Life as reality; a philosophical essay

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A PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAY

BY ARTHUK STONE DEWING

Copyright, 1910

BY

ARTHUR S. DEWING

THE SCIENTIFIC PRESS

NEW YORK

TO

WHO FIRST TAUGHT MB TO LOOK FOR REALITY

Contents

PAGE

I. Life and Nature 1

II. Experience and the Realist .... 18

Foreword

Some years ago I was asked by a friend, while we were climbing old Kearsarge, to defend a system of idealism which gave full value to the will-strivings of our life-interests without degenerating into crude individualism. That reality could be denned in some such terms had been my thesis, — and it is the thesis of the present essay. This little incident occurred several years ago, but in the intervening time, while struggling to make myself clear, I have become the more convinced than ever that reality, for us human beings, is revealed directly through the impulses, the strivings, the purposes of our life and only indirectly through the vast world of objects and facts that pass in ceaseless stream before the eye of consciousness. It is in the effort and not at the goal that we must search for the real.

I have followed the method of trial and error in this search. After stating the problem of the final reality in the opening chapter, I have

inquired what the material world and science

ix x FOREWORD

have to offer by way of solution. Later the problem shifts to the realm of the moral law, to society, to the religious experience, and to the various conceptions of philosophic truth. In all these spheres of relative value, we find that the underlying reality is revealed in the self-expression of life. In the eighth chapter, "Life as Reality," — the crux of the book, — I have striven to state my main contention. The last two chapters show the application of this main thesis of the "one" of philosophy, and to the "many" of our practical, everyday life. To the whole idealistic trend of our modern world, my debt is obvious, most especially, I presume, to the imperial genius of Kant.

Cambridge, February 13, 1910.

The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.

— Byron

It is natural for the human mind to seek for ultimate reasons. Our ordinary, everyday activities require that we reach some working understanding of what our life means to us. We believe in the existence of the objects of sense experience; we believe in the existence of our own consciousness, and we have an almost involuntary belief in the existence of great moral forces in our world. We hold to these simple faiths without ordinarily admitting them to any more critical analysis than is given in everyday experience. Yet with all this simple assurance in the elementary beliefs, there comes a time when either of our own wish or by force of circumstance we must subject them to criticism. At this point the problem of reality presses forward. We want to know whether our sense-world is ultimately real, or only a modification of consciousness; we want to know in what sense our own moral life has a place in the order of the world, and to what extent it squares with the final value of the universe. Religion, too, pushes forward its own questions. We are outgrowing the time-honored dogmas of our fathers and blazing out new paths of our own through a wilderness of doubt and criticism. Here we must have a firm understanding of the true values of the religious consciousness in order to distinguish what is permanent in religion from what is only temporary. All these and a thousand other questions of daily moment require that we straightway face the problem of reality and determine what is ultimate in the varied wealth of our experience.

In the truest sense we are all philosophers. We can never close our eyes to the world in which we are living. We are all like Kasselas: whether we would or not, we must go forth into a living world and meet the issues of a living reality face to face. Hume preferred to play backgammon beside his huge kitchen fireplace than to amuse himself with his own speculation, and the record of some human achievement appealed to him far more than the subtleties of cause and effect. Life cannot be interpreted as a fixed mould into which our experiences fall with a kind of predetermined certainty. Reality comes only through actual living. Experiences are nothing, moral efforts count for nothing, religious aspirations signify nothing except as they have a depth of reality to the conscious being who knows and feels them.

This search for a final truth in our world is a vital question notwithstanding the sophistry of logic into which it often degenerates. All that we attend to, all that interests us, all that we hope and pray for, is built upon the assumption that we believe something in the universe is real. We feel that this reality is intimately associated with our actual lives, either as the values of our moral, social, or religious consciousness, or as the material world of external experience. We believe in our inner life and we believe in outer nature. These two truths stand out clearly. One is the simple unquestioned reality of our own consciousness, the inextinguishable belief that we as conscious beings think and feel and stand for some value in the universe. The other truth is nature, — the belief in the reality of the vast world of material objects lying outside our own consciousness but somehow akin to it. Life is personal, in the truest sense individual. Nature is impersonal, in the truest sense universal. Life is grasped immediately through activity, through feeling; life is life only so far as it is lived. Nature is known only by means of the senses; it has a far-away character, a sort of impersonal fixity never to be confused with the inner feeling of life.

