The philosophy of the future

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Preface

This book has cost me more than half a century of toil and the loss of most things that men chiefly desire. And still it is very imperfect. How, indeed, could it be otherwise, since I have had to cut my way through a wilderness, aided only by the errors of those who have preceded me? But, as I have shown in my "Philosophy of History," we are on the verge of a great transition. The Protestant age of dissent and division has exhausted itself, and has now little of value to offer us. And so I send forth my book, hoping that despite its imperfections, it may serve to foreshadow the better time that is coming.

I am encouraged too by what Kant says in the Scholia to his Prolegomena : "All transitions from a tendency to its contrary pass through the stage of indifference, and this moment is most dangerous for an author, but the most favorable for the science. For when party-spirit has died out by a total dissolution of former connections, minds are in the best state to listen to several proposals for an organization according to a new plan."

S. S. Hebberd.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Nature of Thought ... i

II. Causality 10

Section i. The Fundamental Principle

The principle upon which I seek to found a new philosophy is this: The sole, essential function of all thinking, as contrasted with feeling, is to discriminate between cause and effect.

It is a simple thesis ; but it will not be disparaged on that account by any one who knows the history of inductive science. Such an one will remember that the greatest discoveries have always borne this stamp of simplicity. The secrets of Nature always seem open and evident when once we have found them out. But it is not so easy to find them out and verify them. It is far easier to plod along in the old ruts of tradition and error; or to revolve, like one lost in the woods, in circles of verbiage and ambiguity.

But your thesis, it may be said, is nothing new. It is but a revamping of Schopenhauer's reduction of all the Kantian categories to that of causality. But such an objection would be both shallow and false. Some of the Pythagoreans anticipated dimly the Copernican discovery, but they never verified their vague conjectures; and the contrast between my doctrine and Schopenhauer's is much wider and deeper than that, (a) For he confined his view to processes of the understanding, which for him — as also for

Kant, Hegel and the rest — was but a part of the intellect; and a very inferior, rudimentary part, the source of all error and deception, (b) Nor did Schopenhauer even attempt to prove the reality of causation ; he never questioned Kant's view of it as but a logical necessity, an arbitrary compulsion forced upon us by the deceptive understanding, (c) Above all, he did not see that this universal scope of the causal concept could be converted into a proof that it was no mere figment of the mind ; to him it was merely "subjective. " In fine, Schopenhauer simply carried the Kantian philosophy one stage farther on — into that pessimism which, as the history of India so painfully shows, is the inevitable outcome of every fully developed theory of Maya or illusion.

My doctrine is the exact opposite of all this. For its main design is to find an ultimate, universal criterion of truth, and thus overcome the skepticism lurking in both the materialistic and idealistic modes of modern thought.

Section 2. Hume's Problem

Modern philosophy is tormented by one very grievous malady. Its criticism has destroyed the old criteria of truth, but has never been able to put anything else in their place ; it has torn down, but knows not how to rebuild. Even through all the storm and stress of the eighteenth century, the primary convictions of mankind were conserved, at least for the majority, by the doctrine of innate ideas or intuitions.

But Kant completely wrecked the intuitional method of defending truth. The very fact that all men were somehow mysteriously compelled to accept, without any proof, certain convictions concerning time, space, substance, cause, etc., was made a ground for discrediting these convictions. His criticism has never been adequately answered. And for more than a century now, our most elementary convictions, moral as well as religious, have been hanging in cloud-land, true castles in the air. Thus modern philosophy, having no firm foundation, has become a chaos of dispute, paradox and vain subtleties.

My contention is that philosophy can be rescued from its evident state of decadence and chaos only by finding some way of solving Hume's famous problem of causality. In the failure of Kant and all his successors down to the present day to solve that problem has been the main source of trouble. Thinkers have naturally tended to ignore, to shove aside a principle that seemed to mock at all their efforts to solve or understand it. Many of them seem to have nourished a spite against it. Thus Royce says solemnly: "The unhappy slavery of metaphysicians of the past to the conception of causation has been responsible for some of the most fatal misfortunes of religion and of humanity." 1

Not having any fear of such a slavery, I propose in this volume to prove inductively that the sole essential function of all thinking is to discriminate between cause and effect ; in other words, that there

1 The World and the Individual, I. p. 444.

is no known form of thought which is not ultimately reducible into an assertion of cause and effect. If I succeed, then plainly to cancel causality is to efface all distinction between truth and falsehood, and thus to render all thinking logically impossible. The argument is in fact a reductio ad absurdum in the completest form imaginable. The geometer proves his theorem by showing that its denial would logically lead to the denial of some universally accepted principle, and would therefore be absurd; I prove my theorem by showing that its denial would invalidate all principles, efface all distinctions, in fine would involve the utter extinction of thought.

