to Believe_, pp. 278-279. ED.]
[51] [Cf. A. Spir: _Denken und Wirklichkeit_, part I, bk. III, ch. IV
(containing also account of Herbart). ED.]
[52] [See above, pp. 42, 49.]
[53] Here again the reader must beware of slipping from logical into
phenomenal considerations. It may well be that we _attribute_ a certain
relation falsely, because the circumstances of the case, being complex,
have deceived us. At a railway station we may take our own train, and
not the one that fills our window, to be moving. We here put motion in
the wrong place in the world, but in its original place the motion is a
part of reality. What Mr. Bradley means is nothing like this, but rather
that such things as motion are nowhere real, and that, even in their
aboriginal and empirically incorrigible seats, relations are impossible
of comprehension.
[54] Particularly so by Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, in his _Man and
the Cosmos_; by L. T. Hobhouse, in chapter XII ("The Validity of
Judgment") of his _Theory of Knowledge_; and by F. C. S. Schiller, in
his _Humanism_, essay XI. Other fatal reviews (in my opinion) are
Hodder's, in the _Psychological Review_, vol. I, [1894], p. 307; Stout's
in the _Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society_, 1901-2, p. 1; and
MacLennan's in [_The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific
Methods_, vol. I, 1904, p. 403].
[55] Once more, don't slip from logical into physical situations. Of
course, if the table be wet, it will moisten the book, or if it be
slight enough and the book heavy enough, the book will break it down.
But such collateral phenomena are not the point at issue. The point is
whether the successive relations 'on' and 'not-on' can rationally (not
physically) hold of the same constant terms, abstractly taken. Professor
A. E. Taylor drops from logical into material considerations when he
instances color-contrast as a proof that _A_, 'as contra-distinguished
from _B_, is not the same thing as mere _A_ not in any way affected'
(_Elements of Metaphysics_, p. 145). Note the substitution, for
'related' of the word 'affected,' which begs the whole question.
[56] But "is there any sense," asks Mr. Bradley, peevishly, on p. 579,
"and if so, what sense in truth that is only outside and 'about'
things?" Surely such a question may be left unanswered.
[57] _Appearance and Reality_, second edition, pp. 575-576.
[58] I say 'undecided,' because, apart from the 'so far,' which sounds
terribly half-hearted, there are passages in these very pages in which
Mr. Bradley admits the pluralistic thesis. Read, for example, what he
says, on p. 578, of a billiard ball keeping its 'character' unchanged,
though, in its change of place, its 'existence' gets altered; or what
he says, on p. 579, of the possibility that an abstract quality A, B,
or C, in a thing, 'may throughout remain unchanged' although the thing
be altered; or his admission that in red-hairedness, both as analyzed
out of a man and when given with the rest of him, there may be 'no
change' (p. 580). Why does he immediately add that for the pluralist
to plead the non-mutation of such abstractions would be an _ignoratio
elenchi_? It is impossible to admit it to be such. The entire
_elenchus_ and inquest is just as to whether parts which you can
abstract from existing wholes can also contribute to other wholes
without changing their inner nature. If they can thus mould various
wholes into new _gestaltqualitaeten_, then it follows that the same
elements are logically able to exist in different wholes [whether
physically able would depend on additional hypotheses]; that partial
changes are thinkable, and through-and-through change not a dialectic
necessity; that monism is only an hypothesis; and that an additively
constituted universe is a rationally respectable hypothesis also. All
the theses of radical empiricism, in short, follow.
[59] _Op. cit._, pp. 577-579.
[60] So far as I catch his state of mind, it is somewhat like this:
'Book,' 'table,' 'on'--how does the existence of these three abstract
elements result in _this_ book being livingly on _this_ table. Why isn't
the table on the book? Or why doesn't the 'on' connect itself with
another book, or something that is not a table? Mustn't something _in_
each of the three elements already determine the two others to _it_, so
that they do not settle elsewhere or float vaguely? Mustn't the _whole
fact be pre-figured in each part_, and exist _de jure_ before it can
exist _de facto_? But, if so, in what can the jural existence consist,
if not in a spiritual miniature of the whole fact's constitution
actuating every partial factor as its purpose? But is this anything but
the old metaphysical fallacy of looking behind a fact _in esse_ for the
ground of the fact, and finding it in the shape of the very same fact
_in posse_? Somewhere we must leave off with a _constitution_ behind
which there is nothing.
[61] Apply this to the case of 'book-on-table'! W. J.
[62] _Op. cit._, pp. 570, 572.
[63] _Op. cit._, pp. 568, 569.
[64] _Op. cit._, p. 570.