These two realms of reality, life and nature, appear mutually exclusive, — we cannot live nature nor observe life through the senses. We cannot even know of the universe that surges about us except through the indirect testimony of external experience. Nor, on the other hand, can we sense life itself as a living reality. We cannot measure it by objective standards and compress it into the sense-forms of our own objective experience. Life leads us within to our own personal feelings, to the very font of our beings; nature leads us without to the clearly defined world of sense experience. There can be no confusion between the two, because the contrast is as deep and fundamental as anything within the grasp of our minds.

This contrast between life and nature is directly revealed in consciousness. Life is a matter of value; nature is a matter of fact. Life means to the living personality a continual testing of things done and things undone, of successes and of failures, of efforts, struggles and ideals. Life stands as a symbol for all this wealth of subjective imagery, for the inner meaning of what we only vaguely feel. The problem of nature is not one of values, it is one of fact. Sense experience carries with it a blind certainty and the facts of nature come to us with the stubborn resistance of a reality alien to our own consciousness. They must be accepted as true in our understanding of the world that surrounds us. This certainty is the first presupposition of the natural sciences.

Different periods of the world's history have emphasized either one or the other of these two problems. Human speculation resembles the swing of a huge pendulum, — one age worships subjective life, another objective nature. The old bards of the Vedic hymns far away in an unknown land saw, with a prophetic vision, the problem of the world as a problem of life. They were the first idealists. Their voice resounds through the centuries, — the world of reality is within, it is life. In the ancient city of Miletus, rich and opulent, where the wealth of Persia and the industry of the Ionian Greeks met, Thales first taught a philosophy of material reality. The beginning and the end of all things is water; this, of all the world, is real. Great wealth fosters a belief in the final reality of nature because then men look for human values in the material stimulus rather than in the subjective satisfaction. But this passes away. A century or so later the philosophy of nature of the early Greeks was replaced by the philosophy of mind of Anaxagoras and Plato. The Greek genius had tested the reality of the material world and found it dependent on the flux, of human consciousness. It craved the reality that is centered in man. The rhythmic pulse of human thought vacillates between a philosophy of nature and a philosophy of life.

But now our own age is naturalistic. We have learned through practical tests to gauge our knowledge by our conquest over natural forces. We have little interest in understanding the springs and currents of human values. These are too subtle, too little capable of practical reckoning to interest a materialistic age. Science has taught us to seek for truth beyond consciousness. It has taught us to objectify truths It would even throw life on a screen and lead us to mistake the image for the reality, the centrosomes and the lines of amphiaster for the living protoplasm. Our immediate interests make science the revelation of God to man.

Judging from its practical results, science is worthy of this confidence. It has harnessed natural forces, predicted the complex phenomena of wind and storm; it has read the composition of distant stars and measured the energy of the electron. Upward of a hundred years ago one of the most eminent scientists of modern times prophesied that chemistry would never be a true science because its facts could not be correlated with mathematics. To-day chemistry is in the forefront of the physical sciences and it has long since learned to predict its phenomena with mathematical accuracy. A few years ago the principles of inheritance were as mysterious as ever; to-day they are unfolding their secrets to the pupils of Mendel and Darwin. All this is true, but it is not all.

We call our age practical because it idealizes the material or else materializes life. We interpret the conquest of science over our physical environment as if in the problem of nature lay the problem of reality. We have drawn the vitality out of life in order to measure its world. But it is not so simple as we would make it, because the whole of reality is not exhausted by our knowledge of nature. The things for which men and society have sought and struggled for are not the things of scientific moment. On the contrary, they are the intangible principles of life and liberty, of moral vigor and religious fervor, which cannot be materialized into facts and formulas. They are real, notwithstanding, and the world is dead without them. Even our practical age must give to the values of life their place in reality, for the problem of reality is a problem of poise. It is psychologically a balance between the impulse to interpret life in terms of nature and the impulse to interpret nature in terms of life. Logically it is a balance of ultimate principles of reason. In either case it is first a problem of value, the value of life in the mechanism of nature and of nature in the reality of life.

