Collected essays and reviews

Preface

I. Sargent's Planchette [1869] II. Lewes's Problems of Life and Mind [1875]

III. German Pessimism [1875]

IV. Chauncet Wright V. Bain and Renouyier

VI. Kenan's Dialogues VII. Lewes's Physical Basis

VIII. Remarks on Spencer's Definition

of Mind as Correspondence [1878]

IX. Quelques Considerations stjr la

Methode Subjective [1878] . .

X. The Sentiment of Rationality

XI. Clifford's Lectures and Essays

XII. Spencer's Data of Ethics [1879] XIII. The Feeling of Effort [1880] . XIV. The Sense of Dizziness in Deaf-

XV. What is an Emotion? [1884] . . XVI. The Religious Aspect of Philosophy [1885]

XVII. The Consciousness of Lost Limbs

XVIII. Reponse aux Remarques de M. Renouyier stjr sa Theorie de la

Volonte [1888]

XIX. The Psychological Theory of Extension [1889]

PAGE V

4 12 20 26 36

137 147

220 244

303 310 m

Contents

PAGE

XX. A Plea for Psychology as a "Natural Science" [1892] .... 316 XXI. The Original Datum of Space- Consciousness [1893] .... 328 XXII. Mr. Bradley on Immediate Resemblance [1893] 333

XXIII. Immediate Resemblance [1893] . 339

II LEWES'S "PKOBLEMS OF LIFE AND MIND" x

More problems! Why should we read them if they are not our problems, but only Mr. Lewes' s? Of all forms of earthly worry, the metaphysical worry seems the most gratuitous. If it lands us in permanently skeptical conclusions, it is worse than superfluous; and if (as is almost always the case with non-skeptical systems) it simply ends by "indorsing" common-sense, and reinstating us in the possession of our old feelings, motives, and duties, we may fairly ask if it was worth while to go so far round in order simply to return to our starting-point and be put back into the old harness. Is not the primal state of philosophic innocence, since the practical difference is nil, as good as the state of reflective enlightenment? And need we, provided we can stay at home and take the world for granted, undergo the fatigues of a campaign with such uncomfortable spirits as the present author, merely for the sake of coming to our own again, with nothing gained but the pride of having accompanied his

I 1 Review of Problems of Life and Mind, by George Henry- Lewes, first series, 1875. Reprinted from Atlantic Monthly, 1875, 36, 361-363. Ed.]

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expedition? So we may ask. But is the pride nothing? Consciousness is the only measure of utility, and even if no philosophy could ever alter a man's motives in life, — which is untrue, — that it should add to their conscious completeness is enough to make thousands take upon themselves its burden of perplexities. We like the sense of companionship with better and more eager intelligences than our own, and that increment of self-respect which we all experience in passing from an instinctive to a reflective state, and adopting a belief which hitherto we simply underwent.

Mr. Lewes has drunk deep of the waters of skepticism that have of late years been poured out so freely in England, but he has worked his way through them into a constructive activity; and his work is only one of many harbingers of a reflux in the philosophic tide. All philosophic reflection is essentially skeptical at the start. To common-sense, and in fact to all living thought, matters actually thought of are held to be absolutely and objectively as we think them. Every representation per se, and while it persists, is of something absolutely so. It becomes relative, flickering, insecure, only when reduced, only in the light of further consideration which we may bring forward to confront it with. This may be called its reductive. Now the reductive of most of our confident beliefs about Being is the reflection that they are our beliefs; that we are turbid media ; and that a form of being may exist uncontaminated by the touch of the fal-

COLLECTED ESSAYS AND KEVIEWS C 1875 ]

lacious knowing subject. In the light of this conception, the Being we know droops its head; but until this conception has been formed it knows no fear. The motive of most philosophies has been to find a position from which one could exorcise the reductive, and remain securely in possession of a secure belief. Ontologies do this by their conception of "necessary" truth, i. e., a truth with no alternative; with a prwterea nihil, and not a plus ultra possibile; sl truth, in other words, whose only reductive would be the impossible, nonentity, or zero.