Thus we shall reach the solution of Hume's problem, which, according to Hoffding, 1 "Kant failed to solve and is indeed insoluble." Hume argued that causation was only the more or less uniform succession of phenomena in space and time. But I shall prove that each word in this definition is in its essence a declaration of causality. The relations severally indicated by each of the words used — more, less, uniform, succession, phenomena, space, time, of, in, and — all rest primarily upon causal relations; and if the latter were eliminated, the words would lose all their meaning. Thus in the very act of denying causality, Hume is compelled to affirm it over and over again.

Section j. The Law of Knowledge My fundamental theorem carries with it a very

'History of Modern Philosophy, II. p. 58.

obvious corollary. If all thinking is essentially a relating of cause and effect, it manifestly follows that a cause cannot be known except through its effects, nor an effect apart from its cause.

Simple and self-evident as this corollary appears, it is of the utmost value for the unraveling of those entanglements in which speculation is perpetually involving itself. As we proceed in our exposition we shall see how many far-famed conceptions in philosophy are but half thoughts, mutilated and worthless because they are attempts to conceive a cause apart from its effects or an effect apart from its cause. Many a dispute has lasted for ages, because one party was stubbornly clinging to a half-thought and the other party to the complementary half, one emphasizing the cause and the other the effect. Take, for example, the most famous and persistent of all these controversies, that between the Eleatic and the Heracleitean school, the former claiming that Being was one, indivisible, immutable, while all appearance of change or motion was due to the deceptiveness of the senses; the latter maintaining that everything is in constant flux, forever transforming itself, its nature a consuming fire. In fine, one school sees the uniformity of cause or causal processes, the other sees only the effects or changes. And yet this dispute outlasted ancient philosophy. Plato was puzzled by it, as his Parmenides plainly shows. And in the Aristotlean theory of knowledge it is again apparent as "a contradiction of which the results run through the entire system of Aristotle."

Turn now to Hegelianism, the most vigorous of all philosophies now extant — unless, indeed, you count "pragmatism" as a philosophy. Hegel begins with that equation which has astonished so many, Pure Being=o. And yet there is no need of astonishment; the equation is but a bald truism. For to Hegel pure being means only an effect isolated from or unrelated to any cause, or as Wallace puts it: "We do not mean something which is, but mere is, the bare fact of Being, without any substratum. The degree of condensation or development when substantive and attribute co-exist has not yet come. The terms and forms of Being float as it were freely in the air ; or to put it more correctly, one passes into the other. . . . This Being is immediate, i.e., it contains no reference binding it with anything beyond itself, but stands forward boldly and nakedly as if alone; and if hard pressed it turns over into something else." 1 Now, as a matter of course, such Being as that — for example, a motion apart from anything that moves — is nothing. In fine the whole first book of the Logic is occupied with an inherent absurdity, a mutilated half -thought, to wit, effects that have no cause. And to discover therein paradoxes and self-contradictions naturally becomes an easy task.

To quote from Wallace again : "If the first branch of Logic was the sphere of simple Being in a point or series of points, the second is that of difference and discordant Being broken up in itself." 2 It is

1 Logic of Hegel, Prolegomena, p. cxix.

2 Ibid., p. cxxi.

enough here to note two indisputable facts. First, the whole drift of the second book is to identify the effect with its cause ; thus we have a series of transformations of causes without any real effects. Second, in the end all causation is discarded as self-contradictory and unreal.

The first and second books, then, vividly illustrate my Law of Knowledge, the impossibility of knowing effects apart from their causes or causes apart from their effects. The third book, based upon the conjecture that the universe is an organism, illustrates the straits to which a thinker is driven after he has discarded the conception of causality.

Section 4. The Relativity of Knowledge

But there is a possible objection that must be considered. It may be said that even if I succeed in proving that the sole essential function of all thinking is to affirm cause and effect, I have not escaped the toils of the Kantian subjectivism. Nothing would be proved except that as our minds are constituted, it is impossible to think otherwise ; but other beings with minds differently constituted may think in quite a different fashion. Cause and effect may, after all, have no actual reality outside our fallible human minds.

