The roots of realty; being suggestions for a philosophical reconstruction

Front matter

Class _

Hook

Ol}*V£l

Preface

In the following pages the author, starting from certain postulates, founded in the consistency of consciousness itself, seeks to rough-hew some outlines indicating the leading . directions such as it appears to him any future philosophic construction is bound to take (or, if this be disputed, let us say, at least to take account of) if it aspires to be even relatively adequate to the needs of the up-to-date philosophic mind. The general basis in question is here found uncompromisingly in that of modern philosophical Idealism, though not perhaps in the form in which it has loomed largest in modern philosophic thought, or indeed, precisely in any form in which it has been hitherto presented. On the contrary, what to the author seems a more adequate formulation is suggested in accordance with which the leading problems in the chief departments of Experience are sketched out.

The author is aware of certain shortcomings (real or apparent) that the * critic may find in the present book. These may be summed up generally as (i) the going over, here and there, however briefly, for the purposes of the argument, x PREFACE

of ground familiar to the Fachmann; and (2) a certain amount of repetition in places, arising from a desire to emphasise and drive home with unmistakable clearness leading positions. These shortcomings, if they be such, the author regards as necessitated by his purpose of reaching the average intelligent man who is now beginning to interest himself in speculative problems, no less than the professional " thinker."

For the rest, he begs one favour of the reader, whether critic or otherwise, and that is that if he tackles the book at all, he will suspend his judgment until he has gone through the whole of it. This, which in fairness always behoves in dealing with a work involving a connected argument, is especially necessary in the present case, where owing to the character of the exposition, objections which might be raised against propositions as stated in one place will often be found dealt with in another.

In conclusion it may be mentioned that certain of the positions here elaborated were stated in an incomplete and very brief form in a little book published many years ago by the author, entitled "The Problem of Reality," and now long since out of print.

Contents

Preface

Introduction ....

I. The Problem of Consciousness II. Modern Idealism .

Introduction

The restlessness of formulation so characteristic of .modern thought is even more noticeable in metaphysic than in other less abstract departments of knowledge. Negative criticism has a peculiar tendency to run amuck amongst the more fundamental problems of philosophy. Every university man entering upon his career, professional, pedagogic, or otherwise, whose bent leads him into the fields of speculative thought, seems to think it necessary to show his quality by starting a tilt at well-nigh every established position in speculation and scuttling Criticism

it completely — in his own estimation versus

1 rr r i i • • construe-

at least. Unfortunately, the positive tj ve

result of all the apparatus of criticism thought.

he brings to bear upon his subject is generally

exiguous in the extreme, recalling the relative

proportions of bread and sack in the well-known

quotation. It is comparatively easy nowadays

to snatch a measure of success as a critic, not so

as a constructive thinker.

Let us take in review the main philosophical

attitudes that have prevailed within the memory of the present generation. 1 Empiricism, now better known as the theory of the " Associational " school, was the dominant attitude in the 'fifties and 'sixties in this country and, to a large extent, on the Continent of Europe. This theory, the national output par excellence of British speculation from its origin in Hobbes and Locke and its working out by the Scottish Psychological School, takes sense-perception as an irreducible basis, and the mind (in a psychological sense) as the mere Historical rece i ver an d co-ordinator, through its sketch. function of thought, of the ready-made Empiricism, impressions or, more correctly, perceptions received through the special senses. The peculiar advantage of the theory is its plausible appearance of irrefutability and of accordance with sound common-sense. A more thoroughgoing analysis discloses the fact, however, that the theory of Empiricism really evades the main problems of philosophy, that its postulates are not ultimate in themselves, but presuppose conditions not recognised in the empiricist theory, that its truth, such as it is, is somewhat of the nature of platitude, and that the truth claimed for it by some of its exponents is not truth at all, but fallacy. It is now beginning to be fairly well acknowledged that Empiricism, historically considered, is a one-sided pendant to the equally

1 I must apologise to the reader versed in the matter for even this brief survey which follows of ground to him familiar and trite enough,

