two classes. When James says that consciousness is but " a kind of external relation (be- tween objects) and does not denote a special stuff or way of being " (ibid., p. 25), he admits the duality. The " external relation " is unique, and cannot be reduced to the objects. They are not this relation; the two are forever distinct; of what use to call the distinction one of relation rather than one of stuff ? It leads only to a rephrasing of all the episte- mological queries. The " soul " of animism, the " inner state " of introjection, are no more different from bodies than the " external relation " of the empiricist. Here is the same oversight that attended subjectivism, when it thought to reduce all matter to spirit. The puzzle remains, how this sort of external relation can do the things which conscious- ness does, and suffer the incursions of physical forces in short, the old problems of interaction and parallelism come up once more. Monism cannot wipe out dualism; it can do no more than provide a comprehensive rubric. Did Spi- noza answer the puzzles about body and mind by calling them two aspects of one substance ? Have Avenarius, Ward, James, et al., accounted for the differentiation by saying that the species belong to one genus ? " Pure experience " if it is to have philosophic value, must either explain how the primitive reality gets split up into two sorts, or must show that there are not really two sorts. It does, and can do, neither of these. It can only say " don't ask and you won't get into trouble." Sometimes indeed it appears to be trying to justify this negative attitude. " Let the reader arrest himself in the act of reading this article THE SOLVENT: PURE EXPERIENCE 99 now. Now this is a pure experience, or datum, a mere that or content of fact. ' Reading ' simply is, is there; and whether there for some one's consciousness, or there for physical nature, is a question not yet put. At the moment it is there for neither ..." (James, Essays in Radical Em- piricism, pp. 145-146). If this is meant to defend the monism of " pure experience " against the dualism of subject-object, is it not the old mistake, committed in such slogans as " back to nature " or " the simple life " ? Of all men, philosophers ought to know better, for none have tried so often to return to naivete, and have so often re- traced the same weary round. More honest, it seems, is either subjectivism or objectivism, with its frank accept- ance of a difficult task. As to the fertility, it is no more suggestive of the outlines of reality to call it pure experience, than to call it mental or external. Not merely this, moreover; it works positively against the search for such an outline. For " experience " is a concept in unstable equilibrium. It tries to avoid the tilt by balancing in the centre; but its point is too minute. It inevitably falls over to one side or the other; it is inter- preted in an objective or subjective sense as the recent discussions show. Professor Ward tends to the idealistic side, James and Dewey on the whole to the realistic. The controversy between subjectivism and objectivism will then break out anew. It is the ancient moral lesson: if you abstain from doing evil by mere inaction, your last state will be worse than your first. Historically the inefficacy of the doctrine is rather obvious. So far as we know, no advo- cate of this type (excepting the theist, Professor Ward) has gone beyond it to map out the universe, to indicate the specific structure of the real world. The irony of life is evi- dent here; the philosophy which talks loudest of experience 100 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY and empiricism, has presented to us the abstractest and vaguest of all terms; most devoted to experience, it has learned less from experience than either subjectivism or objectivism. For experience is specific, and the philosophy of experience, so far as it keeps its purity, gives no specific information about the universe. Its critical point, consequently, is sooner reached than that of the first two types. Subjectivism's formula applied categorically to a large portion of reality, and hypothetically to the remainder; and its meaning, though limited, was definite. Objectivism's principle applied everywhere; but it was impotent to account for the contact of subject and object in knowledge. If less precise than the first type because it reduced the world to no one particular kind of being it was at least more precise than our third type with its lack of any particular formula. There can be no term more limitless in scope than " experience "; there can be no term less suggestive of the characters of reality. The critical point of the experience-philosophy is the concretions, subject and object. It is, no doubt, a wiser philosophy than the other two, for it has learned to stand outside the combat and see more broadly; but its wisdom is only that of dis- illusionment, since it does not lead to any positive con- clusion. Abjuring epistemology, it is itself concerned with nothing else. And, with its rigorous diet of pure experience, it has reduced philosophy to the skinniest possible outline. Need we point out that this extreme of unproductiveness is due to the same faults which ruined the other two types ? The experience-system is, in spite of good resolutions toward empiricism, actually more exclusive than either of them. For fear of insoluble puzzles, it will not admit either subject or object to ultimate reality. And in order to escape the one-sidedness of these two, it adopts a watchword so exhaus- THE SOLVENT: PURE EXPERIENCE IOI * tive as to have lost clear meaning, and with it the power of imparting information. We have nowhere said that the experience- view utters a lie. There is perhaps not a word of untruth in all its writings, except where it denies its rivals. But it is the very certainty of its message that renders it futile; for its pronouncement that all is experience is irrel- evant to any description whatsoever of the constitution of that experience. Be it understood, however, that we are here appraising the type as regards its contribution to the solution of our first issue; as an empirical attitude toward reality in general we shall consider it in Chapter VIII. At this point we must meet an accusation which we have perhaps put off too long; a formal one, we think, but a favourite with workers upon these topics. What we have written concerning " pure experience " will presumably arouse the criticism, that we have not defined our terms with sufficient care. Of our treatment of subjectivism, indeed, and of objectivism as well, the same indictment is only too easy. We have deferred it until now, because it is so much more obvious with that term of infinite connotation " expe- rience." One who agrees with the views here defended if there be one is contented, and will not wish to burrow into niceties of meaning; but to a hostile critic in the field of philosophy the objection always lies at hand, that a deeper analysis of the terms used would reverse the deci- sion. This is peculiarly the case in that territory, because the object-matter is not a hard material thing that stays for confirmation of one's testimony: reexamination will almost always add something new, or push the old into the background of attention. And consequently the objection is sound enough as far as it goes. It is likely that no one has examined any philosophical concept with adequate rigour; 102 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY that is, in fact, one of the reasons mentioned in Chapter II for the disagreements of investigators. Yet it is often need- less to carry analysis beyond a certain point; for we believe what we seem clearly to see. That 2 + 3 = 5 we do not doubt; but no one probably has traced all the foundations of this truth, and it is precisely when the mathematicians begin to do so that the hue of uncertainty and disagreement first appears on their clear-cut horizon. So simple a truth simple because abstract is its own guarantee; and the most we can hope for, in the philosophical field, is to ap- proach the directness and simplicity of elementary arith- metic. So it is with subjectivism, objectivism, " experience " and all other types yet to be examined. We give as much elucidation of their concepts as seems sufficient to our pur- pose of understanding their main drift. Many refinements might be added; some of them, no doubt, suggestive and fundamental, and they would lend a certain weight to our argument. But when we seem to ourselves to see certain truths about these types so clearly that no refinements, within a reasonable doubt, would refute them even as no analysis is likely to give the lie to my vision of this paper or addition of 2 and 3 then we cannot but forego the im- pressiveness of the splitting-up process, and exhibit those truths. Of course this does not mean that we should never pursue analysis further than is convenient. On the contrary, we should do so as much as possible. But we cannot refuse, of course, to believe at all, because mistakes may later be detected. It is very good to wish to " get down to funda- mentals," but that desire should not lead us to deny the verities we feel compelled to accept. One must draw the line somewhere in the process of analysis; and we have drawn it where it seemed to us reasonable, knowing that indisputable proof is practically impossible. THE SOLVENT: PURE EXPERIENCE 103 But to return: many thinkers have felt the barrenness of the subjective-objective issue, and have judged the solution offered by this third type to be negative. To such the other alternative we mentioned above is all that remains. They must choose a more synthetic way; a doctrine which in- cludes both sides. At the same time, the spirit of partisan- ship, dissatisfied with the negative result of the impartial experience-theory, is likely to revive. Let them then espouse a philosophy which will combine the truths of sub- jectivism and its rival, yet will define one of these in a more fertile way, so as to give it a more fundamental part than the other. Which one ? we may ask. There is likely to occur, historically, a choice first of one and then of the other; viz., first a philosophy which enlarges its conception of the sub- ject to include the elements claimed by objectivism, and second, one which does the same for the object. We shall follow this order; for reasons expounded in the " histories of philosophy " events did hi fact so transpire. The subjectively weighted combination would naturally proceed as follows : (i) A genuine distinction must be evolved out of subjec- tivism whereby to differentiate the real from the illusory; that is, the self of that view must be enlarged. It will con- sequently not be the private self of some particular mind, but a Great or Universal Self. The real object will here be the presentation to the Great Mind; the illusory, the pre- sentation merely to the private mind. Thus the enlarg- ment or fertilization of subjectivism by objectivism leads to a new concept. And in this type, the object must, as we just said, be really included, in order to prevent the endless seesaw. This means that the characters of objects must really be accounted for, deduced out of the necessary attri- butes of the Great Self. That is, the principal categories of 104 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY the objective world must be derived by immanent logic from the concept of that Self. (2) The dualism of objective realism is thus retained ; the difference between object and subject is permitted along- side the sameness, in that it is grounded in the difference between the private self and the Great Self. Whereas objectivism's critical point was the cognitive relation, this new type demies that relation by sameness between the con- tents of this Great Mind and the object. (3) The positive doctrine of " pure experience " is also retained, inasmuch as it is alleged that there is nothing in the whole universe which is not object of sentience i. e., some function of experience. But as the term " experience " has been already seen to be one of the vaguest in the phil- osophical vocabulary, there is little importance in this third trait. By virtue of its logical inheritance, we may fitly call this view Great Subjectivism ; it is today usually known as idealism. It forms a much more complicated and interesting type than any of the above three, and must be examined in a separate chapter. CHAPTER VI GREAT SUBJECTIVISM THE type here presented is usually called idealism : we have already stated why the heading of this chapter seems an apter title. But there are other reasons also. " Idealism " has been applied to many kinds of system, differing as fundamentally as Plato's, Berkeley's, Kant's, Herbart's, and Hegel's. We are to set forth a doctrine which approximates the Kantian and post-Kantian ones, before Hegel; a doctrine whose unique and unmistakable influence upon thought, and whose intrinsic beauty, render it deserv- ing of a distinguishing name. Since it differs down to its very roots in spite of surface resemblances from the objective rationalism of Plato, the subjectivism of Berkeley, the psychological realism of Herbart, and the absolutism of Hegel, it is hardly just to use an official designation whose connotations are shared by all of these. Occasionally, how- ever, for brevity, we may be permitted to retain the older usage. In a sense this type is subjective, but so transformed and augmented as to be upon a level of its own. It would re- form the procedure of philosophy by denying reality to objects independent of mind; it alleges that reality, con- sidered as something complete by itself and apart from a mind that knows it, is full of insoluble puzzles and contra- dictions, but that these disappear when reality is treated as not something by itself, but solely for mind. So far it goes with subjectivism ; but it has learned the lesson read to that 106 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY view by objectivism, and has forged a new weapon unknown to the subjectivist. If the latter could not pass beyond the line between present data and unknown objects, without the help of the crutch potentiality, idealism has longer and stronger legs. It needs no such adventitious concept as " permanent possibility "; it walks about naturally among the remotest actualities. For it uses mind to mean not only the private self but the Great Self or Subject; a Universal Mind to whom all things are present, and whose content they are. External real objects, while beyond the private consciousness, yours or mine, are the content of that uni- versal one. To be content of that mind is indeed to be real; to be content of a private mind alone, is to be only idea. Idealism is therefore truly a synthesis of the first two types. It keeps the mind of subjectivism and provides for the ex- ternal reality of objectivism by the adjective " universal." The hostility of the two is overcome by peaceful wedlock; but the subjectivist factor is the male, for it is his name that is legally adopted, and he bears, as a rule, the brunt of the attacks. Great subjectivism escapes the danger of one- sidedness to which subjectivism seemed liable, since it can- not be accused of solipsism, or of denying dualistic realism; and idealists are fond of refuting solipsism as well as mere subjectivism. Herein, to be sure, they are wrong, for we have seen neither view to be erroneous; yet idealism is no doubt a more adequate view than either of them. Whereas subjectivism seemed to deny its counterpart, objectivism, idealism does not even seem to do so. It rather guarantees its truth. From the attribute of universality which it bestows upon mind, idealism deduces the concept of the ex- ternal object. Thus it passes uninjured that point where subjectivism was maimed, and had to resort to a crutch. Idealism may be likened to the chemical formula of a sub- GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 107 stance, which explains the substance's properties, even when it has passed its critical point. More than this, however, idealism deduces the principal relations which objects bear to one another, i. e., the categories. In short, it claims to be a. fertile view. It furnishes, as neither subjectivism nor objectivism did, a conception which accounts for something of the character of the world; space, time, causation, num- ber, quantity, etc. In this it is altogether upon a higher plane. It is no longer merely formal, like those simpler types. If they are one-dimensional, with their simple linear attributes of the subjective or the objective, idealism is two- dimensional, with its double characterization of mentality and universality. And being two-dimensional it makes possible a plan or map of the world, a philosophic system with some wealth of content; which neither subjectivism nor dualistic realism were able of themselves to furnish. In fact this productiveness is the keynote of idealism, its test and proof. It is precisely upon its ability to account for objects and their chief relations, that idealism bases its claim of truth. Such was the spirit of Kant's Transcenden- tal Deduction; such is the soul of the deductions of cate- gories presented today by the idealists Natorp,Miinsterberg, Royce, Baldwin, and others. And in examining the creden- tials of this system, consequently, it is upon this aspect that we must fix our attention. The same peculiarity of idealism stands out when we com- pare it with another and allied system, that of absolutism (often called absolute idealism). This latter view, of which the Hegelian and certain recent English systems are ex- amples, certainly agrees with idealism as regards the su- premacy of mind; but not only does it reach that mind by a different route, but also the function of mind differs widely in the two systems. For absolutism, mind is the single 108 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY all-inclusive whole; for idealism, mind is not the whole so much as the head of the universe. It is one factor among others, dominating the rest, ordering and arranging it, creating out of it a cosmos; but it is not the whole which shines through and is identically each and every part. The absolutist has his Universal Mind, but he does not generate out of it the special characters and relations that appear in the world. And that is just what the idealist does. For him the universal is an asymmetrical affair: the centre of gravity lies on one side of it, the side of mind. For the absolutist the whole is symmetrical. No one aspect or part is intrinsically more significant than any other; it becomes so only by being more inclusive. Degree of reality is degree of approximation to the whole. Idealism is subjectivism with the subject no longer a passive recipient or container, but transformed into an active orderer, a creator of laws and forms, by its own inherent productiveness. That is why for the idealist the categories are developed out of the activity of the Universal Mind, for absolutism as with Hegel out of one another in ever increasing breadth until the whole is attained. Thus idealism, though a synthesis of subjectivism and objectivism, remains only a partial synthesis, for its material, the content of its mind, is still other than that mind itself: something which it works upon; while ab- solutism is a complete synthesis, identifying mind with the unity of content and form. The correctness of our descrip- tion may be seen by comparison of recent idealistic systems (those of Cohen, Natorp, Cassirer, Rickert, Windelband, Miinsterberg, Royce*) with the absolutism of Bosanquet and Bradley. For the former group would with the pos- sible exception of Royce refuse to accept the system of the * In his later volumes, The World and the Individual, and Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, vol. I, pp. 67-135. GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 1 09 latter pair; and conversely. And accordingly we shall have to treat absolute idealism as a different type. Some of our deepest emotions and practical needs lead to idealism. Strongest, perhaps, is what we might call the wor- ship of personality. A person, even a shallow or debased one, is doubtless a marvellous affair. It is conscious, and creates; it shows its superiority over Nature by dominating it in some small degree ; and to man the person must always be the most interesting object of his environment. For the ide- alist Kant a person is always to be treated as an end, never as a means. So wonderful an entity, we feel, must possess a metaphysical rank appropriate to its worth and interest. The overwhelming conviction of value thus urges us toward idealistic theory. For the more scientifically minded this admiration of personality counts less; hence we find that the realism of our own day appeals to scientific standards. Yet so strong is the modern personality-motive, that even the realistic foes of idealism study exclusively the problems of mind, consciousness, or knowledge. Though they repudiate idealism, they are not free of its influence; the tenacious grip of that doctrine is but slightly loosened by the intel- lectual refutations. But why does not this personal motive lead to subjectivism rathdr than to idealism ? Because of another note that is peculiarly modern; the social one. The single person is no longer conceived as a complete individual. Isolation, anti-social behaviour, these we detest today above all things; the person is now wholly a socius. The great movement toward democracy drives in this direction. The person is thus enlarged, and its enlargement cannot stop with the commonwealth, the nation, the race, the whole of humanity. It becomes the Universal Person. Such a con- cept is the cumulation of two of the strongest motives in modern life. 110 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY Upon art and religion also the idealistic attitude leans. It is the essence of art to be creative; the artist according to the usual view makes more than Nature can make; he does not copy Nature, but creates a new entity out of the materials which Nature provides. He gives to Nature its values; indeed value and worth are so bound up with per- sonality that idealism and value-philosophy tend to coalesce. Whosoever esteems fundamentally the artist's point of view will then be inclined to idealism. Indeed, idealism is the artist's philosophy par excellence; for idealism's greatest apparent triumph is that which it wins over its arch-enemy, realistic science, when it shows that the body of science's laws is itself a work of art, a chef d'ceuvre in which thousands of collaborators participate. For science is to this attitude not a passive contemplation of facts as they are, but a pro- ductive ordering of brute data in a rational system of laws, where the laws are the creatures of the mind. The disci- pline in which mind appears most subservient to nature is the one in which its mastery is most triumphant; fact be- comes artifact. This aspect of idealism appeals to the romantic side of human nature; it is a form of the Wille zur Macht; it is an impassioned view, an agressive view. Its home is in the temper of modern Germany and, in part, of the United States of America; no idealistic systems have arisen from the less romantic English, or more impersonally logical French temperament. Both art and artisanship unite in the motive of creative efficiency which is the essence of Kultur. To the religious it appears a quick and easy step into idealism. For if God is spirit and if God is supreme, then the Universal creative Mind is straightway established. To such a view any form of hostile realism seems antitheistic; it limits the power of God, it places something outside him to which he must perforce acquiesce. Yet it is not the GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 1 1 1 pantheistic God which idealism worships. Its chord com- bines the three tones of personality, art, and religion; and of these the dominant is personality. Its God will then be a personal God and a poet or maker. The real objects, the brute matter of the world, are just and only the material which he orders; the Anstoss of his creative power. For absolutism, which is pantheistic, real objects are constitutive of God; for idealism they are other than but wholly subject to God. And as religion organized, proselyting religion has always rejected pantheism, so it rejects absolutism and fosters idealism. To be sure, there are realistic motives in religion, as we have already seen, and shall again see in Chapter X; but enough that there are idealistic ones too. Now there appears to be no reasonable ground for doubting that all these motives unite to give an overpowering per- suasiveness to idealism. The system may or may not be true; its value may or may not constitute its truth; but were it not for its significance to which, it is to be feared, opponents are often congenitally blind it seems clear that it would not be so persistently proffered as the only rational account of things. As culture is better than bar- barism, the arts of refinement than bare eating and drinking, so idealism from the point of view of worth towers above objectivism. It would indeed be a strange contradiction if the simple logic of the business pointed in the opposite direction from that indicated by all the humanities. So thinks the idealist; and we shall find, perhaps, that he is justified, though not exactly in the manner he claims. A little in exposition of the character of the Great Subject, and we may go to the proofs of idealism. The hero of this particular drama is quite unique. Just because he is so great he forfeits the concreteness, the immediacy, which the in- dividual subject of our first type possessed. He is tran- 112 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY scendental, ideal. Whether we consider the " Transcenden- tal Ego" of Kant, the "Universal Ego" of Fichte or Schelling, the " Self " of Royce, the " Sollen " of Rickert, the " Over-will " of Miinsterberg, we find the same hyper- empirical quality. Rickert assures us that the consciousness of which he is treating is " keine Realitat, sondern ein Begriff." (Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis, 2te. Aufgabe, pp. 67, 149.) Royce regards the Self as not a datum but an ethical ideal (World and Individual, I, p. 287). So too Miin- sterberg, very emphatically (The Eternal Values, p. 90). The rationalistic "school" of modern Germany, with its "reines Denken " deals with a similarly implicative affair, tran- scending particular experiences. Indeed, the traditional proof of this Great Subject is by implication. The corner- stone of idealism is thus not itself an observable fact, though it may be a fact and founded upon fact. It has an inferential character. From the very beginning idealism has the pale cast of thought, of rationalism as opposed to empiricism. It is not, as we have already seen in another respect, a genuine synthesis of the two; it is an asymmetrical construction. The universe's centre of gravity lies on the side of thought. The form is more than the matter; though the matter is real enough, it is real as secondary to, or dependent upon, the form. Whatever categories idealism delivers to us it derives not by induction from the empirically verified contents of experience but by deduction from the forms of ideal thought. Causality, to take an example, is treated as a linkage by which the mind as it were joins events externally, rather than anything proceeding out of the nature of the events themselves. So the table of categories offered by idealism is not based upon the specific detail of fact and event but upon the implication drawn from certain intellectual ideals. For mind, the artist, orders the data and hence the categories are GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 1 1 3 due to mind alone. Like the bridegroom at a wedding, the specific data must be present, but their appearance is of no particular interest. Idealism is herein rightly named; it is the doctrine of certain intellectual, moral, and aesthetic ideals. And yet this is but half the truth. The hero of our present type may be " sicklied o'er " with transcendental attributes, but he is neither ghost nor skeleton. More recent idealism, such as that of Royce, has endowed him with a goodly share of flesh and blood; by means of a diet drawn from psy- chological products. For there is an empirical side of the whole matter indeed, there has been, from the very birth of idealism in Kant; though it is much thickened today. The Universal Mind is a Subject and that usually means a Self. Now a Self is after all something we believe to partici- pate in our concrete life, and its habits and constitution have long been studied in the empirical discipline of psychology. Much of idealism's doctrine about the Great Subject will then, of necessity, be empirically based. The categories will be, not merely ideals, but human ideals, the ideals men have actually felt and worked towards and are constantly em- ploying. The table of categories will be discovered by analy- sis of the human mind. Even so Kant found his table in the kinds of judgment made by men; and though this psychological tendency is repudiated by some later idealists, they nevertheless, as we shall see, follow it. If the idealist is not empirically minded with respect to the objective world he is not greatly concerned, whether matter is reduced to electrons or a continuous ether he nevertheless is em- pirically minded with regard to the subjective world. He is interested in psychology above all other sciences. He scrutinizes, hard and long, the operations of the human, or even the animal, mind. Psychology has become the " key 114 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY to the scriptures." The world-knot is most promisingly attacked from the point of view of the internal meaning of an idea. (Royce, World and Individual, I, p. i.) Psychology is the one science which the philosopher must know. (Alas, that the psychologists do not respond to these overtures with the converse declaration!) In this empirical aspect, whose manifold consequences will soon appear, there is gain as well as loss to idealism. That there is gain appears when we contrast idealism with ab- solutism. The latter is, as we have said, a doctrine of symmetry. No one part or aspect of the universe is by itself more fertile for the understanding of the rest, than any other. The result is that distinctions of high and low, ground and consequent, better and worse, tend to vanish. True, absolutism admits them ; yet in the end it is so equally tolerant of everything as to emphasize nothing. Idealism, however, avowedly selects for study as the most efficient member of the universe, the self or person, and thereby has been able to furnish much information about at least one particular topic. There is a concreteness about recent idealistic doctrines which absolutism, with all its verbal insistence upon the concrete, does not display. The narrow- ness of idealism, like that of human attention, renders pos- sible a concentration upon one problem which has effected a definite addition to our knowledge. What this addition is will appear as we proceed in the discussion. The loss to idealism which its preoccupation with mind occasions is not only that its treatment of scientific cate- gories is quite formal, but also that it confines itself to a field in which results are none too certain. Psychology as an independent science with a clear-cut method did not exist when idealism was launched; it has even now, perhaps, hardly got a precipitate of truth outside the realm of sensa- GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 1 1 5 tion. Any alleged facts about the self on which idealism may build are therefore probably open to question for some time to come. Indeed, individual idealists, not being con- strained by a generally accepted psychological doctrine, are at liberty to emphasize this or that side of mind almost at pleasure. Consequently we find that idealism splits into factions. One " school " views mind as fundamentally thought, another as will, another as feeling. Upon these different bases are erected the philosophic structures known as rationalistic idealism, voluntarism, and aesthetic idealism. This fission into three began with Kant, but his strong hand prevented it from developing into an internecine strife. Later philosophy has not been so fortunate. Today we find the rationalistic party of Cohen, Natorp, Cassirer; the voluntaristic one of Wundt, Windelband, Rickert,* Royce, with Miinsterberg's system shading through value-idealism into the third division, the aesthetic, which Baldwin's "Pan- calism " has occupied. This tripartition appeared earlier, in the divergencies of Kant, Fichte, the " romantic school " and much of Schelling. And one hardly sees how, in view of the present dissensions of psychology, the spirit of strife is to be laid. The plot, then, has thickened. We have on our hands not only the rupture between idealism and its external foe, realism, but also a war within the idealists' camp. Let us proceed without dfelay to exhibit in detail, and to judge, the various idealistic theses. THE CASE FOR THE GREAT SUBJECT The Universal Mind or Self, differentia of the type as a whole, is founded upon two arguments and two only. The * Of course Rickert does not fit this scheme any too well: his " So lien " is so impersonal as to place him almost on the edge of realism. Il6 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY first has been many times stated and restated, from Kant on, and if we once more restate it in our own way, it is with the hope that it will not go unrecognized for the true tran- scendental argument. We may refer to it as the argument from fertility. The second, as the above analysis would lead us to expect, is the counterpart of the first, and is based on psychology. It offers empirical evidence of the reality of the Great Self. There are in idealism proper, apart from subjectivism, no rebuttals of the external enemy; because idealism's method is the positive one of justifying itself by its fertility and by psychological testimony. Its hypothesis of the Great Self is accepted on the ground that it accounts for the well-ordered world of objects (Kant called it the list of valid synthetic judgments a priori] ; and also because our inner consciousness bears witness to the presence of that Being. Before proceeding, however, to this argument, we must notice a certain way of putting its case which has, we think, tended to obliterate the distinction between Great and ordinary subjectivism. It runs as follows (Royce, World and Individual, vol. I, p. 398). " Are these many knowers related or not ? Answer as you will. . . . Then this, the fact about their relations, exists, but exists only as a known fact. For our theory asserts universally that all which has Being exists only as a known object." And (p. 399) "But this assertion . . . implies that one final knower knows all the knowing processes in one inclusive act." In short, what- ever is real is present to a mind. But many things are real that are not present to any finite mind, viz., remote stars, the beginnings of the earth, etc. Hence there must be a mind to which these things are present, i. e., a Big Mind. Now this seems to be a patent fallacy. It is not proved that all objects are for a mind until these distant ones are shown GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 1 17 to be such. They can be shown to be, as we saw in Chapter III, but the mind for which they are objects was there found to be one's own or some one's else particular mind, which is thinking of them during the argument. Or perhaps even the mind of some astronomer or geologist but in any case some one, or some finite number of human minds. These things were recognized to be its potential, if not its actual, objects. Here lies no road to a Universal Mind. The argument tries to get idealism from subjectivism alone; whereas it must be drawn from the marriage of subjectivism with objectivism. It is unfortunate for the cause of Great Subjectivism that such a plea has been presented. The argument from fertility we now restate. How is it that the Self, impregnating the object, fathers the categories ? To learn this we had best turn to the group of midwives who have delivered them: from Kant to Natorp, Miinsterberg, Cassirer, Royce, and Baldwin. We find common to them all something like the following train of thought. Subjectivism could not account for the distinction be- tween real and imaginary objects. Subjectivists have had to resort to some haphazard attribute of the mind's contents in order to distinguish the two; viz., intensity, liveliness, resistance, space-occupancy, commonness, etc. But what constitutes objective reality ? This: that an object out- lasts my momentary perception, or that of any one. It stands always ready to be perceived by any one at any mo- ment of its continuous existence; it is, as contrasted with the particular perceptions, a universal. Its reality in fact consists in just this universality. As a universal tran- scends any particular, so the real object transcends the particular perception of the particular subject. But if we suppose a subject to whom all the momentary states of the object are always present, the real object will not transcend Il8 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY his mind but may be adequately described as the content thereof. Such a subject could not truly be said to be quite timeless, for it includes all the particular elements in any process of change; Royce's ascription to it of an indefi- nitely long "specious present" is fairer. Now such a sup- position is very fertile; it accounts for much more than the object in general. For it entertains universals; and a universal is a rule, capable of exemplification in many in- stances. Every object that is real is such a rule; viz., a cow may be characterized as that object which can be counted on to appear and behave in certain definite ways. Unless that regularity of appearance and behaviour were traceable, there would for us be no such object as a cow. A real object then is that which obeys laws the laws of its own make-up. Law is " das letzte erreichbare Kriterium der ' Objekti- vitat.' ' (Cassirer, Substanztheorie und Funktionstheorie, p. 248.) And a subject whose mental content is a real object is by that very fact one whose mental content is a number of laws. The laws of nature, or the assemblage of the ways in which objects behave, are the content of that mind. And since " object " is here perfectly general, it follows that all reality, and its laws, form the content of the mind in ques- tion. Hence it is seen to be no less than a Universal Mind. Since also the real objects are no longer transcendent of the Universal Mind as they were of the particular subject, the Universal Mind does not passively receive those objects as it were from an external agency, but, arranging them by its laws, helps to determine them. In Kantian words, its knowledge is constitutive. As there is no longer anything outside it, the Great Mind may now be conceived as con- trolling its own content. It does not create it ex nihilo but, finding the content as it were within its own mind, it confers objectivity upon it. Objectivity, as distinguished from GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 119 mere being-other-than-mind, is the work, the artifact of mind, the result of its labour. " Wirklichkeit selbst, Gege- benheit ist Denkbestimmung, und zuletzt Leistung reinen Denkens." (Natorp, Die Logischen Grundlagen der Exakten Wissenschaften, p. 66.) Now from the concept of the uni- versal the main categories which describe objectivity can be deduced. For the universal offers a series of instances grouped into a class; whence are drawn the notions of unity, plurality, totality, etc. As to the detail of the categories, there has been some difference between the lists offered by different philosophers. The finished deduction is not found in the pioneer Kant, but only in quite recent times, chiefly in the elaborate and painstaking systems of Natorp and Miinsterberg. Kant in the " Schematism " just missed deducing the particular categories. He started from the notion of time, which is of intuitive origin, rather than from the universal. Fichte did better, by starting from process as the essence of mind; and that dynamic basis is now fairly well accepted by idealists. (Cf. Natorp, op. cit., p. 15.) But the development of the scientific categories out of the bare concept of object i. e., out of the universal mind had been consummated by Natorp. On the practical side, the extraordinarily detailed labours of Miinsterberg far exceed any previous work; and on the aesthetic side, nearly the same is true of Baldwin. In these finished products, the ripest fruit of idealism, the earlier errors are corrected, minute links strengthened, and the whole system perfected almost, it would seem, to the limit of human capability. We therefore select them as examples of idealistic deduction; they are the great outstanding instances of idealism's argu- ment from fertility. And hereby we are led from the parent stem to the three branches of idealism. 120 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY In summing up his standpoint at the outset Natorp re- marks " So kann also von keinem ' gegebenen ' Gegenstande mehr die Rede sein; also auch nicht von Erkenntnis als blosser Analyse dieses Gegebenen. Gerade der Gegenstand viehmehr ist Aufgabe, ist Problem ins Unendliche. Und also ist Erkenntnis, als auf den Gegenstand gerichtet, not- wendig Synthesis in Kants Sinne, d. h. Erweiterung, bestandiger Fortgang " (op. cit., p. 18). It is an endless task which the creative mind has, that of constituting the object; in this progress new qualifications of that object appear, new categories. Indeed the object itself is that task: "Das Objekt der Erkenntnis wird Projekt, der Gegenwurf Vorwurf " (p. 33). (The similarity between this definition of " object " and Royce's definition of it as fulfil- ment of a plan of action is striking; indeed both say much the same thing. The former says it in intellectualistic, the latter in voluntaristic, phrasing; a fact whose significance shall engage us later.) To the solution, endless in its detail, of this problem of determining the object, we now pass. From the synthetic unity of the manifold, by which the mind generates objectivity, is derived the category of quantity (the many, the totality, etc.). This includes the concept of the unit; a purely formal entity, for " Was in jedem Falle als Eines gelte, ist hierfiir gleichgiiltig " (p. 54). The content of it is anything you please, and is not deduced or explained. But there is more than one unit. A second unit is implied else no collection or group to embody the universal (p. 55) ; but this too must be followed by another, for the same reason, and so on. Here we have the series. " Wohl der bezeichnendste Ausdruck dafiir ist die Reihe oder Reihung, Auf- und Aneinanderreihung " (p. 55). This notion of series replaces, indeed, the older notion of the static concept; a fact constantly emphasized by Cassirer. GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 121 That thinker is never weary of insisting upon the difference between the two. (Cf. Substanztheorie und Funktions- theorie, pp. 7-9, n, 15, 22-23, 27, 33-34, 247, 249, 297, 305.) But to proceed with the deduction: since the mind unites as well as differentiates, there is at each step an awareness of the whole result. At the third step in a series, for instance, there is present a sense of the totality already attained. Hence arises the concept of the " how much " (" Das bestimmte Soviet " p. 56). This is a novel creation of the thought: three is quite distinct from " one-and-one- and-one." But now the universal, the synthesis of the many in one, is not exhausted by any total number of instances. It is something more, something yet to be determined. This discrepancy shows that the categories of extensive quantity are inadequate. The mind has not yet solved its own prob- lem of determining a real object. Not in extent, but in con- tent; not by external addition of one case to another, but by looking inward to the nature of the instances, shall mind define that object. The successive instances (not neces- sarily successive in time, of course : we might be comparing various perspectives of one object as seen by you, by me, by some one else, etc., all at one moment) the successive instances are now viewed as presenting identity with one another. A tree is the same tree, and has much the same perceptual content, throughout the variety of particular presentations in which it appears. This gives rise to the qualitative categories of identity and difference. These categories, like those of quantity, are indifferent to the specific characters of the objects; " Was in jedem Fall als Identisches gesetzt wird, ist hierbei so gleichgiiltig, wie bei der ersten Stufe der Quantitat . . ." (p. 60). And identity and difference are mutually involved. Now precisely as in 122 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY quantity the unit and the multiplicity united to form the concept of totality, so here the series of like instances, with their individuating differences, combine to give the notion of the class or species (" Gattung," p. 62). Here we find, by the way, a decided improvement over Kant's artificial triad of positive, negative, and infinite. Yet if an object is to be real it is more than quantity and quality; it has a regular, identifiable behaviour. A definite object is a synthesis of the manifold; but to be identifiable as itself it must be distinguished from other syntheses of the manifold, other objects. Hence arise the categories of rela- tion, or the " syntheses of syntheses " (p. 66). These must comprise the relations which objects bear to one another their behaviour. As this is to be determined beforehand (for objects must be identifiable) it must obey causal laws in mathematical language, functional relations. The different instances of each object and of the relations between objects, must then form a series whose members display an orderly functional relation; they form, that is, an ordered series. The later members of the series are determinable, calculable, from the earlier members or vice versa. And since there are many objects, we may regard the several series of in- stances each of which comprises a particular thing, as parallel series. That being the case, there will be a strict one-one-correspondence between the instances of various series, such that from one of them another may be deter- mined. We then have not merely the regular behaviour of each object, but, going with that, the mutual dependence of objects. The world of nature is " eine Ordnung, die sich von Glied zu Glied verschiedener, aber unter sich in Ver- kniipfung stehender paralleler Reihen muss durchfiihren lassen " (p. 69). Now such an order implies a permanent or standard series, by comparison with which the changes alone GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 123 become apparent. This demand of science for a persisting somewhat (mass, energy) is again indifferent to the content of fact; for no permanent entities appear in sense-experience. The category of substance is a creation of reason, not a given percept. " Dass eine solche empirisch gegebenen weder ist noch je werden konnte, macht es nur urn so fiihlbarer, dass diese Ansetzung eine reine Denkleistung ist und kein Datum " (p. 72). Here arises the concept of time, as the single fundamental order common to all that occurs. " Sie (time) bedeutet also eben dies: dass eine gemeinsam zugrunde liegende gleich- formige Ordungsfolge sein miisse, welche in den sich ent- sprechenden Stellziffern der Einzelreihen : Xi x* x 3 . . . , yiy^ys . . , Zi ZzZs . . . und so fort sich ausdriicken wiirde; durch deren Identitat dann alle diese verschiedenen Reihen zugleich aufeinander in einer gemeinsamen Ordnung bezogen sein wiirden " (p. 73). If three objects x, y, and z, have each the states denoted by the subscript numerals, then the order /, 2, 3, etc., of those numerals, demanded as a common fundamental order, the same in all, is nothing less than time. The relation of coexistence (" Miteinander," p. 73) between x, y, and z, with the added qualification that they are individually distinct and separate facts, forms the category of space. Natorp characterizes space as " Ordnung des Miteinander " (pp. 73-74). The reason for the plurality of dimensions in space is not given at this point, but in a later chapter; for convenience we omit it. This will later be seen not to affect our criticism. Now when the mind re- gards objects as following in a definite time-order, such that earlier determines later, it is employing the category of causality. When it regards contemporaneous objects in space as in the fixed order of space, determining one another by their positions in that order, it uses the category of red- 124 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY procity (" Wechselwirkung"). In causality, the earlier state is followed, in accordance with the law of behaviour of that particular object, by the later. And this holds also of more than one object; it holds of the relations between objects. But it too, like the other categories, is indifferent to the specific detail of things. If it happens to be a law of nature that the sun warms a stone, then the placing of the stone in the sun's rays is followed by the stone's increased tempera- ture: but causality alone cannot determine that the law should be that particular sequence. The law might have been that the sun cooled the stone, or disintegrated it, or anything you please. Let the above suffice as an example of the idealistic method in the field of intellect or science. Nine no, eleven categories have been deduced ; and deduced from the concept of the universal mind i. e., the mind which has the universal as its content. Two things stand out clearly: first, that the deduction derives its force from the side of the universal, not in the least from that of mind, and second, that the categories deduced are not in general those which science actually employs. The categories of one, many, total, identity, difference, series, are simply read off from the definition of a universal. A universal is understood at the outset to mean a series of instances as numerous as you please, which are different instances of the same. The categories of time, space, sub- stance, cause, reciprocity, are read off from the concept of several universals (objects) present together before the mind. Whether there is a novelty produced at each stage of the reading-off process or not, we do not ask; but if there is, it is not due to the mind. Once granted the universal, or the group of universals, the categories that follow are compelled to follow by the nature of the universal. They could not be GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 125 other than what they are. The mind may be there to read them off, but that is a very different thing from its deter- mining them to be what they are. It is simply present, and they become its objects; but it is as passive and inert as the particular self in subjectivism. The " problem " which the object offers to mind is simply that of ascertaining what it contains. There is, we venture to say, no authority what- soever for calling this an active ordering on the part of the mind, or for asserting that mind helps to account for any- thing present. The apparent justification for such an asser- tion lies, perhaps, in that a universal is supposed itself to be a mental product. This, however, we have in our examination of subjectivism found quite unproved. Indeed, we found it to be a matter of indifference. So here : the Great Mind is a true faineant king; its presence or absence makes no differ- ence to the deductive fecundity of the starting point. The universal happens to be a very rich concept, and therefore Natorp is able to draw from it many categories; but one can scarcely read his treatise without feeling that the " Denken " might just as well be called " Realitat " or any other objective term. The categories which Natorp deduces are not in general, we have said, those which science uses. As to what science uses, indeed, there appears to be an ambiguity. Consider, for instance, the science of physics. This has two aspects: the experimental and the mathematical. The one is just as necessary to it as the other. The laws of physics are verified in the laboratory as true within the limits of probable error. They apply to particular real events. But philosophers un- fortunately tend nowadays to study almost exclusively the mathematical side. In stating the concepts which science uses, they look to the implications of the mathematical calculations which the physicists make. Time, as used by 126 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY physics, then appears to be a certain ordinal relation, and no more. Space suffers the same ravishment. Force is a numerical ratio simply; in fact, everything tends to be- come number or quantity or function. But on the experi- mental side, physics appeals to the senses; and the concepts force, time, space, cause, etc., are no longer mere numbers, but properties of events, visible, or verifiable, resident in sense-data. The full meaning of the scientific categories cannot be learned from their numerical values alone; they are concepts which apply to the sense-data, and their mean- ing must be learned also from their manifestation in those data. Natorp, we found, insisted frequently that his cate- gories were indifferent to their sensuous content. But no true scientific category is thus indifferent. Time, for ex- ample, cannot be predicated of any content; only of con- tents which change. Space as such is not in time, numbers are not in time. So of space: not every " Miteinander " is spatial, but only those which have certain relations to (actual or possible) vision and touch. The space and time that are used in experiment are sense-data; but Natorp's space and time are not sense-data at all. They have no ex- tensity or pastness or futurity. The causality by virtue of which one body warms another body is of such a kind that the wanned body could not, under the circumstances, have become cool; the content of the effect is here by no means " gleichgiiltig." Why certain effects and not others follow certain causes, is not even suggested by idealism. Why " Miteinander " takes on the appearance of length, or position, or extension, why time means the passing into non- existence and rising into existence, of things these are left quite out of account. All that the idealist does is to develop from his starting point a list of ideals which in one aspect of its work science does approximate; but these ideals do not, GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 127 beyond a very slight extent, define the concrete actuality with which the scientist experiments. In short, rationalistic idealism does not account for the specific characters found in the world of objects. Like subjectivism, it is philosophically barren. This is no denial of its truth. The Universal Mind, such as it is, may be admitted to be. An object undoubtedly is a universal, and hence it contains a series whose instances are numerable. And the mind which entertains these various concepts is no doubt an object of possible interest. But that that mind is Great in the sense of ruling nature, directing her courses, setting the stars in their places, guiding human des- tiny, etc. this has nothing whatever to do with the logical starting point or with the result of rationalistic idealism. The practical and emotional motives of the type remain unfulfilled. This has been felt, one may opine, by the voluntaristic idealists; and they have believed that the abstractness of the category-maker's results would be filled out if they could show that the Universal Mind is a Will. For will is active and creative (so the common man thinks) ; and if the world be object of a Great Will then it may be truly said to be no abstraction. No other human faculty so appeals to our sense of the concrete as will. Let us then examine the deduction given by a voluntaristic idealist of the main characters of reality. Surely a system which is based on will, must satisfy the deeper yearnings of our practical and emotional nature. We are here so fortunate as to possess a most elaborate deduction of this sort: Professor Miinsterberg's book " The Eternal Values." True, his fundamental concept, value, is not merely volitional, but contains a tincture of feeling also. But so much the better, for then we may expect the greater wealth of results. 128 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY Everything is to be determined by deduction from a will- attitude, yet not from a bare will-attitude, but from one that seeks and makes its own satisfaction, i. e., determines values. (Often Miinsterberg speaks of will alone, but it is to be understood as will which in fulfilling its purposes creates values.) That the will rather than passion or contemplation is fundamental, is thus signified: " Especially in the modern German philosophy the conviction is growing that the con- ception of being itself is founded on the conception of obliga- tion. The existence of reality is given to us in judgments, and their affirmation ultimately has no other reason than the fact that our thought faces a rule, an ' ought,' which obliges our will to judge. There is no positive judgment of existence in which the will is not affirming, no negative judgment in which the will is not denying " (Op. cit., p. 54). But obligation is not all. The will gets satisfaction in ful- filling the obligation; the attitude becomes a value-attitude. " We stand before the fundamental fact that there exists a will the fulfilment of which satisfies us, and that means is valuable for us, and which yet is without reference to any individual pleasure or displeasure, necessary for every pos- sible subject and therefore absolutely valid" (p. 65). Thus value alone is the fundamentum. It is more ultimate than the category of fact itself. " The evaluation precedes the existence " (p. 55). But this evaluation is not, in the last analysis, an affair of any private, finite self. It is performed by a Great Self, an " over-will," or " over-self "; its per- formance or " self-realization," is the " over-deed." This " over-will " is the fans et origo of all reality and all special values; it is the generator of the outer material world, of the many selves or " fellow-world," and of the inner world of each self. A true philosophy, according to our author, deduces from it space, time, and these three worlds, as well as the main categories (or values) in each of these worlds. GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 129 Value is then the TTOV O-TCO; existence is simply one kind of value. " The existence of the world, its reality and its con- nection, means to us a certain evaluation of life-experiences " (p. 351). And that kind of evaluation is not more important or more certain than the other kinds of evaluation which we shall later meet. Hence, the absolute will, the " over-self," " is thus certainly not a thing which has existence; the fundamental reality is life-activity, deed " (p. 399). And there is nothing besides this over-self. " We know further that the over-self does not find any material outside of itself " (p. 399). "... the will of the over-self finds as material only its own willing " (p. 404). This will is not a temporal process. " In the beginning there was a deed, but the beginning does not lie in time, as time is only the form- thought of that object-world which is created by the pri- mary deed " (p. 405). " The world as absolute reality is the unresolved unity of this eternal deed " (p. 407). How then does this timeless valuation, this will or deed, give rise to the differentiations which constitute the world of things, of selves, and of special values ? Thus: " in every will-act of ours the resolving analysis may find the starting point of the striving, the striving itself, and finally the goal of the striving which becomes realized " (p. 407). (Again, we must not yet think of this as a process occurring in time.) Now, " the same must hold true for the fundamental will of the over-self " (ibid.). Analysis then finds in the over-will the same three points. " The starting point is that which the will no longer wills when it seeks the goal; the goal is that which the striving has not yet reached " (ibid.). " In the deed itself the not-yet and the no-longer are one. . . . But from the standpoint of the detached striving factor of the deed, the no-longer and the not-yet stand separated against each other " (ibid.). Between them lies the striving 130 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY itself, a " relation-point." This relation-point we call the now. From the standpoint of such now the no-longer be- comes the past and the not-yet becomes the future. " With the resolution of the striving from the atemporal [sic] will- totality the time is posited as a relation between starting point and goal " (ibid.). Here ends the deduction of the category of time. Next is evolved space. " When the striving separates itself from its content, still a further antithesis is posited. Just because the striving maintains the content in the tran- sition from the past to the future, this content is acknowl- edged as something independent. It is now not a part of the striving itself, is therefore outside of the striving effort, and in this way the not-here arises as against the here " (pp. 407- 408). The passage is obscure, for we are not told what the " content " may be. Why, too, does the acknowledgment that something is independent, other than my striving, in- volve the acknowledgment that it is outside me in space ? Professor Miinsterberg's deduction is here no clearer than its prototype in Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre. (We remember how many times Fichte tried to make this clear, in succes- sive editions.) Why the will-deed gets a content at all is a mystery. Why, also, the content is manifold and simul- taneous, is equally so. " The space at first knows only one opposition, here and without. But that without refers to the whole manifoldness of the simultaneous contents " (p. 408). And also " with every single content the the char- acter of the without shades itself and becomes a particular space-direction. In this way arises the endless manifoldness of space-directions as soon as the striving detaches itself from the totality of the deed " (ibid.). From the manifoldness of this space-and-time world follows the variety of strivings, the individual selves. Here then we have the outer world, GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 131 the fellow-world, and the world of each self in puris, or the inner world. Now an empirically educated scientist may snort in dis- gust we have heard such emotional responses with this a priori and (too often) obscure mode of explanation. Nev- ertheless we believe it to have its rights. It does explain, granted its starting point, certain relations which are some- thing like our space and time manifolds. " Something like " we say; we cannot say more. For the space and time, the many objects and selves, of this deduction, are the palest ghosts of the actual space, time, objects, and persons we know. All specific qualities have disappeared from them: space and time are, as with Natorp's deduction, mere order and " Miteinander." Extension is not reached by Miinster- berg's account, nor process of change : provided, that is, there was no time imported, at the beginning, into the over- deed of the over-self. If, as he says, analysis discovers a " no-longer " and a " not-yet " in that deed, then it is diffi- cult to see with what justice the analysis may claim to be true, unless those temporal attributes were existentially present in the original deed. If not, they are certainly not accounted for by the character of the deed. All our actual deeds in this world are temporal processes, and do contain such temporal distinctions; therefore it seems easy to say that the original deed is the source of time. But the deed has no priority over the time; either is meaningless without the other. And if concrete time and space are not accounted for by his deduction, neither is the division into the outer world, social world, and inner world. For that division hangs from the manifoldness which time and space introduced. The Great Self (over-self, or over-deed) does indeed account as we shall see, for objectivity; and if value means the 132 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY identity of the end with the original intention, for value also ; and, granting the three worlds, even for the different kinds of value in general. But it does not explain why any value whatever comes to reside in just the specific instances in which it is seen. We may now specify the stages by which the valuation becomes a definite world. " The one fundamental act which secures for us a world " is this: " We demand that there be a world ; that means that our experience be more than just the passing experience, that it assert itself in its identity in new experiences " (p. 75). (Note here in this " identity " the universal, which Natorp also started from, couched in terms of a will-object.) " We will that our experience is a world " (p. 76). And this is an act of choice. " No one can be forced to perform that deciding deed " (p. 76); we may be skeptics if we prefer. When identities throughout dif- ferences permanent recognizable objects are found to exist in the world, our will-attitude is satisfied and reality becomes a value. From this one fundamental value all the others are deduced. " The system of values must then be recognized as soon as we ask what has been really posited by this act of world-assertion. It will be the topic of all the following inquiries " (p. 78). Four principal categories are implied. " First, every part must remain identical with itself in the changing events [the category of the universal and the other categories of intel- lect belong here] ; secondly, the various parts must show in a certain sense identity among themselves, and thus show that they agree with one another and that no one part of the world is entirely isolated [here come the categories of feeling: harmony, beauty, etc.]; thirdly, that which changes itself in the experience must still present an identity in its change by showing that the change belongs to its own meaning and GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 133 is only its own realization [the categories of action, life, morality] " (ibid.). These three are called " the value of conservation, the value of agreement, the value of realiza- tion. But if the world is completely to assert itself, that is, to hold its own identity, these three values must ultimately be identical with one another, one must realize itself in the other. Then only the pure will gains its absolute satisfac- tion; and then we gain the fourth value of completion [the categories uniting the world in one whole, i. e., those of religion and philosophy] " (ibid.). But now each of these four values may be realized naively and unconsciously, or consciously as the " labour of civilization." " In each of these two large groups, the life-values and the culture- values, we then have the four heads ..." above named (p. 80). But further, each of these eight must be divided into three, " inasmuch as experiences which are to assert themselves can belong to three different fields, either to the experience of the outer world, or to the experience of our fellow world, or to the experience of our inner world. Hence we have a system of eight times three groups of values, and yet all these twenty-four values are only ramifications of the one value which fulfills our will that our experience is to belong to a self-dependent, self-asserting (i. e., real and valuable) world " (p. 80). And the whole world is here conceived, not as a finished given reality, but as a task set to the mind, a creation of it, not arbitrary, but systematic and planful. "We make the world " (p. 81) in the idealistic sense. The first group of values, that of " conservation" contains the categories which belong to recognizable (because rela- tively permanent and regular in their behaviour) objects. These categories, as already stated, fall into two groups: those employed by common life and those employed by the 134 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY conscious endeavour to establish identity-in-difference be- yond the region of superficial observation. This last sub- group comprises the field of science. Then each of these subgroups contains three compartments: identity-in- difference as it appears in external nature, as it appears in the social world, and as it appears in the inner immediate life of the private self. Hence we may expect six categories under the heading of " conservation." These are called by Miinsterberg the logical values. First, in the ordinary prac- tical dealing with reality, identity-in-difference gives us the real object, or thing. This is demanded : something which is one and the same possible object for every possible subject (p. 96). In the social world which is found, by the way, in the experience of will-attitudes, my will meeting other wills directly in sympathy or antipathy, agreement or rejection this permanent-through-change is found in the concept of the person. The person is a will which takes atti- tudes toward different objects; it continues to be the same will, with changing attitudes in changing circumstances. " A really existing person must have the possibility of main- taining himself in every new act of will " (p. 112). In the third realm, that of the inner life, " the world of the over- personal will " (p. 113) the permanent will-attitude is that which wills what it wills because that alone is the condition that there be a world at all. This is nothing else but the fact that there is value, the most fundamental category of all; most fundamental, because all the world and all that is in it, is value. The development which these three categories undergo when they are posited by mind in thoroughgoing fashion, carried out in details where their application is not to com- mon observation immediately evident, gives rise to the cate- gories of science, history, and reason. Of science the chief GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 135 category is causality; which means identity of the cause, preserved in the effect. In the field of social life, enduring identity of will is the goal sought by historical science. " The task of the historian is to understand the subjects (persons) in such a way that a closer connection of all beings by identity of will becomes possible " (p. 141). In a nation, for instance, all the members of that nation will the same thing the existence of that particular commonwealth. In the field of the inner life, i. e., of the values, the identity of Ithe four kinds of value is posited. For all four proceed by deduction from the original value with which we started, and by induction from all four we reach the one value of which they are the species. But all deduction and induction proceed by our viewing one and the same content in new ways or in varying situations. And the same holds of the more particular values within each of the four species, as the rest of the book aims to show. " All the aesthetic values refer to the self -agreement of the world " (p. 165). That is, the different parts are in har- mony. This harmony, perceived merely by common sense and where it is obvious, he calls unity; where it is the prod- uct of conscious elaboration, it is the beautiful work of art. " Our thesis is that whenever in our experience a manifold- ness of wills approaches us, their agreement, their volition of mutual support, is to us absolutely valuable " (p. 174). Here things are seen to have their wills "Is this will of the outer world real ? For the one whose soul understands it and feels it, it has exactly the same immediate reality which the own life-experience may have " (pp. 175-176); though the reality is not objective existence as of motion or matter. This agreement as found in Nature is harmony; in our fel- lows, love " that your will is to become my will and my will your will " (p. 189) ; in the inner life, happiness. Hap- 136 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY piness is not pleasure, for that belongs to the merely in- dividual will; it is the harmony of one's own inner life as a demand of the universal will; " the height of completed unity in which our over-personal self finds complete satis- faction " (p. 198). The harmony or agreement in the world, found as the result of trained effort, gives beauty. It is here not agreement with our own will which would give to the beautiful an existential value but with itself, with its elements and parts. Hence the beautiful object must be unreal; ihe*work of art. Art as concerned with the subject- matter of external Nature is called Fine Art; with our fel- lows, literature; with the inner life, music. (We neglect perforce the rich suggestiveness in his treatment of detail particularly in regard to music; no other book on meta- physics that we know has so fully covered the aesthetic categories.) But experience, he continues, is not only full of finished facts; it is in a state of constant becoming. Hence values also take on the form of ideals to be striven for. To the " immediate life-experience " these are the kinds of " de- velopment "; their later stages being identical with, or the fulfilment of, the earlier. Yet more than the category of development is provided. In each group, we must remem- ber, there are two subgroups. The values of this group will first be of the more obvious kind, which need no painstaking effort for their realization; secondly, they will be the prod- uct of civilization, of Kultur. The first class Miinsterberg calls values of development; in the second class, " the valu- able deed may subordinate itself to a conscious purpose; it then becomes an achievement " (p. 257). Hence the second class is called " values of achievement." In accordance with the general plan, we find that the values of develop- ment contain three members. These are respectively the GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 137 forms which development assumes in external nature, in the social world, and in the inner life. They are: in nature, growth; in society, progress; in the inner world, self- development. Growth is change such that " the other which comes is a realization of the first which has gone " (p. 260) ..." the flower is identical with that which the seed-corn willed " (p. 261). Progress is never merely the establish- ment of this or that particular institution, but the " transi- tion towards a standpoint at which every individual wills in accordance with the over-personal will, that is, with the pure valuation. Whatever moves toward this goal is pure progress; whatever moves away from this goal is regress " (p. 288). What specific forms this transition takes we are not told. Self -development is that development in which " the self wills to develop its own willing, wills to unfold and strengthen its own volitions, and yet always remain in unity with itself " (p. 296). The three corresponding values when consciously elaborated, the three values of achievement, are those of industry, law, and morality. Industry is nature ful- filling its task (through the cooperation of man) in conserv- ing and adding to the values of life. The production, distribution, and consumption of material goods thus take a high place among the pure values. Not because they minister to our comforts, but because they fulfill the poten- tialities of Nature itself, do they attain the rank of over- personal values. (Is this not a slight distortion ? Nature here appears not so much to be fulfilling its own potencies, as to be transformed by an external agency, man, to satisfy his desires. It is not easy to see in industry the " task to awaken the slumbering desire in the outer world, to lead nature's faint will by helpful human work to fuller and fuller success" (pp. 311-312). It is well-nigh impossible to regard the publishing, advertising and selling of a new 138 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY dictionary as such an affair.) The second value of achieve- ment, whereby the community consciously realizes itself, is " law and the state as far as it serves the law " (p. 317). " The content of that common will, on the other hand, has nothing to do with the value of the law as such " (p. 326). The third value of achievement, morality, is conscious, in- tentional self-realization. Here as with law, the content of the act is indifferent. " Every ethics which deals with re- sults and effects necessarily remains at the standpoint of the pre-moral " (p. 333). When we speak the truth or save a life, as true moral agents, " We will ourselves as truth- speakers or as life-savers only on account of the action itself, not on account of the desirable results. When the self which is willed in such a way becomes realized, a pure over-personal demand is fulfilled " (p. 337). These various threads are brought together in the final series of values. This series contains two groups; religion and philosophy. Religion sees, in immediate fashion, the unity of all the values in God; philosophy consciously elaborates this, proves it, finds their only source in a one Over-self, or absolute will. This will is, as we have already seen, the/ows et origo of outer world, with its multiplicity of objects, of the fellow-world and of the many inner lives. From it they are deduced. How shall we estimate this most stupendous of idealism's deductions ? It gives indeed a rich haul of categories. Besides the initial state, containing space, time, and the three sorts of world, we have: thing, person, value [sic], causality, history, systematic reason, harmony, love, happi- ness, beauty in fine art, in literature, and in music, growth (of living things), progress (of mankind), self-realization or morality, industry, law and the State, religion. Perhaps these overlap a bit, perhaps they are not all of the categories GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 139 of experience. But the achievement of idealism seems superb. It shows that a Great Will which regards a world like our own as object of its will, and as itself will, somehow obtains all these categories. It is of course much to know this. But much in what way ? The character of the knowl- edge must not be overrated. Is the information which is vouchsafed, truly drawn from the initial will-attitude ? The will and its satisfaction are really two distinct mat- ters. The former does not generate the latter. The world may be defined as object of my will-to-attend ; but that will does not decide what attention shall find. There must be things, yes; but what things ? Why grass and flowers, water and air ? There must be persons, but of what sort ? Why stupid, or tender, or brilliant ? There will be causal connections, but why may not anything cause anything else ? There will be music, but why not of smells rather than of sounds ? It is the old difficulty, found in all tran- scendentalism from Plato down, of accounting for the par- ticular from the universal alone. But that reality which it is philosophy's purpose to map contains particulars as well as universals even if it contains them only under the guise of appearance or unreality and the Great Self, in failing to account for the particulars, has to that extent met its critical point. It cannot suffice as a basis for a satisfactory philosophical system. Notwithstanding the tremendous impression created by this vast system of categories, we cannot forget that all the categories are ideals, indifferent to their application, not explaining their particular dress on particular occasions in short, so far divorced from the reality. We must even go further. Not only do the cate- gories fail to account for the particulars; the Great Will does not account for the categories. Miinsterberg would never get those 2X3X4 divisions from the one notion of a 140 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY will willing its own willing and finding its satisfaction. Such willing and satisfaction we are perfectly ready to grant as shall later be duly acknowledged but they start no fertile process; from them emanates nothing. Why should there be the three worlds of self, fellows, and the inner life ? Why the immediate value and the consciously elaborated value ? Why the " starting point, the striving, and the goal " ? We simply find these subdivisions of our life, in experience. Are we answered that idealism does not pretend to deduce a priori all these primitive elements ? Then, we reply, idealism does not justify itself; for its claim to our accept- ance was to be based upon the fertility of the Great Will in accounting for the make-up of the world. Let voluntarism condemn the static Reason of the rationalists as it may, the dynamic Thdtigkeit of the Will accomplishes but little more. It looked more promising, because it connoted movement and life; but it does not fulfill the promise. All along the line we find this inability of the monarch Will to guarantee the performance of his commands: the irony cannot but strike us, of a will which is powerless to execute. And this is but the same indifference of form to content, as we found in the rationalist Natorp. It was shown by the Kantian prototype, and how should the children not inherit the paternal traits ? Kant never claimed to account by his transcendental formula for the detail of the world, either in the scientific or the moral domain. How from the precept of right for right's sake could we drive the maxim of honesty ? Kant did so, avowedly, only by appealing to the empirically taught lesson of life, that society perishes without mutual confidence. And this indifference is no accidental incom- pleteness of Great Subjectivism, but is ingrained in the Great Subject. He does not originate any distinctions. His will is not productive of its end : it is simply so defined at GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 141 the beginning as to include it. In fact, the very nature of the will-concept used by Miinsterberg and other voluntarists rules out productiveness; for their will has no causal ef- ficacy. Causality is but a minor aspect of the world; a relation which the contents of the will-world display toward one another; this single instance of effectiveness, which it would seem the idealists ought above all to profit by, in their attempt to show how the Great Self rules over his world, is thrown aside. Royce, for example, says (World and Indi- vidual, vol. I, p. 326) " I speak not here of will as of any causally efficacious entity whatever." Can we then expect this emasculated being, this Great Eunuch, to generate anything, to account for anything, even the thinnest of categories, outside his own self ? We cannot; and hereby voluntaristic idealism is convicted of a formality as vicious, though not as extensive, as that of subjectivism. And by the same token, voluntarism fails to satisfy the practical needs, and the emotional cravings, which it was especially designed to meet. Of what use to call the world valuable, when the value of it is quite disconnected with all that makes values good ? The result is secured, not by showing that the world contains what we want, but by rede- fining value. The kind of value which all facts have, merely because they are facts, is not a kind from which any signifi- cance of those facts for our future destiny or for the coloured detail of reality can be traced. The kind of knowledge we get, when we know that the world is object of an Over- individual Will, is not such as to afford us any guidance in our conduct of life, or any explanation of the world's con- tents. Once more, the original philosophical problem has been forgotten. In our eagerness for a map of the universe, we have with rule and compass marked out a beautiful figure with twenty-four compartments, radiating from an 142 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY empty circle in the centre. A certain pleasure there may be in gazing at this work of art ; but it fulfills no lofty motive, and detracts rather from our ability to adapt ourselves to the particular traits of our environment. The immortality of a timeless attitude may be possessed by everybody, but it is of the least possible interest and significance; the Great Will may be a fact, but He will do whatever the blind forces of nature or our own free choices make Him do, and He can command little reverence from us mortals. The Great Will is as barren as the Great Reason. As regards barrenness, it must be admitted that idealists have felt the accusation and honestly endeavoured to meet it. Thus Royce: " I have tried to show that the idealist is not obliged either to ignore or to make light of physical facts " (World and Individual, vol. II, Pref., pp. x-xi). But neither he nor, so far as we know, any other idealist makes definite connection of those facts with the Great Self. Be the values and the scientific categories which this Being wills or sees what they may, they do not tell us why bodies gravi- tate, why entropy increases, why men love women. Nor do idealists on the other hand employ very significant char- acteristics of our universe in their delineation of the Self. Of course idealism must respect the positive contents of the world as they pass before us in experience, for that system needs them to fill in the blank forms it offers. But beyond stating this general need of the particulars, it has naught to say. Remember the criticism which idealism used to make, when it was winning its way to the front, upon the older empiricism. No amount of summing up of particulars will prove a necessary law, we were told. True, of course. Idealism has never been able to see the equally true con- verse. No amount of a priori necessities, however real or valid they may be, will account for the existence and the GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 143 specialty of a single instance. For this Aristotle criticized Plato; but idealism has forgotten the lesson. Kant himself , even, knew that the particular was a surd to the universal. Perhaps we should not blame idealism more than any other system for failing to deduce one from the other; for no sys- tem has yet done this. We ourselves shall later endeavour to do so, because we believe that until it is done, civil war in philosophy's camp is inevitable. But we need not re- quire even so much of idealism. It should at least, if it is fertile, proceed from genus to species, in ever increasing con- notation, until it comes at any rate close to our particulars. It need not reach them. But at present, even in Miinster- berg's elaborate product, it remains quite bare of character and of determination. The universal we found able to gen- erate many categories; Mind and the Great Will were able to generate little or nothing. How much Professor Miinster- berg had to assume at the outset, and how empirically did he obtain it! Yet despite the extraordinary interest of his detailed account of the categories, we must confess that it is not as the work of a Great Subject, that it is interesting. Against our criticism it may be objected that we have failed to get the point of view of voluntarism. Our judg- ment has been couched, we may be told, in static, logical, or existential terms : but volition is a Thathandlung, as Fichte said. Or as Miinsterberg and others put it, existence is a value. Perhaps the deductive point of view which we have maintained misses this value-side. Now we do not here raise the whole question of the mean- ing of value. We are discussing idealism, and consequently we are concerned only with value in the personal sense : value as a category of consciousness. Some thinkers have maintained that good and bad may reside in objects by themselves ; that, if there were no men living, to a flower the 144 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY sun would be a good. Such a view seems antagonistic to common sense : but it matters not to us now, whether it is right or wrong. Even if we admit that value is dependent upon a subject and is indefinable that " there is nothing good or bad in the world but thinking makes it so " - what we shall say retains its force. Should the value-attitude, then, replace the scientific or theoretical one ? Do we get a better understanding of the world when we put it all into terms of willed end, frustrated or fulfilled purpose, yes, even an impersonal Sollen ? We may indeed do this. To be a blade of grass is doubtless to be an object which fulfills my purpose of finding out what com- poses the lawn in front of my house. It is, however, just as correct to say that the satisfaction thus afforded to my curiosity is an existing fact, a real occurrence. The reduc- tion of existence to value does not forestall the converse reduction. If reality is what we ought to believe, then what we ought to believe is reality, and the fact that we ought to believe it is a real attribute of the universe. The only justification for our preferring either reduction lies in its fertility. Does it help us to see more of the make-up of the universe, to regard it in value-terms rather than in the cold impersonal way of the rationalist ? And we have found that it does not. The value-attitude, however interesting an object of study for itself, has not cast more light upon the scene before us, than the contemplative one. It gives a cor- rect, though inadequate, formulation of the panorama; so does the existential rendering. As far as results go, there is no ground for asserting the primacy of either value or fact. A third sort of idealism remains to be considered. As the human person has been thought to have three " faculties," viz., intellect, will, and feeling the modern fashion pre- GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 145 fers the word " processes " or " functions " so the Great Self has been alleged to be Reason, or Will, or Feeling. Having expounded the performances of the Great Reason and the Great Will, we ought now to set forth the system of aesthetic idealism or the doctrine of the Great Feeling. This system has not indeed been so prominent as the other two. Shall we be wrong if we assign as the reason the predom- inantly practical and scientific colour of modern civilization? The ideas of the Romantic School, and the philosophy of Schelling, could hardly flourish long in a scientific and indus- trial epoch. Nevertheless, we have today a reappearance of this affective idealism, as we might call it, and in a more thoroughly organized form than Schelling was able to give it. We refer to the system of Professor Baldwin. This magnum opus, begun in the three volumes of Thought and Things and culminating in the Genetic Theory of Reality, could hardly be expected to receive its meed of attention and appreciation so soon after its birth (1905-15) as the present date; but it would seem to represent along with the above systems one of the chief types of human thought. Let us then expound it and estimate its metaphysical significance. The author thus resumes his position: "It remains, finally, to characterize our result from the historical point of view. We have seen that the interpretations of reality, since the introduction of the subjective point of view into modern philosophy, have vibrated between various rationalisms and various voluntarisms, apart from tendencies of a ' positive ' character, which have recognized certain limitations of method and so have denied the possibility of a philosophy of reality. In speculative thought systems of rationalism and voluntarism have contested the field. " A third point of view, making appeal to feeling, has per- sisted, however, more or less desultorily, its presentation 146 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY growing more and more articulate. Its clear formulation is today most urgently needed." (Genetic Theory of Reality, pp. 308-309.) Such a formulation is his own system, the metaphysical theory of " Pancalism " or the beautiful whole (rb KO\OV TTO.V). The title sufficiently indicates the aesthetic trend of the doc- trine. The interpretation of reality, now in one way, now in another, by individual and race, reaches its goal in a con- ception which synthesizes the positive elements of previous views: that of aesthetic experience. Such experience, and such alone, is ultimate reality. In order to appreciate it, we must consider how it has evolved from earlier modes of thought. The development of human thinking about reality has passed, according to Baldwin, through three stages, viz., the prelogical, logical, and hyperlogical. Though not strictly necessary to our purpose, we believe it will conduce to a better realization of the system's im- portance if we recount some of the details of this progress. In the prelogical stage reality is, to man, a social institu- tion. The tribe, not the individual, is the primary thing; the individual is not, except as a member of the tribe. What- ever the tribe endorses is real, and whatever is real is what the tribe endorses. " If this be true, we should expect, the farther back we trace human culture, the more emphatic, dominant, and irresistible we should find the social means of organization and control to be. . . . We are accustomed to think of the ' natural man ' as a sort of primitive ' in- dividualist/ free from our social conventions, and roaming at his own sweet will in the broad fields of life. But the very reverse is the case. Primitive man is a slave, subject to unheard-of severities, brutalities, terrors, sanctions, per- secutions, all represented by detailed rites and ceremonies that make his life a perpetual shiver of dread, and a night- GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 147 mare full of spectres. Nothing is so slight, not even his shadow or his dream, as to escape the regulation of the mystic powers, speaking in the social code ; and nothing is grave enough to secure him a moment's respite or exemption from the penalties socially decreed. The savage is never gay; gayety is the product of civilization " (p. 46). " We may say, without hesitation, that primitive interpretation (of reality) considered as common meaning or representation collective, is ' syndoxic ' : that is, it is apprehended by the individual as being the common possession of the group, accepted by others as by himself. He makes no claim to have discovered or even to have confirmed it. It is a body of commonly accepted teachings ..." (p. 46). This interpretation of reality is not dualistic: self and other, sub- ject and object, actual and ideal, are not yet distinguished. It confuses the two sides; facts are not, as we now view them, physical facts merely, but emotionally interpreted physical facts. " It is as in the case of the child who refuses to admit that the doll is merely a thing of wood and paint, seeing in it the identity of a loved and cherished compan- ion " (p. 56). There is lacking " the distinction of persons from things, and the distinction of persons as individuals, from one another especially of the personal self from other selves, of ego from alter " (p. 59). " This appears in the mass of evidence collected by the ethnologists, which shows that the primitive individual does not and cannot consider himself, even physically, a separate, distinct, self- identical being " (p. 62). This primitive monism is signifi- cant, for to it we return at the end, though in an enriched and ripened form, which has profited by the dualism of the later stages. And finally, we note that it is a religious inter- pretation; the physical object is identified with its mystical meaning. "... the animism of primitive life is that of the 148 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY affective type " (p. 79). "... things are intermediaries, agents, instruments of good or ill, of fate or fortune, or they are ends, beings to be propitiated, avoided, welcomed, ap- pealed to, defended. In both cases they are values " (p. 81). This is a religious attitude, because " there is the recognition in this object of a presence or force worthy of respect and capable of giving aid " (p. 88). It is a personal affair, for " All the great religions of the world have personal gods " (p. 93). To this religious and affective character of reality, so prominent in the view of primitive man, we return in the theory of " Pancalism." " In the passage from the prelogical to the logical type of knowledge, the imagination is the constant instrument. . . . By the schematizing imagination, the materials of knowl- edge are released from the grasp of external and social con- trol, and made available for reconstruction in experimental hypotheses and aesthetic unities " (p. 140). With increased play of fancy, grows up the pure contemplative impulse, the impulse " toward the explanation of things, in the whole range of nature and mind " (p. 142). But we must not believe that the scientific method which follows is the only organon of truth. It is but one among others; to select it out as alone worthy of respect is to worship an abstraction. Fancy, too, has its insights; myths have their truth- value. " It is not only true that the imagination serves as an in- strument to knowledge . . . , it is equally true that its. constructions may not have such ends in view, but may con- stitute a mode of interpretation having independent mean- ing " (p. 144). " And this semblant picture [drawn by religious myth], presented to faith and contemplation, is not merely a temporary substitute for a fully rational account; it is a permanent rendering of ideals in forms with which the logical dispenses, but which nevertheless hold their own in GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 149 human thought " (p. 145). After these warnings, we may proceed with the logical stages. Imagination soon reveals the dualism of fact and value ; and hence reality is seen in either of two guises. It may be viewed as a group of " facts, truths, principles " or a group of " ends, values, norms " (cf. the table, p. 151). These give respectively rationalisms and voluntarisms. We must admit that Professor Baldwin here rather lightly brushes aside the " realistic " types of thought, as if the idealisms (rationalistic or voluntaristic) were the only ones worth considering. He says, " It would seem, then, that, historically considered, speculative thought has allowed, tacitly or avowedly, the presupposition that it is in a mode of experience, or through consciousness, that reality reveals itself. We may say that this is true without doubt. The subjective point of view . . . has remained the starting point of the theory of reality, as it is the pre- supposition of the judgment of existence. A theory may refuse to admit this . . . but in that case it must still postulate a principle . . . the meaning of which can be determined only in human experience " (ibid.). It is a con- sequence of his inadequate treatment of this issue surely as patently unsolved today as any in philosophy that his final synthesis includes only idealistic motives, and in so far fails to be as complete a philosophical synthesis as the author believes it is. But to proceed. Both intellec- tualism (rationalism) and voluntarism are convicted of one-sidedness, in twenty pages of searching analysis. We give two examples : " Every experience of exclusive interest, - the child's kiss, the drunkard's cup, the image present to the gaze of the devotee gives a sense of reality more intimate than all the proofs of logic " (p. 156). "... all the ideals (of voluntarism) become intelligible, continuous, and coordinated goods only by reason of the function of 150 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY knowledge, which not only discovers the ideals, but enforces them by finding them true " (p. 169). Having thus escaped from the exclusions of the logical period, we pass to the hyperlogical. Here we find the beginnings of the attempt to synthesize the various opposing views of the logical period. They are indeed hardly at all synthetic at first; rather a return from the oppositions of that period to the directness and simplicity of immediacy. They are, therefore, called " immediacy theories "; of the more primitive type, there are mysticism of the naive sort, and subjectivism; of the more sophisticated kind, intuition- ism, transcendentalism and the " higher mysticism." The second group of hyperlogical theories contains "those based on the immediacy of synthesis ": i. e., those which make a more serious attempt to combine opposing motives in the history of thought. Here are grouped perhaps rather arbitrarily such different men as Plotinus, Fichte, Hegel, Bradley, Plato, Jacobi, and at the highest point of the progress, Aristotle, Kant, and Schelling. The relationship of our author's view to that of Schelling is, as we should expect, close; and one is glad to see the merit of Schelling, too long obscured by his great contemporary Hegel, receiv- ing something of its due recognition. The one trouble with Schelling was that in his system " The art consciousness is not shown to have the requisite content " (p. 214, italics mine). " What Schelling's resort to the aesthetic really lacked, then, was an analysis of the art consciousness and its products, which would show that it really fulfilled the role of reconciliation which he assigned to it " (p. 215). The synthesis of " Pancalism " follows. " The aesthetic experience is so rich in meaning that we are able to recog- nize no less than four suggestions of dualistic meaning [taken up from the logical stage] whenever it is experienced, GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 151 each contributing, however, to the immediacy of the whole effect. There is, in the aesthetic object, first, the character of imaginative semblance, which suggests the ordinary dualism between idea and fact; there is, second, the char- acter of idealization, which suggests the dualism between fact and end; there is, third, the character of self -embodi- ment or personalization, suggesting the dualism between the self and the not-self; and finally, fourth, there is the char- acter of singularity, suggesting the dualism between singular and universal. It remains to show, however, that . . . these strains of dualism lose themselves in the rich synthesis of immediate contemplation. With all its varied sugges- tions, no state of mind is more fully one and undivided than that of aesthetic enjoyment, when once it is fully entered into " (pp. 231-232). " The distinguishing thing . . . about the aesthetic interest is its end ; it seeks the intrinsic meaning of the object, not a meaning foreign to or beyond the object " (p. 236). It seeks and finds the reality itself. "In aesthetic appreciation, the object is read as possessed of the very mental and moral life of the observer ..." (p. 239). "What we are justified in taking the real to be is that with which the full and free aesthetic and artistic con- sciousness finds itself satisfied. We realize the real in achieving and enjoying the beautiful " (p. 277). " The conclusions we have reached allow us to suppose that reality is just all the contents of consciousness so far as organized or capable of organization in aesthetic or artistic form. . . . The whole of reality would be the entire experience of a consciousness capable of grasping and contemplating it as an aesthetic whole. The whole is an organized experience, and this experience has the form of a self " (p. 303). This is aesthetic idealism. It differs from absolute idealism such as Mr. Bradley's in this, that it does not construe the partial aspects 152 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY as appearance over against