Personalism

Front matter

Class Book

THE N. W. HARRIS LECTURES FOR 1907

%\)t jfh W* Harris; lectures;

Preface

Early in the last century, M. Comte, the founder of French positivism, set forth his famous doctrine of the three stages of human thought. Man begins, he said, in the theological stage, when all phenomena are referred to wills, either in things or beypnd them. After a while, through the discovery of law, the element of caprice and arbitrariness, and thus of will, is ruled out, and men pass to the second, or metaphysical stage. Here they explain phenomena by abstract conceptions of being, substance, cause, and the like. But these metaphysical conceptions are really only the ghosts of the earlier theological notions, and disappear upon criticism. When this is seen, thought passes into the third and last stage of development, the positive stage. Here men give up all inquiry into metaphysics as bootless, and content themselves with discovering and registering the uniformities of coexistence and sequence among phenomena. When this is vi PREFACE

done we have accomplished all that is possible in the nature of the case. Metaphysics is ruled out as a source of barren and misleading illusions, and science is installed in its place as a study of the uniformities of coexistence and sequence which are revealed in experience.

In this view Comte was partly right and partly wrong. By explanation Comte understood causal explanation, and he was quite right in pointing out that explanation in terms of personality is the one with which men begin. He was equally right in saying that abstract metaphysics is only the ghost of the earlier personal explanations. Later philosophic criticism has shown that the conceptions of impersonal metaphysics are only the abstract forms of the self-conscious life, and that apart from that life they are empty and illusory. Comte was equally right in restricting positive science to the investigation and registration of the orders of coexistence and sequence in experience. But he was wrong in making caprice and arbitrariness essential marks of will, and equally wrong in rejecting all causal inquiry. The history of

PREFACE vii

thought has judged his doctrine in this respect. Causal inquiry, though driven out with a fork, has always come running back, and always will. It only remains to give the causal doctrine the form which is necessary to free it from the objections of criticism.

The aim of these lectures is to show that critical reflection brings us back again to the personal metaphysics which Comte rejected. We agree with him that abstract and impersonal metaphysics is a mirage of formal ideas, and even largely of words, which begin, continue, and end in abstraction and confusion. Causal explanation must always be in terms of personality, or it must vanish altogether. Thus we return to the theological stage, but we do so with a difference. At last we have learned the lesson of law, and we now see that law and will must be united in our thought of the world. Thus man's earliest metaphysics reemerges in his latest ; but enlarged, enriched, and purified by the ages of thought and experience.

In war the success of a campaign seldom depends solely upon sheer fighting and direct viii PREFACE

assaults upon the enemy's position. It often depends equally, and even more fundamentally, upon seizing and holding certain strategic positions which may command the enemy's communications, or threaten his rear, or make his position untenable. Intellectual campaigns are subject to the same law. They are commonly decided at points quite remote from the apparent battlefield, and without any u thunder of the captains and the shoutings." These are the strategic points that command the field and decide the day. They lie in our epistemology and metaphysics — subjects which seem to have little or no practical bearing, yet out of them are the issues of intellectual life or death. Our notions of knowledge and its nature, our conception of reality and causality, our thoughts respecting space and time, — the two great intimidating phantoms, — these are the tilings that decide our general way of thinking and give direction to our thought even in morals and religion. Some harmlesslooking doctrine is put Forth in epistemology, and soon there is an agnostic chill in the air

PREFACE ix

that is fatal to the highest spiritual faiths of the soul, or some sensual blight and mildew spread over the fairer growths of our nature. Space and time are made supreme laws of existence, and determinism and materialism and atheism are at the door. This general fact explains the form of the campaign. The " thunder of the captains and the shoutings " are omitted, in order to deal with the questions which both experience and reflection show to be the really strategic points in philosophic discussion.

BORDEN P. BOWNE.

February 1, 1908.

