Dynamic idealism

Front matter

■''■'• 111

K llliiy

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Preface

THE following chapters, as has been indicated on the titlepage, are made up from material used in a university lecture-room, but the impulse to put the substance of the lectures into the form of a book really came from another source. A year ago I gave six lectures upon subjects from psychology, before the Twentieth Century Club of Detroit; and the certain difficulties as well as the apparent successes that I met with in those lectures led me into the writing of this book.

Accordingly, throughout the ensuing pages I have had in mind, as my possible readers, those who are not strictly technical students in psychology, and on their account I have tried to avoid the more serious technicalities. The subject, however, is a deep one, and it deepens as it goes. So let me confess here that, while always courting both brevity and simplicity and often using extremely popular and large-written illustrations, I have not always refrained from vi PREFACE.

saying, as occasion has offered, even what has seemed likely to be of interest only to psychological specialists.

My standpoint is also indicated on the titlepage, at least in part. Not only am I heartily in sympathy with such thinkers to-day as insist that psychology without metaphysics is useless, if not absurd, but also I go to the extent of believing that real psychology is metaphysics. I have, therefore, whenever considering a psychological theory, been more interested in its relation to Dualism or to Monism — that is to say, in its metaphysical implications — than in any of its mere external details. For example, the physiological or the paidological statement of any fact or process, or the abstract statement from any other field of inquiry, has always seemed to me to be subordinate to the metaphysical principle. Only the metaphysical principle can make any fact or any process really concrete.

And, finally, in special illustration of my predilection for metaphysics, I may say that I have felt that the first duty of psychology was to give a distinct, explicit doctrine of the soul. Psychology must not and cannot tarry any longer at either the body or the mind alone, nor even at both together. " Science of the soul," the

PREFACE. vii

old-fashioned definition, which has been scorned or discreetly neglected by modern rationalism, is, after all, the true definition. Perhaps, however, the scorn has meant only the passing of a certain idea of the soul ; and in recognition of such a possibility I have usually employed the more general term, " self," for the soul-reality. Surely there is a soul-reality, whether there be a " soul " or not.

A. H. L.

Contents

PAGE

Introduction "

part i. THE WORLD OF THINGS

HAPTER

I. Part and Whole 35

II. Change 48

III. Organism 54

IV. The Body 59

V. The Outer World 75

VI. The Two-faced Object, or Language . . 87 part 11.

THE WORLD OF IDEAS.

VII. Ideas as Forms

VIII. Historical Illustration 107

IX. Ideas not Forms but Forces m

X. Illustrations from Education 123

XI. Body, Mind, Soul 129

XII. Time I47

XIII. A Summary: Dynamic vs. Formal Idealism 158

XIV. Consciousness as Interest 166

XV. Thought and Language 178

CONTENTS.

part in.

THE WORLD OF ACTS.

PAGE

CHAPTER

XVI. Reaction or Interaction? 197

XVII. Will 2 °9

XVIII. The Living Ideal .219

Appendix: A Study of Immortality in Outline 227 Index 2 45

DYNAMIC IDEALISM.

Introduction

PSYCHOLOGY, the special science through which in this book an entrance is to be made into the field of philosophy, has been defined in many ways, but the best definition, or at least the best introductory definition, runs as follows : Psychology is science of the soul.

A science is a classification of facts, or of what are supposed to be facts. It is organized knowledge. The classification of facts, however, or the organization of knowledge, is hardly aimless. Science does not by any means end with itself, is never only for science's sake. Men have often appeared to think that science as a body of knowledge was its own end, but obviously to think so for long is quite impossible. Science leads to something.

It is accordingly well worth while to recognize at the start the end or aim of science. Thus, any particular science is a body of knowledge which defines — that is, which relates and co-ordinates — the incidents or conditions of some process or activity. Physics defines the conditions of a so-called physical process, such as heat or light or electricity; biology, those of what we call organic growth; ethics, those of personal conduct in society: and the process or the activity, the incidents of whose expression are defined in a science, is the end of the science itself.

But although in general the end of a science is some process or activity, an important distinction has to be made. Some sciences have for their end an activity which belongs, or seems for a time to belong, to a sphere quite apart from the scientist, while others would free the activity of the scientist himself. The former are called objective or, in the more general use of the term, physical ; the latter, subjective. The former seek an answer to the question, How does the world about us act? the latter to the question, How do we, and so how can we, act? Psychology, most properly regarded, is the subjective science.

