A system of metaphysics

Front matter

Copyright N^

copiTRiGifr DEPOsrr.

A SYSTEM OF METAPHYSICS

Preface

Some of the material in Chapters I, II, and V of this volume has already appeared in the Psychological Review; and Chapters XV, XVI, and XVII have been reprinted without very much change. They first appeared as articles in the same journal. In Chapter XXXIII I have made some use of two articles published in the Popular Science Monthly. The chapters on Space and Time are reprinted from the Philosophical Review with little change except that, in Chapter XI, some new matter has been added. To the editors of the journals mentioned. Professor Cattell, Professor Baldwin, and Professor Creighton, my thanks are due for their courtesy in permitting me to reprint as I have done.

Thus, about one-fourth of the present volume has already seen the light. It is right that I should say that nothing that has already appeared has been taken up into the book as an afterthought. From the beginning the work has been a unit ; it has been for a number of years on my hands, and the publication of the papers above mentioned was due largely to a curiosity to see how the doctrines advocated would impress others. It was, perhaps, hardly fair to present them deprived of their setting, and this injustice, if injustice it be, is remedied now.

At the end of the book I have placed a note on the Physical

World Order, by my former pupil. Professor Edgar A. Singer,

Jr., of the University of Pennsylvania. It has seemed to me of

especial interest, as coming from one trained in metaphysical

analysis and familiar with the principles and methods of the

sciences.

GEORGE STUART FULLERTON.

Columbia University, New York, July, 1904.

vii

CONTENTS PART I

PAGE

I. The Mind and the World in Common Thought and

IN Science 1

III. How Things are Given in Consciousness ... 33

IV. The Elements in Consciousness 56

V. The Self or Knower 71

Part II

VI. What we Mean by the External World ... 95

VII. Sensations and "Things" 115

VIII. The Distinction between Appearance and Reality . 132 IX. Significance of the Distinction between Appearance

AND Reality 146

X. The Kantian Doctrine of Space 162

XI. Difficulties connected with the Kantian Doctrine

of Space 172

XII. The Berkeleian Doctrine of Space 184

XIIL Of Time 194

XIV. The Real World in Space and Time .... 210

XV. The World as Mechanism 226

Part III

XVI. The Insufficiency of Materialism 245

XVII. The Atomic Self 262

XVIII. The Automaton Theory: its Genesis .... 284

X

Contents

XIX. The Automaton Theory: Parallelism

PAOE

. 298

Part IV

XXVII. The Existence of Other Minds 433

XXV'III. The Distribution of Minds 458

XXIX. The Unity of Consciousness 473

XXX. Subconscious Mind 488

XXXI. Mental Phenomena and the Causal Nexus . . . 508

XXXII. Mechanism and Teleology 527

XXXIII. Fatalism, "Free-will," and Determinism . . . 550

XXXIV. Of God 570

XXXV. Of God (continued) 598

Note. — The Physical World Order 609

A SYSTEM OF METAPHYSICS

Chapter I The Mind And The World In Common Thought And

IN SCIENCE

It is impossible for the mature mind to turn back to the experiences of infancy, and directly to recall, by an exercise of memory, the beginnings of its conscious life. When we have attained to an age at which reflection is possible, and at which the impulse to reflect makes itself felt, the dawn of consciousness has passed into oblivion ; and he who is curious to inquire how the world looked to him, when he first rolled an unmeaning eye at it, must be content with information gained in roundabout ways. As far back as we can remember, the world of our experiences has not been so very different from the world in which we now habitually live.

It was formerly, it is true, a more indefinite and a more incoherent world, less marked by clear distinctions and less orderly, more full of acutely delightful and acutely distressing surprises, more exciting and more mysterious. Memory gives us a series of pictures imperfectly representing the successive stages by which the more sober and orderly world of our later experience came into being. But as we journey into the past the pictures become more and more indefinite and incomplete, and the series comes to an end before their general outline has passed over into a something more rudimentary and of a quite different nature. The world which we can recall is always a world of things^ among which we find one peculiar and interesting thing not to be placed precisely on a par with the rest, the self, which tastes, touches, and possesses things — the sun around which other things are made to revolve.