INTRODUCTION 3

one-sided Dogmatism of the earlier Continental schools, arising directly out of the systems of Descartes and Leibnitz, and indirectly also out of the scholastic tradition of Nominalism. Pure philosophic Empiricism however, which was in itself mainly a psychological doctrine, had two important offshoots in what we may term popular philosophy, viz. eighteenth-century Materialism, and nineteenth-century Agnosticism. I regard the latter, at least in its prevalent form, as an offshoot of British Empiricism, although I am well aware that a case may be made out for regarding it as a more direct descendant of the critical philosophy of Kant. We must not forget in this connection the important part that British Empiricism on certain of its sides played in the Kantian system.

According to Empiricism, there exists an external world of matter in space in the form of " a sort of a something," e.g. the so-called primary qualities of matter. Over against this is the mind, which apprehends and comprehends the world of objects by means of its sensory consciousness, of which the specific senses constitute the organ, although the external world in itself is not usually held by the empiricist to be the same as the external world perceived by the mind through the senses. Locke and the earlier empiricists, while conceding that the so-called primary qualities of matter (extension, resistance, figure) inhere in the objects, credited the secondary qualities (colour, smell, taste, &c.) solely to the perceiving mind. Berkeley went a step farther and got rid of the primary qualities of matter as existing independently of the mind with his famous formula of " esse est percipi." Hume, on similar grounds, we need scarcely remind the reader, invalidated the claim of the soul or mind to an independent existence apart from the succession of impressions and ideas, which, as he contended, the term alone denoted. Empiricism thus on this line resulted in idealist Scepticism. On another side, the Empiricism of Hobbes and Locke issued in the Materialism of the French school, chiefly through Condillac and Helvetius. Taking his stand on the sense-impression, Condillac maintained the thesis not only that the mind did not contribute anything separately to knowledge, but that all thought was simply sensation refined and transformed. Hence Sensation- . , . r . . .

ism and knowledge comes from without, and

Material- the sensibly perceived world is the fount and origin of all things psychical. Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius in sensti fuerit. How this order of ideas developed into the systematic Materialism of d'Holbach and La Mettrie is obvious, though unnecessary to dwell upon in this place. But the crude Empiricism of Locke and his immediate followers was the foundation, in part at least, of yet another direction in philosophical method. Kant, taking up the problem at the point at which Hume had

INTRODUCTION 5

dropped it, drew the crucial distinction between consciousness-in-general, the consciousness that apprehends reality, and this consciousness as reproduced in reflection as the content of the individual mind. By his analysis of the conditions presupposed in the concrete consciousness, consciousness-in-general, as he termed it, which we call reality or the real world, and the particular consciousness ascribed to the individual as such, Kant became the pioneer for modern times of an entirely new method of philosophical investigation.

As is well known, starting from Hume, Kant stated the problem as to how Hume's " impressions and ideas," that is, certain of them, came to have a universal and necessary validity. He found that certain thought-forms or categories, acting through the sense-forms of space and time, transformed the raw material furnished by the senses into conscious experience or reality. Fichte, who got rid of the unknowable things-in-themselves of Kant, exhibited the whole world-process as having its Alpha and Omega in the subject of consciousness itself. Schelling pursued this line of thought with certain essential modifications, and finally Hegel reduced the whole world of reality to a system of categories, of which Kant's list was an imperfect adumbration. Hegel's was a vast attempt, the most thorough-going and stupendous in the whole history of philosophy, to disentangle the leading apperceptive syntheses or categories that go to make up conscious experience. This* it is that gives Hegel his unique place in the history of thought. But his attempt to unravel in reflection, and present in the form of literary exposition, the almost unfathomable complexity

From Kant f ^ thought-forms in a water-tight to Hegel. s . . s

system was beyond even his intellectual powers. The Hegelian system as a system fell to pieces, although the Hegelian influence and the Hegelian method, however modified in formulation, can hardly fail to remain to all time. In addition to the insuperable difficulties of the task which the great German thinker set himself in the presentation in abstraction of the complete system of the categories of experienced reality, a fatal flaw, which we shall later on have occasion to discuss, seems to us to exist at the basis of his conception no less than at that of the conceptions of other encyclopaedic thinkers with whom he may be compared.