reality. "As to these special modes of reality, they are not to be considered invalid or unreal. . . . The aesthetic reveals something new, some- thing peculiar; but it accepts and reinstates, in its own way, the realities and even the contrasts of the partial modes. . . . Each is therefore a valid, though, genetically considered, a modal and incomplete aspect of the real " (p. 304). Nor is this aesthetic whole a " static absolute." "It is just the quality of the aesthetic ideal to reach finality in every state- ment of its results; but to say that reality is itself finished, in this intent of finality, is to deny the continued efficacy of the motives themselves upon which this very intent is based " (p. 305). "... the whole is continually and progressively moving on ..." (ibid.). Professor Baldwin's achievement is, we believe, unique. He has the breadth of motive of the true philosopher. On the idealistic side, he has gathered up the partial views into a synthesis which adds to the merit of comprehensiveness that of a specific verification in experience which rationalistic and voluntaristic idealism have seemed unable to attain. And he has raised into prominence an invaluable human experience the aesthetic whose significance for knowl- edge the modern workaday consciousness is all too inclined to overlook. How then shall we adjudicate the metaphysical claims of the system ? Professor Baldwin's method is genetic; and this means that he does not attempt to deduce from the Great Esthete's experience the various parts and the de- tailed outline of the universe. Such a Being is conceived as the goal toward which we human beings are progressing, which indeed some of us occasionally touch. We believe the conception to be a just one. If, however, that is the goal, we have yet to understand how it happens to realize itself so GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 153 gradually, through partial stages, one at a time, each suffer- ing from the exclusions and bitter oppositions found in human history. This is always the difficulty for an idealiz- ing view, as for a synthetic view; granted its truth, does it account for the happenings of this nether world, with its imperfections which cannot be explained away ? It maps the better side of reality, if you will ; but the worse side the side, that is, to which we most need to adapt ourselves is not understood. The value of a philosophical system, i. e., the extent to which it satisfies our instinctive curiosity to know the universe and to adapt ourselves to it, is meas- ured by its power of explaining just those characters of the universe which offer difficulty to us: the particular things, the forces that frustrate one another, the real as opposed to the ideal. The aesthetic system is too good to be wholly sat- isfactory , just as the rationalistic was too logical to be wholly true. A perfectly correct picture of one side it certainly gives. The aesthetic experience " when once it is fully entered into " (p. 232), has all the soul-satisfying qualities attributed to it by our author. At the same time it is but one point of view of the universe, even though it were the broadest possible. It may include everything in its net, just as subjectivism did ; but it finds a surd in the other all- inclusive points of view already studied those of the will and the intellect. The aesthetic experience itself may be analyzed nay, must be analyzed ; and by this means it becomes in turn less fundamental than the logical. As subjectivism and objectivism tilted interminably, so there is here the occasion for another endless seesaw; viz., between the three kinds of idealism. The logical, the volitional, the affective, may each be defined in concepts of the others, and any sort of idealism is thereby " cut under " by any other. If the aesthetic type had been able to deduce the fundamental 154 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY categories of the other types, it would have remained su- preme : but because the reality it lays before us is end rather than source, it cannot do so. The genetic method is more concrete, more personal, more empirical; but it has thereby foregone the explaining power which the more a priori de- ductions, in however abstract a fashion, might claim. The balance remains pretty nearly equal, between the three views. All are, in their positive teaching, about equally true; none refutes the others, none cuts deeper under the others than they under it, and none can account for the pres- ence of its rivals. They are simply cross-sections of the universe from three distinct angles; they miss the thickness of fact, for they have discovered no productive principle. Herewith we finish our study of the first argument of Great Subjectivism, viz., the argument from the fecundity of the hypothesis of a Great Subject. The second ground, as we have already said, is of a less transcendental nature. Its evidence is not drawn from conceptual deduction but (at least in the intention of its defenders) from the empirical results of psychology. It is not, to be sure, employed by all idealists. Some of them e. g., Professor Rickert (Gegen- stand der Erkenntnis, pp. 57, 69, and 107) claim that the transcendental deduction of categories is the only proper justification of so ideal a being as the Great Subject ; these thinkers insist upon the inadequacy of particular psychologi- cal fact, even its irrelevancy, to any so universal problem. We believe that they are open to some charge of incon- sistency; as, for example, we find Rickert himself building upon Brentano's theory of judgment (op. cit., p. 106) which is a wholly empirical matter. We wish however to take idealism at its broadest, and to neglect no one of the pleas made for it by the experts; accordingly, we shall, in spite of these disclaimers, proceed to the psychological evidence for the Head of the universe. GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 155 But alas! as so often in these baffling currents, we must first clear the jutting rocks laid bare by the objections just raised. Characteristically enough, another issue has here arisen to cleave the idealistic party in twain : the issue be- tween " Psychologismus " and " Anti-psychologismus," as the Germans call it. This dispute we witness in the writing of the " neo-Friesians " on the one side (a leading work of their camp is Leonard Nelson's Die kritische Methode und das Verhaltnis der Psychologic zur Philosophic, Gottingen, 1904), and on the other the work of such logicians as Schiippe (Erkenntnistheoretike Logik), Husserl (Logische Unter- sttchungen), Cohen (Reine Logik} and others. The defenders of " Psychologismus " argue that whatever is, is accessible to direct verifying observation ordescribable in terms of such observation; hence the transcendental self, the universal mind, and other " pure " concepts are either nothing or are part and parcel of the concrete stream of human thought and feeling. The latter deny .this accessibility to experience, and instance many entities which we credit with reality, such as TT, V2, the infinite, or indeed any "universal," con- cept or law. For these are by definition incapable of ade- quate presentation in any finite series of cases, such as human life offers. The controversy waxes hottest about the nature of judgment; for idealism has agreed to define reality as the object of a valid judgment. We find the one faction urging that judgment is a psychosis, a mental event, and should be investigated quite empirically; the other that because it apprehends an external reality judgment is more than a mental occurrence, and has aspects not redu- cible to psychical terms. It seemed, not long ago, as if the latter opinion were correct; for an enterprising psychologist, Karl Marbe, undertook an examination of the psychical content of the judging process (Marbe, Untersuchung uber 156 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY die Denkthatigkeit) and found no contents that seemed con- stant to all his subjects and relevant to the process. Accord- ingly, Marbe decided that judgment was not intrinsically a psychosis. Contradictory though this seemed to common sense, the result commended itself to the " anti-psychologis- mus " people. But not long afterwards, certain experi- menters (Narziss Ach, H. J. Watt, August Messer, Alfred Binet, and others) deciding that Marbe 's experiments were not sufficiently thorough, instigated a long series of labora- tory studies with the object of digging out psychological material from this elusive phenomenon. And they claimed to find a number of hitherto unnamed states. At the same time, Benno Erdmann's Umrisse zur Psychologic des Den- kens (Sigwart Festschrift, Tubingen, 1900), an equally painstaking investigation, came to the conclusion that the material discovered by such methods is irrelevant to the real nature of thought. It is not our purpose to retail these various and conflicting deliverances; the reader will find a resume in Titchener's Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Processes (1910) which certainly as far as a layman may decide, leaves little or nothing to be desired in the way of completeness. The residuum of accepted result is, to be sure, small. However confident we may be that future ex- periments will reveal new subject-matter in the cognitive states of mind, it must be admitted that as yet the " antis " are not definitely refuted. In this matter we can simply look to the experts to decide. When, indeed, we remember that many psychologists nowadays (among them no less an authority than the experimentalist Wundt) deny the pos- sibility of introspective study of thought, we are not too sanguine of a decision. But who can tell what new argu- ments may be discovered ? Meanwhile we can but em- phasize the fact that there are almost as many different and GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 157 conflicting theories of judgment within the " anti " faction as within the other. The reader may, if he thinks the labour worth while, look up the theories of Wundt, B. Erdmann, Marbe, Bradley, and others, and see whether they show more or less disagreement than those of Sigwart, Jerusalem, Brentano, Mill, Schrader, and their " psychologistic " allies. The philosophical issue is, in truth, not one which may be settled by appeal to particular facts of the mental Ifie. There is clearly something about such concepts as TT, Va, the infinite, the self, which is not attained by any sum- mation of particulars, while at the same time these entities are realized only in the particulars. The analogy with the subjective-objective issue is perfect. Real objects may always be described in subjective terms, but those terms never contain all that is meant by " real " as over against " mental." Yet whatever more is meant, can in turn be stated in subjective phraseology only to serve as an indication once more of something not yet reached ; and so on indefinitely. This we saw in Chapter IV. It is the same with the concept and the psychical symbol or the particular image, or case of the concept. The irrationals, ir, etc., can never be summed, yet every decimal place that can be named may be calculated with exactness. It is the relation of more-to-come, of further possible cases, that is not repre- sented by any one value or instance. But is not this relation, this possibility, a definite content present here and now before the mind ? Is it not in a psychical process that we apprehend it ? How else indeed could we apprehend it but in an act of apprehension ? And is it not thereby the con- tent of the particular state in which it is apprehended, as truly as for subjectivism the object is content of the subject ? Undoubtedly we must acknowledge that it is. All that is, as subjectivism showed, is content of the mind 158 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY whether actual or possible content. For even the possi- bility-of-further-instances is itself something thought of. The upholders of " Psychologismus " are correct. But their opponents also are correct when they insist upon the inadequacy of the present instance to express the whole series, and upon the inability of the formula " more-to- come " to tell what that more will be. The never-ending tilt follows the denial of either side. It is not the subjectivity of the concept, or its extension beyond the present content, that determines what the future cases are to be, but the nature of the concept itself. The concept TT has a different second decimal from that of the concept V^, because of its own intrinsic qualities. In the controversy over " Psycho- logismus," then, neither side gives a clue to the nature of concept or real object; and neither side can deny the cor- rectness of the other except when that other denies its op- ponent. Meanwhile, what we are interested in is not the psychical or conceptual character of the Great Self, but its reality and its make-up. With this we pass to the specific evidence for idealism which is drawn from the psychological field. Genetic psychology, it is alleged, shows that one's own self is a social product. It grows with and by its fellow- selves. The child's self develops by imitation of, and re- action to, the acts of already formed selves (adults) ; he does not know he has a self until he is aware of other selves. The mature self is nothing but a socius. The work of Baldwin and Royce in this field (cf. in particular, Royce, World and Individual, II, lect. 4, " Physical and Social Reality ") is well known ; its importance for idealism is not sufficiently recog- nized by realistic foes. So indispensable is the position for a just appreciation of idealism's endeavour to be concrete that we venture to give it a distinct title. In contrast with the GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 159 isolated-self-doctrine of subjectivism, viz., solipsism, the social-self-doctrine of idealism may fitly be named socip- sism. It is the doctrine of the Great Self as the organic unity and identity of the little human selves; a unity involved in the structure of each self, and verifiable in daily experience. It obeys not a transcendental, but an empirical motive; and the two props of idealism, abstract logic and concrete psy- chology, here meet to give mutual aid and comfort. In modern life, powerful influences confirm this empirical prop. All our emphasis upon " social service," the spirit of society, altruism as the chief virtue, democracy, all our dread of loneliness and our contempt of obscurity, combine to render the distinction between the socius and the solus into that between the good and bad, the true and false. The rapid rise into favour of the " social sciences " is but a sign of this. Here, as with other philosophical doctrines, many motives besides the intellectual bring about the current view. And those who oppose the claims of idealism, built as it is largely upon this empirical organic theory of society, would do well to remember that they are opposing the favourite virtues of their own time. Not that this is a refu- tation of their position, for each age no doubt exaggerates certain aspects of life and neglects otners ; but it is well to see where the arguments lead. And at any rate it seems difficult to find other rational ground for the preferred vir- tues of present-day ethics, than this one of the mutual immanence of private selves. This doctrine of the veridical Great Self clinches the nail driven by the other line of reasoning about the object as a universal. The real external things in Nature, trees, houses, and rocks, are, in the teaching of idealism, content universal, common to many minds. They are also defined as the con- tent of the Great Mind. The latter thus appears as the l6o PRODUCTIVE DUALITY unity of the various particular minds. So we find Royce speaking of matter as object of the social mind (op. cit., vol. II, p. 197). A scientific truth is one which is capable of confirmation by many expert witnesses. Such unity, how- ever, must be carefully conceived; it does not intend to contradict a diversity of the little selves. The tree which you and I see is undoubtedly in part the same ; but it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to point out exactly those elements of it which carry the identity. The colour, the shape, the position, vary with the place and the sense- organs of each observer. It is rather the conceptual limit, the object of inference toward which the sensuous messages point, that forms the identical content in the diverse minds. This is expressed by every-day language in the phrase " that particular tree which we all mean "; that is the com- mon element. And while this limit is more than the content of any one mind, it is the content of that unity of all minds which constitutes the Great Self. The idealist may of course be asked where he will put these outstanding diver- sities between your presentation of the tree and mine; but the reply is at hand. He may put them in either of two regions. In so far as they are erroneous, he may relegate them to the particular mind of the observer alone. If I am red-blind, the tint of the autumn leaves as seen by me will not be identical with that hue which delights your eye : my visual content lies in that realm of fancy, the merely private. It is true that this gives rise to grave objections connected with the problem of error. But that problem, as will even- tually appear, is a difficulty to every philosophic type alike, and it is therefore not open to the opponent to condemn idealism for not squaring with the real presence of illusory objects. Hence for the present we may disregard this criti- cism. The other alternative before idealism has to do with GREAT SUBJECTIVISM l6l the data before my mind when they are correct but diver- gent from the correct data of your mind. The fir tree as, I see it may have a general conical figure, while to you who look from a different angle, it is shaped more like an egg on end. Now neither of these is incorrect: the outline of the tree is really such that from one angle it looks a cone, from another, an egg. Both are to be included in the true nature of the object, each admitting the truth of the other. The differences are due to each observer abstracting from the point of view of the other. The identity is found by each including the ignored aspect and arriving at the same total as the other. In this way, then, may idealism show the numerical sameness of the many minds. But not alone on its theory of Nature and self -conscious- ness does the present argument of idealism lean. A similar chain of reasoning is drawn from the doctrine of interest. And this turn of reflection, though not more coercive, is perhaps more persuasive. My own self is best realized when I identify my own interests with those of the social group, and the greatest self is he whose interests have the greatest social intension. The argument may easily be enlarged by ethical and psychological detail. Its appeal to the sympa- thetic instincts is powerful : to many minds, the coincidence of warm sentiment with the cold constraint of reason forms irresistible circumstantial evidence. That these considera- tions are exact or exhaustive, however, would be too much to claim. Psychology is hardly in so established a state that we can base philosophy very firmly upon it. Yet there seems to be a great loose body of evidence which goes to show that the self is in high degree social. For accuracy's sake we had better say that a large part of the content of the self, whether on its cognitive, active, or sensible aspects, is of social origin. On the other hand, it does seem clear that idealists have 1 62 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY underestimated certain instincts which extol solitude and independence, and have neglected a considerable body of evidence which would argue against the social-fusion view. At best, the idealists have hardly done more than to point out the actuality and the importance of the social side of human nature. Some amount of unity and mutual implication between our various private selves, then, undoubtedly exists. The empirical plea of our type has a measure of truth. But is there enough truth in it for the purposes of idealism ? It seems fair to answer that the common part of all the mem- bers of our race, taken together with their interpenetration, is sufficient to intimate a Head of the universe, in the sense of a rough unity of their minds' contents and their interests. So far as their objects and interests are one, doubtless the many minds are also one. But for aught that is yet shown, this unity may be of a sort that mankind finds no special satisfaction in discovering. The Great Self has present to it all those objects which are verified by many witnesses. How many witnesses ? We are never certain as to the required number ; and in practice this uncertainty cuts the muscle of the social argument. What seems almost universally confirmed in one age may be discarded in the next so testifies the history of science, of ethics, of politics. All we can say is, that what eventually is agreed upon by the experts, working independently, will be the truth. The One Mind which sees all things gives us no clew to what those things will be. After all, is any more knowledge afforded by the statement that the truth is object of One Mind, than by the proposition that the truth is the agreement between many minds ? The One Mind has nothing uniquely its own, nothing from which we can infer the character of what is present to it, or the map of reality. GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 163 It remains a purely formal unity; a large circumference which is bound to include all within the map. It is not the mental quality of it, that helps our knowledge; it is the unity and the agreement between all men which it holds out as a final criterion of the truth, or goal it is that alone which is helpful to the seeker after knowledge. But this unity may quite as well be put in realistic as in idealistic terms. We grant, then, that there is, actually, concretely, in each of us, a consciousness big enough to include what others are conscious of; and this may be true even though we do not know just what in particular and exactly is this common stock of truth. Nevertheless such a great con- sciousness gives no indication of the structure, the laws, the behaviour, of the contents before it. True, but nugatory, must be the verdict. The like is to be said of that approximate unity of interests which constitutes the emotional and practical tissue of this large Self. My self is social, yes; my interests are indeed bound up with yours; but what will be the true realization of that self and those interests ? The fact that the Great Unity identifies them all, does not help us to know, of any particular desire, whether its fulfilment would promote your interests as well as my own. It is the specific nature of each end which alone decides that. Is it for your best in- terest and mine, for the fullest realization of your self and my own, that the government should take over the rail- ways ? that children should be brought up by the state ? Psychological idealism pretty generally has come to admit that there is no deduction of particular institutions such as the family, this or that kind of state, or system of education. Certainly, if there is, it cannot be based upon the empirical fact that we are in the main social beings. All that socipsism teaches is that we must in general live with others, learn 164 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY from them and instruct them, work with them in coopera- tion and competition (both ? or only one ?) in short, that whatever we do we are in large measure mutually dependent. For the tracing of consequences from this dependence, we must go back to those deductions of categories which made up the transcendental argument of idealism. That argu- ment we have already dealt with. From the empirical de- fence we gain a Great Self whose unity is no more significant for knowledge, than is the string which we use to tie up a bundle of sticks significant of their shape, weight, or number. Idealism, like subjectivism and objectivism, views the world from one corner, albeit a fascinating one. Charmed with the concept of personal individuality, it resolves to envisage all reality from that coign of vantage. It would re- duce everything to a function of some Immense Person. And it has succeeded in doing so. Indeed any corner in the universe affords a unique perspective of the whole scene, and all within the panorama may be truly denned from that perspective. But such projection is bound to distort the vision; certain jutting points will stand out magnified, others will be diminished, still others cast into shadow. Idealism has proved its case at the cost of specific informa- tion. It has secured truth but it has lost pertinence. Its adversaries, feeling the barrenness of the net result, have straightway endeavoured to disprove it. Failure in this endeavour leads to a reaction in which idealism again proves its case. For it is futile to try to break down the chain of reasoning. It is, in our opinion, unbreakable. At the same time, we must acknowledge the force of the reasons which have led to revolt: namely, its unsatisfactoriness to the instinct which seeks a map of the universe for purpose either of practical advantage or contemplation. GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 165 As a matter of history, idealism's thinness has reacted upon idealism itself; the philosophic disease has in these latter days of the system broken out in an aggravated form. The particular projection of reality which it has affected conceals the contours and indentations of reality's map; it gives a bare circumference with no filling. The evanescent reality takes revenge; in true Hegelian fashion, idealism gradually takes on the colour of a doctrine which gives no acquaintance with reality. This was foreshadowed in Kant's doctrine of the things-in-themselves. They were the real things, and we could never know them. All that we know is unavoidable illusion. Later thinkers, beginning with Fichte, expunged this germ which infected human knowl- edge with error. But since idealism had no principle for discovering the empirical contents, it could not provide a guarantee of the reality of what we see in our experience. If now there are no " things-in-themselves," everything we can know remains, not merely illusion, but illusion about nothing; for there is nothing in the background of phenom- ena. It is but as if things were what they seem to be. The Great Person is a form without content; he works in vacua if even he can be said actually to work. This result has been reached by that most faithful of Kantian students, Professor Vaihinger, in the Philosophic des Als Ob. Here we find the reductio ad absurdum of that method which would derive reality from the subject however colossal the frame of that subject may be. Nothing is ; we can only say, it is as if it were. Of course it is not merely the unsatis- factoriness of the consummation that we condemn; it is its patent falsity. Everybody does believe that reality is somewhere and somehow known if only the real fact that doubting occurs. This Descartes pointed out; and if he presumed to interpret it in the subjective sense of the Cogito 1 66 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY ergo sum, introducing a point of view whose pleasantness to man obscured its barrenness, the objective correctness of his discovery remains to rebuke this last product of the subjective interpretation. The subjective types, both little and great, have herewith exhausted themselves. Whatever other types we find, will be objective, realistic, or else of a sort which is foreign to this whole issue. But before we proceed to these types, it will be instructive, perhaps, to make some comments upon the general bearings of idealism. The doctrine has, apparently, had a tremendous influence upon modern history notably upon German political ideals and methods (as is beauti- fully shown in Dewey's German Philosophy and Politics), and our accusation of barrenness is therefore not easily ad- mitted in the practical realm. Scientifically impotent though it is, may it not lead to fundamental modifications in national policy ? In considering this question, too, we shall be led to see something of the real influence of phi- losophy upon, as well as its indifference to, the practical issues of life. It is true that the human thinkers who have taken idealism as an absolutely true system, have acted quite dif- ferently from those who denied it. One who thinks that a certain group of categories must be, no matter what is the empirical material filling them up, will naturally stand for the supremacy of system, at almost any cost to the individual. He will prefer a rigid national structure to the comfort of the individuals who compose it ; he will tend to condemn politi- cal experiment, the fickle popular vote, or other democratic measures; he will tend to despise that readiness to learn by experience and to adopt working compromises, which has characterized pragmatic and realistic Anglo-Saxon com- munities. These effects are plain, in the efficiency of GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 167 modern Germany; the vast difference between the life of the German private citizen and that of the American, is obvious enough. The experimental attitude of pragmatism (a type later to be examined) could not find much sympathy in Germany; the idealistic system of categories could not long command wide support among philosophers of England or the United States. How then shall we say that the Great Self is but a figure-head ? We might find similar practical bearings of other systems. The Platonic realist, as we shall soon. see, resembles the idealist in valuing the continuance of the State above the welfare of the individual citizen; the nominalist is likely to do the opposite. In our own civil war, the Republican and Democratic parties were thus aligned ; and even at the present day, the alignment has not ceased. The former is roughly the party of the vested interests, the latter the champion of the rights of the masses. The monist with his theory of the social organism, is not apt to favour compe- tition, laissez faire, individual enterprise ; the pluralist and empiricist is led in that direction. The philosophy of Catholicism could not be the same as that of Protestantism. It would, we dare say, be true that no fundamental phil- osophic doctrine is without its effect upon the political ideals, the religious attitude, or the moral principles, of its upholder. Scoffers are fond of illustrating the irrelevancy of philosophic issues by the mediaeval dispute over the num- ber of angels who can dance upon the needle's point; but, as philosophers know, the real question there was, whether personal individuality is indifferent to space-occupancy and possession of a physical body. The man who holds that it is, may well believe in immortality, the man who denies it, generally does not. These two will, in their religion and ethics, differ profoundly; they will, it may readily be imag- 1 68 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY ined, behave in quite opposite ways upon being faced with death or bereavement. Certainly they have often, though by no means universally, done so. Now many writers have accredited this claim of philosophy to kinship with be- haviour, but (disliking for some reason to grant efficacy to the former) have insisted that the philosophical tenets were effect rather than cause. It does not really matter; the point is that certain deep-seated reactions upon the environ- ment have been made by men, and that the main types of philosophy have at least corresponded with the types of reaction. There is not mutual indifference; either may be taken as on the whole an index of the other. That belief influences action is today a psychological com- monplace ; but it may influence it profitably, or again it may influence it to futile or even injurious results. If one's phi- losophy induces one to go to church on Sunday, then that philosophy is not indifferent to his conduct; but if the going to church on Sunday has no effect upon his behaviour during the rest of the week and no connection with his understand- ing of the universe's plan, that conduct may still be called indifferent to his life. Or if, indeed, going to church makes him endeavour to refute the creeds of others who go to other churches, or even to persecute them, and in such a way that they inevitably do the same to him, while neither has any greater truth than the other then his conduct may be called not only indifferent but injurious. It consumes energy needed for constructive work, promotes unhappiness, and makes life poorer because less inclusive than it might otherwise be. Now, is not the conduct which is in line with idealism something like this sort of Sunday worship ? The result (or the cause, if you will) of the idealistic philosophy is the tendency to a propagandism of systematic, rigorously ordered political life. Perhaps it goes further, and affects GREAT SUBJECTIVISM 169 the conception of home life, social observance, economic dis- tribution, etc. In fact, there is no doubt that it does. But this result is a rough, vague affair. It never descends to detail. It never enables us to deduce a particular institu- tion: only institution in general. From the beginning idealism was powerless to do that. The special categories of industry, the nation, the family, which Miinsterberg's exhaustive inquiry arrayed before us, were, as we saw, found in experience, not provided by idealism. Only the spirit of respect for law and order, in all spheres, is the essence of idealism's practical contribution. Now if this spirit is in- tolerant of a fair measure of freedom, and social experiment, it becomes an evil. In modern civilization it has become an evil, for it has aided and abetted the intolerance of the Prussian idea of the state; it has led to war. It has no patience with the other side, the pragmatic, rough, irregular side of life, which our own American practice upholds. We ourselves may be accused, doubtless, of an analogous im- patience. The narrowness of the pragmatic attitude shall be later dwelt upon ; at present we are studying idealism. The spirit of respect for law and order indispensable as it is becomes injurious when it is entertained in too exclusive a fashion. The same thing happens in the practical field as in the theoretical. If people refute one another in theory, they fight one another, in however refined a way, in practice. A man's personality is normally one; as he thinks, so he acts; and as he acts, so he thinks. If the theoretical aspect of idealism leads to an endless tilt, the practical side leads to an endless warfare between the state and the individual, the conservative and the radical, the partisan of order and the partisan of freedom. Instead of pooling their gains and cooperating, the factions try to destroy each other, and thereby they diminish the sum of thought and life. Mean- 1 70 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY while, the real problem of government, of economics, of family life, etc., is: how much system and how much free- dom shall we have ? How much of either is fitting for the German people, how much for the North American, the English, or the French ? And how much for each aspect of life ? Such a problem is not solved by accepting idealism as the absolute truth; nor yet by rejecting it in favour of a practical nominalism or individualism. It is solved by the study of the special questions in each of these fields; a study conceived in the spirit of respect for law and for as much individual freedom to experiment as is consistent with good social order. Idealism, then, if not conceived in ex- clusion, contributes an indispensable attitude; but, as we shall find, so does every other type of philosophy. Beyond this, it has no claim to superior truth or value. It does not gratify the religious instinct for a personal God, for a Great Artist or Artificer of the Universe; for its Great Subject is not a Maker. It does not help the scientific instinct for comprehension of the scheme of things. And with all this failure to solve the original problem of man, it remains irrefutable. It is so thin as to extend its truth everywhere. Of course these things have all been said before ; notably by Hegel, who is called an idealist. In Chapter IX we shall find that the title is not discriminating enough; at any rate, Hegel's idealism is of a fundamentally different kind from any of the above systems. And we shall also discover that Hegel himself was guilty of a similar fault to the one just mentioned. But his warning to humanity against the one- sidedness to which it is prone, needs reemphasis at every stage of life. " The sort of truth that is in most danger of getting itself ignored is the whole truth " says even that arch-antagonist of Hegel, Professor Perry (The Free Man and the Soldier, p. vii). And if that lesson is itself but one GREAT SUBJECTIVISM which needs to be counterbalanced by a correlative and opposite caution, it is none the less sound, and necessary for a just understanding of the whole problem of life. But we cannot expect human thinkers to forego the at- tempt to characterize the universe from one corner, until a great many corners have been tried. The revolt against idealism which its exclusiveness is bound to occasion, will probably go to the other extreme. The next type which we are to consider will probably reverse idealism's point of view. Instead of reducing objects to a phase of some Great Person, it will reduce personality, selfhood, consciousness, to terms of objects and their relations and functions. It will claim that the errors of idealism are due to its having started wrong: to its having been loaded down from the beginning with an infertile hypothesis. That hypothesis the Universal Mind must now be discarded. Interesting and valuable as personality is, it has no metaphysical supe- riority, no preeminent philosophical virtue. The world itself, the objective universe, is what the great initial prob- lem incites us to study. This new reform, then, erases the lines drawn on the idealistic chart, and commences a New Year with high hopes of discovery. A candid empiricism, a fair field for all hypotheses, a simple recording of the objec- tive facts as they are this will be its spirit. Objectivism is indicated ; but not the rather superficial one of the com- mon-sense dualism, for that was met by idealism. A deeper objectivism is needed, which describes everything, even the subject, as one fact among others, and to be defined, as all others are, by its relations to the rest. The face of this resolution is steadfastly set towards reality. We have re- turned to the original naive attitude, but we are equipped with the wisdom drawn from experience of error. Is not the promise fairer than it was at the outset ? CHAPTER VII GREAT OBJECTIVISM THE conclusion of the last chapter showed another New Year dawning in the history of thought, and another set of resolutions being framed. The troubles of philosophy are due so it was thought to the barren point of view which the subjective types adopted. Even the Great Self cannot explain the make-up of the actual world; it is un- illuminating. Nay more, it is a provoker of controversy; for idealism has internal dissensions. Let us then lay the axe to this root of evil ; let us abandon the figment ! But its fall involves others. If the Great Self is exiled, its kinsman the private subject is hardly likely to be a court favourite. Realistic criticism has shown that the latter cannot so much as account for the presence of external reality to say nothing of its characters without the help of the Universal Mind ; and idealism laid its foundations in accordance with this criticism. To lose faith in the Great Self is then to take from the little selves what makes them in any degree fun- damental. Yet on the other hand, these individuals are more obviously real than the Universal Self; for every man seems to know himself in some way immediately present, while he sees not this vast personality, nor empirically verifies it. The empirical argument for idealism was found to vanish into the transcendental argument. The new sys- tem will therefore not cast out utterly the private person- ality or consciousness, as it does the public one; rather it will admit it, but rid it of its subjectivity, analyze it into 17* GREAT OBJECTIVISM 173 terms of objects and relations of objects. Resolved, that the objective side of the universe is the sole reality: so reads the first article of the new creed. The novelty lies in treating the subjects just as subjectivism treated the objects; and the result is a quite objective metaphysics. " Pan-objec- tivism " it has been called, in disregard of linguistic pro- priety; the commoner name is "new realism." We have already seen that " realism " is an egregious misnomer, im- plying as it does an opponent defending " unrealism " who never existed. It is not the reality of anything that is here mooted, but the objectivity of the subject. In consequence of the thoroughness of the objectivism it would seem fittest to call the type Great Objectivism. It is correlative to Great Subjectivism in denying the substantiality of its counter- part and in giving a definition of that counterpart in terms of itself. Consciousness, then, is to be reduced to a kind of function, or phase, or process, of objects. Not necessarily physical objects; concepts, Platonic ideas, "subsisting" relations, all these may have their share in the constitution of a mind. The view is broader than materialism. Yet its method is somewhat analogous: if it has given up the old attempt to find a stuff-definition of mind an attempt in which ma- terialism never succeeded it is influenced by the modern predilection for functions, series, relations, behaviour, and the transeunt generally, and wishes to give a relational defi- nition. Mind is to be a certain kind of process or combina- tion of things or concepts : even as more modern materialism tended to regard thought as a kind of motion, rather than like the old, as a secretion, juicy or gaseous. In consequence of the radically objective character of this reform, the objects of knowledge will be regarded as inde- pendent of mind. " Independent " is here used to signify 174 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY that objects exist and are what they are, whether minds are aware of them or not. It connotes the indifference of objects to our consciousness of them. When minds become aware of real things, the content of the mind is dependent upon the existence and character of the objects, but in no other sense can dependence be alleged. Ordinary or dualistic realism which we called objectivism did not go so far as this; it was content to show that objects are numerically other than our mind's contents. But, as we saw, subjectivism could meet this " otherness " by showing that " otherness " is itself a relation to the mind. Great Objectivism, however, would cut under subjectivism; it makes objects too great to be reducible to such a relation. It will not degrade them by assigning them a relative status; it therefore abolishes the relation of otherness entirely. When I am aware of an object, that object is not other than my mind; my mind enters into, nay, is the object. Here is a return to the old view of common-sense that we know reality directly and immediately; hence the view is sometimes called naive realism. But the motive of it all is independence. Here stands the object, and it is what it is and needs no mind or relation to mind to constitute it. If I wish to know it, I must enter into it. 7 am in knowing dependent upon it, but it is not dependent upon me. In fact, my whole mind, in the cognitive aspect at least, is constituted by the objects, and the functions of them, with which it identifies itself. Thus independence leads to a presentational theory of knowledge ; we know objects directly and immediately as they are in themselves. Even in the case of the secondary qualities, and of errors, the content of the mind is objective. Corresponding to the deduction of categories in idealism, we may expect a deduction of the subjective world here. To some extent this has been carried out, though, owing to the GREAT OBJECTIVISM recency of the movement, not as far as we could wish. There are a few attempts to account for the origin of the psychical and of some of its leading characters, such as error, ideas, hypotheses. But we do not find as yet any clear-cut system of Great Objectivism, corresponding in patience and detail with such systems as those of Natorp and Miinsterberg. Nevertheless we may, perhaps, eventually expect them. Such a type fascinates us by its novelty, its thoroughgoing quality, and its independence of tradition. Like every other philosophic view, it is due to the combination of several mo- tives besides the rational one. If idealism makes its appeal largely to the respect we feel for personality and its daughter art, Great Objectivism rests mainly upon the correlative feeling of respect for the impersonal facts, the world of nature and science. Where the accumulated store of human labour in literature, fine art, institutional religion, and social convention is large and impressive, the new view will not easily raise its head; where the worship of these things is lighter, its growth is more favoured. Hence in the western world is found the more ardent advocacy of the present type. In Germany and France it hardly exists; in England, its chief defenders are found less in the literary centres than in the traditional home of science, Cambridge, and in the newer universities. Reverence for science, however, may assume different forms. Progress in science has depended upon two factors: the experimental and the mathematical method. Science has given us an ever fuller knowledge of the detail of fact; it has also by mathematical refinements been able to subject our knowledge to a more and more exact deductive reasoning. Two motives then appear: empiricism, and exact deduction, or rationalism. No true philosopher can help following these ideals; they stand for all that is right- eous in thinking, over against the seductions of hope, fear, 1 76 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY the will-to-believe, as the essence of intellectual sin. And if idealism made much of its appeal to the latter side of human nature, Great Objectivism may claim a higher moral tone, comparable to the categorical imperative itself, in the wor- ship of truth for its own sake and of the ideals of rigid logic, definition, and demonstration. Idealism appears to the ex- tremer devotees of such a reaction as romanticism or mysti- cism; yes, even at times intellectual dishonesty. Cold fact and cold reason together are almost irresistible ; and if the idealist follows them too in his own way, yet the very fact that his results claim a certain satisfactoriness prevents the moral element from standing out as it does in the correlative type. Independence of comfort is ever an ideal; independ- ence of any sort indeed; and both empiricism and ration- alism combine, in Great Objectivism, to reveal that ideal in all its austerity and authority. The fact that we are to expect no satisfaction for other human needs renders this particular need more dominating. Passing to the study of the doctrinal content of modern realism, we note that not only as a whole, but also in its ramifications, the view is a counterpart of idealism. Like that type, it divides into three. The fission conies about in the following way. Imbued as modern realism is with the spirit of objective investigation, it will tend to take science and the methods of science as its ideal and its model. Now the realist finds two groups of sciences: the biological and the physical, dealing with organic and with inorganic nature. In the organic, mathematical methods are less, in the inorganic more, emphasized; biology is more purely experi- mental than mechanics, less of a deductive scheme. Accord- ingly a certain choice seems open. The objectivist may select as his ideal the less deductive and more empirical method of biology, or he may prefer the more deductive GREAT OBJECTIVISM 177 processes of physics. He will probably justify the former choice by asserting that all things are in time, changing, developing, acting, and reacting with their environment; he will defend the latter choice by pointing to the assured re- sults of mathematics and mathematical physics, which treat things atomically and statically. The former choice will lead him to an anti-intellectual philosophy, the latter to a rationalism of a Platonic, or nearly Platonic sort. Con- sequently we find among recent realists an opposition be- tween the disciples of pure logic and mathematics, and the students of change, activity, and growth. But this second group, again, contains a division. Though its members agree in regarding the ideal concepts of mathematics and physics as artifacts, or " hypostasized abstractions," they are of two minds as to the nature of the flux in the world. Some of them define it from the point of view of action; real objects are stimuli of organic behaviour, or goals of in- quiring thought, the environment to which organisms are ever seeking to adjust themselves. These thinkers are the pragmatists. Other empiricists, however, no less enam- oured of life and time, regard reality as something not to be understood either by discursive intellect or by the needs of practice, but only by a kind of sympathetic insight, or intuition. These, led by Professor Bergson, are the intui- tionists. Now these three cults of Great Objectivism, ra- tionalist, pragmatist, and intuitionist, all professedly hostile to idealism, differ among themselves much as the three divisions of their common enemy. We recall how idealism split into the rationalistic, voluntaristic, and aesthetic fac- tions. Natorp, Cassirer, and Cohen instituted the first, Miinsterberg, et al., following Fichte, the second, and Bald- win, perfecting the earlier work of Schelling and the Ro- mantic School, the third. Each, building upon the notion of 178 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY the human person, diverged from the rest according as the intellect, or will, or feeling appeared to him the basis of per- sonality. So here we find a similar three respectively pre- ferred. Though the realist is not primarily interested in mind, he has not wholly shaken off the custom of idealism. He defines reality as the kind of object which intellect is peculiarly able to grasp, as made, so to speak, of rational material, and thereby writes himself down a devotee of exact logic and the reality of concepts, i. e., a Platonic realist; or again, he considers real objects to be essentially stimuli of action and things to which we must adjust ourselves, and writes himself a pragmatist; or, finally, he insists with Pro- fessor Bergson that the only true knowledge of reality is won by an intuitive attitude, an immediate feeling of the stream of events as they bud and grow and wane. The shadow of idealism hovers still in the background; but we must credit the good intentions of the realists, and must remember that it is, after all, the objective reality upon which their atten- tion is fixed. The issues between the three camps will not be decided by examination of the nature of personality, but by study of the nature of objects. Indeed, the subjective- objective controversy will be lost to view, and the campaigns will be conducted upon new fields. Such questions as Platonic realism vs. nominalism, determinism vs. freedom, the static vs. the dynamic, will be puzzled out quite by them- selves. The philosophy of Great Objectivism becomes a gateway through which the thinker, hitherto shut within the confines of the subjectivistic purview, escapes to appre- ciate, in however inadequate a manner, the wealth of other aspects which the universe displays. But the gate itself, like the paddock from which it leads, has three compartments. These three subtypes of Great Objectivism, however, are not exactly delimited among present-day philosophers. For GREAT OBJECTIVISM 179 one thing, the whole point of view is too new; it has not yet settled into cut-and-dried systems. Here, as always, we are speaking of tendencies which seem to be at work; and those tendencies may never reach fulfilment. The modern phi- losopher who revolts at idealism is afraid of system; he has seen so many systems disappear. To be sure, it would be as reasonable to be afraid of life, since so many living beings have died; but the intellect is not always reasonable. It does not easily distinguish between enjoyment of truth and unwillingness to learn new truth; and so it fears that enjoy- ment. This dread of system then is perhaps the reason for the absence of a consistently worked out Great Objectivism, in the case of many recent realists, rationalistic and other- wise. A leader of the rationalist party, Mr. B. Russell, argues against pragmatism and intuitionism, but will not reduce consciousness to an objective complex, though his philosophic twin, Mr. G. E. Moore, does so. M. Bergson himself would not go so far; he still treats the mind as a substantial thing, by no means secondary to the external world or reducible to some function of it. Yet these thinkers oppose idealism and subjectivism, and their whole attitude is thoroughly objective. The pragmatists, W T C shall soon learn, usually do go the length of Great Objectivism; and outside their circle are the instances of Professors Holt and Montague, of whom Holt at least has not been afraid to es- say something of an objective system. But there is much hesitation to proceed to extremes. If the conditions of the environment permit, we may find, not many decades hence, a crystallization of the three tendencies above noted, comparable in articulation and mutual exclusion to the idealistic schools. Nevertheless, for the purpose we have in view, of considering the opposition between the chief philosophic tendencies, it will be just to anatomize, as we l8o PRODUCTIVE DUALITY have done, Great Objectivism and its subtypes; precisely as if such anatomy had been already accepted by living writers. The general case for Great Objectivism appears to be somewhat as follows. Subjectivism and idealism con- sidered mind as the basis of all reality, i. e., an ultimate thing, a substance. But substance is here only a name, a resort of ignorance. If mind, or soul, is to mean anything, it must become empirically verifiable, a phenomenon rather than a " noumenon," viz., the " stream of thought " which appears to introspection. Not a substance will be admitted, but a complex of terms and relations of a certain structure and behaviour, i. e., a definable affair. Idealism defined objects in terms of mind, but left mind indefinable; we now define mind. All that is needed to carry us to the extreme position of Great Objectivism is to make this demand for definition thoroughgoing. If the soul is abandoned for the " stream of thought " yet there lurks in the latter the taint of an irreducible conscious quale; but this also must be de- fined. As Berkeley kept asking " if there is matter what do you mean by it ?" so they ask us " if consciousness is any- thing in itself, what do you mean by it ? Describe it! " And when we do so, consciousness as such, sui generis, seems to go the way of the soul. This might have been predicted beforehand. If Kant was right in asserting that the soul lacks verifiable content, then the " steam of thought," the psychical, has no discernible conscious quality to distinguish it from the objective data. As the psychologist Wundt has so carefully explained, the psychical contents do not differ in their material and composition, from the physical; the only distinction is one of point of view. And if one accepts the new-realistic theory of presentative knowledge, this distinction also disappears. GREAT OBJECTIVISM l8l The details of the demolition of consciousness display, as we might expect, an analogy to the argument of subjectivism against matter. There is a negative side and a positive. On the negative side, the concept of consciousness is found to contain an antinomy and therefore to lack respectable status for itself; on the positive side, it is found that all the attributes of it, all there is about it and in it, can be described in terms of objects and their relations. Let us begin with the negative side. THE ANTINOMY OF CONSCIOUSNESS " Does Consciousness Exist ? " asked James in the title of one of his later papers. While his own answer was perhaps a little ambiguous, probably his sympathetic readers under- stood him to answer: No. But we must not be deluded by words. Any reduction of a term to lower terms may seem to deprive it of reality; it does not, of course, do anything of the kind. Sugar is not unreal for being C+H+O, etc. If consciousness is reduced to a relation or function of some- thing else, that relation, etc., is still present and influential. The delusion is simple, and seems easy to avoid. " Psycho- phobia " as Montague has well called it (The New Realism, p. 269) is an emotional reaction, not an articulate doc- trine. Philosophers too often adopt this method of denying what they believe themselves to have defined ; for instance, idealism has been supposed to deny matter, nominalism to deny universals, etc. Many such needless controversies might have been avoided by a little care in expression; for the exclusiveness of either party is quite gratuitous. The real issue for Great Objectivism is not, whether conscious- ness exists, but whether it can be exhaustively defined in terms of physical objects, or conceptual objects, or proposi- tions, or relations, etc. And the antinomies, if correct, will 1 82 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY at most show that consciousness is not an independent entity. The demolition of consciousness should be recognized to mean only the annihilation of the substantive theory of mind. The antinomy is not directed against a " transcendental ego " but against the view that the contents of any one's experience are irreducibly "psychical." For if this is proved, the basis on which rest the transcendental ego, and even bolder reaffirmations of the soul, is cut from under. Like most antinomies, the argument is a priori. It has, however, certain semi-empirical forms. We state first the a priori formulation. Consciousness is self-contradictory, (i) It is somehow an object of consciousness, else we could not even mean it, still less envisage it, as we do in introspection. (2) It can- not be object of consciousness, for what is seen must be other than the seeing of it. The subject must be other than the object, whereas in self-consciousness the subject is not other than the object. The first statement seems undeniable. There is some- thing, a property, an attribute, anything you please, which belongs to certain living organisms like our own, and which we call consciousness. However elusive it is, this property is not just nothing at all. Its presence is sometimes verifi- able : men have it, stones have it not. Even were it illusory, it would at least be object of erroneous thought; it is itself the very thought which entertains the error. The second statement, if not inevitable, appears to have so much in its favour that few would dare deny it. Every case of awareness except the one in question, presents the two distinguishable sides of subject and object. It matters not whether we call them substances, or object and function, relation, or behaviour; there is in any case a difference in GREAT OBJECTIVISM 183 meaning between an object and the consciousness thereof. It would seem hardy indeed to doubt that so general a property of knowledge should in just this one case be wanting. The second statement may also be put in a more empirical form. Consciousness actually never is the object of con- sciousness; for when we " introspect " we find only bodily tendencies, bodily states and movements, external objects, concepts, or other " subsisting " things. I see not my seeing of the table but the table; and the most prolonged intro- spection finds nothing else, unless it be the strain of eye- muscles and accompanying bodily phenomena, or other objects called up by " association of ideas." These other objects are not " images " but external things, however: if the table leads me to think of Julius Caesar, it is for the realist Caesar himself, that past being, whom my thought embraces. There are no " mental images "; all content of mind is part of some objective world. And what is true of thought is true of other modes of consciousness. I do not feel my feeling of the pain; however much I turn inward my glance, I find only the pain-quality and the simultaneous bodily set. Hume declared that he could find, in the stream of his own experience, no soul or self; it is reserved for the modern to exhume the agnosticism, in the claim that he finds no consciousness as such at all. And even the idealist Schopenhauer said much the same: " as soon as we turn into ourselves . . . and seek for once to know ourselves fully by means of introspective reflection, we are lost in a bottomless void, we find ourselves like the hollow glass globe, from out of which a voice speaks whose cause is not to be found in it, and whereas we desired to comprehend ourselves, we find, with a shudder, nothing but a vanishing spectre." (Schopenhauer, World as Will and Idea, Bk. 3, Eng. tr., p. 358, footnote.) 184 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY If the antithesis, when couched in this empirical language, is closely studied, a certain arbitrariness appears. It pur- ports to deny consciousness, but it might just as well be turned about and made to deny objectivity. If we say the consciousness of the tree is naught besides the tree, why not as truly say with Berkeley that the tree is naught be- sides the consciousness of it ? If we show that there is nothing more about the knowledge of a tree than the tree and what is known thereof, might we not as rightfully de- clare that there is naught in the tree besides our knowledge of it, and the content of that knowledge ? If there is no special conscious quale over and above the objects of which we are conscious, there is equally no special objective quale over and above the mind's contents. Did not Kant point out that there is no describable difference between an idea and the reality of it ? It would seem as if the antithesis proved that consciousness and its object are through and through identical; and this surely does not militate against self -consciousness, but rather shows its plausibility. What is needed, to enforce the contradiction, is a proof that we must prefer the objective rendering rather than the Berkeleyan rendering of this identity. Now Great Objectivism does attempt to do this in its second and positive argument, wherein it would reduce the subject to objective terms and account for all of its properties thereby. That argument we have soon to consider; without it however, the antithesis is quashed and the antinomy-argument seems to evaporate. As subjectivism was unable to justify itself without appeal- ing to a Great Self which would account for the properties of objective reality, so objectivism is unable to justify itself until it can furnish an objective definition of consciousness which will explain the properties of mind. Not by a reductio ad absurdum of consciousness, but by a fertile objective GREAT OBJECTIVISM 185 metaphysics, able to generate mind and its attributes, can Great Objectivism alone succeed. Reductiones of this sort are, indeed, only the argument from damnation, employed by subjectivism, over again. If we are conscious of our own consciousness and at the same time cannot be, no amount of reduction of consciousness to something else will solve the difficulty. For, suppose consciousness were defined as a certain relationship among objects: call it / (o). Where this peculiar / is found, there we have consciousness, and where it is not found there we have it not. From the point of view of non-conscious objects, this /is as unique as an ulti- mate substance would be. Its relational or functional char- acter will not save the differentia of consciousness from being just as irreducible and opaque as an old-fashioned soul. And it will still have the property of being its own object. If to be conscious of a certain thing is/ (o) then to be conscious of that consciousness is / (/ (o) ) ; and if / (/) is an impossi- bility we are no better off than before. Let us not be de- ceived into thinking relation, or function, a magic talisman. These terms are useful in analysis, and necessary to enlarge our information; but they simply restate in the above case under relational form the same old contradiction as the sub- stantial form presented. We saw a similar thing in Chapter III when we considered the Kantian antinomies as evidence for subjectivism; we there learned that subjectivism does not at all remove their force. In general, it is true that no contradiction is solved unless it is solved directly and as it stands, in just the aspect and environment in which it arises. The endeavour to solve it by resorting to a new point of view, or a new sort of description, relational, synthetic, or whatever you please, is futile. Of course, one may try to escape the above antinomy by denying the thesis. One may say that we are not conscious 1 86 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY of consciousness. In that case we ask, " how can you at- tempt to define something that you are not thinking of ? " For that is what Great Objectivism does attempt. But such considerations as we have been urging, though we believe them to be fundamental and at bottom the really decisive ones, seem to many thinkers too formal ; the advo- cates of Great Objectivism insist that they offer us empirical and specific evidence. Let us then pass to the more concrete and special cases of the above antinomy. So far as we know, all reduce to one typical case, the criticism of introspection. Introspection, it is claimed, is self-contradictory. For it im- plies unconscious consciousness (B. H. Bode, Journal of Philosophy, 1912, p. 509). Looking back upon my mental state just past, I find that I was aware of the clock ticking, though I did not at the time know that I heard it. Now, how could that auditory datum have been in my conscious- ness if I was not aware of it ? Can I be conscious of some- thing of which I am not aware ? It seems a clear reductio ad absurdum. The " fringe " of consciousness is a delusion, if it is understood as a reservoir of these unconscious-conscious contents; it must be reinterpreted as a sort of physical be- haviour or something else. Introspection is not really employed at all ; it is, in a case like this, a memory of a just past bodily " set " or tendency to react in a certain way, etc. Notice that this argument does not merely claim that every psychosis has its characteristic bodily behaviour, and that the best means of describing it is to study that be- haviour. It goes further; it would ruin introspection be- yond saving. And it seems to depend upon a confusion. I was aware, perhaps, of the tick of the clock, but I was not aware that I was aware. Introspection a moment later furnishes the knowledge that I was aware of the tick. In- GREAT OBJECTIVISM 187 trospection is a judgment upon a judgment. The alleged antinomy confuses awareness with awareness of awareness, consciousness with self-consciousness. To assume outright that what introspection discovers in consciousness must have been there without our being aware of it, is unqualified dogmatism. And we could hardly help mistrusting the whole plea, if only because psychologists have by intro- spection discovered some unquestionable facts. Professor Holt, indeed, one of the extremest of Great Objectivists, and no friend of introspection, has himself answered the objection in a similar way to this (Concept of Consciousness, p. 192). Probably the road was prepared for such antipathy to- ward the psychical by certain doctrines of idealists. They have occasionally declared mind to be non-quantitative, not open to scientific description, private, beyond the province of discursive knowledge. We here recall Royce's doctrine of personal individuality as indescribable, a volitional rather than an intellectual category; Miinsterberg's thesis that a person is a will-attitude and that sensations have no quan- tity; in fact, the whole idealistic tendency to put mind above rather than alongside the realm of objects. The tend- ency has even permeated the details of psychological de- scription. We may instance James' claim that similarity is not reducible to partial identity, that the taste of lemonade is not the taste of lemon plus the taste of sugar, that the description, given by a friend, of a certain family as having " blotting-paper voices " " though immediately felt to be apposite, defies the utmost power of analysis," etc. Of the same tenor is the general view that every conscious quality is simple, unanalysable. Such a position owes its plausi- bility to an appearance of having made a distinction which its deniers overlook. Lemonade, it says, as physical is 1 88 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY lemon-juice plus sugar, but we must distinguish the sensa- tion of lemonade from the liquid itself. So too the conscious- ness of similarity must be distinguished from the similar objects, etc., etc. But the advantage as often with those who deny an assertion by making a distinction is only apparent. In making the distinction, they overlook a deeper identity. If the taste of the lemonade does not reveal the composition of the lemonade, how is it a guide to the truth ? Consciousness of an object is in fact by the realists asserted to be that very object itself. In the whole position, their opponents have displayed an enmity toward analysis which has no grounds whatsoever, and which is now justly reacting upon them. The dictum of irreducibility is a brutumftdmen, a " Thou shalt not " from the skies, an order to suppress the instinct of inquiry. Sooner or later it must have been questioned, and as soon as questioned, denied; for we cannot stop anywhere in the effort to analyze. The realist, then, takes a fair revenge when he says that this mysterious quality of consciousness, which puts it and its states beyond the pale of analysis and definition, renders it, for intelligence, nil. What cannot be described or explained or understood, plays no part in the world of reason; no satisfaction can be afforded by it to that instinct which would comprehend the scheme of things. " If this occult thing, consciousness, means anything," they say, " whereby it is distinguished from nothing at all, tell us what it means; do not say only that you feel it, intuit it, will it." But if it cannot be analyzed, it might just as well be dropped. The scientific attitude which the realist has adopted, urges him to abolish this enemy of understanding. And when it occurs to him that with the disappearance of this indissoluble surd, there disappear also those vexed problems of parallelism, interaction, automatism, and other issues which centre GREAT OBJECTIVISM 189 about the relation of mind to body, we shall find it easy not to blame him for rejecting the belief in mind sui generis. All this hostility might have been avoided, had certain idealists and idealistic psychologists not placed mind on a pedestal and crowned it with a halo. Not that the idealists have consistently done that; they have vouchsafed to us incidentally plenty of traits wherewith to define mind. But the human tendency to prefer one to another, to cut off the low from the high, to put the Ultimate beyond the reach of humble intelligence, will crop out here and there; and its dominance leads to revolt, and the overthrow of idealism's excessive pretensions. Herein we see once more how great a part emotion plays in the philosophical world. But to return: the negative case for Great Objectivism is by itself indecisive. All its force turns upon the success of the positive side, just as with idealism all turned upon the fertility of the Great Self to account for the specific nature of objects. What then does our present type have to say about the existence and the character of those affairs which we call minds ? Can it account for them ? Upon its ability to do this rests whatever justice there is in its claim to be a genuine philosophical theory. The objective formula for consciousness, from which should be deduced the attributes of that state, is not a mat- ter of general consensus among recent realists. This was also the case with idealism. The Great Self was here a will, there an intellect, or again an evaluator. We may however consider each realistic formula on its own merits. So far as I know, the following include all that has been furnished up to the present time (1915). Consciousness is the real potentiality of an event or fact (physical or conceptual) (Montague, The New Realism, p . 2 8 1 ) . " Consciousness is the potential or implicative presence 190 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY of a thing at a space or time in which that thing is not actually present" For instance, in the case of memory: I recall my first day at school, and thereby that past event becomes present here and now to my mind. Yet it is not present in the space-and-time world; it long since departed from that region. The brain-state in my head is not itself that past event, but is an effect of it, indicates it as effect implies cause. To say that that past event is implicatively or poten- tially present is to say, then, that my brain is thinking of and remembering it. What is physically an impossibility - the recurrence of that first school-day is enabled to be- come actual because a new and unique point of view, quite foreign to the physical, is introduced, viz., that of potential or implicative reality. And the new point of view enables this peculiar sort of presence-through-absence which dis- tinguishes consciousness to be realized. Thus by means of a combination of the category of potentiality or implication with that of physical existence, we define consciousness. The same method may be illustrated in the case of percep- tion. A distant object, say a star, is perceived by me. But the star is not here, not in my brain or my body or the near-by space, and it may be even non-existent by the time its light reaches me; yet in consciousness, we say, it is some- how here. How can this be ? Apply the category of impli- cation. My brain-state is the effect of the light radiating from the star; i. e., it implies the latter as its source. Now regard that latter as implicatively or potentially present in my brain. This enables us to solve the contradiction be- tween the absence of the star in my brain and the presence of it; it does so by generating a new standpoint which is defined by the union of " potential " and " physical," viz., consciousness. From a logical point of view this is as elegant as anything in the Hegelian deduction of categories. (We GREAT OBJECTIVISM 191 regard this as a commendation, not an aspersion.) It is empirically based, and seems to guarantee the very thing desired. Does it then account for the fact that there is con- sciousness and that it has this and that specific property such as connation, affection, judgment, error, etc. ? We are not here assessing the truth of the above definition, but its sufficiency. We may believe that Professor Montague has laid his finger upon a genuine attribute of consciousness. It is quite another question, whether or not he has succeeded in undermining the idealistic system by reversing it and re- ducing mind wholly to terms of objects. The latter question only concerns us here. Notice the way in which the definition was obtained. We have compared it with the Hegelian method. From an antinomy by a synthesis a new conception is formed which will solve the contradiction. We believe that this is no accident of exposition ; for we find the same failing that was formerly alleged to infect the Hegelian deduction. Suppose two categories apply to the same subject-matter, and at the same time contradict each other. This fact does not of itself compel them to unite in a third or " higher synthesis." Per- haps they do unite, perhaps there is some discoverable char- acter of the said subject-matter which actually exemplifies both aspects in such a light that we can understand how it is that they do not really conflict. If this is the case, there is a real " higher synthesis " ; but it is not due to the activity of the conflicting categories that this synthesis occurs. It is simply an ultimate datum, quite unaccounted-for. And recent Hegelianism accepts this point, no longer regarding the deduction as a productive affair. In mathematics, when it is desired to prove that two postulates are not contradic- tory, the accepted procedure is to show that some entity exists which satisfies them both. A fact which is to be ac 192 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY cepted, not a deduction from either or both, is the solution. So here it happens that there is something consciousness which demonstrably contains the two conflicting cate- gories of presence and absence. But there is nothing in the nature of objects to imply that this is possible, or to make clear how it is done. A new creation, as it were a higher dimension than space-and-time, must first be begged before the synthesis can be accomplished. This higher dimension or synthesis is from the point of view of objects a surd. Of course we have here been speaking of material objects and things in space and time; but the same reasoning applies, mutatis mutandis, to concepts, relations, or other non-ma- terial objects. In the actual existence of consciousness the deduction has reached its critical point. That existence can indeed be defined in objective terms, just as for subjectivism all objects could be denned in terms of the subject; but the definition does not guarantee the actuality of the definitum. The dualism of object and consciousness remains ultimate; the definition, while no doubt true as true as subjectivism was does not account for its appearance in a material world. Stating this criticism more formally, we may put it thus. Granted the objective world, a congeries of things, relations, categories, etc. Among these are found the following : pres- ent realities, absent realities, potentialities. When these three are joined in one conception, we have that unique and immaterial thing known as consciousness. But who has made plain the occasion and manner of the junction ? For aught that is shown to the contrary, it might be the miracu- lous act of God that effects it or it might be a fortuitous freak of nature, or the birth of the soul; for it is no less mysterious than these. In any case, something new in principle is invoked, something not drawn from the original GREAT OBJECTIVISM 193 objective order, viz., the combination itself. " Nil in mente quod non an tea in rebus fuit," we might say, " nisi mens ipse." Did not Kant himself with his " Synthetic Unity of Apperception " or power of combining the absent with the present, have much the same result as Dr. Montague ? Of course we may be accused here of captiousness. Ought we to demand at one stroke a full-fledged explanation of the origin and nature of mind ? Surely it is all we have a right to expect, to know that consciousness means potential pres- ence of the absent. Now it is to be remembered that we are not quarrelling with the truth, or the interest, of the defini- tion in hand. It is its service to Great Objectivism, its ability to refute subjectivism and dualism, that concerns us. And on this point we cannot hesitate to say that its descrip- tion of mind leaves us with as ultimate a dualism as any that could be conceived. It simply redefines the old dualism, as Spinoza redefined the dualism of matter and mind by dub- bing them two aspects of one substance. The one thing that would make Great Objectivism a fruitful view would be, an explanation of that combination of objective entities which makes up consciousness. As subjectivism failed to throw light on the fact of external reality, as idealism was unable to generate the specific properties of the world, so this new system has no solvent for the surd of mind. It is able to bring mind successfully under its formula, but not to state why there should be such an unique being as can confer presence upon the absent and reality upon the unreal. For Great Objectivism, mind remains a miracle. Or the same point may be expressed in a concreter way. If consciousness is the potential presence of something not really present, how does it differ from potential energy as usually employed, say, in physics ? The potential energy of a weight resting on a table is treated by that science as 194 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY something which would under suitable conditions turn into a downward motion. It is not at the moment such motion, for that motion does not exist. But in conscious- ness there is a certain real presence about the perceived object, or the remembered event, which the term potenti- ality does not sufficiently convey. Professor Montague indeed characterizes his own view as " the theory that The potentiality of the physical is the actuality of the psychical ..." (op. cit., p. 281). Yet that actuality remains unexplained and undefined upon objective grounds. How should there arise an entity, mind, which is able to confer actuality upon what is physically only potential ? The crux of this difficulty is found in that which from the point of view of physical objects is the subjective thing par excellence, viz., error. There is, on the whole, agreement be- tween two of the joint authors of the volume entitled The New Realism (Professors Montague and Pitkin) , that errors arise because the brain-state may be the effect of any one of many external causes. Thus, the visual star, the one that I see the disturbance of the visual tract in the brain - may be due to a material star that has since " gone out " or a star that still blazes, or to a diseased cornea, or pressure upon the optic nerve. Any one of these is, in Montague's use of the term, implied by the disturbance of the visual area. Now "when . . . the cerebral implicate . . . happens not to have been the actual cause, or happens not to exist, then we shall have apprehension of what is unreal, which is false knowledge, or error" (The New Realism, p. 287). Error involves the selection of one implicate and exclusion of the rest. But we are not told why any one implicate must be chosen and the others rejected. To be sure, con- sciousness is selective : but that is one of its specific proper- ties which the above definition has not accounted for. Why GREAT OBJECTIVISM 195 should not consciousness be content with having all, or at least several, implicates present at once, with no choice made between them ? It is the actuality of error as a conscious state, the particular fact that one potentiality of the many somehow becomes present while the rest do not, that is the real thing to be explained. To explain this we need to be provided already with the psychical field; for therein, it seems, alone can errors reside. If we have not accounted for the fact of this field, how shall we explain then the fact of error ? We are left with the dualism as before. Dr. Montague's contribution to the definition of mind we believe to be valuable. It is verifiable and therefore ir- refutable. In particular, its revival of the now unfashion- able notion potentiality seems to be a piece of common justice to that neglected concept. (Cf. Ch. X.) Perhaps the use of " implication " to cover both the relation between effect and cause, and potentiality, is a little vague; perhaps it would have been better to define implication more care- fully or even to show that it is indefinable (as some realists claim). But these are at most faults of detail. Meanwhile, we must admit that his essay points not toward objective monism but toward dualism; and there seems to be some reason for thinking that he is himself consciously a dualist which result would be a confirmation of our criticism. More consistently true to Great Objectivism is the work of Professor Holt. This author unequivocally announces his objectivism: "it is not that we have two contrasted worlds, the ' objective ' and the ' subjective ' ; there is but one world, the objective, and that which we have hitherto not understood, have dubbed therefore the ' sub- jective ' are the subtler workings of integrated objective mechanisms" (The Freudian Wish, p. 93). And in his more extensive treatment of the topic (Concept of Conscious- 196 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY ness, p. 57) he brings out the greatness of his objectivism: "... this volume, in spite of its apparent digressiveness, aims at nothing but a deductive account of the concept of consciousness." In his essay, The Place of Illusory Experience in a Realistic World (The New Realism, pp. 303-373), Holt shows how all conscious contents are quite objective. Errors, viewed in a broad sense, are not the prerogative of mind. The physical world also errs: photographs are not true to the object, images projected through a lens or a stereoscope distort the thing imaged; and a wealth of similar discrepancies is im- pressively catalogued. Secondary qualities, likewise, are not the deliverances of some subjective factor, such as the " specific energy " of the nerve-fibers; they are groupings and form-qualities of physical stimuli, more or less dense fusions of objectively given data. That is, they are not in any way due to activity of mind. They arise from the fact that the sense-organ cannot register with sufficient distinct- ness the many small stimuli which come from the object; the succession of light-waves or sound-waves or heat-waves is too rapid for our organs to adapt themselves thereto. The result is that the stimuli come into the nervous system fused into a unity which has a Gestaltqualitat quite different from that of the physical succession of them. The secondary qualities " are all form-qualities in which the temporal sub- divisions are so small that the time-sense cannot discrimi- nate them, whereas the frequency-magnitude or the density still remains perceivable." (NewRealism^p.^S.) Now these densities or fusions are simply functions of the objective physical facts; functions which depend upon the receptive capacity of the bodily nerve-endings. Notice the inductive character of this description; it is more apparent than in the one given above. The supposedly subjective states, GREAT OBJECTIVISM 197 viz., the secondary qualities, are examined in the environ- ment in which they occur the body and the objective stimuli and then the reason why they appear to be " subjective," why they differ from the other stimuli which are given as they are, is empirically explained. Thus a large part of what we call the subjective is accounted for upon a physical basis. But what of our perception of several primary qualities together ? It is surely a subjective event. Yes, but the subjectivity lies only in the fact that these qualities are at one and the same moment selected out by the nervous sys- tem as objects to which it will respond. The subjective aspect, or consciousness, here appears to be nothing but the fact that a cross-section is carved from out the matrix of all objective reality. " Any class that is formed from the mem- bers of a given manifold by some selective principle which is independent of the principles which have organized the manifold may be called a cross-section. And such a thing is consciousness or mind, a cross-section of the universe, selected by the nervous system. The elements or parts of the universe selected, and thus included in the class mind, are all elements or parts to which the nervous system makes a specific response. It responds thus specifically to a spatial object if it brings the body to touch that object, to point toward it, to copy it, and so forth ..." (Concept of Con- sciousness, p. 353). But the cross-sections are not limited to the physical universe. In fact, Holt considers that universe to be only a part of the total complex of objects. He calls this total complex "neutral" because it is in itself the ulti- mate material out of which all things are made ; all things real or unreal, particular or universal, true or false, good or bad, physical or conceptual. These neutral objects subsist rather than exist; to be real is a qualification of to be. "A 198 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY mind or consciousness is a class or group of [neutral] entities within the subsisting universe, as a physical object is an- other class or group " (p. 373). Thus his Great Objectivism is not materialism. How then is that peculiarly subjective thing, human error, explained ? Thus : error is simply a case of contradic- tion. In the physical world, we find contradiction when two bodies moving in opposite directions collide. In the realm of consciousness, we find it when two assertions deny each other. The assertions subsist together; they are objective facts which do not exist but none the less are, and which be- have toward each other in a way quite analogous to the behaviour of clashing bodies. In a world where many things conflict, we should expect to find, under the head of con- scious states, errors. Any namable, distinguishable sense-element, any affec- tive tone, however private it seems to be, is not merely pri- vate; the same intensity of pain felt by you and me is one and the same intensity, common to both ; the pleasantness of a sunny landscape is in the landscape, for it is true of it. " Pleasure and pain are neutral entities and, both in theory and practice, are as amenable to communication and logical handling as are the concepts of acceleration and TT." (Con- cept of Consciousness, p. in.) And of the emotions: "in so far as we know about them at all they are in the same way neutral " (ibid.}. In fact, the whole theory of " representative " perception, which allows a distinctly subjective state to exist beside the thing perceived, must in this view be replaced by a " pre- sentative " theory. " Nothing can represent a thing but that thing itself. And if anybody has ever assented to the representative theory of knowledge it is only because he has GREAT OBJECTIVISM 199 not examined the concept of representation. The theory plays altogether fast and loose with this concept. Typical and indisputable cases of representation are readily found. A photograph represents a landscape : a sample represents a web of cloth: a statesman represents a borough. But the photograph does not represent the landscape in all respects ; it leaves out, for instance, the features of colour and size. The photograph of a distant mountain top gives no clue to the size of the mountain. It represents the landscape in the one respect of contour, and does so by being in that one re- spect identical with the thing it represents. If with a per- fectly just lens a photograph were taken of a carefully constructed ellipse, the photograph would have exactly the same shape, but not the same size, while that the two shapes are identical is proved because the analytical equation for one will be found identical with that for the other. Only the constants which define the size will be different. The same is true mutatis mutandis for a photograph of the most com- plicated object. In so far as it truly represents the object it is just so far identical with it. Likewise the sample of cloth represents the web in so far as it has the exact colour, texture, and thickness of the rest of the web. If it has not these identical, it is not a fair sample or a true representa- tion. As to the number of yards, be it noted, the sample does not profess to be a representation. Just so the states- man represents the voters who elected him in so far as he does precisely what a majority of them, in the same situa- tion, would do. If he does not do this he does not truly represent them, although he may do better or worse than they would do. "A representation is always partially identical with that which it represents, and completely identical in all those fea- 200 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY tures and respects in which it is a representation . . . every case of representation is a case of partial or complete identity ..." (p. 142-143). Pausing now to estimate this interesting and admirably worked out account of the universe, we ask, how far has it deduced consciousness from objects ? Certainly it has been able, to an extent hitherto unequalled, to find in the pecul- iarly conscious states, objective material. Yet we must recall a significant phrase of Professor Holt, in his definition of mind as a cross-section of neutral objects. He said : "Any class that is formed from the members of a given manifold by some selective principle which is independent of the prin- ciples which have organized the manifold may be called a cross-section. And such a thing is consciousness or mind " (quoted above p. 197). We have italicized the words which suggest our criticism. Is not that selective principle which marks out the mental from the total matrix of things, inde- pendent of that matrix ? If the objective deduction is to be carried through, it must be shown that the power of the nervous system to select, to make specific response, to carve out its objects from the rest, is itself explicable upon quite objective grounds. This is, for aught yet seen, a doubtful matter. The structure and functions of the nervous system have not yet been proved capable of explanation upon phys- ical or neutral grounds alone. We do not now wish to deny that that may sometime be done; but until it is done, the case for Great Objectivism is at any rate incomplete. Does there not remain, then, something irreducible about mind, namely, the fact that there is a selective, responsive prin- ciple ? This is the same point that we made against Mon- tague's theory. We said then that it was not explained, how the potentiality which we call consciousness can, in consequence of objective laws, actually come into being. GREAT OBJECTIVISM 2OI That mysterious presence-in-absence of the past event which constitutes memory, so impossible from the point of view of the physical order, remained as mysterious, as inex- plicable as ever. And has Professor Holt come any nearer to showing how the world of objects can of itself so function as to separate out a part of itself in the manner designated as a conscious cross-section ? Materialism has ever been unable to explain the origin of consciousness. Though Holt is no materialist, his task is analogous to materialism's task. His Platonic realism does not lighten it ; for is it any easier to show how subsisting relations, concepts, and principles give rise to a selecting mind, than it was for the materialist to show how the concourse of atoms developed into a con- scious organism ? And failure of materialism seems to augur a like failure of Great Objectivism; indeed we shall shortly learn that the latter type is inherently unable to give the ratio existendi of mind. The great merit of Holt's work, as (in the reverse direction) of Berkeley's, Natorp's, Miinsterberg's, and others', lies in the extent to which he has reduced all conscious contents to objective terms. None has done so much as he, in this regard. He has made clear the general principle, that every phase of mind, every con- scious state and content, can be objectively defined. Yet the fact that there is something to be denned is not itself accounted for. The situation is in every respect analogous with the earlier one of subjectivism. Everything about the object can be reduced to subjective terms, but the presence of objects, as distinct from the subject, cannot be grounded. So here, everything about mind can be expressed in objec- tive phraseology, but the presence of mind as a specific kind of behaviour among objects, cannot be explained. The conclusion is strongly suggested that here as in Montague's essay, Great Objectivism has met its critical point. It is 202 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY true, but it is infertile to generate that very notion which it was designed to produce. Coming now to details, we find that the existence of errors, as events in the history of minds, is not elucidated. We may admit that errors are a kind of contradiction found in con- scious cross-sections; we may acquiesce in the statement that contradiction is also a physical fact of frequent occur- rence; as when opposing forces act upon a body. Yet there is a difference between the two kinds of contradiction. In the material world, the opposition is in a sense instantly re- solved as Satan like lightning fell from heaven. When the dropping ball hits the ground it stops or rebounds. The motion which " contradicts " the resistance of the earth does not continue. The opposing forces may somehow be working against each other, but their effects do not exist in contradiction; the ball is not at the same time moving through the earth's surface and being pushed outward by the earth's resistance. In the physical world the law of contradiction is still valid; two conflicting results cannot hold of the same body. In human errors on the other hand, both members of the contradiction do exist together; the opposition persists without the least hint of solution. I see in the dusk a shape, which I consider that of a man; it really is a post. The judgment that it is a man contradicts the physical presence there of the post, yet neither side of this contradiction is annulled. The erroneous judgment con- tinues unabated, and so does the post; whereas the motion of the ball ceases. The error persists, of course, because it is in a distinct field, that of consciousness; if it were an object of the same sort as the post, both the error and the truth could not remain. For this reason, then, errors are extant unresolved ; and that is not to be expected in an instance of contradiction. Once more, note the similarity of our criti- GREAT OBJECTIVISM 203 cism here to the one we passed upon Dr. Montague; for thereby is suggested an intrinsic infertility on the part of Great Objectivism. As Montague could not account for the actual presence of what is physically not present but only potential, so Holt is, we think, unable to justify the real occurrence, unmitigated by the contradicting fact, of er- roneous opinions. The actuality of the subjective is again found to be an unsolved mystery. Professor Holt, we remember, does indeed at the begin- ning of the essay, Illusory Experience, indicate that errors are not necessarily subjective things; they occur in the phys- ical order, in such cases as bad photographs, faulty ma- chine-made products, etc. Be it so then; they are no less denials of the actual fact, and their occurrence undissolved is no less an impossibility. He may now designate their habitat by another name than mind, viz., the realm of " sub- sistence "; and yet this is but a title for a limbo of mysteries. It is precisely the task of the philosopher to account for this limbo. The history of metaphysics, says James in effect somewhere, is but the writing down of so many solving names; men think they have explained a group of facts when they have invented a new name for it. We condemn the " faculty-psychology " for trying to account for, say, the activity of intellect, by invoking an occult thing called Reason ; but is not the new-realist guilty of the same fault when he thinks to throw light on the problem of error by con- signing error to the class of " subsistents " ? The method is quite unfruitful. We are not led to understand how real things can give off this vapour of unreal subsistence, or why, in the terms of our present system, being should come to divide into the two realms of being real and being unreal. In any case, the dualism between errors and facts (or truths) persists and will not be explained away. 204 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY But to return to the problem of consciousness. The same failure to ground the presence of minds is found in that "very holy of holies of the subjective" (Concept of Con- sciousness, p. 282), volition. Professor Holt urges and, we grant, rightly urges that volitions, being purposes, are comparable to laws of nature, to generative formulae, as of an algebraic series, etc. " Now if we examine candidly any human purpose, we shall see that it is nothing other than just such a generative law. ... It is, for instance, my desire to walk along the edge of a cliff, keeping near enough to the edge so as to see the surf below and far enough from it so as to run no danger of falling over. . . . This purpose is at once then the law of my movements; it generates them and is itself their sole unity." And this law is " absolutely all that I can discover about it in my own most ' subjective ' recesses of consciousness " (Con- cept of Consciousness, p. 287). "A purpose or volition is then nothing at all mysteriously subjective, and it is a law of the same type as is found in the neutral realm logically ante- cedent to either matter or mind" (ibid., p. 288). Of course the law may not be manifested in overt deeds, just as the law of falling bodies is not realized when the bodies are sup- ported or may not be present to consciousness, as in the sleepwalker's skillful perambulations but when it is pres- ent it is that sort of objective logical entity. And that is why we speak of the purpose or will of a race, a nation, a social group. It may or may not be clear to the conscious- ness of any member of the group ; but it is none the less a real influence, a law of the behaviour of those members. Yet, acknowledge though we must the truth of his description, we are obliged to pass the same judgment here as before upon Professor Holt's view. The essentially " subjective " aspect of a purpose lies in the presence of the end at which I aim, to GREAT OBJECTIVISM 205 my mind before that end is objectively realized. This pres- ence of the not yet realized is the counterpart of memory, which is the presence of the no longer realized, or past, event. What then accounts for that odd presence of the future which is not yet present ? As with Montague, so with Holt: there is a sort of actuality which mind seems to confer upon that not-present end; a temporal, not a Pla- tonic actuality, which it is the very essence of mind to con- fer. It is more than a mere potentiality : it is more than the mere law of the series of purposive acts : it is rather the im- mediate presence here and now of the particular end aimed at or event remembered, res ipsissima. (So, at least, say these realists.) And there is nothing in the documents of Great Objectivism which informs us why this presence occurs. Why do I now think of the purpose which defines the course of my deeds ? A stone presumably does not think of the law of gravitation which governs its various positions during the fall; but I am conscious of the motive which directs my steps along the edge of the cliff. Such then is our estimate of two new-realistic attempts to reduce mind to objective terms. There are other endeavours also in the philosophic field today, but none with one exception have been carried through in the same sys- tematic spirit, or with the same appreciation of the Great Objectivism which is their moving power. We therefore merely mention the view of S. Alexander (Mind, 1912, p. 315) which defines knowledge as a certain kind of " together- ness " of objects, and the definition of G. E. Moore (Mind, 1903, p. 450 ff.) which reduces consciousness to a sort of " diaphanousness " of objects. It seems obvious that our criticism will apply to these, however fully they are worked out; for these relations of " togetherness " and " dia- phanousness " are themselves as unique as anything in the 206 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY world. The category of relation, indeed, useful as it often is in affording description, is not of itself a guarantee of scientific fertility; it may often simply rename an old mys- tery, and one may doubt if, for the purposes of a map of the world-order, it is able to replace wholly the older notion of substance. But we have said this before. We spoke just now of an exception. There is a most im- portant one, fully informed with the spirit of Great Objec- tivism, and yet in sharp contrast with the above views. If those views have not been quite able to account for mind's appearance in the scheme of the universe, perhaps it is because they treated it as a ready-made affair, a thing, a static entity. But surely it is rather a process or function. Would it not then be better to define it by its behaviour than by its inner constitution ? So think those who share the view which we now proceed to expound. It is a dynamic view; it treats consciousness as a mode of behaviour of the organism. On the whole it is the view suggested by the doctrines of the " pragmatic " school; those who adopt the biological point of view as the more ultimate one for meta- physics. The treatment of pragmatism as a whole shall be given later, when we discuss the subtypes of Great Objec- tivism; at present we are concerned only with its great- objectivism, its reduction of consciousness to terms of the behaviour of those objects which we call living organisms. On this view, we start with the supposition that thought, consciousness, the " psychical," occurs in living organisms only. Now obviously the only proper way of learning its nature is to study it in concrete, in the actual situations in which it is found; i. e., as a process occurring in living beings. But all living processes are reactions of one sort or another to stimulation by some part of the environment. Such is, e. g., the grasping reflex, by which the fingers of the GREAT OBJECTIVISM 2 07 babe involuntarily close about an object touching the hand's inner surface; such, equally, is the deliberate choice of a cigar by a mature smoker a choice based upon the stimuli of touch, of smell, and of suggestions afforded by the mem- ory of other cigars. The psychologists have pretty well shown that all our mental life, even of the most refined intel- lectual sort, such as solving a problem of higher mathe- matics, or deciding upon our religious beliefs, can be brought under this same rubric. In these cases the stimuli are simply of a more ideal sort and the full reactions may be deferred for a longer or shorter period. For the stimulus of a bodily reaction may be of the most varied kind: a light ray, a bodily pain, a memory; and the reaction may be a percep- tible movement of eye, hand, vocal apparatus, or it may be a brain-current (thought) whose muscular expression in speech, writing, or other act is temporarily suppressed. All conscious states, be they never so quiet, are active. Even in so passive a state as listening to the wind when it moans in the trees, we unconsciously adjust the ear and set the muscles of the throat, perhaps, as if to sing to the pitch heard, while the brain's activity, in the shape of fancy, travels far and fast along the road suggested by the mem- ories which the sound calls up. And so on; it would be tedious to detail the familiar teachings of modern psy- chology (cf. e. g., Angell, Psychology, ch. 3). Great Objectivism, building upon this biologically coloured science of mind, finds a definition of consciousness almost ready to take for the asking, viz., a certain type of reaction to stimu- lation. What type then ? Everything in a sense reacts upon its environment : the stone reflects back the heat-rays which come to it from the sun. But it does not redirect the energy so as to further its own existence. This conscious beings do. But conscious beings, even when they are not 208 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY acting consciously, as in reflex or instinctive action, may also react in ways unfavourable to their preservation. Con- sciousness must evidently be further differentiated. Now we learn from genetic psychology that it appears first in the early life of the human being on occasions where the instinct or reflex does not produce the desirable end, or when its action is blocked, and some new sort of conduct is needed. Upon such an occasion thought, rudimentary though it may be, arises. The child, the beast, the adult, who has lost his way, knows not by instinct which direction to take; he wakes up to the difficulty, casts about in his mind, starts to respond to the situation by turning this way or that. The cat, finding the door closed through which he usually passes, in perplexity paws about here and there until by accident he hits the latch, thus undoing it, and goes out. By the method of trial and error he has found the proper response. The child learns in the same way; but his growing power of thought enables him to avoid the trouble of going through many of the possible responses. In his brain the nerve- current arises which would lead out through the motor nerves to a certain action. But he has learned by experience that that action would not be a success, and the current is checked. This nipping of the current, this holding up of the action, marks the distinction between thought and deed: thought, the essence of consciousness, is then incipient or tentative response. When the incipient immediately be- comes the completed act, as in an instinctive reaction or reflex action, like grasping or sucking the breast, thought and consciousness are at a minimum ; where the response is delayed and there is hesitation, plans of action arise, i. e., tendencies to act which are frustrated by other tendencies until finally some stronger one prevails and action results. This is equally the case in the child finding his way home and GREAT OBJECTIVISM 2 09 the statesman outlining his policy for years to come. The brain is the instrument of thought because the brain is the theatre of these incipient nerve-currents which may or may not get to their end-organs, the muscles, and give rise to specific behaviour. Thinking then appears as a labour- saving device, whose usefulness has rendered its possessor more likely to survive in the struggle for existence. Thus an evolutionary point of view enables Great Objectivism to fulfill its purpose of defining consciousness. " The brain, the last physical organ of thought," says Professor Dewey, " is a part of the same practical machinery for bringing about adaptation of the environment to the life requirements of the organism, to which belong legs and hand and eye. That the brain frees organic behaviour from complete servitude to immediate physical conditions, that it makes possible the liberation of energy for remote and ever expanding ends is, indeed, a precious fact, but not one which removes the brain from the category of organic devices of behaviour." (J. Dewey, Does Reality Possess Practical Character ? in Essays in Honor of William James, etc., pp. 64-65.) And again in justification of this dynamic description: " It is interesting to note how the metaphysical puzzles regarding ' parallel- ism/ ' interaction,' ' automatism,' the relation of ' con- sciousness ' to ' body/ evaporate when one ceases isolating the brain into a peculiar physical substrate of mind at large, and treats it simply as one portion of the body, as the in- strumentality of adaptive behaviour " (p. 65, footnote). We may quote also the words of Royce, who has accepted much of the view: " Your intelligent ideas of things never consist of mere imagery of the thing, but always involve a con- sciousness of how you propose to act toward the thing of which you have ideas " (World and Individual, vol. I, p. 22). Hear also this statement of Dewey's: " Awareness means 210 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY attention, and attention means a crisis of some sort in an existent situation. ... It represents something the mat- ter, something out of gear, or in some way menaced, inse- cure, problematical, or strained. This state of tension . . . is not merely in the ' mind,' it is nothing merely emotional. It is in the facts of the situation as transitive facts ..." (Dewey, op. cit., p. 73). " If this be true, then awareness . . . means things entering, via the particular thing known as an organism, into a peculiar condition of differential or additive change " (p. 74). This marks the disappear- ance of the old " sublimated gaseous consciousness " (foot- note p. 74) and the substitution for it of the process-view. Or again: " If knowing is so qualitatively and functionally different from alterative action, how do we make the transi- tion from it to efficient action ? " (Moore, Pragmatism and its Critics, p. 106). If knowledge is passive contemplation, how comes it that the knower ever acts ? The new view makes this clear by showing that knowledge is a kind of action. Professor Dewey has also said, in a discussion of Bergson: " In words of Bergson's own which cannot be bettered: ' That which constitutes perception is our dawning action, in so far as it is prefigured in those images (namely, objects). The actuality of our perception thus lies in its activity, in the movements which prolong it.' Take this passage seriously and literally, and you have the precise view of perception here contended for. It is ... a process of choosing. The possible responses involved are not merely postponed, but are operative in the quality of present sensori-motor re- sponses. The perceived subject-matter is not simply a manifestation of conditions antecedent to the organic responses, but is their transformation in the direction of further action " (Journal of Philosophy, 1912, p. 663). Or as Moore says " . . . for the pragmatist the distinction of GREAT OBJECTIVISM 211 ' fact ' and ' idea ' is a distinction of ways in which a con- tent functions." (Pragmatism, etc., p. 169, footnote.) Moreover, if we do not adopt behaviour as the essence of consciousness, what else have we ? A mere entity behind the scenes, whose presence will make no difference whatever to conduct; a mind which does nothing and, pragmatically considered, might as well not be; a mere zero point. Con- sciousness must at least lead to behaviour of a specific type: if a thing is what it does is its relations then what does nothing is nothing. (This is also the argument of E. A. Singer, Journal of Philosophy, 1911, on pp. 181-183 of a paper entitled Mind as an Observable Object.) And that argu- ment loses no force if we do not yet know even what type of behaviour consciousness essentially consists in. " But thought I don't know what life means, nor what conscious- ness means, I feel that I know how we may go to work to find out these things, if once we see that neither stands for an eject forever veiled and hidden in the land beyond ex- perience " (Singer, op. tit., p. 184). Finally, there is the argument of scientific utility. It seems probable though it has never been absolutely proved that every " thought " or " state " of mind has its uniquely corresponding brain-event and bodily event. But if so, why is not the mental state the same thing as the latter ? The latter is verifiably present, the former elusive at best; the correspondence between the two alleged by " parallelism " would be explained by identifying the former with the latter. Wundt, to be sure, has enumerated certain " states " that have no brain-correlative, viz., self-conscious- ness, valuation, etc. Yet these must have their appropriate bodily set or tendencies hard though they may be to dis- cover; and it is surely more economical to retain these last alone in our system and discard the " veiled and hidden " mental states. 