In such conclusions as these philosophy re-joins hands with common-sense. For above all things common-sense craves for a stable conception of things. We desire to know what to expect. Once having settled down into an attitude towards life both as to its details and as a whole, an incalculable disturbance which might arise, disconcert all our judgments, and render our efforts vain, would be in the last degree undesirable. Now as a matter of fact we do live in a world from which as a rule we know what to expect. Whatever items we found together in the past are likely to coexist in the future. Our confidence in this state of things deprives us of all sense of insecurity ; if we lay our plans rightly the world will fulfill its part of the contract. Common-sense, or popular philosophy, explains this by what is called the judgment of Substance, that is, by the postulation of a persistent Nature, immutable by time, behind each phenomenal group, which

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binds that group together and makes it what it is essentially and eternally. Even in regard to that mass of accidents which must be expected to occur in some shape but cannot be accurately prophesied in detail, we set our minds at rest, by saying that the world with all its events has a substantial cause; and when we call this cause God, Love, or Perfection, we feel secure that whatever the future may harbor, it cannot at bottom be inconsistent with the character of this term. So our attitude towards even the unexpected is in a general sense defined.

Now this substantial judgment has been adopted by most dogmatic philosophies. They have explained the collocations of phenomena by an immutable underlying nature or natures, beside or beyond which they have posited either the sphere of the Impossible, if they professed rationalism throughout, or merely a de facto Nonentity if they admitted the element of Faith as legitimate. But the skeptical philosophers who have of late predominated in England have denied that the substantial judgment is legitimate at all, and in so doing have seemed among other things to deny the legitimacy of the confidence and repose which it engenders. The habitual concurrence of the same phenomena is not a case of dynamic connection at all, they say. It may happen again — but we have no rational warrant for asserting that it must. The syntheses of data we think necessary are only so to us, from habit. The universe may turn inside preys on all other systems, may also in strict theoretic legitimacy prey upon the ultimate data of Mr. Lewes's Positivism taken as a whole; even though all men should end by admitting that within the bounds of that empirical whole, his views of the necessary continuity between the parts were true. To this reduction by a plus ultra, Mr. Lewes can only retort by saying, "Foolishness ! So much ontologic thirst is a morbid appetite." But in doing this he simply falls back on the act of faith of all positivisms. Weary of the infinitely receding chase after a theoretically warranted Absolute, they return to their starting-point and break off there, like practical men, saying, "Physics, we espouse thee; for better or worse be thou our Absolute !"

Skepticism, or unrest, in short, can always have the last word. After every definition of an object, reflection may arise, infect it with the cogito, and so discriminate it from the object in se. This is possible ad infinitum. That we do not all do it is because at a certain point most of us get tired of the play, resolve to stop, and assuming something for true, pass on to a life of action based on that.

We wish that Mr. Lewes had emphasized this volitional moment in his Positivism. Although the consistent pyrrhonist is the only theoretically unassailable man, it does not follow that he is the right man. Between us and the universe, there are no "rules of the game." The important thing is that our judgments should be right, not that they should observe a logical etiquette. There is a brute, blind

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element in every thought which still has the vital heat within it and has not yet been reflected on. Our present thought always has it, we cannot escape it, and we for our part think philosophers had best acknowledge it, and avowedly posit their universe, staking their persons, so to speak, on the truth of their position. In practical life we despise a man who will risk nothing, even more than one who will heed nothing. May it not be that in the theoretic life the man whose scruples about flawless accuracy of demonstration keep him forever shivering on the brink of Belief is as great an imbecile as the man at the opposite pole, who simply consults his prophetic soul for the answer to everything? What is this but saying that our opinions about the nature of things belong to our moral life?

Mr. Lewes's personal fame will now stand or fall by the credo he has published. We do not think the fame should suffer, even though we reserve our assent to important parts of the creed. The book is full of vigor of thought and felicity of style, in spite of its diffuseness and repetition. It will refute many of the objections made by critics to the first volume ; and will, we doubt not, be a most important ferment in the philosophic thought of the immediate future.