Contents

1/ COMMON SENSE, SCIENCE, AND PHILOSOPHY 1

II. THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE 54

III. PHENOMENALITY OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD 111

II

How is experience possible ? This is the question with which Kant inaugurated a new era in philosophy. Before his time there had been two views respecting the origin of knowledge. One was that all knowledge is from experience. Mind is purely passive in knowing, and impressions are made upon it from without. The famous metaphor of the tabula rasa has served this school as both doctrine and argument ever since the time of Plato. Knowledge, then, is a mere reading off of what the mind passively receives. The other view was that the mind may know many things independently of experience. The former view had been reduced to absurdity by Hume, and the latter view had run into a barren formalism in the hands of Leibnitz's disciples. Both views were superficial. The empirical school had never decided what experience means when the mind is utterly passive, and they had found it easy with Locke to deduce many rational principles from a passively received experience. But Hume came and showed that such an experience must become a vanishing phantasmagoria, which perishes as fast as it is born and leaves nothing articulate behind it. Since, however, we do have an articulate experience, it is plain that the question of the origin of knowledge is subordinate to the deeper question respecting the origin of experience itself. If it should turn out that experience is a product of our rational nature, the folly of seeking to deduce reason from experience would be manifest. Hence the epochal significance of the question, How is experience possible?

Kant's answer is well known. Experience is not something given ready-made from without, but is actively constructed by the mind within. Experience is possible only through a certain constitutive mental activity, according to principles immanent in the understanding. In this way the raw material of sense impressions, which in themselves are fleeting and discontinuous, is built into a rational world of experience. This insight was Kant's great contribution to philosophy, and it remains, in spite of all criticism, a permanent possession of reflective thought.

This result finally vacates the traditional empiricism which views the mind as only passively receptive in knowledge. Hume showed the inarticulate nihilism to which the doctrine must come when made consistent, and Kant showed that actual experience is a mental product. In this result he had been forestalled by Hume, in a somewhat left-handed way, in his admission that there is much in thought which cannot be found in an experience of the passive type, and which he ascribed therefore to a " mental propensity to feign." When carefully studied, it turns out that this "propensity to feign" is a very active faculty in Hume's system. Between Hume and Kant the old sense empiricism is deprived of all visible means of rational support. It now belongs to the family of superstitions.

" The principles of knowing are primarily im- U m'anent laws of mental activity. This we must now endeavor to bring out into clear vision, as the great difficulty in popular philosophizing and all the strength of traditional naturalism lie in the apparent immediacy of knowledge, so that it seems to be no problem at all. This makes it easy to believe that a great system of things can exist and be known without the activity of any rational and spiritual principle. This assumption is the corner-stone, and indeed the whole foundation, of all mechanical philosophizing. Hence the need of making this activity evident.

Knowledge of course cannot be defined except in terms of itself, neither can it be deduced from that which is not knowledge. There must always be a certain unique and immediate character to knowledge which can rest on nothing but itself. In some sense, then, there is no answer to the question, How is knowledge possible? for there is nothing deeper or other than knowledge by which to explain it. Still the study of knowledge may reveal certain conditions and implications which are unsuspected by unreflective thought and which have profound significance for philosophical theory. This fact gives us our next subject of inquiry. We do not aim to tell how knowledge is possible, in the sense of giving a recipe by which it might be compounded from that which is not knowledge, but in the sense of studying the conditions and implications of the knowing process. And, first of all, we must make clear the problem and our starting-point.

A fundamental distinction in knowing is that between the " me " and the " not-me." I place all other things or persons as my objects in changeless antithesis to myself as conscious subject. But inasmuch as this "not-me" includes my fellow men, the " me " is soon enlarged by their addition, and then the antithesis becomes the " us " and the " not-us." We human beings become the " us," the subjects, and the cosmic order with whatever else there may be becomes the " not-us." Then the " not-us" breaks up again into the cosmic order, so far as it is an object of scientific study, and its cause.

If we could attain to clear and definite knowledge on all of these points, we should have made great progress in philosophy.

It will very likely be objected by some that we have made too sharp an antithesis between the "me " and the "not-me," the " us " and the " not-us." This objection is due to the fact that many persons have contracted the habit of talking about monism without any very clear conception of their own meaning, and still less of its concrete possibility.! Whatever monism can do for us, it can never confound us with one another so as to identify Jesus and Judas, or make Mr. Spencer's critics the authors of his philosophy. Whatever universal elements the fact of knowledge may contain or imply, as a concrete process knowing is necessarily individual, a gathering by the " me" of information respecting the " not-me' ' ; and any other method of treatment will result in confounding all distinctions and telling us, perhaps, that the subject of the universal experience is the same as the subject of the particular experience — a dark saying, to which unfortunately no key has been furnished, not even for teachers.