That this series of experiences has been preceded by other experiences in which such distinctions do not exist, and that they are

B 1 the result of a development from an experience of the workl — if one may call it such — in which there are as yet no objects with definite relations to each other, may be satisfactorily established partly by reflection upon the series of experiences which we can recall, with the developments to be there observed, and partly by observation and interpretation of the actions of human bodies which reveal minds just passing through the earlier stages of their existence. Thus, there is good reason to believe that the distinction between the self and the not-self, a distinction which thrusts itself upon the attention of the developed mind with such insistence that we are inclined to read it into the experience of every mind, however rudimentary — there is good reason to believe that this distinction, like a multitude of others which make their appearance in later life, was not present at the dawn of consciousness at all.

But, however it may be with the infant mind, the mature man always finds himself in a real world of real things, and he distinguishes between himself, as knowing and acting upon things, and the things over against which he stands as a something apart and different. As has been said, he can remember no time at which he did not make some such distinction. Unless he be accustomed to reflective thought, it sounds to him highly absurd to speak of a conscious experience in which such distinctions do not obtain. Can there be, he asks, a pain that is felt by no one ? Can there be knowledge, or even anything faintly resembling knowledge, unless there be something known and some one who knows that something ?

His experience at every moment seems to fortify him in this position. He looks at the pen which he holds in his hand, feels it, is sure that he knows it, and that it is he that knows it. The pen seems capable of existing by itself, but surely it cannot know itself. It appears too immediately evident to call for proof that every act of knowledge requires the two participants, the knower and the known. When he suffers, he is convinced that he feels the pain, and he knows that he and the pain are not identical. He regards it as quite impossible to doubt the reality of such experiences, which repeat themselves everywhere in his mental life, and he listens with some impatience to any argument which seems gratuitously to cast doubt upon their reality.

That men actually do have such experiences as those cited it •would be folly to deny, and something may be said for the plain man who turns a deaf ear to the metaphysician, charm he never so wisely. We do know objects, and in the act of knowing, if we think about the matter at all, we are conscious of distinguishing between the knower and the objects known. One can have no legitimate quarrel with this experience, in itself considered, nor is it reasonable to attempt to explain it away. The only reasonable thing to do is to try to analyze it, and to indicate clearly just what elements it contains; in other words, to show plainly what the experience really is. That one may have experiences without being able to analyze them successfully, and that most men make little attempt to analyze their experiences, is matter of common observation. An experience unanalyzed is only half possessed, and may easily give rise to serious misconceptions.

It needs but little reflection to convince the man who feels so sure of the existence of the knowing self, of the object known, and of the activity exercised by the former, that there is much in his experience that is vague and indefinite. Some distinctions he readily makes which are not made by the child. For example, where it never occurs to the child to define in any way what he means by the self, the unavoidable half-conscious reflection to which one is impelled by everyday life leads the man to, at least, a dim consciousness of what is to be included under this name and what is to be excluded.

The child does not distinguish between mind and body ; the self is a something vaguely distinguished from other objects, and in it the body stands out as the most prominent element, but there is no conscious distinction between the bodily self and the mental, with the consequent recognition of the latter as the true self which knows and acts upon things, and from which all other things, including the body, must be distinguished. To the man these distinctions have become more or less familiar. Vague and indefinite as his ideas are, he has arrived at somewhat the same way of looking at things as that adopted by the psychologist ; and, indeed, it is not unreasonable to regard his view of the mind and the external world as constituting the beginnings of a science of psychology. He believes that he has a mind, though he has no very clear notion of what it is. He believes that this mind is intimately related to his body, which is a thing outside of his mind. He believes that through this body it is related to an external real world, from which it receives influences and which it can influence in return. In this external world he thinks he finds other bodies more or less closely resembling liis own, and believes that there are connected with them other minds, as his mind is connected with his body. Further, lie believes that as he can express, by the actions of his body, ideas or emotions in his mind, so the minds connected with other bodies can give expression to their ideas or emotions, and such an expression is to him the revelation of the contents of these other minds. By comparing the mental states of other men with his own, he comes to form some general notions of the contents of other minds and of the ways in which they act, thus arriving at the beginnings of a mental science. He may have done all this without ever having heard of the science of psychology. No one who has not done all this has arrived at the knowledge of the world proper to a human being of mature years, however unscientific. Of course, some do the work better than others, and arrive at a more accurate knowledge of the external world and of their own and of other minds. But done in some way it must be, unless healthy mental development be arrested. It is the normal man's way of looking at the world in which he finds himself.