The empiricist, the agnostic, and the common-sense man, all alike treat philosophy as a " dead dog." The positive side of Empiricism, it is true, has lost its influence, but the negative result survives to a large extent. Philosophy is declared to have a shifting basis of sand. This idea is apparently supported by much of modern metaphysical literature, in which, as elsewhere, negative criticism is the dominant note. As a matter of fact, philosophy, in the sense of metaphysic, has

INTRODUCTION 7

attained certain positions that may be regarded as rock bases. These indefeasible results, meagre as they may seem as compared with Results of those of physical science or with the philosophidetails of the philosophical systems calanal ysis. that have in some cases illuminated and in some cases obscured them, form foundations, nevertheless, on which future thinkers may build. Before proceeding to discuss them, and even at the risk of their not being fully understood at this stage by the reader unversed in these studies, we give them here in brief: —

1. That reality is synonymous with conscious experience possible or actual, that every real is essentially object of consciousness, and that the words "existence" and "reality" have no meaning except as connoting the content of a possible experience — this is, stated in a sentence, the position of Modern Idealism, which is that of philosophy or metaphysic, properly so called.

2. The self-consistency of consciousness as a whole constitutes the ultimate test of truth. This is somewhat clumsily expressed by Herbert Spencer (whose general position is not that of what we here term Modern Idealism) in his well-known formula of " the inconceivability of the opposite." The formula itself may be open to criticism, but in substance it expresses the unimpeachable doctrine as to the test of truth which necessarily follows from the main position of Idealism, as Idealism is understood in the present day. If reality is co-equal in extension with consciousness potential and actual, being nothing more than consciousness considered from the point of view of content, in a word, nothing more than the what-ness of consciousness, it is plain that truth, which is the formulation of reality in abstract thought, must have as its test its inseparability from the fundamental conditions of consciousness as a whole. These two positions may, it seems to me, be regarded as impregnable.

3. An analysis of consciousness discloses that every concrete experience or reality cannot be analysed into less than two elements corresponding generally to the Aristotelian distinctions of matter and form, potentiality and actuality, and that in the union or synthesis of these two elements reality or objectivity alone consists. These alternate two elements I here identify with the alogical and the logical. Apart from their synthesis, these elements do not exist at all as reality, but merely as distinguished and reproduced in reflective thought, or, in other words, as abstract notions.

4. That reality in its ultimate expression implies a totality of all possible relations of experience, but that the term as commonly used simply means a totality within certain limits, i.e. a relative totality.

To these four positions the present writer would be disposed to add the method of contra-

INTRODUCTION 9

diction, or Dialectic, if not precisely in the shape it takes in the Hegelian system, yet none the less in a modified form. This latter point, however, would admittedly be disputed by many modern thinkers who otherwise accept the main speculative positions as here given.

Chapter I The Problem Of Consciousness

All science, all explanation, nay, all knowledge whatever, consists in the bringing of a content under a new unity, particularity under universality. Every unification of this kind constitutes what is called an apperception or an apperceptive synthesis of knowing, and every "knowing" implies a synthesis. Science is simply a continuation of the same process as common-sense experience on a higher plane, the bringing of particular contents under new unifications. . The more comprehensive the unifying thought-form, the higher the point of view as science. This process is also termed categorisation, since every apperception necessarily means the reduction of the particularity of the given under the thought-form or category. 1 The sensible impressions immediately given me at the present moment of a certain hardness or resistance, a certain

1 Certain writers, notably Professor James Ward, seem inclined to reserve the word " category " for categories in the Kantian sense, i.e. those thought-forms specially constitutive of " common-sense " reality, as cause, substance, &c. I cannot see, however, any sufficient grounds for limiting the use of the word in this way.

PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS n

limitation in space of this resistance, conjoined to visible extension and colour, with their corresponding limitation in space (such limitation in both cases being termed shape or xheapperfigure), are in common experience, ceptive with its practical ends, reduced by s y nthesis - me under a particular category or apperception, as "writing-desk," for instance. I further identify this synthesis of qualities under the category of " wooden object." Becoming more scientific and overleaping intermediate steps, I still further apperceive the desk as wooden object under a wider category of objects possessing certain chemical properties, to wit, under the category of organic matter. Thus is my knowledge of the desk enlarged. Yet, again, the organic matter, of which the desk is a particular instance, is apperceived by me under the category of matter- in-general, that is, resistant extension or a "somewhat" occupying space.

In physical science this process of the reduction of the manifold to unity reaches its highest point in the bringing of the world of objects making up the content of space and time, under the generalisation matter-in-motion. Recently it has been sought to simplify still further the dual generalisation matter-in-motion by a recourse to the conception of force or to the notion of ether as the root-category in physics. The hypothetical spacial unit of matter, the atom, is conceived by most modern physicists either as a force-centre or as a focus of vibrations, or, again, as ether-stress, that is, a local concentration of ether. These ultimate physical hypotheses only concern us here as illustrating the direction towards which the highest generalisation of science inevitably tends. But the highest possible or conceivable unification arrived at by physical science is not all-embracing. By its very nature physical science, in all its generalisations, from the lowest to the highest, tacitly assumes something which, whilst it is presupposed by these generalisations, is not included in them. Hence The most out °^ Physical science can never come exhaustive the most exhaustive category of all. category. Science cannot give us that most comprehensive view of the world which the widest category in its system of articulations should open up to us. This highest and most comprehensive point of view, which science no less than empirical consciousness (common-sense) presupposes, while ignoring it in its judgments, is consciousness as such. In the last resort, all the objects of science, no less than of "common-sense," together with the judgments to which they give rise, are determinations of consciousness, possible or actual. * In other words, they presuppose an apperceiving ego or subject at one end, and a somewhat apperceived at the other. When closely viewed, this somewhat discloses itself in the last resort as nothing but a modification of the aforesaid apperceiving ego or subject itself.

Now, the totality of the processes of apperceiving and apperceived, subject and object, is included under the term consciousness. Consciousness may be actual or may be potential merely. In common language it is generally used in the former sense as opposed to the " unconscious." As a matter of fact, consciousness, as concrete, that is, as reality or experience, is a synthesis of potential and actual elements, as we have said. 1 It is sufficient hereto recognise the truth that the highest, the supreme generalisation under which all things can be brought, is expressed in the term consciousness, regarded per se. % The recognition of this fact does not imply any slur on the terms in which science ultimately unifies all things from its point of view. The claim of philosophy, the branch of human knowledge dealing with the world from the point of view of, and in terms of, consciousness as above defined, is not that the formulation of science is wrong as far as it goes, Philosoph y but merely that the terms under which not bad it formulates reality are not ultimate, seienee - unimpeachable as they may be within the purview of physical science itself, as well as from the standpoint of ordinary experience.* Philosophy must not be regarded as science gone wrong. Its method, aim, and subject-matter are radically other than those of science. There is a story

1 In this sense, the unconscious itself belongs to the unity or universe of consciousness — it is the potentially conscious (see p. 10).

told of a contested election in the old briberydays. Two rival candidates on the eve of the poll were entertaining the electors with the best of their cellars. Port and sherry, we should mention, were then the only wines known to the average Englishman. One of the candidates, finding that his port was becoming exhausted, furnished the constituents with a very fine old Chateau Lafitte, but this cost him the election, the voters declaring that they would have nothing more to do with a man who fobbed them off with sour port. Men of science, like Hackel, are only too fond of denouncing the methods and results of philosophy as though it were a kind of sour science, and not, as it really is, an altogether different "discipline," as regards which the conventional criticisms of the man of science are as irrelevant and as pointless as the free and independent electors' criticism of the excellent Chateau Lafitte offered them by their would-be representative.