In addition, we must note that our knowing in its very nature implies being in the sense of a content which is the object of the knowing. Knowing as an act never ends in itself as a psychological fact. It always relates itself to a content which the knowing act does not make but reproduces. There is, then, in the very idea of our knowing a presupposition of something existing apart from the knowing as a mental event, and this, indeed, is the very essence of the idea. This fact has always been overlooked by empiricists, who have thought the only problem of knowledge was to group particular sensations in the individual consciousness, and when this has been done to their own satisfaction they have supposed that the problem of knowledge was solved. In fact, however, they have not even seen the problem, to say nothing of solving it. If their associational mechanism worked perfectly, it would only give sensations associated in some particular consciousness, and could never give anything beyond it. Solipsism would be the only result. This outcome is escaped by the ambiguity of the term sensation, which means primarily an unqualified and particular impression in the individual sensibility, and which then, without warning, is transformed into a symbol or revelation of a world of things existing beyond itself. But this is something very different. If the sensations are only affections of the sensibility, they never carry us beyond themselves; but if they point to and reveal a world beyond them, we have something more than sensationalism. All the apparent success of sensationalism rests upon this ambiguity, as Green has shown with such thoroughness in his Introduction to Hume.

Assuming, then, this world of things other than myself, in the sense that they cannot be identified with myself, we have the question, How is a knowledge of such things possible?

Knowledge is conditioned both by the nature of the subject and by the nature of the object. In order that a thing may be known, the subject must act in certain ways and the object must be of a certain nature. If the subject remained passive and inert, there would be no knowledge; and if the object were such as to admit of no rational construction, again there could be no knowledge. We consider the activity of the subject first. How is knowledge possible as a subjective apprehension of objects other than the knowing subject?

The general answer to this question is that our human knowing of other than purely subjective states must depend upon some form of interaction between the "me" and the "not-me." This "not-me," so far as yet appears, might conceivably be the world of things about us, or it might be an all-embracing impersonal energy, or it might be a supreme spirit upon whom we all depend. Common sense, of course, assumes that the interaction is between apparent objects and Ourselves, for there seems to be nothing else in sight. This view, however, loses its plausibility as soon as we come to see the phenomeuality of the world of objects. Then we find ourselves shut up to one or the other of two views ; but for our present purposes it makes no difference what view we take of the " not-me." Whatever it be it cannot give us ready-made knowledge, or do anything but furnish a stimulus to our own mental activity. In all interaction between things the reaction is but an expression of the agent's own nature, for the manifestation of which other things but furnish the occasion. Hence the mental reaction which we call knowledge can be looked upon only as an expression of our mental nature according to principles immanent in itself. But this statement is too abstract for easy understanding by the unpracticed reader, and we must attempt a more concrete explanation.

Common sense begins by taking knowledge for granted. In the beginnings of mental development knowledge is not even a problem. Things are there, and are reflected by the mind as a matter of course. Of the complex and obscure processes and postulates of cognition, spontaneous thought has no suspicion, and knowledge would have always been taken as a matter of course had not experience revealed difficulties and contradictions in our thinking. Men stumbled at an early date upon these difficulties and skepticism was awakened, and thus thought was gradually forced to consider its own methods and to inquire into the possibility of knowledge itself; but the problem did not receive its full and adequate statement until the time of Kant. From his time epistemology has been a leading department of philosophy. Common sense supposes that knowledge arises without any process of mystery, but epistemology shows that the matter is exceedingly complex. The existence of things is by no means the same as our knowledge of them, and reflection makes plain that if things existed precisely as they appear to us the knowledge of them could arise only as the mind by its own action reproduces the contents of things for thought. Knowledge is nothing which can be imported ready-made into a passive mind, but the mind must actively construct knowledge for itself. We see this most readily in the case of conversation or any form of mutual understanding between persons. In such cases no ideas pass from one mind into another, but each mind for itself constructs the other's thought, and thus apprehends and comprehends it. This is self-evidently the case in all personal communion, and every one would see the absurdity of any other supposition. Thoughts are not things to be exchanged or handed along. They exist only through thinking, and to perceive another's thought is to think it for ourselves. But this equally expresses the fact in all knowing. To know things is to think them, that is, to form thoughts which truly grasp the contents or meanings of the things. The things do not pass ready-made into the mind. Indeed they do not pass into the mind at all, but upon occasion of certain action upon the mind the mind unfolds within itself the vision and knowledge of the world. And this it does, according to the physiologist's report, without pattern or copy, and in consequence of certain nervous changes of which moreover it knows nothing directly and commonly knows nothing whatever. This being the case, it is manifestly idle to think of knowledge as impressed on a passive mind, or as carried ready-made into the mind. The knowledge originates within, and the laws and forms of knowledge must primarily be the laws and forms of thought itself. Just as little as ideas pass from the teacher's mind into the pupil's mind, just as little do they pass from things without into the knowing mind.