Ill

GEKMAN PESSIMISM 1

The German intellect is a far more complex affair than the English intellect, and a fortiori than the French or Italian. From sensualism to mysticism, from fatalistic quietism to the most ruthless practicality, there is hardly a mental quality or tendency which one will not find better represented in Germany than elsewhere ; save only one, and that is the quality of naivete or spontaneity. Every subject of King William is, ex-officio, reflective and selfconscious, unable to surrender himself to any sentiment, however simple, till he has reflected on it and woven it into a systematic theory, or in other words transmuted it from an impulse into a principle. Whatever the German feels or does, he does with malice prepense ; he justifies himself, by showing that the act or thought must rightfully flow from one in his position. Whether the position be that of a citizen properly filled with Nationalbewusstseifiy of a competitor in the egoistic struggle for existence, of a subject of the Categorical Imperative, or of a Moment in the Weltprozess, is all

[ 1 A review of Der Modern Pessimismus, by Dr. Edmund Pfleiderer. Berlin, 1875. Reprinted from Nation, 1875, 21, 23&-2S4. Ed.]

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one — we find everywhere that same cold-blooded self-corroboration and merging of the personal deed in universal considerations which, more than material spoliation and Draconian discipline, exasperated the French during the late invasion, and have made them call the Germans "hypocrites" ever since.

Perhaps as striking an illustration of this overweening tendency to theorize as can be found is afforded by the popular German school of pessimistic philosophy, of which Professor Pfleiderer's pamphlet is the latest and one of the ablest criticisms. In other countries, aristocratic misanthropes, dyspeptic pleasure-seekers, and unappreciated geniuses have existed, and their utterances never passed beyond the sphere of splenetic or pathetic individuality. Souls with an unassuageable love of justice and harmony have also existed, and their utterances, like Leopardi's and Shelley's, have been lyrical cries of defiance or despair, which perished with them. It was reserved for Schopenhauer to show his countrymen that the cursing and melting moods could be kept alive permanently, and extended indefinitely by making proper theoretic deliberation; and Schopenhauer's disciple Hartmann, whose work, the Philosophie des Unbewussten, has met with one of the greatest literary successes of the time, and carried the new gospel into regions where the torch of metaphysics had never yet begun to glimmer, has made everything so simple and perfect in his system, that all who have a quarrel with destiny, whether peevish or tragic, can be housed there side by side, without altering their mode of life or losing any of their "home comforts" in the process of cure. For it would be unpardonable in these philosophers to preach disgust with life unless the disgust were likely to lead the way to a cure. Existence being of course the original sin of that substance or essence of things which Schopenhauer calls "Will," and to which Yon Hartmann gives the name of "the Unconscious," annihilation or nirvana is of course the cure. And in both philosophies this may be attained through the thorough and final intellectual persuasion of the vanity of all the goods of life and the consequent extinction of every desire.

But here begins the divergence. The aristocratic master has no hopes of the human or any other race as a whole, and his nirvana is restricted to the few who are ascetics and saints. In the witty words of Pfleiderer, the battle-cry with which he plunges into life's fray and rallies his followers about him is the well-known "sauve qui peut." The pupil, on the contrary, equipped with a Berlin education and imbued with notions of evolution and progress which to Schopenhauer (who wrote before Darwin) were profoundly distasteful, provides for a collective salvation, based on no less a performance than a unanimous resolve on the part of all sentient beings, penetrated at last through and through with tedium vitw, and despair of gaining anything by fighting it out on the line of existence —