But understand thoroughly the doctrine here presented, and your objection vanishes; this question of relativity, which has stood unanswered since the dawn of philosophy, is instantly answered. For my doctrine sweeps aside all that swarm of chimeras — such as innate ideas, intuitions, a-priori categories, etc. — that heretofore have made relativity seem so plausible. Dismiss, then, this tangled mass of unproved, impossible assumptions. Conceive thought or reasoning just as science conceives everything else — that is, functionally. For, as I propose to demonstrate, the sole essential function of thought or reason is to discriminate between cause and effect; and from this functional point of view the question of relativity becomes superlatively absurd. If you imagine thought or reason after the Kantian style, that is, as a mere medley of innate ideas, or a- priorities, flung together at random, no one knows how, whence or why — having no object except to engender false appearances — then indeed relativity becomes highly plausible. It seems almost certain that there must be somewhere some higher order of beings endowed with a higher type of thought or reason, less complicated and cumbersome, leading to something else than universal imposture. But abandon this preposterous and immoral scheme. Interpret thought or reason as you would anything else — according to its known function. Then, if I prove, as I certainly shall, that the sole, essential function of thinking is to discriminate between cause and effect, the question about relativity becomes simply ridiculous. For it is to ask whether there may not be some higher order of reason which is not reason and contradicts reason. It would not be a whit sillier to ask whether there may not be some higher kind of motion which is not motion? Or some higher kind of a triangle that has four or forty sides ?

Furthermore I cite Kant himself, the great highpriest of relativity, as an unwilling witness to the truth of my doctrine. For in trying to prove universal relativity, he is forced to make an exception of causality. I do not refer merely to the well-known fact that he describes the thing in itself as the cause of the matter of our sensations. I refer to the much broader fact that he describes the whole phenomenal universe as caused mainly by the peculiar constitution of the mind. He forgets that according to his doctrine, causality is merely relative and therefore can tell him nothing concerning the true constitution of the mind. In fine, he uses the idea of cause as real in order to prove that it is not real. In the very act of denying causality, he affirms it.

Note finally that we are here concerned only with the alleged relativity of the causal relation. Other supposed relativities will be discussed later on; and they will be found to vanish, one by one, before this functional view of thought or reason as a relating of cause and effect. The one ruinous defect in modern philosophy is that it is not "a city which hath foundations." It hangs in the air with nothing underlying it but such obsolete superstitions as innate ideas, intuitions, postulates, a-priori necessities of thought, etc. It needs the insight which Archimedes had long ago : "Give me a place to stand on, and I can move the world."

Section i. Sequence

The most surprising feature in Hume's famous polemic against the belief in causality is the extreme tenuity and emptiness of the arguments he was called upon to meet. He spoke the simple truth when he declared that "every argument which has been produced for the necessity of a cause is fallacious and sophistical." Take, for example, Hobbes's proof, which is specially notable, because he more than any contemporary writer bases his philosophy upon the conception of causality. It is as follows : All the points of time and place in which we can suppose any object to begin to exist are in themselves equal; and unless there be some cause which is peculiar to one time and one place, and which by that means determines and fixes their existence, it must remain in eternal suspense; and the object can never begin to be for want of something to fix its beginning." Hume answers to that: "But I ask is there any more difficulty in supposing the time and place to be fixed without a cause than to suppose the existence to be determined in that manner?" 1 Then Hume turns to the proofs given by other distinguished writers, and answers them with equal

1 Hume's Philosophical Works, Edinburgh, 1826, II. pp. 111- 112.

promptitude and ease. Indeed, his task of refutation seems so easy that one wonders why it had not been accomplished long before. Evidently there had been little serious attention given to this most crucial of all philosophic questions. Hume's victory was due largely to the fact that like a skillful general, he had taken the enemy unawares. And even in this inattention we may see some confirmation of my thesis ; the concept of causation was so intimately bound up with the whole process of thinking that no one dreamed of doubting its validity. They took it for granted. Hume himself, as has often been noted, unconsciously took it for granted in the very attempt to contradict it.

But many other obscuring agencies, besides inattention, have darkened the conception of causality. The most potent of these agencies perhaps, especially since Kant's day, has been the ethical impulse. The pivot upon which the Kantian criticism turns is the assumption that if causation cannot be proved to be phenomenal or illusory, then ' liberty and with it morality must yield to the mechanism of nature." But that view will be considered in my last chapters, wherein I hope to show that the demonstration of freedom and morality is made possible only by the principle of causality rightly understood. Deferring that question then, I turn to perplexities that have sprung from the development of modern science. And first of all, to the degradation of causality into mere sequence.