212 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY Let us now adjudge the merits of this position. The dynamic theory has its critical points. Take for instance, memory. There is undoubtedly a conscious " state " or organic response which goes by this name, and it has, by general consent, the property of referring to (" being aware of " is the usual phrase) a past event. Now, there can be nothing in the nature of present behaviour be it of what- ever sort to indicate that its object is past. That the organism reacts in a certain way, however complicated, is a present fact, and contains nothing about it which suggests that the object to which it adjusts itself was, and no longer is, real. The organism's action thus fails to give an account of the full significance of the knowledge of past events. Sup- pose, e. g., we defined memory as a type of organic response which treated its object as fixed, irrevocable, unchangeable. This might be a true description, but it would not be ade- quate to the meaning of the past, as that which was and is not. Behaviour itself, totally immersed in the stream of time, for that very reason cannot generate what we may call a vision of the stream from without. Here must enter, it would seem, a certain static aspect of consciousness; that by virtue of which, in consciousness, the past persists rela- tively unchanged and thus not subject to the wear and tear of time. The dynamic can define the static no more than the static can define the dynamic. To be sure, memory is fallible, and often does change the object: yet if ever there are true memories there are so far things recalled unchanged. Difficult, impossible though it may be to draw an exact line, there is yet a line between the true core and the false dis- tortions of the remembered events. Now any view of con- sciousness, which makes it mere process and no more, omits this aspect of the matter. And the same remarks apply, mutatis mutandis, to expectation and prediction. Notice GREAT OBJECTIVISM 213 that we do not deny that consciousness is behaviour; nor that some of the most interesting or the most illuminating properties of consciousness are to be discovered in that attribute of it. We deny only that that attribute is suffi- cient to account for certain undeniable properties of mind. When those properties are once granted, indeed, it can truly predicate of them their own unique sort of behaviour. No doubt memory has its characteristic response; as also has expectation, and indeed every conscious state. The case is analogous with that of previous philosophic types. The present view meets a surd, a " foreign other " which it can describe, as knowledge of the details of conscious behaviour grows, more and more in its own terms, yet whose descrip- tion never reaches the limit, never quite touches the nerve of that surd. If the static views erred by not accounting for the tentative side of mind, its uneasiness, its ever-repeated efforts toward adjustment, its connection with the active side of our nature, the dynamic no less errs in failing to ex- plain the statical aspect, the side of mind which, though not itself out of time, is yet more or less unaffected by it and not so much a process as consciousness thereof. But just because that statical aspect is itself in time, acted-upon, object of behaviour, the view in question can in turn object to our assertion of a surd, and proceed to describe it further and further. The tilt may then become an endless one. It is like the elastic rubber cord fixed at both ends which can be stretched more and more toward one without leaving the other end. The argument is perhaps more obvious in the case of error. In the pragmatic account of error, that doctrine is, we think, seen at its best. Professor James thus distinguished unreal things from real ones. " . . . as the general chaos of our experience get sifted, we find that there are some fires that 214 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY will always burn sticks and always warm our bodies, and that there are some waters that will always put out fires; while there are other fires and waters that will not act at all. The general group of experiences that act, that do not only possess their natures intrinsically, but wear them adjec- tively and energetically, turning them against one another, comes inevitably to be contrasted with the group whose members, having identically the same natures, fail to mani- fest them in the ' energetic ' way. I make for myself now an experience of blazing fire ; I place it near my body ; but it does not warm me in the least. I lay a stick upon it, and the stick either burns or remains green as I please. I call up water, and pour it on the fire, and absolutely no difference ensues. I account for all such facts by calling this whole train of experiences unreal, a mental train. Mental fire is what won't burn real sticks; mental water is what won't necessarily (though of course it may) put out even a mental fire. Mental knives may be sharp but they won't cut real wood. Mental triangles are pointed, but their points won't wound. With ' real ' objects, on the contrary, consequences always accrue ..." (Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 32-33.) As Professor Dewey says, " A mistake is literally a mis- handling " (op. cit., above, p. 69). A tentative reaction of the organism, designed to enable it to adjust itself to a cer- tain given situation, which if carried out would fail to pro- duce such adjustment that is error. " For if and so far as an assertion satisfies or forwards the purpose of the inquiry to which it owes its being, it is so far ' true '; if and so far as it thwarts or baffles it, it is unworkable, unserviceable, ' false ' " (F. C. S. Schiller, Studies in Humanism, p. 154). The aptness of these definitions is seen by a comparison of them with the following definition (from the pen of an op- GREAT OBJECTIVISM 215 ponent) : " Thus the judgment that two terms have a cer- tain relation R is the relation of the mind to the two terms and the relation R with the appropriate sense: the ' cor- responding ' complex (the object of the judgment) consists of the two terms related by the relation R with the same sense. The judgment is true when there is such a complex, and false when there is not. The same account, mutatis mutandis, will apply to any other judgment. This gives the definition of truth and falsehood" (B. Russell, Philosophical Essays, p. 184). Now the latter definition simply says, in technical language, that a judgment is true when it corre- sponds to fact, false when it does not; an assertion which is as clear as it is uninforming. Of the meaning of "corre- spondence" there is no analysis. The pragmatic definition, however, tells, right or wrongly, what " correspondence " means. It renders that notion into something capable of verification, open to test and experiment; it really does define the terms truth and error. Is there, then, anything about error which this definition neglects ? Notice that it speaks of tentative response; the error is the response which the organism tends to make, and which if completed would lead to maladjustment. This reduces the thing to a potential affair, and reminds us of Montague's definition. We criticized that, on the ground that it did not do justice to the fact of the actual presence of the illusory object to the erring mind. Will not this defini- tion then probably fail in a similar way ? Is it not likely that the phrase " tentative response which would lead to mishandling " will be found to convey to the reader no idea of the actual presence, at the moment when the error is en- tertained, of the false object ? For that object is, in some sense, thought of then and there. You may put this into words of practical, dynamic import if you like. Say that 21 6 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY the thought of it is the incipient, projected reaction which would lead to disaster. But that is not an adequate account of the thought. There is more than incipient response, there is an intention to respond, an awareness more or less dim of the completed response, the purpose, which is not yet car- ried out. What will, if the response is fulfilled, occupy some time, is present as a plan of action all at once to the mind that errs. The phrase " tentative response " does not suggest this consciousness all at once of what might in the working out be spread over a considerable interval. Now such con- sciousness we undoubtedly have, and it, with its anticipation of the future, shows a certain time-transcending quality which the dynamic formula is impotent to convey. This is analogous to the case of memory which, we saw a moment ago, displayed a time-transcending quality in recalling the past. Consider an instance. Suppose I judge a ditch to be seven feet across when it is ten; then, in pragmatic terms, I tend to make too short a leap in crossing it and to fall in. But this meaning, that the ditch requires only a weak jump, is felt by me all at once ; I should not be now in error if my organism did not at present in some way prefigure this leap. This presence of a future act, as a purpose now entertained, when that act is not physically present (and indeed cannot become so because I am mistaken about the width of the ditch) this presence reveals a certain static aspect of the case; an aspect which the dynamic account just misses. Consciousness, however, has both static and dynamic as- pects, and any attempt to reduce it to terms of one alone will be unsuccessful. The attempt will meet its critical point in the other aspect. The error of the idealists was, perhaps, in treating the mind as if it were out of time and merely static ; the dynamic realists seem to go to the other extreme, treating it as wholly in time and merely dynamic. But it is GREAT OBJECTIVISM 217 always in time and yet it has a power of linking the different parts of the time-stream as in memory and expectation. Nevertheless the dynamic account is true on its positive side, and if excluded will insist upon its rights. The very consciousness of a purpose, of an act which is to be and is not yet, involves a bodily set or tendency. It has its character- istic behaviour. Expectation and purpose will in general show differently ordered responses from those of memory or perception. That behaviour and those responses will not of themselves suggest that their objects are future or past, but when it is once granted that they are such, then they can be defined as objects of this and that sort of response. It is, again, just as in the subjective-objective issue. The formula of subjectivism cannot guarantee the existence of objective reality as over against imagination, but when that reality is admitted, subjectivism can define it. And the same we found true, mutatis mutandis, of objectivism. And as there, when either party tried to rule out the interpreta- tion of the other, an endless tilt was set up, so here the denial of the dynamic formula by idealism or any static theory of mind, or the denial of the statical aspect of mind by dynamic realism, will lead to a similar never-ceasing controversy. Of the superior merit which some claim for the " be- haviouristic " method (to repeat an ugly word) in psy- chology, we need not judge; nor are we able to do so. It is for the psychologist alone to decide whether it yields better results than introspection. But as for the assertion that this latest definition of mind does away with the vexed problems of the relation of mind and body, it seems clear that that is a mistake. The mind is not the body, and the question of their relationship is not deprived of sense when mind is viewed as an unique function or kind of bodily response. 21 8 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY As long as mind is not material and the view does not consider itself materialistic so long the problem remains, how a purpose or plan can influence the brain-currents and through them the body. Or how can that function which is able to recall the past, and lay hold of the future in predic- tion, come to be identified with a material process (response) which is confined to the present ? In some such way would the old questions now be put, in view of the dynamic for- mulae; but they are just as difficult of solution as before, for they are the same questions, translated into a new terminology. Dynamic realism is hardly more fertile for the explanation of properties of mind, than was idealism for the understanding of the details of the objective world. In finding the limits of Great Objectivism before the task of defining mind, we have by inclusion discovered the fault of the old materialism. Materialism was a lesser form of Great Objectivism, since it would reduce mind to a function of a particular sort of objects, namely, material ones. It was, indeed, never able to verify any particular reduction; it tried one after another fire, gas, phosphorus, fine mat- ter of almost any kind, motion, vibration, etc., but all were so palpably insufficient to account for the properties of consciousness that it practically gave up the attempt. Pro- fessional philosophers have for some time ceased to be materialists, and idealistic doctrines have held possession of the field, though without having refuted the enemy. For the fact remains that any thought-process, however subtle or spiritual, has its characteristic bodily reaction; conse- quently we can describe the thought in terms of the reaction, as gold is replaced by bills and checks. It is but a little step to the belief that consciousness is itself matter or the motion of matter. But we have seen the critical point beyond whfch materialism, and even the broader view, Great Objectivism, GREAT OBJECTIVISM 219 cannot pass, viz., the fact that in mind, the past and future are often present as in memory and foresight. Indeed until that particular critical point had been brought out, we do not believe it was possible to parry the materialistic blow. If we look at the history of philosophy we find that mate- rialism was met only in the most superficial fashion; so superficial, indeed, that the materialist usually went away convinced that he had beaten his opponent. Idealists have answered his charges by reversing the formula, reducing matter to terms of perception and thought (as Berkeley did). But no reason so far appeared, why their reduction was truer than the other; and meanwhile the materialist re- flected that our thoughts are utterly dependent upon blood- supply, nutrition, and other quite physical agents. The idealist could not dispute this; the most he could do was to interpret blood-supply, etc., once more in psychical terms. This left the materialist practically master of the situation; so the idealist returned to the fray with a counter-affirma- tion, which made up for its logical weakness by its dogmatic fervor. " Thought simply is not matter or motion! " (e. g., Paulsen, Introduction to Philosophy, Eng. tr. Thilly, p. 83). Without showing in any specific way how it is not motion this is no better than saying to one's accuser " you are a liar." Yet the statement has in effect been repeated again and again. Here is a recent example : " The brown colour which I immediately see is simply not a form of wave- motion, but something quite different, and by no possibility can we, in the least degree, trace the genesis of the former from any mode of behaviour of the latter" (G. Dawes Hicks, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1911-12, p. 177). Such statements may be true, but they are too dogmatic to be effective upon a controverted point. What was always needed was a particular property of mind whose 220 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY appearance could not be explained or accounted for by material properties. Nevertheless, even when this has been accomplished, by the instances of memory and prescience, materialism is not annihilated; but only emasculated. For it can describe that memory and prescience, after having once admitted them, in terms of bodily response; whereas, though uniquely indicating it, the bodily response will never sufficiently define that present transcending power of the mind. And since this unique indication is always possible, we may expect those thinkers who do not see the significance of the critical point to return anon to the charge and to revive materialism. Presumably the theory will be yet many times revived so desirous is man of an exclusive monism before the lesson is learned. Precisely the same is true of spiritualism. Spiritualism is the kind of idealism which considers mind to be a substance im- material of course and matter as a phase of that sub- stance. It keeps the mysterious category of mind-substance, even as materialism keeps the mysterious category of physical substance.* But as neither subjectivism nor ideal- ism can account for the existence or the character of real objects, they are no more final than their opposites. And as the less is included in the greater, so spiritualism is unable to meet the same contingency. Spiritualism is as one-sided as materialism ; and is as liable to recrudescence. The battle between these two is as inevitable as the tilt between ideal- ism and realism. And each is right, but infertile. It is owing to its being unconscious of its infertility and conscious of its truth, that each continues to endeavour to refute the other. Is it not another instance of the irony of history that these modern thinkers, who endeavour so sincerely to be empirical and scientific, afford in their mutual rebuttals and reprisals * Which is the more unintelligible, inert matter or hidden mind ? GREAT OBJECTIVISM 221 one of the clearest examples of that Hegelian dialectic for which they express little but contempt ? This completes our study of Great Objectivism as a whole. We now recall that it has divided into three camps, roughly corresponding to the idealistic factions of rationalism, voluntarism, and " pancalism," viz., Platonic realism, prag- matism, and intuitionism. These three are not directly concerned with the subjective-objective issue; and for our own part, we confess to a sense of relief in leaving that pro- vincial atmosphere. It is reality that the philosopher undertakes to investigate ; the original instinct of curiosity was turned object-wards. There was always a feeling of unnaturalness about a doctrine which put the universe's centre of gravity within a subject. As a protest against such an inversion came the spirit of Great Objectivism ; the ob- jective study of facts as they are, independent of human val- uation. If the fruits of this spirit have failed to justify our expectations, at least the whole attitude inclines us toward forgetting for the moment about mind and considering the structure of reality. This is a service which the sub- jective types, preoccupied with consciousness, could hardly perform. It is as if Great Objectivism, in getting sufficiently away from mind to define it, has backed off far enough to push open the gate which leads to the outer world. Through that gate we are now to pass. We are to ask about the real nature of objects: physical objects, or concepts, or laws, or principles, or what not. True, we shall find too often that they are conceived once more in subjective terms; for the subjective bias in modern thought is powerful. We shall not, however, concern ourselves much with this, deeming it already disposed of. But the issues between the three ways of describing objective reality are complicated enough to demand a separate chapter. CHAPTER VIII INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM r I ^HE names in our title subserve brevity rather than A exactness. Intellectualism is often understood today to refer to certain rationalistic tendencies shown by ideal- ists; we denote by it the rationalism of the realists, though indeed rationalism, as we shall soon define it, is common to both parties. But it appears purer among the objective schools, because it contains no admixture of Thought or a Great Thinker. As to Pragmatism, we do not pretend to discuss the whole of it, but only some influential doctrines for which it seems to be the sponsor. And we shall be mani- festly unjust to many details of that very concrete and sug- gestive system of Professor Bergson which is inevitably designated intuitionism, as well as to its twin sister, mysti- cism, for we aim to study either only as a competitor with other systems, i. e., in that aspect of it in which it rebuts, and is rebutted by, the rest of them. As we have repeatedly indicated, each thinker and each system is as little of a strict adherent to one type, as is a falling body to the unmixed tendency to gravitate. INTELLECTUALISM This type's main thesis seems to be, that universal*, those entities with which par excellence the intellect concerns itself, are the real things; particular or individual (we do not here distinguish these adjectives) things, events, persons, are not real, or if they are so, then only by participating in the universals whose essence they dimly body forth. These INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 223 universals are quite objective, depending in no way upon the conscious minds who think them. Like the types previously discussed, this view envisages the whole scheme of things from the angle of a special problem; the problem of the relation between general principles or laws and the partic- ular events or things in which those laws are exemplified. Also like other types, it answers to a certain temper, to a certain group of human insights and needs. Let us for a moment look at intellectualism in this broader light. That it is congenital in human nature was witnessed by Kant, when he wrote of reason's tendency to ascribe reality to its " noumena " God, freedom, and immortality; yes, even while he himself hoped that his own system would sup- plant the tendency. But though no one had recognized its inevitableness, we could scarcely find better evidence than its reappearance today. Of all ages in history the present seems the least Platonic: democracy, individualism, human- ism, the practical, all these motives are prominent now as never before. Yet in this gravelly soil even in the British Isles and the United States of America the tender flower has once more bloomed. The Platonism of Holt, Russell, and Spaulding (The Concept of Consciousness, The Principles of Mathematics, The New Rationalism} affords illustration. One reason for its persistence, indeed, lies in the versatility of the type. It can join itself to so many interests, even to the most opposite. Once it fostered religion: Plotinus, the Gnostic Sects, Augustine, Eriugena, Anselm, used it to help the belief in God. Today it disclaims any such religious trend; it cultivates instead the impersonalities of formal logic. Once the doctrine of the mystics, now it is the foe of romanticism, the devotee of cold analysis and exact defi- nition. Nevertheless in both extremes it is one and the same motive, the original motive of its great protagonist Plato, 224 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY viz., aspiration for that which is lofty, higher than the indi- vidual and imperfect, more enduring than the changing par- ticular, above and beyond the immediate empirically verified content of the moment. For those who love personality, it leads to a transcendent God; for those who worship the exactness of science, it leads to the modern "logistic." But God and the rigid concepts are equally far from the " con- crete change and hurly-burly of life," and it is this aloofness, and consequent stability, of the Ideas, that gives them their worth and distinction. It is a " static " or non- temporal world, cut of! from transeunt detail and to be investigated for its own sake, that we are asked to believe in. Not the application to concrete problems why empirical space has three dimensions, time but one, why there is life, etc., nor to any material utility : these would degrade philosophy. It is the adoration of the ideal, unmovedness, arapa^ia. Says a prominent de- fender of the universals: " Philosophy is a study apart from the other sciences: its results cannot be established by the other sciences, and conversely must not be such as some other science might conceivably contradict. Prophecies as to the future of the universe, for instance, are not the busi- ness of philosophy: whether the universe is progressive, retrograde, or stationary, it is not for the philosopher to say " (B. Russell, Scientific Method in Philosophy, pp. 236- 237). "Between philosophy and pure mathematics there is a certain affinity, in the fact that both are general and a priori. Neither of them asserts propositions which, like those of history and geography, depend upon the actual con- crete facts being just what they are " (op. cit.,p. 186). Utterly dogmatic are these statements, to be sure; for they answer but to an ideal which is felt, which has stirred the hearts of austere thinkers here and there; a Plato, a Spinoza, a Rus- INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 225 sell. The earnestness of the feeling is evinced in the moral tone which the doctrine assumes: truth is a duty (cf. the almost realistic Sollen of Rickert). The method of search, too, is laid down: " from the complex and relatively con- crete we proceed towards the simple and abstract by means of analysis ; seeking, in the process, to eliminate the partic- ularity of the original subject-matter, and to confine our attention entirely to the logical/orw of the facts concerned " (op. cit.,p. 185). This is from the pen of a " realist," but since we are now treating an issue which is unconcerned with the distinction of subject and object, we find that " absolutists " also share in intellectualism. " The way of philosophy is not the way of life " says Mr. Bradley. " Philosophy is as unable to formulate a thesis in the realms properly belong- ing to physics or to biology, as it is to build a steam-engine " (Royce, World and Individual, vol. II, p. 7). And Mr. Bosanquet, though not an intellectualist, leans toward this abstractness of intellectualism when he says: " We should not expect metaphysics to predict terrestrial history." (Principles of Individuality and Value, p. 268.) But we need not, of course, confine ourselves to the present: in earlier philosophy since Plato the clearest case is that of Stoicism. If we abstract from Spinoza's concern with the problem of mind and body and look at his general plan of the universe, we find it to be suffused with the emotions of the intellectualist. In the field of psychology, Herbart is the protagonist of the type. As to the doctrine of scientific cate- gories, the " reines Denken " of Cohen and Natorp is as intellectualistic as anything in Russell. The present type seems also fairly close to what Royce has called the third conception of being, though not, of course, possessing the subjective cast he has given it. (World and Individual, vol. I, ch. 6.) 226 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY The essence of the universal is that it is unchangeable. It may " enter into the stream of time from an eternal world outside " (Russell, op. cit., p. 167), but it is not thereby affected. It is the prototype of independence. Whatever is universal is independent of change and of the destiny of the particular instance; and whatever is independent is so far a universal. But it is not enough to grant that there are such independent entities; intellectualism goes further. It shows a decided preference for them, over and above the particulars. Upon what then is this preference based ? It is not simply for a logical reason that the universal is honored. Independence is not demonstrably a sign of greater reality. Why is not the dependent as real as that upon which it de- pends ? Is not the chain as real as the hook from which it hangs, or the child as actual as its parents ? Or is it that the universal endures while the particular changes, vanishes ? But there is no assigned reason why that which survives to a later date is of a higher metaphysical rank than the tran- sitory. If to be later were to be more real, then 1900 A. D. is today more real than 1800 A. D. , and so on ad absurdum. No : we want to be sure of something in the future, something at once good and enduring, and the superior gratification which future certainty provides over future uncertainty, we easily read into the universal as a title to higher reality. Desire of peace, rest, security: that is the great motive of intellectu- alism. We might expect such an irony: the view which makes greatest parade of cold reason is nourished by a semi-religious desire. James has called this view " tender- minded "; presumably because it is wounded by the dis- agreeable concrete world and sadly longs to attain the rest of the Platonic heaven. In this aspect the motive becomes an " other-worldliness." INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 2 27 But intellectualism contains a further motive, and here intellect comes to its rights. A world of universals has one peculiar property; it loses much of its dignity if it is not well-knit. Not mere persistence, but a persistence of prin- ciples and laws which in their order and system manifest logical beauty; If it were not for this aspect the name intel- lectualism would be undeserved; we should have, instead, mysticism, or idealism in the artistic sense of the word. The parts, the various universals, must either themselves imply one another, or some must imply others, or they must in permutation and combination account for the categories of science. Not induction, but deduction, is in order. Implica- tion and other logical relations are at a premium. Platonism led, as the mind of its founder matured, to Py thagoreanism : intellectualism in a like manner leads to mathematism. Exact logic (i. e., presumably symbolic logic) is the key to philosophy, nay, is philosophy. The discovery of the inde- finable terms, the relations they take on, the deduction therefrom of the categories of pure science that is the subject-matter of philosophy : the method is the method of rigid demonstration, of pure logic. These emotional preferences for the enduring, the sure, the well-knit, are then some of the pillars of intellectualism. Other preferences we should expect it to misjudge. The interest in change and in humanity displayed by the prag- matist would be interpreted as giving pragmatism a whimsi- cal or subjective cast. (Cf . James' View of Truth, in Russell, Philosophical Essays.) Intuitionism would be taken to be romantic; idealism considered to be subjectivism. This is actually the case, and is a confirmation of our diagnosis; for a view based upon a certain value-attitude will always misunderstand and belittle a view based upon a different value-attitude. 228 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY We now pass to the arguments in favour of this type. Inasmuch as the universal is that which is unvarying throughout varying circumstances, the main argument for Platonism usually takes some such form as the following: On the one hand the very fact of change itself implies an underlying permanent subject of the change. Just as you cannot have motion without something that moves, so you cannot have change unless in something which changes. " This man has changed " we say; but that could not be true unless the man himself were still in some way the same man. Otherwise the change could not be attributed to him (compare here the argument of Kant's First Analogy in the Critique of Pure Reason). On the other hand, the very nature of description and analysis likewise implies changeless terms of discourse, concepts with fixed meaning, as it were permanent logical atoms out of which judgments are com- pounded. These two statements are but the objective and subjective sides of one and the same fact, viz., that change and complexity, if they are to be understood at all, must be explained as the permutation and combination of simple, ultimate elements. In chemistry, this thesis has occasioned the atomic theory; in modern logic and mathematics, it is exemplified in the indefinables, axioms, and postulates; in modern physics, in the theory of electrons. In fact, every mature science, which has grown far enough to assume rigorous deductive form, has taken the shape of a logical atomism. But the atoms, whether physical bodies or con- cepts, are the universals, the terms which enter now into one relation, now into another, without being altered thereby. In recent parlance, this thesis is called the principle of the externality of relations; and it has appeared to be the deadly foe of that principle which we found in subjectivism, viz., the internality of relations (Ch. III). Mr. Russell, one of its INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 229 chief defenders, thus sums up the case for the former prin- ciple and against the latter: " In short, no relation ever modifies either of its terms. For if it holds between A and B, then it is between A and B that it holds, and to say that it modifies A and B is to say that it really holds between different terms C and D. To say that two terms which are related would be different if they were not related, is to say something perfectly barren; for if they were different, they would be other, and it would not be the terms in question, but a different pair, that would be unrelated. The notion that a term can be modified arises from neglect to observe the eternal self -identity of all terms and all logical concepts, which alone form the constituents of propositions. What is called modification consists merely in having at one time, but not at another, some specific relation to some other specific term ; but the term which sometimes has and some- times has not the relation in question must be unchanged, otherwise it would not be that term which had ceased to have the relation." (B. Russell, Principles of Mathematics, vol. I, p. 448.) This is the same line of reasoning, be it noted, which may be used to prove a first cause or an irreducible substance, - in short, any last thing or permanent standard, anything which is independent of other things in the sense of not changing when they change. (Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, i. lesser, ch. 2 (Bonn's tr., p. 49.) As applied to the problem of knowledge, it leads to the doctrine of independent real objects, unchanged by our seeing, thinking or otherwise knowing them. Hence the realists are likely to be better intellectualists than the idealists. But Platonism has many forms, as universals are of various kinds. Common to them all is the logical need of a TTOV orco ; their distinctness lies in the purpose for which that irov is needed. How much does the argument weigh ? 230 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY It proceeds by a reductio ad absurdum. If you admit that A and B, when related, are changed to C and D, then you eventually get into an endless regress : for no longer A and B, but C and D, are related, and then since C and D are modified by their relation, no longer C and D are related, but E and F, and so on forever. Now this must be avoided - hence A and B when related are unchanged. But whence this certainty that the infinite regress must be avoided ? Skepticism, it seems, is the alternative. Well, why not be skeptics ? Here no ground can be assigned except that we are not. Whether this is ascribed to an immediate objective revelation, to a Fichtean act of choice, or a Kantian postu- late for purposes of action or anything you please one and all of these descriptions amount just to the fact that we do accept last terms, fixed concepts, entities entering un- changed into relations. The above argument then proves nothing: it simply brings to light that we do think in a cer- tain way. It would seem better to acknowledge this out- right than to dress it up in the form of a demonstration. The force of the position does not lie in its logical cogency, but in its actual credibility. It might become the foundation of voluntarism (does indeed so, with Fichte and Miinsterberg) or of intuitionism, or what not. There is here no ground for emphasizing the authority of logic or reason over any other human faculty; condemning, for example, a pragmatic basis for Platonism, or an intuitive one. " Universals we believe in because we need them for our thought " so might a pragmatist speak so too proceeds the argument of Mr. Russell. And we might as properly say with Descartes that we accept universals because they appear before us clear and distinct in lumine naturali. That there are universals, then, we cannot help admitting, but it is not implied in anything else unless we decide to INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 231 imply it, nor is it demonstrable by reason's laws. It simply is true, as a sort of ultimate datum. It rests upon no reductio ad absurdum of an opponent who insists that there is nothing permanent. And as its truth does not depend upon the suicide of the opposing view, we may well ask, is there not really an even balance between the belief in universals and the belief that all things change ? May not the permanent indefinables themselves take on changes, superimposed upon their unchanging cores, as they pass through the vicis- situdes of their concrete milieu ? May not the principle of externality be true at the same time with the principle of the internality of the relations ? If we acknowledged that an atom A , when brought into a certain relation R to another atom B, was thereby modified so as to become C, what would result ? We should say, B is no longer related to A, but to C instead. Now we could just as well say, B is still related to the old A , but that A has taken on a new qualification, in addition to its former prop- erties, while remaining otherwise the same as before. ( 'A has changed into C " means, " A is what it was before, plus a new quality #," where # is a resultant of the relation be- tween the old A and B. And this new C (= A-\-x) is not such as to replace the relation originally asserted of A and B, by one between B and C. Once admit that the modifica- tion may be an enlargement of A without modification of A throughout, and A is not threatened by the infinite process; for the original relation is not annulled. Hence the infinite process has lost its sting. And the defender of " externality " might well admit this, for he can grant that one part of any entity might remain unchanged. Of course, the advocate of " internality " may reply, " but my principle, which you profess to accept, says that the original properties of A must also be modified by the relation. You have not modified 232 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY them; you have only placed a new content, x, in external juxtaposition to them. But the x must in turn affect the original A." We answer "All right; let it be so. Let the A be modified by the addition of x into A+y." All we need to do is to admit the modification, and write it down as the original plus some new attributes. Then the " internalist " will once more protest that the original remains still un- modified, and we shall once more admit a modification, writing it down as A+z, etc. At every stej> we can admit his claim; as fast as he urges that it is not satisfied, we can satisfy it. The similarity of this logical situation to the old issue of subjectivism with objectivism is apparent. Either side may grant the claims of the other and then proceed to interpret the whole thing in its own way. Neither side can ever quench the desire of the other for further conquest, but on the other hand neither side can deny the justice of the other's principle. Both internality and externality may be granted, to any extent that is wished; and at no stage of the process does one side rule out the claim of the other. But just as soon as the internalist would prohibit the demand for an unchanged substratum persisting through the changes, he goes against that ultimate datum we spoke of above; and just as soon as the externalist denies the influence of relations upon their terms he runs counter to that principle of in- ternality whose soundness we bore witness to in Chapter III. The attempted reductio ad absurdum of internality is a failure. Internality of relations may be admitted at every step of the analysis, but it cannot rule out externality. The penalty has lost its force. Intellectualism surreptitiously understands internality in such a way as to forbid permanent terms, and then goes on to condemn it for not admitting permanence. But such understanding is quite gratuitous, and only makes the trouble which intellectualism finds. It INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 233 reminds us of the proverb " Give a dog a bad name and hang him " and is, in fact, but the old argument from damnation once more. And we might have suspected the Platonist's anathema, if only because it appears to prove too much. If it were true, there would be no " internal " relations at all. Bring- ing an object say a chair into a new situation, as for instance a fire would not alter it. Now perhaps the ultimate atoms of the chair do persist unaltered: but are they alone to be considered as real ? Must we condemn as unreal whatever suffers change ? It would seem that we ought to do so, and in fact that is just what Platonism always tends to do. It slights the vanishing, the particular; it dubs it appearance, unreal. But this condemnation can be logically justified only if the particular instance is wholly defined in terms of universals. This definition of individuality in conceptual terms is the task which now confronts intellectualism. As Great Objec- tivism accounts for conscious minds by defining them in terms of objects; as idealism reduces objects and laws to terms of the social mind ; so Platonism, if it be true to itself, must define the individual as a certain function of universals. Thus, a particular oak tree in a certain field is itself and no other because it is a certain combination or " logical prod- uct " of qualities or universals. Other trees are different combinations or products. The first tree is the logical prod- uct of green and oaken and 150 years old and owned by X, and so forth; the second tree is the product of green, oaken, 125 years old, owned by X, etc. ; a third tree is the product of a different group of adjectives. The individual is a mode of the universal (as with Spinoza), a function or relation of concepts: individuals which have no distinction between their qualities are mutually indiscernible and identical. 234 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY But as Great Objectivism found its surd in mind, may we not expect a similar fate to meet Platonism in the individ- uals ? For notice : no finite number of universals combined will provide that there shall be only one case of the combina- tion. Why not two, three, or more, just exactly alike ? Perhaps the difference might be incommunicable, just bare position, " thisness " as many thinkers have said. Plato- nism cannot disprove this alternative. And as it cannot re- fute an indescribable difference, so it cannot generate the one out of the class. It suffers from the fault analogous to its rival, mysticism's, which cannot get the many from the one. The universal is that which permits an indefinite number of instances, and out of universals can be generated no prin- ciple which limits the number. Of course, in a given world, where the number of existing objects is finite and unchange- able, the product of two universals would have fewer instances than one of those universals. In a given navy which can be neither increased nor diminished, there will be a certain number of steamships: there will be a smaller number of steamships which have a certain added property say, of mounting seventeen-inch guns fewer still which in addition to this property have that of carrying the com- mander of a fleet etc., etc. And so we tend to believe that as universals are combined more and more, there is a gradual approach to, and final attainment of, individuality. And there is, provided we are dealing with a finite number of individuals and universals. But the concept of the universal, that of which there may be any number of instances, cannot by shaking be made to precipitate the notion of a certain number of instances, still less of one instance. As no finite sum makes infinity, so no logical product of infinites makes a finite number. The individual must be considered as unat- tainable by any finite combination of universals: the limit INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 235 rather, approached by such combination as it increases in complexity. The combination can be made ever greater by discovery of more and more properties of the individual; and it can thus differ from the real individual's nature by a difference less than any assigned difference. For such a difference can be added to the combination and then the combination no longer differs to that extent from the real individual. Hence the individual may fitly be called the limit, or the surd, of the combined universals. Platonism knows that it cannot account for the fact that there are particulars; hence it does not like to admit them into its purview, and we find statements like those quoted from Messrs. Russell, Bradley, et al. Nevertheless Plato- nism is not refuted by this inadequacy. Individuals are its true critical points, and it becomes emasculated at those points; but it still lives. Everything about an individual can be defined in universals; yes, even the phrase " this and no other " is itself a group of universals (to borrow from Hegel). The paint of universality can be daubed over everything as was the case with subjectivity too. Name something, if you can, about the individual which eludes conceptual description, i. e., the universal. You can do nothing but repeat " individuality " which is a name for the fact that what we have asked for is unknown. Or, again, will, desire, caprice, or other terms with which Royce's studies of individuality (The Conception of God, pp. 217-271) have made us familiar these are describable criteria, and thus reducible to terms of universals except for the ever outstanding " individuality." This however is from the point of view of conceptual definition a true ding an sich. The logic of the present issue is exactly the same as that of our previous issues. The very minute when something is discovered about individuality which has not yet been 236 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY brought within our definition, that something is described and thus brought within. Yet always something more is left. Which side then has the advantage ? Neither: it is an endless seesaw. But that means that both sides are cor- rect. Individuality is forever beyond universals in the sense that they are not adequate to account for it: but as long as it is taken to have any meaning, that meaning lies in univer- sals. Here intellectualism meets its opposite extreme, nom- inalism; and it cannot refute it and reduce the individuals to unreality per se. Before bringing up a second critical point from which the type suffers, we ought to square ourselves with the old ques- tion, whether the universals are ante rem or only in re. Granted that there are real universals, are they so to say in a separate world, as Plato thought, or wholly knotted in with the concrete particulars of this world, or neither, but only in our minds ? Strictly logical intellectualism, standing as it does for independence, should accept the first, the ante rem view. And if our analysis of the principle of external relations is correct, independence is the fact. For we found no reason for thinking that the opposed principle of " internality " could refute it; and it meets a certain ultimate intellectual ideal. Hence we should be willing to admit that the universals are separate existences. But it must be borne in mind that our present findings are sub- ject to modification by the results we may gain from later types. This is, indeed, a general remark which should not be forgotten throughout our whole investigation. Another critical point of this view is the fact of change. If universals cannot generate the individual, neither can the permanent, which is the universal in its temporal aspect, generate change. To be sure, every state of the changing thing can be abstracted out and put into terms of universals. INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 237 The successive positions of the moving object are static posi- tions, defined in spatial terms, and motion itself may be defined as the occupation by one and the same body of a cer- tain position at one time and of another position at a later time. This conceptual definition of motion is quite like the definition of the object proffered by idealism, or that of con- sciousness furnished by Great Objectivism. It is true enough, but it is inadequate. It does not explain how it can be that there is such a thing as time at all, and time means change. It means that a certain moment or brief duration now is and now no longer is and thus has changed in re- spect to its existence. But universals always exist (or if you prefer " subsist " or " are ") and no shadow of differentia- tion of this property into two such categories as " are " and " are not " is discernible in such blank monotony of being. To say that motion or change are relations between earlier and later positions or states of one thing, is not to define the nature of such a relation, but to beg the very quale we wish to understand. What relations are they ? Precisely the transeunt ones that have occasioned all the trouble. It is not explained how they can be found in a Platonic world. The actual world is simply an additional, unintelligible ex- crescence. Of course it is open to anyone to say that phi- losophy does not care about the particular facts of the world or the changes that occur in it; but is interested only in the star-like ideas. Such a choice of subject remains arbitrary, and there is no reason why a man might not declare that philosophy is interested only in the particulars and the changes that occur. Why is not philosophy just as much concerned with the actual as with the ideal and purely ra- tional ? Meanwhile the original problem of philosophy as we saw it in Chapter I is forgotten; no map of the universe as a whole is provided, for half of it is left out; and 238 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY there is no explanation of the more or less rough, irregular, inexact things which confront us at every turn. These actualities are the rocks against which intellectualism breaks into froth and foam. But, as ardent anti-intellectualists like James have failed to see, intellectualism is not refuted thereby. It passes into a vaporous stage beyond its critical point ; but it never is annulled. As all objects can formally be brought under the shadow of the subject, so all change, suc- cession, particularity, can be analyzed into momentary static states; even as any moving thing may be photographed. It is those states, but it is also something more. If you ask " What more ? " you can be answered by the interpolation of further connecting states and so on forever. As often as you claim to have dissected motion, so often you will be told that the relation between the successive states has eluded you; and as often as you analyze that relation between into further successive states, the objection will be repeated. Both sides are correct enough. The relation can always be analyzed into transition-states, just as a line joining two points can be analyzed into points and so on forever. And the states always imply a relation between them, as the points are connected by a line. The tilt is endless, because the analysis is never adequate, yet always true. So it is, then, as regards the issue between the Platonic universals and the concrete changes. The former can be used to de- scribe the latter, but they cannot fully succeed in the endeavour; they are infertile. On the scientific side of intellectualism another critical point appears. That type views the world of universals as a well-knit one. The various properties, etc., are deduced by logical necessity (i. e., by the axioms and principles of reasoning) from the indefinables and their relations. Hence all is determined to be what it is, and there seems no loop- INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 239 hole for letting in alternative possibilities, chance, the unde- termined and free for example, the free human act. We recall Spinoza's mechanical universe. Freedom of will in such a view has to be reinterpreted to mean action which follows necessarily from one's own inner nature. Now in the world of sense-observation we do not wholly verify this strict and well-knit character. No event perfectly mani- fests obedience to the universals of science, the " laws of Nature." Bodies do not fall in quite straight lines, measure- ments do not fully bear out the law of pressure in gases, etc., etc. How then does our type adjust itself to this awkward situation ? Well enough, indeed. It declares that the uni- versals which are present in Nature are so many and so complex that every particular event is a compound of a vast number, a resultant of indefinitely many laws. If the laws we know do not suffice to account for the behaviour of a living body, a dog or a man, then we say there are other laws acting undiscovered. But what if determinism thus adapts itself to the apparent irregularity of the concrete world ? It is quite formal; it has become so abstract as to be utterly infertile for prediction. The issue of freedom (or chance) vs. determinism is not treated as an empirical one. It is not that we demonstrate the laws by observing uniformity in events day following day, year, year, the same conditions in the laboratory producing the same results again and again. However ir- regular the sequence of events might be, one could still be- lieve them governed by laws at bottom. One's own thoughts are often chaotic enough, yet one may believe them subject to law. It is always open to us to say that the laws are so many and the conditions so complex as to necessitate ap- parent irregularity in the resultant events. It is true that we should not notice the presence of law but for fairly evident 240 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY uniformities; but an intellectualist might accept the pres- ence of law where he could not observe it. The real ground upon which determinists believe that all events are necessary is, that that appears to be a postulate of reason. It seems to go against all the nature of our intellect, to believe that an event can happen without a cause. An a priori " prin- ciple of sufficient reason " is invoked, and being dignified with the title of principle, at once assumes sway over our minds. To be sure, determinists appeal to the progress science has made, in explaining one by one events which used to be regarded as inexpli cable. The plagues which were once unaccountable divine visitations have been traced to germs; the caprices of man's thought have been accounted for by laws of association; dreams are explained by the state of the organism or the " suppressed-wish " of Freud; and the man who thinks that he freely chooses to vote for a candidate finds that his choice was dictated by invincible prejudices. The cumulative weight of all this causal ex- planation, increasing in geometrical ratio as it does with the advance of science, is indeed most impressive. But though the argument is convincing, it is not sound. It works by overpowering the reason, not by dissuading it. It is quite possible that we discover an ever greater number of causes operating in the world, while yet in the operation of each cause there be a slight divergence from law. In a line an inch long we may discover by subdivision more and more parts yet never do we succeed in reducing the line to points and nothing but points. The case of causal explanation is quite analogous. For a single fact such as the path of a falling raindrop we may bring to light one cause after another gravitation, air pressure, wind, evaporation, etc., yet each of these particular causes itself might exhibit a slight devi- ation from perfect law for it is well known that no perfect INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 241 case of law has ever been found. It is quite possible, nay it is probable, to judge from past observations, that every par- ticular cause that is acting on the raindrop, no matter how carefully isolated and measured, would be found to vary slightly from exact obedience to law. There is no empirical guarantee whatever that in the last analysis the same cause always produces the same effect. Nearly the same, we grant, of course, and more nearly the same the more the cause is isolated; but there is no proof that the deviation from law approaches zero as its limit. It only approaches something very small as its limit. But for clear thinking nearly the same is quite other than exactly the same, and determinism claims a regularity which in the last analysis is perfectly exact. The cumulative argument for determinism can no more rule out chance variations than shortening a line can make it into a point. If we based our opinion on empirical grounds, in- deed, we should say that every one of the infinite causes which combine to produce a certain event is itself a little bit irregular and unaccountable for that is always the case with the causes we know and measure. But we do not wish here to settle this fascinating question; merely to point out that determinism has given no more than an a priori solution; correct, perhaps, but indemonstrable. It appeals to a feeling of reverence for law, an a priori postulate which is not only unprovable, but by some serious thinkers denied. And since this law, being so a priori, can be made to fit any sort of irregularity that might be found in human life, it is indifferent to particular occurrences. The knowl- edge that all my deeds are determined does not tell me which way I am going to decide in a given alternative. In other words, determinism never accounts for any particular event. Every specific act of a human will, every event in inorganic nature, is as a complete individual quite unexplained; each 242 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY forms a critical point, and the relation of determinism toward these critical points is similar to the relation of the preceding types to their critical points. The theory can be so extended as to fit them, but in doing so it exhibits its infertility to account for them. It fails to do that which it set out to do, viz., to propound a universal working theory of the order of the real world. It is a consequence of the formalism of the deterministic view, that it cannot refute its opponent. If one waxes indig- nant over determinism's inability to explain the particulars, it is quite possible to retort to the whole position, that all law is at bottom a chance coincidence, a fortuitous recur- rence of similarities. For just as irregularities are explained by determinism as due to the enormously complex combina- tion of laws, so the reverse procedure is logically open, viz., to declare that the seeming regularity of causal sequences is due to an extraordinarily complicated heaping together of chance events. No one, to our knowledge, has done this,* because we love law and order ; but there would be nothing in it which would contradict our experience or our science. Such chance would of course not explain our world. It could not show any ground for our scientific predictions, in which we believe more or less absolutely. It would find its critical point, in turn, in those innumerable cases where we are justifiably certain of the future as in foretelling an eclipse, or calculating upon a man's defending himself when at- tacked, etc. But though it could not account for such in- stances, it could reiterate its position concerning them, and declare that they are simply odd coincidences. And since there is no limit to oddity, it could always stretch its elastic * Mr. C. S. Peirce came nearest of all men to doing it, perhaps (The Monist, vol. 2, pp. 321-323), but even he assumed a "habit-taking tendency " among things which is equivalent to assuming an irreducible element of law. INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 243 concept of chance to cover any coincidence, however incred- ible. For intellectualistic methods, the issue between determinism and chance is without end. In the Platonic world all can be deductively arranged from the indefinables and axioms; but that has no bearing what- ever upon the stream of particular and irregular events in time, and it leaves deliberately with some thinkers, unwittingly with others one half of the world a mystery. Must we repeat that we do not say there is no such Pla- tonic world ? On the contrary, we have seen that the argu- ment for the universals is sound. It is not a demonstration in the sense of discursive proof, but it is a valid appeal to inspection. But as a reform of philosophy's perennial diffi- culties, the type is analogous to the procedure of one who would reform human society by fleeing to the desert. It is an escape rather than a solution. It discovers a new world, but neither tells how that world is related to the old one nor sheds any light upon the old one. It cannot explain in- dividuality, or change, or motion; it cannot from its doc- trine of determinism enable us to foretell the future, and it cannot account for the fact that the universals are always imperfectly manifested in the concrete, that laws are only approximately verified. It appears to define motion and change by redefining motion and change so as to leave out the element of transeuncy, that is, by treating instead their pale Platonic analogues. And by this one-sided procedure it is sure to produce, in true Hegelian fashion, a reaction in favour of the dynamic, the concrete, the immediately felt, the practical. Such a reaction forms our next type. ANTI-!NTELLECTUALISM, OR RADICAL EMPIRICISM This is a broad stream, and it flows closer to the public places than any other; it has democratic affiliations, being 244 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY of quite opposite temper to the aristocratic instincts of the Platonist. Such empiricists as Bergson, James, and Dewey may almost be said to be popularly known; one hears of them in the novels of the day, and they are, for philosophers, very widely read. The banks of the stream are, perhaps, not so clearly defined as some we have followed. We might say it is swampy at the edges ; but swampy ground may be fer- tile, and what the stream lacks of clear-cut boundary will, it is hoped, be compensated by the fertility it contributes to the valleys which it irrigates. We said there were three subdivisions under Great Objec- tivism, to be sure, and it now looks as if there were only two: intellectualism and empiricism. But the latter has two forms, distinct and hostile except in their treatment of the common enemy, viz., pragmatism and intuitionism. These share the antipathy to such transcendental entities as the universals, to the remote Platonic heaven and the static generally; " static " becomes with them a term of reproach as when they characterize the Absolute of Hegel by that adjective. They also share the acceptance of time, change, and the concrete particulars of the world as ultimately real. These two points are their common root, radical empiricism: the way in which they branch off from that root shall be later described. We begin with the root and then take up the branches. On the negative side, the type opposes the pure concepts of Plato and Mr. Russell, the mathematically constructed universe of Spinoza, the transcendental Ego of Kant, and all such entities which are above or beneath the temporal flow of events. The Great Self of the idealists, uniting and relating the sense-data, and itself outside those data; the ding-an-sich; the external objects' of the representative theory of knowledge which are never in but always implied INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 245 by our sense-impressions all these transcendent things are per se not real or if they are, they may be neglected. To all intents and purposes, they are not. Such reality as these great principles have can be rendered wholly into terms of our every-day experience. This type is, in truth, that positive side of the "Pure-Experience" doctrine mentioned in Chapter IV. " In point of fact " said James of the conceptual realm " it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist fancy may take refuge from the intolerably confused and Gothic character which mere facts present. It is no explanation of our concrete universe, it is another thing altogether, a substitute for it, a remedy, a way of escape. " Its temperament, if I may use the word temperament here, is utterly alien to the temperament of existence in the concrete " (Meaning of Truth, p. 22). Intellectualism, then, can scarcely furnish a valuable map of reality. " Rational- ism tends to emphasize universals and to make wholes prior to parts in the order of logic as well as in that of being. Em- piricism, on the contrary, lays the explanatory stress upon the part, the element, the individual, and treats the whole as a collection and the universal as an abstraction. ... To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its con- structions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences (viz., the universals, the transcendental ego, etc.} must them- selves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation ex- perienced must be accounted as ' real ' as anything else in the system. . . . Now, ordinary empiricism, in spite of the fact that conjunctive and disjunctive relations present them- 246 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY selves as being fully coordinate parts of experience, has always shown a tendency to do away with the connections of things, and to insist most on the disjunctions. Berkeley's nominalism, Hume's statement that whatever things we dis- tinguish are as ' loose and separate ' as if they had ' no manner of connection,' James Mill's denial that similars have anything ' really ' in common, the resolution of the causal tie into habitual sequence . . . and the general pulverization of all Experience by association and the mind-dust theory, are examples of what I mean. " The natural result of such a world-picture has been the efforts of rationalism to correct its incoherencies by the ad- dition of transexperiential agents of unification, substances, intellectual categories and powers, or Selves; whereas, if empiricism had only been radical and taken everything that comes without disfavour, conjunction as well as separation, each at its face value, the results would have called for no such artificial correction. Radical empiricism, as I under- stand it, does full justice to conjunctive relations . . ." (James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 42-44). If then there are for us no objects transcending all possible experience, what are we to say of physical things ? For they are surely outside of our own thoughts of them. So simple a thing as a pebble comprises many attributes which I do not ever think of or apprehend. Its chemical properties I may not know ; even the greatest scientist does not know all of them. Are not these really transcendent of human experience ? In short, our perceptions seem to have a cer- tain objective reference, to point to a reality transcending them. But this reference, according to our present type, is sufficiently described as a " feeling of tendency " in the pres- ent experience, toward some future possible experience. The pebble's externality to my mind means that there is INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 247 more about the pebble than I compass now; that if I ex- amine it further I shall have more perceptions and thoughts. " Objective reference, I say then, is an incident of the fact that so much of our experience comes as an insufficient [sic] and consists of process and transition. Our fields of expe- rience have no more definite boundaries than have our fields of view. Both are fringed by a more that continuously de- velops, and that continuously supersedes them as life proceeds " (Essays in Radical Empiricism, p. 71). This definition of the object by " further possible expe- rience " suggests subjectivism, but we must remember that James is a Great Objectivist. His essay " Does Conscious- ness Exist ? " referred to in Chapter III, favours a reduction of mind to objective, though concrete terms. Summarizing, he says: " Radical Empiricism consists first of a postulate, next of a statement of fact, and finally of a generalized conclusion. " The postulate is that the only things that shall be debat- able among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience. (Things of an unexperienceable nature may exist ad libitum, but they form no part of the material for philosophic debate.) " The statement of fact is that the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves. " The generalized conclusion is that therefore the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience. The directly appre- hended universe needs, in short, no extraneous transempiri- cal connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure." (James, The Meaning of Truth, Preface, pp. xii-xiii.) 248 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY But the negative side is not all of radical empiricism. It is not content with denying the universals ante rent; it pur- ports to do justice to all that they really mean to us. This is its positive side. As Great Objectivism did not mean to ex- clude mind, but to define it in objective terms, and as Great Subjectivism intended to recognize the external objects, but by reducing them to a phase of the Universal Mind, so radi- cal empiricism would include the alleged transcendent beings, redefining them by means of experienced relations, functions, tendencies, etc. It does not so much rule out the static as restate it in dynamic terms. " For rationalism " wrote James, " concept-stuff is primordial and perceptual things are secondary in nature. The present book, which treats concrete percepts as primordial and concepts as of secondary origin, may be regarded as somewhat eccentric in its attempt to combine logical realism with an otherwise empiricist mode of thought ' ' (So me Problems of Philosophy, p. 106). Nominalism the present type would be, with its primacy of individuals, did it like Hobbes and the rest deny the universals; but by virtue of its definition of them as the possibility of further similar instances it should rather be entitled Great Nominalism. Such a Weltanschauung, which is probably more influen- tial among Protestants today than any type we have yet studied, owes its attractiveness in the main to congruity with so much of our modern attitude toward life. If Platonism rests largely upon emotion, even more obviously does Radical Empiricism especially as presented by the charmingly temperamental James. And the emotions it calls into play are just those dearest to the twentieth-cen- tury mind; for they are democratic emotions. James gives us the apotheosis of the commonplace, the imperfect, and these form the masses, the majority, of our experience. INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 249 Human beings, looking upon their actual environment, do not find things clear-cut, exact or pure. There are no perfect circles, no straight lines, no rigid bodies in Nature; no man is wholly selfish, wholly sensual, absolutely rational or gener- ous. Instead of being " simple, clean, and noble " like the Platonic world, our life is for the most part " tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed " (Pragmatism, p. 21). We " muddle along somehow." Instead of being ordered from top to bottom by unalterable law, we find life full of hazard, risk, alternative possibilities. We like nowadays to think that we make our own future; and the doctrine pleases us by its appeal to action and free choice, favourite categories of a vigorous, bustling age. Chance, which to the well- regulated Platonic mind appears distasteful or even vulgar, and which seems so patent in common experience, is allowed a place for it makes our work and play more zestful. Even God, the supremely real one, is not the immaculate ideal of perfection: " in this world of sweat and dirt, what- ever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman " (Pragmatism, p. 72). There is no other- worldliness here, but rather a glorying in the struggle of this one. God himself, in James' view, struggles with evil, and grows thereby; and this success is helped or hindered by our own choices. The Platonic idea, aristocrat of metaphysics, is replaced by the shifting scene of ordinary human expe- rience, where all the elements of the stream have equal opportunity to prove their value and truth. The cold and classic universe gives way to the romance of daily work, industry, the common needs of life. Dignity, austerity, asceticism, those virtues of a by-gone age, are likely to be interpreted as pomposity and self-centredness. The leaders of the movement are unpretentious, simple-minded; such as Professor Dewey, social democrat and organizer, the humane James, and the fun-poking Schiller. 250 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY But realism is devoted to science; and these men are not idealists. In contrast, however, to the Platonist's devotion to exact science, which works with the artificial conditions of the laboratory and the abstractions of higher mathe- matics, we may expect the empiricist to select as ideal the sciences which deal with living, growing things and which observe them as they work in their natural environment. For living things possess all the traits which this type loves to contemplate; their very essence is to change, to struggle, to disappear ; they show none of the fixed immobility of the intellectualist's types. The true method of approach should be the temporal one, i. e., the evolutionary; and the sciences which are taken as the fount and model of truth will be the biological sciences. This tendency to base philosophy upon biology finds aid and comfort, too, from recent critics of the inorganic sciences such as Rey, E. Boutroux, Ravaisson, Renouvier, Poincare, Enriques, Pearson, Ward, and many others; as well as from the idealistic interest in human personality. But it is time that we examined the detail of the argument which has been offered against the abstract universals. Whereas change, relations, and individual things are directly presented and therefore real, concepts as such are never seen, touched or otherwise observed. They are, at best, only limits, ideals, which are more or less imperfectly approximated in our experience. For concepts are exact; and nothing we observe is exactly anything. Whiteness is never seen, for it means just white, pure white and all the whiteness we know has admixture of something else, be it a little darkness, or other quality. A horse is not just a pure horse, but a nervous horse, a sorrel horse, etc. Most evi- dently is this sort of assertion verified in the physical sciences. There is no mere water or mere carbon ; you can- not get them unalloyed, no matter how careful you are; there are no perfectly elastic bodies; no lines that are just length without thickness, but only long thin objects such as strings, wires or threads; no mere planes, but only fairly smooth tops of tables, etc., etc. Nor are pure cases ever found, of one law of science; the action of one law is always interfered with by some other. The pendulum in the labora- tory swings a little slower than it should, owing to friction; the ball falling in a vacuum is attracted by other bodies from the straight path; and so on. Universals, pure concepts, are then not given in experience. Experience does not come to us in generalities, but is specific and complex. " To at- tribute a superior degree of glory to it (the concept) seems little more than a piece of perverse abstraction-worship " says James. " As well might a pencil insist that the outline is the essential thing in all pictorial representation, and chide the paintbrush and the camera for omitting it, forgetting that their pictures not only contain the whole outline, but a hundred other things in addition." (James, Meaning of Truth, pp. 204-205.) The particulars contain " a hundred other things in addition " to any of the universals they re- veal. In so far as the universals get embodied at all, it is in the form of particulars teeming with qualities. It is the thinness, meagreness, poverty of universals, that make them less real than the particulars. The reason why no law is exactly fulfilled, no concept found pure, is that they would be too colourless to be noticeable. They would not be in concrete contexts, they would not be available to more than one sense-organ or mode of apprehension. Who could ever identify a mere horse ? How point him out to others, how recognize him but by his colour, size, behaviour, etc. ? No, the universal is no more real than the skeleton is alive. The particular, which is never simple or abstract, is alone " verifiable." 