The materialism of our modern world may have accomplished much. It has not, however, understood the significance of its own achievements because it has not seen that the reality of nature is borrowed from life, which alone is real. Centuries ago Socrates plead with the youth of Athens to forsake the vain search for a material universal and find first the universal of consciousness and life. Nature is forever external to us, life and the moral world are close at hand. The old Greek saw a chaos of conflicting opinions struggling for vantage ground. He saw men looking for wisdom outside of themselves, when the true wisdom lies in life. Socrates did not appreciate, perhaps, the wonderful future that lay in store for the physical sciences, but he saw clearly that men must understand themselves before they understand their world. And to-day, notwithstanding the achievements of the sciences, the reality of the inner world of life is as certain as when the grand old man taught it to his faithful pupils in the prison opposite the Areopagus. Science has changed since Socrates lived, but his philosophy of life has not.

Science can give us no insight into that life which to understand we must feel. The objectworld of fact and certainty, of law and order, has a borrowed kind of reality; it is this that furnishes the inspiration and the limitations of science. The inner world of life activity has its truer values. It can never come within the range of scientific observation for the simple reason that it can never be objectified. It cannot even be described, for description can deal only with what can be portrayed to another, and life as a living reality can be known only as it is lived. Science can never instill into her clear-cut formulas the intimacy and the vitality which makes the experience real to the human being that experiences. Her ghostly forms of a dead reality can neither think nor speak; they can only express the outer shell of what was, never the living germ of what is. At best they are the protoplasm congealed, the ashes of the fire quenched.

Here lies the difficulty of all our human speculation. The reality which we want to express because it is the reality within our own consciousness is not the reality which we actually do express by any means within our power. The world of external sense-experience and formal law is not the deeply felt reality of our own life. The value worth knowing is this reality of life, but no sooner does it become articulate than it loses its vital character and shrinks into the dead images of objective experience. We try to hold to the reality of our life. But in trying to express this it fades away and something else looms up in its stead. We know what reality is, but we cannot make another feel what we mean by it. We cannot throw it into the forms with which we are accustomed to deal with our sense images. Nor, on the other hand, can we bring science up to the level of life, in spite of the rude efforts of the psychical and the social sciences. It is here that such subjects as psychology and sociology fail in their endeavor to explain vital processes. They may construct laws, they may theorize regarding the psychophysical parallelism or the structure of consciousness or a thousand other things, but these have at most merely an academic interest. They remain forever objective to our consciousness; they never make us feel that they are concerned with, something real and vital to us. They do not bridge the chasm; they do not explain one syllable of life as a living reality.

Science fails to express more than an objective copy. Literature and art believe they can strike nearer home. Literature seeks to portray some phase of the multiform variety of human feeling, its strivings, its passions, its ideals, but at best these are always interpretations of what cannot be made articulate and recorded on paper. Lady Macbeth, Othello and Lear may speak in the words of Shakespeare's genius, but they are dead unless their emotions are understood in terms of what life means to every one of us. Literature does not give us a living reality, it merely supplies the rough clay into which we breathe the vital spark. And other arts, like painting and sculpture, do no better. They see the emotional striving for a finished perfection and seek to embody this in a form appreciable to sense experience, but find that the living spirit has vanished as soon as the object of art is created. They can give us, it is true, the vague shadows of a living reality, but these shadows reach no nearer the fountainhead of art's inspiration than the dead formulas of science. As a whole, art fails even worse than science, because its error is more subtly veiled. Science advances no claim of omniscience; it would include only nature. What cannot be expressed as object it passes over knowing full well that there is a kind of truth it may not touch without blighting. But art, vain, fervid, impulsive, rushes into the innermost recesses of life. It would grasp the secret and transfigure it into some permanent form of reality. But the congealed life which it brings forth to the light of day is as dead and essentially meaningless as the crude and imperfect descriptions of science. In no way have either art or science succeeded in bridging the chasm between life and nature. Yet the bridge must be crossed, else life and nature are nothing to one another.

If the mere statement of a problem is all that is demanded for its understanding, then the contrast between life and nature has brought into the foreground as deep and permanent a problem as our human powers may hope to grasp. But the statement of the contrast is not enough. Our mind revolts at any chasm between the two fields of reality. We demand with a childish feverishness that our universe be a true universe. We want to know and to understand the relations which seem to subsist between life and nature. Moreover, we revolt at any inordinately complex and subtle theory of metaphysics. Life and the experiences of nature lie close at hand. There is nothing more directly certain than these two great realities, — why, then, refer them back to some unknown cause veiled in the obscurity of metaphysical dialectic? The philosophy of our modern world is simple, almost childish; it is akin to the animism of the old savage who saw himself in the great soul of nature. We have outgrown, perhaps unfortunately, the figurative play of his imagination, but we have not outgrown the utter simplicity of his philosophy. We want the most direct means for understanding life and nature, because life and nature are themselves so simple and so immediate.