Still, objective science and subjective science are related in a way very important to remark. Thus psychology cannot but be the centre of all science. The statement was made above that the objective sciences were interested in the expression of activities that belonged, or for a time seemed to belong, to a sphere quite apart from the scientist ; but every one must recognize that the activities are never really apart. Sooner or later an objective science comes to be applied, and with the application the scientist makes the activity, that had seemed so apart from him, his own. The so-called application of science always realizes an identity of physical process and personal activity. It shows man finding his own life in the world's life. So, to repeat, because objective sciences are concerned with processes or activities that in point of fact are not external but are destined in time to belong to the self, they are themselves as to their centre subjective or psychological.

Another definition of psychology now presents itself, — a definition which in the first place recognizes that the natural aim of the science is an activity, and, in the second place, makes all the physical sciences also psychological. Instead of saying simply that psychology is science of the soul, we have now to say, Psychology is science of self-expression. This definition makes psychology more than mere abstract knowledge, since it gives to knowledge a real motive-power ; and it precludes any separation of the self and the world, since the expressed self is always the self identified in activity with the world, or, in a commoner phrase, adjusted to the world. But, again, psychology is the body of knowledge that so defines the conditions of the life of the self as to liberate the self's activity. As has been said, it answers the question, How does man, and therefore how can man, express himself? It is not, as many have tried to make it, a merely ontological science ; nor is it a merely epistemological science : it is distinctly a biological science. It is not interested in the self only as being, in the self as a substantially and independently existing soul ; nor yet in the self only as knowing, in the self as mere mind: it is interested in the self as living and doing. Clearly the self as doing both is and knows.

The purely ontological psychology has long been dismissed from a truly responsible philosophy, but the epistemological psychology, which assumes that knowledge or consciousness in general is somehow a distinct and separate state of the self, and accordingly a state to be explained wholly within itself, still holds sway over thinkers of the day. The former belonged to a time when theology was the predominating interest, a world quite aloof from this being supposed to be both the source and the goal of mankind ; and the latter, resulting from the reaction that set in so strongly toward the close of the eighteenth century, has belonged to a time given over to naturalism, to rationalism, to knowledge for knowledge's sake, to consciousness as something to be sought and cherished solely for its own clearness. But a new interest has already asserted itself in our time, an interest in expression or fulfilment instead of in mere being or in mere knowing; and in obedience to this interest psychology has been finally defined here, not ontologically as science of the soul, nor epistemologically as science of mind or of the self's sentient or conscious life, but biologically as science of self-expression or self- adjustment. The self as doing, as in expression, be it said once more, both is and knows. Action fulfils soul and mind as not two but one.

It goes almost without saying that the new interest of the present time carries with it a new idea of the soul itself. Were one to ask a number of persons what the soul or self is, the answers would be many. Some of them, too, would be very vague, as, for example, that the soul was life, or the body, or God in us, or unity, or the absolutely commonplace. But answers that were clear and at all definite, and that were born of any insight into the spirit of the present time, would show a remarkable sympathy with that old-time thinker Aristotle. Aristotle, also living when man's life had reached or at least was approaching a culminating period, a moment of fulfilment, regarded the soul as a function of something. For him, as for us to-day, the soul was the fulfilment of the world, the perfection of the body. An " entelechy " he called it. As the pianist is the perfection of his piano, having quite within himself just the nature that the piano requires for the realization of the end to which it is a means ; as the mechanic is the fulfilment of his peculiar tools and materials, being, so to speak, a sort of walking embodiment of his special environment, being the very activity that expresses the nature or meaning of his environment; so, in general, the soul is the perfection or fulfilment of the world, the self is the entelechy of the body. Wholly in accord with Aristotle are such timely accounts of the self as that it is an animated experience, a responsible agent, a defined but liberated force. The pianist or the mechanic or the philanthropist is describable in any one of these ways. The walking-stick or the walkingleaf, in its embodiment and expression of the conditions of its life, conspicuously illustrates what modern thought finds in Aristotle's idea, being nothing more nor less than the soul of its peculiar surroundings.