[1875] GERMAN PESSIMISM

to stop, and back out of it, when this world will cease at any rate. Whether there will ever be another world depends wholly on whether the wicked old "Unconscious" chooses again to emerge from its state of mere potentiality; and as it is being without rhyme or reason, a mere orutum, the chances for and against that unlucky eventuality are just even, or expressed in mathematical language by the fraction one-half. Schopenhauer's philosophy, says Hartmann, is one of despair. So far is this from being the worst of all possible worlds, that it is the best, for it tends invincibly to the summum bonum of extinction. Let no man then desert the ranks, but each labor in the Lord's vineyard, sneering, lamenting, and cursing as he pleases, getting indigestion himself, and begetting young, to inoculate them with a disgust greater than his own, and co-operating so with the grand movement of things which is bound to culminate in deliverance. Above all, let us have no standing aloof and trying prematurely to save one's individual self, like Schopenhauer's ascetics. This delightfully unselfish submission to epicurean practice in the midst of pessimistic theory is Hartmann's cleverest stroke. As in Beranger's song :

"Nous laisserions finir le monde Si nos f emmes le voulaient bien !"

Schopenhauer was truly a bungler. But, joking apart, the reader can easily see how little living seriousness Hartmann possesses. He seems to us to have a clever journalistic mind, with a Prussian education, ready for any paradox which will make a sensation, and without a grain of that auctoritas which belongs to the sombre and impressive genius of his teacher.

The latter is assuredly one of the greatest of writers. When such a one expatiates upon the texts of Homo homini lupus and Woman the focus of the world's illusion, he will have all the cynics with a taste for good literature for his admirers. And when he preaches compassion to be the one cardinal virtue, and morbidly reiterates the mystic Sanskrit motto, Tat twan asi — This [maniac or cripple] art thou — as the truth of truths, he will of course exert a spell over persons in the unwholesome sentimental moulting- time of youth. But the thing which to our Anglo-Saxon mind seems so outlandish is that crowds of dapper fellows, revelling in animal spirits and conscious strength, should enroll themselves in cold blood as his permanent apostles, and feel as sorely when their pessimism is attacked as the fabled old dead inmate of the almshouse did when, not good enough for heaven, she was also shut out from hell, and sat on the road and wept that she should have to return to Tewkesbury.

For, however it may stand with Tewkesbury, in the world at large, practically considered, optimism is just as true as pessimism. These Germans can attain their absolute luxury of woe only by speaking of things transcendentally and metaphysically. As far as the outward animal life goes, the existence

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of a Walt Whitman confounds Schopenhauer quite as thoroughly as the existence of a Leopardi refutes Dr. Pangloss; and Hartmann's elaborate indictment of the details of life is precisely on a par in point of logic with the "wisdom and beneficence" philosophy of the most edifying and gelatinous Sunday-school orator. Common-sense contents itself with the unreconciled contradiction, laughs when it can, and weeps when it must, and makes, in short, a practical compromise, without trying a theoretical solution. This attitude is of course respectable. But if one must needs have an ultimate theoretical solution, nothing is more certain than this, that no one need assent to that of pessimism unless he freely prefer to do so. Concerning the metaphysical world, or the ultimate meaning of things, there is no outward evidence — nothing but conceptions of the possible. Distinct among these is that of a moral order whose life may be fed by the contradictions of good and evil that occur in the external phenomenal order. Those empiricists who are celebrating nowadays with such delight the novel mathematical notion of a fourth or "transcendental" dimension in space, should be the last persons to dogmatize against the possibility of a deeper dimension in being than the flat surfacepattern which is offered by its pleasures and pains, taken merely as such. Now, if such an order in the world is possibly true, and if, supposing it to be true, it may afford the basis for an ultimate optimism (quite distinct from mere nerveless sentimentalism), there is no reason which should deter a person bent on having some commanding theory of life from adopting it as his hypothesis or working faith. He may of course prefer pessimism, but only at the price of a certain internal inconsistency. (We purposely neglect to consider dogmatic materialism here.) For pessimism is really only consistent with a strictly dogmatic attitude. It is fatalistic in the thorough Oriental sense, being by its very definition a theory from which one is bound to escape, if he can. Its account of things is confessedly abhorrent, and nothing but coercive outward evidence should make one stay within its pale. Now, a hypothetical door like that offered by the notion of a ransoming moral order "behind the veil" is better than no loophole of escape; and to refuse to give one's self the benefit of its presence argues either a perfectly morbid appetite for dogmatic forms of thought, or an astounding lack of genuine sense for the tragic, which sense undoubtedly varies, like every other, from man to man.