No end is achieved by inventing some supreme universal, neither life nor nature, where all contrasts are obliterated in a vague, gray indifference. The fashion of philosophy and theology to explain the known facts of consciousness by some unknown principle of universal reality leads only to confusion. The Infinite Being of Parmenides, the Mystic One of Plotinus, the God of Erigina, the Substance of Spinoza, the Absolute Indifference of Schelling, and the Unknowable of Spenfer are all alike in their unintelligibihty. Under different names, among different peoples the old fascination for explaining the known by the unknown has occurred and reoccurred. But yet these Absolutes, one and all, either have meaning to our consciousness, in which case they are part of the interests of our life, or else they mean nothing and are no more than words, mere words signifying nothing. The Absolute, or whatever else we call reality, must be intimately related to life and to the human experience of external nature, because such a conception exists solely to make life and nature clearer. The Supreme Mystic One has no significance as a background of reality simply because it occupies so exalted a place that the everyday facts of our mind cannot reach it. We are compelled to interpret reality by the simple evidence of our own human consciousness. What is either so individual or so subtle as to claim for itself a place beyond life and nature can have no place in reality. Bather is it true that unless God or any other conception of ultimate reality can meet the values of human appreciation, unless it can be interpreted to our mind, it is in no sense real.

"Man is the measure of all things" has rung through the ages, an echo of what was taught along the banks of the Ilissus. But man's measure of things is relative and not absolute; the very purposes by which he would measure his "all things" are themselves measured. They are relative. He looks out upon the world of material objects, that he believes himself able to pattern after his own mind; he would shape dead nature into a living image of himself. True, he does it; but is he himself not a part of what is shaped? Must we not go deeper than the external form of our ordinary purposes and efforts to discover reality? All the experiences which press upon consciousness, and all the struggles and moral purposes of life make us believe that there is a reality somewhere. This is the lesson of modern idealism, but it is only half the truth. The rest consists in finding what this reality is.

Life and the experience of external nature are known to us in terms of our human consciousness. Whatever is real, whatever has significance, is reflected there, for out of human consciousness in some form must come that which is real to us human beings. The untold richness through which the life which is lived and the nature which is known are borne into human consciousness, is not without depth and purpose. We demand a reason for ourselves and for our world. Many are the possibilities which rise into the foreground, many are the efforts to establish the reality of life and nature on a permanent foundation. We shall examine each in its turn. Sense-experience, science, happiness, the moral law, society, and religion each has its claim, each has its contribution to offer to the totality of human values, each believes itself the final reality in a universe of law and purposes. Beneath and beyond all stands the reality of life.

II

To Truth's house there is a single door Which is experience.

— Bayard Taylor

The reality of nature is revealed to us through sense experience. If, therefore, we are to find ultimate truth and reality within the range of external nature, it must in some way be based on the evidence of our senses. As distinguished from our own consciousness we can in a measure regard the sense world as an independent region of causal sequences having a dignity and an ultimate truth peculiar to itself. There is an insistent certainty about experience which pleads its own cause. We must believe in it. There is, therefore, every reason for beginning a search for the reality of life and nature in nature itself. Such a theory of reality is in truth a realism, for it asserts, with no small degree of modesty, that reality is found crouching beneath our ordinary sense impressions. Reality is outside consciousness in the world of physical objects, a world that is true because it is forever pressing inward on the mind with an insistency that involves belief. The stern facts of sense do not lie. Their truth is the truth of an everlasting reality beyond and above our own varying consciousness.

Kealism as a theory of real existence is directly built on the assumption that sense-experiences lead to a true reality. We know nothing of material reals except as they are manifest through sense impressions. There is the test, there is the fulcrum by which alone the reason may enter into possession of the world of external nature. Experience can give us only a theory of knowledge; realism is a theory of reality. Yet the one is bound up in the other, — the ultimate reality of external nature stands or falls with our analysis of experience. The first step in any understanding of reality is in the direction of an understanding of the character and sources of our knowledge. Experience must plead its own cause.