So the soul or self to-day is not some entity, spiritual in character in the sense of being altogether immaterial, but an intimate function of the world in which it finds itself. The self is both in and of the world, responsible to the world and dependent upon it. Psychology is science of the expression of a self that does but show forth in its acts the meaning of the world, the inner truth of the natural universe. In short, the world's activity — that is the self, that is the soul.

But, furthermore, there is the fact of consciousness. The self not only is, but also is conscious. Indeed, at least for psychology, consciousness is the self's chief characteristic, although, as must be kept in mind, not the only characteristic or not an isolated characteristic. Consciousness certainly does not inhere in mind as a separate part of the self, but is vitally incident, is essential in the activity of the self as a whole. Just as in physical science we should not separate the phenomenon of friction from that of motion, so in psychology we should not separate the selfs consciousness from the self's activity. Indeed, if one understands friction forwhatit really is, consciousness might itself be styled a form of friction, since it is born with the tension of self-expression.

Recent science, whether as psychology or as biology, has concluded that life and consciousness are coextensive, that where one is the other must be also. This conclusion has been reached with much reluctance, since the necessities of thought have not been verified with perfect satisfaction to all in the outer world ; but it is self-evident that in an outer world such a conclusion never could be verified. Unconsciousness is a natural predicate of anything external. As Romanes has put the matter, however, the criteria of life and the criteria of consciousness are identical, and they must be so. Of the two each one must presuppose the other. Thus, in simple phrases, life can be present only where there is capacity of a selfinterested response to an outer stimulus, that is, only where the stimulus to an action answers to some already developed motive or " functional tendency; " and consciousness is but the apprehension of, or the interest in, such a stimulus. Without consciousness life is impossible.

The common view that consciousness is something added at a certain time to the altogether separate condition of life, at the time, say, of the transition from plant to animal life, may satisfy those who limit consciousness to certain forms of experience, but it is very far from satisfying the reflective thinkers who seek the general principle of life to which the mere fact of consciousness as such must testify. It may serve a short-sighted classification to say that plants only live, while animals are also conscious, but it shuts wholly from view both what life really is and what consciousness really is. Nothing ever is what any particular form, or group of forms, of its expression would seem to have it. And the case in hand grows only the more difficult when the peculiar self-consciousness of man is put on trial. Plants live, it is said ; animals are also conscious, although only passively so ; but men think, being self-conscious, actively conscious, constructively and relationally conscious. Yet such distinctions, while not without meaning, can only rather hinder than help the understanding. If it is true that wherever there is life there is consciousness, it is also true that wherever there is consciousness there is thought. What is thought in its simplest nature but the use of consciousness for some act of adjustment? In all life, however, even in the very lowest, such a use is manifest. A passive consciousness, a consciousness that is not seeking adjustment, is a contradiction of terms that can be matched only by an unconscious life. Yes, if we will but interest ourselves in principles, freeing our minds for a time from the notions of ordinary life, we can say to ourselves with conviction that even plants are conscious and that the very animals think.

The true thinker must of course always pass quite beyond the understanding of ordinary life. He cannot use terms as he finds them used about him. In fact, in a very real sense his duty is to use them differently, that is, more deeply and more widely, with reference to their underlying meanings instead of to their obvious or superficial applications. " True," he may, for example, say to his fellows, " you and I are conscious, and we are alive, and we think withal, but quite apart from our life and our consciousness in themselves what are these things that we possess? What is thought? What is consciousness? What is life itself?" And then he gets an answer to his questions which discloses the very things into whose nature he has inquired in places where formerly he had been sure they were not. In general, merely to think is to find the identity of a thing and its negative; and this one needs always to remember when the conclusions of science seem hostile to cherished preconceptions. Hostility is itself no evidence of truth, but also it is veryfar from being a mark of error. A deep-thinking science must always shock one's settled views, but so at first must any brighter light dazzle if it does not wholly blind the eyes. New light always begins by being a greater darkness. The thinker himself finds his new thought at once true and unreal. So, again, even plants are conscious and the very animals think; but not for such of us as live the passive thoughtless life of plants and animals, only for those among us who think too.

