Knowledge, life and reality; an essay in systematic philosophy

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I Philosophy: Its Conception and its Problems 1

II Philosophy : Its Method and its Divisions . 21

Chapter I Philosophy: Its Conception And Its Problems!

In its more general and vague, but most adequate and human meaning, the word " Philosophy " may be made to include all the products of man's reflective thinking. And since man, as we know him in history, has always been given to reflection, fragments of thought which bear the characteristic marks of the philosophical interpretation of experience, exist from the beginning. Indeed, if we discard all uncertain conjectures with regard to that mythical being, the so-called " primitive man," and the yet more uncertain conjectures as to some order of beings half-human, half-animal, we must agree with Aristotle: " All men by nature reach after knowledge." But this sentence occurs at the beginning of his work on Metaphysics, or First Philosophy; and the kind of knowledge to which he refers is the distinguishing pursuit of the philosopher. To philosophize, then, is to be human. For in the words of Mr. Shadworth Hodgson : " The need to philosophize is rooted in our nature as deeply as any other of our needs."

As a matter of course, however, men began at first to reflect upon those facts of external nature, and those inner experiences, which seemed of most immediate and pressing interest. As a matter of course, too, both the method used and the results of their reflection, were vague, confused, and indecisive. But in saying this, we must be careful not to do discredit to the intellectual acumen and intellectual interests of the most undeveloped races or barbarous and uncivilized peoples. Modern research seems rather to be widening than closing up the gap between the least civilized known races of men and the most intelligent of the lower animals. And at the same time, it is increasingly emphasizing the essential spiritual unity of the human race. Their language, customs, folk-lore, and attempts at scientific explanation and philosophical interpretation, show these so-called primitive peoples to be lacking, not so much in intellectual quality or ethical sensitiveness, as in the enjoyment of the accumulated resources of a long line of ancestral efforts, under the more favorable physical and social circumstances — which we at present enjoy. Nor are they altogether deficient in power to make some of the most essential philosophical distinctions. The untutored man, the member of a somewhat isolated savage tribe, has little inducement, and less opportunity, for cultivating any of the particular sciences after the modern method of experiment and induction. He attributes the direction and flight of his arrow to the strength of his bow and the pull of his arm; the grateful sensations of warmth to the sun or to the fire; the birth of children to the act of procreation; the drift of his canoe to the currents of water and wind. But to him the wind, the sun, the fire, are themselves mysteries too deep and high for solution by any formula that summarizes facts of invariable or customary sequence; therefore he naively and instinctively resorts at once to the metaphysical interpretation of his experience; he makes gods out of these natural objects, who must be propitiated or obeyed. How, indeed, should he arrive at a scientific explanation of phenomena which are increasingly difficult and baffling even for modern physics to explain? Why, also, should he not, failing of modern science, recognize at once what this science itself is compelled to recognize — namely, that, back of all its formulas, there is a Being of the World, which the human mind is compelled to interpret as like itself, and yet superior to itself ? And as to the phenomena of birth, and life, and death, this need of the philosophical interpretation, as something additional and yet working, as it were, in and through the scientific explanation, is surely no less great for the savage than it is for the most learned of modern biologists.

It is not strange, therefore, that even among the most gifted and progressive peoples, philosophy did not earlier separate itself from other cognate forms of human endeavor, as a sort of independent discipline. It was, at first, the rather, all intermixed with literature, in the form of myth, legend and poetry; with crude attempts at history, and with the uncertain beginnings of the particular sciences ; but above all with theology and religion. Indeed, a large proportion of the philosophizing done at the present time, and that by no means the least important, does not recognize in any practical way the necessity for making this separation. In India, which has been characterized for centuries by a kind of speculative genius, philosophy is chiefly an attempt at a deductive theology, which may be made a matter of science resting upon personal experience for the more profound thinkers, but which is given to the people in the form of religious myth. In China, philosophy is either a science of politics, as related to heavenly powers and to the spirits of deceased ancestors; or else it is a conglomerate of geomancy or other forms of divination, based upon a crude and antiquated conception of nature. In Japan, apart from the importations of Western speculative thought, philosophy consists either of hair-splitting distinctions in the pantheistic systems of the various sects of Buddhism, or in the distinctive development given in that land to the Confucian ethics by the demands of its feudal system. While all over the Muhammadan world, philosophy is a rigid and uncompromising doctrine of either practical or mystical monotheism. But these countries comprise, not only the majority of the civilized races, but also some of the most interesting and choice developments of reflective thinking.