[65] How meaningless is the contention that in such wholes (or in
'book-on-table,' 'watch-in-pocket,' etc.) the relation is an additional
entity _between_ the terms, needing itself to be related again to each!
Both Bradley (_op. cit._, pp. 32-33) and Royce (_The World and the
Individual_, vol. I, p. 128) lovingly repeat this piece of profundity.
[66] The 'why' and the 'whence' are entirely other questions, not under
discussion, as I understand Mr. Bradley. Not how experience gets itself
born, but how it can be what it is after it is born, is the puzzle.
[67] Above, p. 52.
IV
HOW TWO MINDS CAN KNOW ONE THING[68]
In [the essay] entitled 'Does Consciousness Exist?' I have tried to show
that when we call an experience 'conscious,' that does not mean that it
is suffused throughout with a peculiar modality of being ('psychic'
being) as stained glass may be suffused with light, but rather that it
stands in certain determinate relations to other portions of experience
extraneous to itself. These form one peculiar 'context' for it; while,
taken in another context of experiences, we class it as a fact in the
physical world. This 'pen,' for example, is, in the first instance, a
bald _that_, a datum, fact, phenomenon, content, or whatever other
neutral or ambiguous name you may prefer to apply. I called it in that
article a 'pure experience.' To get classed either as a physical pen or
as some one's percept of a pen, it must assume a _function_, and that
can only happen in a more complicated world. So far as in that world it
is a stable feature, holds ink, marks paper and obeys the guidance of a
hand, it is a physical pen. That is what we mean by being 'physical,' in
a pen. So far as it is instable, on the contrary, coming and going with
the movements of my eyes, altering with what I call my fancy, continuous
with subsequent experiences of its 'having been' (in the past tense), it
is the percept of a pen in my mind. Those peculiarities are what we mean
by being 'conscious,' in a pen.
In Section VI of another [essay][69] I tried to show that the same
_that_, the same numerically identical pen of pure experience, can enter
simultaneously into many conscious contexts, or, in other words, be an
object for many different minds. I admitted that I had not space to
treat of certain possible objections in that article; but in [the last
essay] I took some of the objections up. At the end of that [essay] I
said that still more formidable-sounding objections remained; so, to
leave my pure-experience theory in as strong a state as possible, I
propose to consider those objections now.
I
The objections I previously tried to dispose of were purely logical or
dialectical. No one identical term, whether physical or psychical, it
had been said, could be the subject of two relations at once. This
thesis I sought to prove unfounded. The objections that now confront us
arise from the nature supposed to inhere in psychic facts specifically.
Whatever may be the case with physical objects, a fact of consciousness,
it is alleged (and indeed very plausibly), can not, without
self-contradiction, be treated as a portion of two different minds, and
for the following reasons.
In the physical world we make with impunity the assumption that one and
the same material object can figure in an indefinitely large number of
different processes at once. When, for instance, a sheet of rubber is
pulled at its four corners, a unit of rubber in the middle of the sheet
is affected by all four of the pulls. It _transmits_ them each, as if
it pulled in four different ways at once itself. So, an air-particle or
an ether-particle 'compounds' the different directions of movement
imprinted on it without obliterating their several individualities. It
delivers them distinct, on the contrary, at as many several 'receivers'
(ear, eye or what not) as may be 'tuned' to that effect. The apparent
paradox of a distinctness like this surviving in the midst of
compounding is a thing which, I fancy, the analyses made by physicists
have by this time sufficiently cleared up.
But if, on the strength of these analogies, one should ask: "Why, if two
or more lines can run through one and the same geometrical point, or if
two or more distinct processes of activity can run through one and the
same physical thing so that it simultaneously plays a role in each and
every process, might not two or more streams of personal consciousness
include one and the same unit of experience so that it would
simultaneously be a part of the experience of all the different minds?"
one would be checked by thinking of a certain peculiarity by which
phenomena of consciousness differ from physical things.
While physical things, namely, are supposed to be permanent and to have
their 'states,' a fact of consciousness exists but once and _is_ a
state. Its _esse_ is _sentiri_; it is only so far as it is felt; and it
is unambiguously and unequivocally exactly _what_ is felt. The
hypothesis under consideration would, however, oblige it to be felt
equivocally, felt now as part of my mind and again at the same time
_not_ as a part of my mind, but of yours (for my mind is _not_ yours),
and this would seem impossible without doubling it into two distinct
things, or, in other words, without reverting to the ordinary dualistic
philosophy of insulated minds each knowing its object representatively
as a third thing,--and that would be to give up the pure-experience
scheme altogether.
Can we see, then, any way in which a unit of pure experience might enter
into and figure in two diverse streams of consciousness without turning
itself into the two units which, on our hypothesis, it must not be?