With transcendental optimism, on the other hand, it is just the reverse. If it is true, why, then, there is the deepest internal congruity in its not being mechanically forced on our belief. As a fatalistic nolens-volens creed, it would be devoid of all moral character. Or rather, we may not talk of its being true, but becoming true. Its full verification must be contingent on our complicity, both theoretical and practical. All that it asserts is that the facts of the world are a fit basis for the

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summum honum, if we do our share and react upon them as it is meant we should (with fortitude, for example, and undismayed hope). The world is thus absolutely good only in a potential or hypothetic sense, and the hypothetic form of the optimistic belief is the very signature of its consistency, and first condition of its probability. At the final integration of things, the world's goodness will be an accomplished fact and self-evident, but, till then, faith is the only legitimate attitude of mind it can claim from us.

So plain is all this that the pessimistic controversy has far more of an ethnic than a philosophic interest for us. We are only sorry that, at this distance, the data are too few for us to see what its full ethnic import is. If it simply result in confirming in Germany the tonic creed that there comes a time when every good, however precious, is fit for nothing but destruction, for the sake of a higher good, and that passive felicity is a dream, it can do no harm. Dr. Pfleiderer's pamphlet, which takes substantially the same ground as we do, is both temperate and witty, and may be cordially recommended to those interested in the subject.

IV Chauncey Weight 1

The death which we briefly noticed last week reminds us most sadly of the law, that to be an effective great man one needs to have many qualities great. If power of analytic intellect pure and simple could suffice, the name of Chauncey Wright would assuredly be as famous as it is now obscure, for he was not merely the great mind of a village — if Cambridge will pardon the expression — but either in London or Berlin he would, with equal ease, have taken the place of master which he held with us. The reason why he is now gone without leaving any work which his friends can consider as a fair expression of his genius, is that his shyness, his want of ambition, and to a certain degree his indolence, were almost as exceptional as his power of thought. Had he, in early life, resolved to con-

i 1 Reprinted from Nation, 1875, 21, 194. James acknowledged bis indebtedness to Wright's "intellectual companionship in old times," in the Preface to the Principles of Psychology, I, p. vii. He borrowed the expression cosmical "weather," in Will to Believe, p. 52. There are important points of resemblance between Wright and C. S. Pedrce, to whom James gives the credit for pragmatism. Wright's death occurred on September 12, 1875, in his forty-fifth year. His Philosophical Discussions have been collected and edited with a biography by 0. E. Norton, New York, 1877. Ed.]

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centrate these and make himself a physicist, for example, there is no question but that his would have ranked to-day among the few first living names. As it was, he preferred general criticism and contemplation, and became something resembling more a philosopher of the antique or Socratic type than a modern Gelehrter. His best work has been done in conversation; and in the acts and writings of the many friends he influenced his spirit will, in one way or another, as the years roll on, be more operative than it ever was in direct production. Born at Northampton in 1830, graduating at Harvard in 1852, he left us in the plenitude of his powers. His outward work is limited to various articles in the North American Review (one of which Mr. Darwin thought important enough to reprint as a pamphlet in England), a paper or two in the Transactions of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a number of critical notices in our own pages — the latest of these being the article en^ titled "German Darwinism," which we 1 published only two weeks ago. As a writer, he was defective in the shaping faculty — he failed to emphasize the articulations of his argument, to throw a high light, so to speak, on the important points ; so that many a casual peruser has probably read on and never noticed the world of searching consequences which lurked involved in some inconspicuously placed word. He spent many years in computing for the Nautical Almanac and from time to time