(i) There are three distinct objections to this sequence theory, each one of which is sufficient to overthrow it. First there is Reid's well-known objection that the invariable succession of day and night does not prove that the one is the cause of the other. To that, so far as I know, no serious or satisfactory reply has ever been made. Mill shoves it aside with the curious remark that the conjunction of day and night "is in some sort accidental." . . . "Invariable sequence is not synonymous with causation unless the sequence, besides being invariable, is unconditional." 1 In other words, unless the succession is caused by something else. That obviously is to surrender the very point which Mill was trying to dispute. Bosanquet's reply is still more oblique and obscure, a palpable "darkening of counsel" behind a host of words and irrelevancies. 2 Adamson's answer is that increasing experience enables us to discriminate between two kinds of succession. 3 But did the stupidest of savages ever consider day to be the cause of night or night the cause of day ?

(2) Reid's objection then is unanswerable. To it I add two others both my own. The first of these is my proof that sequence or succession implies time ; and that the conception of time is made possible and intelligible only through the prior conception of cause. But for that proof I must refer the reader to my chapter upon Time.

(3) My other objection is that the uniform se-

1 Logic, Bk. III. ch. 5, § 5.

2 Bosanquet, Logic.

'Development of Modern Philosophy, p. 320.

quence of events does not even indicate a relation of cause and effect between them. It indicates, rather, that the successive events are both effects of the same cause. In the revolutions of a wheel, for instance, one revolution is not the cause of the succeeding one, and that the cause of the next, and so on indefinitely; but all the revolutions are successive effects of a common cause unlike any one of them. In fine, sequence, instead of being synonymous with, is not even a sign of any relation of cause and effect between the sequent objects. But one error leads to another. And modern philosophy having, under the guidance of Hume and Kant, started out on a false path — the minifying of causality — has been led from error to error into a wild tangle of blunders and perplexities. Some of the chief of these errors I shall consider in the next section.

Section 2. Causal Processes One of the most signal of scientific triumphs has been the discovery of the marvelous complexity of causal processes. It has revolutionized our view of Nature compared with the ancient view. In the philosophy of Aristotle and of antiquity in general, each effect or change is conceived as the product of some single cause — either of some substantial thing or else of some "occult quality," some force or power hidden within that thing. If anything weighed much, there was an occult quality of heaviness within it ; if it weighed little, there was within it an occult quality of "levity." This view prevailed far down into modern times, and was one of the chief stumbling blocks to scientific advance. Chemistry, for example, until almost the close of the eighteenth century was prevented from becoming a science by the doctrine of phlogiston — a strange substance possessing the still stranger quality of levity or negative weight. But science has finally changed all that. It has learned that an effect is the product not of a single, unitary cause, but of a vast complex of interacting agencies, of a causal process with a multitude of factors.

But the older, pre-scientific view still lingers ; for it was long ago crystallized into the usages of common speech and grammar; insensibly it molds our thought — all the more, the less we are aware of it. Hence there is a constant, bewildering conflict between two quite disparate modes of thinking. On the one side the crude primitive view of the single cause; on the other, the scientific, verifiable view of the causal process with its host of factors.

This conflict is largely responsible for the confusion and bewilderment so evident in modern philosophy. Hegel's Dialectic especially is but an artful display of the countless "contradictions" that may readily be evolved by passing back and forth from the crude popular view of cause as single to the scientific view of it as a causal process, an infinite complex of interwoven factors. But in English philosophy we find a more familiar example in the long controversy concerning the plurality of causes. How happens it that the same effect may issue from the most dissimilar causes — death, for instance, from drowning, or shooting, or disease, etc. ? Very curious solutions have been given. Thus one recent writer says : "The total effect in each case is never mere death, but death in some one special shape. A man who is shot and a man who is drowned are both dead ; but one is dead with the special symptoms of death by drowning, the other with those of death by shooting." 1 But Mill long ago suggested a less fantastic solution than that, in fact, one very near the truth. "From the different causes of the same effect," he says, "we may be able to ascend to some one cause which is the operative circumstance in them all. Thus it might and perhaps will be discovered that in the production of heat by friction, percussion, chemical action, etc., the ultimate source is one and the same." 2

Thus in a dim, tentative way, Mill had caught a glimpse of the greatest of scientific revelations — the principle that an effect is the product, not of a single cause, but of a complex causal process combining many co-operating factors. Mill lived to see his prophecy concerning the theory of heat completely fulfilled. But he never fully developed the principle of the causal process of which he had caught a glimpse. If he had developed it, he would have solved that problem of the plurality of causes which baffled him, and other thinkers also. He would have seen that a causal process would remain uniform even if one factor was substituted for another,

1 Taylor, Metaphysics.

2 Mill, Logic, Bk. III., ch. 10, §3.

provided the new factor was precisely equivalent in efficiency to the old.