252 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY But poverty and meagreness are no good reason why we should call the universals less real. Less interesting, less fruitful, less profitable, yes: but when it is a question of existence, we might as well say a hillock is not as real as a mountain. It is by mistakes analogous to this that social injustice originates. We overlook the poor and uninterest- ing people. We are more considerate of a genius's feelings than of a nonentity's, we slight a child for an adult. The small has its wants as well as the large, and there is enough of reality " to go around." The quantitative argument as we might call the above is not a logical one ; it is a statement of our interests merely. It must be supplanted by another if it is to have objective significance. And other arguments we find. The universals have certain metaphysical defects. Thus, it is a sine qua non of reality to be individual ; and the uni- versals do not meet the demand. Perhaps the case has been best stated by Royce. The argument was used by him, we know, not to justify radical empiricism, but to support the ultimacy of individuals; but it is of perfect application here. By that beautiful inversion which is so frequently seen in philosophical reasoning, the same train of thought which led the intellectualist to condemn the individuals is here employed by the individualist to condemn the universals. As the particulars could not measure up to the standard of the concept, so now the latter is found to fall short of the converse requirement. The argument runs as follows. Individuality = reality; the concept is not an individual, therefore, etc. Now it is clear enough, perhaps, from what we have already said, that individual and universal are ir- reducible one to the other. The real force of the argument lies then in the assumption that individuality is of the essence of reality. Long ago Aristotle said, "Primary sub- INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 253 stance to be sure in everything is that which does not be- long to another thing." (Metaphysics, 6. ch. 13: Bonn's Library tr., p. 199.) What are the grounds of this unhesi- tating acceptance of the individuals ? It seems that Being is taken to signify a certain complete- ness. What is real is " all there." This pen could not be, unless it were a finished article. " An entire instance of Being . . . permits your ideas to seek no other " said Royce. (World and Individual, vol. I, p. 347.) However infinite in number be the points on the surface of a five-cent piece, they must all be present, none lacking, in the surface. But the universal, by its very definition, is never complete, never " all there " for there may always be further in- stances of it. It is like infinity in this regard. Men have difficulty in granting the actuality of the infinite, because it is something which cannot be compassed. It is forever unattained, unrealized. Universals, then, lack the finished character which is a requisite of reality; hence they must be unreal. Now of course in a sense whatever is real is individual. But does it follow that it cannot also be a universal ? May there not be another aspect of every stick, stone, or person, in which they show an unfinished character, a suggestion of more to come ? Time seems to display this very property. The present moment is all here; everything up to it has been completed, and yet that completeness is no bar to a tend- ency toward further experience. Space also : a given volume, say the area included by Neptune's orbit, is all completed and present, but it implies a region outside and beyond. This potentiality of further regions and future events is a very real attribute of space and of time. Any account of them which omitted it would be clearly inadequate. And if time and space possess this unfinished quality, why not 254 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY horses, dogs, trees, and other individual things ? As a matter of fact, they all do suggest to us that there may be further instances, more horses, more dogs; and that feeling, that there may be more like them, is just the gist of our consciousness of the concept. From this point of view, the concept is not poorer than the individual thing, but richer; for it leads on to more individuals than we have already found. This leading-on is a positive addition to our appre- hension of the present. Professor Royce somewhere asked, " What is a mere possibility unrealized ? " On the practical side, at all events, it is a good deal, for in daily life we have to take account of possibilities which are not yet fact, and which may never become so. My house may burn down, or it may not; but I take out insurance against the bare chance that it will. We shall enlarge on the importance of this category of the potential in Chapter X ; but it seems evident to the most superficial reflection that a view which would denude reality of its aspect of incompleteness is a priori, narrow, and against all empirical results. We conclude that so far the universal is not shown unworthy of being real. The incompleteness of the universal, it must be noticed, is simply its property of being inexpressible completely in individual terms. Starting from individuals, and nothing else, we could not define the universal. The relation " ever more and more to come " must be introduced; but the " ever " already contains implicitly the essence of the uni- versal. And no finite array of individual cases can exhaust this notion of " ever more and more." We have here then two elements, such that one can never be reduced to a phase of the other. The alleged proof of the unreality of concepts is only the demonstration that they can never be translated into individual terms; the error lies in the conclusion that since completed beings (individuals) are real, incomplete ones INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 255 (universals) cannot be so. In elementary logic this is called false obversion. But, it will perhaps be said, the concept as we have here used the term, is no abstract entity, but only a property of the individuals, viz., their suggestion of further similar instances. The thing which radical empiricism objects to is not this functional relational thing, but the transcendent universal, supposed by Platonism to exist complete, by itself, apart from all particulars. Surely all the arguments above adduced against the concept, will apply to that sort of abstraction. We must reply in the negative. The abstract universal is no more to be condemned than the concrete. To be sure, it is not fully realized in the stream of events that make up human history, or terrestrial or solar history. But did it ever pretend to be so realized ? Why should it be ? It is aloof from them, independent of them; " a clear addition," as James said, not an explaining principle. But this is no denial of its reality. It is not its reality that is impugned by this remoteness, but its concreteness, its presence in the earthly milieu; and there is no known ground for arguing that what is not so present is not real. All that is concrete is real ; but it does not follow that what is not concrete is not real. Here lurks the same fallacy as with the individualist. To show that abstractions are unreal one must appeal to very different reasons. As far as we can ascertain, these are just two in number; the " principle of parsimony " is one, and the Hegelian doctrine that the abstract leads to dialecti- cal contradiction is the other. Now the former, so far from tending, as is usually thought, to rule out the abstract uni- versal, is perhaps its strongest support. For we could not manage our daily life, our religion, our science, if we were not constantly setting up abstractions, thinking of them as 256 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY pure and unmixed, and guiding our behaviour by their light. If I wish for selfish reasons to make a friend of a certain vain man, I flatter him rather grossly. For the moment I ab- stract entirely from his being a person of common sense, a reputable artisan, a sound business man, etc. I treat him as just vanity and nothing more. I make progress in his affec- tions by reacting toward him as if he were the Platonic idea, Vanity. In point of fact, this abstractness is the funda- mental trait of human conduct. As psychologists and phi- losophers do not cease to emphasize, we live by selection; we advance against the hostile forces of the environment by tacking, by meeting one at a time that is, in abstraction the problems of life. Consciousness itself is through and through selective. We attend to one part of our surround- ings at once; experience itself comes to us in abstracto. And what is true of the layman's mind is equally true of the priest's or the scientist's. The preacher addresses a tran- scendent God in his prayer; and the worshippers are invited to contemplate moral virtues which, however good men may be, are practically never completely realized. Even the practical ethical-culturist must think of the virtues one by one, and realize them one by one. And in science, as is so well known today, abstractions such as inertia, velocity, straight lines, perfect ellipses, etc., are simply indispensable. It is astonishing that radical empiricists of the pragmatic cast, who define the true as that belief which enables us to adapt ourselves to the environment, should not hold up as true all these acknowledged abstractions. They are not only helpful, they are prerequisites of success in every walk of life. Take an instance from one of the least intellectual of human experiences the mass meeting, the political rally. Does not the orator who sways the crowd, do so by the reiteration of abstract terms such as " republicanism," " the INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 257 democratic spirit," " social justice," " Americanism," " the British Empire," and so on concepts the brilliance of whose emotional halo is directly proportional to the degree in which they fall short of concreteness ? No, the principle of parsimony would rather incline us to acknowledge the reality of abstractions per se ; so far from being praeter ne- cessitatem they are quite indispensable to human progress. And it is per se that they are to be invoked; if we could not for the moment abstract from all else and envisage the virtue, the ideal, the quality we wish to gain or to suppress, all alone, it would lose its power. Humanity is, and must always be, dominated by abstractions; concrete success comes through that road, as a man has to step back in order to jump the ditch. Let him then not scorn the means by which he succeeds. For that matter, individual things are just as abstract as generalities. A person no more exists alone, apart from his environment, than does selfishness apart from selfish per- sons. Yet we say he is real enough; at least radical empiri- cism says so. The only consistent denial of the abstract universal would seem to be the Hegelian doctrine that nothing cut off from its context is real. This doctrine is based, apparently, on two foundations; the fact that all our experience forms a sort of continuum, every part and aspect being more or less tied up with every other, and the principle that the abstract is, for ultimate analysis, self-contradictory. Now as to the fact, we should not think of disputing it. The radical empiricist admits it: James and Ward and Dewey and other empiricist leaders insist upon it. But here as above we ask, is that the whole truth about our experience ? Is there not another side, the side which we have just been dwelling upon, the side of partiality, selective attention, limitation ? Objects come to us in an environment, but 258 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY they also go out of that environment before us ; they manage to get off alone as it were, to be contemplated in vacuo a process whose subjective description is called our abstracting. Do you say this is subjective only, while the objective fact is the continuum alone ? In answer we may refer back to what we said about subjectivism in Chapters III and IV. There is no particular reason why the abstract should be considered more subjective than the concrete. Kant thought it should be so considered; but we have examined his argument in Chapter III. The abstracting process is unavoidable, it is useful for extending knowledge, for enabling us to cope with life, it is similar in all of us and pretty much the same con- tents are abstracted out by everyone colour, tone, etc. ; in short it has all the marks by which we judge any subject- matter to be objectively real. There is indeed no good ground why we should select the side of our experience called individual and ascribe to it a reality we are unwilling to give to the universal side. It is an arbitrary preference, a dog- matic exclusion. It is bound to lead to a sense of injustice and thus to generate a revolt in favour of the concepts and so to prolong the tilt between nominalism and Platonic realism. There remains the other reason assigned by the Hegelians, to wit, the principle that all partial things are self-contradic- tory. This argument depends upon certain presuppositions which radical empiricism has not been willing to make, and which for that matter none of the types we have yet studied would admit. In Chapter IX we shall examine those pre- suppositions. They go along with an entirely new point of view in philosophy and cannot be properly treated until that point of view has been expounded. For the present, then, we must content ourselves with a promise to study the principle later. With the proviso, however, that we there INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 259 find no just cause for the denial of abstract universals, we seem able to conclude that they have as good a title to reality as the individuals, the shifting temporal scene, or the rela- tions and functions that hold between its parts. Radical empiricism, at any rate, shows no sufficient reason for cutting them out. It seems worth while now to state our results in more posi- tive terms; for we believe they supply a much needed cor- rection of certain pet superstitions in modern philosophy. If we have argued rightly, any abstraction which is set up with due regard to the rules of evidence, ought to be judged real. Of course, it must be properly based : not every gen- eral idea should have our credence, but only those whose contents are drawn, with valid inference, from sensuous or other accepted data. The abstract concept witch does not seem to have any justification, because it is of no help for scientific description or for conduct. The abstract concept gravitation is quite different. It is of the greatest help in scientific description, and it is in practice a necessity, for we realize by its aid a property of the things we lift and let go, which we must always take into account. It is therefore quite correct to say that there is an actual entity, called the force of gravitation. Those apparently prudent, but really prudish, admonitions given by certain semi-philosophical physicists against the belief in real forces, are needless. It would not do the slightest harm to anybody to admit a force of gravitation, a power of the electric current, or any other " metaphysical " principle behind the scenes. Of course we must not abuse these forces and powers. Let us not think that they explain the particulars, in the sense of accounting for their existence. They do no such thing ; they afford only a convenient description. But explanation is not the only ground for belief; description is as genuine a need of science 260 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY as explanation, and what furthers description best in the long run should be respected and accredited. Nor should we be so narrow-minded as to deny the forces because their names do not of themselves stimulate us to analyze them. The force of gravitation is doubtless in need of analysis; but suppose that it were analyzed as successfully as chemical attraction, light, heat, and other powers of nature have been, even then the actuality of the force would not be dissipated. Who ever said that analysis takes away the reality of what is analyzed ? Is John Jones the less a man for the results of biology ? Must we say that water is unreal because it is a compound ? Do either of these lose anything of their unity by being shown complex ? They lose neither unity nor actuality, and the names (one of which is capitalized in English, both in German) are no bar to the analysis. No more is the belief in a force of gravitation an inducement, to the sincere investigator, to forego the examination of the nature of that force. It is one thing to deify forces, to use their names as an injunction against inspection; it is quite different to believe in them and to proceed to elucidate their meaning. In fact, reason as he may about the matter, man will always have to speak, and think, and act, toward forces and powers as if he believed them real. To stigmatize them as " hypostasized abstractions " is another instance of that one-sidedness, intolerance, and needless exclusion which so frequently appears in history. What we have said of forces and powers applies also to institutions. Political nominalism, which is the same phi- losophy as the nominalism so despised by those who sneer at the subtleties of the Middle Ages, denies the reality of the state, the commonwealth, the municipality, in and for itself. It declares that they are nothing over and above the in- dividuals who compose them. But this is not borne out by INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 26 1 the behaviour of the public-spirited citizen. He labours for an abstract universal: abstract in the sense that it is one single object of his devotion and thought, not then " pul- verized " into its members. (However rare this devotion is in modern politics, it is certainly not entirely wanting.) Of course it must not be conceived as hostile to the needs of individual members : it then assumes an exclusiveness which we have all along condemned. But it is distinct ; the welfare of the state does not mean the immediate welfare of every citizen, and so far the state is a different thing from the mere group of citizens. We often see public officials caught up by the spirit of the institution which they serve; display- ing a zeal, a tireless energy, which before entering upon office they had never shown. One may observe the same in the young athletes who strive for the glory of the college they represent, in the voter's otherwise unintelligible ad- herence to a political party; yes, even in the positivistic (and passionately anti-Platonic) devotion of Comte and the ethical-culturists to " humanity." The United States of America, in the Civil War, declared itself a Platonic realist when it put down by force the attempt of individual states to deny the permanence of the whole nation. So far from these political abstractions being non-empirical, a pragmatic consideration shows that their efficacy upon men's conduct is too real for us to refuse them all the actuality that we ascribe to individuals. It follows that not only forces, powers, and institutions, but all scientific Hiilfsbegriffe, are quite real: real, that is, for aught that radical empiricism has to say. Chemical atoms, molecules, ions, electrons, the ether provided they are truly serviceable for description or explanation are as real as the things which they explain. Indeed, how could a compound be understood as made of such parts, unless the 262 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY parts were truly present ? The explanation is cut from under if its terms are not admitted to be actual. These auxiliary concepts, in which science abounds, are often likened to the scaffolding by which we build the edifice of knowledge. But the scaffolding is as real as the building; else it could not be employed. The electrons, in fact, are alleged to be visible at least, the explosions of them against the screen when they are given off by radium may be detected through the microscope. But the chemical atoms (provided, of course, chemistry and physics con- tinue to find them of use in accounting for the observed facts of multiple proportion, etc.) are bodies that would be seen if we could have vision fine enough. So, too, the other side of the moon would be seen if we could, per impossibile, get off in space beyond the moon. Nobody thinks that the present invisibility of that surface is a bar to its actuality; nobody calls it a mere conceptual device to round out the moon. Should the smallness of the atoms enjoin them from the privilege of being ? The attempt of the Energetiker philosophy to disqualify all entities that are not directly observed, is wholly misconceived, and if consistently carried out would lead to a positivism narrower than Comte ever thought of. And we may add that the " faculties " of the older psychology must also be admitted to good existential standing. It is quite correct to speak of a faculty of reason, of will, of memory, and so on. Of course, these faculties ex- plain no concrete acts of thought, or volition, or recall ; but their names denote real entities, common to many partic- ular cases of reasoning, or willing, or remembering. It is no more helpful to progress in psychology to deny such ab- stractions than it is to invoke them as explaining principles. It is simply a confusion of thought to conclude that because they do not account for the particular phenomena subsumed INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 263 under them, they have no existential status. We admit that they are not fertile for a genetic account; we have, for that matter, accused the whole intellectualist program of infer- tility. But that is no denial of its truth. Denial of its truth will inevitably lead to a revolt which in turn denies the truth of the particulars. For neither the universal nor the particular has been explained in terms of the other. And this revolt will therefore lead to an opposite revolt, and so on forever. These reflections on the reality of certain abstractions may justify to the intellect the attitude of the poet or the mystic. When the poet speaks of the spirit of the forest, the mood of Nature, the lament of the waves, etc., his fancy is not misled to error. Such entities are of value to his appre- ciation of nature ; they foster his life and the life of humanity in general. Pragmatically they should be judged real, there- fore. It is not that they explain, nor even that they furnish a more orderly scheme of description for the real world; it is rather that they are ways of reacting to our environment, which render our life deeper and richer. When we come to see, as it is hoped we shall shortly do, that pragmatism is cor- rect in dubbing as true the conception which best enables us to live in nature, we must admit that the insight of the poet, the artist, the devotee, may give us a direct knowledge of objective reality. The scientific attitude should not deny the poetic, condemning it as play of fancy; there need be no war between the views of either provided, of course, that the artistic concepts are not taken to be what they are not fitted for, viz., causal explanations or logical deductions. There may be other organs of truth than the intellect, even though there can be none which gives results contradicting the fundamental principles of reasoning. And this serves to validate our method of giving, in each of the philosophic 264 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY types, the emotional and practical motives as well as the intellectual ones. Poetic insight, when the artistic faculty pronounces it genuinely inspired, reveals objective truth. " I do not know " says Mr. Bradley " whether this in my case is a mark of senility, but I find myself now taking more and more as literal fact what I used in my youth to admire and love as poetry " (Essays, p. 468, footnote i). And radical empiricism should not hesitate to do the same. If we have reasoned correctly up to this point, radical empiricism is wrong in thinking that it can refute extreme Platonism. There is in the abstract universals nothing self- destructive. But the present type goes further. It has a positive aspect, wherein it claims that all the universals mean to us can be put in terms of the changing particulars. If this is true, and if there is nothing about the concept which cannot be satisfactorily expressed in these empirical terms, then the principle of Occam would seem to be in order, and the abstractions must be shaved off. Let us then examine the way in which empirical nominalism defines the universals. We must confess that here we are badly stumped; for there seems to be no extant passage in the empiricist writers where the problem is faced in detail. Very frequently they declare that the thing can be done. Express warnings are given that they do not intend to deny the actuality of the universal. " Lest I be charged," writes Professor Dewey " with intimating that concepts are unreal and unempirical, I say forthwith that I believe meanings may be and are im- mediately experienced as conceptual ' ' (Journal of Philosophy, vol. 2, p. 599, footnote). But unfortunately the difficulty is to see how, from observation of particular stones, or sticks, or other objects, one gets the sense of something general, of which there may be any number of instances. Idealists here INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 265 appeal to mind as the manufacturer of the concept; but they do not attempt to build it up by mere summation or comparison of instances. And empiricism, abjuring the transcendental maker, has not yet put any agent in its place. Must it content itself then with remarking that we simply find the universal persisting through the changes that we see the common elements of many cats, or dogs, or men directly and so observe the universal ? No doubt the remark is a true one. But it does not account for the feeling that there may be further cases; and this feeling touches the centre of the universal. Of course it will not do to say that we get this feeling by generalizing from our past experience : we saw three dogs one day, and the next day saw a fourth, whence we conclude that today we may see a fifth. The very power to generalize is what we wish explained. To generalize is to be aware of the universal. The property that there may be more is not itself an individual datum among the concrete cats and dogs. It is doubtless somehow a datum, but its meaning cannot be exhausted by any num- ber of instances. Radical empiricism is forever right in asserting that this property is a direct object of human experience ; for we do become aware of it, and awareness is experience. But its significance cannot be fully expressed by a series of particular cases in time. It is eternally for- ward-looking, suggestive of more to come than has yet come. We repeat that this very suggestiveness is itself something which we experience in the temporal flow of our daily life. But it means always something more than our present experience of it; it means that our present experience of it may come again. That meaning also is no doubt a present object of my experience; but immediately it goes beyond the present, suggesting another appearance of this same object to me. There is always something more about the 266 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY universal, in short, than the dynamic formula can grasp. Again and again the " more " may be reduced to a present experience; as often it slips the leash. The issue is exactly parallel to the other issues we have examined. Radical empiricism can define the universal in its own terms, as the felt object " further possible similars "; but intellectualism can always come back with the objection that it is more than that particular felt object in the particular context where it lay when it was felt. So realism always reiterated its chal- lenge to idealism, so idealism to realism, so radical empir- icism to Platonism, and so, finally, Platonism to radical empiricism. The upshot of the matter is that we have here two irreducible things, viz., universal and individual or change; and no monistic scheme is applicable. The at- tempt to put all in terms of one aspect must lead to an endless seesaw. All this battle of dynamic vs. static, individual vs. uni- versal, is very wearisome to one who seeks information about the make-up of the world. What advantage lies in knowing whether concepts are more or less real than changing partic- ulars, so long as we are not told what concepts are the fun- damental ones, or what particular things are the important ones ? With all its insistence upon the concrete, radical empiricism has provided little but another series of New Year's resolutions. What it needs is some specific affirma- tion about the nature of the concrete particulars. Are they for instance, all material, all doomed to vanish and leave not a wrack behind, or do they indicate certain principles which the still Platonic world does not hint of ? And it is as if radi- cal empiricism were sensible of this defect; for it has, at least with the majority of its adherents, crystallized into a more precise description of the nature of reality. Reality, they tell us, is not merely experiences, but in particular, INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 267 practical experiences. The fault of previous philosophy lay in this: it treated of issues whose solution had no conse- quences for human conduct. Reality is not an indifferent, inert thing, but is something which affects, and is affected by, the life of man. When " man " is emphasized, the doc- trine becomes humanism; otherwise it is, speaking generally, what is called pragmatism. It claims to be a more specific philosophy than any of the above, in that it abjures all abstract indifferent subject-matter and considers that alone to be real which is concerned with living, doing, working, and satisfying our vital needs. This view, the first of the two forms into which the opposition to Platonism divides, constitutes the second realistic type under Great Objectivism. The pragmatic current, being radically empirical, is not clear-cut at the edges. It contains this according to one critic, that according to another. Professor Dewey speaks of "that vital but still unformed movement variously termed radical empiricism, pragmatism, humanism, functionalism, according as one or another aspect of it is uppermost " (Jour- nal of Philosophy, vol. 2, p. 393). Professor James had to write an article entitled " The Pragmatic Account of Truth and its Misunderstanders "; elsewhere, too, he complained grievously of misinterpretations at the hands of pragma- tism's enemies (cf. Pragmatism, passim). Unjust interpreta- tion is all too frequent in philosophy, we know; yet there seems to have been a maximum of it in this controversy, if we may take the words of the defendant. Can we hope to escape the imputation of unfairness then ? And no doubt, also, the thing is too near us to be judged equitably. But our desire is at present not so much for accurate attribution of views as for the appreciation of certain characteristic and major tendencies of this broad stream. 268 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY The system is here treated as radical empiricism qualified by the selection of the practical aspect as that in terms of which all things are to be understood. The genus is radical empiricism, and the specific difference is the point of view of the needs of life. The following will, we hope, bear out our interpretation. (i) The doctrine is realistic in its metaphysics. Dewey writes " Speaking of the matter only for myself, the pre- suppositions and tendencies of pragmatism are distinctly realistic " (op. cit., above, p. 234). James, repudiating cer- tain theses laid at pragmatism's door, insisted upon this point in the article just mentioned, " Fourth misunderstand- ing: No pragmatist can be a realist in his epistemology. . . . It is difficult to excuse such a parody of the pragmatist 's opinion, ignoring as it does every element but one of his universe of discourse. The terms of which that universe consists positively forbid any non-realistic interpretation of the function of knowledge defined there. The pragmatizing epistemologist posits there a reality and a mind with ideas " (Meaning of Truth, pp. 190-191). And " To begin with, when the pragmatist says ' indispensable ' it (the misunder- standing) confounds this with ' sufficient.' The pragmatist calls satisfactions indispensable for truth-building, but I have everywhere called them insufficient unless reality be also incidentally led to. If the reality assumed were can- celled from the pragmatist's universe of discourse, he would straightway give the name of falsehoods to the beliefs re- maining, in spite of all their satisfactoriness. For him, as for his critics, there can be no truth if there is nothing to be true about " (op. cit., p. 195). It is in accord with such words that we have placed pragmatism among the objective types. Indeed, when we remember the dynamic theory of consciousness which it fathers, we cannot but classify it INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONI^M 269 under Great Objectivism. " To the thoroughgoing empiri- cist," writes Dewey, " the self, the ego, consciousness, needs, and utility, are all alike in terms of functions, contexts, or contents in and of the things experienced " (Journal of Philos- ophy, vol. 2, p. 656). Many critics, however, have selected other and contradictory statements, and from their implica- tions have called it a subjective type. Now perhaps they too are correct; perhaps pragmatism contains opposing ele- ments. Yet it seems that in such a case more weight should be assigned to the express avowals of the pragmatists than to the subtle and perhaps unmeant implication of their phrases. Should any one quarrel with our interpretation, it is no great matter; we are interested now in certain ideas which do not depend directly upon the subjective-objective issue. (2) Though realistic as regards objects before they are known, however, pragmatism seems to be more like subjective idealism as regards objects when they become known. " The pragmatist agrees with the realist: (i) that the ' world ' or ' experience ' (the term does not matter here) does not consist of ' a system of ideas ' ; (2) that ideas do not aim or ' desire ' to absorb, or be absorbed by, the rest of the ' world ' (or ' experience ') ; (3) that at any given time some of the world (or experience) may be ' independ- ent ' of knowledge in the sense that it is not then ' being known/ that is, it is not in the knowledge mode or stage of action. But at the next step, where the ' unknown ' part of the world (or experience) passes into knowledge, the prag- matist and realist part company. For the realist this pas- sage occurs with no ' essential ' alteration in the material which enters into knowledge; while the pragmatist believes knowing to be a part of the process in which the world of 2/0 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY ' things ' or ' events ' or ' experience ' brings forth new 1 things ' or ' events ' or ' experiences.' " Between pragmatism and idealism there would be a vital point of agreement in the conception of the ' active,' ' con- stitutive ' character of thinking if it did not turn out that for most idealists this character does not belong to ' our ' thinking, but only to the absolute thought." (A. W. Moore, Pragmatism and its Critics, pp. 108-109.) Our minds, then, are conceived by the pragmatist to be essentially active: they are not blank tablets which lie still under the imprints of reality, but they react immediately, even in apprehending; they affect reality. Knowing is a way of acting. Here the qualification of their empirical realism by the practical point of view appears. (3) It is not a static, but a dynamic view, treating reality as a process yet unfinished, growing; it is in line with the view of Heraclitus. " The alternative between pragmatism and rationalism, in the shape in which we now have it before us, is no longer a question in the theory of knowledge, it concerns the structure of the universe itself. " On the pragmatist side, we have only one edition of the universe, unfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in the places where thinking beings are at work." (James, Pragmatism, pp. 258-259.) " Here (in pragmatism) all is process; that world (rationalism's) is timeless. Possibili- ties obtain in our world; in the absolute world, where all that is not is from eternity impossible, and all that is is neces- sary, the category of possibility has no application." (Prag- matism, p. 266.) In its dynamic or functional aspect, then, pragmatism belongs under the genus radical empiricism. (4) It contains a principle which may be applied to the solution of philosophy's perennial issues. By employing that solvent, we can distinguish real and important issues INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 271 from verbal ones. And further: the solvent itself has implications as to the character of reality. Every issue is a real one, whose decision would have con- crete consequences for human life; and that side is correct whose acceptance by us would in the long run enable us to live our lives more successfully. Materialism-spirit- ualism is a real issue, because if materialism is right, there seems no hope of a life after bodily death, and religion would be radically altered. Subjectivism-objectivism, by the results of Chapters IV and V, is no real issue, because the settlement would make no difference beyond itself. If all the world is proved subjective, no information is gained, no specific addition to our stock of scientific truth, or our maxims of conduct. And the same is true if realism tri- umphs over its foe. (The pragmatists themselves have not used this illustration; had they done so, much of their own controversial matter would not have been written.) This appears at first to be solely a method. But men do not cook up methods in abstracto. A method is but a fruitful way of approaching reality, fruitful because reality has cer- tain traits which that method is adapted to reveal. The pragmatist believes reality to be a web of details wherein each thread and knot is tied up with the others. Hence the true description of each will show how its presence makes a difference to those others. A description which lays bare no such influence does not touch the essence of the object. As the lady in Dombey and Son says we are put into the world " to make an effort " so for the pragmatist things are here only " to make a difference." Things are their consequences. " To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. 272 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY Our conception of these effects, whether immediate or re- mote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive significance at all." (Pragmatism, pp. 46-47.) Its method is " looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts " (ibid., p. 55). The resemblance of this to subjectivism's major premise (above, Chapter III), viz., the principle of internal relations, is evident: it differs from the subjectivist premise in being more specific. It is not that a thing is all its relations to other things, but only those relations which display its efficacy, its influence in working changes, determining posi- tive and specific characters of other things; in particular, of human experiences. An apple or pear is not, in any meta- physically valuable sense, that which is related to a stone by bare otherness, but that which, eaten by me, produces cer- tain digestive processes, change of tissue, in my body, etc. The Absolute of the Hegelians is not for pragmatism the implied whole, real in itself, so much as the entity which gives me the feeling of security in the midst of daily struggle. And so on. Things are their effects upon our action as well as partly the products of our action and thought. Here is perhaps the primary specific difference of pragmatism from radical empiricism. (5) As a doctrine of truth and error. It follows from the above that the true idea is the idea which enables us to adjust ourselves successfully to the real environment; the erroneous one is the one that does not do so. This doctrine is in line with the biological doctrine of natural selection. Man's mind is an object in a temporal world, and its con- tents must be treated accordingly. They are functions of living organisms and subject to the laws of those organisms. Ideas, as we saw earlier in this chapter, are tentative re- sponses; they are confirmed or rejected by trial. It is a INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 273 case of hypothesis and verification. The categories which today seem so a priori to us space, time, causality, num- ber, and so on, are but happy ways of coordinating objects, which long ago chanced to arise in some ancestor's mind, and by their helpfulness enabled him to survive, were in- herited through the ages, and now seem " necessary and universally valid." This view of the origin of our chief categories, stated in Pragmatism, chapter VI, was first sketched in the last chapter of James' Psychology, vol. 2, on " Necessary Truths Effects of Experience." Points (4) and (5) are, we think, the most significant part of the pragmatic position. They announce its attitude as the experimental one; the method of trial and error. Not blind acceptance, or a priori deduction, but testing by results, is the criterion of truth. (6) As a doctrine of social cooperation. In reply to a criticism by Royce, Dewey has insisted on the social char- acter of truth (Philosophical Review, vol. 2 1 , pp. 69-8 1 ) . Not what you find it satisfactory to assume, in your reaction to the environment; what you find it satisfactory to assume in consistency and agreement with other men ; that alone is the truth. Truth is a social result. This is the case in the lab- oratory, where the various experimenters must confirm one another's results, and in daily life, where we must verify one another's statements, and the lessons taught by the expe- rience of our predecessors. No transcendental " Absolute " is needed, to give fixity to an otherwise fluctuating mass of opinion. The verdict of society corrects the errors of the private judgment. Here pragmatism draws near to ideal- ism's doctrine of the veridical Great Self (as we called it in Chapter VI) both being democratic views. But of course it conceives that Self in terms of particular action and reaction between environment and man. 274 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY We must be careful in interpreting the words " practical " and " consequences." Mistakes have undoubtedly been made here by critics; they have insisted upon taking them in a more narrowly utilitarian sense than the leaders of the movement would countenance. We read that pragmatism "agrees with nominalism, for instance, in always appealing to particulars ; with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects; with positivism in its disdain for . . . metaphysi- cal abstractions." (Pragmatism, pp. 53-54.) Now the views referred to have, as a matter of historical fact, been one-sided, condemning positions which pragmatism would not condemn. Pragmatism is broader than they, as any sympathetic reader can see. And a hostile reader will fix upon these phrases, take them in abstracto, and as a result accuse this type of having no care for righteousness, truth, or science. But consider the following: " And we hold all this (pragmatic view) without believing that we are in the least invading the tradition of wissen- schaftliche Freiheit, or that we are substituting ' a philistine opportunism ' for ' the scientific spirit. ' We insist that this doctrine does not call upon the scientist to turn out every week a new flying machine or a new breakfast food. It has nothing but approval for the investigator who shuts himself up with his 'biophors,' his 'ions' and 'electrons,' provided only he finally emerge with some connection established between these 'idols of the den ' and the problems of life and death, of growth and decay, and of social interaction. " Furthermore, it asserts that if we follow the scientist into his laboratory we shall find that this connection is not something outside but a part of the method of science itself; that 'biophors,' 'ions,' etc., have no scientific meaning or value, no scientific truth, except in their relation to an actual efficient control of these experiences. This doctrine recog- INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 275 nizes that science should indeed be free from the pressure of immediate response to current wants and problems, but only in the belief that its response may be larger and more ef- fective. It freely concedes the ' impersonal ' character of the scientist's work. But again, it is with the understanding that this is only an immediate impersonalism, for the sake of a larger personalism in the end. Like the impersonalism of the just judge, it takes the impersonal standpoint in order the better to serve all persons." (Moore, Pragmatism, pp. 10-1 1 .) With this defence of the theoretical interest we may associate Dewey's description of it as " a practice that is genuinely free, social, and intelligent." (Journal of Phi- losophy, vol. 9, p. 648.) And finally, hear what James says: " Seventh misunderstanding: Pragmatism ignores the theo- retic interest. . . . When we spoke of the meaning of ideas consisting in their ' working ' value, etc., our language evidently was too careless, for by ' practical ' we were held to mean opposed to theoretical or genuinely cognitive, and the conclusion was punctually drawn that a truth in our eyes could have no relation to any independent reality, or to any truth, or to anything whatever but the acts which we might ground on it or the satisfactions they might bring. . . . Having used the phrase ' cash-value ' of an idea, I am im- plored by one correspondent to alter it, ' for every one thinks you mean only pecuniary profit and loss.' Having said that the true is ' the expedient in our thinking ' I am rebuked in this wise by another learned correspondent. ' The word expedient has no other meaning than that of self-interest. The pursuit of this has ended by landing a number of officers of national banks in penitentiaries. A philosophy that leads to such results must be unsound.' " But the word * practical ' is so habitually loosely used that more indulgence might have been expected. When one 276 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY says that a sick man has now practically recovered, or that an enterprise has practically failed, one usually means just the opposite of ' practically ' in the literal sense. One means that, although untrue in strict practice, what one says is true in theory, true virtually, certain to be true. Again, by the practical one often means the distinctively concrete, the individual, particular, and effective, as op- posed to the abstract, general, and inert. To speak for my- self, whenever I have emphasized the practical nature of truth, this is mainly what has been in my mind. ' Prag- mata ' are things in their plurality; ... in that early California address, when I described pragmatism ... I expressly added the qualifying words: ' the point lying rather in the fact that the experience must be particular than in the fact that it must be active/ by ' active ' meaning here ' practical ' in the narrow literal sense. But particular consequences can perfectly well be of a theoretical nature. ... It is therefore simply idiotic to repeat that pragmatism takes no account of purely theoretical interests. All it insists on is that verity in act means verifications, and that these are always particulars." (Meaning of Truth, pp. 206-212, passim.) And this author gives in another place some account of the origin of the pure theoretic in- terest. " It is obvious that although interests strictly prac- tical have been the original starting point of our search for true phenomenal descriptions, yet an intrinsic interest in the bare describing function has grown up. We wish accounts that shall be true, whether they bring collateral profit or not. The primitive function has developed its demand for more exercise. This theoretic curiosity seems to be the characteristically human differentia, and humanism recog- nizes its enormous scope " (ibid., p. 86). INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 277 We find no other doctrine under pragmatism which seems to deserve mention here, unless it be the position defended by James in the title-essay of The Will to Believe, and Other Essays. In that paper, the author asserts our right, in case of equally probable alternatives upon which decisive evi- dence is not available, to choose the one which best har- monizes with the needs of human nature as a whole. If James' qualifications are not omitted the view is justifiable enough. It is pretty generally adopted in practice, quite apart from any pragmatic theories. It simply tells us that in case of doubt we have a right to adopt as a working hy- pothesis to which pro tern, we assent, the one we like better. Such choice is preferable to the eternal suspense of judg- ment which would lead to inaction; is indeed the only means of getting fresh evidence. It is simply and solely the method of trial and error. Yet this view easily lends itself to caricature. By dropping out the clause " equally prob- able alternatives for which decisive evidence is not avail- able " we reach the interpretation, that it is right to accept any view which best harmonizes with our desires. Such a rendering of pragmatism has been made by Mr. B. Russell among others ; but it seems to be so clear a case of exaggera- tion with a view to condemnation as to merit no serious consideration. How long shall it be the custom of thinkers to abstract out from its qualifications a given statement of the opponent and therewith to damn his view ? It is possible, however, that these critics are thinking of Kant's practical postulates; according to which we have a right to posit the otherwise indemonstrable existence of God in order that we may lead moral lives. So far as we remem- ber, however, James, or any other pragmatist, has nowhere acknowledged that Kantian doctrine; and the opponents of pragmatism have not mentioned it. In any event it forms 278 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY a different type of theory which we shall later consider (in Chapter X) : therefore we now dismiss it. We do not then ascribe to pragmatism the view that our wish or will to have reality this or that makes it so, except in case of material changes worked by our muscles. In the above survey we have found pragmatism to contain (i) a realistic element, (2) a dynamic element, i. e., ac- ceptance of process as relatively fundamental, (3) the definition of things by their particular consequences to other things and par excellence to the satisfaction of our needs, (4) the definition of truth and error as those tentative reactions by organisms which will or will not adjust them to the environment, (5) insistence upon social cooperation, in the determination of truth and error. Now we have already estimated the first under the type " Realism." One aspect of the second we considered in connection with the type " Intellectualism," where we urged that the transeunt element contains a surd which eludes adequate description in terms of concepts. The counter- claim of the pragmatist, that the static universal has no metaphysical rights, we noticed under the discussion of radi- cal empiricism. We there saw that as individuals cannot serve to define universals, so the transeunt cannot generate the notion of the permanent. Now we have the latter no- tion: we use it in our sciences (i. e., in the shape of the " logical constants ") and on pragmatic grounds it should be ascribed to reality as much as any other which leads to fruitful consequences. The particulars lose all significance, practical or theoretical, unless the fixed universals be also accepted. And equally the changing loses all significance unless certain permanent characters of the universe and so far as we can see, forever permanent such as certain properties of space, of time, and of number, are admitted. INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 279 If James " as a good pragmatist " accepts the unalterable Absolute for the help it gives to life, so ought all pragmatists to accept as objectively true the rigid laws of number and quantity which enable us to count vibrations, predict veloci- ties, estimate the strength of bridges, and otherwise adapt ourselves to our environment. Change may be ultimately real, but rigidity accompanies it; and each becomes mean- ingless alone. Pragmatism is irrefutable, but it does not refute its alleged adversary, the " static " type; it rather confirms it. The next aspect of pragmatism, in which it demies things by their relations and par excellence by their consequences to our living, depends on a principle which we have called the principle of internal relations. This we discussed under sub- jectivism (Chapter III), finding no reason to deny it. The turn which the pragmatist gives it is as just as any other turn; for the principle works in all directions. A hat may with propriety be defined as that which I put on my head; a tiger as a beast I should run from; water as that which I can with suitable apparatus decompose into 2H+ O, or use to revive a wilting flower, or drink. Yet there are cases where the object must be defined as that to which we react merely by attending or contemplation. These are limiting cases, where the consequences to life are so utterly remote that they are not discernible, or if one wishes to go to the other extreme they are so very immediate that they can hardly be called consequences. They are by no means rare; in fact, they are found in almost every moment of waking life. They are present as another aspect of the matter than the consequential or practical aspect, present along with it continually. When for instance I take up my pen to write, I treat " pen " as meaning " that with which I write "; yet also I see and apprehend it as a black object, and the black- 280 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY ness is entirely irrelevant to the uses of my behaviour. So far as we can learn, it has not at this moment any practical bearings. It would have, did I take particular interest in the colour, or feel a desire to change the colour; but actually, while I feel no noticeable interest or desire, I nevertheless am aware of the blackness as a still objective fact. Such aware- ness is quite contemplative, for however short a time; and it is states like this which constitute what is known as the theoretic attitude. There is an attitude which would know for the sake of the knowing: it is practical, of course, in the sense that it seeks to satisfy an instinctive human need, but that need is not only felt as indifferent to the maintenance of life, sometimes it even works against it. This self-con- tained state of beholding, pragmatism does certainly tend to neglect. " Organic functions " writes Professor Dewey " deal with things as things in course, in operation, in a state of affairs not yet given or completed. What is done with, what is just ' there,' is of concern only in the poten- tialities which it may indicate. As ended, as wholly given, it is of no account." (Creative Intelligence, p. 20.) (We have italicized the words which seem to us to exclude pure cogni- tion.) Now we assert that such an independent need is to the other needs, the " practical " ones, however broadly conceived, much as the abstract universal is to the concrete particulars, or the external world to subjectivism; in short, it is a surd, a critical point at which the pragmatic formula becomes a formality. That formula can embrace it, to be sure; the principle of pragmatism is never false. But it / cannot in any way help us to understand this phenomenon, so curious from the practical point of view. How from the fact that we seek knowledge in order to get on better with our environment, could one ever suspect that we should come to seek it pure ? Or how by examining the objects of INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 281 theoretic curiosity in the light of the fact that they satisfy an instinctive need, can we ascertain anything about the make-up of those objects which would not come to ordinary observation ? Consider my seeing of black as the satisfac- tion of the instinct of curiosity. Is that a fertile way of looking at the matter ? Does it suggest in any measure the nature of what I shall see ? In the case of practical knowl- edge, the stimulus-response formula is indeed suggestive: for it enables us to bring knowledge, even consciousness, into the category of organic activities, and abolishes the mys- terious dualism of intellect and will. But the dualism breaks out when we come to those thousand and one instances of negligent awareness which accompany our attempts to adjust ourselves to the environment. The object black is not significantly defined when it is considered a stage in an organic process. Professor Moore in a passage already quoted has likened the disinterested curiosity of contemplation to the imper- sonality of the judge; both being designed to secure greater benefit to human life in the end. No doubt both do secure it; but the theoretic attitude is not conceived in that spirit. It sometimes does not work for practical benefits at all. Naturally, it does not refuse them; but it is in itself indif- ferent to them; it is self-sufficient, like the universals upon which it sometimes fixes its gaze. Such self-containedness and independence of the other needs of life can hardly be ac- counted for by our saying that its utility is a very remote one. As no addition of distances can make up infinity, so no putting off of the practical benefits to a remoter and remoter period can reach the limit of pure decopia. The limit is be- yond the series. It is, once more, from the point of view of the series, a " foreign other," a surd which must be recog- nized but cannot be explained in terms of the members of 282 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY that series. It can even, if you insist, be denned by reference to the series i. e., as its limit; but such definition is barren, since it does not guarantee the actual existence of that limit. Here then we seem to find the critical point of pragmatism, in the independent theoretic need and in the character of the reality which satisfies that need. The pragmatic rule can neither account for the presence of such an instinct, nor give any information as to the specific content of the real world of objects and events. In our waking moments, disinterested contemplation and interested practice accompany each other at every turn. If you like, each implies the other. But neither is more fun- damental than the other, for neither can be adequately reduced to an instance of the other. If pragmatism were true then by its own criterion it should be a profitable doctrine; it should aid us in under- standing the nature of reality. We have granted that it is true, though we have accused it of throwing no light, at least directly, upon the general scheme and plan of the universe. How can we reconcile these statements ? Thus: pragma- tism is of great intellectual profit, but in a negative sense. It has dissolved many of those old knots which philosophers have been unable to untie. If we accept its principle that "there is no difference which doesn't make a difference," the ancient quarrels about subjectivism, Platonism, ideal- ism, etc., disappear. For, as we have tried to show, those issues have no bearing upon the details of science or life; they make no difference to any view but their own, they furnish no specific information. Our whole treatment thus far has itself been pragmatic ( if we understand the term rightly) ; and we might have been expected to concede the truth of pragmatism itself. Not that, so far as we know, any pragmatist has applied his method to these time-honoured INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 283 controversies. On the contrary, present-day devotees of the doctrine have confined themselves almost wholly to extolling their method ; they have scarcely employed it upon a single problem connected with reality. But we believe that it could easily be done, and have endeavoured to some extent to do it. And thereby we claim to have shown that the prag- matic solvent justifies itself by dissipating certain issues and releasing a large store of human energy, formerly penned up in those fields, for more profitable inquiries. But it does not seem to show itself fertile to account for the specific con- tours of reality, or of the human mind on its contemplative side. The two remaining theses are the definition of truth and error and the doctrine of social cooperation. No new critical points can be discovered, it seems, from an investigation of them. The former has been perhaps sufficiently discussed under the dynamic definition of consciousness, and the latter in what we said in Chapter VII about the veridical Great Self of idealism. So much for the individual theses of pragmatism. But if we said no more, we should be unfair to it ; for beneath the surface runs an undercurrent, in which they swim, and which undoubtedly sets in a forward direction. We have not as yet singled this out; for it is pervasive rather than explicit in the pragmatic writings. We refer to the fact that pragmatism upholds a method of investigation which is in- valuable to man, yes, indispensable; viz., the experimental or trial-and-error method. The pragmatist does not believe, for example, that we could be satisfied with an a priori proof of God, however infallible. God's existence could not really mean God's existence, unless in the details of life we found by actual trial, that we could somehow draw upon Him with profit. Profit, of course, not necessarily material or sensual, 284 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY nevertheless/^// as profit ; whether as enlargement of mental horizon, or increase of energy in social work, or as immediate joy and peace. This experimental mode of truth is con- ceived by pragmatism to be of universal application. In the sphere of government, for instance: it is of no use to deduce beforehand the nature of the ideal state; one must test one institution after another, learning by failures, find- ing at last the kind best adapted to the particular nation. Equal opportunity for all forms, as for all men, is its social- istic watchword. It finds in the democratic common- wealths of the Anglo-Saxon peoples such a possibility for experiment; in contrast with the rigid monarchical system of Germany, where social experiments are not permitted. (See Dewey, German Philosophy and Politics, pp. 125-126.) Readers of Professor Dewey's book, German Philosophy and Politics, which is nothing but pragmatism applied to the science of government, will perhaps learn more of the work- ing spirit of this type than students who confine their atten- tion to the philosophical treatises from which we have quoted. Of course this method is not new, as indeed the pragmatists recognize. But it needs to be emphasized ; for it is indisputably sound. Just as in science an hypothesis is not true unless it explains the particular details of fact, so in religion a creed is not worthy of acceptance unless it makes men's daily lives better, and in politics a platform is not justified unless it is tried and found to lead toward ultimate prosperity. Too long have the philosophers over- looked this truth, with their controversies over universals, idealism, realism, determinism, and all the long list of issues whose decision admits of no experimental test. It is, we think, the one great contribution of pragmatism, to insist upon such verification; and it would seem petty and mean to overlook its value and to confine ourselves only to the INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 285 somewhat one-sided metaphysics which accompanies the gift. We do not say, as perhaps some pragmatists would, that experiment can reveal nothing absolute and eternal, which would never need retesting; but we do say that veri- fication of a principle by its concrete effects in the particulars is a sine qua non of any proper philosophy. And herein pragmatism offers a just criticism of many systems which have gone before. Meanwhile, we must once more regret that pragmatists have contented themselves with urging their method, rather than going on to use it for the solution of such specific ques- tions as we have named above. The formality and barren- ness which have afflicted the other types, have not failed to infect the present occasion also. What social institutions will experiment justify ? What metaphysical truths will the pragmatic inquiry give us ? What religious truth ? We are not told. So long as these questions remain unanswered, so long will the pragmatic defence of the experimental method be controverted by the static types, and the internecine strife of metaphysics be perpetuated. For, besides the method of concrete testing, there is another one, viz., the / thinking out of things beforehand. There are many plans which a little common reflection is able to approve or con- demn without the trouble of testing. In contrast with the empirical method, is the method of reason. The whole func- tion of reason is to provide short-cuts, to obviate the toil and trouble of experience, to anticipate the results of experi- ment. Now, is it right to discount this faculty wholly ? Of course the pragmatist is too intelligent to do so; but there can be little doubt that he neglects the a priori side. If an ontological proof of God were some day worked out, should it not have weight merely of itself ? We acknowledge that it should also be tested, to see if it meets the demands of 286 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY daily life; but if reason is not allowed to perform its own functions, more or less in abstracto, experiments cannot well be conducted. Doubtless the pragmatist would admit this; but he does not perhaps emphasize it enough. In particular, in the fields of politics and social reform, it would seem that some check is needed against a too great freedom of experi- ment. Though we want to learn by experience, some expe- riences cost too dear. And the danger in pragmatism is that by over-emphasizing an undoubtedly sound method we undervalue, if not entirely neglect, an equally sound yet contrasting method. The eternal tendency toward needless exclusion is as active here as it is everywhere else. Perhaps, however, the failure of pragmatism to provide specific truth about the universe is due to its too great con- cern with the human side, the epistemological problem, and other gateways to knowledge. How could it furnish a map of the world when it is occupied with the construction of compasses, pencils, and other instruments ? Should we not do better to adopt a method which is so simple as to involve no technical apparatus, no laborious defence before it can be admitted, much less employed ? Let us then once more essay a reform of philosophy, by discarding the intricacies of exact logic and of biological theory, and adopting a method that is no method, because it goes straight to the heart of reality itself. Such reflections as this lead to the next piece on our program, the philosophy of intuition. Feeling, insight, the mystical rather than the rational or practical attitudes, make up the platform from which the philosopher is now to view the world. We pass then to the third of the great modern types of realism; the system of immediacy. INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 287 INTUITIONISM AND MYSTICISM The way which philosophy enters when it adopts the method of immediate insight, seems to be as transparent as light and as simple as a straight line. But there are no straight lines in nature; and it is as impossible for man as for nature to pursue a goal undeviatingly. The mysticism of human thinkers has been of many sorts, according to the idiosyncracy and the environment of the thinker. And be- cause the method is a very old one, variations are the more numerous. It has been employed by the Vedanta, by Bud- dhism, by the Pythagoreans, at times by Plato, fundamen- tally by Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists, by the mediaeval mystics, by Jakob Boehme, Schopenhauer, Swedenborg, Schleiermacher, and in our own day by Bergson to men- tion only a few. To cover the vast area of these systems is, of course, beyond our powers. Yet we find in all alike a condemnation of reason and apotheosis of intuition. And there is a special reason why we may neglect the great mass of doctrinal result and confine our attention to this common method. We are asking after the causes of the never- ceasing disagreement in philosophy ; and the controversies of other philosophers with the mystics have not been con- cerned with their results, but with their method. A ration- alist, a pragmatist, a materialist, does not discuss Boehme's vision in the Aurora, or Swedenborg's Arcana Coelestia; he limits himself to refuting the claims of the intuitive method. Professional philosophers have, for the most part, ceased to show interest in the structure of the universe itself; they have seemed to believe that their powers were circum- scribed by the task of finding out how to find out that struc- ture. And in the case of M. Bergson, criticism has directed itself little to his specific description of the real world, and 288 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY much to his defence of intuition. The controversy over method is the real bone of contention. Let us, then, try only to understand and estimate the claims of immediate insight as a method. Describing it first in general, we may note that it makes a fairly broad appeal. It is not confined, as so many ra- tionalists would have us believe, to the realm of feeling or emotion. Certain mystics have laid stress upon feeling as the guide to the ultimate verities; to wit, Plotinus and Schleiermacher. No doubt, if all the mystics could vote upon the matter, some emotional experience or other would win by a large majority. But Schopenhauer interpreted insight as a phenomenon of the will, and Bergson's descrip- tion, though giving it an affective nature, yet adds certain qualities which are not usually associated with feeling. Hear him: " by intuition I mean instinct that has become dis- interested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely." (Creative Evolution, Eng. tr., Mitchell, p. 176.) He also speaks of the continuity between two kinds of intuition sensuous and supra- intellectual, adding " if there are thus two intuitions of different order . . . there is no essential difference between the intellect and this intuition itself" (op. cit., p. 360). Again he refers to intuition as " a vague nebulosity, made of the very substance out of which has been formed the lumi- nous nucleus that we call the intellect " (p. xii); and once more " pure intellect is a contraction, by condensation, of a more extended power" [intuition] (p. 46); but we must remember that " This nucleus does not differ radically from the fluid surrounding it " (p. 193). And Bergson, like Kant, has spoken of sensuous intuition. In fact, sensation pro- vides a direct insight into the real world, and is thus a true form of intuition. But the intellect too has its intuitive INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 289 powers: for instance, it sees, without the necessity of a demonstration, the truth of certain axioms. If A implies B, and B implies C, then A implies C; if A is the same as 5, what is true of A is true of B; and so on. Such principles, which it is the task of logic to bring to light rather than to prove, derive their authority from the mere vision. Des- cartes knew this; when he said " all that is very clearly and distinctly apprehended is true" (Medit. 3, tr. Veitch, p. 1 1 6), he stated the basis of intuitionism. The founder of French philosophy, indeed, opened the path which his latest successor has trod. The well-known clarity of the Gallic, over against the form-loving Teutonic and the prag- matic Anglo-Saxon mind, is but the sign of this same in- tuitive spirit; a spirit we might expect to find in a people with so exquisite an artistic sense as the French. In fine, intuition is of the widest possible application. When it obtains a view of the Whole, or of the highest values, we call it mysticism; when it is directed toward material objects, sensation; when toward the analysis of some specific field, insight or genius. It means being immediately aware, so immediately that there is no room for error. It applies so widely just because it is utterly simple. It is the natural light that lights everything that comes clearly before the mind. " Comes clearly " we say; for what is not clearly seen is so far not seen, as darkness is absence of light. In- tuitionism 's principle is no thing more than the maxim " see- ing is believing." And as a matter of fact, the pragmatist, the intellectualist, the realist, the idealist, and every other type of thinker does homage in his own way to the dictum. Each has his major premise, which he accepts because it seems to him so clear and evident. We found the sub- jectivist's major premise to be the principle of internal relations; the Platonist built upon that of external rela- 290 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY tions; the idealist upon the primacy of personality; the pragmatist upon the biological " situation " - there is no one who does not take his TTOU orw by intuition. The coldest rationalist, and the most fervent mystic communing with God, alike believe what they see. It is true that these schools seem to see very different sorts of reality; yes, in the opinion of each, conflicting sorts. The one cannot admit the truth of the other's vision; ra- tionalist quarrels with pragmatist, realist with idealist, and so forth. And since X's results contradict Y's, and Y's major premise cannot be demonstrated, X denies that premise and ascribes Y's view to temperament. He forgets that his own premise is equally unprovable, and wonders that Y accords the same treatment in turn to him. What they do not understand is that temperament is but a name for a natural ability to see one major premise so much more clearly than the rest, as to endow it with exclusive authority. Yet, as we have been discovering in every controversy, the exclusion looks gratuitous; the premises do not disprove one another. Temperament, if stripped of its animosities, is a valid source of knowledge, and the intuitive method is hereby justified. Or at any rate the objection is removed which says that on the whole it gives contradictory results. But we must confess that few mystics, and least of all the famous intuitionist, M. Bergson, have conceived their one instrument of knowledge so broadly. As a rule they have drawn a line around it, separated it off from the methods of reason, of empirical science, or of practical common sense, to the disparagement of these. They have urged a disuse of reason, science, and practical motives, or a use of them only up to a certain point. In fact, intuitionism and mys- ticism are partisan views; and with this statement there appears before us the duty of a more detailed description. INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 291 To begin with, they are realistic: a point we must insist upon, since their spiritualism has led many to call them idealistic. Intuition is directed upon reality. It is not crea- tive, as idealism and pragmatism deem cognition creative; it is recipient. Bergson likens it to " the artist . . . placing himself back within the object by a kind of sympathy " (op. cit., p. 177). To be sure, the mystic, seeking to commune with God, turns the gaze inward, away from the material things, but this is no directing of attention upon his own processes. " To ascend to God " says Hugo of Saint Victor " is to enter into ourselves, and not only so, but in our in- most selves to transcend ourselves." (Quoted from Hocking, Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. 379, footnote.) This transcending, now, is the essence of the matter. No doubt, too, the God of the Christian, or the Life of the Berg- sonian, are identical with our deeper self, Atman; but this is not, so to speak, our peculiar individuality: the One is greater than the particular subject. And the immediacy of the vision of Deity does not mean that He is our own feeling, but that He is seen without intermediaries. God is not re- duced to me, but I am raised up to Him. We do not deny, of course, that some mystics have been sub jectivists ; but many certainly have not, and on the whole idealism is hostile to the objective attitude of the devotee. While he is, as Royce well says, a consistent empiricist perhaps even the only one he is so in the realistic sense of radical empir- icism : he believes that ultimate reality can be directly wit- nessed. His realism is not that of our second type the dualistic sort: God is no inference, beyond observation, transcending our experience; rather our consciousness is swallowed up in Him. In fact, this total immersion of the private self in God or the elan vital brings the type into line with Great Objectivism. But it is not, like the two previous 292 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY forms, anxious to define consciousness by means of the Great Object ; for its interest is contemplative and practical rather than scientific. Yet occasionally we hear the mystic speak of consciousness as the split-off section of the One; Bergson writes of the great current of life being shattered into bits which are our individual selves. (Creative Evolution, pp. 26, 269, et al.) The intuitional creed is not materialistic that is ob- vious. Nor is it, like the system of Holt, neutral; it is un- equivocally spiritualistic. Reality is an assemblage of spiritual beings; matter is to be explained away an illu- sion, a negation, a foil to the spirit, frozen mind, a secretion of sin or the source of it, and so on. If these spiritual beings are at bottom one, as the mystic in ecstasy realizes, then they are numerically and substantially one. The supreme unity is no network of logical implications. The whole atti- tude is diametrically opposed to the formality which has so pervaded the types already discussed. It does not seek to prove that the world is mental, or independent object, or throughout determined, irrespective of its particular make-up; it would show that reality offers the gifts of the spirit, that it is in a practical, concrete way spiritual, con- ferring on us peace, joy, and strength. Historically, the mystic's revelations abound in statements about the con- stitution of the universe. God is person, one and three, the kingdom of Heaven is ordered thus and thus, the plan of salvation is so and so, in this manner did the world originate from God, by such and such discipline may we return to God. So far from being speechless or negative, as Royce (World and Individual, vol. I, chapters 2 and 4, especially pp. 180, 181, 195) and others put it, the system is richer than all the rest in specific information. If it reduces all the world to the unity of one spirit, that is not a blank monotony of INTELLECTUALS, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 293 being, but an identity running through, supported by and supporting, all the distinct individuals. The Parmenidean " Being is, and not-Being is not " gives no idea of the wealth of content in the mystic datum. " True Vedanta does not make one sink to the level of the beast or the stone, but see one mighty unity in all nature and work more efficiently in the world for the very light it throws on the problems of life." (Homo Leone, The Vedantic Absolute, Mind, 1912, p. 63.) The oneness upon which mystics love to dwell is not exclusive but inclusive; not a zero-point but a substance displaying the same attributes (love, productivity, order, etc.) in infinitely diverse situations. The vision of it is simple and unmediated ; the content which is seen need not be simple or without form. (Cf. on this matter Hocking's similar view; in Mind, 1912, p. 42.) And Royce himself says " It has determined, directly or indirectly, more than half of the technical theology of the Church." (World and Individual, vol. I, p. 85.) Of modern philosophies, none is so replete with evidence drawn from specific facts and experi- mental results as that of M. Bergson. His message is inter- esting; being also brilliantly expounded, it commands even a degree of publicity. As James used to say, other types are "thin"; the intuitionist's is "thick." It is beside the point for these others to declare that the mystic deliverances are mostly false, for they pay no serious attention to the evidence; true to their unconcern with reality, they limit themselves to the method. They would not credit the traveller's tale of the far country, since they have proved travelling impossible. But at any rate, mysticism's tale is positive and specific; and it would seem a decided recom- mendation of its procedure, that it is able so far to excel the meagre information afforded by the other types. 294 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY Objective-minded, even near to the confines of Great Objectivism, empirical, spiritualistic, full of concrete in- formation: such is the character of mystical systems. But of course there are differences, even in method; and we shall now bring out what seems to us the greatest, in fact, the one important difference. The Bergsonian system is dis- tinguished from the general run of mysticisms by its pre- occupation with time, and by certain corollaries consequent thereupon. Most of the mystics reveal the Eternal; to the French philosopher of our fast-moving age, the eternal, the resting all quietistic tendencies indeed are miscon- ceptions. For this reason we shall divide our discussion, first characterizing the Bergsonian doctrine, then passing to the larger group. For Professor Bergson, time or change is above all things intuition-stuff. It is the very opposite of the intellectual objects, the universals, the logical constants, etc. ; it is non- conceptual, fluid, dynamic. As Heraclitus conceived the soul to be made out of that quintessence of the changing fire, so for Bergson life and consciousness are made of time. Mental states contain no repetition; they are ever new. He described his view, in fact, as " a philosophy which sees in duration the very stuff of reality." (Creative Evolution, tr. Mitchell, p. 272.) " Change," he declares, " is far more radical than we are at first inclined to suppose " (op. cit., p. i). " There is no feeling, no idea, no volition which is not undergoing change every moment." " My mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration which it accumulates ... as a snowball on the snow " (p. 2). Even if five minutes from now I have the same thought as at this moment, it cannot be exactly the same, for it has recurred. " The circumstances may still be the same, but they will act no longer on the same person " INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 295 (p. 5). And by time, of course, we do not mean that steady uniform flow of which Newton spoke, but change. " Real duration is that duration which gnaws on things, and leaves on them the mark of its tooth. If everything is in time, everything changes inwardly, and the same concrete reality never recurs " (p. 46). Finally, this duree reelle is not object of thought, but of immediate experience. " We do not think real time. But we live it, because it transcends intel- lect " (p. 46). Thus reality, which is time par excellence, is object of intuition. From this dynamic source springs the next feature of the system: reality is unpredictable. M. Bergson declares that " to foresee consists of projecting into the future what has been perceived in the past, or of imagining for a later time a new grouping, in a new order, of elements already perceived. But that which has never been perceived, and which is at the same time simple, is necessarily unforesee- able. Now such is the case with each of our states, regarded as a moment in a history that is gradually unfolding: it is simple, and it cannot have been already perceived, since it concentrates in its indivisibility all that has been perceived and what the present is adding to it besides. It is an orig- inal moment of a no less original history " (p. 6). Thus temporal things cannot be predetermined. Exact science, which is the work of the reason, treats all things as if they were determined by an inexorable necessity. But exact science deals with a false abstraction from the real world. It does not employ the notion of duration, but only of mo- ments that correspond of simultaneity rather than length of succession. The sun will rise tomorrow at the instant when the hands of the clock are in a certain position: "... the flow of time might assume an infinite rapidity, the entire past, present, and future of material objects or of isolated 296 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY systems might be spread out all at once in space, without there being anything to change either in the formulae of the scientist or even in the language of common sense " (p. 9). But this series of coinciding events that science studies is not real time at all, for time is succession and duration. It is given alone to my inner experience: " it is no longer some- thing thought, it is something lived. It is no longer a relation, it is an absolute (ibid.}" And this absolute is irrational, for " the more we study the nature of time, the more we shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new " (p. n). Diametrically opposed to science, to causal explanation, to reason and understanding, are time, indetermination, real change, and intuition. Our intuition feels time, feels the unpredictable already budding out of the present (par- ticularly in our free acts) ; reason always tries to explain by referring to a cause. Its motto is, the present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause (p. 14). The intellect does not admit real novelty; it forever reduces the new to the old. " Same- ness " would be its characteristic comment upon the variety of the world in space and time. The Platonic method, which places the concept in and behind all the particulars, is the true intellectual method and the essence of all ra- tionalism; it is the polar opposite of intuitionism, which sees only novelty, growth, creation. As a part of the anti-intellectual program we should expect a condemnation of analysis. A conscious state, indeed any reality at all, is one and indissoluble; it is not composed of distinct parts. " As soon as we try to give an account of a conscious state, to analyze it, this state, which is above all personal, will be resolved into impersonal ele- INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 297 ments external to one another, each of which calls up the idea of a genus and is expressed by a word. But because our reason, equipped with the idea of space and the power of creating symbols, draws these multiple elements out of the whole, it does not follow that they were contained in it. For within the whole . . . they permeated and melted into one another." (Les donnees immediate* de la conscience, tr. Pogson, p. 163.) Indeterminism of course means freedom. " Freedom is the relation of the concrete self to the act which it performs. This relation is undefinable, just because we are free. For we can analyze a thing, but not a process; we can break up extensity, but not duration" (Creative Evolution, p. 209). Professor Bergson is careful to explain in this same Chapter III that freedom is not to be taken as implying a choice be- tween alternatives. He said earlier " This does not mean that free action is capricious, unreasonable action. To be- have according to caprice is to oscillate mechanically " (op. cit.j p. 47). Nor is the free act still undetermined, when all the events preceding it are completed : freedom consists not in discontinuity with the past but in qualitative inde- finability. It, like time, reality, the self, and the other ultimates, is solely object of intuition. Such is the positive side of the doctrine; there is a nega- tive side also, designed to cut off escape to any other type. It consists in the revival of the old antinomies of reason. This dialectic has been a favourite thesis of other mysti- cisms also, and their use of it is a phenomenon of significance. In pointing to these paradoxes, they show an advance over all the previous types. Each of these types, intent on its own positive truth, failed to see that itself was occupying but one small corner of the universe. It was so possessed with the zeal of its doctrine that it could not see beyond its 298 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY own critical point to the equally just claims of its opponents. It could not realize that the whole situation of philosophy was one of never-ending tilts, of mutual refutations all equally right and equally wrong, none being based upon specific information about reality in short, a thoroughly dialectical conflict. The more modern types have usually heaped scorn upon the dialectic of Kant and Hegel; and it is not wholly without justice that they themselves, in their ceaseless and barren strife, are but living examples of it. Now the intuitionist, using as he does a quite objective method, attains an impersonality, an objective-mindedness which tends to lift him above the plane of the warring fac- tions. No longer an advocate of a special, sectarian creed, he is able to see the spectacle of the dialectic as the par- ticipants cannot. The partisan types of course appealed to the antinomies, but for their own purposes; they never ascribed them to the intellect itself, to the nature of the whole situation. But the mystic does so, and thereby shows that he is one step above his predecessors, and on the road to an entirely different type of philosophy; a type which abandons the exclusive spirit and takes for its watchword " synthesis." Yet after all he is only on the road, for he does not complete the journey he has begun. As if ex- hausted by the unwonted effort to be impartial, he straight- way sinks back into a new partisanship. He uses the dialec- tic, not to show that all are equally correct, but to show that all are equally wrong. He chooses the negative interpreta- tion, and thereby, as we shall see, in his turn occasions one more endless controversy. To the dialectic of mysticism, then, we proceed. Reason has two sources of its corruption; we may perhaps call them the negative and the positive sources. The former has been emphasized by M. Bergson, the latter is common to all INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 299 mystics. The first is a sort of spectre or death's head, pres- ent at every intellectual feast, reminding us that we are tottering on the edge of an infinite abyss: this is the " Mys- tery of Being." Why is there Being rather than nothing at all ? Why any one kind rather than another ? Why any sort of a world at all ? It is the child's question, " who made God ? " This alternative always obtrudes itself; this emptiest of all notions, the naught, flouts the profoundest reasoning with the taunt " why the laws of logic rather than nothing at all ? " " From the first awaken- ing of reflection, it is this that pushes to the fore, right under the eyes of consciousness, the torturing problems, the ques- tions that we cannot gaze at without feeling giddy and bewildered. I have no sooner commenced to philosophize than I ask myself why I exist; and when I take account of the intimate connection in which I stand to the rest of the universe, the difficulty is only pushed back, for I want to know why the universe exists; and if I refer the universe to a principle immanent or transcendent that supports it or creates it, my thought rests on this principle only a few moments, for the same problem recurs, this time in its full breadth and generality. Whence comes it, and how can it be understood, that anything exists ? . . . How why does this principle exist rather than nothing ? " (Creative Evolution, p. 215.) This " Mystery of Being " has been acknowledged, of course, by many thinkers. Generally they try to put a good face upon it, resignedly saying that we can know only the how, not the why, of things, and leaving perhaps to religion the insoluble problem of the why. (Cf. Paulsen, Introduction to Philosophy, Eng. tr., p. 10.) (In the same way science hands over the problems it cannot solve to philosophy.) James, more candid than others, marches the mystery out before us, that we may 300 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY know the worst at once. (Some Problems, ch. III.) But one might as well confess that intellect is fundamentally bank- rupt, argues the mystic, for it fails to solve its own problem. Itself conjures up this idea of the pure naught, and then finds that it cannot discover any ground why there should be anything else than just this same naught. Is it not a pure, unalloyed self-contradiction ? Does not the reason by its own secretion poison itself ? The cure lies in abandon- ing this artificial procedure of reason. Take experience as intuition reveals it, and there are no gaps, zeros, naughts, no arrests, no empty space, none of these negations and hence the idea of the naught is a " pseudo-idea." (Creative Evolution, pp. 277 ff.) " The image, then, properly so called, of a suppression of everything is never formed by thought " (p. 279). So the question " Why something rather than nothing ? " is a meaningless question. To have spotted this ghost is the unique merit of M. Berg- son; few philosophers have had the acumen to see the im- portant role of this least of reason's entities. And if he has laid him, he has indeed ridden philosophy of a terrible spectre. But now come to the second taint of reason. It is, of course, as old as the Eleatics; yet Professor Bergson has presented it in a novel manner. The intellect gives only static views of reality. Like the cinematograph, it repre- sents the changing scenes of the world by a series of in- stantaneous pictures (op. cit., pp. 305 ff.). When, then, it would define motion, change, or continuity of any sort, it must split them into static positions with ever more positions between them. It can never convey the idea of transition. Hence arise the paradoxes. " The arguments of Zeno of Elea, although formulated with a very different intention, have no other meaning. INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 301 " Take the flying arrow. . . . Motionless in each point of its course, it is motionless during all the time that it is moving. " Yes, if we suppose that the arrow can ever be in a point of its course. [Which is just what scientific calculation says it is.] ... To suppose that the moving body is at a point of its course is to cut the course in two by a snip of the scissors at this point ..." and so on (pp. 308-309). The contradiction might be applied in other directions. The single positions, being static, can never convey the idea of motion; in order to do this we must show how they are connected, how the passage comes about from one to an- other. This leads to the putting of positions in between a given two, and when those positions also are found to be distinct, to putting more still between these last, and so on forever. The transition thus appears as a completion of an infinite series of steps but as infinite means endless, there can be no such completion. The source of the trouble is, of course, that we are trying to put the fluent into rigid terms, while retaining the fluidity. But it is the very nature of intellect, with its fixed concepts, to do this hence the reductio ad absurdum. The solution, to be sure, lies in the dynamic view, which denies that the static really exists. " All is obscure, all is contradictory when we try, with states, to build up a transition " (p. 313). Professor Bergson applies the dialectic to the cases of qualitative change and growth; he might apply it univer- sally. It is not merely in the description of the dynamic that thought has been accused of inconsistency. The dialec- tic of the absolute idealists has found all the categories of science and of practice to be infected. While we shall take these up more fully later (Chapter XII) we may here mention the one antinomy in addition to the well-known Kantian 302 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY list, which would seem by itself enough to condemn all intel- lectual truth. We refer to the antinomy of the judgment. " The very act of attribution," said Plotinus, " involves a distinction between subject and predicate, which is impos- sible in the case of what is absolutely simple " (Enneads, VI, IX, 3) and we might substitute for the " absolutely simple " the individual of any sort; since oneness is equally oneness, whether of the simple or the complex. Formal as you please is this mode of argument; but it is only the rational method carried out to the bitter end. To renounce it is to play into the hands of the mystic. For while the analyzing intellect never reaches a point at which the diver- sity of subject and predicate does not conflict with their identity, our immediate intuition shows us that they do not conflict. Thus by the dialectic the intuitionist triumphs. Mysticism, or the religious side of intuitionism, has also a plea of its own; and here we pass from the Bergsonian to the wider form of our present type. Even if none of the above dialectic be accepted, the mystic will claim that when we come to the ultimate reality, to God, thought is radically incapable. " Who by searching can find out God ? " And what description is, not so much adequate, as even indica- tive of what the notion of God means at all ? If we define Him as person, then we leave out the infinity, omnipotence, etc., which no person that we know possesses. If we define Him as infinite, then infinity is a negative idea the end- less, the unbounded, etc. Or if you try to make it a positive idea, to wit, the self-containing, that of which the part cor- responds to the whole, as in infinite number then the unity of God seems to be lost and He becomes a collection. Did not Plotinus say of the One that it is not quantitative, or numerical, or indeed the possessor of any predicates or properties or qualities; for all these imply, to the human INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 303 reason, something other than the One itself, which is exter- nally joined to it ? There can however be nothing besides the One. So, too, the One is not efficient cause, which would have to be other than its effect; nor is it thinker as over against its thought-object; nor will, which involves the dis- tinction of intention and performance. All these categories drawn from our finite experience and what other cate- gories have we ? imply too much limitation ; they are too narrow, they cut off the One from something outside it but there is nothing outside it. " The One, whose nature is to generate all things, cannot be any of those things itself. Therefore it is neither substance, nor quality, nor reason, nor soul; neither moving nor at rest, not in place, not in time, but unique of its kind, or rather kindless, being before all kind, before motion and before rest," . . . (Enneads, VII, IX, 3: quoted from the translation in Benn, Greek Philosophers, II, p. 311). Such is the second form of the dialectic of the intuitionist and the mystic: reason renders what we immediately see into terms which either contradict the vision itself, or con- tradict those very terms. And this is particularly shown forth in the case of time, of all intellectual description, and of God, the ultimately real. When we couple the spectre of the naught which vitiates all explanation, has reason any- thing left, except the uses of the finite, practical life ? Nothing, says the mystic. What then are we to say of the truth of this extraordinary view ? We shall try to show, on the positive side, that the method of intuition is justified; that it gives unquestionable truth when it feels the temporal flow, the free and novel creations of psychical life, the supreme unity of God. Into the specific detail of its picture of the great universe we can- not enter; for the correctness of such detail must be judged 304 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY by evidence which philosophers have not thought it worth while to consider. We are now concerned only with the issues which have been fought out by the historical systems. As to the negations which the mystics are alleged to have insisted upon, to wit, the unreality of the permanent, the exact, the repeated event, and the vanity of intellectual explanation and description, we shall endeavour to prove that mysticism, like the other types, has its arbitrary ex- clusions and its critical point, which renders its method true but insufficient to meet the just demands of the inquiring mind; that, consequently, the controversy between it and rationalism is another of those interminable but needless tilts which have hitherto confronted us in all the types of human thought. As to the positive value of the method, there lies an oppor- tunity for a gifted writer: an opportunity which three of our philosophers have seized. Royce, James, and Hocking have treated the subject, as no American could be expected to do, with convincing eloquence; and after their words, any praises of intuition on our part would be a sad anticlimax. Our task is to be the less stirring, but perhaps indispensable one, of showing up its logical soundness. Time penetrates our affairs, yes: but this penetration has two aspects. It is now an acid, now the germ-plasm of new life. It eats into Bergson says " gnaws " or " bites " and destroys the old; but also it provides the novel, it ensures advance. According as we look at one side or the other, are we likely to rebel at, or to approve, the doctrine of time as ultimate reality. But these are emotional reactions: impartial scrutiny shows the almost if not quite universal influence of this destroyer and creator. So far we can easily go with the author of Creative Evolution. His view, how- ever, demands a more extreme admission. Everything real INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 305 without exception is temporal, changing. Does this not go too far ? He said that even if the same circumstances were re- peated, they would act no longer on the same person; my thought of blue colour is not the same as it just now was. At most it is very like. Now this universal negative is not an empirical position; it is not based, as the thesis of spirit's descent into matter, the three orders of life, etc., are based, upon concrete evidence. It is founded upon an a priori axiom. It would not be possible to prove by observation that all our mental states, when they recur, recur modified. So far as inspection goes, I may not detect the least shade of difference often I do not between my present image of the letter A and the image of it which I just now entertained. An absolute dictum, like that upon which M. Bergson bases his philosophy of time, could not be empirically established; the exhaustive induction which is requisite could not be carried through. The most that one would be able to say, would be, that a majority of our thoughts and feelings are modified as they reappear; that there is not much monotony in our mental life; that blank sameness in the field of atten- tion soon leads to sleep. But we must not let the majority rule, in philosophy as in politics; for in politics we compro- mise in order to get something done, but in philosophy we seek the truth. And the time-philosophy could not utter its universal negation of sameness, did it not employ a certain axiom; which is, that all later states must be modified, whether we detect it or not, by the changes that have oc- curred elsewhere, i. e., the changes in the context or environ- ment. This is none other than the principle of internal relations. We have already discussed it ; our result was that it is sound, but does not preclude the correlative principle of externality. (Cf. the treatment of Platonism in this Chap- 306 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY ter.) My present image of the letter A may be the same through and through with my past image, while the novel circumstances add overlying differences without number. I may think of A as blue, of exactly the same shade as in the former case, and of exactly the same shape; but it may be larger, or in a different word, or what not. How does that alter the shape or shade ? To be sure, M. Bergson says that since the present mental state is one and indivisible, any dif- ference in the parts of it makes it wholly a new stale. But this " one and indivisible " is only the principle of internal relations once more. His reiterated declaration that my state cannot be divided into parts is again the same a priori principle. For why should it not be divided in thought without falsification ? Only because then the influence of each part on the others would be neglected an influence which is attested by the internality of relations alone. Everything in mental life modifies everything else, inter- penetrates it, forms with it an " indissoluble unity " : this is his fundamental assumption. We do not need to deny the presupposition. What we do deny is, that this modification of the present image A by its new context, does anything more than make the whole present state different on the whole. There is no possible way of ruling out the description of the matter in terms of its parts; equally, there is no pos- sible way of ruling out the description of it as a whole. There is, in short, no genuine issue here. The extreme formula of Professor Bergson is, in so far as it is true, a formality. It does not rule out exact repetition: it only insists on interpreting recurrence as not mere recurrence of parts but as recurrence in a changing whole. It does not tell us anything concrete] it does not tell us that we cannot get the same shade, or the same shape, or the same anything, before the mind twice. There is as much repetition in life INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 307 as there is, and as much novelty, and no a priori principle can inform us beforehand how much there is going to be. Is it necessary to add that the change-philosophy has had all along to appeal to the very things it has contemned ? What meaning is there in change, unless in something which suffers the change ? Is there not always in our mind some standard by comparison with which we estimate change ? Does not Professor Bergson himself use more or less fixed concepts and meanings in setting forth to us his arguments ? He does so, of course. The point is a very old one, but it seems to be still true. One cannot by reason invalidate reason. Professor Bergson himself has made much of memory, as a criterion of consciousness, in the Matiere et memoir e; and memory is a meaningless word if it does not imply some sort of repetition whether it is we who go back to the past or the past that revives in us. In general, it is impossible to reduce all the static to the dynamic, for the dynamic alone could not even account for the illusion of the static. In conceding the truth of the time-doctrine, then, we have had to concede also its one-sidedness. It cannot be refuted unless it denies that the same parts recur, in themselves indis- tinguishable from their earlier form. In fact, we have in essence discussed this issue in our treatment of the concept- philosophy (first part of this Chapter). The static universal was there seen to be, for the dynamic view, a critical point; which is perhaps the reason why the radical dynamist wishes to extirpate it from reality. There is a perfect balance between the Platonism which denies the changing and the dynamism which denies the permanent; neither has the slightest advantage over the other. It is perhaps something of an accident that the latest intuitive philosophy should have selected tune as its fa- 308 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY vourite category. More sympathetic to the usual habit of mysticism is the doctrine of indetermination or freedom. Yet the kind of freedom which the intuitionist champions is one that the determinist need not fear to admit, for it does not break any of the accepted laws of science, annul the " Conservation of Energy " or the like. The raindrop's fall is not sufficiently explained by gravitation, to be sure : then add the resistance of the air. But this is not enough; then add the attraction of other raindrops. This too is not enough : then add other causes indefinitely. Of the person's deed the same holds. My writing of this sentence is determined by my desire to express a certain belief, by my past philosoph- ical education, my personal preferences, and so on. In each case alike, the whole event, the complete deed, is a resultant to which no finite sum of causes is adequate. But the determinist may retort if you had infinite knowledge, you could make an infinite sum of causes which would be ade- quate. What would then be left unexplained would be only the form of individuality. My so-called free act can you name any specific detail of it which is not, had you full information of my past history, quite foreseeable ? Its freedom lies only in the fact that it is a unique, individual event, whereas individuality is not wholly reducible to con- ceptual terms. The Bergsonian freedom is not true in- determination: " this " he said " does not mean that free action is capricious, unreasonable action ; to behave accord- ing to caprice is to oscillate mechanically." It is not the freedom which James defended, of genuine alternatives in conduct, and real possibilities. The intuitionistic freedom might be admitted by the veriest fatalist as far as the con- tents of his future deeds are concerned provided only he acknowledge that what happens constitutes an unanalyzable whole. And while such barren freedom does not preclude INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 309 its opposite, it cannot possibly help to account for what must seem very singular: that we can come so near to pre- dicting what a given man whom we know will do in a given case. Approximate regularity is its critical point. Always it can reformulate itself after being shattered on this point for it insists that the determination was due to analysis which is, metaphysically, falsification. But its ability to reformulate itself is secured at the cost of fertility; its free- dom of individuality is so general that it covers the fated deed of passion as truly as the deliberate moral choice. Turn we now to the mystic's vision of God. Is it not from its very purity and immediacy, incoherent ? Have not the mystics themselves denied every predicate of the ineffable One ? Recall the quotation from Plotinus. Yet careful interpretation is needed here. The ecstasy is a private ex- perience; herein it stands out in contrast with sense-in- tuition, which is social and communicable. Both ecstasy and sensation are direct experience of reality so at any rate the experient is convinced. But because man is so made that what one senses, his fellows also sense, he can com- municate, that is, describe, his sensations. Because you and I both see the round yellow moon, we can use the same word for it; and on the basis of a large group of these same-for-all objects we can establish a system of communication language by which to convey to one another our own experiences. In the sphere of sense-intuition, this com- monness of the data is the usual, normal thing. But the mystic's ecstasy is rare; it is not the normal thing. It has little or no sensation-content. Consequently the mystic cannot point with his finger, as at the moon, and expect others to see what he sees, and invent a name to refer to their common object of vision. To the majority of men his experience becomes incommunicable. The most he can say 310 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY in the way of description is " what you see when you come into such and such a psychical state fasting, prayer, humility, etc. - " or perhaps he may speak by analogy and parable. It is as if one of us were born with the faculty of seeing a new colour. He could not communicate it, de- scribe it, except to another who had the same sense-datum. That however does not in the least mean that what he sees is inherently indescribable, a mere zero for analysis, incap- able of definition. The difficulty is subjective, not objective. The intellectualists have seized upon this human weakness and distorted it into an objective irrationality. There is no more reason for condemning the revelations of mysticism as essentially incoherent than for declaring my perception of red colour incoherent. The one, as the other, is an imme- diate datum, but that is no reason why it should rule out mediation by comparison, analysis, or other conceptual ac- tivity. When Royce defined mysticism as the doctrine that " to be real means to be felt as the absolute goal and conse- quent quietus of all thinking and so of striving" (World and Individual, vol. I, p. 83), his statement would force upon the view a needless exclusion ; and an exclusion which enables him to refute the type. For the mystic, to be real does mean " to be felt as the absolute goal of all thinking and striving " but it by no means follows that it is the " con- sequent quietus." If I am looking to ascertain what is the colour of the horse in yonder field, the goal of my thought and striving is attained when I get a sense-intuition of the white horse; but this is not, in any pertinent sense, the quietus of all thought. I may go on to think about the white colour. Because the mystic attains a state of intellectual peace and rest, is he never to think further about God ? As well say that because after a walk I sit down, I can never get up. INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 3 1 1 But what reason have we for trusting the revelation of the mystic ? Grant that sometime, perhaps, the human race will have so developed its religious sense that men can be assured of common revelations, of visions shared by all, so that they may institute a mystical vocabulary, even as now we have a sense- vocabulary grant all this, we say; but what guarantee is there of the truth of these revelations ? Have they any authority in themselves ? To which we must reply, yes. They would possess all the authority that our impressions of the material world now possess; and prob- ably no one would think of questioning their validity. It is now, when the vision of God is rare, that it is suspect. Yet it should not be so. " Whatever is very clearly and dis- tinctly apprehended is true " said Descartes; and we have tried to show that all thinkers implicitly follow the dictum. What I alone see, if I see it clearly, I must believe. Of course there is always liability to error; but error is present only where the various intuita are inconsistent, or are con- tradicted by some other accredited fact. The only mark of error which the intellect knows is contradiction. In so far, then, as the mystic's deliverances are not contrary to estab- lished facts, he must (and does) believe them. On its positive side, the method of intuitionism is irrefutable. It must be admitted that many mystics have gone be- yond this point, and insisted upon ruling out the intellect. If Plotinus did it, what wonder that the lesser lights have done it too ? Now it is just this exclusion that has oc- casioned the revolt of intellect and the endless warfare of religion and reason, of faith and science. Not that the mystic alone is to blame; the rationalist would no doubt in any case have tried to proscribe every method of attaining truth but his own: such is human nature. But the mystics have made a very thoroughgoing attempt to discredit 312 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY reason's methods; and we must now consider the question, whether they are right in accusing the latter of the dialectical contradictions. The alleged suicide of reason was presented in two ways: (i) reason, creating a fictitious concept the Naught has hereby conjured up the great mystery of Being which it cannot solve: it has laid upon its own shoulders a burden which it cannot lift. (2) All thought leads to antinomies particularly thought about the supreme reality, God. Let us take these in order. It will be enough to show that mysticism offers no escape from the toils. Now first a general reflection: suppose reason does fashion this " pseudo-idea " of blank nothing- ness; how can we say that it is no true idea ? Is not that saying that it is nothing ? no great paradox, surely. That was all it pretended to be and it is enough to make us wonder why there is anything " positive." It seems as if this little germ of disease were too small to be caught. But more specifically: M. Bergson devoted several pages to the demolition of the idea; but the demolition amounts to this, that what we are really thinking of when we think we are thinking of nothing, is the absence of some expected or desired thing, which we find replaced by something else. Have we then no concept of the limit which we approach, as one thing after another is removed ? Bergson, who does not favour the pure concept, cannot admit such a limiting notion. But it is a genuine notion, for it can be defined. For instance, take Schroeder's definition of the "null-class": that which is a member of all classes. It belongs at the same time to mutually exclusive classes to the class of white things and the class of things that are not white. This is, perhaps, self-contradictory; but " nothing " is the one privileged concept which may be inconsistent with itself. INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 3 1 3 " Nothing is self-contradictory " would not break the law of contradiction. That the definition has sense, may be seen if we remember that one often says: " that class is composed of so and so, and nothing else besides." Ordinary usage, then, would seem to agree with Schroeder's definition. The concept of nothing is a perfectly good static concept. Of course Professor Bergson is unable to give it a place in his universe, because his universe is a dynamic one. But we have tried to show that the dynamic view sees only one side of reality. If then the concept of the naught is a ghost that cannot be laid, the mystery of being returns upon us. The mystic does not abolish it; he