'It is customary to say that the Greeks were the first to cultivate philosophy as an independent discipline. Hence we flatter ourselves by deriving our descent from these gifted ancients, along the lines of reflective thinking and its product in the form of systematic philosophy. This is largely, and yet only partially, true. But as Zeller has shown, even the indefiniteness of the term " philosophy " among the classical Greeks, and yet more among their degenerate successors, proves that the thing itself had scarcely as yet appeared as a " specific form of intellectual life." When the earliest Greek writers separated so-called philosophy from its traditional form of religious myth and poetry, they made of it a sort of crude metaphysics of physics. The term "natural philosophy," which persisted down to the more recent times, has, therefore, a legitimate birthright. There was no attempt among the Greeks, however, to distinguish between science and philosophy. Indeed, in the modern meaning of the words, there was as little science as philosophy. And the moment — as was inevitable — that the insufficiency of any material principle like water, air, fire, or the " unlimited " of Anaximander, " The infinite mass of matter out of which all things arise," became apparent, something spiritual in the way of a Divine Being, or Mind, was assumed as necessary to interpret the sum-total of phenomena. That is to say, the need of something super-sensible, if not strictly supernatural, in order to complete the explanation, was fully recognized. Even Plato and Aristotle did not hold a conception of metaphysics favorable to its claim to a domain distinct from the particular sciences. The former did, indeed, recognize a system, or kingdom, of " ideas," which under the supremacy of the Idea of the Good was to furnish an explanation of all that men esteem actual in occurrences, or real in existence, as tested by their daily experiences. But this doctrine supersedes by abolishing all that the modern man considers essential to the conceptions and working methods of the particular sciences. Plato's definition of philosophy makes it a . certain attitude of mind rather than any systematized collection of the fruits of reflective thinking as guided by the principles and discoveries of the particular sciences. With Aristotle, however, philosophy, or as he sometimes called the same thing "wisdom" (aoyla), was identified with science in general. It, therefore, included the theoretical sciences of mathematics, physics, and theology, and also the practical sciences of ethics and politics. But this greatest' of ancient thinkers also recognized a "First Philosophy" — a pre-eminently philosophical discipline which comprised the systematic and critical knowledge of the most general and fundamental principles of Being. In modern times we should call this " metaphysics " in the narrower meaning of the word ; or "ontology."

After Aristotle, and until comparatively recent times, little or no advance was made in limiting or clearing up the conception of philosophy. During the mediaeval period in Europe it was almost completely identified with the defence or attack of churchly dogma, or the prevalent and authorized systematic theology. Descartes, who is popularly called the " father of modern philosophy," in his three principal works included the discussion of topics which would now be divided amongst treatises on logic, theory of knowledge, metaphysics, theology, and physics. Spinoza and Leibnitz did not distinguish between philosophy on the one hand, and theology and the particular sciences on the other hand. Locke, and his successors in England and France, did not separate the metaphysics of mind from psychology and a theory of scientific method. Indeed, in England almost down to the present time the use of the word has been so loose as to justify the sarcasm of Hegel, called forth by an advertisement promising to teach, for seven shillings, "The Art of Preserving the Hair on Philosophical Principles."

It was Immanuel Kant who undertook the more precise limitation of the province of philosophy. This he thought to accomplish satisfactorily by his customary method of hard- and fixed-line divisions. All knowledge, he held, is either historical or rational; the former sets out from empirical data, the latter from principles. Again, of this rational knowledge, one kind is based on concepts; the other is based on the construction of concepts. The former alone is philosophical, the latter is mathematical. Thus does Kant with two strokes mark out the domain of philosophy, as distinguished from the empirical sciences on the one hand, and on the other from pure mathematics. He then proceeds to divide philosophy, as related to the ends of reason, into moral philosophy and cosmical philosophy; as to its objects, into the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of morals; and as to its methods, into pure and empirical.

Careful reflection, and even a superficial acquaintance with history since Kant, convinces us that his distinctions cannot be justified in their original rigidity; nor can the divisions which grew out of them be comprehensively maintained. The development of human reason, too, has its history; and the empirical sciences have no history except as they are germinated and illuminated by the same human reason. No form of knowledge, least of all either cosmical or moral philosophy, can be " based on concepts" that are not themselves' empirically derived, or based on experience.

If we were to follow in detail the various attempts which have been made since Kant by the more or less distinguished writers on philosophical topics, to define strictly their conception of their pursuit as at least a relatively independent and separate discipline, the result would be only to add to our disappointment. The inquiry, " What is philosophy ? " cannot be answered by a direct appeal to history. Neither can we find any great authority in either science or philosophy who has succeeded, either theoretically or in his own practice, in completely and clearly dividing off the domains rightly allotted to these two forms of intellectual endeavor. All the sciences are still, either naively or intelligently, metaphysical; — that is, they are actually interested and concerned in the development of the oldest and most persistent branch of philosophical discipline; and no branch or school of philosophy can even begin its investigation and display of material, without a concealed or frank, but always absolute, dependence upon the positive sciences.