That such a knowledge of things as that above described is less indefinite and rudimentary than that of the child in its earlier years is sufficiently evident. Minds have come to be distinguished from material things, and knowledge has become in itself an object of attention. And yet, as I have said above, it requires but little reflection to convince the plain man at this stage of his progress toward clear thinking, that there is still much in his experience which is very indefinitely and unsatisfactorily known. He speaks of an external world, but would be at a loss to describe, if asked to do so, just what he means by that phrase. The mind he distinguishes from the body, and yet when he is brought to ask himself what a mind is, and hoiv he thinks of it, he realizes that his thought is vagueness incarnate. He probably makes a distinction between the mind and its ideas, but can give no intelligible account of the relation of the mind to these ideas; and although he feels sure that the mind knows things, he has not the faintest notion how it knows them.

From the inaccurate and indefinite knowledge of minds proper to the unscientific, one may take refuge in psychology ; and for a more satisfactory knowledge of the external world one may turn to the various physical sciences. In entering upon the study of ii these, the plain man does no great violence to the ways of thinking to which he has been accustomed. He does not change his whole point of view. He merely learns to do more accurately and carefully what he has done before, namely, to observe, compare, classify, and infer. He is still in a world of material things, in the one case, and in a world of minds which know things, in the other.

For instance, as a plain man, he has known plants and animals. He has observed them more or less narrowly, and he has some rather loosely generalized information regarding them. In becoming a botanist or a zoologist, he collects his information more planfiilly and arranges it more critically. But he goes through no intellectual revolution in becoming a botanist or a zoologist. As a plain man he knew something about plants and animals ; as a scientist he knows much more ; but his knowledge is of the same general nature. There, in the real world, are real objects which he is to examine and upon which he may experiment. The results obtained by the botanist and the zoologist are sufficiently intelligible to him, even if he be a very poor scientist himself. They are expressed in a language of which he has always known at least the rudiments.

And the physiologist assumes, just as he has been in the habit of doing, an external world, in which are a number of organized bodies, forming a part of a real system of things. He seeks to obtain a general knowledge of the peculiar phenomena presented by these bodies, and to fix their relations to the rest of the system. Every one knows something about physiology, even if he has never heard the word pronounced. One's ignorance may be profound, but even in that case it differs from that of the physiologist only in degree. The point of view is essentially the same. Lungs are lungs, and exist and function in a real external world among other real things, and the only problem is to discover how they conduct themselves there. Physiological truths do not lead one away from the ways of thinking to which one is accustomed in common life. Physiology has to do with external things in an external world ; it assumes that they can, under given conditions, be known ; and it troubles itself little about the meaning of externality or the nature of knowledge.

It may here be objected that what has above been said of such sciences as botany, zoology, and physiology, can hardly be said

6 llie Content of Consciousness

of certain other sciences, such as chemistry and physics; nor, indeed, of the sciences lirst mentioned, in so far as they may be based upon the hitter. The chemist and the physicist seem to take leave of things as we know them, and to pass into a new and different world of things imperceptible to the senses. To the plain man the real external world consists of extended things which may be seen and touched. These things appear to be continuous ; and, although they may be divided, the parts into which they may be divided are conceived as really parts, i.e. as fragments of the things, and as of the same general nature with them. But to the chemist and the physicist these realities have become appearances ; not the things themselves, but phenomena under which the real things, themselves imperceptible, make their presence evident to the observer. Is this the world of things in which the plain man finds himself, and in which he lives and moves and has his being ?

But a closer scrutiny reveals that, although the material world is to the man of science by no means the same thing that it is to the unscientific, yet it is a world of essentially the same nature, and it is not difficult for the plain man to understand the language in which it is explained to him. The atom, for example, is supposed to exist in space and to move about in space. It is not directly perceivable by sense, but it is conceived as though it and its motions were thus perceivable. Atoms are thought of as material things ; it is assumed that they can be indirectly known; and no such questions are raised as those of the nature or possibility of knowledge, the nature of space, and what is meant by existence or reality.