Often are we told that in the given experience there is an immediacy and a finality beneath which our ordinary human consciousness cannot penetrate. We are told that experience is simple;

it must point to something ultimate. We all feel an innate confidence in experience; we attach to its decisions a strength and a vigor which no other authority, whatever may be its character, can quite repudiate. Since the days of Bacon and Locke the scientific mind of all the world has turned to experience as the supreme court of appeal, for by her evidence all things human reach a final decision. She has no wily ways to lead astray men's minds. "A fact is a fact, an experience is an experience," — so runs the golden rule of the empiricist. Here truth begins, here it ends.

This, in a word, is the creed of the empiricist. He is a self-satisfied, eminently practical individual, always right, not by virtue of any wisdom of his own, but because of his unbounded confidence in his mistress. He never doubts in his own name, but always in the name of his oracle. His doubts are never true doubts, they are only echoes of what experience might say. His mental poise is never ruffled, he never feels the sting of uncertainty that sometimes falls to the lot of his less confident brethren. Every one of us has been an empiricist at some period of life. It is a larval stage through which we all pass, so simple and naively fascinating is the world of sense certainty. The stage, however, is not permanent. A child breaks open its toy in order to see for himself its mechanism. So it is with all of us; there comes a time when our simple confidence in the unvarying certainty of the sense world is no longer self-satisfying and we find ourselves, too, inquiring what is this experience to which our confidence is so firmly shackled.

The belief in the reality of nature rests on sensations. The experience of the bit of paper is to each one of us a composite group of sensations, — whiteness, evenness, shape, contour, stiffness, pliability, toughness, etc. In all this description, it will be observed that we never have before us directly, in an immediate manner, the experience of this one bit of paper. The experience stands as a complex of sensations associated together because they all occur at one point in our consciousness. Even the single sensation is not immediately itself and nothing else. The paper is white, but is not whiteness associated with snow, clouds, cloth, mosques, and a thousand other objects? And in a similar way every other quality by which the paper is sensed as an object of experience belongs to many other objects quite different in character from the paper. The sensations, immediate though they seem, are, therefore, only the common elements among experiences.

Qualities do not inhere within a single experience; they are part and parcel of many. No sense experience can ever come to consciousness which is not both itself and also the common quality of a thousand other experiences. It is by means of these common qualities, whiteness, roundness, smoothness, and the like, that experience becomes intelligible to our consciousness. These and similar qualities knit our world of sense impressions into a closely woven whole. We see nature not as a series of disconnected objects. We see it rather as an interrelated whole, with the web-lines running in all directions. All this is not new. It was pointed out centuries ago by the Platonic Socrates, and its truth is as certain now as then.

The interrelatedness of all experiences through the common qualities of the sensations points to the importance of the conscious mind, where alone relations have their place of abode. Nor can this be disproved by a certain type of modern empiricist who claims that relations, like sense-objects, can be immediately sensed. " Whiteness " and "complexity" cannot be directly experienced in the same way as "white paper" and "machine," for relations develop as the mind develops. They are genetic like consciousness. Whiteness, as a relation among objects, is different for you at one age from what it is at another, and much more are such relations as complexity the direct result of mental activity. They depend on training and insight, which are characters in no sense empirical, unless the empiricist stretches the meaning of his term out of all proportion to the significance in which he ordinarily uses it. Mechanical complexity is quite a different relation to the trained mechanic than what it is to one untrained, notwithstanding it may be excited by looking at the same machine. The relations are not static; they are constituted through our life's interest and the grasp of our mind. The sheet of paper and the mosque of Djedid have no connection in themselves, yet through the common quality of whiteness the mind is able to bring them into a single class. This association does not He in the paper nor in the mosque, nor does it spring full- armed from the forehead of a creator. It is due rather to an attitude of our will activity. The whiteness is not crude passiveness. Nothing in the world is quite that. It stands for something which responds to my life purpose in a particular way. It is a bit of raw material which my will reacts to and translates into something intelligible. The understanding of experience, with the assortment and arrangement which my consciousness involves, is nothing but a retroactive process by which those values of my life which I define for myself from moment to moment become crystallized in an objective world.