Philosophy maintains that its own outlook, from which the world is viewed as a system of articulations of consciousness-in-general, although it includes that of science, nevertheless differs from it inasmuch as it transcends it, since it is the most comprehensive aspect from which the world can be regarded. "The world is my presentment" ("Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung"), says Schopenhauer, at the opening of his Welt als Wille. This is another way of expressing in a few words that the idealist position, in the wider sense of the term, is the one to which the thinker is forced who is not content to rest satisfied with half-thoughts, but who presses forward to a coherent and self-consistent grasp of what we call reality.

In addition to what has been above said, it may be desirable in the interests of the reader unversed in these matters to explain once more the- sense in which the term Consciousness is employed in philosophic writing. As commonly understood, Consciousness is regarded as the attribute of the individual. Each individual mind is supposed to have its own consciousness over against other individual minds and the world without. But Consciousness, in a philosophical sense, does not mean consciousness conceived as appertaining to this or that individual, which at best constitutes the subject-matter of empirical psychology, but consciousness considered in its essential nature. This is what is meant by consciousness-in-general, or consciousness as such. To say that the whole system of things stands or falls with your, or with my, individual consciousness ox psyche (the position of Solipsism), is a palpable absurdity. The "world" is plainly not "my presentment" in this sense, nor is it yours. But notwithstanding this, on analysing this " world," we fail to find that it consists of anything else than a system of facts or, in other words, of possible or actual experiences ; and experience is only another name for consciousness, as above denned. Hence, although it is absurd to regard reality as exhausted within Conseious° tne nrrut s of any personal consciousness in ness or individual mental experience, a^aveat '' nevertne l ess > since it is a system of experienced facts and of inferences or judgments from those facts, in short, a system of sensations or feltnesses knit together by thoughts, it is nothing else than, as we have said, a system of affections of consciousness.

The non-philosophical reader will say : " But is not consciousness always particular, always individual ? " In one sense, yes ; in another sense, no. Unreflective experience, common-sense as it is termed, itself automatically draws the distinction between those thoughts and feelings that are special to itself, the content and products of one's own mind, and those that constitute reality, independent of the individual's own mind, or, as it is the current fashion to say, those that have an " objective reference " attaching to them. But common-sense so called, as philosophy shows, falsely ascribes the elements of reality, implicitly or explicitly, to something independent of consciousness altogether. The crux of the problem. the Philosophical problem, therefore, may be stated as being the existence within consciousness of a universal and necessary element, and the further existence within consciousness of an element apparently foreign to itself, an object as opposed to itself as subject, which element again discloses itself, on analysis, as the subject's own negative determination}^ The relation of consciousness-in-particular, which concerns the individual mind, to. consciousness-in-general, which concerns the system of things, or reality, is the sempiternal mystery, to find an adequate formula for which has been the constantly recurring pre-occupation of philosophy in its wider issues from Plato downwards. The most elaborate of these attempts is undoubtedly the philosophy of Hegel himself, the culmination of the great German philosophical movement taking its rise in Kant.

From the foregoing it will be evident how mistaken is the notion of some scientific thinkers that there is any necessary opposition between the conclusions of science and those of metaphysic, using the latter word in its true Aristotelian sense. The standpoint of science is inevitably materialistic, and a scientific or "cosmic" philosophy, that is, an attempted solution of the world-problem on the basis of physical science, will be successful and convincing precisely in proportion to the thoroughness with which the materialistic position is adhered to.

The philosopher pur sang, i.e. the metaphysician, can accept all the conclusions of scientific Materialism in so far as it is not attempted to formulate them dogmatically as

1 Cf. Spinoza's " omnis determinatio est negation

B absolute and exclusive. Yet none the less, the standpoint of philosophy is necessarily idealistic Philosophy m tne sense above explained. And as ultima inasmuch as philosophy's highest ratio. generalisations are presupposed in the

conclusions of science, no less than in those of ordinary or common-sense experience, philosophy claims to have the last word in the solution of the world-problem, or, to put it otherwise, claims that its problem is the ultima ratio of the world-problem altogether.