There is much in the experience of the unlearned man that can make comprehensible to him the views of the nature of matter held by the chemist. He has long known that things consist of parts which are, at least under some circumstances, invisible. Every time that he approaches an object from a distance, it is made manifest to him that parts become visible which were not visible a moment before. The animated speck which crawls away before his eyes, he infers to be an insect, and to be as complicated as insects usually are. That he cannot discern its parts does not prevent him from believing that such exist. Nor is his belief arbitrary and ungrounded ; it rests upon his experiences of things and the variations of things in his experience. Moreover, lie has had abundant opportunity to remark the fact that what appears to the sense continuous when observed from a distance, may be recognized as presenting many a gap when seen from a nearer point. It is far from inconceivable to him that bodies which seem continuous should really be composed of atoms separated by considerable intervals. Finally, the thought that different combinations of atoms should exhibit different properties does not strike him as surprising. He who has brewed a bowl of punch, or looked on at the manufacture of a pudding, has observed that things in combination do not have the same properties as the same things taken separately, and he can readily generalize this experience so as to make it cover cases which have not yet fallen within his experience, and even cases which can never enter his experience directly, but for the reality of which he has credible evidence of some sort. The plain man has already reasoned as do the chemist and the physicist, but he has not carried his reasonings so far, nor has he been as accurate and systematic. Had he not had such experiences as I have described, the doctrine of molecules and atoms would strike him as incomprehensible ; and, indeed, had the man of science not had such experiences, he would never have framed the hypothesis in question. There would have been lacking the basis demanded by scientific hypotheses, the foundation in experienced fact without which they can have no sort of significance.

The truth that the man of science occupies essentially the same standpoint as the plain man may be illustrated, not merely by a reference to those sciences which have to do directly with existing things, whether they be regarded as perceptible or as imperceptible to the senses ; it may be illustrated by a reference to the abstract sciences as well. Some mathematical knowledge is possessed by every civilized man who is not intellectually deficient. He can count things, add and subtract, multiply and divide. These same things are done by the mathematician, and, with the aid of an ingenious system of symbols, are done in a very complicated way. The plain man reflects but little upon the nature of numbers ; his aim is to use them. The relativity of number he has learned at a very early age ; he knows that the same bit of wood may be both a yard long and three feet long, and that one dozen is the equivalent of twelve units. But it does not occur to him to ask himself precisely what happens in his mind when it conceives of something as a unit. The science of arithmetic does not, or at least it need not, trouble itself about such matters a whit more than he. We all know, in a certain dim, unanalytic way, what we mean by a unit and by the successive addition of units. We know what it is to grasp together as a whole a number of individuals, to separate a whole into its constituent parts, and to compare two wholes and find them equal or unequal. The arithmetician may assume this knowledge to be present in the mind of the man whom he undertakes to instruct ; and may, proceeding upon this basis, show him how to repeat in more and more complicated ways, operations which, in a simple form, he has been accustomed to perform from his very childhood. If the pupil desires, not so much to perform the operations in question, as rather to pry curiously into their ultimate nature, he may be referred to the psychologist, the logician, or the metaphysician. The arithmetician is in no way bound to answer questions touching such topics as these.

The same thing is true in geometry. Every man has some notion of what is meant by a point, a line, a surface, and a solid, however abortive may prove his attempts at definition. He knows that even a very small surface is not to be confounded with a point, and that a narrow strip of surface is not a line. He is willing to affirm with confidence that the thinnest sheet of ice has two faces, and not one only. The axioms assumed by the geometrician appear to him reasonable, because he seems to find them verified in his experience ; and, indeed, he seems to himself always to have known them, although it would not have occurred to him to state them in that general form. He can see that a straiglit line is shorter than a crooked one joining two points. When he contemplates a triangle before him, he sees, and he was able to see before he studied the mathematics, that the sum of the three internal angles is greater than any one or any two of those angles taken alone. The exact determination of the sum of the three angles, and, in general, the exact determination of any geometrical relations save the very simplest, can only come when he has had the proper schooling ; although individuals may differ rather widely in their conception of the proper meaning to be given to the phrase, " the very simplest relations," and some may be able to see at a glance what others can only be brought to see with a good deal of assistance.

There is, then, no absolute line dividing the geometrical knowledge possessed by all normal minds from that possessed by the geometrician. The knowledge of the latter is more exact, more exactly expressed, and it covers a far wider field, since it is possible by the aid of scientific methods to perceive a multitude of relations which it is beyond the power of the untutored mind to grasp. But the fundamental notions of geometry are taken from common experience, and the world of space and of things in space remains essentially the same, after one has become familiar with geometrical reasonings, that it was before. The geometrician is under no obligations to ask himself how it is possible for the mind to know extended things, to enter into speculations regarding the nature of space, or even to attempt to solve the contradictions which seem to stare him in the face when he reflects upon the continuousness of space and the possibility of its infinite divisibility. All these problems remain, and call for a solution, after the geometrician has done his work. But there is no good reason why they should be laid upon the shoulders of the mathematician, nor does it seem that they can be solved by the employment of the methods which he is accustomed to use in his work.