In pages to follow the coextensiveness and inseparableness, indeed, the virtual identity of life and consciousness and thought, will be an important interest. Now, consciousness is of something, it has an object; and a preliminary view of the object of consciousness is desirable. In general, the object is the conscious self's environment, being that of which the self is the fulfilment and embodiment. In a very real sense the object is only the self or subject over again. In the single case of man, whose objective environment is the world of the sensuous qualities, — colors, tastes, smells, sounds, and the like, — the identity of subject and object is apparent enough. Man must say of the object's qualities that they are rather his states than its peculiar properties. In them he does but become aware of himself. Even at the moment when he ascribes them to the not-self he finds their identity with the self. The red rose a dozen feet away is red and distant to his peculiar eye and according to his effort, implied if not expressed, to reach it. The quality of any sort in his outer world can interest and stimulate him only if it answer to some motive that is already his. In its sensuous quality, in its spatial character, even in the material nature whereby it has substantiality, it is he or his, being related to him or of his nature, and real only as he is real, changing as he changes, its structure or order only reflecting his organization, and its law being only the measure of his power. We study human history in the languages and institutions and monuments of all sorts that have risen in the wake of man's progress, but languages and institutions and monuments are only the peculiar environment, or object, of what we know as historic man. Psychology sees not a different object, but the same object in its more general characters, in the characters which record a deeper and a longer history. The whole outer world, as we have it now about us, in all its wonderful nature and with all its lawfulness, has also risen in the wake of the progress of man, or, let us say, in order to be quite broad and inclusive, in the wake of intelligent life as a whole ; and even as languages and monuments, as if an outer counterpart or even a " negative " of his nature, are but man over again, so the outer world, in those most general characteristics to which the psychologist looks, is man too. What seems not-self is only the reverse of self.

But this is not all that is to be said of the object of consciousness, even in an introductory chapter. This alone would be sure to be misunderstood. The object of consciousness carries with it larger implications than what has been already indicated. Thus it is a common experience among us, when we see or feel anything without, when belief in a reality in any sense beyond or external seizes upon us, in the first place to feel a more or less definite responsibility to a more far-reaching life than our own, and in the second place to get a sense of companionship in that responsibility with other living creatures ; and this common experience only bears witness to a general principle. Larger responsibility, and that a shared or a social responsibility, is an essential implication of objectivity in general ; and being this it must serve as a means to further interpretation of that identity of self and not-self which has been referred to. The not-self will prove to be fundamentally social in its nature, comprising only other aspects of the same reality of which the self is but one. Even as in human history the external or objective institutions of human life have always served a social as well as a merely natural life, — and the one of these, in fact, in the other, — so the object of man's consciousness, or of any consciousness, is more than mere object, being incident to and accordingly always indicative of a social life. Simply this: There is no not-self that does not itself comprise other selves. The not-self, or object, of the hand as self, is the life of the whole body ; but for the hand the life of the whole body is a social, not a merely natural or physical life : and, similarly, for the individual man the life of the outer world must be social. Ordinary historians and politicians hardly go so far as to recognize in matter or physical substance a social institution, — they reserve the term for church and state and school and the like ; but the philosopher, examining human experience at its greatest depths and in its most general aspects, can see material substance in no other light. The philosopher finds in matter as not-self rather a principle or a relation than a distinct substance ; a pure principle, be it said quite abstractly, of sociality. So, again, — and this is a very important point for psychology, — not-self means other selves ; or, rather, it means a system or organism of selves.

Psychology has far too often neglected the sociality, the social life, intrinsic to the very consciousness of an object. Psychology has failed to see that sociality, not distinct substantiality, is the essence of objectivity. To fail in this way, however, to neglect so important an implication of consciousness, is to miss almost the richest truth about consciousness and its object. Psychology, then, is not naturally individualistic. On the contrary, psychology is naturally socialistic. As hinted before, men have recognized, although, on the whole, unreflectively, that responsibility to nature was social or shared. Again and again it has been proclaimed that man is a part of nature, being but one expression among indefinite other related expressions of her life. Psychology, however, greatly deepens this popular notion, when it makes consciousness, which is coextensive with life, an essentially social phenomenon. The human organism's environment, or for that matter any organism's environment, if not always social to the individual self as a whole, is so, at some point in the division, to the self's parts. Thus, to put the case somewhat roughly, although one man may not always find other men in his objective world, yet he will find other hands or legs, or other eyes or hearts, or other living cells, or other biophores, or other molecules, or at the very least other atoms, upon which to base a social life. Environment is sometimes described as now social and now physical or natural, but the distinction is quite parallel to that between whole and part. One's natural environment is social to one's parts, its natural character answering only to one's unity or wholeness.