only turns away from it. He solves no difficulty; he ignores it. And the intellectualist takes a just revenge when he accuses the mystic of himself explain- ing nothing. Mysticism has become a synonym for mystery. But the great human problem is not answered by such means. Ever more we have the ignominious spectacle of mutual accusation, a perpetually reiterated tu quoque. So long as the mystery of being is not dissolved by reason, so long mysticism shares the guilt of its counterpart, rationalism. The situation is not very different as regards the dialectic. The fluid, we are told, cannot be defined in terms of the solid. The flight of the arrow is not a series of momentary posi- tions. Well, then, we ask, what else is it ? It is the trans- eunt fact of passing through those positions. But intellect always comes back and inquires, what does this " passing through " mean ? It means being now in one position, then in another, and so on. The only way to avoid this static interpretation is to forbid the question. But we have no right to choke off the reason. The only satisfactory out- come will be one which admits the right to analyze motion 314 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY into static terms, as well as the right to intuit those terms together into a process. To insist upon the claims of in- tuition to the exclusion of analysis, is again but to ignore the difficulty. And the same is true of the dialectic of predica- tion. If it is, in the last analysis, a self-contradiction to say " A is B " then we do not help matters by refusing to de- scribe anything. That refusal would indeed render the intuitionist speechless. Professor Bergson would not be entitled to say " reality is fluent, is life, tune, creation, etc." To be sure, the opponents of mysticism, and too often the mystics themselves, urge that the vision of reality leads only to silence. But we have seen that this is no necessary consequence of the intuitive attitude. The alleged incom- municability of the mystical message is only the difficulty of suitably expressing an unusual experience. And the mystics have written volumes, and believe themselves therein to have written the truth, in descriptions and predications con- cerning the Divine attributes. All this they could not have done, were their dialectic just. Whoso condemns thought, thereby condemns intuition also. Whoso says that God transcends all adjectives, makes God not richer but poorer. We do not at present urge that the dialectic is unsound, that God is fitly defined as person, as love, as infinitely mighty, omniscient, etc. ; we urge only that if these, or other attri- butes, may not be predicated of Him, then the mystic has nothing to teach and indeed has himself learned nothing. On the other hand, we do insist that the dialectic is a sign of some grave disease in human thought; and we have said that those who refuse to pay attention to it are themselves living instances of it for they war with one another pre- cisely as thought is supposed to war with intuition and with itself. The mystic is eternally right in pointing out this disease, and in doing this he soars above any other partisan INTELLECTUALISM, PRAGMATISM, INTUITIONISM 3 1 5 type; but he does not heal the malady. He simply tries to forget it. And this is good so far; it helps him to new and positive information about the universe, which he would forego if he remained immersed in the problem of the antinomies. This releasing of attention is beneficial; it is necessary if the patient would not die of skeptical despair. The mystic, the intuitionist, let in fresh air into the sick- room; they raise the blinds, that we may gaze out upon reality. But with all this positive good that they do, they do not touch that secret source of philosophy's perennial quarrels, that debilitating malady which always prevents man from going forth to chart the world of reality. And as their attitude is broader than that of any preceding type, so their critical point is broader : it is all thought, all description. The knot of the dialectic they cannot untie. Whoever has learned the lesson of mysticism, knows that human thought is saturated with hostilities and that there- fore any type of philosophy which makes one aspect of reality alone fundamental is bound to be opposed by another which selects a contrasting aspect as its base. All partisan types are hereby condemned including mysticism itself. It is true that we have not gone through every one of those types which have appeared in history. Still less have we exhausted the count of all possible partial types. Many possible ones, doubtless, would never become actual; for the angles from which they are conceived would not seem interesting enough to men. Human beings, finding them- selves attractive objects of study, have thought it worth while to characterize the universe as function-of-human- thought (subjectivism) ; but it is hardly to be expected that any one would undertake to define the system of reality in terms of the ludicrous, or as a complex function of plane surfaces. Innumerable world-views of this sort might be 316 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY elaborated, but their critical points are too obvious to re- quire pointing out. And after what we have said, it seems that we scarcely need take up the further partisan types which have appeared. Such one-sided philosophies as the positivism of August Comte, the naturalism of the nine- teenth century, the " Energetics " of Professor Ostwald, and others equally narrow, fail so clearly to account for facts like consciousness, value, etc., that it is not necessary to con- sider them in detail. Under this head, of course, comes that system of optimism known as Christian Science; a system which, however practically useful, is unable to account for the illusions that we suffer of bodily pain and weakness, and for evil generally. Once for all, it seems, we must give up hope of constructing a chart of reality which is to satisfy the innate craving for knowledge, in terms of any one element or part of the whole. CHAPTER DC THE RATIONALISTIC SYNTHESIS above failures are no bar to a new reform. But J- this one will differ as it were in kind; it is not to be a rival on the same plane with them, but in a higher dimen- sion. The preceding reforms erred by one-sidedness. All the promising angles from which the world might be viewed were tried, one after another: subject, object, individual, universal, static, dynamic, mind, matter, biological adjust- ment, pure theory, will, reason, feeling yet each, however interesting in itself, failed to fulfill its promise. And the failure was always due to the same vice : the vice of so con- ceiving each base as to exclude at least one-half the universe. The penalty immediately followed, that the maps furnished by each system, traced but a little way from the point of departure, ended in a blank sheet. Does not the remedy at once suggest itself, of putting together all these fragments ? Combination or synthesis, then, will be the watchword from now on. This lesson has, to be sure, been learned again and again in the history of thought. In each successive epoch we find men running through the partial types of interest to them, ever refuting one another, until at last a harmonizer appears. Such was Aristotle at the end of Greek phi- losophy, Aquinas at the close of the mediaeval epoch, Leibnitz for the Renaissance, Hegel for the modern period. These thinkers believed themselves to have healed the phil- osophic disease by the device of breadth or all-inclusiveness. This notion of all-inclusiveness attracts the human thinker not only on logical, but also on emotional and practical 317 3l8 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY grounds. For instance, there is what we may call the quanti- tative instinct. If the partial types make unacknowledged appeal to the qualitative instinct as when mind is deemed fundamental because it is better thanmatter, or person because it is higher than thing, or universal because more independent than particular equally does the synthetic motive gratify our love of immensity. Quantity is no slight factor in our estimation of values. We naturally desire to increase our circle of friends, our height, our progeny, our strength, our material possessions. If great riches appear an end to many, it is largely the magnitude of the end that attracts them. Cities pride themselves upon a doubled population, nations upon expansion of territory, authors upon the number of their readers, and so on. The adjectives great! grand! magnificent! bear witness to our admiration of mere quan- tity. Who, if he could help it, would be diminutive, or thin, or poorly-informed, or for that matter limited in any way ? So in our thinking we do homage to a hidden major premise, which declares that the comprehensive view is the true view. We value massiveness and extensiveness for them- selves. Intensity is a sign of superiority, but extensity is the peculiar mark of genius. The poet has expressed the same motive in his eulogy of our great American leader, President Lincoln: His was no mountain-peak of mind Thrusting to thin air through our cloudy bars, A sea-mark now, now lost in vapours blind, Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined, Fruitful and friendly for all humankind. Yet, just because largeness is an attribute of powerful brutes, of dead matter, even of empty space, its appeal lacks to the cultivated mind a certain effectiveness. A less naive motive is that of balance, impartiality, justice. We like to THE RATIONALISTIC SYNTHESIS 319 see everything get its rights; we feel that even the smallest details of reality should have their place. In a sense, every distinct fact should count as one, and none as more than one. A person should not be more real than a gnat, a nation than the least of its citizens. This is akin to what we call the objective-mindedness or impersonality of science; but equally do the sporting instincts testify to it in the phrase " a fair field and no favour." One might also quote Scrip- ture: "The very hairs of your head are all numbered," " Not a sparrow falleth," etc. Not that this impartiality would overlook distinctions of quality and value; it is rather that it would reduce them to distinctions of inclusive- ness. If a man does somehow count for more in the scheme of things than a dog, it is because he feels and thinks and wills all that the dog can, and much besides. The winner in the metaphysical race is he who brings the greatest number of contestants to victory. Cooperation, not competition; a balanced unity in which all play their appointed parts: such is the mark of reality as the synthetic type sees it. To the partisan types, this attitude is related as classic to ro- mantic art. Those types persuade by their positiveness and virility; this one by its rounded completeness. There will always be in the human mind a presupposition which reads " the account that gives a place to every fact and motive is the true account." As the rain descends upon the good and the evil alike, and the just judge gives ear to the pleas of all, so the present type accepts every contribution to knowledge. To speak in ethical terms, it gains by yielding; its spirit is not aggressive, but meek; it rules by love rather than fear. Its code is that of non-resistance. To the fighting spirit which imbues the philosophic partisan, such a method is almost contemptible. Yet we found that idealism attempted to synthesize sub- 320 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY jectivism and objectivism; and Great Objectivism in its own way strove for the same end. Harmony is, at any rate, unavoidably a good for us ; and it would seem that the syn- thetic spirit is nearer than the competitive to that appre- ciation of peace, mutual forbearance, and kindness which distinguishes the modern western consciousness. Indeed, synthesis, with its motto of equal opportunity for all views, is close to the ideal of social democracy. But unlike socialistic enterprises, it is not " radical " as that word is commonly used ; it is conservative. The har- monizing systems do not wash everything off the slate and draw the picture entirely anew. They would not destroy, but fulfill; they countenance no revolts. Upon them, in consequence, is thrust the thankless role of orthodoxy. They uphold the main tradition of religion, morality, gov- ernment, culture in general; they are eminently respectable; humanity's right wing. Hegel was always a model boy, and to his contemporaries his mature intellect must have seemed flawless. Caird, Bradley, Green, Bosanquet and that ilk: what an air of finish they have, of having already considered everything that a finite critic could urge, what a quiet supe- riority! It is this rectitude that secretly aggravates the reader. The school does not arouse sympathy; there is no romance, as of the elan vital, or the Great Self, or the starry Ideas. One feels himself shamed by the type's perfection. This of itself would render the synthetic attitude unpopular today, when men feel more for the under than the upper dog, and admire the virtues of dash and brilliancy more than those of patience, subtlety and breadth. Certain free spirits find a well-appointed scheme constraining, and dub the syn- thetic system " closed." And they in their turn pride them- selves on their freedom and openness of mind. How often have we heard the opponents of " absolutism " speak thus: THE RATIONALISTIC SYNTHESIS 321 " I have no closed system, I want only the facts! " This is much as if a starving man should boast of his empty belly. What is there to be proud of in having no chart of the uni- verse ? System, provided it is true, can be no bar to further investigation, and the obstinacy which refuses it is the more dangerous because it assumes the cloak of modesty. The satisfaction of the absolutist in his system is not more vicious than the priggishness of the blatant empiricist, be he " radical " or " positivist." The conservatism of the synthetic point of view is perhaps the source of that impression of finality which it alone seems to convey. A federation of all the states in the world is not open to aggression from without. When every enemy is wel- comed and incorporated, there seems to be no possibility of overthrow. The partial types had avowed hostilities, and each kept its place by a burdensome militarism; the syn- thetic attitude is a sort of universal disarmament. Each partial type was in unstable equilibrium; the synthetic ap- pears to possess a stable equilibrium. As a ball in a hollow, pushed aside, is brought back by gravitation, so any new reflections are attracted, by force of the synthetic motive, and assimilated into the system. The system guarantees its own permanence as a clock perpetuates its own motion. It is not easy to resist the suggestion that we are now in a higher dimension, which enables us to reconcile the factions as an area unites lines of various direction. With a click the mechanism settles into place; the circle is completed. Such are some of the motives which urge philosophers to a synthetic type of view. Combined, they offer a front of dignity and majesty; any partial type feels, before them, as a rebellious child rebuked by a wise parent. When it de- fends itself, it is told that its reasons have already been con- sidered, and as much as is good in them embodied in the 322 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY counsel of the elder. It is not a case of strife between chil- dren, but between maturity and immaturity. The adult has lived through and absorbed the experience of the child; let the child be docile! No, the system cannot easily be attacked from without. Like the ocean, it yields to the striking body only to swallow it up in the end. There is just one way of testing it: by its own method. Give it rope, let it develop unchecked; if it brings to light no internal discrepancies, it is the final system that men have sought. Well! it has developed unchecked. The synthetic motive has produced its fruits for they are more than one. We have already mentioned Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibnitz, Hegel: these are the greater figures. There are also lesser ones, synthesizers who did not proffer an all-inclusive com- bination, but carried the harmonizing process up to a cer- tain point and excluded the remainder. The latter however are not the simon-pure instances; we confine our attention to those instances. Yet, as is well known, they too differ; they deny one another. Can there be then a flaw in the synthetic attitude ? Let us ask how divergencies might arise. The parts of the world cohere; now in what way do they cohere, by what principle are they united ? For the whole is not a mere con- glomerate, but an ordered system. We wish then to see explicitly the mark of the combination on each article. As the stock-breeder brands his animals, so the whole should brand each part. Select some particular object: a rock on the mountain-side. Examine it carefully: do you not see that its internal structure implies that certain external agents have been at work ? So, perhaps, with every object; yes, even the mental ones. A's character could not be what it is, were not the village where he lives a quiet hamlet which again depends on the political situation, etc., etc. THE RATIONALISTIC SYNTHESIS 323 Such connectedness between one thing and another we call logical. A philosophic system which declares that every single thing and part thus implies every other, is a logical or rational synthesis. But it is not the only possible kind of synthesis. The things and persons and forces that constitute the universe might not logically imply one another; each and all might have been created by fiat of some Higher Being so as to make a harmony, a total of beauty and order. In that case the principle of connection would be called not a logical but an aesthetic one. And perhaps there are other kinds of synthesis. It is possible, then, that the synthetic philosophers will differ as to the kind of synthesis which governs the world. The principle which combines may not be the same for all. Each owner may have his own brand. And we find, historically, at least three types: the Hegelian or logical, the Leibnitzian or aesthetic, and the Thomistic- Aristotelian, which we shall later characterize as the practi- cal type. Each of these wars with the others, to say nothing of conflict with the partial types. A full-blooded synthetist will, to be sure, not like to admit that this split is possible. He will say that the real nature of each particular thing cannot be distinguished from its con- nectedness with all the rest. The mode of synthesis is to him nothing apart from the things connected. The com- bining principle is not something over and above the parts; it is the parts, for each part, truly understood, is the whole. An alleged principle of Good is not to be contrasted with a principle of logical implication, for hi the last analysis neither one has any sense without the other. This attempt, he will say, to single out and define the principle of combina- tion is but a recurrence of the old partisan attitude; for it attempts to render the whole into terms of some one aspect, that of intellect, or value, or practical need. 324 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY But we must remember that the synthetic view by itself and with no admixture of anything else simply tells us that the whole alone is real. While this may turn out to be true, and to be as far as it goes a source of gratification, it is not the only sort of gratification which we seek. The philosophic instinct will never be content with a dogmatic statement that everything implies the whole. It must see that it does so ; and to see that is to see how. Unless this con- nectedness is made articulate, we shall have nothing but an unintelligent mysticism, such as the synthetists themselves do not love. The penalty of refusing to make clear the mode of synthesis is that we are limited to assertions like " all is one," " all is experience," " experience is individual," etc., which, positive though they are verbally, are no more illuminating than the Eleatic, " Being is." And, historically, the harmonizers have always tried to ascribe some precise character to the mode of connection. Here, accordingly, in the fact that synthesis itself admits different interpretations, we may find a little rift where strife enters. At any rate, suspicion is aroused, and we must examine with care each form of the general type. Moreover, when we recall that even after the synthetic systems are known, men have gone back to the partisan ones, there is the more reason for doubt. To the study of the several forms, then, we proceed. We begin with that which arose nearest to our own time, viz., the Hegelian synthesis. THE HEGELIAN TYPE: ABSOLUTISM Here we treat of certain tendencies which are perhaps less emphasized by Hegel than by the " neo-Hegelians "; on the whole we prefer the later form in which the Master's doc- trine has appeared, as it is the more likely to have pruned away the extravagancies and to have developed the funda- THE RATIONALISTIC SYNTHESIS 325 mental points to their logical conclusion ; in short, to have realized the type in its essentials. We do not, of course, attempt to be just to the historical Hegel, or to the whole systems of such modern thinkers as Bradley, Bosanquet, et al. As we have so often said, the types we portray are scarcely ever found naked, but they are none the less influential. Hegel said " Whatever is real is rational, and whatever is rational is real." He left no such motto about the good or the beautiful being real. And rationality means mutual implication between the parts or aspects of the universe, such that all together form an organic unity or " absolute spirit." Everything depends upon and implies everything else. The rationalism of the view, however, is not exclusive of empiricism. His ground for this belief or at least the modern Hegelian's ground is no a priori axiom, or set of them, but empirical investigation. Philosophy, he alleges, starts with no presuppositions. It has no " intellectualist " principles valid in abstracto, coining reality out of them- selves. Reason is rather the crown of the whole, than the creator of the whole. Opponents have often failed to see this and have characterized the view as abstract intellec- tualism, or transcendentalism, or pure rationalism. But that is unjust to the breadth of the system. Whatever rules of reason hold, are discovered in the materials of reality, in the course of human history, in the flowers, the earth's crust, the clouds> the stars. In the deduction of the cate- gories it may be convenient to start with a certain one (e.g., Being), but that is for purposes of exposition. If we con- sidered any fact e. g., a lead-pencil we should find that its lead and wood and their properties implied all others in the universe; but the inquiry would be more complicated than if arranged in the order of Hegel's Logic. The system 326 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY is thus according to its defenders in no sense arbitrary, but forced upon one by a frank and empirical investigation. It is plain matter of fact, they tell us, that every part or aspect of this universe is interwoven with every other. Each is so dependent upon the rest that it cannot be understood without that rest. This is true at once of facts and of phil- osophical systems. Consider, for instance, some fact: the present political situation in the United States of America. It obviously could not be fully understood without a knowl- edge of the history of Protestantism, of Roman Catholicism, of Roman law, of Anglo-Saxon law, of economic history, of the Celtic, Teutonic, Scandinavian, English and other races and so on indefinitely. Or take a less complicated in- stance. The character of my friend A. B. could it be com- prehended from a study of his private life alone ? His character is to be described by what he does; and what he does reaches far beyond himself. If he starts a revolution leading to the birth of a new sect, party or nation, where is the limit of his personality ? Or can I explain his nature without a knowledge of his forbears and his environment ? But we need not confine ourselves to human examples. A stone is dependent on so much of the rest of the universe that we cannot draw a line beyond which that dependence ceases. Gravitation, probably ubiquitous, ties all bodies together by an unbreakable cord. Alter the position of a speck of dust, and you have altered, however slightly, the position of every other body in the universe. How many other cases might we not add ? The more our empirical knowledge grows, the more illustrations we discover of this interdependence. Ponder it, and the weight of the evidence grows overwhelming. It becomes as hard to resist the im- pression of a great organic unity in things, as to find an event without a cause. Indeed, we believe that, on the THE RATIONALISTIC SYNTHESIS 327 empirical side at least, the cumulation of instances, which modern science especially biology and history offers, is the prime occasion of the rationalistic synthesis. Or consider the mutual dependence of the partial types of philosophy. Our whole treatment of them should have made clear that each involved one or more counterparts; for each fails just because it refuses to acknowledge that counterpart. Subjectivism failed because it could not give any clew to the facts of objectivity; idealism because it refused to explain the real detail of the world; voluntarism because it gave no place to the claims of rationalism and romanticism. Determinism likewise would have given a fair map of reality if it had been able to account for the actual variations and irregularities which our experience everywhere meets. Each of these systems would have been satisfactory, could it have generated the truths which its opposite stood for. And so we might speak, it would seem, of every possible partisan view. Does not this mean that in truth each of them implies that other half of the universe which it fails to notice ? Does not the very fact that the perennial controversy between the factions is due to their exclusiveness suggest that the quarrel could cease only if each side implicitly included the other ? And must we not conclude that each category which serves as the basis of such a partisan view implies the rest of the universe ? Every partial system is but the glorification of a certain special category; and if that system truly involves a counter-sys- tem, then each category involves the counter-category. The dialectic of the historical systems is but the dialectic of the categories, and Hegel in his deduction of categories has given the deduction of the philosophic types. Of course, science has never said its last word, and it could never have proved that all there is about every least speck is 328 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY dependent upon all else. Let the impressiveness be as great as it may, we know in our hearts that universal interdepend- ence is not empirically demonstrated. Gravitation may not be ubiquitous, my friend's character might contain some truly spontaneous variations; observation gives of itself no absolute denial of these. Still less do we know that one kind of dependence carries with it every other kind. My char- acter may depend upon yours, but does my liking for red meat depend upon your dislike of pepper ? The position of the earth hangs upon the position of Sirius, but does the chemical composition of the former depend upon the chemi- cal composition of the latter ? No : these have not been scientifically established; in upholding such claims the syn- thetists, like all philosophers, go beyond experience. Their belief in organic unity rests upon another, if you will a deeper, source. They appeal to a logical postulate, a de- mand which, they urge, it would be irrational to deny, whose denial cuts at the very root of thought itself. Even if we have not seen how every particular in the universe is tied up with every other, we are, they say, justified in having a faith that it must be so. For the description, the defini- tion, of anything is never in terms of that thing alone, but in terms of its relations with other things; yes, even if those relations amount only to bare distinction. That is a fun- damental trait of knowledge. Things are to be understood only in their connection with other things. And if to under- stand a thing is to behold the very essence of the thing, then the very essence of a thing is its connections with other things. And you cannot draw a line where this connected- ness stops. Hence ultimately everything is its relations to everything else. " For logic at all events, it is a postulate that the truth is the whole " (Bosanquet, Logic, 2d ed., I, p. a). THE RATIONALISTIC SYNTHESIS 329 The appeal here is not to practical needs or to an aesthetic demand, but to the nature of thought, of intelligibility. And that is why we have characterized the type as a rationalistic synthesis. The mortar which cements the bricks into the building is a logical one. In the Thomistic system we shall see that this is not the case. And it is neces- sary to realize this logical nature of our present view in order justly to estimate it. Much of the persuasiveness of writers like Bosanquet is due to the empirical illustrations of dependence, which, with the skill of the artist, they inter- weave in the metaphysical structure; yet the nerve of the argument is not this concrete evidence, but the postu of late rationality. For the system would be true even if many things did not show material interdependence. Even if gravitation, say, were found not to hold within intramo- lecular distances, that would only mean that a motion of atom A did not tend to effect a change of position in atom B. The ultimate nature of A would still involve the fact that it could with B constitute a molecule while B remained stationary and A moved; and this describes A by its rela- tion to B. Such relationships, formal though they seem, would be real enough, and would bear out the postulate that everything involved its environment. The absolutist admits, indeed, that in many cases the connectedness of things is hardly traceable in concrete. Says Mr. Bradley: " I believe in -a word in the implication of all aspects of reality with one another. But once more I cannot believe that we can see this implication in detail " (Essays on Truth and Reality, p. 123). And "Philosophy in my judgment cannot verify its principle in detail and throughout . . . it continues still to rest upon faith " (op. cit., p. 27). The oft-repeated statement that absolute idealism starts with no presuppositions is thus both true and false. At the 33O PRODUCTIVE DUALITY beginning, to be sure, no axiom is laid down to which reality must conform; we discover by " an ideal experiment," i. e., by reflecting upon what experience offers us, that mutual implication pervades reality. This universal principle is not ante rem but in re. Yet it is of logical tissue constituted, though not in abstracto developed, and its alleged application is wider than the range of our experience. It is distinct, though not separate, from that which it binds. We cannot explore without a light, and the light is not the same as the material which it illuminates. It is of a different blood and of an authority in its own right, and is in this sense a priori. But of course it would not be visible except it impinge upon the data of experience. We must however guard ourselves against the belief that this principle is capable of an a priori proof . Thus: deny it and you find you have already implied it. There is, we shall suppose, no dependence of A upon B. Then A will have to be defined as that which is independent of B which is to define A in terms of its relation to B which is to make A depend upon B to express its full nature. But the argument assumes the principle of interaality (cf. Chapters III and VIII), which is the very thing to be proved. We do not question the justice of that assumption, but the demon- strability of the principle. We have seen in previous dis- cussions that it is not demonstrable; it is a postulate, or object of faith or insight whichever you wish. Yet this principle is not the whole logical guide of the system. It is but the half. If it were the whole, the system would not be truly synthetic. The counterpart of mutual dependence is independence; to the principle of internal relations is opposed that of external relations. Both of these must be recognized, if we are to have genuine synthesis; neither by itself is final. The principle of internal relations THE RATIONALISTIC SYNTHESIS 331 alone would give us relativity, which is but one more partial type, and is subject to the criticisms we have made upon the other partial types. For absolutism, however, if universal interdependence is true, it is equally true that everything is itself a unique point of reality, a single and valid way of viewing the whole, not reducible to any other point. If the principle of dependence were th f e only basis of the system, each fact would be dissolved into its environment and lose its integrity. The counter-principle is needed, that each fact is what it is immediately and directly seen to be. My friend A. B. is not just a group of relations to the world, but a real being in himself. Where would be society if all its mem- bers were nothing but their relations to one another? There would be no terms to sustain the relations. Of equal im- portance with the logical postulate of the organic unity, then, is that other logical postulate of the parts. Each is real. The particular stones, trees, birds, men, planets are all real; as real as are the relations which knit them to- gether. " Any positive attribution ... to Reality must be right," says Mr. Bradley, " so long as it abstains from the denial, implicit or explicit, of something more " (Mind, 1911, p. 315). But these counterpart-principles seem to contradict each other. If an object A is the same as its relations to other things, as the principle of internal relations asserts, it is also different from those relations, for it is something positive and concrete in itself. Here arises the famous " dialectic," whose only difficulty lies in its extreme simplicity. For how can two things which are the same be different ? Call the object as viewed merely by itself, A ; call the total of its relations to other objects, X] then A and X are and con- stitute one and the same thing, that particular object, while yet they are quite distinct. Common sense sees no difficulty 332 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY in this, for common sense is sophisticated by the needs of practice and of science; it says that nothing is easier, point- ing us to one case after another of sameness-in-difference; the same piece of paper in two places successively, the same colour in two oranges, etc. But absolute idealism, with childlike directness, retorts that this explains nothing. One still does not understand how two entities that are different can yet be the same. For if they are different, the one is not the other; if they are the same, the one is the other and that gives unalloyed contradiction. Contradiction " con- sists in ' differents ' being ascribed to the same term, while no distinction is alleged within that term such as to make it capable of receiving them " (Bosanquet, Principles of Individuality and Value, p. 224). Into the merits of the dialectic we do not yet enter. Enough that it is conceived as a logical instrument, not an aesthetic or practical one. It is used to show that the objects in the world are not truly understood when they are repre- sented as a system of terms in relations. True thought, or as Hegel called it, Reason, must solve the contradiction; it must see the universe as a great organism in which the union of parts is so intimate as to pass beyond the relational scheme. Yet this intimacy does not preclude distinctness of the parts. Ordinary thought isolates its objects and dwells in abstractions, and it cannot see how the many may be one, the different terms identical; true thought would enable us to see the unity-in-difference of the concrete whole, which alone is. Mr. Bradley, who accepts a nar- rower definition of thought, regards this higher insight as above the intellect; Mr. Bosanquet, like Hegel, defines thought in a broader fashion and considers it as the organon of reality. (Cf. Bosanquet's Logic, 2d ed., II, pp. 292, 293.) But for all three, the motive which leads to, even if it THE RATIONALISTIC SYNTHESIS 333 does not consummate, the discovery of this absolute whole, is a logical one. And the two later Hegelians agree that this vision cannot be made articulate or explained in detail. We have analogies for it, as we have for the fourth dimension. In feeling of a cube with my hand touching all its sides I get a sense of the many faces and of their unity in one object. And we may conceive a vision of this sort which would em- brace the universe in one such immediate group. This " higher synthesis " or " higher immediacy " would re- semble the lower immediacy of sense, but would contain also the distinctions discovered by analytic thought. Yet it is only analogically that we may speak here. This whole is not given to us nor explicable in detail. Mr. Bradley's mode of argument for it in his main work, Appearance and Reality, is significant. He shows that it can be, and that it must be, and therefore that it is. He does not straightway show us that it is. He could not do so, for the Absolute is approached indirectly and by a logical postulate. We are not here impugning the truth of the system, but seeking to characterize it. And the same rationalistic quality is revealed from another side. The present syn- thesis is idealistic, and its idealism, true to the original intent of Hegel, has always been predominantly logical. For the proof of idealism which the system offers is the proof of an all-inclusive Knower; it is not a proof of an all-inclusive desire, or emotion, or will. Not that his will and his feeling are reduced to a kind of knowing, as was the case in Great Subjectivism. Great Subjectivism is not a true synthesis and does not place all aspects of personality on a par. The present view is no asymmetrical one. " We are hence mis- taken," says Mr. Bradley, " when we attempt to set up any one aspect of our nature as supreme, and to regard the other aspects merely as conducive and as subject to its rule " 334 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY (Essays, p. 3). The present type, however, finds that the logical aspect of the Absolute is the aspect which gives him his title of all-inclusive spirit. The argument for his reality is that the universe must logically be a many-in-one, whereas the only thing that can be a many-in-one is a mind. For a mind, as we saw in the last chapter, can unite the temporally and spatially distinct in one present content. Matter, for instance, cannot display a genuine unity-in- difference: two particles are not capable of being the same particle. So of spaces, or times, or indeed of anything but mind. This argument for idealism is the exclusive property of the rationalistic synthesis. It has been, so far as we know, overlooked by realistic opponents, and is quite foreign to subjectivism. The whole is a cognitive mind just because it is a synthesis. " The ' driving force of Idealism,' as I understand it, is not furnished by the question how mind and reality can meet in knowledge, but by the theory of logical stability, which makes it plain that nothing can fulfil the conditions of self-existence except by possessing the unity which belongs only to mind " (Bosanquet, Logic, 2d ed., II, p. 322). Now the course of our reasoning has tended to show that the above is, at all events in the main, a true account of reality. As we went through the partial types, we found that they were, so far as they were positive and not exclu- sive, sound enough. The principle of internal relations we had to accept; the principle of external relations also. That the real world must be consistent, must be able to adjust these two principles harmoniously, offers no strain upon one's credulity. Yet we find that the system is rejected, not only by devotees of the partial types, but by other devotees (e. g., Thomists) who nevertheless adopt the motive of THE RATIONALISTIC SYNTHESIS 335 synthesis. How comes this to be so ? Is it their narrowness, or can we find some excuse for them ? Let us examine carefully the character of the whole, or Absolute; both in itself and in its relations to the parts. First notice that absolute idealism is not absolute mon- ism, but dualistic monism. This is a consequence of the fact that it is built upon two principles: the externality and the internality of relations. The whole is, and ultimately the whole alone is; but there is something besides what is ultimate. There is the world of appearance, the parts, the elements abstracted out by thought, and to some degree given to our experience as isolated. And the appearances are not mere illusion or negligible, but are necessary to make up the sum of reality in the whole. They are in their own way integral and real in themselves. " The value of the Whole is not separable from that of its diverse aspects, and in the end apart from any one of them it is reduced to nothing " (Bradley, Essays, p. 68). The two sides, the Absolute and its appearances, are essential, and neither is aught without the other. A pure monism would be a nega- tive mysticism, but this system is positive, recognizing all specific particulars; yes, implying them. Critics have sometimes treated the doctrine as if it made the Absolute transcend its appearances; but the relation is one of im- manence. " And when I hear, for instance, that in the Absolute all personal interests are destroyed, I think I understand on the contrary how this is the only way and the only power in and by which such interests are really safe " (op. tit., p. 249). The whole is not a destroyer but a pre- server. " No finite purpose . . . could have its place taken by another without a genuine alteration of the whole; . . . the whole would not be what it is were not precisely this 336 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY finite purpose left in its own uniqueness to speak precisely its own word. . . . You are in God; but you are not lost in God." (Royce, The World and the Individual, I, p. 465.) " I hold that all finite consciousness, just as it is in us, - ignorance, striving, defeat, error, temporality, narrowness, is all present from the Absolute point of view but is also seen in unity with the solution of problems, the attainment of goals, the overcoming of defeats . . ." (op. cit., II, p. 320). " Our sorrows are identically God's sorrows " (p. 408). " The Absolute knows all that we know, and knows it just as we know it " (ibid.}. " For not one instant can we suppose our finite experience first ' absorbed ' or ' transmuted ' and then reduced, in an ineffable fashion, to its unity in the divine life " (ibid.}. Professor Bosanquet would not go quite so far as this, though adhering to the preservation of the parts in some sense: " Transmutation, then, must be the rule in the complete experience. Everything must be there, as all the artist's failures, and the fact of failure itself, are there in his success. But they cannot be there as analyzed into temporal moments and yet drawn out unchanged into a panorama within a specious present of an immeasurable span " (Bosanquet, Principles of Individuality and Value, p. 391). At any rate, the Absolute is in no sense exclusive of the particulars; it makes all the difference in the world to them and they to it. Neither is in any degree without the other; and to this extent, both are of equal rank. The partisan types seem to have no cause of quarrel, for the parts are fairly admitted. But the duality of absolute idealism has further conse- quences. In spite of assertions to the contrary, there is a certain gulf between the Absolute and its appearances. It is admitted that we who live in the parts do not see how they are combined into the whole. We do not see why every fact THE RATIONALISTIC SYNTHESIS 337 implies every other fact. The Absolute is " inscrutable " and it is inscrutable because the mode of synthesis, the logical implication which binds the parts together while keeping them distinct, is not clear to us. We believe it must be, perhaps, but we do not see that it is done. With this belief one need not quarrel; it is not the truth of absolutism that we shall deny, but its sufficiency. The inability to see how the whole is made up means that the system cannot furnish a transition from the parts to the whole. There lies a moat which our understanding cannot bridge. And pre- cisely as we cannot pass from the parts to the whole, do we fail to discern the nature of the process by which the whole gives off the parts, generating the realm of appearance. Given a unity, how can that unity ever come to split itself up, to give rise to the abstractions, the separations, in which we live and move and think ? From the one you cannot explain the many, as from the many you cannot derive the one. The appearances in their separation really appear, and their separate appearance is a fact really distinct from the whole which does not as such in any abstraction appear, but simply is. How does the ultimate reality come to shatter itself into the parts which appear ? The way downward is no clearer than the way upward. This is, of course, but the modern way of putting the old problem of evil. If God is perfect, how can he give birth to imperfect creatures, or how can they aspire to union with Him ? To be sure, the system insists that we must not thus separate the absolute and its appearances. Neither side of the duality would be what it is, were it not for the other; they " interpenetrate " and " fuse." Our answer is that we wish to understand the matter: and we cannot see how they could even interpenetrate unless they were in some way distinct. If no blank monism, then duality; and if duality, 338 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY then, in spite of formal declarations, as far as our under- standing can go, we have mutual indifference. Only the exercise of supreme faith can assure us of the fusion. And the intellect, of all things, cannot live by faith alone. It must have sight, and sight is denied it. Whole and parts are not specifically shown to influence each other; we see only their indifference. Philosophy demonstrates the Absolute, and science demonstrates the particular facts of the world; and each is in its detail irrelevant to the other. " Philosophy like other things has a business of its own, and like other things it is bound, and it must be allowed, to go about its own business in its own way. Except within its own limits it claims no supremacy " (Bradley, Essays, p. 15). Yes, even the various sciences are more or less indifferent to one another. " And hence the main aspects of our being must be allowed, each for itself, to have a relative independence . . . every aspect within its own realm is in a certain sense supreme and is justified in resisting dictation from without " p. 10). What then has become of the reciprocal implication of the parts ? Our philosophy, in short, does not so far as we can see owe anything to the fact that light is an electrical process rather than a corpuscular one, or that man is more akin to the apes than to the reptiles; nor does it in any way contribute to explain these peculiarities. And similarly, the well-being of the Absolute has no bearing that we can trace, upon the good or ill-fortune of the human race, or any mem- ber thereof. " The ' good ' of the universe must be such as belongs to a world and not to the member of one " (Bosan- quet, Principles of Individuality and Value, p. 24.) " We are . . . not fitted to be absolute ends " (p. 25). Indeed, the rationalistic synthesis does not deny the fis- sure we have been speaking of. Not only is the understand- ing of the connection between the two sides of the dualism THE RATIONALISTIC SYNTHESIS 339 impossible ; it is frankly declared to be undesirable. " Those for whom philosophy has to explain everything," says Mr. Bradley when summarizing his doctrine, " need therefore not trouble themselves with my views " (Essays, p. 246). It would be unworthy to seek to discover from philosophy the answer to questions of human welfare. " We put the whole inquiry in a wrong perspective, and lose its truth and its significance, if we make some special form of human destiny the unspoken interest of our arguments; if, one might say, when we refer to the Absolute we are really thinking of Heaven. We should not expect metaphysic to predict terrestrial history; and still less, therefore, that which lies beyond the grave " (Bosanquet, op. cit., p. 268). And Professor Royce tells us that " the demand for a direct sign from heaven is not the abiding expression, either of the religious or of the philosophical consciousness " (op. cit., II, p. 6). " What religion practically gives to the faithful is not the means for predicting what is about to happen to them- selves, but the strength to endure hardness as good soldiers " (ibid.). " Religious faith involves no direct access to the special counsels of God " (ibid.). And again " Philosophy is as unable to formulate a thesis in the realms properly be- longing to physics or to biology as it is to build a steam- engine " (p. 7). And there is a certain nobility about these utterances. They declare the dignity of philosophy, its austerity, its aloofness from the vulgar. The head of the house cannot be expected to sweep his own doorstep. Yet, if we seek analogies, the captain of a ship must have gone through the training of the foremast hand. For that matter, philosophy is not held to be quite indifferent to human weak- ness; the faith in God should give us " strength to endure hardness as good soldiers " and contemplation of the Abso- lute restores one's faith. But it does not justify the partic- 340 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY ular pursuits or guarantee the particular ends, any more than it accounts for the specific detail of reality. The trouble is that absolutism has set a problem which it cannot solve. If it were a mere blank monism, it would not do so; but it is dualistic, offering both whole and parts, and asserting that they imply each other, while yet unable to explain how. Or if it had these two aspects side by side and indifferent to each other, then too there would be no un- solved problem. But it insists that they are not indifferent; each involves and is the other. Now, to affirm that a certain thing is so and to announce in the same breath that we can never see how it is so, is to offer to intellect the cup of Tan- talus. Doubtless it is a noble exercise of faith to retain our belief in the synthetic unity; but, resolve as we may, faith cannot endure without some support from sight. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick ; and it is not just our human weakness, but the system's refusal to answer the legitimate call of the universal for its counterpart, the specific, that must sooner or later lead to a revolt. In the absolutist's point of view, the philosopher is one whose intellectual life is forever work, with no rest. Of course we are told that we ought not to wish for specific explanation. By what author- ity ? Who can dictate to the fundamental passions ? That is but an attempt to sanction the incapacity of the system. We do want to connect the parts in detail and to see how they are interwoven to make up the whole, and nothing can erase that want. We do want to see how the whole comes to have just these particular parts that it has. We do require that the light of heaven be used to illuminate the detail of objects upon earth. The system itself may be admitted to be true. Many of the accusations which are today hurled against it that the Absolute is static, transcendent, abstract, etc. are, we THE RATIONALISTIC SYNTHESIS 34! believe, due to lack of comprehension. The concept of the Absolute is perhaps the most positive which it has entered into the mind of man to conceive. It is as dynamic as time itself, for it includes all time. But it is not fertile. It claims to synthesize, by force of logic, the parts of the world; yet when we would see the detailed process of the synthesis, we are told that we ought, as philosophers, to be indifferent to the details. How can we be content with such indifference when we know that the reality which we seek to understand is not indifferent to them ? The absolutists would simply quench our desires because they have no means of satisfying them. Since the reality of the whole gives no clew to the more or less independent parts, absolutism meets here a critical point. It is unable, on its principle that the whole is real, to do justice to the real appearance of the parts, as they come to our experience in relative isolation. Now the parti- san systems, as we saw, are based upon the apotheosis of one or another of these parts. It follows that absolutism does not truly include those systems; their edges fall within its circle, but their centres lie outside. Absolutism admits that the parts are as such real, but it always adds that the part in its isolation is not actual, the abstract not real. Hence it does not grant the one point which each partial type con- tends for, viz., that its own basis is real, by and for itself alone, and not by virtue of its connection with something else. Absolutism, of course, could not grant this: it has no genuine appreciation of the motive of independence. In a formal manner it grants the thing but it does not grant it in the way in which the partisan demands it as self-sufficient. Accordingly, we may say that the critical point of the pres- ent system is the detail, the parts. It cannot account for their appearance as fragments. The partisan, indignant at 342 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY being nominally included but really denied, is bound to revolt from the synthetic point of view. Or, if he still reveres the largeness of its ideal, he will protest at the inade- quacy of the logical type of synthesis, and seek another. If he chooses the first alternative and goes back to some one of the earlier types, an interminable seesaw threatens between the part-motive and the whole-motive. If, seeing the fatality of this, he chooses the second alternative, he pro- ceeds to such a form of synthesis, probably, as we shall take up in the next chapter. But in any case the claim of absolut- ism to be a final, satisfactory answer to the philosophic question, is seen to be specious. The above critical point may be called the external one; there is a second, which we may designate internal to the type. Absolutism makes much of the dialectic. It finds that the part-types, and the particular facts of reality, contain ruinous contradictions. In subjectivism, for instance: the reduction of the object to a phase of the subject is alleged to contradict the self-existence of the object. And of any fact it appears that to identify it with its relations contradicts its own self-sufficient reality. The axiom of internal rela- tions conflicts with the axiom of external relations. As has been pointed out, there is an endless tilt between the two so far as yet seen they can never, by our reason, be har- monized. All the endless tilts which have been brought to our notice are but manifestations of this same dialectic, this opposition never peacefully adjusted. Now the synthetic type claims to be the only one able to effect the adjustment. It would do so by declaring that each part-type implies its opposite, each particular fact its environment. It thus appears to remove the exclusion which made each conflict with the other. But we have tried to show that the syn- thesis was never made plain in concrete. That every fact THE RATIONALISTIC SYNTHESIS 343 does imply its environment was not, in general, proved. Certain obvious instances, taken from social life and gravi- tation, have been brought forward ; but the mutual implica- tion was never shown to be universal. How the white paper before me implies the orbit of Saturn, for example, has not been made clear and by the candid admission of Mr. Bradley, cannot be made clear. Consequently, we must confess that the synthesis which should unite the dialectical opposites cannot be made clear. The principle of internal relations cannot be shown consistent with that of external relations. Having once affirmed that the sameness of sub- ject and predicate contradicts their difference, the absolutist cannot show how to supersede the contradiction. He simply asserts that it must be done, suggesting such analogies as the unity of immediate feeling, etc. But in all honesty he is bound to acknowledge that we cannot understand how the subject involves the predicate without losing its own iden- tity. He is driven to say, as Mr. Bradley says, that thought is incapable by itself of attaining reality. Or if, with Hegel and Mr. Bosanquet, he believes that thought can attain reality, then he is no better off, for he cannot make clear to our thought how thought does it. The dialectic is not intel- ligibly overcome. It is an internal knot in the system which the system cannot untie, a kink which threatens to break its wire; an internal critical point which we can formally but not effectively pass. Formally, because we may insist that the dialectic is solved by reality itself must indeed so insist; but this is a promise which is never materialized. The thing is never, so far as we can see, accomplished. Seen from this point of view, absolutism is confronted by a new opposite, skepticism; for the breakdown of faith is immi- nent when it is never rewarded with sight. In this ironic fashion does the Hegelian dialectic apply to the Hegelian 344 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY system itself. The claim of finality is replaced by the claim of despair. If we thought to know everything in all its rounded completeness, we now find that we know, and can know, nothing. And all this, because we could not solve the dialectic. The disease of philosophy reappears as before and the system plays into the hands of its opponents. But to absolutism belongs the credit of having made the disease explicit. Mysticism also did this; but mysticism at once dodged the issue. It did not try to solve the contradic- tions; it ran away from them. The rational synthesis is more manly; it tried to make clear the mode of solution. It failed, yes: but it recognized, as no other system had yet done, the necessity of grappling directly with the malady. It saw that the solution of the antinomies is the adjustment of the age-long disagreements of all the philosophic types; that in no other way could the perennial strife be stilled. Hence- forth philosophy must seek a point of view which will show clearly and specifically how one aspect of reality can be peacefully fused with its counter-aspect. At this point the following reflections naturally arise. Having failed to find a logical cement for the construction of the synthesis, why not seek another kind ? Perhaps the mistake of the rational type of synthesis was due to its starting from a general postulate; for the particulars must ever be a critical point to the universal. Let us then make a new start; and this time from the side of the particulars. The way in which one particular leads to another will now be not the un verifiable one of rational implication, but the verifiable ones which are furnished by the concrete expe- rience of life. No aspirations after the ideals of logic, un- revealed in fact, will be our guide; rather the dry facts of daily life and common experience. In short, let us adopt not a theoretical but a practical point of view. Perhaps the THE RATIONALISTIC SYNTHESIS 345 practical categories will suggest to us an understanding of the way in which opposites, counterparts, indeed all facts, are combined into a perfect whole. Such a synthesis we find in the official philosophy of Roman Catholicism: a blend, in the main, of the system of the practical and empirical Aristotle with the Roman genius of organization. CHAPTER X THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM way upon which philosophy here enters is one to JL which about half the professional thinkers of today the Protestant half pay scant attention. Yet we shall show that it is, in a rudimentary form at least, commonly traversed as commonly, perhaps, and as unconsciously, as the ether through which the earth passes. But it is not an outgrowth of science, or of reflection upon science; and in a scientific age like the present, the vivid hues of ration- alism and empiricism obscure its prosaic colours and we do not realize that we are using it. To understand its claims, to estimate impartially their validity, is no easy task for the Protestant who prides himself on the independence and self- sufficiency of his thought. Nevertheless, a humbler attitude on his part might enable him to learn something new; for in despising the Catholic position he misses large areas of human experience. The platform from which we are now to view the world is so different from those hitherto occupied, that it seems at first view hostile to the just demands of intellect, yes, even a remnant of superstition. Such is the usual Protestant belief about it; and if we would correct the error, it is necessary to go back to fundamentals. Let us then begin by recalling some of the motives which lead to the synthetic attitude. Some day we learn, if our eyes are open, that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. The words of the poet might be uttered by a partisan type, repenting of its narrowness. The world is too 346 THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 347 large to be comprehended under one formula. The sub- jective idealist at length sees that the term " human mind " affords no clew to the understanding of Nature. The materialist discovers that radio-activity and the electrons give no prospect of accounting for the laws of consciousness. The nominalist comes to acknowledge that if everything actual is individual, it is impossible to explain the uniformi- ties in the world. And thus, we may imagine, every partisan realizes that the true system will be one which combines all the factions; for nothing else can be adequate to the wealth of reality. But the synthesis must go further. The parts which form this stupendous whole are together. They are more or less interlaced; they often act upon one another; many of them betray, in their very make-up, the presence of their fellows. The ocean's tides show the pull of the moon, and the policy of the United States to Japan indicates the policy of Japan to the United States. How far this mutual implication reaches, experience does not reveal; certainly the inter- penetration of all things, after the Hegelian manner, has not been verified. Yet though we find no clinching proof of this interpenetration, we cannot wholly strangle a belief that there is some real bond between all the parts. The monistic impulse, defeated in the Hegelian campaign, still agitates our thought. " If we could but find the right point of departure," it urges, " we should discover the linkage. Logic, science, reason, it must be admitted, have not been able to find it. The principle of internal relations is in many cases but a formality. But the intellectual point of view is not the only one. The scientific mood has weight; and you, living in a scientific age, are so awed by it that you dare not whisper of any sanctions but those of reason. But man has entirely different moods, when considerations of 348 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY practice and of value hold sway. Man is more than a thinker, he is a doer. And the practical moods are in fact more frequent, and even more dominating; yes, they give more insight into life." We learn best about the world by living in it. To take hold of the lever and run the engine is to know it better than by the contemplation of a blue-print. To deal with men in buying, selling, organizing, teaching, is to understand men better than by psychologizing. The difference between the scientific and practical moods is the difference between theoretical knowledge and wisdom. The man of practical wisdom will perchance discover connec- tions in this universe which disinterested observation or calculation in their aloofness are unable to discern. Let us then see how a practical attitude might find some ground for uniting the parts into a whole, which the ra- tionalist has overlooked. Make the practical attitude thoroughgoing. Conceive the world as a theatre, wherein a drama of persons is being enacted; not as a " complex " of sequences and coexistences, but an arena. Abandon the third-person view; consider the world in the light of the first and second. Struggles, con- summations, goods sought, attained, prevented, thwarted by evils, overcome and overcoming : these will be the central events of the universe, and the nature of every fact will be estimated by the part it plays in such a drama. The cate- gories which we must needs use in order to successful dealing with men and things these are the true ones. Even if we do not understand the raison d'etre of these categories, they are to be accepted. Good judgment, sound common sense, are more fruitful guides than science. For instance: a rigid determinism cannot be true, because in our intercourse with men we have to treat them, to a certain extent, as free beings. Also, causality will be in its own province meta- THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 349 physically ultimate, since we adapt ourselves to nature only by predicting effects. Science, as Hume showed, is unable logically to derive effect from cause; but practice sees nevertheless that the connection is a necessary one. So, too, of our belief in the external world. It is impossible scientifically to prove, from the subjective phenomena, that there is a real external world. There is no logical link con- necting subjective and objective realms. But practically one must assume the reality of both. To common sense it is evident enough that our states of mind are directed upon an outer reality. And so, in general, we may say that a practi- cal attitude sees that one side of life should be supplemented by another because both are needed, for working purposes, for the f idlest realization of life. They minister to the drama. The platform has, perhaps, but one plank; but it is a very solid one, for a tremendous structure will be found resting thereon. That plank is the principle, that whatever min- isters deeply, or indispensably, to life, is to be believed real. At once the reader will say " But this is pragmatism over again! " No: it differs profoundly from that view. Or, to avoid a verbal quarrel, let us say that it differs from the view which above we expounded under the name pragma- tism. The main difference is that pragmatism is wholly a scientific position, while this is not. Pragmatism taking its cue from biology, considers the true to be the hypothesis which is found to cohere with the rest of our experience. By acting upon the hypothesis we test this coherence; and its truth cannot be assumed until the test has been made. The method is through and through experimental. But our type is not one of trial-and-error. It does not wait for decision by results; it does not hold its decisions subject to revision. It has none of that hatred of absolutism and dogmatism with which pragmatism burns. On the contrary, 350 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY it is rather dogmatic; it considers its doctrines to be ulti- mate. The practical animus of common sense justifies its own dogmatic certainty. Certainty must not be delayed until such time as we can test its coherence; for in coping with the emergencies of life we need knowledge at once. Indecision means inaction; but action is necessary to our continued existence. In short, our present view believes that the practical attitude has in itself an immediate means of discovering final truth; it claims to possess a distinct organ of truth, as eye is distinct from touch. And as we see beyond the limits of touch, so this attitude will learn what it is beyond experimental science to ascertain. Other dif- ferences there are, consequent upon this one; they will appear in the sequel. But the above is, we believe, the crucial distinction between it and pragmatism. When we speak of a distinct organ of truth we do not mean a kind of mystical insight, contemning reason. The devotees of practical synthesis use reason ; historically, none have used it more than they. But they use it to subserve always the demands of practice. Reason renders articulate and applicable to life what the practical attitude vouch- safes to it ; it is, in fact, indispensable to a well-ordered life. But it is secondary rather than primary: it is to be trusted because it is one of our normal faculties. No scientific scheme underlies the practical philosophy, as biology under- lies pragmatism, or the transcendental argument underlies idealism. The general principle is that the wise philosopher will be just to all interests, so far as without inconsistency he may. And consistency is respected, of course, for good practical reasons. Life is broad, and one who lives it best must adapt himself to all sides of it. We may almost understand why this motto of one who fares forth in the world has become THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 351 well-nigh extinct among non-Catholic philosophers; for, as we have so often found, their philosophy has tended to glory in its separation from the concrete details of life. But the sojourner through this vale of tears, when he turns phi- losopher, has a distinct message; and we may expect that sooner or later the non-religious thinker will rediscover it. For it has a positive content all its own. It is not to be ex- plained away as using a lesser degree of reason, but to be distinguished as showing a greater degree of good judgment. This counsel of prudence, so vague, so willing to embrace all as to seem almost colourless, nevertheless becomes the most virile and uncompromising when it solidifies. For it does solidify, as we scrutinize it; it congeals, first into the broad code of common sense and then, in a more mature philosophic age, into a religious dogmatism. To be sure, these two are not usually considered blood-relatives. Yet what is common sense but the summary name for the knowl- edge of the practically-minded, when he reflects upon mundane matters ? And what is religious truth but the embodiment of our practical needs at their greatest depth and in the longest run ? Religion seeks ultimate salvation, while common sense looks for worldly welfare a more immediate well-being. Thus a religious philosophy is the maturest form of the practical type. Let us dwell on these points for a moment. Common sense is an attitude of mind which believes what recommends itself immediately to the sane, normal person, to the person who can " get on " in life. It is based upon practical rather than scientific or artistic grounds. It does not in the first instance stand for a clear-cut body of doctrine, though where it does believe it is very positive. It is not to be confused with the common stock of knowledge in a given age. That depends on education, the prevailing bent of that 352 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY age's development, or other accidents; while common sense has varied but little since the dawn of history. Thus, the atomic theory is not a matter of common sense, however universally it be accepted. The Copernican theory and the Darwinian theory are not decided by common sense; yet they are almost commonplaces in our age. These things are not common sense because they are not capable of imme- diate decision on practical grounds. The eminent scientist, notoriously, is often lacking in common sense; so too the great artist. It is the " hard-headed " man of action to whom we look for the greater degree of that faculty, akin as it is to the wordly virtue of shrewdness. Hear its de- scription by a professed defender, and note the prominence of the practical categories in it. " This inward light or sense is given by heaven to different persons in different degrees. There is a certain degree of it which is necessary to our being subjects of law and government, capable of manag- ing our own affairs, and answerable for our conduct towards others : this is called common sense, because it is common to all men with whom we can transact business, or call to account for their conduct " (Thomas Reid, On the Intellect- ual Powers, Essay 6, ch. 2: edition of Hamilton, I, p. 422). Common sense does not seek scientific proof of its tenets, though it is not necessarily hostile to that. It is dogmatic; it regards what it sees as self-evident to a sane mind. Com- mon sense asserts the reality of external objects, of our fellow-men's minds, of the categories we seem to use in daily life, such as cause, free choice, substance, purpose, individual, universal, law, possibility, necessity, personality, soul, etc. It does not feel obliged to deduce these categories from a single source; they are deemed valid because they are part of life. Common sense however respects reason; it believes that reason, properly used, confirms these assertions. In THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 353 fact, it often uses the term " reasonable " as the seal of its approval. It is not radical for radicalism generally con- notes one-sidedness but conservative; it is synthetic, because life is many-sided and it is the great guide of life. It looks pragmatic, but (as above noted) its breadth and vagueness prevent it from reducing all reality to one for- mula, as pragmatism tends to do. It is objective-minded, and it respects the laws of logic as ends-in- themselves; it justifies both theory and practice, art, beauty, and religion all the main roads by which man makes progress. It is optimistic, yet not unpleasantly so; it does not explain away evil. In short, it is a genuinely synthetic position, which points out the many truths and realities of the uni- verse, sees that they are sufficiently defined, and shows that reason, while not deducing them out of nothing, or out of one another, yet reveals their harmony and mutual confirmation. And its appeal is always, in the last analysis, to that inexact but indispensable faculty, sane judgment. Most philosophers and scientists nowadays probably re- gard common sense as uncritical and below the level of the serious search for truth. This is a radical misunderstanding. Common sense is not to be compared quantitatively with scientific demonstration; the two are incommensurable, disparate. To ask which is better is like asking " which is truer, vision or touch ? " The exclusive rationalist, rating common sense as a lesser degree of thought, stands upon a dogma as incapable of proof as common sense's dogmas; upon a dogma, moreover, which his daily life denies. As a matter of fact, most of the important objects of every-day belief have never been scientifically tested often could not be tested, indeed. Your mind has never been demon- strated to me; yet I believe in it with a certainty far exceed- ing the strength of that argument from analogy by which I 354 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY try to justify the belief. The external world itself cannot be proved real; but I feel that to doubt it would be insane. Do not these two categories of reality cover the larger por- tion of human experience ? Common sense is inevitably trusted; in comparison with the sum of its deliverances, science has scarcely more than touched the fringe of our body of knowledge. But it is no part of common sense to reciprocate the hostility of reason; it is synthetic. It has a deep-seated confidence that reason cannot in the end conflict with its decisions, even as reason cannot disprove the validity of our sense-experience. In the history of philosophy, common-sense systems are not infrequent. One instance appeared during the period of Graeco-Roman skepticism, under the name eclecticism. There it was a reaction against the keen refutation proffered by Pyrrho and others, of the possibility of knowledge. If Pyrrhonism showed that we cannot demonstrate an ex- ternal world, our fellows, or God, eclecticism replied that a sane practical attitude does not need demonstration of them, but finds them self-evident. Much later, the same tendency appeared in the thinkers of the " Scottish school," Reid, Stewart, et al. Unfortunately, neither of these schools prosecuted their inquiries in a thoroughgoing manner. The eclectics were hampered by the material unrest of their times, and the Scots were bound down by the narrowness of their interests. Reid and his allies, like most English- speaking philosophers, were too exclusively occupied with the problem of knowledge to institute studies of the objec- tive universe. The Intellectual Powers of Man and the Active Powers of Man furnish but little evidence on the prob- lems of causality, possibility, contingency, eternity and time, God, immortality. A better articulated instance of the common-sense position is found in a later philosopher, THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 355 whose Scottish descent combined with his Teutonic training to develop the practical motive into a clear-cut system. At the same time this philosopher's love of independence and of scientific demonstration prevented him from carrying the common-sense attitude into the second and deeper form of the practical motive, viz., an objective religious synthesis; for that reason the system of Kant is a transition between the two forms of the practical motive. It will be instruc- tive to consider it for a moment in this light; for by learn- ing wherein Kant fell short of the latter we may better comprehend the full-fledged practical synthesis. A large part, and that too a central part, of the Kantian philosophy might fairly be characterized by the epithet sublimated common sense. "Sublimated" we say, because the common sense of most men would hardly consider Kant's doctrine self-evident; but it stands for an attenuated form of what is self-evident. Thus, for instance, did the doctrine of things-in-themselves. The real objects, inde- pendent of our perception, correspond to a common sense motive; but they are refined away to an existence without character to which the ordinary man's common sense could attach little significance. Kant's motive for believing in these things could hardly have been anything but a practical one; he cannot be said to have offered a serious logical plea for what " it had never entered his head to doubt." The " refutation of idealism " can hardly be held to justify the Dinge an sich. Kant himself felt that Berkeleyanism was wrong, as we may see from his phrase " a scandal to phi- losophy." The main stem of his system, however in an at least respectable interpretation of that many-faced entity was his ethical doctrine; and in that, the practical motive attains a clear primacy. If the needs of daily conduct form the basis of most common-sense assumptions, the needs of 356 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY ideal or moral conduct might be said to constitute a sub- limated practical motive. Common sense here becomes, or if you please, is transformed into an altogether unworldly attitude. We say " is transformed into " in order to express the sublimation, the almost evaporation, we would desig- nate. Yet the practical element is continuous throughout the transition. Dogmatically Kant declares that we have an " ought " which we feel drawn to obey; nor does he care to deduce or defend this category. It is what any normal man would admit; it is the practical basis of living, in the best sense of living, viz., the living of a personal life which distinguishes man from the animals. And on this practical- dogmatic we have not said erroneous base, Kant rears his argument for God and for immortality. Since we need infinite tune in order to realize full moral perfection, im- mortality is a practical implicate of the moral life. It is not a logical implication of facts. Morality ought to be, indeed, a verifiable experience, says Kant; but immortality is not, in any actual sense, entailed by morality. It cannot be demonstrated, as a scientific certainty for the future. It enlarges our knowledge, to be certain that we are immortal ; yet Kant repeatedly insists, only in a practical, not in an ontological sense. And the same is true with regard to God's existence. That too is a demand of the moral life, in the sense that without a Just Judge moral effort, success, or failure, would be meaningless. Yet God is no fixed fact which we can by reason demonstrate. We have not on- tological certainty, but practical certainty or as we, unconsciously illustrating the doctrine, say today, moral certainty of his reality; no scientific use can be made of it, nothing can be inferred from it. Such is the rarified common sense, or higher practicality, of the Kantian system. THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 357 But it falls just short of a genuine practical doctrine. For it is not truly synthetic; and the practical motive is syn- thetic. Witness the limitations which Kant imposed on his own results. He included the supersensuous world, together with the sense-world, in the kingdom of reality an apparent synthesis and he did it by the practical method; but he was not willing to accept that method un- reservedly. He comes ever so near to doing so, but he stops just this side of the full practical synthesis. For in the full practical synthesis, a moral certainty is of an objective reality. The reader is only tantalized by Kant's assurance that our " practical certainty " of God and immortality is quite as certain as any scientific certainty can be, for Kant always adds that it is a different kind of certainty, and does not have ontological validity. Reason in its practical use is eternally distinct from reason in its theoretic use; it gives no knowledge of facts; we cannot use it to learn any further facts. Herein Kant's system remains, like Plato's, no real synthesis after all. It fails to take the final step, and tends to slip back into the class of partisan types. That it did not quite slip back, is due, one naturally supposes, to the taste Kant had gotten of the delights of synthesis. But the net result was that Kant offered to the world a system in un- stable equilibrium ; unstable because built on compromises. A compromise is such a combination of two complementary views as includes one, or both, emasculated; and the in- justice of the emasculation is sure to lead to a revolt. Hence, of course, we were bound to have the exclusive choice of the practical side, without the objectivity-factor, in Fichte; of the intellectual side in the rationalistic idealists, as seen in our third chapter; neither choice retaining the synthetic motive. And in order to appreciate the equilibration which the complete practical synthesis will offer us, we had best 358 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY pause for a moment and consider the manner of Kant's compromise, as shown in one of its most important instances. This is the " solution " of the third antinomy. There is a deadlock between determinism and freedom and Kant would combine them in harmony. He decided that they may be so combined if the freedom and the necessity are relegated to different aspects. Every deed that a man does is determined; it must happen just when, where, and as it does. Yet a deed which is performed as in accord with the moral law is a free deed. Viewed as expression of man's rational self, of his true personality, the " noumenon," it is a free act; viewed as a phenomenon in space and time it is a determined occurrence. Now it is easy to see and many have noticed it that this putting of freedom over into the " intelligible aspect " of the matter is an emasculation of freedom. Kant defines it thus in order to admit it; as if one should show his friendliness to an enemy by inviting him to his table bound and gagged. The enemy cannot eat, nor can the free act show its freedom. The phenomenon had to appear as and when it did, and there was nothing undeter- mined about it. It is but a euphemism, a respectable name to cover impotence; a form of prudery, after all, to which the compromising temper, and too often the moral as well, is prone. Doubtless this method will continue as long as man's native false modesty continues; for it at bottom ex- presses the same instinct as that which leads men ever to seek softer words to designate the disreputable and unmen- tionable. Of this type also is the idealism which defines matter as object-for-mind, but makes all mind dependent upon body. It is to all intents and purposes materialism; for the laws of matter are given the reins, and how should it avail that the reins are defined in ideal terms ? They drive as effectually under one definition as under another. THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 359 Such " reconciliation " of religion and science as that of F. Paulsen belongs in the same pillory. Science is to have the decision on all questions of fact, and religion is given per- mission to interpret those facts optimistically. But since the very probable destruction of this earth and all that therein is can hardly be interpreted as a divine consumma- tion, it seems that religion's part is here as void as is free- dom's in the Kantian programme. We can be optimists only by forgetting the inevitable end. At bottom, indeed, these solutions are not honest. It would be better to ac- knowledge that they are partisan views. And in fact Kant's successors were, until the grand synthesis of Hegel, frankly partisan. When Kant sublimated common sense into the practical postulates, he forsook the spirit of common sense; for that faculty would not hesitate to say that what is certain is a fact, and can be used for scientific, theoretical purposes as much as for moral ones. The true perfection of the common- sense synthesis is found in a doctrine which gives ontological validity to the objects of religion. Yet the name common sense is hardly adequate to these high flights of the human mind. The chief guide is not logic, to be sure; it is still of a practical nature. What then fulfills the requirement of being a sufficient, though not a logical guide, to answer man's religious wants ? What alone provides the firmness which ensures that unanimity necessary to a practical, working, organized religion, i. e., to a conduct of life ad- justed to the deepest needs of man ? The reply is obvious: dogma. And dogma, to have a sufficient sanction, must be called revelation. Yet the revelation, if it is to be a work- able one, must not be hostile to reason; it must be capable of clear-cut expression, must be shown consistent with the facts of science and the methods of logic; yes, even on occa- 360 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY sion must be susceptible of demonstration by reason. It belongs to the very nature of a practical synthesis that it includes reason as well as revelation; for reason is one of our organs of truth, though not the only organ, and the exclusion of reason cannot long satisfy the human mind. A body of religious dogma, authoritative and revealed, clearly artic- ulated, supported, and sometimes even proved by reason such alone is able to constitute the full-fledged type of a practical synthesis. Only such a corpus rdigionis can answer man's fundamental practical need, i. e., his need of adjust- ing his soul to the environment of eternity. Herein then the practical synthesis assumes its maturer form, the religious synthesis. In regard to questions of this terrestrial sphere, common sense is guide enough; in regard to ultimate ques- tions of life and destiny, revealed religion is the only form which the practical motive may assume. The complete practical synthesis will then unite these two. Such a syn- thesis we find in the system which was the culmination of scholastic thought, the system of St. Thomas Aquinas. The aim of philosophy during the mediaeval period was in the main a practical one. It was slow in showing its dom- inant motive; it had to pass through many partisan types before it could come, as Hegel would say, to clear self- consciousness. Augustine's declaration of self as the original certainty, Eriugena's pantheism, Abelard's conceptualism, Anselm's rationalistic proof of God, and many other one- sided tendencies, had first to be lived through. The partisan Plato was on the whole the inspiration of its youth; only toward the period of its ripeness did the more practical and more synthetic Aristotle begin to assume his sway. It was, indeed, bound to be so ; for Aristotle was the philosopher of common sense and the adjuster of the quarrel, which Plato originated and inflamed, between the real and the ideal. THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 361 Aristotle alone could be the minister of a doctrine which must be received by a working, organized Church. And when we remember that the spiritual progenitors of the Catholic system outside Christianity were Aristotle and Rome both preeminent among the ancients for their practical inclination we see that the philosophy of the Church was predestined to the character in question. It would not have been possible for an organization which aimed to control the life of man to embrace either a partisan type or a rationalistic synthesis. The system of Aquinas is, by common consent, the sum- ming up of the whole period. In one respect it surpasses even Aristotle; it includes the motive of dogma, or revela- tion. Aristotle had been trained by Plato, and was but one remove from that great rationalist; Aquinas was trained by both Plato and Aristotle, and in addition got from Chris- tianity the respect for the revealed Word. To rest in dogma is, as we shall see, no negative principle, but a positive one ; and is inextricably entwined with thought and action. Con- sequently the synthesis performed by Aquinas is broader than Aristotle's, though perhaps not, on the purely logical side, so tightly concatenated. It was in fact just the super- lative breadth of the former thinker's philosophy which enabled it to receive the highest human award which may be bestowed, viz., adoption as the official system of an institu- tion whose aim is to succour in all ways the life of man. The Roman Catholic Church, noted for its practical wisdom, early discerned the fitness of the Thomistic synthesis for the needs of men, and it has never found reason to reverse that decision. It is not, we believe, the subtlety of Thomas though subtlety there is in plenty nor the learning though it is astonishing but the largeness, the many- sidedness, and at the same time the practicability, the 362 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY common-sense reasonableness, that made his system so acceptable. Contrast it, for instance, with that of Duns Scotus: the British thinker, though powerful, did not combine revelation and reason, but tended to separate them and to give each its own sphere without interference from the other. Herein the Doctor Subtilis anticipates a little of the Kantian compromise. He offers no real synthesis. St. Thomas, on the other hand, allowed to revelation and reason both distinction and union; they are different methods, but they often give the same results, and they directly support each other. Of course we cannot attempt in a brief account to do jus- tice to this gigantic product. In characterizing the system as a practical system, we but call attention to a certain eternal motive in philosophy; which motive, however, we do believe, played a chief part in the structure. For that matter our characterization is no new one. It is not uncom- mon to note the practical character of scholasticism's phi- losophy; James called it "common sense's college-trained younger sister," and certain of the later scholastics have spoken in a similar manner. " Realism " said L. J. Walker, speaking of the Thomistic epistemology " . . . is a phi- losophy which recognizes the laws of common sense as in the last analysis the source whence flows all certitude and truth " (Theories of Knowledge, p. 677). So too J. Balmes: " I believe the expression common sense to denote a law of our mind, apparently differing according to the different cases to which it applies, but in reality . . . always the same, consisting in a natural inclination of our mind to give its assent to some truths not attested by consciousness nor demonstrated by reason, necessary to all men in order to satisfy the wants of sensitive, intellectual, and moral life " (Fundamental Philosophy, Eng. tr. by O. Brownson, I, THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 363 p. 221). We have italicized the last phrase in order to em- phasize its agreement with our own interpretation. Even if, however, this practical motive played only a small part, we should feel justified in pointing it out; but we hope to show, by considering the views of Thomism upon certain of the chief philosophical issues, that the part is no mean one. And there is the more need of this; for the accounts of the system given in most of our histories, yes, even in some of those of the Catholics themselves, show no ruling idea throughout the system. The doctrine appears as a patch- work, a medley, a pudding-stone affair. The only principle common to all its parts is by most Protestants said to be the principle that one must not contradict revelation. But this would not account for the Thomistic doctrines on the many points which have no direct connection with religion. Yet it is the case that there is no one tenet, comparable to the dialectic of Hegel, running through the whole system, the same in all the parts. Common sense is not strictly a doc- trine, but an attitude. Revelation likewise is not one but manifold. And this is what makes the system .unique. The bond of union varies, and in its variety lies a charm ; for the variety is not haphazard, but animated by a consistent in- tention. That intention is to accept what furthers the life of man, here and hereafter; and life as here used includes all aspects, the contemplative, the scientific, the more narrowly practical, and the aesthetic. Facing as it does in so different a direction, the practical synthesis will travel a very different road from the way of Hegel. The rational synthesis portrays an organic whole; the practical, an agglomerative one. For common-sense dogmas are intent upon possession of truths; not method, but results, comprise their aim. They are, taken by them- selves, rather loosely knit. Their categories are not deduced, 364 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY nor are they fused into new unities, " higher syntheses." Addition rather than evolution describes the transition from one category to another. " The complexus of common- sense truths has grown rather by increment than by higher synthesis," says Mr. Walker (Theories of Knowledge, p. 438). The result is that the student of Thomism is impressed by a magnitude, as of the sea. Beside the vast body of doctrine contained in the Summa, our modern epistemologies seem tiny indeed. Yet the steps by which we pass forward are generally simple. The " dialectic " of Hegel is difficult to many; to know it is to know the system. The step from one doctrine of Thomism to another is difficult to no one, and counselled only by the desire tb fare onward : this practical impulse has no logical subtleties, and is no harder than walking. But it is a very long walk indeed through the edifice; and one feels that the system can be comprehended only by a sustained attention such as perhaps no other sys- tem demands. For, aggregate as it is, it is yet a system. Doctrines are added, but they are adjusted. To be sure, they are not " transmuted " or " aufgehoben." Whatever is incorporated is taken in its positive form. But it is trimmed and shaved, if need be. Save and include, says this conservative philosophy, but let it be done in no passive manner. Certain parts, certain doctrines, must be rejected. Some truth, to be sure, can always be extracted from them, but the rest is not " sublated " but is uncompromisingly rejected. Thomism is not a body of compromises. It is written in plain black and white. It refutes heresy. It is virile as any partisan. It has no realities that are real from the finite point of view, but not from God's; no distinction of appearance and reality. Thus in its synthesis it is not absolutely all-inclusive. True to Aristotle's rule of modera- tion, it refuses to carry synthesis to the extreme; it adds the THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 365 dash of partiality needed. And this results in another divergence from Hegelianism. The latter shows a symmet- rical universe, as we saw in Chapter VIII; Thomism makes it asymmetrical. Of two complementary categories, one is usually more fundamental than the other. The particulars are weighted more than the universals, the actual more than the potential, the object more than the subject, substance more than accident, etc. Thus the system combines, in a curious and beautiful way, the breadth of synthesis with the virility of partisanship; it is so synthetic that it includes more than synthesis. We now pass to the special doctrines of St. Thomas; our endeavour shall be to show how they exemplify the above traits. The category par excellence of the practical point of view is causation. To common sense, causing is making; it is the evidence of that most admirable of all things, power, of the ability to do. And it is perhaps the central category of Thomism; for it is the clew to the discovery of the system's chief entity, God. God is the first cause and unmoved mover ; the proofs of His existence are the well-known causal proofs (Summa Theologica, part I, question 2, art. 3). And God creates the world from nothing, by sheer efficacy. "... creation, which is the emanation of all being, is from the not- being which is nothing " (Summa, part I, question 45, art. i; Eng. tr. by Dominican Fathers, II, p. 221). It is not rational necessity which evolves the world out of God; but His simple fiat which produces it ex nihilo. The Hegelian Ab- solute, which is the whole, has no efficacious relation toward its parts; it conceives the situation under the logical rubric of immanence. Herein is the rationalism of pantheism in contrast with the practical quality of theism. Moreover, all that we can understand of God is understood through his 366 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY causal agency. His own inner nature we cannot know in positive terms. " Now, because we cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not ..." says the Doctor in part I, question 3 (Eng. tr., I, p. 28). We can predicate of Him, to be sure, simplicity, perfection, infinity, unity, etc. ; but these are negative attributes. The property from which so many propositions about Him are derived by St. Thomas, viz., that His essence is His existence this attribute is to us a negative matter; for we cannot represent it to ourselves. God of course understands it, and from His point of view therefore the ontological proof is sound; but to us human beings that proof is inconclusive. When we come to fun- damentals, then, we cannot be rationalists; we cannot get above the practical platform which accepts God as the Maker, Sustainer, and Worker; we cannot see in Him the " aseity," the a priori necessity, which Hegel demanded. Our attitude toward God must be based upon His practical character. It is a practical category, then, which ushers us into the system. And the syntheses of that system are accomplished by the employment of this category and others like it; as we have now to set forth. Let us begin with the Thomistic doctrine of God's relation to the world. What are the antitheses which are to be reconciled ? There are two alternative positions: pantheism and theism. Pantheism affirms that the whole universe alone is fit to be God. For only such a whole is supreme, since it is limited or determined by naught outside itself. Theism, on the other hand, asserts that God must needs be distinct from His creation, an active Being to whom we may have per- sonal relations. St. Thomas chose the latter alternative and declared pantheism heresy. Yet he accepted something of pantheism's motive. His God must be supreme; and he THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 367 enables us to ascribe supremacy to God, without treachery to theism, by his doctrine of God's causality. According to the Doctor, everything which God creates, while numerically distinct from Himself, yet is not capable of limiting His power. God has made all things and God continues to sus- tain them after creation. They are never let go apart from Him into an independent existence. They would, indeed, be independent realities if they possessed in themselves full reality. But they do not. Every created thing is afflicted with some curtailment of being. God alone is completely actual, actus purus. All else is a compound of act and po- tency; but potency is incomplete actuality. It is thereby the mark which distinguishes the made from the maker, and which reveals the inferiority of the made to the maker. For a rationalistic view, the effect is the equivalent of the cause: for a practical one, it is somehow less. It is then once more the common-sense category of causation which renders pos- sible the union of the antitheses. Only because God is conceived as the Maker and Manager of a universe which is less than Himself, as the effect is less than the cause, can He possess both the supremacy which pantheism demands and the distinct personality for which theism battles. Yet God is no merely practical being; He is also intelli- gence. In fact, He unites these two: He creates the world, and He contemplates and perfectly understands His creation and Himself. The rationality of His nature is attested in the assertion of St. Thomas, that His essence is His existence. God accepts the ontological proof. And even God's creating is no irrational thing, for He creates through the Platonic ideas or " exemplars." In God, we may say, the practical side, the activity, is absolutely one with the rational aspect. Yet we cannot understand how it is so. The synthesis of 368 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY rational and practical motives is not a rationalistic synthesis. We must perforce accept it, and upon practical grounds. For it is a demand of the whole causal interpretation of things, that God be the one First Cause and source of everything of power and reason alike. Having considered the chief entity, we now pass to some of the lesser elements of the system. In a general way the manner of the syntheses is indicated by the composition of each article of the Summa Theologica. The question being stated, the two opposing partisan views are successively expounded, the second being adopted. But that second view is then adjusted to the first, in that the first is shown to be amenable to a distinction; in one sense it is correct, and is embodied in the second, while in another sense it is rejected. Thus we are bidden to choose between the two senses. And the ground of the choice is not logical necessity, compelling us to adopt as an implication the one we select; rather we add the measure of truth it contains because a sound judgment instinctively perceives its value. Often, indeed, it is dogma which dictates the choice; just as, more often, it is dogma which has already compelled the adoption of the second partisan view. But dogma, as we have seen, is the very acme of the practical motive. The choice be- tween the alternative senses of the first partisan view is of course guided by consistency; if it were not so, the motive of the synthesis would be an irrational one. But the practi- cal motive never runs counter to reason. It is something besides reason, and often something including it. A sane insight, a broad view of life and the needs of life, would wish to include both factions. To do this, of course, a shaving of one of them is necessary: it must be pruned if it is to be retained in the vineyard. Thus there results an asymmet- rical combination, dictated by wise judgment, or by dogma, THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 369 rather than synthesis due to a mutual implication of the partial types. Consider, for instance, the issue between faith and knowl- edge in modern terms, between religion and science. (Summa, part I, question i, art. i ; Eng. tr., I, pp. 1-3.) The one partisan says, naught is to be believed but what reason teaches. For if there were knowledge above and beyond reason, then we ought not to attempt to possess it for it is beyond human powers; and moreover if it is true, it will be concerned with being, which is object-matter of philosophy and reason. The other partisan says: but there is revela- tion! and philosophy, with its reason, is fallible. And he might add, as St. Thomas forbears to do witness the dis- agreement of philosophers. The synthesis of the Angelic Doctor finds that " Since human reason is fallible it is neces- sary that there should be a revelation vouchsafed to man, whereby he may guide his intuitions and acts." Note first the practical motive. There is no logical demonstration of the truth of revealed religion. It must be accepted, because without it we cannot order our lives, in view of the here and the hereafter. (Cf . also the Encyclical letter of Pope Leo XIII quoted at beginning of vol. I, op. cit.) As for Kant God was a postulate of the moral life, so for St. Thomas revela- tion must simply be assumed as a basis of the whole life of man. Secondly, note the manner in which each partisan view is included. The argument of the rationalist, viz., if revelation is above reason, we ought not to seek to possess it this argument is accepted, but a distinction is intro- duced. We should not seek to possess it by reason, but only by faith, the organ of revelation. The rationalist view is not passively incorporated; it is qualified. Revelation is absolutely certain, reason is open to error. Revelation can be, without the aid of reason; but it welcomes the aid of 370 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY reason. We here adopt the rationalist's side in addition to the side of faith, because reason is a useful organ of truth. It " generates, nourishes, defends and strengthens " faith. And reason is not always under suspicion. There are many coercive demonstrations, and that too quite apart from the agreement of reason with faith. Thus reason has, in fact, its own province, as theology has; and each is therein autonomous. Yet when it is a matter of religious dogma, reason is the handmaid; it waits upon dogma, showing it to be consistent, and to agree with other truth, but it cannot always furnish of itself the doctrines. The Trinity, Incarna- tion, Creation in Time, et al., could not be proved by reason, though they can be articulated and by analogy compre- hended. Nothing in the method of reason is rejected, though it is not considered so fundamental on the gravest questions. We have then an asymmetrical combination, grounded in the need of man for knowledge that can be both affirmed without fear of refutation and articulated by the clearest logic. " This doctrine " says the Catholic Turner " of the continuity and independence of the natural with respect to the supernatural order of truth, is the core of scholasticism " (History of Philosophy, p. 420). Another important issue lies in the rival claims of con- templation and activity. Is philosophy i.e., theology a practical or a theoretical science (question i , art. 4) ? The solution reads thus: " Sacred Doctrine [theology], being one, extends to things which belong to different philosophi- cal sciences. . . . Hence, although among the philosophical sciences one is speculative and another practical, neverthe- less Sacred Doctrine includes both. . . . Still, it is rather speculative than practical, because it is more concerned with Divine things than with human acts; though it does treat of these latter, inasmuch as man is ordained by them THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 3/1 to the perfect knowledge of God, in which consists eternal bliss " (Eng. tr., I, p. 6). Here we have the asymmetrical synthesis, putting contemplation above action, yet based upon the practical motive. Theology is contemplative, for contemplation of God is to man the source of the highest joys. Yet in order to comprehend the truths of theology, one must live the good life; hence the' practical side of theology cannot be neglected. But it is in a sense subsidiary. As God is higher than man, our contemplation of God is higher than our regulation of our own activity. The latter is a means to the former. And the motive throughout is the practical one of attaining beatitude. The two main categories which apply within the created world are act and potency (or potentiality). This couple, transformed to suit the occasion, may be detected throughout the whole realm of God's work. The other categories are cases of these. In the words of M. DeWulf " the theory (of act and potency) was applied universally within the real order, and pervaded and penetrated every possible composi- tion of contingent being, of being limited in its reality " (History of Mediaeval Philosophy, Eng. tr. Coffey, p. 317). The universe excluding God is a vast congeries of complementary pairs, each pair being an instance of the act-potency relation. Such pairs are substance and acci- dent, form and matter, individual and universal, species and genus, existence and essence, subject and predicate, etc. Potency herein appears as a device which enables Thomism to join these complements. Each member of the pairs, hostile as it becomes, in a partisan type, to its correlate, is by being treated as a case of the act-potency relation in- duced to unite peacefully with the enemy. We shall now examine the nature of this important instrument of syn- thesis, and then witness its employment in two or three crucial cases. 