If we turn from such sciences as we have been discussing to the science of psychology, we find that the case is in no wise different. We have seen that a certain amount of psychological knowledge is possessed by the plain man before he has made any attempt at scientific accuracy, but we have also seen that his knoAvledge of the mind cannot but be fragmentary and indefinite, unsystematic and unsatisfactory. It must differ from that possessed by the psychologist somewhat as the knowledge of plants common to intelligent persons who take an interest in them differs from the knowledge of the botanist, or as the mathematical knowledge of common life differs from that of the mathematician. The difference is here, as in the other cases, a difference rather of degree than of kind.

This may be clearly seen from the descriptions given, in the handbooks of psychology, of the way in which the plain man has attained to the psychological knowledge which he enjoys. We there find that the subject of our discussion has had recourse to introspection, that he has made use of the objective method, and that he has not confined himself to mere observation, but has sometimes experimented. Experience of his own conscious states has given him the key which is to make significant the expressions and actions of other men and of the brutes. He has certainly observed these expressions and actions, and has framed a more general notion of mind than he could have done by a mere examination of his own mental processes. And every time that he has sought by persuasion, or by any other means, to produce a given mental state in another, he has employed experiment, as does the galopin who rides on the back platform of the bob-tailed car, at a personal inconvenience to himself, with the avowed purpose of getting the driver " wild." Of course, such introspection as he has attempted has been blind and instinctive ; his observation has been loose and inaccurate ; his experiments were undertaken for no scientific purpose, and some of them sin in all sorts of ways against the canons of scientific experiment. Nevertheless, they remain introspection, observation, and experiment. The difference between the plain man and the psychologist does not lie in the fact that the latter uses any method peculiar to himself, esoteric and above the comprehension of the unlearned. It is simply a case of the difference everywhere found between the scientific and the unscientific, between the man who applies methods carefully and seeks accurate and exhaustive knowledge of a subject, and the man who feels his way blindly, going only so far as he is compelled to go by immediate practical needs. The knowledge of mind gained by the plain man is loose and vague, more or less inconsistent, and very limited in extent. Yet it is, as far as it goes, a knowledge of mind, not different in kind from that of the psychologist, and obtained in the same way.

Now that psychology is emerging from that ill-defined medley which has passed by the name of philosophy, and is taking its place as a distinct discipline, it is gradually coming to be accepted that the psychologist must occupy much the same standpoint as the ordinary man. I do not, of course, mean that he must be as loose and careless in his thinking, but merely that he must be scientific rather than metaphysical, accepting without question the assumptions upon which the natural sciences rest, and investigating the phenomena of mind as they investigate material phenomena.

It is only necessary to compare the psychology of a generation or two ago with that of the present day, to see how strong is the current which sets for psychology as natural science. The change is both natural and necessary ; it is only another instance of the division of labor which always follows the successful exploitation of the various fields of investigation, and of which the history of science furnishes so many instances. It is coming to be seen that the psychologist, like the student of the physical sciences, may legitimately restrict the scope of his investigations ; that he may refuse to attempt the solution even of problems which naturally suggest themselves to one laboring in that particular field, if it is not necessary to solve them in the attainment of the definite ends which the psychologist sets out to reach. There seems the more reason for his position when it is seen that the problems referred to — which may, as a class, be termed epistemological or metaphysical— cannot be solved without an apparent repudiation, certainly without a thorough analysis and revision, of those assumptions upon the basis of which psychological investigations more and more commonly, and very conveniently, proceed.

In harmony with this position the psychologist assumes an external real world, the world of matter and motion. In this world there are organized bodies presenting certain peculiar phenomena which he regards as indications of mental action. He accepts a plurality of minds distinct from each other and from the system of material things, each standing in a peculiar and intimate relation to one body. Each mind knows directly its own states, and knows everything else by inference from those states, receiving messages along certain bodily channels and reacting along others. Upon this basis he strives to give an accurate account of the contents of minds and to trace the history of their development. He stands upon the same ground as the ordinary man, and, as has been said above, he follows the same methods in his investigations, making use of introspection, observation, and experiment. He applies the methods in a broader and more scientific way; he is clearer, and more exact and thorough ; but he remains a student of " natural science." However he may modify, as a result of his studies, his views of minds and of their relation to a material world, he still holds to the existence of distinct individual minds in certain relations to such a world and through that to each other. He conceives each as shut up to its representations of things, and dependent upon messages conveyed to it from without, as does the disciple of Locke. Ideas are, to him, like images in a mirror, numerically distinct from the things which they represent, and of which they give information.