There is, furthermore, another implication in the consciousness of an object than this of sociality. Not only is social life the deeper truth of the otherness of the not-self, but also an individuality of self is involved in it. With this, too, the popular mind is quite familiar. It is commonly recognized that an individual is, quite of necessity, conscious of his outer world in some particular peculiar way, although in a way always organically related to the consciousness of others. No two see any one thing alike ; and yet no one thing is exclusively what any single individual finds it, nor again is it the mere sum of many views of it, nor the abstracted

INTRODUCTION. 2J

residue of the differences in many views. Any thing is what all as individually related to it and to each other find it. Thus the actual function of the object of consciousness would seem to be exactly what we know the deeper function of language to be. Language, we are told very often, is a medium at once for the expression and for the exchange of thought; but this does not mean that language ever brings or ever should or could bring a literal agreement between those who use it. Language has as its natural function the adjustment or organization of differences. Those who use it come only to agree to differ. What are creeds and statutes but means to the distinct organization of differing individuals? Certainly they are far from effecting any real communalization. The object of consciousness, however, is only the most general case of these, and it has the same differentiating function. Above it was called a social institution, and social institutions exist for the preservation of differences, developing individuality and sociality together, not the latter at the expense of the former. Were the institution a separate, external, independent thing, were it in the most general instance a distinct self-existing substance, the case might be very different; but being nothing more nor less than a principle or a relation, it mediates differences or organizes individuals in the way suggested. Environment, still another name for whatever is essential in language or in the object or in the institution, is no external medium of a social life, but is itself an actual social life directly related to whatever it is said to " environ."

To put the same truth in still another way, if all were conscious of an object on literally the same terms, then the object itself could have reality, or objectivity, to none. It could be real to any one, for example, only if other forms of life than that which he was peculiarly were also related to it in ways individually peculiar to them. Consciousness, then, is essentially and fundamentally commercial; or, in the short sum, objectivity means not only sociality but also real individuality, it means that society is an organism.

So, in general review, the self, with whose expression the science of psychology is concerned, is conscious simply by virtue of its being alive, and it is rational in that it is conscious; and the object of its consciousness is not something separate and external, but a vital incident of a social life, involving in its very being a larger social responsibility for the self and at the same time an actual individuality.

If this seems mere assertion here, in spite of what has been said in the pages now passed, there is still a chance of a satisfactory demonstration in the more analytical chapters that are to follow.

But before leaving this Introduction the other view of objectivity should be considered, at least briefly, since it affords a method of procedure, or a general scheme for the division of this book. Thus, among many thinkers the objective has been taken as that which exists in the strictest sense of the word apart from the self, or exists, in other words, independently or in and of itself; and under this general view, directly opposed to what has been observed here, things and ideas and acts have all been said to be objective, but in as many different ways. In what sense things, such as trees, stars, books, men, stones, are regarded as objective can be quickly seen. They are spatially objective, being separable from the conscious self and from each other by measurable distances. The objectivity of things is, then, spatial or physical. Ideas, however, are said to be objective in a different way. They may be independent of any individual consciousness, they may exist apart, but the predicates of space have apparently no literal connection with them. They are objective in so far as convincing, in so far as they are necessities of thinking. The ideas that one accepts as true in spite of oneself are objective. Mathematical axioms are usually given in illustration of such ideas, and sometimes the moral law and religious beliefs. And finally, as for acts, these are objective in so far as done by a force or agency, sometimes said to be spiritual, sometimes altogether physical, that is wholly distinct from the self to whom they seem to attach. Usually we hear of the objectivity or reality of things, the truth of ideas, and the worth or morality of acts ; but, terms aside, just as the real thing has been thought to depend on isolation or independent existence and the true idea on a sort of intellectual externalism or determinism, so the moral or worthy act has been regarded as contingent upon a power beyond the self. An act has been bad either because the devil did it or at least because some other than the true self did it; and, if good, one 's act has been taken as giving evidence of a separate nature, divine, all-powerful, infinitely perfect, working its way, asserting its will in the life of wholly dependent man. But objectivity on this basis, whether as reality or as truth or as worth, carries with it as its necessary consequents an isolated selfhood, a wholly alien environment, and a strictly communalistic society. Still, as if in spite of these consequents, it has been and is now much believed in. At least the unrefiective consciousness seems to believe in it.