372 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY According to its sponsor Aristotle, the use of the cate- gory " potency " is unavoidable. For without it we should have no right to call a builder a builder unless he were, at the time, actually building. We could not truthfully say that a man has sight, except when he was seeing: " the same people will be blind many times in the day and deaf too " (Metaphysics, 9. ch. 3, io47a; Eng. tr. Ross). The needs of speech and human intercourse are the warrant of the concept. And a little reflection confirms this opinion. Potency has but the slightest intellectual value; it is hardly more than a name for a practical attitude. It furnishes no explanation of what happens. To say that the acorn is potentially the oak does not help us to understand why, or how, the oak develops out of the acorn. "... it [potency] is ... worthless in so far as it throws no light on the proc- ess which it indicates, but does not even describe " (J. Ward, The Realm of Ends, p. 108). And this lack of value, from the rationalist's point of view, has led the modern philosopher to depreciate the idea, to regard it as a mere name or subjective fiction. " Reality is entirely actuality " says Professor Ward : " the potential, the possible, the prob- lematic, on the other hand, belong exclusively to abstract thought " (ibid.). But explanatory value is not the only test of truth, for rationalism is not the only way of looking at the world. The justification of potency lies in its practical bearing. Aristotle's dictum has been simply forgotten. The term should be viewed in a forward, not a backward direc- tion. It illumines the future, not the past. We adjust our- selves to oncoming events by knowing what they are capable of doing to us or suffering from us. We adapt ourselves to the winter climate by realizing its liability to frost and snow; while it is yet warm we fill our bins with coal. We calculate the resisting power of a dam, or a bridge; yes, science itself THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 373 speaks of potential energy, thereby designating what work we may expect to get out of a given machine. All expecta- tion employs the category; all taking of precautions, all measures of safety, all counsels of prudence, would but for it be neglected. In practical life it is indispensable. It is the common-sense attitude which justifies respect for po- tencies. It is just the practical type of philosophy, just that point of view which considers the needs of action as the test of truth, which would welcome this notion. Keeping in mind this peculiarity of the potential, we may understand its fitness as an instrument of synthesis. If the reason is unable to cope with the problem, the practical attitude, by its feeling for potentialities, sees how the deal may be closed. When the partisan views conflict, how shall they be harmonized ? The problem is similar to the prob- lem of living: how shall I adapt myself to the hostile forces of Nature ? Common sense replies, " by recognizing what those forces may do and preparing yourself beforehand." The same method Thomism carries into its metaphysic. Adjust the quarrel by accepting the one as true, and the other as potentially true. Though I live easily while the sun is yet warm, nevertheless sound judgment urges me to lay in fuel against the future cold. Though the individual is real enough, yet it must be real in such a way as to allow for the universal; the universal is potentially present in every individual. Though the size of any object be finite, yet that size is, potentially, infinitely divided. To accept the enemy as a potency is to maintain your life; and this holds for categories as for living things. And is not this address to the enemy a measure of surpassing tact ? For the potency is a real thing and influential; yet not real in such a way as to offend the actual. It possesses the advantages of reality and of unreality alike. The one partisan is correct, 374 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY the other too is correct, but correct potentially, correct if a little qualification is added, if shaved, bathed, and made presentable. But let us instance some of these diplomatic triumphs. The dispute about the reality, in the material world, of both finite and infinite multitude, is taken up in the Summa, question 7, art. 4. St. Thomas, admitting, of course, the reality of the finite, thus states his solution: " Hence it is impossible for there to be an actually infinite multitude. . . . A potential infinite multitude may exist; because the increase of multitude follows upon the division of magnitude. The more a thing is divided, the greater number of things result. Hence, as the infinite is to be found potentially in the divi- sion of the continuous ... by the same rule the infinite can be also found potentially in the addition of multitude " (Eng. tr., I, pp. 78-79). The doctrine of causation among created things also shows potency's healing virtue. And naturally enough, too ; since potency is causa tions's blood-relative; a pseudo-effi- cacy, a tendency or capacity to be, unable to bring about its own fulfilment. The acorn, potentially the oak, cannot become the oak until the agencies of heat, moisture, and certain chemicals in the soil actually come in contact with it. To change or to be made is to pass from a state of po- tency to actuality so reads the text in question 2, art. 3 and this passing is made actual by something which is already actual, which we denominate the cause. When wood is made to burn, the wood was combustible and thereby had the potency of burning, yet it burned not until touched with the flame. But the potency, though itself ineffective, bridges that logical gap between cause and effect which Hume was later to emphasize. The former cold and the now burning quality of the wood are utterly diverse: what THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 375 permits us to see how the one passes into the other ? This office is performed by potency. The wood had its later combustion in potentia; the jolt is smoothed over. And this in potentia is no mere fiction, but a genuine property of the wood; for what is not combustible does not burn, though a thousand torches be applied. Likewise we find in the scholastic concept of being a syn- thesis wrought by the same mediation. For being is one, true, and good. As regards the union of being and good: St. Thomas affirms that the perfection of anything is the actual realization of its potencies. " Everything is perfect so far as it is actual " (question 5, art. i, Eng. tr., I, p. 53). A perfect apple is one which contains in actu all the tendencies or capacities proper to being an apple. So far as an apple by its intrinsic limitations lacks certain attributes conscious- ness, virtue, etc. so far it falls short of perfection and of full being. To that extent its being is nascent or potential. The good then is united with being potentially if not always actually. Of the true, the same holds. As the Rev. Joseph Rickaby, S.J., succinctly puts it: "every being must stand in the relation of a possible object for intellectual perception " (General Metaphysics, p. 117). Of course, not everything is actually perceived; but whatever is real would under suit- able conditions be witnessed. And when it is witnessed, it gives rise to the ideas in our minds. Thirdly, being is the same as unity; that is, a certain kind of unity. The unity which is the beginning of number is not the sort of unity which is everywhere predicable of being: " we must say that the one which is convertible with being, does not add anything above being; but that the one which is the prin- ciple of number, does add something to being, belonging to the genusof quantity" (Summa, question n,art. i ; Eng. tr., I, p. in). Now as regards this qualified concept of unity, 376 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY it indeed is not, like goodness or truth, sometimes a mere potency. It is wholly actual. There are no cases of being where the unity (we should say individuality) fails to ap- pear. This particular synthesis, then, seems to differ from the two above, in using no device of potency. But we may see in what manner this is so: it is the exception which proves the rule. " One does not add anything to being; but it is only a negation of division: for one means undivided being. This is the very reason why one is the same as being . . . the being of anything consists in undivision [sic] ; and hence it is that everything keeps unity as it keeps being " (ibid.). Unity, so far as in any sense a distinct idea from being, is negative; the repulsion of division. Pos- itively considered, it is the same as being. There is then no true synthesis present. We make the predication, " Being is one or individual," only in order to deny division. Never- theless, in so far as the predicate one is distinct from the subject being, they must for our intellect be two related terms. And the subject-predicate relation is for St. Thomas a case of the act-potency relation (question 13, art. 12); so that even here, there is from the point of view of our intel- lect, though not objectively, a synthesis under the mode of potency. Consider next the combination of determinism with free- dom. While the modern thinker views determinism as the acknowledgment of the ubiquity of law, St. Thomas ex- presses it in religious terms: God's foreknowledge of all things. He believes, of course, in both God's foreknowledge and human freedom. The argument for freedom is, as we should expect, a practical one: " man has free-will " he says " otherwise counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards, and punishments would be in vain " (part I, ques- tion 83, art. i, Respondeo; Eng. tr., Ill, p. 145). The prob- THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 377 lem is to reconcile man's freedom with God's foreknowledge. He performs the synthesis of these apparent opposites in the typical manner (part I, question 14, art. 13). God is eternal, and His knowledge sees all at once what to us is spread out in time and successive. " Although contingent things become actual successively, nevertheless God knows contingent things not successively, as they are in them- selves, as we do; but He knows them all at once; because His knowledge is measured by eternity, as is also His Exist- ence; for eternity existing all at once comprises time (question i o) . Hence, all temporal things are present to God from eter- nity ... as they are in their presentiality " (loc. cit., Eng. tr., I, p. 205). In this way, then, the contingent thing may be contingent, and yet foreknown; for God's foreknowledge is, by virtue of His attribute of seeing all things at once, present knowledge. The contingent event " can be infallibly the object of certain knowledge, as for instance to the sense of sight; as when I see that Socrates is (freely) sitting down." Or when I am aware of a free choice that at this moment I am making, the contingency of the event lies in its temporal aspect: " a contingent thing can be considered as it is in its cause; and in that sense it is considered as a future thing, and as a contingent thing not yet determined. . . . Hence, whoever knows a contingent effect in its cause only, has merely a conjectural knowledge of it " (pp. 204-205). Ac- cordingly, our knowledge of future contingencies is uncer- tain, and of present observed contingencies certain; whereas God's knowledge, being of the totum simul sort, sees the future contingencies as present ones, and though certain, is quite consistent with their indetermination. Note the mode of this important synthesis. It is quite contrary to the Hegelian spirit; it is practically grounded, and it unites the two opposites by a distinction within one 378 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY of them which reduces that one to a qualified form, as if it were potentially true rather than quite true. Eternity is not implied by time, nor necessity by contingency; neither does the converse implication hold. We accept both of the partisan views for good practical reasons: freedom, as we have above seen; and Divine foreknowledge as a con- sequence of God the Maker of all things. But while the foreknowledge is accredited without qualification, the un- predictable free act is seen to be such, as it were, only from a partial or finite point of view. The free act of a man may be looked at in two ways. " A contingent thing can be considered in two ways; first, in itself, as actual, in which sense it is not considered as a future thing, but as a present thing " (p. 204) : in this sense it is the object of God's eternal vision. But "in another way ... as it is in [re- spect to] its cause " (ibid.) : in this way it is not determined by a previous event, by anything that has happened in the man's previous history, or indeed by anything in the created universe whatsoever. The contingent event or free act as seen by God and His vision is unqualifiedly true is wholly actual and permits no alternative; that event seen as a potentiality for the future is not actual and leaves open genuine alternatives. It is from the point of view of events in time, where we have potentialities as well as actualities, that we have freedom. The potentiality which resides in finite beings is the key of the solution. But whereas the Hegelian considers this finite point of view to be mere " appearance," and the Kantian declares it to be only " regulatively true " the Thomist for practical reasons grants to it full objective truth. The doctrine of universals is a similar kind of synthesis. Although St. Thomas, like Aristotle, speaks frequently as if he were refuting Plato, yet it would be unjust to his doc- THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 379 trine, as to Aristotle's, to overlook the fact that in a sense he included the Platonic view of universals. The universal was believed by St. Thomas, as by Plato, to exist ante rem; yet it was not in the view of the former a disembodied existence, outside of every mind. It existed in the mind of God, as " exemplar cause." " It is necessary to suppose ideas in the Divine Mind. For the Greek word I8ta is in Latin Forma. Hence by ideas are understood forms of things, existing apart from things themselves. ... In all things not gen- erated by chance, the form must be the end of any genera- tion whatsoever. The agent does not act on account of the form, except in so far as the likeness of the form exists in himself. ... As then the world was not made by chance, but by God acting by His intellect . . . there must exist in the Divine Mind that form to the likeness of which the world was made. And in this the notion of an idea consists." (Op. cit., part I, question 15, art. i, Respondeo; Eng. tr., I, p. 215). Such was the qualified acceptance of the ante rem; how is it with the in re and the post rem ? The universals exist post rem in our minds, and also are in the individual things themselves; yet the latter is true with some limita- tions. He says " the things which belong to the species of a material thing, such as a stone, or a man, or a horse, can be thought of apart from the individualizing principles which do not belong to the notion of the species" (part I, question 85, art. i; Eng. tr., Ill, p. 181). But " the nature itself (the species) to which it occurs to be understood, abstracted or considered as universal is only in individuals; but that it is understood, abstracted or considered as universal is in the intellect. We see something similar to this in the senses. For the sight sees the colour of the apple apart from its smell. If therefore it be asked where is the colour which is seen apart from the smell, it is quite clear that the colour 380 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY which is seen is only in the apple: but that it be perceived apart from the smell, this is owing to the sight, forasmuch as the faculty of sight receives the likeness of colour and not of smell. In like manner humanity understood is only in this or that man; but that humanity be apprehended with- out conditions of individuality, that is, that it be abstracted and consequently considered as a universal, occurs to human- ity inasmuch as it is brought under the consideration of the intellect, in which there is a likeness of the specific nature, but not of the principles of individuality " (part I, question 85, art. 2; Eng. tr., Ill, p. 186). Thus the universal does exist post rem in the intellect, when the latter abstracts out the " nature " of the thing; it exists in the thing also, yet not as pure universal, but as a nature which " considered as universal is in the intellect "; i. e., in the thing it is a potential universal. The device of potentiality once more enables St. Thomas to combine the opponents. He includes the Platonic idea ante rem but places it in God's mind ; he includes the in re, reducing it to a potentiality; the post rem alone secures full credit. We said, the device of potentiality ; but to be sure the ante rem view does not speak of potencies. There is really no difference in method, however. Of course we could not include the ante rem as a potency, since in God there are no potencies: it appears instead as a part of the Divine Nature (the intellect). Plato's ideas are welcomed but with reservation; they become not potencies, but nevertheless a factor in God's causation: the " exemplar cause." Let one more instance suffice. Our own time has laid stress upon the conflict of subjectivism with objectivism; with that conflict, in fact, we ourselves were introduced to the battlefields of philosophy. Thomism has combined these with ingenuity. It teaches that we know the sense- THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 381 impressions made on us by the objects, as subjectivism claims; we also know, as objectivism urges, the objects themselves from which the impressions come. But ob- jectivism (realism) is given the higher place. The objects are known immediately, directly; the sense-impressions are known mediately, by reflection. When I look at a book, what I am aware of is the book, not my image of the book. But the impressions are, in our usual perception of the ex- ternal world, potentially present. Some of them, indeed, exist only in the subjective realm, being in the object mere potentialities : these are the sensibilia propria or " secondary qualities." Others are objectively real as well as subjec- tively real: these are the sensibilia communia or " primary qualities." The shape of the book is really in the book, and when I reflect upon my experience I find also a sense-impres- sion of shape; that sense-impression is potentially present in my direct consciousness of the book. But the colour of the book is not actual but only potential in the book; its reality consists in the sense-impression alone. The in- genuity of this combination of subjectivism and objectivism lies in the kind of reality which the sense-impressions possess. They are the transparent medium through which the mind sees, rather than the copy of the object upon which alone it looks. " Some," he says, " have asserted that our intellec- tual faculties know only the impression made on them ; as, for example, that sense is cognizant only of the impression made on its own organ. According to this theory, the intel- lect understands only its own impression, namely, the intel- ligible species which it has received, so that this species is what is understood. This is, however, manifestly false for two reasons. Firstly, because the things we understand are objects of science; therefore if what we understand is merely the intelligible species in the soul, it would follow that every 382 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY science would not be concerned with objects outside the soul, but only with the intelligible species within the soul; . . . Secondly, it is untrue, because it would lead to the opinion of the ancients who maintained that whatever seems, is true, and consequently contradictories are true simul- taneously. For if the faculty knows its own impression only, it can judge of that only. . . . Thus every opinion would be equally true; in fact, every sort of apprehension. u Therefore it must be said that the intelligible species is related to the intellect as that by which [italics mine] it understands. . . . But since the intellect reflects upon itself, by such reflection it understands both its own act of intelligence and the species by which it understands. Thus the intelligible species is that which is understood second- arily; but that which is primarily understood is the object, of which the species is the likeness " (part I, question 85, art. 2, Respondeo; Eng. tr., Ill, pp. 184-185). The practical method seems fairly evident here. That we should by means of the sense-impression see the object itself is a simple straightforward suggestion. It appeals to common sense, and is happily illustrated by every-day vision ; we see light, and we see, through the light and by it, the objects. Never- theless, this comparison is only a hint, showing that it is possible to accept the theory. It does not demonstrate that we must accept it. It does not prove that we must have direct access to the objects of vision or of other sense- experience. To be sure, the Doctor assigns grounds why the opaqueness of the impressions cannot be admitted. It is " manifestly false for two reasons," viz. (i) if it were not false, we should have to believe that science was concerned " only with the intelligible species within the soul " and (2) if it were true, then " whatever seems, is true " and con- tradictions would hold, i. e., honey would be both bitter and THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 383 sweet according to the mouth of the taster. (St. Thomas's own illustration, loc. cit.) Now there is no logical coercive- ness in these reductiones ad absurda. Either alternative might be accepted; for either alternative is subjectivism pure and simple. He refutes subjectivism by showing that it leads to subjectivism. The nerve of the argument, one must conclude, is the repugnancy of subjectivism to the common-sense view that science is objective and that objects have their own permanent, consistent characters. Students of philosophy will recall that Kant used almost exactly the same argument in his " Transcendental Deduction of the Categories " (in the first edition of the Critique). Kant urged that objects must have permanent recognizable attri- butes if there is to be anything deserving the name of knowl- edge. " If cinnabar were sometimes red and sometimes black, sometimes light and sometimes heavy, if a man could be changed into now this, now into another animal shape, if on the longest day the fields were sometimes covered with fruit, sometimes with ice and snow, the faculty of my empir- ical imagination would never be in a position, when repre- senting red colour, to think of heavy cinnabar " (Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Max Miiller, p. 84) . But while Kant uses this lever to pry our minds over to the doctrine of an un- changing ego, St. Thomas uses it to fix the stability of the external world. It is indeed a matter of choice which way we turn the lever. But to turn it toward objectivism is doubtless more in line with common sense. In accord with his usual way, then, the scholastic finds a distinction within subjectivism, viz., the sense-impression conceived as opaque, and conceived as transparent, and freely adopts that one of the alternatives which coheres with the practical motive. We now pass to estimation of this great type. We shall try to show that it is, in the main, true enough; for it is in 384 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY principle inevitable, even though some of its details may permit a choice. Yet we shall be obliged to confess that it has about it a certain taint of exclusiveness; it too, like the other types, has its critical point, and is unjust to some motives which lie beyond that point. What is the kernel of the practical attitude of common sense and revelation alike ? Whence comes their over- whelming appeal ? Doubtless the answer must be sought in some attribute common to both these forms and absent in all the other types. Now the most outstanding attribute of this sort seems to be dogma, absolute certainty, authority. Common sense is dogmatic; it claims authority in its own right. The value-attitude is dogmatic; if something feels good it is good and needs no demonstration thereof. Reason may err and has often done so: witness the changes in physical science. But common sense is relatively per- manent; as it were a last court of appeal. And the same is true of revelation. It knows no change, even as faith is unshakable certainty. The practical attitude then is the attitude which accepts authority. And if any one desires a reason, why it should do so, it is ready to supply one; for it does not disdain reason, as it admires all human goods. For successful living, certainty is necessary. Some hazard, some risk, may be desirable, if we are not to become soft creatures; but on the whole and in fundamentals there must be unshaken certitude. Action is impossible without it; I cannot essay to jump the narrowest ditch without trusting my legs. Men cannot treat with one another, unless they agree as to the words they use, the main facts of life, the principles of conduct. Organized institutions, so neces- sary to the safety of society, must have a fund of certainty in their articles. Religion cannot thrive in an atmosphere of doubt, and as human nature is constituted, morality cannot THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 385 be kept up without a fixed system of beliefs to support it. Life needs dogma. " One of the most indispensable elements of any society intended to last is authority] besides being the moral bond which holds the members together it presides over them all, incites, moderates, directs, and reforms, according as it is necessary for the good of all or the individ- ual. Thus in every society authority is invested with certain prerogatives proportioned to the end to be attained by its subjects " (De Vivier, Christian Apologetics, p. 303). And we might add the case of military organizations. Thus the practical attitude, certain of its own claims, yet is willing to justify them to those who doubt. And those claims are summed up in four words: the trustworthiness of authority. But as soon as the phrase is uttered, we are thrown open to doubt. What authority are we to trust ? Not all, surely; for they differ. And if we decide which we are to trust, we decide by comparison, by reflection, by considerations of origin, or by fruits; all of which is reasoning. And the sanc- tion of the authority is thereby reduced to reason, which sub- verts authority. So it seems that no authority is sufficient unto itself. Nevertheless, the tests which our reason applies are them- selves based upon authority. Logic has its laws of thought, and they are not demonstrated. They come to us clothed with authority a truth which we found mysticism wit- nessing in its own way. We cannot but accept them in actual thinking, however much we may theoretically doubt them or image a world in which they do not hold. " If A implies B and B implies C, then A implies C " : this rule we cannot doubt. We may justify it by appealing to common sense or the natural light, or other equivalent phrase; but that only means that the thing comes to us as true in its own right. Yes, we must admit that the rationalist bows before 386 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY his special kind of dogma as faithfully, or as slavishly, as does the religious devotee before his kind. The rationalist calls his dogma an axiom, the devotee dubs his a revelation. But the axioms are no more demonstrated than the revela- tions; they are accepted as of themselves valid. To be sure, some say that the rationalist's axioms are on a very different plane from any others; for they are verifiable, which no other dogmas are. But let us see. It is true that the former " work "; they yield conclusions which are useful to science and to life. But why is that a confirmation of the axioms ? Only because of another axiom, viz., that the coherence of our axioms with one another and with experience is a mark of truth. There is no proof that the test is a sound one ; nor does it need proof, for it has authority. And wherein is one set of dogmas better than another ? But not reason only has its dogmas; sense-observation has, in the eyes of men, an authority of its own. What we hear, see, or touch appears irresistibly real. It is always accepted, unless it turns out to conflict with other things which we hear, see, or touch. That is why the philosophy of " common sense " is realistic; for common sense is the name which authority assumes when conversant with every- day matters. And it is no refutation to urge that because we are sometimes misled by our senses, their authority is no authority. We are sometimes misled by our reasonings also; perhaps all the illusions of sense are due to the falsity of our inference from the sense-data. Nevertheless we trust rea- soning, and we say that the fault lies not in the dogmatic principles upon which we reason, but in our application of these principles. So too we believe that the cure for faulty sense-observation is further sense-observation. And much the same is true of memory. We trust our memory, and on the whole we have to trust it. To be sure THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 387 it is often mistaken, yet we test it in turn by more memory. I declare that I answered my friend's letter this morning, and if I would confirm the assertion, I recall the time when I did it, the things I wrote, the affixing of the stamp, the posting of the letter. And though we frequently test re- membrance by its coherence with present facts as if I should learn that my friend received the letter yet many remembered events are accepted in their own right; and justly so, so clearly are they recalled to our minds. In action, too, we accept authority. We take on faith, in order to act, what is far from being demonstrated to us; we cross a city street thronged with rushing motor cars, in confidence that our muscles will not refuse to work; we trust the plumber not to stuff our drain-pipes and the dentist not to drill new holes in our teeth. Of course we are sometimes betrayed; but life necessitates the making of assumptions. It is impossible, in short, to conduct anything, muscular action, science, or private meditation, without leaning upon dogma of one sort or another. Now the type we are here studying, the " practical syn- thesis," claims, if our reduction is correct, that the real force which binds the partisan views together is the author- itative revelation, given to the man who conducts his life, that they are so bound. This revelation, as we have seen, is vouchsafed in ordinary matters under the title " common sense " or " the requirements of practical life," and in supramundane matters under the title of Christian dogma. Our question is, can these particular kinds of authority be accredited ? On the whole, the former kind has been ac- cepted by men as valid. Certain specialists, e. g., phi- losophers, have been the only ones to demand that common sense produce its credentials. But it seems that a little consideration would reveal those credentials; for the author- 388 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY ity of common sense rests on the fact that its dogmas are part and parcel of the conduct of life. If a doctrine is indis- pensable to conduct, it must be accepted; for conduct is unavoidable. We may disagree as to what doctrines are indispensable, but the method, the criterion, is undeniably sound. If it were true that I could not act in any way for a single minute without tacitly supposing that God exists, then that is a proof of God's existence and no scientific demonstration or logical implication thereof is needed. And so it is in regard to the causal relation: we do assume in practice that the effect must follow the cause. Rationalism, speaking through the mouth of Hume, found no justification of their necessary connection. Yet all men assume it, for they treat effects as inevitable: they avoid poisons, ex- plosives, and fire because they feel that disaster is certain to follow such. Whatever they may write on paper about this necessity, they do practically believe in it, because it is in- volved in conduct. And thus the authority of most of the categories of common sense is in general valid. But the validity of the other kind, that of Christian dogma, is not so directly evident. Its appeal is at any rate less immediate; so many men have seemed to conduct their lives success- fully while doubting or disbelieving it. Such dogmas as the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Creation, do not at once appear indispensable to our living. Accordingly, it becomes our duty to ask for the credentials of religious dogma. Or we may say, for the credentials of religious faith; for faith and dogma are correlative. But further: since dogmas cannot be wavering and uncertain pronouncements, or admit of any vacillation in their interpretation, the authority of dogma implies some organ which states and interprets the dogma with authority; and this means with infallibility, since authority is no longer authority if it be open to question. THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 389 Such an organ cannot be anything but an infallible Church infallible, that is, in matters of religious belief. Our problem then is, to ask for the credentials of an infallible Church. If we could but find them and be assured of their sufficiency, then the " practical synthesis " which has been effected under its guidance would be to all intents and pur- poses the final philosophic system, and our quest would be ended. We say, our quest'would be ended; for there is no doubt that the present type of philosophy has that connection with the detail of life, the specific applicability, which in Chapter I we found to be the original intention of philosophy. In this respect it towers head and shoulders above every other type we have studied. Not one of them presented anything but the meagrest of outlines. See, for example, the con- trast between the absolutist synthesis and the practical. The Absolute, present everywhere, makes all the difference in the world to each particular experience of ours, and since extremes meet thereby makes no difference. By its utter generality it lacks the specific quality which would make it count. On the other hand, the practical system influences, in directly verifiable ways, the minutest detail of its votary's life. He gets on his knees to pray, he goes to church, he gives his money, he feels a steady flame of faith, he organizes his fellows in religious bands, ministers to the poor, etc. Of course, the religious frequently fall from grace; but often they remain true, and that is enough to save the system. The system is efficacious; it is open to utilization, it is turned to practical application, it is the explanation, even, of certain events (the creation, etc.). In Hegelianism, the whole is divorced from the other aspects; in Thomism, it is wedded to them. In examining its credentials, then, we have a very great deal at stake. So full and concrete a map 390 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY of the universe was never before offered; and if we cannot adhere to it we may indeed despair of philosophic truth. There is, first, an antecedent probability that there are such credentials. For if it is the case that authority is welded into the very structure of knowledge itself, does it not seem probable that in every distinct field of inquiry it will be found at work, furnishing as it were the matter which our reason is to arrange in systematic logical form ? In the material world we find the sense-data coming before us clothed with self -evidence; these we work over and refine upon until we have constituted science. In the abstract world of ideal forms, we find certain ultimate propositions invested with certainty, viz., the axioms of all reasoning; upon these we build the structure known as logic. In the moral sphere, also, we discover some principles which must be assumed as the basis of all moral precepts, viz., that ful- ness of life is desirable, truth-telling required, justice an end. Is it not then probable that there are open to man certain fixed truths in the field of religious inquiry ? Why may there not be a power of insight adapted to see truths in this region, just as the sense-organs are adapted to see truths in the material world, the intellect to see them in the world of abstract forms, etc. ? The religious devotee asserts that there is such a power; that the founder of his religion possessed it. That founder's declarations are hence clothed with authority; and the Church, which hands them on at his command, in so far claims a like authority. The particular kind of authority which should give out religious truth, or philosophic truth, in anything like a com- plete or systematic form, is certainly not found within the consciousness of the average human being. However the democratic ideal may insist that each man should judge for himself in religion, it is still the plain fact that most men THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 391 have neither the time nor the inclination to do so. The dogmas of common sense are within the reach of all, and after some reflection the dogmas of reason also; any one can verify them for himself by a little training. But for informa- tion in religious matters we have always had to look to exceptional persons; to some one or more who were in- dividuals of surpassing personal force. Whether we like it or not, this is the fact. Are we not justified in so doing ? Is it not natural and right that there be individuals whose utterances and teachings come from their lips with a certain power, compelling in their hearers belief ? It is said that Jesus spoke with authority, and not as the scribes. Should we then accept his sayings just because they are his sayings, without first verifying them by our own independent re- flection ? Can the credentials of the Church be the ipse dixit of its first teacher ? Now the ipse dixit form of authority is undoubtedly very widely accredited; more widely perhaps than a Protestant likes to admit. We all do assign more weight to the casual assertions of some people, than to the most earnest assevera- tions of others. Often it is because we know the former to be experts. The guess of a famous scientist, in regard to the cause of some new natural phenomenon, is to be preferred to the conviction of the untrained. But this authority has its source in our reason only. We know the expert to be competent; his competence has been tested again and again. On the other hand, we cannot deny that mere con- viction itself is convincing. A man may state his beliefs so commandingly that we dare not question them, even in our thoughts. Thus the orator sweeps us off our feet; thus the preacher makes converts. There is little if any reason in it; belief is immediate and irresistible. Such belief, however, seldom persists long unless corroborated by reflection. We 392 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY do not speak here of mystical experiences, where the devotee has some independent personal data which determine his belief, but only of beliefs which are fixed by the words of another. But there is a further way in which personal authority is found. The mere testimony of a common man is of so me weight, however slight. In the law-courts we call witnesses to the stand, and the presumption is in favour of their truth; cross-examination is required if it is to be impugned. Like the primitive credulity of the child, is the ultimate pre- sumption of the truth of a person's assertion. And even in science, that lair of reason, the ipse dixit is never wholly reduced to reason. For one savant's results must be con- firmed by others. Why should this social motive influence us, if not because each man's testimony is of independent value in itself ? Could a sum of nothings make up a positive quantum of confirmation ? It is true that all testimony is subject to revision; but to deny that it has any authority of its own is like denying that a billiard-ball moves because its motion can be stopped. Of course one person's assertions may be demolished by reasons; but these reasons them- selves gain authority in that all, or most, men agree upon them. The social motive, so prominent in all that we think and do today, is a clear instance of the ipse dixit form of authority.* But nevertheless this kind is in any particular case liable to refutation. The sort of authority we are seek- ing is irrefutable. It is not found in the scientific expert's judgment, in the zealot's impressive utterance, in the social verdict. Each and all of these is liable to error. They must be validated by reflection, or their power is lost. Is there then any sort of ipse dixit left, which possesses finality, * Thomas Reid explicitly states this, Hamilton's ed. I, p. 440, Intellectual Powers, Essay 6, ch. 4. THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 393 independent of subsequent confirmation by thought ? When we look more closely at the foundations of Catholicism, it seems at first as if there were none. For the Church does not rest content with pointing to the Scriptures and its own decrees. It gives a long array of reasoned evidence. Never- theless, if we look more closely still, we shall find the ipse dixit standing fully armed and alone, within the citadel of its elaborate fortress. The Church, we say, has built up a body of rational argu- ment in favour of its authority : the words of Jesus are taken to be divine revelation, i. e., infallible, because Jesus himself showed evidences of His supernatural and divine character - to wit, his miracles. " The Christian religion stands or falls with miracles. They formed an integral part of our Lord's ministry; they are the sureties of His stupendous claims ..." (Miracles and Modern Thought, by the Very Rev. Humphrey Moynihan, S.T.D., in The Ecclesiastical Review, 54, p. 292. Italics mine). And "if they (the miracles) are torn from that story and eliminated from that life, the Gospels become a heap of ruins and Christ Himself almost a mythical personage " (ibid.}. Reason is then, so far, in a general way the foundation of religious authority; where by reason we mean observation of the consequences, the working, the attendant circumstances, of a belief in dogma. The New Testament itself advocates such a use of reason. " Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits if they be of God; because many false prophets are gone out into the world" (I John, IV. i). And Catholicism emphasizes the role of reason as " demonstrating the truth of the Gospel, that is, establishing with certainty the foundations of faith by demonstrating that it is perfectly rational, legitimate, and indispensable to believe " (Rev. W. De Vivier, S.J., Christian Apologetics (ed. by Rt. Rev. S. G. Messmer), 394 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY p. 41). Thus". . . suppose men of irreproachable probity assure me that they have heard these propositions [dogmas] from the mouth of God, suppose I am certain that they speak without any personal interest whatever; nay, more, for the truth which they proclaim they suffer insults, per- secution and death itself, while, on the other hand, their teaching is confirmed by striking and incontestable miracles. Would it not be unreasonable, under these circumstances, to refuse my assent to their doctrines ? . . . Revelation ... is a fact removed from us by many centuries. Hence it is ... testimony which enables us to attain certain knowledge of revelation and, consequently, to demonstrate the foundations of faith" (op. cit., pp. 48-49). But testi- mony is, after all, to be judged by scientific standards; the basis is a rational one. It would seem that a character so lofty, so powerful, so consistent, as that of Jesus could hardly have been invented, either by one man or by a group of men: antecedent probability is against the falsity of the testimony. The magnitude of his personality, the unusual character of his doctrine, and the degree of concurrence of the witnesses, combine to render fraud or mistake on the main points extremely unlikely. " To invent a Newton, one would have to be a Newton himself. What man could invent a person like Jesus ? Jesus alone could do it." (Parker, quoted in op. cit., p. 149.) It is of course possible to doubt; but if the same testimony were offered in regard to any other allegation, the doubt would be deemed an un- reasonable one. And the testimony gains in weight from the fact that it is, in a sense, indirect. Things have happened which constitute circumstantial evidence that Jesus was superhuman. Such, it is said, are the miracles, the earlier prophecies of his coming, his own prophecies of his fate and the success of his religion, his own character, his resurrection, THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 395 the establishment and duration of Christianity itself, and in particular of the Catholic Church, which has outlasted any other institution of similar magnitude and is in essentials unchanged, the fortitude and endurance of the martyrs themselves, the practical fruits of Christianity in promoting order, morality, peace, and other factors of civilization. Moreover, no other religion, such as Buddhism, Moham- medanism, etc., presents such a massive array of arguments. Each one may allege something, viz., miracles, duration; but none has anything like the above summation of distinct evidences, giving mutual corroboration. And each of the great religions is no doubt to a large extent true; though lacking the perfection to which the evidences of Christianity point. So reasons the Catholic. "... we believe in Him because the Divinity He claimed rests upon the concurrent testimony of His miracles, His prophecies, His personal character, the nature of His doctrine, the marvellous propa- gation of His teaching in spite of its running counter to flesh and blood, the united testimony of thousands of mar- tyrs, the stories of countless saints who for His sake have led heroic lives, the history of the Church herself since the Crucifixion, and, perhaps more remarkable than any, the history of the papacy from St. Peter to Pius X. These testimonies are unanimous; they all point in one direc- tion, they are of every age, they are clear and simple, and are within the grasp of the humblest intelligence." (The Catholic Encyclopedia, 5, art. Faith, IV, Motives of Credibility.) Does the principle of authority then vanish into reason, even for the Catholic ? No : further search discloses some- thing more than these arguments. The reasons above given may incline one to trust the authority in question, but of themselves they are not enough to give certitude. No prob- 396 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY ability based upon reasoning, however strong, has the con- vincing force of sight or touch; one may even demonstrate most perfectly that the planet is there in the heavens, but unless he consents to look in the telescope and sees the planet, he has not the highest degree of certainty. Hence it is that science insists upon experimental confirmation of its reason- ings. And so it is here. The conviction of the infallibility of revealed religion is gained only when we by a free act of will assent to the dogmas. And even this act of will is not sufficient of itself. But, owing to Divine grace, it is fol- lowed by a faith, a " certitude " as Newman calls it, of the absolute truth of the revelation ; just as the consent to look in the telescope is followed by the indubitable sight of the heavenly body. "... in the minds of many, faith is re- garded as a more or less necessary consequence of a careful study of the motives of credibility [reasonings], a view which the Vatican council condemns expressly ..." " The Church has twice condemned the view that faith ultimately rests on accumulation of probabilities." " It is the free gift of God." (Op. cit., V, Analysis of the Act of Faith from the Subjective Standpoint.) Faith is, in St. Thomas' words, " an act of the intellect assenting to a Divine truth owing to a movement of the will, which is itself moved by the grace of God " (Summa Theologica, part II, question 2, art. 2). But this " free gift of God " to him who wills to assent, this " Divine supernatural faith " is not rational insight. The dogma to which we assent is not necessarily made clear and intelligible to the light of reason, by our faith in it. If that were so, the whole matter would once more be reduced to reason. " Supernatural grace moves the will, which, having now a supernatural good put before it, moves the intellect to assent to what it does not understand" (Encyclopedia, art. Faith, ibid.). THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 397 The practical motive then, the pure ipse dixit, reappears at the end. "... the proposition [dogma] itself does not compel our assent, since it is not intrinsically evident, but there remains the fact that only on condition of our assent to it shall we have what the human soul naturally yearns for, viz., the possession of God, Who is, as both reason and authority declare, our ultimate end; ' He that believeth and is bap- tized, shall be saved. . . .' But . . . the will needs a special grace from God, in order that it may tend to that supernatural good which is eternal life " (ibid.; the italics are my own). Yet the practical motive is conceived throughout in no subjective sense; it gives insight into reality. Faith is not arbitrary, but the way is prepared most carefully by reasons. There is no question of a leap in the dark. No subjective affirmation decides, as with Kant. The assent of the will does not end the story. We cannot believe merely at will. Supernatural grace is needed to show us, to reveal the truth of the dogma, even though not to explain that truth. So the planet reveals itself to him who consents to look in the tele- scope, though the gazer may or may not understand how the planet can be there for it may contradict all his pre- vious theories. "... supernatural grace . . . moves the intellect to assent to what it does not understand " (quoted above). In the end, then, authority is authority from a delicately balanced complex of motives, of which the clinching force lies in the last step; a step taken by will and by will alone. The will is free to yield or not to yield to the inducements of reason. Reason is not strong enough to compel it. If it decides to yield, revelation crowns its act; but this is a matter of values, of practical considerations: " Super- natural grace moves the will, which, having now a super- natural good put before it, moves the intellect to assent . . . " 398 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY (italics mine). Religious dogma convinces the head by working upon the heart and the hand. The practical mo- tive stands upon its own feet, unaided, in the crucial moment when the ipse dixit, the word of Jesus or the Church, is accepted. What then shall we say of the justice of its claim ? We do not hesitate to affirm that it is in principle sound. From the point of view of pure theory, it would not seem so; but life is not pure theory. If conduct is three-fourths of it, and feeling some fraction also, it would seem that in our trans- actions with reality the intellect plays a minor role. And how then should the message of these other organs be denied ? It is not that practical needs urge us to believe certain things because we wish to believe them; rather because we cannot, if we squarely face the practical situa- tion as the theorist does not help believing them. As human nature actually is, we cannot, in the majority of life's exigencies, wait for the verdict of science or of reason. Much as we should like to do so, a time far beyond what we have at our disposal would be required. The demands of conduct are insistent; control of the passions of men must be firmly established in some organized system; science, extending but little beyond the bounds of the physical, and even varying from age to age within those bounds, would be but a futile guide in questions of the ultimate values. We must perforce appeal, in the common conduct of life, to some immediate authority. And as we have already suffi- ciently seen, we do so. Men abide by common sense in mundane matters; and on the whole, in the ultimate ques- tions, men accept some religious dogma or other, whether dictated by the heart's claims or by some potent person- ality; and in neither realm have men stopped to demon- strate. The Catholic Church is simply the strictly logical THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 399 conclusion in matters of religion, of the common human atti- tude; and that is to say, of the inevitable attitude. Faith we must have, and do have. If life is a war upon evil, and the church life's army, the soldiers must implicitly obey their commanders. But with all this, there is no ground for excluding reason at the end. There will always be something unsatisfactory about dogmas which are not explained, deduced, or seen to cohere with the structure of the world as a whole. It may be necessary for us to believe them, and they may be most unquestionably known to be true; but that is the case with the phenomena of electricity and gravitation, which yet we strive to account for. The practical attitude has its own way of going straight to truth, and it is simply narrow-minded to deny this, or to undervalue it. In fact, no man can live long without some use of it. But we cannot rest satisfied to register a collection of truths. We desire to understand them; and dogma, however indispensable, does not meet that desire. This is as true of the dogmas of common sense as of religious creeds; it is as true of the revelations of sense- observation and memory as of the insights of the artist. All these authorities must be trusted, but the goal is not reached until authority joins hands with reason, and they are seen to be intrinsically self-evident or implied in what is so. The aspiration to explain why there is a solar system, why there is gravitation, why God is three Persons, why Jesus com- manded non-resistance this aspiration is as much a need of life as the needs of faith and of conduct. It is not so im- portunate, for it is not a prerequisite of living; it is patient rather, and enduring. Indeed, no other need surpasses it in endurance. And as long as any religious dogma remains mysterious, so long will our reason protest at being excluded, and the sense of injustice will lead to indignation and revolt. 400 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY We shall then leap to the other extreme, Unitarianism ; the assertion of the exclusive right of private judgment. For Unitarianism is only pure and consistent rationalism in religion. Not only in the dogmatic part of the practical philosophy do we trace this fissure; the crack runs into the reasoned portions. The proof of God, the pivot on which it might be said the whole system turns, involves a leap across this breach between proof and faith. The arguments for God as given in part I of the Summa Theologica (question 2, art 3, Eng. tr., pp. 24-27) are reducible to the argument for a first cause. But we do not understand the nature of causa- tion. How the potential passes into the actual, or why it does, neither Aristotelian, nor Thomist, nor any one else, has explained to man. The match touches the powder and the explosion follows, the ball hits the ground and rebounds; but the necessary connection, which we all practically be- lieve in, is not accounted for. Hume's criticism is not fore- stalled. (Cf. the view of Jaime Balmes on this point, which agrees with our own: Fundamental Philosophy, pp. 481, 482, 483.) Yet suppose the nature of the causal connection were understood; even then the crack would not be healed. The demand for a first cause is, doubtless, a just demand. But there is a counter-demand, viz., the demand for a cause of that cause, and so on indefinitely. The Thomistic proof does no more than insist on the validity of the former claim. It was reserved for Kant to show that the one of these de- mands is no more valid than the other. Has St. Thomas given a sufficient reason for choosing the thesis rather than the antitheses in this antinomy ? Not overtly at any rate. To be sure, a Thomist might offer a further defence. He might urge that St. Thomas really did justice to both sides of the antinomy; for the Doctor did answer the question (in THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 401 question 4) after the cause of the first cause. God is causa sui; His essence is His existence. This is, of course, the ontological proof, and it justifies the comment of Kant, that the causal proof really involves the ontological one. But St. Thomas has already told us (question 2, art. i) that the ontological proof is unintelligible for man. God can under- stand it, but not we. Hence St. Thomas does not reveal to our understanding the grounds for belief in God. The first cause's self-causation remains a mystery, and thereby the antithesis of Kant's antinomy is not truly included; and the proof of God is not rationally defended from the child's objection, " who made God ? " We may resort to faith, indeed : but the cleft has opened before us, and reason must leap across if it is to accept the argument; but this it has no means of doing. We subjoin certain other failures of reason in the system. As to the creation: why and how God created the world must remain a mystery. Nor can we understand generation (as of the Son from the Father). " And Ambrose says (De Fide, I), ' It is impossible to know the secret of generation ' ' (Summa Theologica, part I, question 32, art. i ; Eng. tr., II, p. 58). Also potency, a chief category of the system, has no explanatory value (cf. p. 372 above). These four are not minor points, but foundation stones. But even if none of these logical gaps were there, the principle of not needing to understand all the dogmas would remain, rendering the system inadequate. The breach between faith and reason reacts, too, upon the dogmas themselves. The Catholic prepares the way for faith by a long chain of reasons. Faith is at the top of a ladder; we cannot easily mount if the rungs of that ladder are not absolutely firm. But reason, however careful, is liable to error. " The mind of man," said Pope Leo XIII, 402 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY " is shut up and held in certain bounds, and narrow enough those boundaries are " (Encyclical letter, prefixed to trans- lation of the Summa). Now a chain is as strong as its weakest link; and many of the links are matters of historical evidence, which is proverbially difficult. The words of Jesus might easily not have been exactly quoted when He identified himself with the Father. All the testimony of the martyrs, the miracles, and other circumstantial evidence would then go to show that He was a supernatural person, of an order of greatness far above the rest of mankind, but yet not God. And so with other crucial passages; viz., the address to Peter, et al. As long as the dogmas themselves are not intrinsically evident, it can never be absolutely cer- tain which dogmas of Scripture are the ones revealed. A section of the human race, whose temperament emphasizes reason's claims more than faith's, will find herein a loophole for dissent. The rupture thus started leads to the same endless and futile tilt that we found between previous types of phi- losophy. The Unitarian, revolting against authority in toto, undertakes to work out a religious system by the light of reason alone. But he soon finds life too short for the task. Or, what is the same thing, the problem appears too difficult for men, thinking independently, to attain a solution ac- ceptable to all. The result is that one grows weary and turns his religion into a cult of morality. Unitarians have no theology; most other Protestants have a diminishing one. " Behave yourself properly," they say, " and your theology may be anything or nothing." Such is the gist of a recent typical book, The Religion of the Future. But sooner or later, we believe, this eats out the heart of morality. Auguste Comte, the classical instance of all such " ethical culture " tendencies, at last endowed his polity with the title " Re- THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 403 ligion of Humanity " and in place of the Madonna and infant Jesus adopted the symbol of the young woman with a male child. As we have already remarked, a working religion needs tenets. We cannot act for action's sake alone. We cannot expect men to practice long the difficult arts of self-sacrifice, tolerance, or forgiveness of injuries, unless they believe that those arts are justified by some Principle of the universe, which will ensure them well-being to com- pensate their present losses. What we seek, we seek sub specie boni; we cannot put heart into what brings no gain in the end. The reaction from Unitarianism to some form of Catholicism is but a question of time. Of course, one may at this juncture become a skeptic; that alternative we shall later consider. Provided, however, one retains a genuine religious interest, he will tend to waver between the ex- tremes of dogma without understanding and reason without doctrine. In either event, the philosophical problem is not solved. We have not discovered a plan of the universe satisfactory to the reason and sufficient for the conduct of life. The cure lies of course not in discarding dogma, but in improving it; by which we mean, rationalizing it. The mysteries must be studied until they become either self- evident, or implicates of what is self-evident. The causal connection, which the criticism of Hume has never pre- vented us from treating as if it were necessary, must be shown to be such. We must with all our powers seek to illuminate the arcana of creation and generation. We must strive to ascertain how one aspect of the world implies another. The practical synthesis has shown, by most skill- ful reasoning, how the partisans may become consistent with one another; and this reconciliation is a great achievement. But it has given no reasons why both sides must be accepted 404 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY rather than one only. It has given no rationale of the bind- ing principle. It proves that we may accept both, and a broad common sense, as well as the religious need, counsels the acceptance of both; but we do not see the logic of it. Such logic we ought to seek. Not that we shall ever be able to stop seeking it! No exhortations are necessary, for there is here an instinct which cannot be stifled. But it behooves man to realize this, that he may not continue to fight against a foe which sooner or later must conquer him. Naturam expellas furca, etc. Rationalism, pitching out dogmatism, will sometime yield to that enemy: of dogmatism the correlative statement is true. For there is, naturally, no necessary hostility between the two methods. It is common for Protestants to urge that acceptance of dogma violates reason. Since you are for- bidden to deny the dogmas, you cannot inquire about them; lest your inquiry should result in a disproof of them. One might as well say we should never study the nature of light, since the investigation might disclose the fact that there was no light. We accept the evidences of sense-observation ; and all our knowledge of this world comes from that observation and what it implies ; yet no one would say that the dogmas of sense are endangered by the study of physical science. We know that the plain facts of sense must not in general be de- nied ; but that knowledge is no hindrance to our attempt to understand them, or to make them systematic and clear. " It is absurd," said Reid, " to conceive that there can be any opposition between reason and common sense " (Works, Hamilton's ed., I, p. 425). The certainty of the latter does not rule out the investigations of the former. No more does religious certainty imply a prohibition of rational inquiry. Yet it remains true that the method of authority does not actually inquire into all the " mysteries of the Faith," and THE PRACTICAL SYNTHESIS THOMISM 405 does not counsel the inquiry; rather, in its official human form, it discourages such inquiry (Summa Theologica, part I, question 32, art. i, Respondeo; Eng. tr., II, pp. 58-59). It is this discouragement, which practically amounts to exclu- sion, that provokes the rationalist to his protest. But the exclusion is not necessarily a consequence of dogma. Thus, once more, we find a pretty even balance between the rivals. Each party stands for a motive which is eter- nally sound. Scientific method, deduction, induction, all the processes of the intellect must be exercised; the dogmatic attitude, while admitting this, yet tends to belittle it. On the other hand, practical certainties abound in life, and religious dogma, in spite of many accompanying mischiefs, has on the whole proved its validity by its services to man. Some form of it indeed must always be held among the sober- minded. The one-sided partisan of rationalism believes it to be not yet intellectually grown up ; the one-sided religious devotee considers his opponent spiritually decadent. But as far as we can see, life would be as dreary, even as impos- sible, without the one as without the other. The present age emphasizes the rationalist side, the Middle Ages the dogmatic; but a philosophical survey should not lay too much stress on the present. The scientific spirit has been ascendant less than five hundred years, and while it has greatly altered the material side of life, has perhaps not affected the hearts of men so much as did the religious period. The pendulum swings back and forth, and the course of wisdom is to remember that it is bound to return from every extreme. Everything seems to indicate that Catholicism, in one form or another Roman, Greek, or Episcopal, or some new form is as permanent as science. But neither party solves the original philosophical problem. Protestantism has sharpened an indispensable tool, and 406 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY essays no use of it; Catholicism gives us answers to medi- tate upon, but does not help us to meditate. The one will not demonstrate its results; the other has no results to demonstrate. Each condemns the other, while both are necessary. CHAPTER XI THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISEASE IF any reader has had the patience to follow thus far, it would seem a pity to make him wade through another chapter like the last before coming to our main question. To round out the historical scheme, no doubt, we ought at least to take up the massive structure into which Leibnitz welded the many factions. But our general line of criticism ought to be pretty clear by this time, and we shall content ourselves with suggesting how it would apply to that great system. We have in Chapter VIII characterized Leibnitz's syn- thesis as on the whole an aesthetic one : meaning that it was based upon such ideals as peace, mutual complaisance, and accord. Probably aesthetic is too strong a word ; for though the idea of the universe as a beautiful chord may have in- fluenced him, yet in critical conceptions like the " preestab- lished harmony " and " compossibility " it is not so much positive concord as absence of discord that Leibnitz empha- sizes. His world is more like the unison of octaves than the thrilling quality of the tonic or diminished seventh. This notion of reciprocal sufferance, or non-contradiction, be- tween the parts of reality, was certainly the precipitate of Leibnitz's teaching in the mind of his disciple Christian Wolff. We believe, then, that it would not be difficult to demonstrate that Leibnitz's main doctrines were animated by no motive of mutual implication, nor by our need of conducting ourselves in the environment, but by the desire 407 408 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY to show how the parts of the universe fit smoothly together. Such an attitude we should expect from the man who was at once diplomatist and polymath. Says Hoffding "... the main thought of his philosophy was that existence is continuous and consists of a multitude of individual beings, each with its own idiosyncracy, in reciprocal harmony with one another " (History of Modern Philosophy, I, Eng. tr., P- 33?)- Not only these individual beings (monads) but their states or phases, apparently so diverse and contrary, are mutually adjusted. Rest and motion are not the diamet- rical opposites they look to be; rest is a tendency to move, a real infinitesimal motion. Potentiality is dawning actu- ality; whatever is possible, incipiently and slightly is. Sensation is but dark, confused thought. Matter and mind are not as disparate as they seem; matter is mind with its activity repressed and latent. The parts of the universe, however, do not form an organism, for the monads do not influence one another. They correspond, they are mutually representative, and their differences do not contradict their similarity, because those differences are not qualitative, but only reside in the degree of clearness, or of development of the monad's potencies. Such is, very roughly, the doctrine of the " preestablished harmony." The real world has ruled out all things that are not " compossible," that is, are mutually contradictory. Its members do not cohere in the sense of the rationalistic synthesis; they stand side by side without conflict. In particular we should notice the very characteristic reconciliation of freedom and necessity: every individual thing or event is free, in that it is unique and not reducible to terms of law, while at the same time it is caused by the Divine fiat: a fiat which chooses what it chooses in accord with the greatest possible good of all creation (the principle of sufficient reason). Many other THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISEASE 409 universes than this one would have been possible, but this has the least amount of evil consistent with the fact that it contains finite beings. The motive clearly is to secure a harmony between the good and the necessary: but in this adjustment each works independently, trimming itself so as not to interfere with the other. The system, one would think, ought to be the most satis- factory of all systems. Perhaps too satisfactory; it is per- vaded by an almost saccharine flavour, which alone would lead to a revolt. But even were this not so, we must ac- quiesce in the criticism made by Kant, that the harmonizing principles themselves are not independently verified. The whole edifice seems to be of pure speculative tissue con- structed. Brilliancy, suggestiveness, almost inconceivable breadth we have; but detailed verification is lacking. The system rests alone on its appeal to our sense of harmony. Perhaps this desire to please all sides accounts for the fact that while we of today admire more and more Leibnitz's powers, we do not become his disciples. Hegelians and Thomists there are; there are few if any Leibnitzians. He has no one virile principle, like that of rational implication or practical need. The role of the peacemaker is unprofit- able. Mere good intention, without fulfilment, is so ineffec- tive. He does not show why one monad happens to be accompanied by other monads, how the cause leads to the effect, how God's perfection could possibly come to find itself limited by the necessity of some evil. In this way he fails to meet our instinctive desire to understand. Nor on the other hand does he offer anything positive to fill this gap, as the Thomist does by pointing to the practical need of infallible certainty, satisfied by dogma. These gaps must lead to a protest, and philosophy will return once more to the " solid ground " of experience and the implications of ex- 410 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY perience (as it did with Kant when he reacted against the Leibnitz- Wolffian doctrine). The criticism, then, which we proffer upon the system of Leibnitz will be of the same sort as in the cases of Thomism and Hegelianism ; it does not seem necessary that we estab- lish it point by point. Of all the synthetic types it seems to be true, that they are in their own way as exclusive as the partisan types; for they find their critical points in one another's methods of combining the parts, as well as in the independent partisan types themselves. To those who specially admire some one philosopher out of those we have passed in review, it will naturally look as if we had been quite unjust to his system. And so we have: for every thinker of note is broader than his main tendency. Moreover, the formality of which we have accused each in turn does not apply to all his tenets. There may be no thinker who has not supplied concrete data out of which a pretty full portrayal of reality might, by the pooling of all such contributions, be afforded. In the very map which we ourselves intend to offer, indeed, there will be no one idea which has not been at least suggested before. What is lack- ing, however, throughout all the scattered truths of this sort, is some vitalizing principle which shall be seen to unite them. But even such a principle has been already thought of, though it has not been seriously employed by the professionals. One may also object that some very influential systems have not been treated at all. Thus, Schopenhauer's doc- trine of the Will as thing-in-itself ; the synthesis of Lotze; the coincidentia oppositorum of Nicolaus Cusanus; the number-philosophy of the Pythagoreans; the metaphysics of Mrs. Eddy; and many others. Also certain hoary issues have passed unmentioned, to wit: theism vs. pantheism, THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISEASE 411 continuity vs. discreteness, naturalism vs. supernaturalism, and so on. It may be that these systems and issues are more important than the ones we have taken up. Never- theless we claim to have dealt with most of them in prin- ciple. For instance: Schopenhauer's explanation of, say, a man's traits by reference to Will (World as Will and Idea, bk. II) cannot quite give satisfaction to our desire to under- stand why that man has those traits. The Will is outside the sphere of understanding, and is indifferent to the or- dinary scientific account which ascribes the man's personal make-up to heredity, environment, and perhaps some chance " mutation " or spontaneous variation. Like so many idealists, the genial pessimist regards it as a weakness to seek to account for the course of events. Of course he says that it belongs to science to do this, but in his view science cannot do it, since causality is but a subjective order- ing of phenomena and does not tell us why this particular kind of cause leads to that particular kind of effect and no other as it does lead. Schopenhauer's pessimism itself, however, is not such a formality; it is drawn from the detail of fact. Our wills are ever seeking what they cannot get; and too often they blindly dictate our beliefs, so that we become intolerant and prejudiced. Meanwhile his remedy is not, to show us a way of getting what our wills seek, or of accepting the truths for which our opponents contend, but renunciation. This negative result, which had been partly foreshadowed in the Stoic teaching, cannot long be accepted by a humanity whose instinct irresistibly seeks life, and ever fuller life. As for the other instances above named, we leave it to the reader to convince himself that they fail to meet one or both of the two conditions which are the criterion of philosophic success; either, that is, they do not explain the actual content of the world, or they do 412 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY not present a doctrine which can be used to guide human life. Another respect in which the types here studied fail to coincide with actual opinions, is that they are seldom en- tertained singly; almost always in groups. One thinker is at the same time, say, a subjectivist, a determinist, a dyna- mist, a nominalist; another is a realist, a staticist, a deter- minist, a Platonist; another an idealist, a libertarian, a Platonist; and so on. This is because each type usually bases itself upon a single category, or upon a group of closely related ones; and such a point of view is obviously too narrow to cover all the faces of reality. With respect to one another, these points of view seem disparate and rela- tively indifferent; hence, if one chooses the side of sub- jectivism in the subjective-objective issue, he may or may not choose that of freedom in the determinism-freedom issue; and so for the rest. Actually, then, philosophers tend to be eclectic; and the history of philosophy is a morpho- logical account, listing the compartments occupied by the men in turn. Not that there is no connection between the disparate points of view ; but it does not concern us now to trace it. Yet with all this permutation and combination of them, our main thesis is not vitiated; for the controversies between the parts continue and are motivated as above appeared. We have now gotten fairly before us the data of our problem. We have set forth the grounds of most of the in- fluential philosophic types; we have learned how each one not only fails to provide sustenance for the instinct that sug- gested it, but also provokes the human mind to rebel against it and to adopt some one of the others. All revolve in a circle about that centre which our original problem urges us to penetrate; if we do not like one place on that THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISEASE 413 circle we may choose another, but the whole spectacle of human philosophic endeavour offers, in the main, nothing more than this ceaseless revolution. It becomes, then, our task to survey the data, to discern the source of the trouble, and if possible to find a remedy. It looks simple enough at first. Each system, we found, had a critical point; it described a portion of reality, and so far was true and illuminating, but beyond a certain place the illumination died away. There was always an outlying field wherein its description, though still true, gave no ade- quate notion of the facts. This did not render the system false; and it was still easy to persuade one's self that the system was final, provided one did not think that outlying field very important, or provided one did not feel the need of a principle which should explain all the specific depart- ments of reality. On the other hand, it seemed pretty clear that since all were true, it was an arbitrary exclusion which brought about their perennial opposition. The germ of the philosophic disease would then appear to be a whim, an unreasonable desire to triumph over others; just sheer unwillingness to admit that one's adversary may have as good a truth as one's own. And this unwillingness is not to be laid at the door of the partisan systems only; the synthetic types excluded one another and the partisan as well. To a superficial glance, this may seem sufficient; but it is hard to believe that mere lust of victory is the cause of so deep-seated an evil. No doubt it is a factor for human selfishness is not easily dislodged; but surely not the only factor. There is probably some excuse for this exclusion; something in the objective situation to make exclusion seem necessary. We believe that this is the case. 414 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY A more careful inspection than we have hitherto made shows that the types appear constrained to contradict one another. For every type, there is a critical point; but the critical point has a peculiar property. It lies between opposites. It marks off, for each type, an outer region which is something like the contrary of the region in which that type is at home. Running through the list, we see individuals marked off over against universals, mind over against matter, con- sciousness over against objects, law over against freedom, the will over against knowledge and feeling, the whole over against the parts, dogma over against understanding, static over against dynamic, and so on. Each system starts from one side of this line of cleavage, selects one of these cate- gories as its basis, declares it ultimate, independent, irre- ducible, and reduces the contrary category to a function of it. The whole point of the system is in attempting this reduction: if it did not, it would not envisage the broad field of reality, it would not be philosophy but a special science. Is not this bound to lead to conflict between the systems ? If matter is that-which-is-not-mind, and if mind is that-which-is-not-matter, how can spiritualism and materialism help conflicting ? If law is that which is not freedom, and freedom that which is not law, how can the determinist and the libertarian possibly agree ? And it is no arbitrary assertion, to say that these correlative cate- gories, law and freedom, mind and matter, etc., are op- posites. We found in our study of each type that however much one type tried to reduce its opponent to terms of itself, it never succeeded. There was always something ex- clusive about consciousness; something which the great- objective formula never quite reached, always something about universals which no heaping together of individuals THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISEASE 415 could attain, etc. The lesson of history would seem to be that these categories are mutually exclusive. Is not the quarrel between each system and its correlate then un- avoidable ? To be sure we have said, in every chapter, that the cor- relative systems need not contradict each other. We have said of each pair that neither alternative could refute the other, and neither interfered with the truth of the other. But now we must face the possibility that we judged too hastily. Did we really see that the antagonists did not con- tradict each other ? No: what we did see was that both were true, that neither could refute the other. But what if further analysis should disclose that at the same time each by implication denied the other, even while both were true ? In fact, the more we scrutinize the situation, the more we shall feel compelled to admit the inevitableness of the strife. For there are two very fundamental principles at work here, as it were generating out of each system an opposite with which it must fight: and while no doubt both are sound, they do appear incompatible. The one assures us of the ultimacy of those categories upon which the several systems are built; the other justifies every system in trying to reduce the counter-categories to terms of its own category. These two principles are old friends of ours or shall we say enemies ? They are the externality and the internality of relations. The doctrine of externality says that there are entities which are the same in all environments, independent of the relations into which they enter, and ultimate. We have already argued that this is true; we did not think that its truth could be demonstrated, however, but only witnessed; in actual intellectual work one constantly appeals to it, as to a self-evident axiom (cf. Chapter VIII on Platonism). 41 6 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY The partisan systems all start from it, in that each takes some one category as metaphysically ultimate. Subjec- tivism took the conscious mind as thus ultimate, idealism the Great Self, voluntarism the Great Will, Platonism the universals, pragmatism the " biological situation," and so on. The synthetic systems in their own way also started from it. Thomism takes the practical criterion as ultimate in itself; no rational confirmation of dogma, whether in religion or in common sense, beyond what is necessary to make it appear reasonable and consistent, is necessary. Leibnitz regarded the criterion of harmonious adjustment as self-sufficient. The rational synthesis, building con- sciously upon both the principles, externality and inter- nality, accepts them as self-supporting, independently of practical need or verifiable harmony. Any declaration of truth whatsoever, indeed, which is uttered and believed without the examination of all its possible bearings, is an example of the principle of externality. And inasmuch as we have to believe certain things true even if it be that the whole alone is real and at the same time can never examine all their bearings, we thereby testify to the justice of the principle. And so every system does but do homage to it, when it insists upon the ultimacy of its basal category. On the other hand, the particular systems, having selected their TTOU orw, immediately proceed to exploit the remainder by the other principle, that of internality. And they are driven to do this by a fatal logic; they will not be phil- osophical at all unless they explain the rest of the world in terms of their own base. Unless the universe is reduced, analyzed, exhibited as a function of some principle or prin- ciples, the universe is not understood. Unless, by material- ism, mind were shown to be not ultimate, but constituted wholly by its material relationships, materialism would not THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISEASE 417 be a doctrine at all. If freedom were not explained as a complex kind of determination by law, determinism would not be a doctrine. Each system must then endeavour to analyze its counter-category down into relations toward, or of, its own category. As all belief here and now, in ad- vance of infinite investigation, depends upon the principle of externality, so all understanding depends upon the prin- ciple of internality. We do not wish to prove the latter principle any more than the former; we have already said (Chapter III) that it cannot be proved, but only obeyed. The conflict of the philosophic systems with one another, in fine, is due to the fact that all accept both these principles. While each system saves itself from internal contradiction by applying externality to its own basal category, inter- nality to its counter-category; as a whole, the field offers the spectacle of a contest between these two antagonists. If now, all these pairs of categories were not mutually exclusive, but amenable to reduction in both directions, there would perhaps be no ground of controversy. But it is just the principle of externality which says that they are not amenable; and our own investigation has borne out the assertion. No category has been reduced to its counter- category; nor have we seen any way of doing it. They are logical opposites. On the other hand, if the principle of externality were the only sound one, controversy might cease. The various systems would stand peacefully side by side, and the true philosophy be their sum. But the prin- ciple of internality gives the lie to any such external addition. Viewing the matter collectively, it is as if each category said to its counterpart, " I am ultimate and you are not, for you are only a relation in me " : a state of affairs which, accord- ing as our mood is light, heavy, or strenuous, will appear ridiculous, or tragic, or intolerable. 41 8 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY So pessimistic a description of philosophy will not easily be admitted by the professionals though we may con- ceive the laity taking a certain malicious delight in it; and we have to assure ourselves that there is no escape from our characterization. It would seem as if there must be some way out of this war of all against all. The principle of ex- ternality our own account has verified; if our tale has been convincing, we can hardly believe that categories are re- ducible to terms of their opposites. Why not urge, then, that the principle of internality has been unduly extended ? Our results point that way; we granted, to be sure, that that principle was formally valid, but we decried it as barren, given no real understanding of what it denned. The in- dividuals were not truly accounted for by their reduction to a phase of the universal; the theoretic interest was not genuinely explained as an indefinitely remote practical interest; and so in other cases. Is not this admission that the principle of internality applies only in a formal manner tantamount to a denial of it ? Merely a saving of its face, so to speak, itself as formal as it makes out the principle to be ? Perhaps, then, the situation may be relieved by a partial denial of internality; perhaps by that means we may be persuaded of the needlessness of the warfare; and the various types may be permitted to lie peacefully together. Such a denial, indeed, is current today: it goes by the name of pluralism. It would cure the philosophic disease by a remedy quite the opposite of synthesis: by partition. It is a time-honoured method of settling quarrels: separate the antagonists. It has often appeared in the history of thought; generally in conjunction with other types as in the Herbartian spiritualism, or Professor Ward's theism - because of itself it gives no systematic plan of the uni- verse, and no understanding of one part from another. This THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISEASE 419 does not, of course, render it false; but it is so far negative and a step in the direction of skepticism, however short that step may be. Its negativity in fact explains our omission of so important a tendency from the previous list. Pluralism need not deny the principle of internality in toto; for that matter, no doctrine could do so. But it does usually deny it as regards the chief categories known to man. The various finite selves, it teaches, are ultimately more or less independent; universals and individuals are both real and irreducible to each other; subject and object also; spirit and matter, theoretical and practical needs, God and ourselves, etc. ; all these do not form an organic system but a collection, an aggregate. Two notable books of our time have stood powerfully for this position: Professor Ward's The Realm of Ends and Professor James' A Plural- istic Universe. The new-realists and the pragmatists tend in the same direction. Those numerous revolters against the Hegelian system revolt perhaps primarily at its mon- ism; discarding its idealism because of its internal-relation attribute and its closed unity. The pluralist, then, believes that there are certain things, or categories, or what not, which are mutually indefinable : true last terms, beyond which a perfect knowledge could not go. But the word " indefinable " is, after all, only a more dignified name for a mystery. If there should turn out to be, say, just seven indefinables in the whole universe, that is but a way of saying that there are seven ultimate mysteries; all the rest of the universe may be understood, these seven once granted, but they cannot be understood. Now it is simply impossible to admit, if we reflect seriously upon the matter, that we are to be forever confronted by mysteries even if there are only seven of them. It is impossible for the same reason that it is impossible even to 420 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY try to jump a ditch without taking for granted that our legs will not fail at the take-off. When we are brought face to face with this question of mystery we cannot allow that there are mysteries: it means the snuffing out of that un- quenchable desire to understand; it means resignation before we have tried. It is nothing more or less than an exclusive dogmatism such as the Protestant condemns in Catholicism, and we ourselves in Chapter X condemned. It is, if you like, an act of faith to accept the interpenetra- tion which internality implies as long as faith is not understood to connote uncertainty. We use the term to signify that we are quite certain, but yet have not every- where verified in the particulars. As the religious man feels his dogma necessary to the good life, so the thinker feels this dogma necessary to the enterprise of philosophy. Of course nothing is more obvious than that many men do not so feel, for they deny the dogma; but when they deny it they stop inquiring and cease to be thinkers. They no longer ask, " Why this particular indefinable ? " They say, " Let us rest content at last in a mystery." It is however quite im- possible now to prove that this faith is well grounded; we can only point to its actual employment so far as one seeks to understand, and to the infinity of that seeking. The absolute idealists know this well, and that is their reason for accepting the principle: for they are the most thorough- going rationalists of history. They believe, with Hegel, that everything should be understood, and so they declare that everything is subject to the principle of internality. But, no doubt, one who does not take up the original problem of philosophy with uncompromising sincerity cannot be made to have this faith. It is possible to live without it; it is possible to exercise the intellect a very great deal without granting the universal validity of internality. But, as the THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISEASE 421 absolutists say, if you decide to play the game, you must follow its rules to the bitter end and the great rule of the game of explanation is internality. We have said that those same absolutists have not succeeded in applying the rule, for their Whole is not fertile to generate an understanding of the parts; but at any rate they recognize it. In short, we have in the principle of internal relations an axiom. That axiom is however not treated properly when it is announced by a fulmination and not verified in rebus. It is just the fact that it has not been so verified that has given the pluralists their chance. But even had we no desire to understand, and no faith that we can understand, the large amount of empirical corroboration that lies before us should cast suspicion on the pluralisms solution. In any case, how could he prove his universal negative ? How could we be assured that mind can never be denned, or matter, or free- dom, or any of the type-categories ? Who knows what new light might in future generations be shed upon these topics ? And it is plain enough that the partisans have in their own way put faith in the principle of internality, for they have all used it; the trouble is that they have used it in opposite directions; so that the clash between it and its counter- principle, externality, has turned into a battle between particular systems. The pluralistic type, then, cannot be accepted in so far as we are thinkers. It is but a word for the fact that so far we have not solved our problem. It is not, after all, properly speaking, a philosophic type, for it has no positive scheme to offer, no map of reality, not even the merest outline. It does not locate the parts of the world by reference to one another, as a map should do; it gives to the untra veiled no clew to the character of this or that region, no chart of sailing directions to the voyager in unfamiliar seas. Instead, it 422 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY prescribes an abstinence from thought in which the thinker cannot acquiesce. Its empiricism is commendable, but its dogmatism is an arbitrary prohibition of thinking. But if this universal interconnection is true, what becomes of that principle of externality to which we have already agreed ? It looks now as if that could not be true. We thought that mind and body, consciousness and objects, law and freedom, universal and individual, etc., could not be defined respectively in terms of each other; but it looks as if that result were only provisional, only the registration of our present ignorance. Nevertheless externality is a sound principle; it is, in fact, an axiom quite on a par with internality. It is as much an indispensable object of faith as its counterpart. If we cannot understand without the latter, we cannot believe without the former. Internality alone gives only relativity: everything is so far everything else that it is nothing in particular; the objects of our cre- dence forever vanish into something other than themselves. Each part must however stand on its own feet upon whose feet else shall it stand, if the feet of all the others in turn rest upon its own ? The argument for a TTOV OTCO is eternally valid, and those philosophers who defend exter- nality have always given it, in one form or another and they have given no other plea. So, even though the cate- gories may severally be reduced to terms of their counter- parts, they must remain intact, real by themselves, in some way independent of each other. No, externality cannot be refuted by internality; it is as firmly lodged in the credo of the rational inquirer as is its opposite. This then is the whole trouble, and the source of it, viz., our thought cannot help being governed by two principles which appear to contradict each other. The principles are sound in themselves, and each supplements the other; all THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISEASE 423 thinkers use them both, though with differing emphasis. Even the pluralist uses internality somewhere] when for instance he is occupied in reducing the real world to the list of indefinables. But since they do not seem to be con- sistent with each other, and since the principle of internality is not fully verified in concrete, the latter comes to be denied, now in one quarter, now in another. The materialist denies it of matter, the subjectivist of mind, the realist of objects, the Platonist of universals each justifying his denial by appealing to the independence (i. e., the externality) of his base. The occasion of stumbling is the formality of the internal principle; but the stumbling is made possible by the apparent hostility between it and the external. This then is nothing less than the disease-germ which has poi- soned all human philosophy. This it is which lies at the root of the perennial controversies, the endless reforms and as endless refutations. If the universe appears to contain two principles which are at war, how shall we, who wait upon it for our knowledge, escape contention ? Absolute idealism has seen this, of course. Lacking specific deliverances about reality, it compensates by its understanding of the philosophic situation. It is woven out of the two strands of internality and externality that has been shown in Chapter IX. It finds between them an un- avoidable dialectic; and if our estimate of it was correct, it cannot solve that dialectic. Herein the system self-sacri- ficingly takes up into itself all the controversies which the rest of the philosophic world eternally wages. And in as- suming this burden it is the most honest and the justest system which professional philosophy has to show. If those others condemn it, therefore, they only condemn them- selves, since they in their quarrels are examples of that same dialectic. It is, as Hegel would say, the philosophic situa- tion come to self-consciousness. 