This matter is plain enough upon reflection, but common sense has its difficulties. We venture therefore another illustration. Suppose a man who had lived all his life in a telegraph office and who had to get all his information respecting the existence and nature of an external world by the clicks of the instrument. The clicks are like nothing but themselves. They resemble neither the things they are supposed to represent, nor the thoughts they are supposed to evoke. But if under such circumstances the man did read them back into the external world, it is manifest that he must have the key in himself, as only thus could he pass from clicks to meanings. But this illustration hardly even adumbrates the obscurity and difficulty of the actual process of perception. The sense clicks left to themselves mean nothing ; it is only as they are made the bearers of a rational content that they acquire any significance. Sensations at best in their perceptive relation are only symbols, the meaning must be furnished by the percipient mind.

This conclusion must stand even on the supposition that we simply apprehend or read things in sense perception without modification. But most of our objective knowing is *- not perception, but interpretation. The world as it is for sense is very different from the world as it is for thought. In looking at a » picture the colored surfaces and outlines are in the sense. The meaning is in thought. In reading a book the printed page is in the sense. The signification is in thought, and only in thought. One who does not know how to read would look in vain for meaning in a book, and in vain would he seek to help his failure by using eye-glasses. The same is true also for our knowledge of the world. That which is in sense is very different from that which is in thought. The sense world is flitting, fleeting, discontinuous. Epistemology shows that it is all an inarticulate, phantasmagoric flux or dissolving view until thought brings into it its rational principles and fixes and interprets it. The sense world, so far as it is articulate, is already a thought world. Its permanences and identities are products of thought. The complex system of relations whereby it is defined and articulated is a thought product, which can in no way be given to sense. The far-reaching inferences of science whereby our spontaneous thought of the world is so profoundly transformed, are something which exist for neither eye nor ear, but for thought only. The world of science differs from the world of sense as widely as the conceptions of the astronomer differ from the algebraic signs by which he expresses them.

At first glance this is a hard saying for the plain man of common sense. He is perfectly sure that the things he sees are really there, and there as he sees them, and he is not aware of any of these processes of which we speak. But the question now is, not whether the things be there, but how they come to be there for us ; and when this distinction is made even the " plain man " can be made to see that there are more things in this matter than have been dreamed of in his philosophy. By common consent the last term on the physical side of the perceptive process is some form of nervous change, and this is but a fleeting impression with nothing abiding about it. When these facts are remembered it becomes plain that a permanent and rational world can be reached from these antecedents only as the mind reacts upon them and by laws immanent in itself proceeds to build up the rational order of experience. The flitting and discontinuous impression is interpreted into a continuous and abiding world only by a permanent self with its outfit of rational principles ; and if this were taken away there would be only an inarticulate flux of impressions without rational contents.

Some further illustration may be useful in illuminating this matter. The work of thought is so quick and subtle that it is easy to overlook it altogether and to take the products of thought as original data antecedent to thought. Thus it seems self-evident that sensation, at least, is something which may be given without any rational activity. But this is true only for the fleeting temporal impression, and not for the sensation as anything rationally articulate. But the temporal impression itself is nothing for intellect until it is fixed into an abiding meaning. As occurring, the impression is dispersed through the divisibility of time into an indefinite number of parts each of which is external to every other and different from every other. But thought cannot grasp any such elusive thing as this unless it be able to fix this vanishing flow into a single and permanent meaning, and only thus does the impression become anything for thought. Similarly with regard to recurrence of sensations, this is impossible as a psychological and temporal fact. Past sensations can recur as little as past time can recur. Recurrence is possible only as the mind fixes its experience into abiding meanings and identifies those meanings in successive phases of the sense flow ; and apart from this synthesis and identification by the mind, the sense flow would have neither fixity nor permanence nor recurrence of any kind. The same is true for the discontinuity of our sensations and the continuity of the world of things. The sensations are discontinuous, and if they were all, there would be equal discontinuity in things ; but the mind interprets the discontinuous sensations into a world of continuous things on its own rational warrant, and apart from this interpretation there would be no framework nor systematic connection at all in the world of experience. Thus it is manifest that without this synthetic and interpretative action of the mind there could be no world whatever for us.