1 The Nation. 21 accepted some pedagogic work. He gave a course of University lectures on psychology in Harvard College in 1871, and last year he conducted there a course in mathematical physics. As little of a reader as an educated man well can be, he yet astonished every one by his omniscience, for no specialist could talk with Chauncey Wright without receiving some sort of instruction in his specialty. This was due to his irrepressible spontaneous habit of subtle thinking. Every new fact he learned set his whole mental organism in motion, and reflection did not cease till the novel thought was firmly woven with the entire system of his knowledge. Of course in this process new conclusions were constantly evolved, and many a man of science who hoped to surprise him with news of a discovery has been himself surprised by finding it already constructed by Wright from data separately acquired in this or that conversation with one or other of the many scholars of Cambridge or Boston, most of whom he personally knew so well.

In philosophy, he was a worker on the path opened by Hume, and a treatise on psychology written by him (could he have been spared and induced to undertake the drudgery) would probably have been the last and most accomplished utterance of what he liked to call the British school. He would have brought the work of Mill and Bain for the present to a conclusion. Of the two motives to which philosophic systems owe their being, the craving for consistency or unity in thought, and the de-

[1875] CHAUNCEY WRIGHT

sire for a solid outward warrant for our emotional ends, his mind was dominated only by the former. Never in a human head was contemplation more separated from desire. Schopenhauer, who denned genius as a cognitive faculty manumitted from the service of the will, would have found in him an even stronger example of his definition than he cared to meet. For to Wright's mode of looking at the universe such ideas as pessimism or optimism were alike simply irrelevant. Whereas most men's interest in a thought is proportioned to its possible relation to human destiny, with him it was almost the reverse. When the mere actuality of phenomena will suffice to describe them, he held it pure excess and superstition to speak of a metaphysical whence or whither, of a substance, a meaning, or an end. Just as in cosmogony he preferred Mayer's theory to the nebular hypothesis, and in one of his earliest North American Review articles used the happy phrase, "cosmical weather," to describe the irregular dissipation and aggregation of worlds; so, in contemplating the totality of being, he preferred to think of phenomena as the result of a sort of ontologic weather, without inward rationality, an aimless drifting to and fro, from the midst of which relatively stable and so (for us) rational combinations may emerge. The order we observe in things needs explanation only on the supposition of a preliminary or potential disorder ; and this he pointed out is, as things actually are orderly, a gratuitous notion. Anaxagoras, who introduced into philosophy the notion of the vou? ? also introduced with it that of an antecedent chaos. But if there be no essential chaos, Mr. Wright used to say, an antichaotic vou? is superfluous. He particularly condemned the idea of substance as a metaphysical idol. When it was objected to him that there must be some principle of oneness in the diversity of phenomena — some glue to hold them together and make a universe out of their mutual independence, he would reply that there is no need of a glue to join things unless we apprehend some reason why they should fall asunder. Phenomena are grouped — more we cannot say of them. This notion that the actuality of a thing is the absolute totality of its being was perhaps never grasped by any one with such thoroughness as by him.

However different a philosophy one may hold from his, however one may deem that the lack of emotional bias which left him contented with the mere principle of parsimony as a criterion of universal truth was really due to a defect in the active or impulsive part of his mental nature, one must value none the less his formulae For as yet philosophy has celebrated hardly any stable achievements. The labors of philosophers have, however, been confined to deepening enormously the philosophic consciousness, and revealing more and more minutely and fully the import of metaphysical problems. In this preliminary task ontologists and phenomenalists, mechanists and teleologists, must join friendly hands, for each has been indispensable

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to the work of the other, and the only foe of either is the common foe of both — namely, the practical, conventionally thinking man, to whom, as has been said, nothing has trne seriousness but personal interests, and whose dry earnestness in those is only excelled by that of the brute, which takes everything for granted and never laughs.

Mr. Wright belonged to the precious band of genuine philosophers, and among them few can have been as completely disinterested as he. Add to this eminence his tireless amiability, his beautiful modesty, his affectionate nature and freedom from egotism, his childlike simplicity in worldly affairs, and we have the picture of a character of which his friends feel more than ever now the elevation and the rarity.