424 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY The result of the inquiry so far is certainly not encourag- ing; in fact we are at the darkest point of our whole journey. Looking back over the reforms, we can see this opposition of self to other always at work; first it drove us from one partisan over to its correlate, then, transferring the battle to a higher plane, it vitiated every attempt at synthesis. The practical synthesis, not yet fully conscious of the seat of the trouble, glossed it over (following Aristotle) by reduc- ing one member to the status of a mere potency, and con- tented itself with insisting correctly enough upon the satisfaction of our mind's thirst by dogma. The harmoniz- ing synthesis, too, in the eagerness of its desire for peaceful adjustment, did not realize the latent hostility of the mem- bers it joined with its saccharine paste. The rational syn- thesis, most intelligent of all, has in effect brought to us the realization, how impossible is the marriage of the antag- onists. Not only has every reform fallen through; we see why it must have fallen through. Would it not have been better to fail of the diagnosis ? Then at least we could have continued in the respectable treadmill of philosophic custom, espousing some one side, refuting all the others, and with practice developing, perhaps, enough skill to command a certain attention, or even repute. At this point rises a reflection highly esteemed by the scientific wing; dismissed too lightly, perhaps, in our ac- count above. It is this: the whole argument creates its own difficulties. Don't make those sweeping generalizations, the principles of internality and externality. Be scientific rather; examine each problem, each department of the universe, or each category, by itself. " Isolation of prob- lems " is the suggestion. The account given in these pages may be quite true of the history of human thought, but that history is mainly a record of errors. Men have hitherto THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISEASE 425 adopted a wrong method. The only right one is slow but sure induction, in the manner of Darwin, or the physicists, taking up each on its own merits problem after problem and seeking a total system only when the cumulative evidence points emphatically toward one. Why try once more for a short-cut to knowledge ? Patient investigation alone will do the task, there is no royal road etc., etc. The atti- tude here inculcated is not pluralism, but just open-minded- ness, scientific deliberation. The objection has a fine appearance of wisdom. And though it is one part wrong, it is three parts right. It lays down for the philosopher a requirement with which he can- not dispense. That empirical method, hewing every step as we climb up the slippery face of reality, was championed by no less than Aristotle; if he did not perfect a system accept- able to every expert, it was because the science of his time was but infantile. We, however, have vastly more material at our disposal; let us then see if we may not attain a more stable system than Aristotle could reach. Or if not we for the task is too great to be quickly done then our heirs. At any rate, there is no other way ; for what has not been scientifically tested is not final. Philosophy should be the empirical study of fundamental problems each by itself: the meaning of the chief categories of the universe, viz., mind, life, space, cause, value, time, personality, etc. All very well: but no sooner do we investigate, say, the meaning of personality, than the doubt arises as to what facts are the significant ones for the definition. Is a man his " inner " thoughts, feelings, desires, and their concatena- tion or is he his overt relationships with men and with nature, his social status, his works, his wealth or poverty or is he both of these ? Is causality an external relation between all temporal happenings, to be understood by the 426 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY a priori analyses of Russell and Royce, or is its meaning to be divulged only from the particular modes in which partic- ular causes give rise to their effects ? Is mind best elu- cidated by the introspective psychologist, or should the latter turn biologist ? Such issues are settled by no amount of empirical inquiry; they are, in fact, but the clash of the same two principles which such investigation was designed to supersede, but which dictate the manner of the investigation itself. It is just because those two principles, interrelation and independence, are so ubiquitous, so indubitable, in a word so a priori, that the isolated-problem method will never suffice to heal the philosophic disease. The controversies of philosophy have not been controversies about the partic- ulars is the world made of hydrogen, or is mind able to outlast the body ? Such are not the casus belli; it is the universal trait of reality, that double-faced quality which appears to give the lie to itself, that stirs up trouble. And as the quarrels are not concerned with particulars revealed by empirical methods, so they cannot be settled by those methods. And we might have known that beforehand. To repeat something of Chapter II: if the problems could be solved by objective inquiry, there would gradually have consolidated, as there has in the sciences consolidated, a definite corpus philosophiae. It is that a certain positive character of reality vitiates, and will vitiate, whatever results we gam. Until that devitalizing character is reckoned with, the empirical method is like a dyspeptic who would restore his strength by eating more. No: it is of no use to revive the ancient device of wiping the slate clean and essaying a fresh start. With our new reform of thoroughgoing empiricism, we may think that the old issues are forgotten and outgrown. But they reappear THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISEASE 427 in a modern dress. We cannot get rid of them until we have solved them. For instance, the modern problems of social adjustment, as we hope to show, are but the old ones in a guise suited to the fashions and interests of today. So it is, indeed, with all our chief modern problems. The dualism of externality and internality is bound to confront us wherever we turn; we cannot settle the conflict of these two in their present-day shapes until we have discovered the principle which settles the controversy in the old issues of individual and universal, static and dynamic, and all the other warring pairs. We must resist the temptation to believe that our own empirical, experimenting age is the uniquely gifted one of all history, whose ways of approach- ing the philosophic problem are exclusively fitted for suc- cess. We cannot lastingly solve our own problems before we know the general principle of reconciling opposites : else the clash, removed from one sphere, breaks out in another. Here we have turned our last corner and stand before the lair of a monster whose growls may have been heard anon, amid the din and clamour of rebuttal; to wit, the monster of skepticism. Hitherto this view if it may be called a view has been dismissed as giving up the problem, as intellectual cowardice. But it is not cowardice to know when you are beaten, and skepticism now appears to be something very like that knowledge. How shall we say that skepticism is weakness when the skeptics, from Zeno to Hume, have been the keenest of human thinkers ? And we are not talking of partial skepticism such as religious agnosticism, or doubt of the external world but of the thoroughgoing denial of any certainty whatsoever. That denial cannot be forestalled by argument drawn from any one type for it depends upon the inevitable conflict of types. It is often urged, for instance, against the 428 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY skeptic that he refutes himself when he declares knowledge forever impossible; for how could he know that reality eludes our grasp unless he knew enough about reality to be sure that it is not what we have got ? Or does he doubt the truth of his own assertion that there is no truth ? But this sort of reductio ad absurdum, like the others that we have met in the several types, does no harm. The full-blooded skeptic does not base his denial on the distinction between reality and our minds, or on any assumed principles. He argues by giving his enemy rope to hang himself. He allows the philosophers to develop their theories to the utmost and then quietly points to the fact that they contradict one another and their results cancel out. This is the dialectic of thought made explicit: given tune enough and thinkers enough, thought ruins itself. It is not an a priori argument, but a posteriori. If now it is true that skepticism which is but the sense of despair that overwhelms one who looks upon his disease turns upon the dialectic of views, it devolves upon us to take up that unpleasant topic. This of course includes the problem of the antinomies which we have met in Kant, in mysticism, and in absolute idealism. A moment ago we characterized the difficulty by the opposition between the principles of internal and of external relations. That how- ever is but the more fundamental way of stating it; for all the famous old contradictions of Zeno, of Kant, of Hegel, or of the mystics really depend upon the hostility of these two principles. Consider, for instance, the flying arrow. Ac- cording to Zeno the tip is at each instant of its flight at rest, for it is in just one position. On the other hand the tip is never at rest, because it moves, and motion cannot be analyzed away into a sum of immobilities. Now the single instant of rest is but the element of the whole continuous THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISEASE 429 motion abstracted out and considered by itself, apart from all relation to the succeeding instants. This element must be really present in the flight; it stands there for itself and is real by itself. The principle of external relations tells us that we ought not to say it is nothing apart from its relation to the succeeding instants; it is a fact, really present as non- motion. On the other hand, the principle of internal rela- tions says that such an instantaneous position is nothing by itself, a false abstraction, only an aspect of the contin- uous flight, not an entity out of which the whole is summed, as out of independent parts. In reality, both these prin- ciples are true, and there lies the contradiction. And we do not hesitate to say that this contradiction has never yet been solved. A common device nowadays is to reject the principle of externality (cf. Bergson, Creative Evolution, ch. 4, pp. 308 f., Eng. tr. by Mitchell). That is, we are told that the instant is not real; the arrow's tip is never truly at a certain point in a single time, but is passing through the point. But who does not see that this is an evasion ? How can you pass through anything without being for a moment in it ? This way of escape simply denies the right of analy- sis. But to deny that is to deny thought. Bergson does this, to be sure, but we have already seen with what con- sequences to his own position (Chapter VIII). The point has also been made that the tip is not at rest in any of these instants, because rest means remaining in one position for a finite length of time. That is perhaps true, but it is irrele- vant. In any case the tip is not moving; and the puzzle is, how the motion can come to be analyzed at all points into those non-mobile states. What is true of the rest-motion antinomy is true of the others. For instance, take the Kantian argument as to the beginning of time. Suppose a moment when time began. 430 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY Then this moment presupposes an earlier one, when there was no time: a patent self-contradiction. It is nothing else than the principle of internal relations which dictates the eternal regress. Why does the said moment presuppose an earlier one ? Because every moment of time must be de- fined by its place in the time-series i. e., by its relation to other moments. The principle of externality, on the other hand, assures us that that way lies no possibility of getting a real sequence. If every moment is but its relations to the remainder, what happens when the remainder is likewise analyzed away ? There must be some solid basis for these interminable relations to rest upon, some actually given irov 0. Each moment must have in itself something ultimate and temporal, if it is not to vanish into a set of relations without terms; hence the first moment may exist independ- ent of any previous moments. Mr. Russell has used this last argument in his plea for absolute position in space and time; and it is as old as Aristotle. Neither of the principles can be denied, and there lies the inconsistency. That the same holds of the first-cause antinomy, and of the necessary Being in the Kantian list, is we think obvious enough to need no further comment. And the kind of antinomy which is stated in the form of the " infinite regress " permits the same reduction. Consider it, for in- stance, in space. A line an inch long is one finite completed quantity. Yet, our thought assures us, it contains an infinite number of points; a number so great that if we began at one end of the line and proceeded toward the other we could never traverse them all since infinite means endless. But, again, since the line is finite, we do traverse them all. It is the contradiction of the completed infinite. It may not be avoided by the modern mathematical de- finition of infinity, as that which can be put into one-one THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISEASE 431 correspondence with its own part. Great achievement though that definition is, it does not reach the present issue. The difficulty is to see how there can be, without incon- sistency, as many elements in the part as in the whole. That there are, is obvious enough. In the number series, for example: the first odd number corresponds to number one, the second odd number, three, to number two, the third odd number, five, to number three, the fourth, seven, to four, nine to five, and so on forever. Thus for each number in the odd-number-series we find one and only one in the whole- number-series, and conversely. At the same time there are more numbers in the latter series than in the former, because the former leaves out the even numbers. The number- series then has been put into one-one correspondence with its own part. Obviously, this would not be possible with a finite series, and it is possible with an infinite one. The fact, naturally, we do not question; its intelligibility we deny. The only reason why the part has always enough in it to furnish a correspondent for every new element dis- covered in the whole is that the part itself has an endless (i. e., infinite} number of elements. The very possibility of the one-one correspondence rests upon a tacit assumption of infinity. The notion of endless number, of ever new ele- ments to draw upon in order to eke out the correspondence, is not deduced from the notion of correspondence. What the definition really tells us is that only where we have an in- finite collection is one-one correspondence possible between whole and part. From a logical point of view, it is a vicious circle. From a mathematical point of view, it appears, it is useful, because it brings out a certain positive property of the infinite which it substitutes for the old and negative idea of mere endlessness. But it does not in the least abolish that negative attribute out of infinity; on the contrary it 432 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY surreptitiously employs it. And the puzzle remains, how the endless number of elements can all be gathered together into one whole. Nor is the contradiction avoided by the denial of points (or elements); i.e., by the assertion that they are ideal limits of division, not real parts: fictions, hypostasized abstractions, etc. This is bound to be a mistake, since it is the doctrine of a partisan type become exclusive (the anti- intellectualist; cf. Chapter VIII). Even if we had not the principle of external relations to fall back upon, we could see the error; for one line cuts another in a point, and if there were no real point, the line would not really be cut. The points must then be as real as the line, and indeed both are quite real. Or if with absolute idealism we would con- demn both as abstractions, we should recall that that view at any rate admits the contradiction and as we judged - does not solve it. No, the contradiction cannot be dodged : and we may see why. The endlessness of the collection of points in the inch depends upon the principle of internality; the completeness of the line upon externality, (i) The problem is, what is the true nature of the line ? Internality says it is relative to its points and constituted wholly by them as terms; a line is just a certain peculiar relation between points (two at least). But this relation is of course not a sort of mental comparison in the mind of an onlooker, but an objective fact, and it is to be distinguished from the terms (points) which it connects. Now in space the only distinctions are ultimately differences of position: hence the line must be different in position from either of the points it connects. Position being marked by points, it follows that there must be on the line a point distinct from either of the end-points. This fact is customarily stated as the postulate that between THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISEASE 433 any two points there is a third ; but this so-called postulate is simply an instance of the principle of internality as ap- plied to lines. Well: if we have a new point between the other two, and if by the axiom of internality it is constituted by its relations to them, then between it and its original relata new relations (lines) crop out, leading to new points between them, and so on endlessly. That is, a line between two points contains a third point, the lines between this and the two end-points contain each one more, and so on with- out cessation. All this is a consequence of the fact that a line is conceived as a real objectively existing relation; it dissolves into terms which again imply relations, which relations dissolve into new terms, etc., forever and ever. (2) On the other hand, the principle of externality con- siders the line as no relation but as an independent term. It has a definite magnitude irrespective of the number of its elements. Or if one does not believe in absolute magnitudes, we shall say instead that the line is viewed in comparison with other lines and found to possess a certain length rela- tive to them. In either case the point of view from which the line is estimated is quite indifferent to its own internal- relational character: it is considered as an indefinable, a length, a dimension not reducible to lower terms (number of points). If reduced at all, as in measurement, it is reduced to lines as its parts. Now both these principles apply strictly to the nature of the line itself, and hence they give contradictory results. The relation-view of a line makes it not a complete collec- tion; the term- view makes it complete, i. e., finite. Or the matter may be viewed from the other end; not the nature of the line, but of its ultimate elements, is now in question. Kant put it this way in his second antinomy : it reveals the two principles as explicitly as the above way. 434 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY The thesis reads: there must be a last point in division, a TTOV ffrw. In Kant's words, " Every compound substance in the world consists of simple parts" (Critique of Pure Reason, Miiller's tr., p. 352). This simple part, or last term in divi- sion, is something which is the same whether alone or summed with others hi to a whole; it obeys the principle of externality. The antithesis reads: there can be no last point in division, or as Kant said " there is nowhere in the world anything simple " (op. cit., p. 353). Here the alleged last stage in the division of the line is asserted to be as rela- tive to its parts as every other stage was. There is no rea- son for ceasing to apply the principle of internal relations at one stage more than another; apply it then, and you have the result that the supposed simple part is a relation of further parts, a compound. The analogy between division, recession in time, procession in tune or in space, is perfect; in all of these categories, the axiom of externality wars with that of internality. If we leave the field of space and time and consider the constitution of a thing with qualities, we find the same situation. A leaf is green; there is then a certain relation between the colour and the leaf, which if made clear would explain how that particular colour happened to belong to that leaf. Perhaps that relation would be this: the leaf contains chlorophyll, and chlorophyll is green. But this relation is a distinct entity from the green colour and from the leaf, and we have to ask how it came to apply to them. How does chlorophyll happen to be green, and how does chlorophyll happen to be hi the leaf ? As the line joining two points is a distinct entity from either of the points, and therefore contains a third point which must be joined with each of them, so here the relation of leaf and green through chlorophyll itself needs to have its junction with the leaf and THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISEASE 435 the colour explained. Chlorophyll is green because its chemical constitution is such as to absorb every kind of wave-length except that of green light; and chlorophyll is in the leaf because by capillary attraction the sap has risen from the trunk to the leaves. Then new problems arise, to be answered by new relations. How does chlo- rophyll come to be able to absorb all other light-waves besides green ? How does capillary attraction come to occur in the tree ? And so on without end. The amount of scientific knowledge required to explain a single fact like a green leaf is infinite; an infinite number of material situa- tions must have transpired right then and there in order to produce that one completed result. It is the finished sum of an endless collection of factors. It is the principle of internality which says to us at every stage: the fact you have named is not final by itself, but must be understood, and the only way to understand it is to see it in its relations to the other facts. It is the principle of externality which says at every stage: here is a fact, com- pletely determined, standing on its own feet, which you must believe, independent of its being explained or not. The internality-axiom drives us ever onward, the externality- axiom tells us to be satisfied with what is present. The former shows its power in the real world, hi the infinite inter- twining at every moment of different laws, causes, and ele- ments; the latter shows its power in the resultant existence here and now of finite events and determinate limited things. But how one limited thing can be the sum of an infinite number of real elements is not clear. This situation is often put more technically; and there is no harm therein, provided we are able to fill in the abstract scheme with concrete illustration. Thus, the green leaf is self -contradictory because (i) " green " and " leaf " are 436 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY two the one being a colour and the other a substance yet (2) they are one, because the leaf is green; they occupy the same space at the same tune, and identity is signified by the very form of the judgment which unites subject and predicate. But if " green " and " leaf " are two, their unity, and if one, their duality, needs to be accounted for; hence a new relation must be sought, grounding each in the other. And so without end. Or, once more: A and B the subject and predicate, are the same yet different; this is a plain contradiction, and must be harmonized. Let them be dif- ferent in one respect, alike in another respect. But we still have contradiction. Call the aspect in which they are iden- tical C; call their differences Di and D 2 . How is that while C is different from Di, yet they are both the same in that they constitute A ? And a similar question arises in regard to C and D 2 . The fission of the sameness-aspect, and of the difference-aspect, once begun, will go on ad infinitum. When the thing is put thus formally as it too often is by even so forceful an expositor as Mr. Bradley the un- sympathetic reader revolts. He says the whole dialectic is a formality: not a real contradiction, as when two concrete assertions oppose each other. When one biologist declares that acquired characters are inherited, and another that they are not, there is real contradiction, something to be concerned about and to be solved by further evidence. But when we are told that a thing is a finite sum of infinite rela- tions the contradiction is not significant. It neither adds information nor is to be solved by information. It is con- structed out of figments; relation after relation is " cooked up " in order to create a difficulty when there is no difficulty, so as to lead to some favoured philosophical doctrine. Such a view is common in a time when we want to get results and get them quickly ; it serves to excuse us for neg- THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISEASE 437 lecting a topic as uninteresting to most people as morning prayers and (we regret to say) as ineffective upon daily life. But the view is quite superficial. Who declares the dialectic a formality, has not understood it. When it is stated in symbolic language, we do not see its pertinence. But as we may see from the instance of the green leaf, it is nothing else than the two agents of the dialectic that make us seek ever deeper scientific explanations. Why has a certain substance the colour it has ? Why does the sap run ? Why are some wave-lengths taken up by this substance and not by that ? Why does light come in the wave-lengths observed ? Ques- tions like these are hardly to be regarded as idle figments " cooked up " by a philosophy which will plead for some special view. They are the life-blood of science. Of course if one does not like the word " why " in our account many have said that science asks not why but how things happen he may substitute " how." That is a verbal matter. But the impulse to see clearly the connections in nature's events is no verbal matter; it is, as we said in Chapter I, the root of all science and all philosophy alike. Need we also repeat that whoever rejects the dialectic is by the logic of events made an example of ? As a matter of fact, all the types except the Hegelian, reject it; and they are sufficiently pilloried for doing so. What results have they to show ? They do but contradict one another. And for that matter have they not been found as formal as they accuse the dialectic of being ? If the Hegelian is hardly better off, is it not because he has never been able to get beyond the dialectic ? He only reiterates " We must get beyond: reality gets beyond it." Which we also believe: but how can we understand the getting beyond ? But the dialectic is yet more efficacious. It enters into all human life; into history and politics and art and morality, 438 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY into religion and custom, and in its own way it is not absent from the intimacies of private life. When we gave account of the main types of philosophy, we tried to show that they concerned not man's intellect alone, but his whole person- ality. Each type ministers to practical needs and to emo- tional needs. Subjectivism gave comfort to the egotistic impulses of man, idealism to his love of personality, realism to his worship of independence, Thomism to his need for practical certainty, pragmatism to his instinct for experi- ment, et sic ultra. These systems consciously or uncon- sciously went along with corresponding attitudes to the problems of politics, social order, material progress, religion. What if they did not always succeed as we saw they did not in gratifying the impulses which originated them ? As philosophical systems, they turned out formalisms; in practical life they led always to battles with an opposing school and battles never finally decided. Catholic and Protestant must disagree, Unitarian and Trinitarian, Whig and Tory, Conservative and Liberal, Republican and Dem- ocrat, classicist and romanticist, rigourist and hedonist, advocate of laissez-faire and socialist, capital and labour, all through the long list of parties whose strife has made up human history. Each of these parties builds upon one of the two principles whose clash constitutes the dialectic. Has any of them succeeded in establishing itself as the one right view, satisfying all human needs ? Has it worked out a scheme which even stood fast on its own feet and grew and by the consensus expertorum not to say gentium bade fair to be final ? Perhaps so, for a time ; every age probably views its own prevailing doctrines with a hidden conviction of finality. But in general, men's political institutions, their moral codes, their religious sects, or their business methods, have been as exclusive and hostile and as far short of finality THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISEASE 439 as their philosophical schools; and if the former have lasted longer, it was because their devotees believed them indis- pensable to life and had to organize them better. Let us see in more detail how our two principles have generated these quarrels. When religion champions a fixed theology, it so far abjures the method of waiting to see all the bearings of the dogmas. It says, " we cannot wait; we must have something to go upon." At the dictation of the need of confidence, of a firm basis for the moral conduct of life, it accepts the revelation. Its doctrines are held true in their own right, irrespective of bearings, relations, con- firmations subsequently to be discovered. This is obedience to the principle of external relations. Of course, Thomism did not at all refuse to consider these bearings. It has con- sidered them to an enormous extent: it has, perhaps, found strong confirmation. Nevertheless, the citadel of its fortress does not record that confirmation; as we saw at the end of Chapter X, dogma needs it not. The virtue of the act of faith lies in its independence of evidence from other things. The principle of internali ty is excluded. The Protestant, on the other hand, insists upon confirmation by reason; a doctrine must not be accepted unless shown to cohere with the individual's judgment, with the teaching of science and the best good of human life. Internality is the fundamental principle of Protestantism. True, most of the Protestant sects do not reject dogma entirely. They have their creeds, their revelation, in one part or another; as with the dogma of the Trinity, for example. They have seen that man can- not live by reason alone, and they have accordingly com- promised between the method of scientific confirmation and that of unquestioning faith. In some points they accept the one, in some the other. The Unitarian alone is uncom- promising: his motto is, to believe only what he can see 44 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY squared with the natural reason of man. He cannot under- stand how God may be one and yet three, or how a just God could accept a sacrifice from a sinless Christ. Hence he rejects the Trinity and the Atonement. He is thus forced into controversy not only with Catholicism, but with the other Protestant sects who in part retain the Catholic attitude. Hereby originate those quarrels that have con- sumed so much of the religious fervour of Christianity. Turning now to a very different field, that of social re- form, we find that here the issue lies between the individual's self-sufficiency and his dependence upon the whole social body. " Equal opportunity for all " is the watchword of most socialistic enterprises: it is an altruistic ideal. The laws should be so framed that one man cannot by superior cunning or ingenuity make it harder for others to earn a fair living; monopoly, cornering the market, crowding out small dealers by great combinations, all these practices work against equality of opportunity. When there is a fairly large body of men who feel that their wages are insuf- ficient to give them equal advantages with the rest, and when at the same time their labour is indispensable to the community, they declare war, i. e., they strike. This strife of capital and labour is simply the result of social conditions which permit individual inequalities to grow unchecked. It is due to the fact that one part of society forgets that its own welfare depends upon that of the other parts. Any part or class or individual, if it has the power, resents this exclu- sive, self-sufficient attitude, and social order is more or less destroyed. This is socialism's reductio ad absurdum of individualism ; and in the former's opinion it proves that man is essentially a member of society. The doctrine of equal opportunity is at bottom the doctrine of the social organism; for the organism is that in which each part is THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISEASE 441 both means and end. So it is also with democracy, of which socialism, generally speaking, is only the logical consequence. What else does democracy mean but that all individuals should, as regards the fundamental needs of life, have an equal chance because they are of equal worth ? All should vote women as well as men all should be educated, all should have free utterance, no opinion should be condemned without a hearing, all social experiments should be tried so far as humanly possible, etc. And what is the motive for these beliefs unless it be a deep-seated conviction that one man's welfare depends on that of all others, that a man " lives not unto himself alone " but unto all the human race ? In short, that the individual is constituted by his relations to other men ? In the method by which this ideal equality is to be secured, also, socialism reveals its basis. Government management, government ownership: this is its programme. But government is no individual, it is the representative of society as a whole. It is (or ought to be) the tribunal of justice and impartiality; the sign and seal of the social body. It is to the individual citizen the reminder of the principle of internal relations ; his own interests taken by themselves, lead him to consider himself external to the rest. Progress in civilization, to this democratic view, is only the increased application of the principle of internality to the needs of men. Over against this stands the ideal of individualism. How- ever fundamental are the social relations, individuals will always differ in endowment; for each individual is not simply a social function, but real and unique in himself. Some will get their wants better satisfied than others. Equal opportunity will not ensure equal distribution of goods ; the socialistic ideal is impractical. Individual dislike of certain tasks stoking, cleaning sewers, even preparing 442 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY meals is too strong to be overcome by the social sense alone. Government ownership would bring the railroads, the shipping industry, etc., into a mess of political intrigue, i. e., individual self-seeking. Successful enterprise can be carried on only by individual initiative and individual responsibility. " One-man power " is the watchword of individualism, as " equal opportunity " of socialism. What is society but a collection of individuals ? And do not the greater individuals deserve more than the lesser ? Ought not those eminent intellects who have founded the modern gigantic business combinations, with their perfected organ- ization, to receive the wealth which rewards their superior skill ? Do they not deserve more than the mediocre citizen who plods unambitiously through his daily task, or the poor man who carelessly begets a huge family and then wonders why he has not a sufficient income ? Should the vote of the unintelligent count as much as the vote of the well-informed ? So the argument runs, ramifying into countless details. In all this, individualism rests upon the principle that every man has his own peculiar powers, qualifications, needs, and should be allowed to have what they demand. It is the principle of externality. From its point of view, equality of opportunity defeats itself; when room is made for the small, the great are cramped, and they need more opportunity than the average. Has not all progress come through the exceptional opportunities which chance, or wealth, or patronage, or force, afforded to excep- tional individuals ? If you don't cultivate the geniuses to the exclusion of the ordinary ones, where will be scientific advance ? Such is the reductio ad absurdum of socialism, at the hands of the individualist. If the former lays stress upon the sameness of men, so does the latter upon the dis- tinctions between them. The position leads toward some THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISEASE 443 form of aristocracy, though not necessarily the older forms based upon family or wealth. Our actual life, our government in the United States of America practically all governments today in fact are of course a compromise between these two. The various governments differ in the degree to which they emphasize the one or the other. And within our own government, the distinct departments emphasize the two principles in dif- ferent degrees. The executive branch is based mainly upon externality; the power of appointment, of veto, of com- mander in chief of army and navy, and above all the per- sonal responsibility of the President, bearing the tremen- dous burden of criticism these are externalist ideals. The legislative bodies on the other hand are supposed to act only after free discussion and mutual argument; they are democratic in purpose. But it is well known that the dem- ocratic aspect gradually recedes into the background; how many measures are there whose fate is not decided in the small committee ? To prevent this individualistic reversion to government by the special few, has been proposed the " initiative "; and the issue is once more between govern- ment by the whole social body and government by a few individuals i. e., internality vs. externality. In the judi- ciary branch, the principle of individualism is once more ascendant. The Supreme Court, appointed by the Presi- dent, is independent of the will of the people; they hand down the fixed body of doctrine by which the conduct of the nation its laws must be guided. And here again in recent years the internalists show signs of revolt, in the cry for the recall of judges by popular vote. Again the battle is between the same protagonists. In education also. Most of the civilized nations have committed themselves to the democratic ideal of universal 444 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY education ; but it is not yet possible to carry this programme into the upper reaches of learning. It is still few, though not nearly so few as formerly, who obtain the university training. But the size of our colleges has increased a hun- dredfold. Now note the two policies in conflict. Not long ago was introduced the elective system; at first in univer- sities, then in colleges and high schools. By that system the pupil is free to choose his studies. It is employed in different degrees in different schools; in none quite unal- loyed, in none, or practically none, quite absent. It rests upon the hypothesis that the pupil's judgment is as good as the instructor's. Few instructors would accept this hypothesis without qualification, to be sure, but then the elective plan is nowhere admitted unmixed. In so far as it is adopted, however, that hypothesis is made. It is a thoroughly democratic principle; it places student and teacher on the same level; it furnishes a democratic cri- terion for the success of the teacher's work, in the number of students he is able to attract. The older criterion, the judgment based on the attainments of the individual pupils he turns out, their success in getting the higher degrees, gradually lapses; quantity replaces quality. The instruc- tor's work is not estimated by unusual results in a few cases, but by a wider social appeal. The test is not so much the soundness of what he teaches, its effectiveness in pro- ducing some rare birds, but the attitude which the many take towards it. This is clearly the ideal of education which is governed by the principle of internality. Teaching is assessed according to its effect upon the great social body; according to the numbers taught rather than by its effect upon individual genius. In the very class-room itself the issue arises. Shall the teacher labour that the whole class may understand, or let the dullards go and concentrate THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISEASE 445 upon the brilliant ? The one method lifts the great flat weight of the majority, the other tries to build up a few pinnacles of intellect; which raises the level of humanity the higher ? The more aristocratic European education has produced by selection the latter kind of result; our own more democratic way has perhaps diffused a sort of average intelligence more widely and thus raised that great flat weight. It would seem foolish to adopt one of these very much at the expense of the other; but there is always more or less of an issue between the two. At present it looks, to a surface inspection, as if the dem- ocratic ideals were registering one triumph after another on the sure road to the millennium; not to follow them is to hark back to the cruelty and ignorance of the Dark Ages. How fervently are those ideals apostrophized in the utter- ances of our publicists! How patently do we judge our fellows by their conformance to those ideals! A political measure, a moral maxim, a man's behaviour in the give and take of every day life, is characterized as undemocratic: what more summary condemnation have we ? To every age, we have said, its own major premises seem final; and to this age, even to the most intellectual men of it, the dem- ocratic principle, with its exclusive emphasis upon the social relations and the principle of internality, seems the goal of all human effort and the absolute truth of life. Yet it is not becoming to the thinker, to be carried off his feet by a partisan view. He should learn the lesson of history, that the pendulum is bound to swing from one side to the other, that a one-sided type must sooner or later be corrected by its counter-type. It is not possible that the internal prin- ciple will finally shut out the external. In the latter, the former meets its critical point; which is to say that certain natural instincts of man can never be erased nor quenched 446 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY by the doctrine that man is only a member of society. Man is more than a network of relations. Members differ, and each is bound to retain a measure of independence. He must be allowed, if he can, to see further than the public conscience of his time sees, to develop, perhaps in some isolation, the fruits of his own personality, whether in the way of artistic production, or scientific discovery, or reli- gious insight. The reason why the ideals of democracy, like those of science, seem to be sweeping away forever the old individualism and piety is that up to this date they have not had a fair trial. Their novelty gives them an air of promise; sick of the one-sidedness of the past, we turn to a new one-sidedness. Individualistic government, dogmatic religion, classic art have had their day ; the counter-ideals have not. Let them have it! But much trouble may be saved if we reflect that individualism cannot be quite extir- pated from our nature. Any student of philosophical sys- tems, who has seen human thought try one reform after another, should know that this oscillation between extremes only perpetuates the battle. The bitter conflict persists, and will always persist until some harmonizing principle is brought to bear. As a matter of fact, the only institutions that have ever worked are compromises between the two enemies, modi vivendi, adopted as the best substitute for solution. But compromises are in unstable equilibrium, in practice as in theory, in social systems as in philosophic. They suppress individualism in one place and socialism (using the word broadly) in another; as our government more or less suppresses the latter in the judiciary and the former in the legislative branch. And the result is that socialism protests and would reform the Supreme Court, while at the same time the work of Congress tends more and more to be done in committee, behind the scenes, by the THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISEASE 447 few past masters of the political game, and the President tends more and more to follow the vox populi. And in fact, the boss system, the spoils system, and other efforts toward special privilege, are only individualism returning in a bad form because no other form is allowed it. Once more, naturam expellas furca, etc. In art, we have the opposition of classic and romantic. Classic beauty is dependent upon relation of the parts; it is based upon the idea of balance or organic unity; it fol- lows the principle of internality. Romantic beauty is inherent in the object or situation itself; a virile quality, stirring the beholder by a certain intrinsic dynamism. Herein it manifests the principle of externality, as anything independent does. Impressionism, on the other hand, is in contrast with both these; it looks to the relation between the work of art and the beholder. It thus depends upon the internal principle, but in one direction only; it is allied to the subjectivistic tendency in metaphysics. In another way, however, it is an example of externality. The structure of the object does not matter, its relations to other objects, the arrangement, order, etc., of parts is indifferent. As long as it is felt to be beautiful it is so, and the subject's feeling is a criterion sufficient unto itself. In the same way the philosophic type subjectivism took the subject as independ- ent. Post-impressionism in turn offers a new contrast. As radicalism in art it is akin to social democracy; it stands for the intrinsic interest, even beauty, of all things pots, pans, cobblestones, dreary streets, all that men have hitherto found insignificant. Distinctions of value dis- appear; there is no aristocracy in the realm of beauty. The form, too, tends to deny better and worse: it is " free verse. ' ' In music it gives room to what have been considered discords; it includes all possible combinations; the tonic 448 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY has no superiority; major and minor are no longer dis- tinguished. All is relative to the point of view; if a man is but willing to look or listen, to train himself hi the new modes of expression, they will seem beautiful. Is not this strictly comparable to the democratic belief that one man is as interesting and as valuable as another ? It looks away from individual distinctions, and toward a general levelling. Equality is its motto. In declaring that intrinsically no one chord, or melody, or scene, or object is better than another, it subscribes to the doctrine of universal relativity, and builds upon the principle of internality. And thereby it makes indignant those who retain a belief in distinctions of better and worse; in certain objects, situations, tone-com- binations, as inherently more beautiful than others. The latter view of course illustrates the principle of externality; and once more the battle is on. Further instances may be given. In morals, we find the rigorist opposing the hedonist. The former accepts the idea of certain deeds being right in themselves; the ten com- mandments, or " self-realization," or the mean between two extremes, or the gospel of love, embody his moral law. The latter will grant that any conduct is right which brings a good result the single directly verifiable good result being happiness. The rigorist here follows in his absolutism the principle of externality; the hedonist, deeming goods rela- tive to human feeling, the opposite principle. In general, idealism, whether in morals or art, depends upon externality; for the ideals men pursue are felt to be worthy ends in and by themselves. They justify their own subsistence, inde- pendent of further consequences. Realists in morals and art are relativists; they tend to recognize no ultimate, absolute distinctions of good and bad. Whatever ministers to human advantage is good ; and whatever is true to life is interesting and beautiful. THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISEASE 449 Of this sort is also the conflict between religion and science. The religious man would prove the reality of his ideals, God and immortality; the scientist is not interested in one fact, or set of facts, more than in another. The former does not really care for all truth as such; he prefers some truth, if he can attain it, to other truth. He views reality as an aristocracy, presided over by a supreme being, and he is interested first of all in this supreme being. The dem- ocratic attitude is that of the scientist; he will not seek any such one privileged truth, but will only impartially collect facts and let them, if they must, point to a creator. What- ever comes to his net is for him valuable; he might say " all the true is good." On the other hand, the pious soul does not make good a predicate of all truth; but only of some particular truth; he makes good thus a special quality not possessed by all things. Reversing the scientific attitude, he might say " all the good is true." He makes the good into a substantive, and self-sufficient; his opponent makes it into a predicate, relative to his own desire to get facts. If we take the point of view of value, the scientist appears to lack discrimination; if we take the point of view of truth, the religious man seems to be no impartial inquirer. Each thus condemns the other for not doing justice to his prin- ciple. And in fact each is right. The existence of God, and the truth of immortality, are not yet scientifically estab- lished; nor does the scientist concern himself seriously with the investigation of much beyond the material data of the laboratory. It is usually so; democracy, valuing all things, does not sufficiently emphasize the more important ones, but dwells rather on the less as the French language, accenting all syllables alike, comes to accent the last syllable most. Aristocracy, valuing preeminently the more signifi- cant things, neglects unduly the commonplace. Religion, 450 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY intent on its own objects, overlooks the question of impar- tial evidence, and is accused of believing because it wishes to believe. The quarrel will never be settled until objective investigation, guided by a sense of the superlative impor- tance of the religious questions, gives the conclusions de- manded by religion. And without this guidance that result will never happen. Facts do not of themselves point to anything; they must be arranged in the proper perspective by the human inquirer. The two ultimate axioms penetrate even to the inmost character of a man and the little acts of his daily life. Is he egotistic ? That is but the moral side of a theoretic egoism which regards the self as independent of its fellows. Is he thoughtful for others in small matters: polite, "giving place unto wrath," gentle, considerate ? Then is he realiz- ing the law of internality. Is he a man of uncompromising principle, adhering through thick and thin to his ideals whatever their difficulties may be ? Then he is an exter- nalist. Is he on the other hand a fashion-follower, a man whose beliefs always are found to agree with the main cur- rent of his time ? Then he is a thoroughgoing internalist. Or suppose he is tactful without being too yielding, insisting on his convictions by precept and example, yet not forcing them down people's throats ? In that case he is that per- fectly balanced moral character which is the adjustment of the antagonist claims; a character infrequent indeed in a world of struggle and change, where the reformer must ever be an externalist and the lover of humanity an internalist. In his book Pragmatism Professor James aligned the various conflicts of human thought and endeavour some- what as we have done, under the rubrics " tender-minded " and " tough-minded." His object was to show that the pragmatic attitude is able to reconcile these enemies, and is THE DIAGNOSIS OF THE DISEASE 451 therefore the ideal philosophy. His attempt was of course a noble one ; but it is evident enough to the reader, however sympathetic, that James did not long keep the synthetic spirit. As he proceeded through the problems of philosophy he more and more preferred the " tough-minded " views; and in fact we have had to admit that pragmatism, exclud- ing the static, the dogma, the concept, as it does, is a parti- san type. Nevertheless we believe that James's map of philosophy in lieu of a map of the universe is a sine qua non to him who would grasp the situation. Of his book it is the part least noticed, perhaps, in professional circles; but that should hardly count against it. To be sure, one's sense of justice suggests that in his terms James a little sacrificed fairness to literary effect. Everybody wants to be " tough-minded "; tenderness lies too near to softness, to be wholly admirable in the eyes of the male thinker. James might as truly have called the tender ones long-minded and the tough short-minded, or the tender broad-minded and the tough narrow-minded. The distinction he had in mind seems to be between those who believe most in ideals, re- mote and unrealized, and those who are most occupied with the concrete and imperfect. It almost seems as if we ought to call the tender-minded people the strong, and the tough, the weak ones, since it takes much more strength of char- acter to adhere to one's belief in the ideals than to declare the reality of what is obvious, the imperfect world. Never- theless, comparisons are invidious where both sides are necessary. While we may not acquiesce in James's arrange- ment of this or that view under the head of tender or tough, we find in his distinction substantially our own. The tender minds prefer the ideal and the transcendent, the remote and the perfect; they are aristocratic souls. The tough minds take all that comes, as of equal value to the truth-seeker: 452 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY they have democratic tempers. As empiricists, they test all things by their effect upon our sense-organs or minds, that is, by experience; and everything is the appearance of it in experience. The others, as rationalists, adore certain prin- ciples, independent of their appearance or concrete bearings. The two schools follow the axioms of internality and ex- ternality respectively. The contrast is between self -evi- dence and concrete verification. But how to harmonize these without injustice to either, philosophers, no more than statesmen, artists, moralists, or anybody else, have learned. Such being the nature of the malady which has infected human thought and conduct, we have to ask, is there any escape ? Can we find a point of view which will suggest a cure ? CHAPTER XII THE REMEDY O OMEHOW the real world itself has harmonized these O antagonisms: if it did not, it would be instantly an- nulled. As a man who contradicts himself takes away our belief in what he has just said, so a reality which was incon- sistent would remove what it put down and we should have no experience. Reality has solved the problem; man has not, and so man does not know what reality properly is. The reason man has not learned to adjust himself better to his great environment is that he has not learned the true nature of that environment. He does not yet know the essence of reality. For it is just the essence of reality, that which makes it real rather than a human idea, that we are now in quest of: it might be said to be the definition of reality that the antinomies have driven us to seek. Since what condemns to failure all our attempts at a map of reality, is just our inability to settle the conflict, would not the settlement give us the key-position, the fundamental principle on which the map is to be constructed ? Thus at the lowest point of our inquiry a promise is vouchsafed : if we cure the disease, we shall also do much more, for we shall have discovered the scheme of the map we set out to draw. In laying off our burden we are enabled to leap across the gulf that has held us back from touching the real. Moreover, we may be sure that the contradictions are soluble for our own finite thought. Our thought gets its material from reality, and it cannot really get it anywhere 453 454 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY else. If reality marries two antagonists, thought has no power to forbid the banns; its sole function is to follow reality. If thought could not be equated to reality as Mr. Bradley says then it would be because thought did not follow as it should, but revolted or tried something on its own hook, or some such vagary. For heaven knows what reason, it has essayed to work in vacua and the antinomies have resulted. The dialectic must then be soluble not only in reality, as the Hegelians have taught us, but also in our particular vexed understandings. That last is alone what we seek. It is true in reflection, as in life, that the only escape from the dialectic which is of any value is the actual deliverance in concrete situations here and now. Of what use to government is a Utopia which cannot be put into operation ? How does it help a sick man to know that God is well while he is not ? What satisfaction can the human mind take in a solution of the dialectic which it cannot understand in detail ? The antagonist principles, we are told, deny each other. The one says that a fact is itself, indifferent to its relations. The other says that a fact is not indifferent to its surround- ings, but is in and through them constituted. Both are true; both cannot be true. Of these two last statements one concerns reality, and is positive; the other is a negation, and its sanction lies not in objective evidence. According to the objective evidence, indeed, they could both be true - for they are. Why then do we declare that they cannot ? Because, we say, the one is a flat denial of the other. But is it indubitably seen to be a denial, as the truth of the two axioms is indubitably verified in our daily thought and life ? No, it is not; for denial and contradiction have a reflective character; they are not objectively observed, but are phenomena of thinking, and thinking is just the region THE REMEDY 455 where errors come in. The allegation of contradiction is thus thrown open to doubt. The external principle says to put it symbolically A is A . The internal principle says A is RB where KB means, a certain relation toward, or function of, something else, B. Let us replace RB by C. Then the alleged con- tradiction consists in the statement " A is C and A is A "; for C is other than A and hence " A is C " = " A is other than A," or not A. That A is something else besides A, something different from A, contradicts -4's identity with itself. Sameness excludes difference. That is the contra- diction reduced to lowest terms. Mr. Bradley says, " The simple identification of the diverse is precisely that which one means by contradiction " (Mind, 1909, p. 496). And Mr. Bosanquet declares that contradiction " consists in ' differents ' being ascribed to the same term, while no distinction is alleged within that term such as to make it capable of receiving them." (Logic, 2d ed., I, p. 224.) St. Thomas, too, had the same idea: " Quae secundum se diversa sunt non conveniunt in aliquod unum, nisi per aliquam causam adunantem ipsa." (Summa Theologica, part I, question 3, art. 7.) In the last analysis, sameness and difference are deemed incompatible. This is the part of the organism in which lives the germ of that great malady; and our task is now to attack that germ. The problem is a very abstract one in other words, it is a very simple one, quite unlike the complex issues of daily life. But it is not always in the complex situations in which they occur, that the battles of life are won or lost; it is often in the preparation, the simple, unnoticed decisions, the small matters which go to make up stable character. If to be faithful in that which is least is to be faithful also in much, then our contention is not unlikely, that the solution 45 6 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY of this abstract difficulty will entail that of the concreter issues. The whole root of the trouble lies indeed in the simplest of all things in the world, namely, a quite arbitrary dictum. Its simplicity lies in its arbitrariness; the dictum stands alone, ungrounded, unsupported in any way whatsoever. That sameness and difference exclude each other is the purest dogma, a fulmination out of the darkness, justified by no utility or self-evidence. Search as we may, we find no argument offered, in all the long history of thought, to excuse it. That a thing cannot be itself while at the same time being much else this has been treated as a sacrosanct principle; but we do not hesitate to say it is a priori, need- less, and in fact the case par excellence of thought working in vacuo. In vacuo, because it is not in any way confirmed by observation. We observe in every moment of our waking lives that two things are the same while at the same time different. Two oranges are of the same colour, yet of dif- ferent shapes; a particular stone is now in my hand, now flying through the air, yet the same stone; you are the same man today that you were yesterday in spite of added expe- riences. Always we witness the opposite of this dictum, yet men have felt, or thought they felt, a certain inner compul- sion to utter it. Thought seems to have set up a rule of its own, independent of observation and doing so, has allowed itself to become divorced from reality. If we spoke in the old religious terms, we should say that pride of intellect had debarred man from attaining the knowledge he sought. Of course it is not the dialecticians alone who have done this. They are only those who are honest and clear-headed enough to see that they have done it and to say so. Other thinkers, as we have now many times pointed out, implicitly THE REMEDY 457 deny that anything can become another without loss of its identity. In the field of philosophy, we find a nominalist denying that the colour of one orange can be numerically the same as that of another, or a Great Objectivist alleging that consciousness cannot be unique because it is definable in terms of its objects; in the field of practice, the modern citizen affirms that the individual cannot display any indif- ference to society because he is essentially a social being; in religion, we are taught that one cannot exercise faith unless the dogmas remain mysterious and so on. In fact, to accept our contention is to go against the time- honoured exclusiveness with which man has pursued practi- cally all of his aims. Our simple remedy, as simple as the evil it would meet, seems hard enough to swallow, when we reckon the revolutionary consequences of the admission. And yet if it is true, all those consequences are as inevitable as they are disturbing. And that is perhaps one of the surest indications we could have, that we are upon the right track; for we are seeking a philosophy which will make concrete differences to the life of man. We must frankly acknowledge, in the first place, that certain considerations look to be against us. It is easy enough to say in a rough conversational way that two pieces of paper have, to all appearance, the same degree of white colour. But take the statement seriously and see where you land. Absolutely, numerically the same ? Many people would prefer the non-committal word similar. Does not that seem fairer than to credit a conceptual thing, white- colour, appearing unaltered, unaffected by the peculiarities of the particular papers ? Why, to do so is to break the rule of internal relations! No two things can be the same, for then they are unaffected by the very distinctions which make them two. Perhaps there is, after all, good reason for the dictum above condemned. 45 8 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY Certain other instances seem more striking. You and I are different persons does not our very individuality, our self -hood, rest upon that difference ? We could not be the same and retain our personal identity. " Two souls with but a single thought," etc. that would so far be not two but one. Absorption into the One of the Buddhist or mystic means loss of individuality. In the personal life, at any rate, difference precludes sameness. The value of a person lies in his uniqueness; and that value is destroyed by sameness, by uniformity with others. But we need not go so high as personality. This square foot of ground whereon I stand is quite distinct from one next it; and that distinction could not possibly permit identity between the two. If I prove an alibi, then I could not have committed the crime of which I am accused. If red and green are diverse, how could they be the same ? If a circle is round, how could it be identified with a square ? And we might thus proceed indefinitely. No; whatever else may be said of sameness, it is apparently going against all experience and common sense to say that difference does not exclude it. This dictum is not only self- evident; it is at the basis of all the values of life. Theoretical and practical motives would seem to unite in supporting that " simple arbitrary dogma " as we called it. And yet we must believe these motives to be illusion, and founded on illusion. Let us examine them. The logical reason for deeming sameness and difference inconsistent, we found to be none other than the principle of internal relations. We are told that the quality of one thing cannot be the same as that of another, since it will be affected by the other attributes of the things in which it resides. This is the view of extreme nominalism, which we saw in Chapter VIII; nominalism in the exclusive sense. How can the shade of one apple be exactly the same THE REMEDY 459 as that of another ? Being in different places, the light will not play alike on them; differing ever so slightly in texture of skin, size, or shape, the light-waves will not be reflected and absorbed in identical ways in both. The identity is destroyed by the differences. And have we ground for supposing that there exist in the universe any two shades of red exactly alike ? Surely not. On the other hand, we might ask, putting all questions of logic aside, have we any empirical certainty that there never have existed two perfectly similar instances of red colour ? Or two sticks of absolutely the same length, if measurements could be suitably taken ? Or two candles giving just equal amounts of light ? The principle of internality is not able to prevent such a thing happening. It says only that the different surroundings must affect each instance differently; giving a resultant difference on the whole. Suppose the light of the sun strikes apple A a little stronger than it does apple B . Then A's red will be a brighter red than B 's. But do we not speak of a brighter or less bright shade of one and the same tint ? The identity of the tint has not disappeared. It has been overlaid by a new and additional quality, but the overlay does not annihilate the original. Sometimes it may, of course: as when one daubs the apple with green paint. Nevertheless there is no necessity, no logical com- pulsion forcing us to think that always the difference cuts into the sameness. It may affect it as much as you please without in any degree diminishing it; viz., by adding to it some qualification; a new shade, a limitation or extension of its area, a greater warmth in one apple, etc. So I may be influenced by my friend's argument for government owner- ship, yet respect as much as ever the instinct of property which means only that I seek some plan by which these two may work together and supplement each other. Or I may 460 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY feel the claim of dogma while yet I am influenced by the desire to see the interconnection of the various dogmas, and their agreement with scientific principles. Cannot romantic beauty reside in a face with classic features ? Cannot a man work directly for some end that benefits both his fel- lows and himself as when the physician discovers the antidote for a poison, or the inventor perfects a more efficient system of lighting ? Is it not the teaching of Freud and Holt that good conduct is that which does not suppress one purpose by another, but organizes them into a system in which all are fulfilled ? Every such instance and with the progress of civilization their number increases is a case where one purpose, or quality, or interest, is affected by another without being destroyed. Indeed, the doctrine that one entity cannot be influenced by another without losing its self -identity is a pure superstition, a relic of barbarism. It is the old logic of the " war of all against all " which is being today, thank Heaven ! so widely replaced by the logic of cooperation. But that latter does not yet seem to have penetrated into the halls of philosophy so remote has philosophy become from the currents of life. Still the exclusive logic dies hard; and it has more to say for itself than this. Our instances may be called loose, inaccurate; who can say offhand that romantic beauty is not somewhat lessened by too perfect an outline ? We are not stirred by the compositions of Mozart. We do not listen to the music-dramas of Wagner with a sense of profound repose. We do not find scientific discoveries remarkable for their frequency among Catholics, nor invincible faith in God the rule among biologists and physicists. If it comes to the heaping up of cases, we surely find a majority of them showing that the one interest, when it becomes pretty strong, destroys the other. And this difficulty, if not im- THE REMEDY 461 possibility, of uniting our practical motives would seem to indicate that the theoretical difficulty about sameness and difference must be well grounded. No, we must admit, you cannot get a ringing conclusion from the concrete examples. They are too inexact. If we point out cases where one party, or one set of motives, has influenced the other to join hands with it, you may always retort that each has suffered some loss, or that the har- monization is but a compromise; or you may asseverate that the apparent harmonies are so exceptional as to prove the rule opposite. We must return to the simple abstract case. And there the dialectic lies in wait with a new argu- ment; this time a reductio ad absurdum. Suppose the sun's light qualifies the original red of the apple with a new shade. Then this shade must, by the prin- ciple of internality, work upon the red tint. How can it show any effect upon that tint without changing it ? And what is to change but to destroy, at least in part ? We answer, it is not necessarily that. Destruction is not the only sort of change. A thing may be qualified by a positive addition. Effectiveness is not best shown by killing and maiming, but by new creation, by adding to the sum of life. It is really absurd to speak of one thing, one person, affecting another destructively. Destruction is remoyal of what is real there is nothing to show; it is not effect but absence of effect. This however is probably too simple and too con- trary to accepted standards to be admitted until illustrated; which we proceed to do. Now, we do not know just how the play of light and shade would act upon the colour. But no doubt it would give rise to some new quality, a positive one added to the red and the lighter shade; a third one beside these other two. Imagine, e. g., that it is the quality of having a charming effect. The brighter red, perhaps, is 462 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY more pleasing than the duller. At the same time this charm of the bright red apple must have its effect upon the redness and brightness at least upon them as perceived. Perhaps the brightness is a little increased. Then one more quality has been enrolled on the list. And this too must have its additive result upon the rest we dare not say just what it is, but the principle of internality assures us that the charm is not there for nothing. How much further must we go ? Clearly there is no limit ; the effects must multiply even to infinity. And now, says the objector, behold the absurdity; for the sum total of these qualities is really present, all at once in this particular finite apple. It is our old friend the complete infinite: a patent self-contradiction. So it appears that if we do not straightway confess that the differences kill the sameness, we are driven into the con- tradiction of the completed infinite. Yet a little reflection shows that this argument must be a vicious circle. If, as we saw in Chapter XI, that contradiction is simply a result of the antagonism between the two great axioms of internality and externality, and if that antagonism rests in turn upon the alleged hostility between sameness and difference, how can the last be proved by appeal to the first? In fact, the com- pleted infinite is not contradictory at all, if once we grant that sameness and difference do not belie each other. The sameness runs undiminished through all the infinite list of qualities, whatever their differences. The apple is red ; it is bright red and pleasing; it is bright red and pleasing and some other quality; and so on. What then do we mean by saying that it is complete while all its qualities are so many they can never be complete ? Simply that every added quality, is of the same old apple; is it, in truth, while yet the number of novelties overlaying the sameness is endless. The completeness signifies the fact that the sameness re- THE REMEDY 463 mains undestroyed; the incompleteness, that ever new and positive differences may be added. The series is complete at every stage, for every novelty discovered is a predicate of identified with the original datum, the red apple. It is incomplete at every stage, in the sense that no amount of identity precludes an additional difference which we pro- ceed to discover. But for that very reason the incomplete- ness does not give the lie to completeness. It seems to do so only because it suggests to our minds that always some qualities of the apple, being different from all yet enu- merated, are left out as if they could not be there. But when we remember that they are sure to be identified with, as predicates of, the datum we started with, we can see that they are not left out. That datum already includes them. Their incompleteness, in short, does not mean that they are not all there, but that being there they generate, as it were, ever new aspects of the said object. And these new aspects, again, however many and divergent, are always to be identified with the original datum. There is then a question- begging character in the word incompleteness; it is uncon- sciously assumed to connote that some terms of the series are never reached. But they are all reached; only when reached they at once reveal a novel element, a diversity which enlarges the already completed thing. The whole difficulty turns upon our interpreting incompleteness as if it denied some real part of the object an interpreta- tion which is of a piece with that root-error that difference forbids sameness. Arbitrary exclusion once more ! Even supposing this solution were admitted, however, the way is not closed. Common sense steps up and says " I don't care anything about your infinite regress, but I see that difference cannot truly coexist with sameness. For the one apple differs from the other in one respect, and is the 464 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY same in another respect. The apples are the same in redness, diverse in shape; etc. They couldn't be the same and dif- ferent in one and the same respect. Imagine, if you can, two apples of the same colour, yet different in colour! " The objection looks very formidable. It is due to the principle of externality, as the first one was due to that of externality. It is not based upon the mutual influence, but upon the necessity of keeping intact the sameness and the difference. Sunder them, don't let them get together, lest the one in- fluence the other and destroy it ! The technical term which expresses this sundering is " respect " or " aspect." One aspect of a thing, it is usually believed, may be X and an- other the very contradiction of X; but it matters not, because they are separated; the wall of the thing is between them, and they are on different sides of it. Now common sense is based upon practical needs, and is in general, of course, sound. But it seldom does justice to the need of understanding; and that is the case here. " As- pect " is simply a useful device to prevent us from sensing a contradiction and diverting otherwise useful energy toward it; we must go on with observations and get the concrete information which life and science call for. The dialectic interferes with the business of common sense away with any appearance of it ! To the logical point of view, however, the whole thing is a makeshift. The aspect-device solves no difficulty for the intellect. Do not the various aspects con- stitute the thing ? The colour, form, brightness, scent, etc., of the apple are the apple. However much of an underlying substance is the real apple over against its properties, it is by the principle of internality identical with all those prop- erties. Let the two be identical in colour and dissimilar in shape. Nevertheless, the apples are their forms and their colours; if they are identical in colour they are so far not THE REMEDY 465 distinct from each other. It is logically just as bad as if the apple were utterly simple. Mr. Bradley has made much of this plea, showing that the thing and its aspects offers a self-contradiction. And indeed it does, unless you affirm at the outset that any two things may be the same and also different without regard to aspects or sides. Ah, but now, one says, you are not talking good sense. Things never do show sameness and difference in one and the same respect at the same time. If one red is identical in colour with another, it cannot differ from it in colour. If one triangle has exactly the same shape as another, it cannot differ from it in shape, but only in size or position. Always the difference is found to lie in a distinct aspect of the thing from that of the sameness. This is an empirical matter, logic or no logic. It is not open to doubt. But we reply, what do you make of the resemblance between yellow and green ? Do they not show a sameness in colour and also difference in colour ? Perhaps it would be well to ask what we mean by the " aspect " of a thing; for even though com- mon sense is justified in distinguishing the aspects, and empirically well grounded, it may be that they have nothing to do with the consistency or inconsistency of the thing. Now generally what we call the aspects of a thing are its relations to other things. The colour of a rose is its effect upon my visual organs, the weight its tendency to approach the centre of the earth, the odour its effect upon my organs of smell, the form upon my faculty of space-perception, etc. Each aspect expresses the relation between the one object and a certain other entity ; their diversity is due to the diver- sity of the entities to which the said object is related. And because those external entities are so clearly distinct, we think there is no contradiction in saying the object is mani- fold; if we concentrated attention upon the unity of the 466 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY object by itself, we should deem it inconsistent that it is manifold. The actual ground, however, for attributing to the one thing different aspects is not any such recondite motive as the avoidance of dialectic. Everybody makes the attribution, but very few have felt the danger of the dia- lectic. The real motive is that the thing is empirically found to have many relations. The aspects are distinguished with this simple empirical motive; they are irrelevant to the problem of the dialectic. It is quite possible that some object be experienced which is given as one and yet as at the same time internally manifold; manifold because it offers within itself a composite character. And more : there are such instances. Purple is one colour, yet purple contains two different colours, red and blue. A musical chord or discord is given to us as one sound, yet it contains inter- nal diversity. Do we abolish the contradiction between purple being reddish and purple being bluish by saying that it is red in one aspect, blue in another ? There are no dif- ferent sense-faculties for us to refer these different colours to, in order to separate the conflicting qualities. Of course if we like we may say that purple is red in one aspect, blue in another; but then " aspect " is not used in the above relative sense. No: here is a case where two entities are plainly different and yet are fused into a unity which over- lays the difference without destroying it. And the case shows that the aspect-device is not always available, as common sense thinks, to dissolve the antinomy. Indeed, as we already have tried to show, it never could solve a contradiction, if there were one there. But there are so many instances where it is applicable, and where its specious claims are tempting to a surface inspection, that we make an over-hasty inductive generalization and con- clude that all dialectic contradictions are avoided in this THE REMEDY 467 way. Meanwhile no evidence has been given to prove that there is any dialectical contradiction. The resort to aspects was thought to indicate it; but we find that that resort is dictated by empirical motives; and that even if it did serve to remove the antagonisms, there are cases where it could have no efficacy. But we must go further; those cases are not sporadic, but legion. Practically every colour that we see is a mixture. We almost never see a colour that is not, either obviously or after slight training of the eye, com- posite. The familiar colours of the rose, the violet, of the sky, the sea, the clouds, the sunset, the human face and eye, the clothes, the buildings, the foliage few or none of these there are, which do not present a fusion of several colours into one. In them we see a red that is at the same time yellow without ceasing to be red, a green that is blue without losing its green quality and so on. So far from its being true that red cannot be blue while yet it is red, we find that it usually is something else besides itself, and in the very same aspect in which itself is found to reside. The two apples in our illustration may very well possess an identical red and at the same time be different in respect to colour if, say, one had a slight purplish tinge and the other were pure saturated red. We do not refer the sameness and the difference to different sides of the things. And not of colours alone does our assertion hold. How many sounds do we hear that are not at once several different sounds ? Not musical chords only are composite, but the rumblings of the street, the soughing of the wind, and the voices of our fel- low men; yet these are severally heard, often enough, as one sound. Of aesthetic effects this sort of thing is notoriously true. A painting is pleasing, but tormenting, stirring, yet also restful indeed who shall enunciate the effects upon the cultured beholder of a work of art ? Further illustration 468 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY is easy, and perhaps needless. The work of James, Dewey, and other opponents of Platonism has emphasized the in- exactness of the concrete things; we should prefer to put it in positive terms and call it their richly composite nature. But we promised to stick to the simpler, more abstract examples; let us, therefore, exemplify no more at present. Let it not be supposed that the cases of sameness-in-dif- ference are confined to the psychological field. We are talking about objects: the colour of the rose is as objective as its form (cf . Chapter IV) ; and the motion of a projectile acted upon by many simultaneous forces is objective enough to satisfy even a materialist. Even were it true only in the mental realm, that would be sufficient for our purposes; mental facts are as real (cf. Chapter VIII) as physical. But we are not now asking about anything else but the general possibility of sameness permitting difference; and we have detected no reason against it. We are not asserting that any quality can combine with any other quality. We are only concerned to deny that in a logical point of view none can that is the claim of the dialectician. We on the other hand acknowledge that there are cases where one quality, taking on another, is apparently destroyed. Red plus green usually destroys the red : the resulting grey has no resemblance, so far as we can discern, with either of the originals. And let no one object that we are dogmatically calling resemblance absolute identity. Of course it is so only for analysis; but we have found (Chapter VIII) that analysis, provided it is not incorrect, gives truth. Again, some sounds " interfere " with each other; some human qualities work directly against others, as when jealousy overcomes kindness, or love of comfort inhibits the love of knowledge. The clearest cases of such incompatibility, perhaps, are the elementary physical and spatial ones. If THE REMEDY 469 the end of a stick is in one place, it is so far not in another; if a body is falling to earth, it cannot at the same time rise from the earth. Space and matter are the great depositories of incompatibility, and no doubt it is due to a preoccupation with the material world, not outgrown even by idealists, that the logic of exclusion has remained potent in the higher realms. Yet even in that world things are, so to speak, loosening up. Who has not in the laboratory seen water boiling and freezing at once ? And do not some psy- chologists claim that olive-green is partly red ? (Cf . Holt, The New Realism, p. 334.) The rigid system of mutual ex- clusions that we have believed in is growing softer. Our beliefs about it have to some extent been liberated by the non-Euclidean geometries, and still more by later researches into the underlying postulates of mathematics. That parallelism between straight lines excludes their meeting, is no longer a necessity in itself; that 2+3 = 5 is found to depend upon presuppositions which are not in themselves so absolutely certain as we are used to believe that sum- mation to be. Perhaps some day a system will be discovered which while admitting the truth of our Euclidean geometry, will enable us to accept at the same time many other pro- positions which the older mathematics would not counte- nance. Not that we here build upon what appears at best a remote contingency ; we only say it is not the part of wisdom to deny such possibilities. If anything at all is taught by human history, it is that impossibility is a word which the prudent will seldom use. We do not say " never," but, " as little as he can." Meanwhile, certain apparent incompati- bilities remain, and we are far from denying them here. But the dialectic, and too often common sense, as well as the inherited instincts of man, do make a sweeping claim of the opposite tenor; they deny, consciously or by implication, 470 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY that sameness is consistent with difference. And we declare that for this extreme utterance there is no justification in heaven or earth. Our whole point is that there is no ground for saying that sameness gives the lie to difference, or conversely. It would, of course, not be enough to bring up fact after fact where the two are found together. The empiricists do this, and be- lieve that they have thereby refuted the logician. But they have not met him; the two are arguing at cross-purposes. The logician knows as well as anybody else what the facts are, but he is actuated by an arriere pensee of which they are unaware. He has behind him, pushing him on, this dictum which all men, even the empiricists, actually use in other fields, viz., that logically sameness and difference are in- compatible; he has seen deeper than they do in this regard. That is why such a solution as that of James (.4 Pluralistic Universe, p. 68) is really no solution. James says that they, the dialecticians, take the entity as excluding what it does not expressly include, and then weave in an inconsistency when they find that it includes that same. No doubt he is correct; that is exactly what they do do. But James did not see that they had every motive for doing so; that they but followed the customary procedure of mankind when they did it; a procedure which every philosopher has adopted, and which James himself, in spite of the best intentions, also adopted when he objurgated rationalism, absolutism, and the whole tribe of transcendentalists. We have said motive, but not ground. Our inquiry has led us to believe that at bottom the whole momentous decision, so potent of evil in human history, is a simple, groundless act of choice; caused, if you are a determinist and wish to insist, but caused not by intellectual or practical need, but probably by some mysterious transfer of instinct from the THE REMEDY 471 physical arena of the struggle for existence over to the realm of disinterested investigation. The last stronghold of this brute postulate lies in the claim of self -evidence. " Why argue about the matter," we may be addressed, " when you know perfectly well that different positions never can be one, that white is not and never can be sweet, that red can never be heavy, that you cannot be your friend ? " And after all, who would think of denying these distinctions ? Are they not of all things the most patent ? How then can we say they hold between iden- tities ? Surely if two things are two they are not one, and if they are one they are no longer two; and surely identity means oneness and difference means duality. Now there is just enough of obvious truth in these statements to cast upon one who would qualify them a little, the suspicion of absurdity. White is not sweet, we say; but what is evident here is that white is other than sweet, not that white refuses to be identified in any way with sweet. " White " has toward " sweet " a certain relation which we call " other- ness "; why should it not also have that relation we call " identity " ? In the famous lump of sugar of Mr. Bradley, the white and sweet are identified. It is that little word " not " which contains just enough of ambiguity to mis- direct the intelligence. For we use that one word to mean now the relation of otherness between terms, now the denial of a suggested judgment. Had the peoples who gradually formed the English language been, per impossible, exact logicians, they would have used two different words for these distinct meanings. When I say, Caesar did not kill Brutus, I contradict the suggestion that he did so; when I say red is not blue, I may mean only to signify the duality of these two. The former proposition is equivalent to " it is not true that Caesar killed Brutus "; the latter proposition PRODUCTIVE DUALITY need not be meant as a denial of anything, but rather as an affirmation of the relation otherness or duality. Otherness is a very different concept from opposition or denial; unfor- tunately the negative of human language has not indicated the difference. No, the distinction between white and sweet may be eternally valid, but it is not obvious, when we look carefully, that it precludes identity between them. Nor is it obvious that the distinction between my friend and myself forbids some identity. For certain purposes, I am he; as when he gives me his proxy and I cast the vote, or indeed when I represent him in any way. The objector was sup- posed just now to say that if two things are two they are not one. Here again it is the ambiguity of " not " that is to blame for the opinion that the alleged exclusion is obvious. If they are two, their relationship is so far other than the relationship of identity. But " other than " does not obviously mean " opposed to "; what is obvious is simply that we have here two distinct concepts. So it is not ob- vious that if two things are two, any identity or unity of them ought to be denied. They can be both two and one. Or if we take the other statement, that if they are one, they are no longer two, we must make a similar reply. Unity is other than duality, but there is no excuse for saying that it is opposed to it or denies it. In spite of all arguments, however, one may insist that to him the transition from other than to opposed to is an obvious one. We can not directly say him nay. If a man smells a smell, he smells it, and no amount of assertion on our part that we do not smell it will refute him. How shall we meet this ultimate insistence ? So many men have uttered it - practically all men, explicitly or implicitly: may it not be a sort of final axiom which we ourselves lack the power to grasp ? Here then would be a hopeless deadlock; unless we THE REMEDY 473 can go further than we have gone, we have really not met his claim. We have only contradicted it as arbitrarily as he has posited it. But we believe that it is possible to go further; we declare that in the nature of the case, such a transition could not be self-evident. It is essentially a nega- tive judgment and nothing more. It says " it is self-evident that difference is incompatible with identity "; and incom- patibility is at bottom naught but denial pure and simple. Negative judgments however must have some positive basis; but there is no such basis available. The only such basis could be, observation of some quality, given in experience, about the difference-relation which is seen then and there to rule out identity. Where else than to experience have we to look for positive grounds for our negative judgments ? Not to thought, certainly, for thought is the very agent that is seeking a positive basis for its own utterance. But if we look to experience, we find the very opposite of what we are seeking. We find, time after time, instances of sameness- in-difference; our account a few pages back enumerated some of them. So far from finding positive ground for this mysterious negation of our opponent's, we find ground for disallowing it. No ground is forthcoming, then, for his negation; it subsists in vacuo. And being in vacua, with nothing positive about it, it could not be self-evident. No mere denial can be; for it is something which could not appear as object for the mind to gaze at; it has no content. If we have so far proceeded without serious error, we may then make bold to dismiss the whole claim of the dialectic. And now let us set forth the true significance of our method. It will, we believe, reveal to us a principle which is as beneficent and fruitful of results as the germ of the dialectic was deadly. 