And now to complete the paradox, it must be said that no one can ever perceive any world but the one he makes. I can perceive another's thought only on condition that I think that thought ; and the thought so far as I think it can never be other than mine. I may have the sure conviction in connection with it that it reproduces the content of another's thought, but it can exist for me only as it becomes my own thought, the product of my own thinking. In the same way and with equal evidence the world I perceive is the world I construct. When we are looking at a series of moving pictures we see a great many things that are not there. The train rolls up to the station. Passengers leave or enter the cars. The platform is thronged with persons hurrying to and fro. Yet this busy scene is all in the beholder's mind. The things he sees are the things he constructs. And the same is true in all perception. These "constructs" are all any one can possibly have in consciousness, though it may be that they all carry with them a reference to existence beyond the percipient consciousness. This reference constitutes their objectivity, and makes them possible objects for others also ; nevertheless the " construct "

itself, with of course this objective reference, is the only possible content of the percipient consciousness, and this "construct" must always be the mind's own product. And be the object what it may, we never ' can come any nearer to it than this " construct " will bring us.

These considerations show how exceedingly complicated the perceptive process is upon analysis, and how utterly mistaken those persons are who speak of an immediate knowledge of reality as if it involved no process whatever. But it would be a mistake to infer any doctrine of idealism from these facts. They belong to the process of perception, but this process itself never decides as to the reality of the object perceived. Reflection shows that in any case perception must arise in this way, that is, through a reaction of the mind against action upon it so as to build up or construct the world for itself. It is not merely and only a construction by the mind, it is a construction which carries with it a reference to the content existing apart from the perceptive act.

All thinking has this objective reference. It claims not to produce but to reproduce a content existing apart from the knowing act itself. Furthermore, if we should pass to an idealistic affirmation on the strength of this reasoning the immediate consequence would be solipsism, for it is just as true of the neighbors as of things, that our knowledge of them isa mental construction. Primarily our thoughts of our neighbors arise within our own minds as a mental interpretation of our sense experience, and if we are to deny any kind of an existence to things on account of the process, we must equally deny the neighbors for the same reason. Any tenable idealism, therefore, must rest not upon the process of perception, but upon an analysis of the product of perception. That is, we must examine our objects with the aim of seeing which of them, or how much of them, is to be viewed as having proper existence and how much of them has only phenomenal existence, that is, existence for intelligence. To illustrate: the world of sense qualities is found to have only phenomenal existence, not because of the process of perception, but because a study of them shows that they have no meaning apart from intellect with its function of sensibility.

Thus far we have spoken of knowledge as conditioned only by the nature and activity of the subject. But it is manifest that the nature of the object is also a determining factor. We have spoken of the mind as imposing its laws and forms upon experience and thus reaching objects ; but it is manifest that this is only part of the matter. For unless the objects themselves were harmonious with these laws and forms, the latter could not be imposed upon them. It is manifest that I can understand another person's speech only as I think his thought for myself, but it is equally manifest that I cannot understand his thought unless there be some thought to understand. Or, again, in the interpretation of an inscription which I might discover, I can interpret it only as I have the key in myself, and it is equally evident that interpretation presupposes that the inscription has rational meaning. It would be hopeless to attempt to understand random scratches. The same is true in the interpretation of the sense signs by which we reach the knowledge of nature. The mind must have the key in itself, but there must also be an objective order and fixed meaning as the presupposition of interpretation. Otherwise we should be seeking to understand mere noises or random scratches, which would be absurd. When this thought is carried out it implies an objective rational order parallel to our subjective thinking. As speech implies a mind at both ends of the process, so knowledge under our human conditions equally implies a mind at both ends. Noise becomes speech only as thought is expressed in it, and understood through it. So the affections of sense become knowledge only as they are the media for expressing and transmitting thought beyond them.

And here it might occur to some unconvinced empiricist to return to his claim that the sensations are all. For, after all, he might ask, what is there in experience but the sense content, actual or possible, and what is there that cannot be expressed in terms of sensation, real or expected, or conceived as possible ? How can motion be expressed except in terms of changing sensations, and how can distance and size be figured except in sensational terms ?