Immanent and Trans eunt Causes. Here we have another perplexity that has sorely distressed logicians. Two of the greatest among modern thinkers, Spinoza and Lotze, have emphatically repudiated all but immanent causes. And some recent writers of repute have gone still further, have converted this difficulty into an excuse for extirpating all causality, root and branch. But let us proceed more rationally. Let us look at the difficulty in the light of the now fully established truth that cause is always presented to us in the form of a causal process. Then the difficulty disappears. We see that the distinction between the immanent and the transeunt cause is made absolutely necessary by the very nature of such a process; for any factor therein in order to be a factor, must at once be acted upon and also act upon the others. In fine, exclusive emphasis upon either immanent or transeunt causes is an error due to not distinguishing between the two modes of regarding causation. If we regard it in the ancient way — as Aristotle did — we shall see causes as mainly immanent: if we regard it in the scientific way, we shall see cause as a complex of transeunt or interacting factors.

Hegel and "The Notion." From our present point of view some light, I think, may be thrown upon one of the darkest of the obscurities crowded into Hegel's Logic — namely, the transition from reciprocal causation to the Notion. Hegel's own account of the transition is confessedly unintelligible — a mere chaos of words without connected meaning. Even McTaggart, who with wonderful skill and patience, has devoted twenty-one years to the study of Hegel, says at this point : "I must confess myself unable to follow this." 1 But as I have already said, the strength of Hegel's dialectic lies in its blind, instinctive groping along the line of a great truth which he has but vaguely comprehended. Especially is that true in the present case. The transition from causality to the Notion can be explained only by means of a principle which I shall demonstrate in Chapter VII — to wit, that the real essence of a notion, concept or universal is the affirmation of a causal process. In the second book causality is conceived in the crude, primitive, popular fashion ; McTaggart says that "the treatment of Causality presents very grave defects." 2 But in the third book Hegel passes to causality conceived as the Notion, that is, as causal process. Not that Hegel himself explains the transition in that way. In fact, he does not explain it at all, at least intelliigibly.

Section 3. Uniformity

But the gravest of all the perplexities concerning causation is the question of our belief in its uniformity. No such problem ever troubled the crude pre-scientific view of causation; for, to that view, the processes of Nature were not invariable, but a wild

1 Commentary on Hegel's Logic, p. 194.

mixture of uniformity and irregularity. In the heavens, according to Aristotle, all was orderly and uniform, except in a few cases like "the wandering' ' of the planets. But on earth, events were largely fortuitous, and the course of Nature very capricious. 1 To Aristotle the natural was merely that which happened "generally or for the most part."

Modern thought, on the contrary, has insisted upon the strict uniformity of natural causation, but has never been able to offer any conclusive proof of what it so loudly asserts. Mill, indeed, attempted to prove it from a mere enumeration of instances, but his attempt is now generally recognized to have been a failure. Idealists, on the other hand, seem content to take it for granted under the shelter of some such high-sounding phrase as organic unity or an articulated system. But mere assumption, however vociferous, is not proof. Lotze, it may be added, taught that belief in uniformity rested "ultimately upon the faith which we repose in the universal validity of a certain postulate of thought. 2 But the age of faith ended long ago.

Here then we have a chasm wide and deep, at the very center of modern thought. And the only possible way of bridging this chasm, it seems to me, is by my doctrine of the causal process. For, in the first place, a process in order to be such must be uniform ; in so far as it is not uniform it ceases to be a

*De Coelo, II., ch. 5, P- I. 2 Lotze, Logic, p. 503.

process. In the second place, natural processes do not prevent, but through their complexity necessitate that infinite variableness which we behold everywhere in Nature. This second fact is best illustrated and verified by that crowning example, that most perfect type of scientific induction — Newton's discovery of gravitation. In that we have on the one hand a causal process of rigid, mathematical uniformity at work everywhere, without variableness or shadow of turning. And yet on the other hand not a stone falls to the ground as the result of that process, but what its motion varies in each infinitesimal instant both in its velocity and in its direction as regards absolute space. And so everywhere in the most trivial of natural events we have a miracle of uniformity in the process, and a miracle of variation in the result.

Thus my doctrine of the causal process seems to have a double virtue. It accounts at once for that uniformity so dear to modern science and for that variableness which delighted the more aesthetic genius of ancient Greece.

It may be objected that Newton's induction, however important, is but one case among many, and therefore does not fully prove my position. I answer that it is used here more as illustration than as proof. The full proof will be given in the chapter upon induction, where it will be shown that the essence — the long sought for secret of the inductive method — is the discovery and verifying of a uniform process of causation.