474 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY Confining the discussion still to the more abstract sphere, we say that any two things, A and B, may be identical yet different. Call it partly identical or identical in some aspect, and partly different, or different in some other aspect, if you please; nothing is essentially changed by such wording. The point is that sameness and difference may cohabit with- out shame. Now this means " A is A and also A is B " ; the truth is an ultimate one, not subject to criticism as being partial, abstract, inconsistent, or in any other way phil- osophically damnable. But since both these propositions are true, must we always implicitly affirm them both ? Is it not ultimately true to say that A is B, if we say nothing and think nothing and imply nothing about the other pro- position ? In other words, do these two form an organic unity, such that each implies the other and one without the other is meaningless, or are they just two principles side by side and independent of each other ? If the former is the case, we have an ultimate monism; if the latter, ultimate dualism. Notice that the monistic union of these two principles views them by the light of the principle of internality ; and that the dualistic one views them under that of externality. The monistic view says that each axiom implies the other, and thereby it applies one of the axioms to both of them. The dualistic view finds each axiom independent of the other, and thus applies the other axiom to both of them. And it is quite proper that this should be so; for if these two axioms are ultimate, they ought to apply to themselves as well as to everything else. Have we then ultimate monism or ultimate dualism ? Why, we have both. You can say, A is A throughout all changes the principle of externality; you can stop there, and need not appeal to the other axiom to show it; the statement is ultimate quite by itself. Or THE REMEDY 475 again you can say, A is B the principle of internality; and this need not be supported on the other axiom, for it is able to stand alone. Or, finally, you can say, both are true, each supplementing the other and bringing a new and richer meaning to that other. That we are permitted to say either one we please of the first two is the truth of ultimate dualism; that we are equally permitted to say the third, is ultimate monism. In short, we may choose freely which principle we shall serve, but we must make the choice with the understanding that the other choice is also permitted. Indeed, if it were not also permitted, there would be no freedom ; the choice being once made, we should not longer be free to admit the counter-principle. Phrasing this in objective terms, we say: reality is monistic, and it is du- alistic, either or both; any single object or thing is part of the great system of the whole, or it is independent, or it is both together. But since duality is what permits the alternation, the deeper trait is duality. Duality and unity are not of quite equal rank; the account we shall give of the universe will describe it primarily as a duality. If reality were not thus freely dual, the dialectic could not have been solved. For then, the choice of one side be it ultimate dualism, or ultimate monism, ultimate independ- ence, or ultimate system would have excluded the choice of the other; to accept it as true alone and for itself would be to accept it as exclusive of that other ; it would be as is customary in human affairs, that having made one choice we are not allowed to admit the justice of the other. But reality lends itself impartially to either interpretation; which means that reality itself is both. This may also be put in another way. Human attention is selective; we fix the eye on one spot, and the surroundings pass more or less out of the visual field. But we do not thereby deny the actuality 476 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY of what is beyond the fringe of vision. We ignore it, we exclude it from our sight, but there is objectively no exclu- sion. Here is a matter whose importance, so far as we know, philosophers have never recognized. They are wont to justify their exclusive partisanships by referring to the narrowness of the field of attention; but they altogether overlook the fact that this narrowness is not at all of a denying sort, but is just an ignoring. To ignore is far from denying. The denier does not at all ignore; the ignorer does not at all deny. Now reality is exactly so constituted. Its parts or elements ignore one another, or they consult one another; in consulting one another, they ignore the attitude of ignoring, and vice versa. As human beings are free to attend now to this limited field, now to that, and get indubitable truth when they do so, so reality itself contains parts which display a like freedom ; they are independent of one another, and they are " interpenetrated," and these properties of independence and interpenetration are again independent and interpenetrative, and so on. The principle by which we have rid ourselves of exclusion is not an exclu- sive inclusion, but a free inclusion. Herein our remedy dif- fers, so far as we know, toto caelo from any remedy that has hitherto been proposed, either by partisan or synthetist; yet it includes the remedies alike of both, though freely. In following this method of free choice, it makes dualism absolute; for reality, permitting such a choice, thereby writes itself down as fundamentally dualistic. But again, dualism itself would not be dualism if it were dualism alone; for then it would be single and exclusive. It also permits monism, but once more in no exclusive manner. This is the abstract and formal account of our proposed solution; it remains to apply it to the various antinomies. And in that lies the test of its validity; for however sound THE REMEDY 477 it might happen to seem in abstracto, it must show that soundness also by its bearing upon the concrete issues. Here, too, both of the ultimate principles should apply. If the solution is valid by itself, it ought to be valid as well in its relation to the particular antagonisms which have developed in human thought and practice. Let us then see how the principle of the duality of reality solves the chief antinomies. It is natural to begin with the simpler, i. e., the theoretical ones. Zeno's famous old arrow-tip is at rest in each point of its flight; and notwithstanding the definition of rest as in- volving duration, we might as well call this rest, since it is quite other than motion. The tip is where it is, and none should deny that it is in a particular point of space at a particular point of time; for these points to which analysis leads are quite real. But the rest is not exclusive of motion; which appears as follows. It is the nature of time that the present no sooner is than it becomes something new. In the very act of occurring, the present shows a little bit of futurity; it is transeunt. Transeuncy simply means that the future is here, to however small an extent, with the pres- ent. How, then, do you ask, is that bit of the future which the present has got between its teeth (to use a Bergsonian metaphor) distinguished from the instantaneous present, if both are equally here now ? Simply by the fact that the instantaneous present also takes on the mysterious quality which we call pastness; while the bit of futurity does not. The tip of the arrow is at the present moment here and at another very near moment a little further on; but this occurrence is one integral existential thing. But the second moment is already present with the first moment; such is the continuity and the transeuncy of time. We do not then say that the tip is in two different places at one instant, but 478 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY that it is in two different places at two different instants which in spite of their difference are both present. They are present, however, hi different ways, for the later moment, which we have called a bit of futurity, has itself a transeunt quality similar to that of its predecessor, while its predeces- sor has that fading quality which we call disappearance or pastness. All this is simply our psychological " specious " present, as James called it, objectified. Time is, indeed, just the sort of thing we immediately feel it to be. It con- tains instants and is punctual; but it is also much more, for the points are not cut off or discrete. They are identi- cally present but with different relations; the one being productive of something not included in the present (this is the later moment) the other being not productive (this is the earlier which has the fading quality). And the tip of the arrow is at the present instant just where it is, and at a later but equally present instant somewhere else. As purple is at once both red and blue, the present position of the tip is in both of these positions at one present time; but that time is a dual affair. In this solution we have been just to our experience; for experience offers exactly that union of instant with instant which we have emphasized. At the same time we have not as empiricists in this matter usually do denied the reality of that product of analysis, the punctual element. But we have included both the internal and the external principles; the particular instant and position of the arrow's tip is admitted real, and yet at the same time is admitted the transition to another position. This admission of both is rendered possible only by our general solution: that A may be B while yet it is A , sameness being not exclusive of or excluded by difference. The present moment may in- clude a certain future moment, while not ceasing to be pres- THE REMEDY 479 ent. How much of the future it includes is an empirical matter and actually we find that it includes very little. And of course we have not pretended herein to give a full definition of time. Next, take the antinomy of time's beginning. There can be a first moment of time ; for instance, such a dual moment as we have described above. We were able to describe that moment without in the least presupposing an earlier one. Herein the externality-principle is respected. But the internality-principle need not be denied ; for there may be an infinite number of preceding moments also. But does this not contradict the statement that the said moment was the beginning ? No, for beginning connotes an event such that before it there was nothing other than itself: that event always was. To say a thing always was, up to a certain point of tune, and then was succeeded by something else, is to say that tune began at that point. It is also to grant that there is infinite past tune preceding it; for if you insist that every moment of time is relative to a preceding moment your insistence is rewarded by the admission that the event in question may be dated with reference to the moment before it began to change, and that latter moment again with reference to a preceding moment, and so on without end. But since that event continues unchanged through all these retrogressing moments, this infinite series is not one which could never all have transpired. For the event was eternally accomplished ; it did not have to wait through an eternity before it could happen; the objection to the end- lessness of past time vanishes. As long as we grant that one and the same event can be occurring at continuously suc~ ceeding moments, there is no difficulty about the endless series. But this admission is nothing but our principle of sameness-in-difference. A past moment of time may con- 480 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY tain the same individual event as the present moment con- tains. To deny this is the arbitrary exclusion perpetrated by the Bergsonian and other such theories. We pass to the " completed infinite." Already this antinomy has been solved in regard to the thing-quality category, and predication; we have now to apply the solu- tion to the case of the finite line and its infinite points. The line contains all the points. As we analyze (divide) the line we find ever new points not before discovered. But these new points were really there all the time, ere we dis- covered them. Every new point is but the same old material, the content of the line, which we had at the beginning. The endlessness of the collection of points then does not signify that the line is never completed ; for what- ever new entities the series of points includes are the same as the content of the original line. Since every new element is the same old material, the series is always completed; since on the other hand it is a new instance of that material, different in position from the other instances, the series always can be extended. It is just because the points help to constitute the line that they offer the spectacle of iden- tity pervading an endless series of differences. And it is because sameness and difference are non-contradictory and complementary aspects that this spectacle contains no antinomy. The completed infinite in time looks tougher, because the collection of instants in a duration, say, of one minute, is not " all there " at once. The new instants, as they come on the scene in succession, are not the same old material that was there at the beginning. So at least it appears at first. But recall what we have said about the extension of the pres- ent moment. It contains at least two instants; and these are separated by a finite interval of duration, however THE REMEDY 481 small. It could not be otherwise, because there are no two points next each other. Now such an interval, given all at once as it is, is exactly comparable to the line in space. All the instants which must have transpired and they are infinite are present together, " all there " so that each new point discovered by analysis is but the same old material as the original present moment. There is then no contradiction in this elementary present moment. As to the minute of duration, that is a finite sum of these finite parts and can therefore offer no pretense of an antinomy. We come now to the most difficult of the theoretical list, viz., that apparently hard and fast opposition between freedom and determination. The axiom of internality says that every event is dependent upon all the rest of the uni- verse and in particular upon its antecedents. As the rest of the universe is fixed, being just what it is and was, so then the event in question is fixed; it could not be other than what it is. On the other hand the axiom of exter- nality forces us to believe that the event is a reality for itself, independent of others. Since independence means indifference, the event is indifferent to those others. If they had been otherwise, it might have been the same, and they being what they are, it might have been otherwise. Could there be a flatter contradiction than there is between these two ? Either the event is determined, or it is not determined but since determination is not merely other than indifference but the very opposite of it, it certainly seems as if these two could not be reconciled. We have already estimated the specious reconciliation of Kant and many others, which relegates the antagonists to diverse aspects. We might in any case know from our discussion of the " aspect-device " as a solvent of contradiction, that the procedure of Kant could not succeed. But can we do any better ? 482 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY Take the case of a heavy ball of lead falling at sea level in a vacuum from the height of 32.08 feet to the ground. It should fall, by the law of gravitation, in exactly one second. We find by careful measurement that it falls in 1.0002 seconds. We say that this apparently accidental variation from strict rule is not free, but is determined by the sur- roundings, e. g., by the fact that the vacuum is not perfect. Calculating the retardation due to the presence of a small quantity of air, we find that the ball should have fallen in 1.00019 seconds. This apparently accidental deviation, however, we ascribe to a slight upward component due to the attraction, say, of the moon upon the leaden ball. Cal- culating now the actual effect of this attraction, we find that the ball should have fallen in 1.000201 seconds. This slight discrepancy, again, we explain away by some other cause, and so on indefinitely. At every stage of the explaining process, we find that the phenomenon is for the most part determined, while there is a relatively small residuum which has not been accounted for. This residuum, we say, is due to the action of some remote cause which has been reduced indeed to a minimum, but has not been wholly removed. But as fast as this mini- mum is discounted, we find another minimal discrepancy within it which has not been accounted for. Now each of these slight discrepancies is due to the influence of some fact independent of the main phenomenon which is being investi- gated. The resistance of the air, the attraction of the moon, etc., are causes which do not depend upon the gravitation of the lead toward the earth. The air is a different body from the earth, the moon is distinct from earth and air, and so on ; and each of these bodies exercises its effect by itself an effect which cannot be wholly reduced to terms of the earth's gravitation. However interdependent these various agents THE REMEDY 483 may be, they are ultimately separate things, and as plural- ism has once for all shown (Chapter XI), they cannot be reduced to one bare identity and nothing more. Any one single event, however simple it appears, is indefi- nitely composite; compounded out of an indefinitely great number of causes. The variation of that event from exact obedience to law is only the expression of the presence of these many causes. In so far as these causes are irreducible to one another, they are independent entities; and in so far they are relatively to one another free. The variation of the event from exact law is therefore in the last analysis, free variation; only this does not mean that the said event is itself so far undetermined. Given the existence of the many causes which produce it, itself is quite determined; but though it does the will of those causes implicitly, yet it is, so to speak, carrying out their free behests. And the same is true of the event itself. The ball of lead is an ultimate fact, independent of the pull of the moon, the air, the earth's attraction. It is an element upon which all of these react; an end- term to which they assume certain relations. Its own way of reacting to their influence is eter- nally its own; its own behaviour is characteristic of it, and when fully recorded, serves to differentiate it from all other bodies. Herein lies a freedom peculiar to itself. If the metaphor may be permitted, it must respond to the call of these agents, but it will respond in its own way; even as one man will respond to a sermon or a lecture in a very different way from that of another man. It feels the resistance of the air less than a feather, it is not as elastic as glass, etc., etc. And in all this we are not exhibiting empty formalities such as the lead as a thing-in-itself versus the lead as a phenomenon, or as a unique individual versus a congeries of universals, etc. ; but verifiable traits of concrete behaviour. 484 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY But this is only a superficial reconciliation. Have we any- thing but determinism in such an account ? The ball of lead once given, cannot change its way of reacting; the moon cannot help pulling on it, the air must resist just as it does, etc. It seems quite barren to call these actions and reactions free when we know they cannot be otherwise. There are no genuine alternatives of behaviour before these things. But let us look more closely. When an experiment like this one of the falling ball is repeated again and again, the results are fou^d to vary. Perhaps never do we get the same results twice alike. To be sure, the degree of such variation is relatively small. The resistance of the air varies ever so little, from moment to moment; but we keep it as nearly constant as we can. The attraction of the moon may in itself even vary enormously in direction but it is a remote cause, so small, we say, as to be negligible. Indeed, the very nature of a scientific experiment is that all the causes but one (or a very few) are reduced to a minimum. Consequently, while the experi- ment gives varying results, those results vary always within certain rather narrow limits. The leaden ball, let fall repeatedly, will fall in, say, 1.0002 seconds the first time, 1.00018 the second, 1.000209 the third, and so forth. In other words, the " uniformity of nature " is but approxi- mately verified. The divergence from law never passes beyond a certain range of variation; how narrow the range is, depends upon the accuracy of the experiment. These variations are, it would seem, due to the changing conditions which surround the experiment. They are not to be construed as the realization of alternative possibilities one after another ; everything is so far in accord with deter- minism. But there is another fact which, so far as we know, seems not yet to have been noticed by philosophers. It is THE REMEDY 485 a very well-known fact, but it seems not to have attracted the philosophic mind. We refer to a certain character of these variations from exact law. They are, to a surface view, merely irregular. But when carefully measured, tabulated, plotted in a graph, they show a remarkable prop- erty. The graph is that of the probability-curve. And this is a phenomenon of wide generality; for it is true that almost all the events of Nature show it. Repeated shots at a target, repeated measurements of a rod, repeated almost anything, &> the science of statistics has shown, give a figure which is some form or other skew or symmetrical of this same curve. The significance of such a fact we believe to be this. The probability-curve is what we get when we graphically plot the values of a series of resultants which are compounded out of many causes where all possible combinations of those causes occur in approximately equal numbers. This condition of the equal frequency of all possible combinations is essential to the curve. Is it not a curious trait ? Why on earth should there be such a peculiar property ? We do not know how to account for it. Why, when a given event is tried again and again, should the results vary so as to cover all possible cases ? Why does a man shooting at a small target hit every part of the target if he shoots long enough ? Why do we feel sure that if a vast number of letters were jumbled together, time after time, eventually we should get any designable combination, say the play of Hamlet ? Somehow we take for granted this tendency to vary it; it seems a priori, inevitable. But it is not so. There is no a priori reason why the continual repetition of anything should cover all possible cases. It is a priori quite con- ceivable that it might show no variation. Do you say that the second repetition must be different from the first, be- 486 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY cause the conditions are found to be different ? No doubt, we reply: no doubt they are bound to be different in each repetition. But that does not guarantee the equal frequency of all possible variations. Certain ones might greatly pre- dominate over others: there is nothing in the notion of per- petual difference to forbid it. No, we seem to have here a sort of ultimate attribute of reality; the tendency to spread, to cover all the cases not ruled out by the circumstances. It reminds us of the water issuing from the garden hose, whose general current running in one direction may be likened to a law, and whose spraying, spreading quality, increasing as the water proceeds outward, is analogous to the variations here emphasized. As a matter of fact this impartiality of Nature, giving equal opportunity to all possible combinations of events, is a beautiful illustration of that free union of freedom and determination which we are seeking to elucidate. First, as to freedom. Freedom means impartiality; a free choice would have no intrinsic preference for one alternative over another. If such a preference were shown time after time, we must conclude that there was no freedom, but a ground for the choice. Where there is no preponderance, there is no reason for thinking the choices adopted to be due to anything. That, indeed, is the very definition of indif- ference. An event A is said to be indifferent to another B when A happens equally often in the absence or the presence of B, and conversely. Now just such is the case with so many of the events in Nature. A single event X is the com- pound result of an indefinitely great number of causes Xi, X t , X 3 , ... As the event is repeated, the same causes on the whole reappear, but now one cause, now another, predominates, changing the value of X now in this direction now in that, until all the possible values are (approximately) THE REMEDY 487 equally realized. These causes thereby show their indif- ference to one another. In the case of the falling ball, the variation of the air's resistance is largely indifferent to the pull of the moon; the changes in one are so far not corre- lated with changes in the other. And this fact, that these two are independent, is simply a consequence of the fact that the air has its own character, external to that of the moon, and vice versa. The independence between the varia- tions of the respective agents Xi, X^ X*, etc., of event X is the result of the externality of these agents to one another; just that quality which we dwelt upon a little above. Speak- ing in general terms, we may say that the whole world is the combination of a vast number of independent causal series; independent because made up, respectively, of the behaviour of things which are logically external to one another. The behaviour of no one of these agents can be logi- cally deduced from that of any other; no, not even if we had perfect knowledge of all that that other has done or will do. The freedom really lies in the individual way of acting and reacting which each entity in the universe displays. And this shows how we can say there are genuine possi- bilities, alternatives of behaviour not realized at a given time and place. The " nature " of any one entity say the moon's pull, or the density of the lead, is not deter- minable from anything else but just itself. It might have shown, in any given case, a different reaction from the one it does show. Oh no! we may be told: lead could not rise like hydrogen. Why not ? we ask. There is no way of answering this question without a vicious circle. If it rose like hydrogen it would not be lead, true but why should it be lead ? Why should lead act as lead does ? Perhaps because certain chemical agencies have combined in a cer- tain way to produce this leaden ball; but then the question 488 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY is only shoved back. Those agencies acted as they did for no reason except their inherent " nature." Or if we go back further and find the compulsion in the behaviour of electrons, then we but find those electrons displaying their own " natures." Nevertheless, this " nature " of lead, this ultimate fact that in a given situation it reacts as it does, once discovered, permits the inference that, if that situation is exactly re- peated, the lead must react always in the same way. But it is never in exactly the same situation, presumably, as before. That means that at a given moment it is acted upon by a new combination of causes. How will it react to this new combination ? In so far as the combination resembles the former one, the reaction of the lead will be the same. But if the new were entirely different from the old, we could not predict beforehand what the lead would do. So to say, the lead itself could not predict what it would do; for its " nature " shows, by the principle of internal relations, a different side for every new environment. Now in all ex- periments conducted by man, as they are repeated the con- ditions are very nearly the same. Accordingly, we may be sure that the reaction of the body experimented upon will be very nearly the same. In so far as the conditions differ more and more will the reaction differ more and more, and since the nature of the body is not known until all its intrin- sic ways of reacting are known, we should be able to predict less and less as to what would happen. A perfect knowl- edge of everything that had happened in the past would not enable one to make such a prediction. The " nature " of the reagent is not something preexisting, determining the reaction; it is the reaction itself. There is real indeter- mination here. In the actual situations of our life, the fundamental changes are relatively slight, and so we can THE REMEDY 489 predict what will happen within very narrow limits. We know that certain things are, in the conditions given, practically ruled out. Lead cannot rise suddenly, etc., etc., that we know, because we have seen lead acting in the presence of the earth's gravitation. But if we were suddenly thrown into a universe where different chemicals existed, no gravitation, no electricity, etc., then there would be no way of telling what might happen. There is in short real chance; but where the conditions remain so largely uniform there is very little occasion for it to show itself. But all this is at the same time determination, simply because all that happens is subject to the law that the same conditions give the same results. A thing never acts con- trary to its habits : the leaden ball can be counted upon to behave practically as it always has behaved, because the conditions are practically what they always were. And each way of reacting to each new situation, constituting as it does the character of the reagent, expresses the law of that reagent's nature. This combination of freedom and determinism verifies our principle of duality. One and the same reaction of a given body to a given force acting upon it may be regarded as free, or determined, or both. In so far as the reaction is identically the nature of the body, it is free. In so far as the reaction is only an individual event, while the " nature " of the body is a permanent character, the reaction is deter- mined. These two, the individual event and the " nature " of the body, are the same yet distinct; and it is that sameness-in-difference which allows each aspect of the matter, the freedom and the determination, to be ulti- mately true. Of the freedom of the human will, which is a special case of the above, we do not now propose to treat. The nature 490 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY of will and choice is not very well understood ; the experience of activity is a topic beset with disagreements. The reac- tion of a particular man to the motives which urge him is no doubt free: but just how it occurs, how it bears upon his character, whether a good character has more or less free- dom than a bad one all such questions are empirical ones which, however interesting and profitable, we must here dismiss. We must for the present concentrate our attention upon the application of our principle to the cure of the ancient philosophic malady. It remains to show the solution which our principle affords, of the practical antinomies. In general, that solu- tion must be in accord with the maxim " live and let live." And if we men had each of us infinite time or energy at our disposal, it would be enough to say this. We could put tremendous energy into self-cultivation, by education, re- flection, and other self-regarding processes, and still have plenty left to devote to the problems of politics, economics, and other social concerns. But with our short lives and limited strength we must find a way of combining these opposites. We must seek a mode of life which will so far as possible conduce at one stroke to the interests of both. To a certain extent, it is true, we must allow the separation of private and public interests. There must be times when we play, or seek our own profit and self -discipline forgetful of our membership in the social body, and there must be cer- tain other moments when we deliberately disregard our own interests for the sake of the community. Still, with the limitation of man's powers what it is, these self-seeking moments must be fewer than the moments when we are trying to harmonize egoism and altruism. Our work should occupy a much larger space of life than our play; our d#ily labour in the community than our pleasant fancies or our THE REMEDY 491 bitter sacrifices. Now the solution of the problem, how best to make egotism and altruism interpenetrating and mutually contributory, is not to be found in the principle we have been elucidating, but in its counterpart principle. For, once more, true to our fundamental dualistic attitude, we find that the principle of duality is by itself insufficient. True, valuable, indispensable as it is, it is not enough to give us a positive system of reality or an articulate plan of life. It requires supplementation. Or it would be better to say that the form of that principle which we have already an- nounced, should be supplemented by a second form; since these two bases of reality are really but two sides of one principle. The solution of standing contradictions by a sort of pas- sivity, a meek acceptance of both sides, of all doctrines as equally true, is all very well; but it gives no account of the way in which the universe is put together; no positive idea for which we can do battle with single-eyed devotion. Such a non-resisting attitude is weakening to the intellect un- less it goes hand in hand with some positive principle, some definite platform on which we take our stand as propagandists. When we diagnosed the philosophic disease we found that philosophy was barren because it was exclusive. If then we have removed the exclusiveness, we should thereby cure the barrenness. That same principle which solves the antino- mies and removes the exclusiveness, ought to render human thought fertile to explain the concrete detail of reality. The principle, in other words, should enable us to understand how one fact or aspect of the universe implies others. If, as Mr. Bradley says, " thought demands to go with a ground and a reason," we ought now to have the means of satisfying that demand. The principle which above we 492 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY called the duality of reality thus will appear as a productive principle, or better, since it shows how one thing gives rise to another, a creative principle. Empowering us to go from one part of reality to another, to see how reality builds itself up, it should furnish us with the key to that map of the universe which is the goal of philosophic inquiry. CHAPTER XIII THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE REALITY, we have said, is through and through dual. It is free and constrained, it is static and dynamic, it is term and relation, individual and universal, and so on. Hitherto our effort has been to show that these contrasts are not conflicts. But the very principle of duality suggests that this is but one side of the matter; there is also another side, wherein freedom and law, static and dynamic, individ- ual and universal, have a positive relationship. They do not merely fail to conflict, they are not only mutually indif- ferent; they are also mutually contributory. The two aspects are always of one and the same reality. They are distinct, yet they are united ; they are different, yet in their difference they display a sameness and a reciprocal con- firmation. The principle above announced, of the free duality of reality, was so to speak the individualistic formu- lation of our total result; it must be supplemented by its correlative, the socialistic rendering, which proclaims the junction or union of the counter-aspects. If the former justified the partisan philosophic types in all but their exclusion, the latter will justify the synthetic types in a similar manner. The socialistic attribute of reality, when clearly set forth, should explain to us how it is that reality joins up its contrasting sides. It should elucidate, as none of the synthetic types was able to do, the transition from one real thing or event to another, show how one implies another, how event gives rise to event and show it in 494 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY concrete; in a word it should reveal the way in which the internality of relations works. For, in our solution of the dialectic, we built most upon the principle of externality; we showed that the counterpart members of each opposition were indifferent to each other. We have now to show that they are not only thus external the one to its fellow, but of one blood, mutually supporting and interpenetrating. At first we must proceed abstractly; we shall, however, ascend to the concrete as soon as possible. Since the principle of reality's free choice or ultimate duality has now been justified, let us apply it to the present case. Given any one fact, we are at liberty to fasten upon it in its isolation, to consider its internal make-up, what it is in and for itself; or on the other hand we may consider its connection with the rest of the world. And further, having distinguished these aspects, we are metaphysically correct in choosing to regard only their distinctness, and to say that they are two entirely different sides of it. Or, on the other hand, we may choose to regard their ultimate identity. We may declare that they are at bottom one and the same thing. Let us now make this latter choice; let us say that these counter-aspects, to wit, the thing by itself and the thing's relations, are one. We are herein telling nothing but the absolute truth; it is no merely subjective point of view, foreign to the real manifoldness of the thing, which excuses the statement. Reality is what we see it to be. Now for a moment may we resort to symbols ? Call the thing by itself A , and the thing as related to other things B. The A is identical with B: that is our present declaration. But reality chooses also to contain a differentiation within the identity; it is then also absolutely true that A differs from B. And both these truths hold, neither denying the other. Now of this situation there are certain consequences. THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 495 In any given case, A and B have, as an empirically given fact, some specific relation to each other. What that rela- tion is, depends of course upon the particular case. Sup- pose, for instance, that A and B are the two aspects of a candle-flame X. Then A represents the composition of that flame the process of rapid combination of the oiled wick with oxygen; and B represents, say, the effect of the flame upon some object the light-rays perhaps which illuminate the latter. The specific difference here is, among other things, a temporal one; B is temporally consequent upon A . In general, however, the specific relation between A and B may be of any sort; succession, juxtaposition, leftness, Tightness, or what not. But pay attention for the moment only to the symbols. We have then A and B, and they are quite the same, yet also different and specifically so. Call the specific relation between them R. Now if A is the same as B then what is true of A is true of B. B, being A over again for sameness means absolute, numerical, individual identity or it means nothing at all does what A does, has the qualities that A has, and so on. But it is true of A that it is RB. It follows that it is also true of B that it is RB. B must therefore differentiate itself; it must generate, so to speak, another instance of itself, to which it is related by the specific difference R. This second instance of B must be the same as, and also distinct from, the first instance. We have a repetition of the original case of sameness-in- difference. Something genuinely new, we believe, is here produced out of the original situation: something involved in it, but not tacitly read in or already assumed. The process is one of logical deduction; it is, we think, quite simple, clear and distinct; it satisfies the demand for seeing how novelty can arise though of course as yet in a very abstract and formal kind of case only. Deduction here 496 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY becomes production. And not production of merely one novelty; for the second instance of B is related to the first as that first was related to A; whence it too will produce a third instance, and so on indefinitely. Let the reader then fix his attention upon this paradigm ; we deem it of incal- culable importance for the understanding of reality. In fact, it is the only principle, so far as we know, which gives understanding of the way in which one entity may give rise to another; for it shows how the former necessitates the latter. The situation before us is one in which the twofoldness of a single object is directly seen to operate, to create another object. This is that positive side of reality which reveals the counterpart of our first principle, the dualistic one. It is far more momentous than that one, for it is not negative; it does not remove contradictions, but generates novelties. It cannot dispense with the first principle, but it cannot be reduced wholly to terms thereof. And the two are asym- metrically related. The first does no work, but only liber- ates, as it were, the members of the real object, by untying the knots which chafe and bind them; the second, which cannot act until the first has performed its part, does work in providing the world with a new being. At bottom, nevertheless, these two principles are one; the first being the disjunctive side, with its either-or, the second, with its both-and, the conjunctive side. The second is just the identification of the A and B together with their difference, the former was just the separation of them, of their same- ness, of their difference, and the seeing of them as real in their indifference. And in virtue of the productiveness, the fertility, of our second principle, we believe it to be that particular one which above all the philosopher seeks; that creative principle which shows how the parts of reality are THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 497 joined. By its aid, then, we should be able to furnish a map of reality, and to satisfy that instinct which, as we saw in Chapter I, sets the initial philosophic problem. But the application of this principle is a task of so great magnitude and withal so novel, that we can discharge it only by slow degrees. In what follows, then, we make but a beginning. Consider some natural object : say an iceberg floating in the sea. It is a definite body, a mass, a group of forces i. e., substantial, in accord with the principle of externality. It is much more also : it enters into many relations with its environment. It displaces its own weight of water, thereby raising the level of the ocean. It reflects and refracts the sunlight, affording to the beholder a spectacle of marvellous beauty. It absorbs heat from the surrounding air and water ; it attracts by gravitation much flotsam and jetsam ; and it finally disintegrates as the ice is melted by the warm cur- rents of the ocean. If the substantial aspect is symbolized by the letter A, B may stand for any one or all of these relations between the iceberg and its milieu. Let us select the phenomenon of reflection. Now witness the situation between A and B. A designates the structure and order of the ice-crystals, B the effect of them in reflecting the sun- light, say to a certain distance outside of the iceberg. This reflection B is the characteristic behaviour of A and so far is A; they are in part the same thing. Ice is that which reflects light in a certain way. If then B is the same as A, B must act as A does. That is, B too must be accompanied by the phenomenon of projecting the light-rays further out, and to a distance equal to the one just mentioned; and this second stage, so to speak, of the reflection, similarly implies a third and equal stage. This process, once begun, clearly goes on without end; that is, light is reflected outwards in a 498 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY straight line to an infinite distance. Our principle, viz., the fusion of sameness and difference, of internal and external relations, thus explains a great number of distinct events beyond the initial reflection of the light-rays: nothing less, in fact, than the whole course of the light-rays in their end- less journey. And it explains this whole course in detail and in particular. We can see why the process, once begun, must go on, as clearly as we can see why 2 + 2 =4. We do not have to content ourselves with a causal postulate; we do not rest in a faith-attitude, asserting dogmatically that every event will have its effect. We see directly how and why it has its effect though as yet in this instance only, of course. Herein is fulfilled for the present case that demand which no synthetic type was able to satisfy, that we see how one fact or event, one part of the universe, leads on to another. The principle of internality is no longer merely a general axiom, unverified in concrete; it is an object of sight and understanding. Are we not then bound to believe that our second principle is deserving of the name creative ? It has shown even though to a very limited extent so far a fertility which no other principle yet named has been able to claim. It has accounted for a causal connection; it has shown how from a given initial situation an infinite stream of events all the different stages of the light-ray in its onward progress is generated. Take now some other property of our iceberg. It dis- places its own weight of water. If our principle is sound, why is not this displacement accompanied by a further dis- placement, and so on leaving the ocean heaven knows where, if indeed anywhere at all ? Surely this is a reductio ad absurdum of our contention. But we have only to re- member Newton's first law of motion: that a body in mo- tion continues in rectilinear motion unless acted upon by THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 499 some external force. The displaced water is shoved out of its position when the iceberg breaks off from its parent glacier, and thereby acquires a momentum which, in accord- ance with the law of the Conservation of Momentum, con- tinues. The energy passes, as the water is raised, into potential form, and as the water settles back, into kinetic form; but neither the momentum nor the energy is lost. They simply combine with other forces to produce a com- pound resultant. Now it would be too long a story, to attempt to show here that all causal action is but a case of our sameness-difference paradigm. That story we have told elsewhere (Journal of Philosophy, XI, pp. 197, 253, 309, 365) and naturally we cannot ask that it be taken for granted. So we limit ourselves to the comparatively simple cases where motion is propagated in a straight line. For such cases it would seem that our principle furnishes a real explanation. And if so, to that extent our common-sense faith in the efficacy of causes is vindicated. The necessary connection which Hume was unable to discern between cause and effect, is brought to light. But we may carry the application a little further. The doctrine that the same causes give the same effects which some regard as the essence of natural law is a direct con- sequence of the creative principle. For, if cause A is suc- ceeded by effect B once, then where we have again the individual event A we should have the same effect B. If A 2 is the same as A\ and if A \ is RB\ (related to B\ by the link of sequence) then A 2 must also be related in the same way to Bi, and we shall have B\ over again, or B z . In this manner we justify that postulate which is called the Uni- formity of Nature. Induction, by common consent, rests upon such a postulate; and thereby we have explained the validity of inductive reasoning. 500 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY Of course, we must expect to be confronted at once by a reductio ad absurdum; any philosophic doctrine must expect that, since it amis to be universal and since there will always be special cases where its truth is overlaid with other truths. There is a very easy reductio: several, indeed, of which we select a typical one. If sameness and difference work together as alleged, to create a new entity, then see what results: this pen is like the other pen, i. e., in part identical with it; this pen is now writing, therefore the other must be. But (presumably) it isn't. Or again: my hat is in part identical with your hat, since both are black; my hat has been (with me) on a long sea voyage therefore yours has. Or in general: almost anything is in part identical with almost anything else, therefore it has all the properties of almost anything else. Could there be a sillier view ? Now we might know such an argument is wrong, because a similar argument can be brought against every law whatsoever. Thus, the earth attracts bodies; but a hydrogen balloon moves away from the earth therefore the earth does not attract it. Or action and reaction are equal, but a ball of putty does not rebound from the ground as violently as it strikes, hence there is no such law. We know, of course, that the law is not discredited when other laws combine with it to produce a resultant. Just so with our principle. It never ceases to act, but its action is always compounded with that of another and negative principle, which runs: A is other than B, but B is RC, therefore A is other than RC. (We are talking of individ- uals, A, B, and C and a particular relation R and identity between A , B, and RC: no notion of the class is yet pre- supposed. In magnitudes this principle becomes : if A = B, and BC, then A =*= C.) Take, for example, the colours yellow and red. Yellow is a bright colour, and so is red ; so THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 5OI far they are identical; but yellow is also a different colour from, other than, red, so that the identical brightness takes on in addition a difference: the brightness of red, while resembling that of yellow, is also in part of a different quality from that of yellow. Suppose now the reductio ad absurdum is proposed : yellow is identical with red but red is complementary to green therefore yellow is complementary to green. It is obvious enough that the reasoning is sound as far as it goes. In so far as yellow has that peculiar sort of brightness that is found in red, so far yellow is identical with red, and to that degree, neglecting the specific difference of yellow from red, we may call yellow complementary to green. The only thing that would forbid this train of rea- soning is that we should not be permitted to analyze re- semblance into partial identity; but in Chapter VIII (on Intellectualism) we saw that such analysis is always per- missible. To return now to the earlier reductiones. This pen is in part identical with a certain other pen; this pen is writing therefore the other is writing, which it is n't. Now as a matter of fact the qualities which are identical in both pens are in the pen which is writing; and in that sense the other pen is doing just what this pen is doing. But take account also of the differences. The other pen is off there in a drawer where no hand touches it, therefore it cannot be writing; the apparent contradiction is resolved on the part of reality by the fact of the two instances of the common qualities: one of which is writing while the other isn't. When we speak of that other pen we mean to designate the individuality of it, the differences which mark it off from this one; so we say that it is not writing. But if we were to neglect those differences and to mean by it those attributes only which it shares with this pen, then we could truthfully say that that pen was writing. Do we not often, indeed, 502 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY speak thus without being charged with falsehood ? Do I not say that 7 voted when the man to whom I gave my proxy voted in my stead ? Do we not say of a photograph or landscape-painting " What a beautiful view! " when it is the original that is denoted through its identities with the copy ? We have only to recall the well-nigh universal em- ployment of representation in our lives to see how frequently we single out the sameness of different individuals, and treat the one as if it were doing what the other is doing. In truth, we never can tell beforehand to how great an extent we may identify things even the most diverse. " Every- thing in Nature," said Emerson somewhere, "has all the powers of Nature " ; and we see why that is so. In a very true sense the sameness between the parts of reality permits us to say that one part does what it is, as an individual, very far from doing. This is not poetry at least in the anti-logical connotation of that term but is in accord with the strictest logic. And so, to return to our absurd second instance above: if my hat has been around Cape Horn then the identical qualities in yours have indeed had that same experience. If it suits your purpose to consider my par- ticular hat a representative of yours, you may consider that yours has had the benefit of the experiences which mine has suffered. The absurdity of the illustration lies in the fact that we can hardly conceive any good practical reason why one hat should thus represent another; but there is nothing in the logic of the matter to prevent it. In so far as you separate the individual marks of your hat from those of mine, so far yours has done otherwise than mine; in so far as you identify them, the one has done what the other has done. There are two different points of view about the matter, that is all; and neither denies the other. There is no reductio; the one object does what the other object THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 503 does, and it does also much that the other object does not do. Coming back to the creative principle, we may now ask how it enables our thought to pass " with a ground and a reason " from any one fact outward to others more or less contemporaneous with it ? Certain causal deductions from one fact to its later effects have perhaps been justified, and therein we have taken our first actual step in the philo- sophical journey through the universe. But the whole system of pluralism has not been touched; the reply to that system, which we gave in Chapter XII, remains based solely upon faith, even though properly based. And faith is not enough. We must try to find some tangible thread which joins those distinct parts of the world, showing how one fact of itself implies other facts. We have not yet solved the problem set by the synthetic types. The iceberg of our example above is forever distinct from the sea, the atmosphere, the sun's rays, and the admiring beholder. How does it involve all of these ? And in general, how does the internal constitution and behaviour of any one fact or event show the existence and the character of the remainder of the universe ? It shows them thus. The single fact, iceberg-reflecting- light is a compound affair. It is constituted by the make-up of the ice-crystals, and by the light impinging upon them from however short a distance outside, and being reflected back. Now this impinging of the light upon the ice is a process logically quite similar to the reflection outward. As the reflection proceeds outward indefinitely in its effects, so the impact must have come inward from an indefinitely long chain of causes. The symbols A and B might be ap- plied here, just as above. Let the impact of the light on the ice be A , and the incoming light-ray, just before impact, B. 504 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY Then A is the effect of B, and in accordance with the defini- tion of causation already noted, there is a sameness between the two. This is our typical situation again; the sameness- in-difference of A and B implies a further cause C of which B is the effect, and so on forever. Thus the effect implies the cause outside that effect. And in this way we may detect in the here-and-now behaviour of an object the pres- ence, however remote, of a causal agent producing a part of that behaviour. The Hegelians of course use these same causal illustrations to show the interpenetration of things; only they have not believed it possible for human thought to explain the causal nexus. We, in grounding that nexus, in showing its real necessity, have rendered their illustrations fertile for an intelligent comprehension of the matter; we have empowered the intellect to go " with a ground and a reason " from effect to cause, or from cause to effect. There is brought to light no mere uniform sequence, but a real objective necessity. It is the necessary connection which binds the behaviour of the particular fact to its remote causes. And it is not without interest to note that our creative principle has restored causation to that eminence from which it had been dragged by the inability of phi- losophers to understand it. The Aristotelian-Thomistic system, with the wisdom of common sense, has steadily refused to dethrone this most useful of all concepts; and herein its insight is justified. Indeed, the failure of philos- ophy to explain anything whatsoever is bound to go with its renunciation of this category; for causation is the category which above all others contains the notion of creation and if that is not understood, neither is anything explained. Modern criticism has condemned causal efficacy because it has seen that a law is no explanation of a particular instance of the law. Quite true : the stone does not fall because of the THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 505 law of gravitation. But it is over-hasty to conclude that since the particular is not explained by the universal (as Aristotle thought) it is not explicable. Our own account shows that it is explained by a preceding particular event of dual structure. Laws do not explain, but they are " short- hand resumes " of similar occurrences which are explained by similar predecessors. The extent to which the scientist has been able to trace in isolated events the action of far distant events distant in time, or in space only, or in both is today very great indeed. The rapid enlargement of our knowledge of electri- cal phenomena has furnished impressive instances of this sort: as when, for instance, the magnetic storms on our globe are shown to depend upon certain electrical conditions in the sun. It is true that this tracing of one fact in another is by no means complete, nor can be, perhaps, until our science is complete; but it is much to have justified in concrete the principle of internal relations to the degree already done. The empirical indications are strong that every fact contains in itself the imprint of the rest of the universe; and hereby we find confirmed Leibnitz's doctrine of the monads, those mirrors of the universe. But we avoid the pit of universal relativity into which Leibnitz is said to have fallen, by the other side of the whole matter, the inner constitution of the monad ; for that inner constitution shows an unpredictable reaction, an irreducible factor in the re- sultant behaviour. Every fact, probably, is a mirror of the universe, but each mirror contributes as it were a positive colour of its own to the picture. The reason why previous attempts to get from one part of the universe to another have failed, is that they started from a single instead of a dual base. From one you cannot get anything except what is tacitly presupposed in it; any 506 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY appearance of productivity is due only to the hiddenness of the presupposition. The logical situation here is like the biological. Fertilization proceeds not from one sex alone but requires the union of two. As the fruitful element of language and thought is the proposition or the judgment, with its twofold structure of subject and predicate; as the working element of society is the family, rooted in the sex- contrast; as the foundation of serial reasoning in mathe- matics lies in the binomial theorem, with its two cases sufficing for the whole demonstration; as electrical phe- nomena depend upon positive and negative charges; so at the very heart of reality itself we find that duality is the necessary and sufficient condition of intelligibility and pro- ductiveness. If we had studied, for instance, our iceberg as a term alone, without any external reference, we should never have found implication of aught beyond the original datum. The appearance of the ice-crystals, their form, their smooth contour, their consolidation all these prop- erties by themselves are but so many dead brute facts. " Brute " is the only word for it: they provide no chance for the understanding to work. What is given is given and what is not given is not given. There is no possible basis for inferring from an isolated fact to a cause of it. We are in an Eleatic system as cold and barren as the ice of our illustra- tion. But once introduce that element of external reference, to wit, the light impinging from ever so little a distance out- side the iceberg, and we can progress; we can infer to some- thing more than this given twofold datum. We can combine the two aspects of the situation and from the combination generate a new implicate; this new implicate in turn we can combine with the original, and produce a fourth, and so onward. The small amount of external reference that has fertilized the single datum of the iceberg in itself does not THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 507 secretly contain what we proceed to discover; any more than an inch contains a yard. Given an inch, however, we proceed to take an ell; given a point, a bare unit, and we can take nothing. We did not presuppose that the light which impinges upon the surface of the crystals came from a very great distance; nothing was said or assumed about the original source of that light. We assumed only a very small distance: as small as you please. Indeed, what we assumed was infinitesimal in the true meaning of that word ; for the infinitesimal is no static quantity, but one which is small at will. But this iota of externality suffices to im- pregnate the phenomena of the inner structure; since it gives us the occasion for applying the formula of sameness- in-difference which is the prototype of all rationality and productivity. The little bit of externality, identified with the primitive monad of the original single datum, implies a further bit, and this another, and thenceforth passes out to any required degree. Yet with all this granted, we have at best but made our landing upon the shore of a continent : within the limits of a single volume we can do little more than indicate its vast extent. The doubter, if perhaps in a generous mood ad- mitting that we have landed at all, will pronounce it shifting sandbank or at most a small island. It certainly devolves upon us to articulate our universe pretty thoroughly by this second principle of ours. We have not yet touched those vital disagreements, the practical and emotional issues, of which the philosophical quarrels are the intellectual counter- part. Still less have we delineated that fertile union of the two factions in each issue, which should present a workable plan of action for man. Yet if our formula gives us such a map of the universe as we have been seeking, it must do all this: it must enable us to adjust ourselves profitably to our 508 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY great environment. But as before undertaking a voyage we must possess the chart, or before attempting to cope with our environment we must know its cardinal features, it behooves us now to give some sort of outline, however rough, of the system which we believe our principle warrants. So far, reality is an infinite assemblage, not so much of monads, as of dyads, each of which is two-in-one. This holds, so far as we can see, alike of physical facts, of mental, and of any other which we can with any clearness conceive. For all have their inner substantial aspect as well as their relative, adjectival status. But how are these dyads specifically related ? The above seems at first to tell us very little. Does our principle throw any light upon the fact that there are physical objects in space and time, which also are numerable, have magnitude, exercise gravitation, etc.; that there are minds as well as bodies, living as well as inorganic things, that there are values, goods and evils, as well as bare facts; that there are many of each of these sorts of being rather than one of each; and so on ? These all are things to be explained. Unless our principle at least helps in this direction, it is scarcely to be dignified with a very fundamental title. No one, we believe, has deduced the categories. We showed this partly in Chapter IV; but the most illustrious attempt, that of Hegel, is an even more instructive instance than those of our earlier account. Hegel started with a pure monad (Being) out of which he drew another monad (Nothing) ; these two he combined to produce a third. He was not, so far as we can ascertain, aware of the principle we are extolling; for he believed that contradiction was the spur which pricked thought onward. We have tried to make clear that contradiction plays no part here, except to lead to endless bickerings; certainly the combination of THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 509 contradictories would but annul each. He saw at times just how clearly it is difficult to say that two are needed to produce something; yet he did not see it un- waveringly, for he subscribed to the law that everything of itself turns into its opposite. Now that is a quite unin- telligible doctrine. True or not true it may be : but it is no explaining principle. Better confess at the outset that you have an ultimate duality than try to draw the antithesis from the thesis. But Hegel passed himself off not for a dualist but for a monist, and a monist only; and thereby he lost the pith and juice of the creative formula; for dualism must be ultimate if we are to explain things. The origin of the categories is still a virgin soil for philosophy. Besides this problem of the genesis of the categories is the problem of the main attributes of each category. Life, for instance: why has it the attributes of nutrition, secretion, mating, breathing, etc. ? Space: why is it infinite, contin- uous, homogeneous, and so on ? Time: why is it linear, irreversible, infinite ? And so for each category. Now these two problems are, at least to some extent, amenable to treatment by our principle. As to the former: we can account for the origin of certain categories. For instance, generality, or the universal, or class. Suppose the simplest possible dyad : any two things 'which possess both sameness and difference. Call them A and B. Then B, being the same as A , must have the relation to B which A has, to wit, difference. B is therefore different from B. (This of course does not destroy the identity of B, as same- ness and difference are not mutually destructive.) This second B should be called by a new name, to distinguish it from the first, viz., C. Now C, being the same with B, must be, as B is, different from itself hence is implied a new entity D. This series is indefinitely long. Herein is gen- 510 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY crated the notion of a class; for we have a collection of individuals, all displaying a sameness, while the number of the collection actually taken is indifferent. It is potentially infinite. Such is the logical universal which when re- garded from the point of view of the various individual cases of it, we call a class. And we have produced this category by applying our principle to just two individuals, with nothing general or universal about them. They are individual, their relation is an individual one, and every- thing about them is individual. There is, so far as we can see, no tacit presupposition which is later hauled out of its hiding-place to provide some unexpected novelty. There is simply production, due to the union of these relations of sameness and difference in accord with our principle. The category of individual with which we started has generated its counter-category, the universal. But from one individual alone we could never have gotten this result; we need two, related by sameness and difference. Again, consider number. The series we have above brought forth forms the series of ordinal numbers. It con- tains a first and second instance at the outset, and from these two it spins an endless sequence; the third instance, fourth, fifth, and so on. From such a series, as is well known, can be obtained many, if not all, of the materials of arithmetic and algebra. When we come to the genesis of space, there is a difficulty which we do not yet know how to meet. The property of extension, or side-by-side-ness, seems qualitatively unique and not generable. Once grant this property, to be sure, and we can deduce a great many of the properties of space. Given two points, one being in any way you please dis- tinguished from the other to the right of it, say, or above it; then it follows that there must be an endless series of THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 511 points further to the right, or further above the former, as well as an endless series in the other direction. Given two equal areas touching each other and differentiated as were the points, then further areas may be implied as were the further points. And the same is true of volumes. The homogeneity of space throughout can then be deduced, if we assume at the start only two bits of space which are homo- geneous. But we do not at present know how to account for the fact that things have position at all; nor, granting position, can we deduce therefrom lines, or areas, or volume, or even higher dimensions, if there are any. That is a prob- lem for the future and of course there is a plenty of such problems. Their presence simply shows us that our map cannot yet be completely filled in; but we have made no claim to do this. We claim only to have exhibited a prin- ciple which will remove the vitiating, self-devouring habits of previous philosophy and will to some degree show us how things can be accounted for. There may well be other fundamental principles besides our own; but at any rate it should, by virtue of the services it performs, take its stand somewhere near the head of the universe. We hope to show in later studies how the creative prin- ciple helps to account for some of the other categories and their peculiar traits. For we strongly suspect that it does so ; though naturally we can ask no one to accept our opinion until evidence shall have been produced. The problem is at the outset an empirical one. We must learn by inductive inquiry and analysis the meaning of each category; for each category's definition is to be gathered only from the specific properties of the facts to which that category ap- plies. We must then ask whether this definition can be accounted for upon the basis of some simple dyad ; whether, indeed, the definitions of the many categories can be ac- 512 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY counted for, by the aid of our principle, from one another, or from some ultimate simple dyad. The reason why we can hardly help believing in the efficacy of our principle to accomplish this task is that it furnishes so clear a paradigm of productiveness, of the generation of one entity out of another (dual) entity. To solve that problem of generation is, in embryo, to solve the world-problem; for the whole world-problem is to show the why of things, their origin or genesis. If the universe is an intelligible affair and the axiom of internal relations is but the registration of our indomitable faith that it is so then somehow the main categories of it must be capable of deduction ; and the type of all fertile deduction seems to be before us in our second principle. It is true that we have not shown this to be the only type; there may be others. Yet a little reflection sug- gests that that is probably the case. For it was just by a perverse interpretation, a dismemberment, of this simple dyad, that philosophy emasculated itself; by refusing to admit both terms of the duality and clinging to one and excluding the other, or again, admitting both together and denying each in itself never, in short, admitting on equal footing both part and whole, both sameness and difference, in that lawful wedlock which alone can generate legitimate offspring. If then the recognition of this dyad is the one thing needful for the salvation of philosophic thought, it looks as if it were the one thing which knits together the parts of reality; for what is thought but the humble fol- lower of reality ? But this is at present only a high prob- ability, not a proved result. At any rate, the philosophic child has taken his first step onward ; and though he will certainly fall often and as often mark tune quite after the custom of his caste, it seems to be only a matter of patience, till he walks about and surveys, THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 513 with trigonometric exactitude, the whole universe. And he may rejoice in freedom from the old shackles. He will no longer have to square his findings with epistemological criti- cism; he need not fear that he is " hypostasizing " any con- cepts, or believing in abstractions; he need not pause to refute the stock solution of his problem by realism, or ideal- ism, or pluralism, or nominalism, or pragmatism, or any other factional ism; for all those views, considered as possible foes, are equally true, irrelevant, and infertile. He need ask only whether his results depend upon correct observation and inference, and whether they are able to explain, i. e., logically to generate, the facts they are meant to illuminate. We turn finally to the practical issues. Obviously their solution is not, like that of the theoretical, one which can be assured on paper. We might make certain proposals, or utter injunctions, but even were this done with the greatest wisdom and impressiveness, there could be no guaranty of their realization. Reality solves its own problems in the very act of existing; but the practical solutions depend upon the free choice of human individuals. In fact, it looks as if we must go further, and say that the practical evils of man's life are inevitable. Man's difficulties in living arise from two sources; the one being a more or less wilful perversity and the other a certain restriction imposed on him by the environment. Wilful perversity, we say; but there are many degrees of this, shading down into simple inability. A man may re- main idle, though with leisure enough, from sheer laziness; he may be seduced from the human problems by a round of social pleasure (this holds perhaps of women more than of men); he may belong to too many organizations and be overridden with their administrative detail (a rather fa- vourite vice of our gregarious epoch); being of moderate 5 14 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY means, he may beget more children than he can afford to maintain, and be driven to make more money a not uncommon failing, whose cruelty is not excused by thought- lessness or tradition. Or, zealously studying the needs of mankind, he may allow himself to become so obsessed by one doctrine as to neglect the truth of the counter-doctrine; this is the prevailing fault, perhaps, of those who really wish to think and labour for the common good. Again, many an earnest soul, truly interested in the graver prob- lems, is so wearied by the day's toil that he cannot take them up with sufficient seriousness; enough to keep the wolf from the door from day to day. Putting off the time of reflection till he shall have established his family in secure comfort, he becomes at length so absorbed in the daily business that he cannot change. Or, once more, he may be the victim of ignorance; nobody has taught him the imperative duty of ameliorating the whole lot of man. Who is any one that he should blame another for such ineffectiveness ? Yet, though we know not where to draw the line, it seems certain that some men, having opportunity to study the practical issues, do it not, or else, studying them, they adopt one or another solution in so exclusive a fashion as to kill the spirit of free inquiry. For this we cannot but impute blame; and as long as such a fanatical attitude is indulged, so long will men fail to meet their life-problems. But the other factor remains potent in any case. Reality is no doubt, from the human point of view, capricious and unjust. She limits the re- sources on which we must draw if we are to live. The supply of material goods, as well as of some that are not material, is not adequate to the demand. The more land one man owns, the less is left for others ; the more money he possesses, the less another can possess; and so on. The very concep- tion of economic value is built upon the conception of THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 51$ limited supply. The problems of social readjustment, the issues of capital and labour, of private and state ownership, et al., grow out of this situation. But not these problems only. Time is available to man only in restricted quantities. If one devotes his best years to trifling, he has once for all lost the opportunity of being useful to society in any great measure. And the sober-minded also feel time's pinch. We want to be well informed: we would acquaint ourselves with all the scientific knowledge, the great works of art, the events of the day, the history of nations, et sic ultra; but the time fails. And in many other ways the environment holds us down to mediocrity, even to poverty, spiritual and material. It looks impossible, even with the best will in the world, to carry out in the practical sphere any such scheme of reconciliation as we have expounded in the theoretical. As regards the free choices of men and women, they can doubtless never be discounted beforehand. So long as the poor carelessly beget too many children, or insist upon buy- ing as good meat as their wealthier fellows buy; so long as the idle rich set up an exclusive " society " which is con- cerned only with itself so long will the best projects fail. Nevertheless the region within which such choice is exer- cised, may be much restricted. Education, increased sense of social responsibility, legislation, even on occasion force, may help in this direction. Indeed, they are steadily doing so. It is impossible to doubt that the altruistic spirit is spreading. But unless that spirit is aided by intelligent manipulation of human resources, it may do as much harm as good. What we need is some plan or method which will minimize the incompatibility of your possessing sufficient means of life and my possessing them. The niggardliness of the material world, of time, of human powers, must some- how be reduced; the contradiction, hitherto deemed so 516 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY obvious, between your wealth and mine, your success and mine, must be exorcized. Now in the attainment of these results two requirements must be kept in mind ; the one is concerned with details and the other with the general object. The former is a matter for expert knowledge in special fields; the latter can be fulfilled, we believe, only by philosophy. Each has tended to despise the other, and disaster has resulted, and will ever result, while that is the case. No philosopher, without expert knowledge of economics, social psychology, hygiene, machinery, etc., can hope to launch upon the world a plan of social organization with any hope of success. Such Utopias have been proposed often, and with different degrees of practicability; according as the originator was well or ill acquainted with the actualities of human nature and the material environment. They have all more or less failed, just because of the impossibility of the needed expert knowl- edge. On the other hand, experts in economics, sociology, hygiene, or social legislation, have generally not had a sufficiently broad philosophic point of view. The chief difference, perhaps, between the older Utopias and the modern socialistic schemes, resides in this : the former were too exclusively philosophical, and the latter are too exclu- sively utilitarian, or materialistic, or somehow one-sided. Now in this situation, the philosopher's part is to point out the ideals which must be continually kept in mind, to which the experts must adapt their schemes. If the latter do not do this, they will but renew the old battles between individ- ual and society, authority and freedom. It is reserved for the philosopher to indicate, along general lines, the com- bination of the two counter-ideals which can alone found a workable solution. More than this he cannot do; there is always a distinction between the general law and the specific THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 517 application. The dualism which holds everywhere else holds here also. If it were not so, there would be no other knowl- edge than philosophical knowledge; but we saw at the very beginning that philosophy is distinct from the special fields of science, art, religion, and practice, and that each is needed for the best kind of living. At the same time, the philo- sophic contribution to the practical solutions must occupy a leading position: the relation between philosopher and specialist is an asymmetrical one, like that between the law and the jurist who interprets it to fit the particular occasion. The ideal is to combine the two antagonist principles so that each fosters the other. Now the institution which so unites the individualistic and the socialistic factors is divi- sion of labour. The spirit of this institution is organic and systematic; it gives a certain scope to individual preference and ability, at the same time making them conduce to the collective interest. But it is of the very essence of such a system that it is not symmetrical. Individuals never will be equal in native endowment; some will be clearer-headed and more devoted to the common good than others. Initia- tive, discovery, and invention will therefore come from individual enterprise; and the centering of responsibility and authority in one, or a few individuals, is a corollary of this. Every government, every organization for any prac- tical end, presumably, must therefore be a kind of aristoc- racy. The more intelligent and public-spirited are the ones who should govern a nation; not the great mass of the people. That mass is too unwieldy, too slow-moving, too inexpert, to judge quickly and wisely upon difficult ques- tions. The principle of division of labour requires that the labour of governing should be placed in the hands of a small minority. How then are we to select for our rulers such 51 8 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY well-endowed individuals, whose very individuality consists in this devotion and this ability to exercise it intelligently ? As Plato long ago saw, this is the first great problem of politics. But he himself did not answer it; for however admirable was the system of training which he advocated as the means of selecting these guardians, he had to pre- suppose some already existing power which could and would carry out that training. We, with our government by popu- lar vote, have no very sound criterion of selection. For see: with us there must always be two parties, since there will always be, in some form or other, the same dualism of purposes that pervades all the needs of men. It may take the shape of the business interests versus the "labouring" classes, tariff versus free trade, national honour versus pacifism, manhood suffrage versus the democratic project of universal suffrage or any other of those issues with which we are today wrestling but always we may expect to have two rival claims to adjust and consequently a con- solidation into two principal parties. And while with a smaller group of experts such differences of opinion may be settled by free discussion, that is hardly feasible with the great mass of the people. The logical result will always be, to a greater or less extent, party organization, and the well- known evils thereof. Accordingly, even were the bulk of the people the best judges of the fitness of their president and legislators, the institution of the popular vote would in a measure defeat itself . But in any case they are not; it is really quite ridiculous to suppose that the vote of a habitual drunkard should count as much as that of a professor of political science. Wrong it doubtless would be to deprive any of the ruled of a voice in the choosing of the ruler; every mite has its needs, and its point of view should be represented. But it is THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 519 equally wrong, to reduce all voices to the same level. We have rightly cast out the old unintelligent form of aristoc- racy; we have largely abolished its injustices, cruelties, class privileges, etc. But the democracy toward which we are tending has its own injustices; the tyranny of majorities, the warping of genius to the popular taste, the premium put upon social cowardice, the lack of reverence for the high as against the low. We need some new sort of aristocracy. Of course, " equality of opportunity " is a perfectly just ideal; and we do not advocate such an aristocracy as would prevent its realization. An aristocracy of altruists is the very best means of securing it. The old objection at once arises, that it is not safe to give absolute power to one or to a few; they will exploit the people. The real way to meet this objection is to make it safe. In the old days of caste, it could not be done ; but today the spirit of universal brother- hood has grown far beyond what it was; so far has it grown that it begins to be credible that rulers may not be selfish beings. At any rate, the best way to secure such an aristoc- racy as we here speak of is to develop, slowly though it be, and more especially in the young and impressionable, the simple virtues of kindness, tolerance, and breadth of interest. It is a matter of gradual education; but there is no short and easy road. No revolutions are needed, no upheavals of the existing fabric of government from the bottom. It is in the spirit, not in the letter, that the victories are to be won which ensure intelligence and devotion in our leaders. In short, there is only one way of bringing into existence a class of men fit to be the ruling class, and that is by the insistence, in season and out of season, upon the altruistic virtues. Then, when intelligence and expert knowledge are joined to these virtues, there is nothing to fear from a ruling class. And only in a society where there is a class like this, open to 520 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY all who show themselves fit, are the social and individual motives organically joined. We do no more at present than give these general indica- tions; hoping later to give a more specific account. Our wish is now but to show that our dualistic scheme of the universe has definite consequences for human action; con- sequences which we believe would tend to abolish that perennial strife which man wages with himself and which a niggardly Nature had made so easy. In spite of its policy of non-resistance, of meek acceptance of all views, our position has its propagandist side, and demands a militant attitude. It is indeed positive, more positive, we think, than any other, inasmuch as it is the only one which possesses fer- tility. Its rubric is that the free union of two produces a third; its ideal of the State is the union of individualist and social motives in which each, so to speak, fertilizes the other; the good citizen's individuality being developed by his citizenship, and conversely. Even if the time is not yet ripe, to establish the new aristocracy here spoken of, our system makes a difference to our present political acts. For instance, at every presidential election, it is probably the case that one party represents a more extreme view than the other; that the former stands for measures which would over-emphasize the individualistic motives, or the socialistic. At the present tune we believe that the Democratic party has taken such a one-sided position. It is, we think, tending to extol the socialistic motives to the exclusion of the individualistic; accordingly, we should not think it right to support it. Some decades ago, the boot was on the other leg; the Re- publican party with its high tariff and other measures favouring " capital " had emphasized individualistic mo- tives too much, and on the whole therefore seemed too one- THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 521 sided. Always we should try to restore the balance, to avert the dangers of political monism. Sometimes it might hap- pen, however, that a certain extreme measure should be adopted in order that its evils be thoroughly appreciated. One cannot tell beforehand how the rule is going to apply; always empirical knowledge is required to fit the rule to the occasion. But one cannot do this i. e., one cannot really vote intelligently unless he knows the rule. And he must keep before him, we believe, as the ideal rule which he seeks to approximate, the organic fusion of the two counter- motives which make up human society; and by precept and example hasten the time when expert knowledge may com- bine with exceptional endowment and public spirit to form a responsible type of magistrate. So much for a vague suggestion of the way of meeting one social problem. Let us make now some analogous applica- tions in the sphere of individual morality. Hitherto it has been too common to assume here an exclusive attitude; if I do the right thing, it matters little to me what you do. At any rate, it matters little to the morality of my act what you do. Since generosity is a virtue, shall I be generous when my being so makes you less considerate or just ? Suppose you ask me to lend you a sum which I could well afford to give you, I knowing that you are shiftless and ought to feel the pinch of want a little to learn the lesson of thrift. Many a kind-hearted person has been admired for an impulsive generosity which increased the sum-total of immorality. Should a criminal be pardoned because " the quality of mercy . . . blesseth him that gives and him that takes " ? Ought he not, in justice to society, and in obedience to that motive of all law, the prevention of crime, to pay the de- creed penalty ? These are not idle issues today; we see every few days cases like this where the admiration of that 522 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY chiefest of modern virtues, sympathy, is conceived in such exclusion as to preclude other virtues no less necessary to society. This solution we offer is of course nothing new, yet we believe it is much needed. Our exaggeration today of that social virtue, kindness, is working dead against the individual virtue of prudence. The real kindness is that which endeavours to identify the benefit of the recipient with that of society. Reform the criminal, but let him suffer punishment too; refuse your careless friend, but show him why you do so. Devotion to a person who is doing wrong may be consistent with a certain severity of treatment as the parent's love of a child is consistent with punishment. Fortunately the progress of mankind has made the above remarks rather trite; but they are the precise application of our principle, and they need emphasis. A mode of conduct which creates further good conduct, even as the cause creates an effect like itself that is the only true, because the only productive morality. An act of kindness which tends to develop the recipient's character so that he may perform similar acts such is the only desir- able kindness. This, again, is not merely the organic theory of society; for that theory excludes the possibility of merely individual morality. But there is a merely individual morality too. A man owes certain things to himself; if it were not so, others could not owe him anything. He owes to himself prudence, and reflection, and a certain amount of self -consciousness; the cultivation, so far as it interferes with no one else's benefits, of a sound body and mind merely because it is an admirable thing in itself. And one mark of this is the unaffected sensual pleasure which accom- panies it. Also because it gives pleasure to others, no doubt; but not for that reason alone. Selfishness itself is bad only when it excludes altruism; and it does not always do so. THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 523 Men should be free to cultivate themselves for their own sakes as well as to make themselves better citizens, friends, fathers, brothers, etc. ; where to be any of the latter is to do acts that are both good in themselves and tend to be re- peated by others. It is a mistake to say, as one often hears it said, that selfishness is the root of all evil. An exclusive devotion to any one person at the expense of another is equally wicked. A mother's blind devotion to an exacting child, or a woman's to her faithless lover, has little admir- able about it; both are socially pernicious. The minute this tendency to repetition is frustrated, that minute we have moral evil; the act, beautiful in itself, becomes ugly in relation to others, and the blemish destroys its integrity. Also when an act, beautiful in its effect upon others, tends to dwarf one's own character, so that one will not be likely to repeat it, that act loses moral worth. As the only proper metaphysical principles are fertile and productive ones, so the only proper ethical maxims are those which promote conduct which promotes further conduct, i. e., those which increase the sum- total of life; a generative series which produces itself indefinitely, like the living organism. Were we to write a book of ethics, we should begin by saying that a sound ethics must be based upon meta- physics; for we shall never know how to adjust ourselves to our great environment until we know the nature of that environment. Our treatise has grown terribly lengthy: we must leave to the reader (if we dare assume such a being) the application of the mam principle to the other issues. Free union and fertility these are the watchwords which must be the guide of man as he journeys through a universe which is made up, from beginning to end, of dyads. 524 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY We may characterize our doctrine summarily as follows: (1) It maps reality as a collection of dyads, or two-in-one monads: if a physical comparison is allowed, of two-atom molecules; if a biological one, of families, each of which is based upon the contrast of sex. It does not at present offer any further chart; it is here limited to the study of the microcosm rather than the macrocosm. This is, of course, a defect, and a partial failure to fulfil the intention with which we set out. We here say nothing of the objects of religion, the categories of science. May we be able to do so upon a future occasion! Nevertheless, we believe that the slight contribution which alone we could exhibit is a gen- uine answer as far as it goes, in that it reveals the type of explanation and is also of utility in the long run. (2) It is absolute positivism, because it ascribes no nega- tions to reality; negations, that is, in any sense but other- ness. Exclusion and denial are totally ruled out, except in application to themselves. If a statement is true, the ex- clusion of that statement from every universe of discourse is excluded. This is the " law of contradiction "; don't deny your statements. It is only a recasting of our main point; exclusion is excluded from reality. We have used the phrase " absolute positivism " also to contrast our view with that of Auguste Comte ; the latter was one of the most negative systems which it has entered the mind of man to devise. It excluded nearly everything in which man is most deeply interested: religion and the extra-physical generally; whereas our own works in just the opposite direction. (3) Or one might follow out the suggestion of the last paragraph about negation and style the treatise The Mean- ing of Negation. For the pivot on which we turned from the realm of eternal strife to what we deemed the fertile solution was, the analysis of negation into otherness rather than THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 525 removal of what is negated. Our whole system rests upon the proper interpretation of the negative; the most shadowy of all concepts, perhaps, and the least likely to attract atten- tion; and therefore just the one where the great root-error of human thought would choose to lurk. (4) Lastly, we are driven to characterize the universe as an asymmetrical affair. Much has been heard, in recent philosophy, of symmetrical and asymmetrical relations; we have also described certain systems as symmetrical ones, others as asymmetrical. This distinction we believe to be profoundly important, particularly for practical applica- tions of our own view. The ultimate dyad (sameness-in- difference) is not wholly a symmetrical affair; or at least, while in one aspect symmetrical, in another it is asymmet- rical ; and the latter though not more real than the former yet plays a larger part. If we call the two elements of the dyad A and B, then A, the first one, is the more significant element. For B is in a sense dependent upon A; it is de- fined wholly by reference to A . B is defined by the words "the same as A " and "yet different from A." A deserves the name of the first and B of the second member of the couple; though both are equally necessary, and though B cannot be reduced wholly to terms of A , yet A appears the more fundamental. In fact, if we did not add to our account this last little touch, the distinction between A and B would evaporate. They would both be logically quite relative; each one displaying no nameable quality which the other had not. But if there is something in A which B has not viz., a certain fundamentality, then an ultimate difference has been named between them. They are no longer inter- changeable because they are not on the same level. And this difference of level, i. e., of importance or significance, pervades all the pairs of categories which align themselves 526 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY with the dualistic scheme. As A is more fundamental than B, so the sameness-relation between them, rather than their diversity, is the carrier of the productiveness by which C was generated. It was the sameness between A and B, which alone enabled us to infer from B to a new entity C. To be sure, the difference between A and B was necessary also, but it gave of itself no movement onward, no transi- tion, no motion, so to speak, such as resulted in the third entity. And likewise of the pair " universal-individual." The category of individual is more fundamental than that of universal, for by the former (by two individuals related) was the latter defined. So it is with the pair " cause-effect " : the cause is logically and temporarily prior to the effect, but yet the effect is necessary. But here again we must content ourselves for the present with a curtailed exposition; we pass at once to a certain application of fundamental importance which we wish to make. It is in general true that the principle of externality is prior in reality to that of internality. This may be seen in many ways. We found in Chapter XII that it is through the principle of internality that opposition was rendered possible in the philosophical field; although no doubt the other principle must cooperate, in order that opposition may become actual. In the battle-ground of the subjective the situation is the reverse of what it is in the kingdom of reality. What is real is individual such has been long a favourite principle of philosophers, from Aristotle to Hegel. The rela- tions between real things, though indeed no less real, are secondary to the things. We express this in the category of the adjective. The adjective is in a clearly recognizable sense subordinate to the substantive, the quality to the sub- stance, the relation to the term. Reality needs both cate- gories, as does our understanding; but it rests in the one, THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE 527 and moves by the other in order to attain that one. Now in the realm of social problems, the corollary is fairly ob- vious. The prior requirement of the successful solution of those problems is the establishment of a strong and moral individuality. The reformation of society must be built upon that of individuals. We do not say that latter would suffice; it certainly would not. The social sense is some- thing over and above the individualistic motive; however they may be identified in division of labour or other devices, the one can never be wholly submerged in the other. But you cannot, by legislation, by material rewards, or by any other ingenuities, build up a well-founded state while the individuals have not firmly fixed good characters. A man cannot be a great publicist until his private character is incorruptible; until he can control his anger, his jealousies, his rivalries, his exclusiveness of many sorts. It is possible, no doubt, for him to do these latter things while not labour- ing very much in the service of the State; but even so, his life is a relatively meagre one, for it then denies, to a large extent, the social impulses. But the social depends on the individual more than the individual upon the social. This is a truth which needs emphasis and reemphasis in these days when the individual is in danger of drowning in the social bath. But social reform not preceded by individual self -discipline is reform resting upon no foundation. For this reason politics is not quite so important as religion and morality; these being concerned primarily with individuals. " Seek ye first the kindgom of God and His righteousness," said Jesus; and we of today have almost forgotten these words. This does not in the least imply that we should neglect the interests of our neighbours and of the State; any more than the love of one's friends implies a hatred of the rest of the world. On the contrary, such a view, if 528 PRODUCTIVE DUALITY correct, makes us the more likely to adjust ourselves to the social milieu. And so religion and morality, if properly understood, should make one a better citizen. But that does not mean that they are swallowed up in politics or statecraft, of however exalted a sort. Every practical problem should, in our belief, be met thus: of the two positions in conflict, ascertain by empirical analysis which one represents the principle of externality, and which that of internality; seek a solution which will identify the interest of each factor, yet so as to leave room for the pursuit, on occasion, of each one by itself; and remember that in this identification of their interests that one of the contestants which stands for the principle of externality should claim priority in emphasis or in time. INDEX INDEX Absolute Idealism or Absolutism, 107-108, 31 7 ff., 423. Abstractions, 255 ff., 341. Act and potency, 371. Actus purus, 367. Adjective, 526. Aesthetic idealism, 115, 145 ff. Aesthetic synthesis, 407 ff. Affective idealism, 145 ff. Agreement in philosophy, 25 ff. Algebra, 510. Als Ob, Philosophic des, 165. Analysis, 187-188, 238, 287 ff. Antinomies, 46, 181 ff., 300 ff., 428 ff., 477 ff- Aristocracy, 519 ff. Aristotle, 229, 253, 360-361, 372. Arithmetic, 510. Art, 19, no, 135-136, 150 ff., 447- 448. Aspects, 464 ff. Asymmetry, 9, 108, 371, 517, 525- 528. Authority, 384 ff. Avenarius, 92 ff. Axioms, 289, 386. Baldwin, 145 ff. Balmes, 362. Behaviour, 206 ff . Being, 375, 508. Belly and Members, Fable of, 21. Bergson, 287 ff. Berkeley, 42, 44, 46, 61, 62. Biology, 176, 206 ff. Bosanquet, 225, 328, 332 ff., 455. Bradley, 225, 264, 331, 436, 455. Categories, 107, 112, 113, 117 ff., 414, Catholicism, 360 ff., 439-440. Causation, 123, 135, 365 ff., 374, 400, 496, 504 ff. Centered responsibility, 517. Chance, 239 ff., 481 ff. Change, 236ff., 300 ff., 477~479- Classicism, 447. Common sense, 348 ff . Completed infinite, 428 ff., 462-463, 477-480. Comte, 316, 524. Consciousness, 180 ff. Content of mind, 45. Contingent, 377~378. Contradiction, 342, 428 ff. Cf. An- tinomies. Counterpart, 413. Creation, 370, 401. 493 ff. Critical point, 66, 79, 90, too, 139, 195, 201, 218-219, 237, 239, 242, 282, 304-305, 341, 405, 413- Deadlock, 85 ff. Deduction, 107, 120 ff., 1275., 238, 495 ff- Definition, 70-71, 101-102. Democracy, 159, 248, 284, 441 ff., Descartes 50-51, 289. 531 532 INDEX Destruction, 461. Determinism, 239 ff., 481 ff. Dewey, 32, 166, 209-210, 214, 249, 267 ff. Dialectic, 46, 300 ff., 313 ff., 454 ff. Difference, 455 ff. Disagreement, 25 ff. Disease, philosophical, 35-36, 317, 344, 413 ff- Division of labour, 517. Dogma, 351,3845. Dualism, 87, 195, 475 ff., 493 ff. Dyad, 508. Dynamic view, 206 ff. Eleatic, 506. Emotion, 29. Empiricism, 20-21, 511. Endless tilt, 86 ff., 158, 217, 221, 243, 342- Equal opportunity, 519. Erdmann, B., 156. Error, 194 ff., 202-203, 214 ff., 272- 273- Eternal past time, 479. Eternal truths, 479. Ethics, 523. Exemplars, 380. Expectation, 216-217. Experimental method, 283-286. External world, 67 ff., 80, 159-160, 380-383. Externality or External relations, 53 ff., 228 ff., 330-331, 415 ff- Faculties, 262-263. Faith, 329, 384 ff. Fertility, 496 ff. Forces, 261. Form, 380. Freedom, 238, 358, 376-377, 475. 481 ff. Function, 188-189, 206 ff. Fusion of externality and internality, 493 ff- Genesis, 496 ff. Genetic method, 145 ff. God, 302-303, 365 ff. Good, 375. Government, 27, 166-167, 169-170, 260-261, 440 ff., 517 ff. Great objectivism, 172 ff. Great subjectivism, 105 ff. Harmony, 135, 407. Hegel, 317 ff., 508-509. Herbart, 54, 225, 418. Holt, 70, 195 ff. Homogeneity of space, 511. Hume, 499. Idea, as behaviour, 206 ff. Idea, Platonic, 228, 378-379. Idealism, 43, 105 ff. Identity, 53-56, 86 ff., 455 ff. Imagination, 148. Impressionism, 447. Indefinables, 228 ff., 419. Independence, 81-83, 173 ff., 224 ff. Individualism, 440 ff., 517 ff. Individuality, 2345., 252-253. Induction, 499. Industry, 137. Infinite, 430, 510. Infinite regress, 428 ff. Infinitesimal, 480-481, 507. Institutions, 260. Intellectualism, 222 ff. Interaction, 98. Interdependence, 325 ff., 474-475. Internality or Internal relations, 52-57, 306, 330, 415 ff. Introjection, 96. Introspection, 183-187. INDEX 533 Intuition, 287 ff. Isolation of problems, 424-426. James, 33, 40, 95, 98-99, 213-214, Jesus, 5, 388, 393, 394, 398, 402, 527. Judgment, 53, 155-156, 436. Kant, 45-49, i7 ff-, *93, 355-359, 383, 429 ff. Knowledge, 7 ff . Law, 118 ff., 138, 182 ff., 239 ff., 259- 260, 499, 505. Leibnitz, 407-410, 505. Life, 509. Marbe, 155-156. Materialism, 218-220. Mathematics, 227. Memory, 190, 201, 212, 386-387. Metaphysics, 20, 523. Mind, defined, 172 ff. Miracles, 395. Monads, 508. Monism, 58, 324, 508. Montague, 189 ff . Moore, A. W., 210-211, 269 ff., 281. Moore, G. E., 179, 205. Morality, 27-28, 138, 356, 448, 522- 523- Motion, 301. Miinsterberg, 127 ff. Music, 447-448. Mystery of Being, 299-300, 312-313. Mysticism, 287 ff . Natorp, Nature, 159-161. Needs of men, 7 ff . Negation, 471, 524-525- Negative judgment, 473. Nelson, 155. Newton's first law of motion, 499. Nominalism, 51, 248. Nothing, 299, 312, 508. Novelty, 495 ff . Null-class, 312. Number, 510. Objectivism, 67 ff . One, 302-303, 375-376. Opposition, 414 ff., 472. Optimism, 3. Otherness, 472. Over-will, i28ff. Panaceas, 5. Pancalism, 115, i46ff. Pantheism, 365-367. Parallelism, 98. Past time, 63-64. Personality, 109, 134. Philosophy, 12 ff., 231!., i66ff., 516- 5i7. Plato, 222 ff., 360, 518. Plotinus, 302-303. Pluralism, 418-420. Political parties, 440, 520. Positivism, 316, 524. Possible alternatives, 484-490. Post-impressionism, 447. Postulate, 328, 356-357. Potency or Potentiality, 77 ff ., 189 ff. Practical or Practice, 7ff., 166-170, 277-279, 346 ff., 437 ff-, 5i3 ff- Pragmatism, 177, 206 ff., 2670*. Presentative theory, 86 ff., 174. Primary qualities, 61. Probability, 485 ff . Problem, the supreme, 4 ff . Progress, 3, 34. Psychical, denned, 190 ff . Psychologismus, 155. Psychology, 113. 534 INDEX Pure experience, 92 ff. Purpose, 207. Radical empiricism, 243 ff. Rationalism, 115, 222. Rationalistic synthesis, 317 ff. Realism, 67, 172, 380-383. Reason vs. dogma, 398 ff. Reid, 354, 392. Relation, see Externality and Inter- nality. Relativism, 505. Religion, 5, 28, iio-m, 138, 359 ff., 449. Representative theory of knowledge, 86, 198-199. Revelation, 384 ff. Rickert, 115. Romanticism, 447. Royce, 108, 158, 209, 225, 253-254, 335-336, 339- Russell, B., 179, 215, 229, 235. Sameness, 331-332, 455 ff- Santayana, 25. Schelling, 145. Schiller, 214. Schopenhauer, 42, 183, 410-411. Schroeder, 312. Science, 5,6, 19, 110,176-177,424-426. Secondary qualities, 59-61, 196, 381. Selfishness, 522-523. Self-repeater, 495 ff. Series, 120-121. Sex, 506. Similarity, 187. Singer, 211. Skepticism, 427 ff. Social or Society, 109, 158 ff., 273, 440 ff., 513 ff. Socipsism, 158. Solipsism, 72-76. Space, 123, 126, 130, 510-511. Spiritualism, 220, 291. St. Thomas Aquinas, 360 ff . Static, 212, 224 ff. Stimuli, 206. Subjectivism, 38 ff. Substance, iSoff., 206, 526. Symmetry, 108. Synthesis, 317!?. Temperament, 31-32, 39-40. Term and relation, 526-527. Theism, 365-367. Theology, 370. Theory, 7 ff., 270-282. Thing and qualities, 434~435, 526. Thing-in-itself, 87, 165, 355. Thomism, 360 ff. Thought, 209, 453-454- Time, 123, 131, 294 ff., 477 ff-, 5 I 5- Titchener, 156. Transcendental deduction, 1 1 7 ff . Transcendentalism, fault of, 139 ff., 249. Truth, 214-215, 272-273, 375. Types, 36, 38-39. Uniformity of Nature, 499. Unitarianism, 400, 402-403, 439. Universal mind, see Great subjec- tivism. Universals, 117 ff., 236, 250 ff., 510. Vaihinger, 165. Values, 127 ff., 146 ff. Voluntarism, 1275. Walker, 362, 364. Ward, 96-97, 372. Wells, 26. Why vs. How, 512. Will, 126 ff., 513. Will-to-believe, 277-278. Zeno, 46, 300 ff., 428 ff. p \ \ 4 PRINTED AT THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE, UASS., U. S. A. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY This book is DUE on the last date stamped below t 6 1950 OCT 19 195! hi 14 '58 \y$ JUN 3 >1959 REC'D Ml H 1959 Form L-9-20m-8,'37 RcC'D MLD DEC 5 1961 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGfiLffi B791 S54s Sheldon UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY A A 000009903 6 B791 S54s SUPPLIED BY