When, then, we hear Hegel and Trendelenburg defining phi-

PHILOSOPHY: ITS CONXEPTIOX AXD PROBLEMS 7

losophy as the " science of the Idea " ; while another writer declares that it is " the rational science of reality *' ; and yet another identifies it with the " metaphysics of the unconscious," or with a "theory of universal knowledge," or with " self-knowledge," or with the " systematic arrangement of the necessary a priori elements or factors in experience," or dubs it " the return of Metaphysic upon psychology " ; — we need not be dismayed or wholly discouraged by the failure to unite all authorities in the use of common terms to define their conception of divine philosophy. The authorities in science do not unite upon a definition of any one of the so-called " positive sciences" — not even of mathematics, the most positive of them all. Xeither has any of them a favorite theory which commands a quite universal consent. While it is notorious that if one wants an infallible expert opinion regarding some complicated, concrete case to which these principles may be applied, inquiry for it is apt to result in the increase of one's confusion of judgment.

It would be a gross violation of the spirit and method of philosophy, however, to conclude that nothing is to be learned from history about its conception and its problems. On the contrary, the vague but historically true declaration that philosophy is a term which may be used to cover all the fruits of man's reflective thinking, and that it is human to philosophize, may now be converted into certain statements more strictly defined and technically correct. History teaches us — that of the particular sciences as well as the history of philosophy — that the human mind has never been, much less is it now, satisfied with those explanations of experience which terminate in the relating, causally, and concatenating of phenomena, under terms that lay claim to more or less of mathematical exactness. The intellect seeks for some more ulterior and fundamental, for some more nearly ultimate and final, explanations of human experience. The heart craves, and the conduct of life demands, such interpretations of the Being of the physical Universe, of the natural objects and laws that are progressively revealed to human observation, and of the significance and destiny of human life, with its relation to unseen forces and agencies, as shall be in accord with humanity's most important and persistent ideals. All the positive sciences are obliged to recognize these sesthetical and quasi-moral, as well as more purely intellectual demands. Hence they are all, both in their foundations and in their upper reaches of theory and speculation, essentially philosophical. Physics and chemistry have their theory of reality as truly as does religion. The doctrine of the ether, or of the atoms, or of the ions, as the builders of the world of inorganic and organized existences as it appears in experience, is as much a system of metaphysics as was Plato's kingdom of Ideas, or Hegel's self-evolution of necessary and rational concepts. The assumptions of the physical and natural sciences, their categories and principles taken for granted, require and merit criticism, and even sceptical inquiry, as acutely and persistently as did those of the mediaeval theology. It would be a desirable and beneficent thing for human knowledge, if the experts in these sciences would themselves undertake this task of critical philosophy; just as it would have been desirable for the theologians of the Middle Ages to have looked more sceptically upon their own presuppositions and contested principles. But neither science nor theology, nor any form of the so-called "humanities," can properly claim to lie outside the domain which is to be kept open always to the critical explorations of that form of reflective thinking which is called philosophizing.

But now the question recurs: Can we define philosophy as an independent and separate science or discipline? Certainly not, in any strict meaning of the words " independent " and " separate." The attempt to do this, and thus exalt philosophy as the so-called " science of the sciences " to the position of judge and arbiter, or even of sovereign, over the particular forms of intellectual life which arrogate to themselves the title to be

•ailed scientific, has been one of the chief causes of the modern contempt and rejection of philosophy. Thus philosophy has

recently exhibited the pitiful spectacle — to borrow a phrase from Lotze — of '*' a mother wounded by her own children." But after all. this may be only a part of the general tendency of an age which exalts the young and relatively thoughtless to a supremacy over the aged and more mature. And there are some plain and gratifying signs that the hostile or negligent attitude of science and philosophy toward each other is only temporary. This attitude, indeed, must ultimately pass away; since both start in the same sources of human nature and have the same final purposes in view. Only the emphasis is different ; and also the extent to which each carries its endeavor to realize its own somewhat peculiar ideals.