Metaphysic, i.e. philosophy proper, it is almost needless to say, is not what it is popularly supposed to be, that is, is not mere speculation on things in general. It is an inquiry into the truest, the most comprehensive significance of reality. It reduces the world of our common-sense experience in its totality, no less than the same world as metamorphosed by scientific thought, to what is at once its most immediate and most ultimate expression, to wit, to a system of determinations of consciousness-in-general. In this way, the radicalness of the opposition between thought and thing is abolished.

Were thought and thing utterly distinct from each other, as is commonly supposed, the world of philosophic thought would, of course, and thing. ke impossible, but so would be also the world of common-sense reality. A reality containing no thought-element would be unapprehensible, since every apperception or general term is nothing but a form of thought. This is true from the lowest to the highest. To know a thing, whether in ordinary experience or in science, is the same as to define it under thought-forms or general concepts.

All reality is object of either possible or actual knowledge, or it could not be spoken of. An unknown reality, a reality not an actual object of knowledge, may be spoken of, but certainly not an unknowable reality, a something that is not a possible object of knowledge. I do R ea iitvas not mean to say that all knowledge external is primarily logical, for, as I shall oto J eet * endeavour to show later on, undoubtedly the ^logical is not only an element, but a primary element, in all experience. An element, however, qua element, is not a reality, but an abstraction. Reality, as pointed out, necessarily implies a synthesis of at least two elements, and nothing short of reality can be content or object of consciousness, the two terms being, in fact, synonymous. In ordinary consciousness — external perception — the ultimate elements of a reality or thing are an alogical feeling or sensation, and a logical form or category. What, for example, is meant by the terms we use to express the objects of ordinary consciousness — "table," "house," "tree," &c. ? We affirm a thing to be a "table" .by virtue of connecting in thought certain sensations under certain universal forms or categories. Its reality as " table" involves at once its distinction from other realities that are not " table," and its relational identification with certain other realities or objects under certain universal concepts common to all objects.

The empiricists of the Associational school, like the scholastic nominalists, are fond of dilating on the fact that the repeated experience of a particular object builds up in the individual mind the universal notion of the object in question. This may be quite true if it be meant that the individual mind becomes aware of the fact that an object is what it is through reflection on experience, and that it is thus enabled to abstract in reflective thought the universal concept from the object. But this does not prevent this universal concept from forming part of the object in the original perception of it. The thought-element or concept-relation which the mind abstracts, is originally there to be abstracted. All that Empiricism, therefore, has to teach us in this connection resolves itself into the truism that the abstract concept of reflection, or, to apply the scholastic phrase, consciousness in its Perception " secon< ^ intention," cannot be identiand fied precisely with the same concept

reflection. as e l ement f t h e concrete world, or as entering into consciousness in its " firstintention," to wit, as in the original perception. The universal and necessary element which all reality, all objectivity, involves, is clearly thought into the object. Yet although thought into the

object, it is as clearly not thought into it by the

individual mind, since the latter finds it already

there in the object as perceived. If we take

it away from the object, the object ceases to be

object. In ordinary perception, the individual

mind finds the category imbedded in the object

Now, as to the second element. In an ordinary

perception of our common-sense consciousness,

if per impossibile we abstract from the thing, the

table, tree, or house, all the special categories

under which it is apperceived, up to those that

are involved in the nature of every object, such

as substantiality, causal connection with the

universe of objects, &c, we shall find that all

that remains over is divers modes of feltness, to

wit, the sense-impressions we term Sense .

the primary and secondary qualities residuum

of matter. Once the universal and ona ostrae-

, , tion of

necessary element in the synthesis, thought

the element of thought-forms, of cate- element, gories, is gone, the reality, the object, has vanished, leaving the caput mortuum blind sensation or feltness in its place. The formal, the logical element, in the synthesis under which the alogical feltness 1 was apperceived is thus seen to be as