We shall then understand better the true nature of philosophy if we consider more closely the relations in which it stands to the particular sciences. And here the first thing to notice ia the important and even essential and permanent resemblances of the two. As has already been indicated, both science and philosophy arise in the rational, human impulse to understand — that is, to explain and interpret — the totality of human experience. In their most successful form, both must largely employ the same method of carefully guarded and systematic reflective thinking. In order, however, to separate between the two, and thus to establish in its more modern form the claim for philosophy to have a place among the intellectual and practical interests of the race, as a somewhat independent discipline, it is necessary to emphasize further certain of their more important differences. At the same time, it can scarcely be too often repeated that these differences, no matter how much they are accentuated by the progress of both, can never render science and philosophy more than relatively independent of each other. In the first place, then, the particular sciences are distinguished from philosophy, by their standing in a more intimate relation to the phenomena, or facts of experience, and to the formulas which express the relations ascertained to exist, with more or less of uniformity, among the phenomena. It is by selecting certain groups and orders of these phenomena, and by making of them a special study, that the so-called particular sciences come to exist.

They are also sometimes called positive sciences, because they are supposed to limit themselves to undeniable affirmations of fact, abjuring all metaphysics or appeal to occult causes and to other doubtful sources of explanation. As a matter of fact, however, no form of human knowledge can render itself strictly " particular," .or separate from other branches of scientific endeavor. Each part is part of a whole. The universe is that whole; and every particular science soon finds itself involved with phenomena, and confronted by problems, which belong almost equally to the domain cultivated by some other particular science. Physics and chemistry cannot be kept wholly apart; chemistry is part of biology; biology is complicated with psychology; anthropology and sociology cannot be cultivated except in dependence upon psychology; then follow such pursuits as literature, history, law, theology, etc., which, whether we call them sciences or not, are less " particular " and " positive," because of their sharing in so many and such complex groupings of inter-related phenomena. No wonder, then, that there has never been any agreement reached as to a special scheme for the strict classification of all the so-called sciences. No wonder that the modern scientific expert strives to specialize in the knowledge of some limited class of phenomena, while at the same time paying respectful attention to what other experts have to say about facts and laws in parts overlapping his own, but in which these others have chosen to erect claims to special expert knowledge. In fact, no mining district in the West is more confused in respect of superficial and underground claims, both legitimately " staked out " and also " jumped," than are the fields of modern science.

Now, modern philosophy does not invade this field with any claim to a special part of it as its very own. It is not a " particular " science ; above all it is not " positive," in the positivistic meaning of this much-abused word. It is general; it aims to be universal. This, too, must not be understood as a claim to possess or to dominate the fields belonging to the different sciences. The philosopher does not aspire to be the president of a syndicate which shall have bought up, or grabbed, all of the separate mining claims. On the contrary, he just wishes to know how much, and what, genuine productpure gold, etc. — has been extracted and coined from them all. To translate the figure of speech: Modern philosophy, in its effort to vindicate its right to an important place in the intellectual and practical interests of the race, is a humble inquirer, sitting at the feet of the particular sciences. It has laid aside its former pride of superior lineage and larger heritage. Indeed, the aspect of modest confidence and half-expressed awe with which many youthful philosophers are looking up, as into the face of some divinity, toward the "scientist," to catch his approving though somewhat scornful smile, is not by any means always justified by the certainties of modern science as contrasted with the uncertainties of ancient philosophy. But the would-be philosopher who knows his business is well aware that the attempt to deduce the facts and laws of the positive sciences from some form of a theory of the Idea, or of the Absolute, must be forever abandoned.

Such an one knows also that philosophy must take the world as science finds it. For it is the real world, and not any merely conjectured or mightbe world, which philosophy desires to help science more profoundly to explain, more fully and satisfactorily to interpret. And since the philosopher cannot possibly become an expert knower at first hand in every branch of human knowledge, cannot carefully survey all the groups of phenomena, subject them, wherever intrinsically possible, to experimental testing, and formulate the uniform sequences and causal relations existing between them; he gratefully receives all this at the hands of the most competent authorities. Even in this way, if he aims at the completeness of the true philosophical ideal, his task is infinitely complex, and destined to ceaseless undoing, — although it may be only partial, — and to doing over again in better form by other hands. But this is only to say that philosophy, like science, is an affair of development, the conclusion of which cannot be foreseen in time; and the final form of which cannot be predicted with precision. Hence the need which modern philosophy has of the particular sciences in their modern form is urgent and indispensable. So far forth, philosophy is absolutely dependent upon the particular sciences for the material which it assumes to treat by the method of reflective thinking, in order to vindicate its own right to be regarded by these sciences as of important interest to them all.

Not only for its material, but for its method also, modern philosophy is largely indebted to the particular sciences, as they are themselves cultivated in modern form. Philosophical speculation, which has its head in heaven or in the clouds, without having its feet upon the ground, is no longer tolerable. But it cannot be forgotten that the methods of the particular sciences are themselves a comparatively modern affair. When science and philosophy were more frankly mixed, or unconsciously muddled, than they now are, unverifiable conjecture or groundless speculation were thought quite adequate to establish the opinions of each in the minds of the majority of the devotees of both. And if science is at present more insistent upon method than is philosophy, this may be due quite as much to differences in the intrinsic character of the two pursuits as to differences in the spirit and temper of those who pursue them.

Doubtless, in modern times the tables seem to have been completely turned against philosophy. And, indeed, it is not Positivism alone, of the more formal sort, which proposes entirely to dispense with philosophy. Plainly its divinity is much hedged in, wherever it is not wholly dethroned. Just about as plainly, this distrust and contempt are largely the fault of philosophers themselves. For the " mother of the sciences " has been as much discredited by the mob of the immature and unscrupulous within her household, as have the particular sciences which owe to her so largely their birth and early nurture. Perhaps the proportion of quacks is no greater in the one than in the other. At any rate, there can be little doubt that philosophy has suffered in the loss of consideration and prestige, even more than have the sciences, from sensationalism and the attempt to be interesting without being careful of exactness and truthfulness, as setting the standards of the highest success. Just as we once heard one of the world's greatest mathematicians say that no person ought to deal with the conceptions and formulas of the higher mathematics, who did not appreciate and revel in their beauty; so do we think that no one has any business to undertake the technical pursuit of philosophy who does not have, and keep, the serious and reverent spirit toward its conceptions and its problems. If there is any kind of human undertaking for which one ought to prepare one's self by thinking soberly, long, and hard, it is writing or speaking on philosophy.

It is only necessary, however, to understand, even superficially, the nature and achievements of the modern so-called positive sciences, in order to discover how the tables may again be turned. For, indeed, their need of more sound philosophy is very evident and very great. In fact, the whole body of them is either penetrated with, or incorporated of, the products of reflective thinking, — and this, in philosophy's most despised branch of metaphysics. That this is necessarily so, and how it is so, will be made clearer when we come to treat of metaphysics as including every assumption, however unverifiable, and every theory, however scientific, which deals with the nature and relations of what we call " real," or " actual," whether of things or of minds. Even to mention this fact with regard to the most ordinary and approved doings of the workmen in the different particular sciences is to call attention to two important offices for science in general which philosophy may fulfill. In the first place, it may criticize the categories, or fundamental conceptions of the particular sciences. In the second place, it may criticize the syntheses of the particular sciences, and may supplement them by, or even substitute for them, syntheses of its own.

How naively, and even confusedly, current scientific conceptions are employed, becomes abundantly evident to the most superficial inquirer. In vain have the authors of scientific treatises striven hitherto in their efforts to agree precisely upon what they mean by their terms as applied to actual events and real existences. The right of each author or investigator in science or philosophy to define for himself the conceptions which he proposes consistently to attach to the terms he uses, need not be contested. But the claim that he is using them in the way most appropriate to the correct functioning of the human mind, and to the truths of nature's processes and laws, always admits of further critical examination. Moreover, the underlying assumption of the student of any positive science is that his conceptions and conclusions may be brought into some kind of harmony with the conceptions and conclusions of the students of other and kindred positive sciences. If, therefore, science will undertake, and carry to a successful issue, the criticism of its own categories, with all the metaphysical implicates which these categories involve, no one else should greet the achievement' with so supreme satisfaction as the devotee of philosophy. But such work of criticism requires a profound knowledge of psychology, logic, the theory of knowledge, and metaphysics. And why a mind equally gifted and equally studious should not acquire, by life-long devotion, some technical skill and superiority of method and achievement, in these subjects, as well as in those treated by the physical and natural sciences, it is difficult to see. We conclude, then, that modern science pre-eminently needs modern philosophy for the criticism of its own (as of all) categories.

Another urgent need of philosophy by science is closely connected with the foregoing. The positive sciences do not stop, and ought not to stop, to consider the nature, laws, limits and guaranty of all knowledge. They have neither the right, nor the duty, to be sceptical as to the possibility of discovering the actual facts and true causes (verae causae) of what they regard as an " external " and independently existent " Nature." The proper scientific attitude toward natural phenomena is one of naive trust or unquestioning confidence. To express it in more strictly philosophical terms, the scientific attitude toward natural phenomena is that of common-sense realism. But all the assumptions of this attitude, and all its conclusions with reference to the essential nature and ultimate meaning of the physical universe, are profoundly affected by the opinions which one holds with regard to the nature, laws, limits, and guaranty of all knowledge. A critical investigation here is undertaken by another branch of philosophy, which calls itself epistemology, or theory of knowledge.