II
There is a way; and the first step towards it is to see more precisely
how the unit enters into either one of the streams of consciousness
alone. Just what, from being 'pure,' does its becoming 'conscious'
_once_ mean?
It means, first, that new experiences have supervened; and, second, that
they have borne a certain assignable relation to the unit supposed.
Continue, if you please, to speak of the pure unit as 'the pen.' So far
as the pen's successors do but repeat the pen or, being different from
it, are 'energetically'[70] related to it, it and they will form a group
of stably existing physical things. So far, however, as its successors
differ from it in another well-determined way, the pen will figure in
their context, not as a physical, but as a mental fact. It will become a
passing 'percept,' _my_ percept of that pen. What now is that decisive
well-determined way?
In the chapter on 'The Self,' in my _Principles of Psychology_, I
explained the continuous identity of each personal consciousness as a
name for the practical fact that new experiences[71] come which look
back on the old ones, find them 'warm,' and greet and appropriate them
as 'mine.' These operations mean, when analyzed empirically, several
tolerably definite things, viz.:
1. That the new experience has past time for its 'content,' and in that
time a pen that 'was';
2. That 'warmth' was also about the pen, in the sense of a group of
feelings ('interest' aroused, 'attention' turned, 'eyes' employed, etc.)
that were closely connected with it and that now recur and evermore
recur with unbroken vividness, though from the pen of now, which may be
only an image, all such vividness may have gone;
3. That these feelings are the nucleus of 'me';
4. That whatever once was associated with them was, at least for that
one moment, 'mine'--my implement if associated with hand-feelings, my
'percept' only, if only eye-feelings and attention-feelings were
involved.
The pen, realized in this retrospective way as my percept, thus figures
as a fact of 'conscious' life. But it does so only so far as
'appropriation' has occurred; and appropriation is _part of the content
of a later experience_ wholly additional to the originally 'pure' pen.
_That_ pen, virtually both objective and subjective, is at its own
moment actually and intrinsically neither. It has to be looked back upon
and _used_, in order to be classed in either distinctive way. But its
use, so called, is in the hands of the other experience, while _it_
stands, throughout the operation, passive and unchanged.
If this pass muster as an intelligible account of how an experience
originally pure can enter into one consciousness, the next question is
as to how it might conceivably enter into two.
III
Obviously no new kind of condition would have to be supplied. All that
we should have to postulate would be a second subsequent experience,
collateral and contemporary with the first subsequent one, in which a
similar act of appropriation should occur. The two acts would interfere
neither with one another nor with the originally pure pen. It would
sleep undisturbed in its own past, no matter how many such successors
went through their several appropriative acts. Each would know it as
'my' percept, each would class it as a 'conscious' fact.
Nor need their so classing it interfere in the least with their classing
it at the same time as a physical pen. Since the classing in both cases
depends upon the taking of it in one group or another of associates, if
the superseding experience were of wide enough 'span' it could think the
pen in both groups simultaneously, and yet distinguish the two groups.
It would then see the whole situation conformably to what we call 'the
representative theory of cognition,' and that is what we all
spontaneously do. As a man philosophizing 'popularly,' I believe that
what I see myself writing with is double--I think it in its relations to
physical nature, and also in its relations to my personal life; I see
that it is in my mind, but that it also is a physical pen.
The paradox of the same experience figuring in two consciousnesses seems
thus no paradox at all. To be 'conscious' means not simply to be, but to
be reported, known, to have awareness of one's being added to that
being; and this is just what happens when the appropriative experience
supervenes. The pen-experience in its original immediacy is not aware of
itself, it simply _is_, and the second experience is required for what
we call awareness of it to occur.[72] The difficulty of understanding
what happens here is, therefore, not a logical difficulty: there is no
contradiction involved. It is an ontological difficulty rather.
Experiences come on an enormous scale, and if we take them all
together, they come in a chaos of incommensurable relations that we can
not straighten out. We have to abstract different groups of them, and
handle these separately if we are to talk of them at all. But how the
experiences ever _get themselves made_, or _why_ their characters and
relations are just such as appear, we can not begin to understand.
Granting, however, that, by hook or crook, they _can_ get themselves
made, and can appear in the successions that I have so schematically
described, then we have to confess that even although (as I began by
quoting from the adversary) 'a feeling only is as it is felt,' there is
still nothing absurd in the notion of its being felt in two different
ways at once, as yours, namely, and as mine. It is, indeed, 'mine' only
as it is felt as mine, and 'yours' only as it is felt as yours. But it
is felt as neither _by itself_, but only when 'owned' by our two several
remembering experiences, just as one undivided estate is owned by
several heirs.
IV
One word, now, before I close, about the corollaries of the views set
forth. Since the acquisition of conscious quality on the part of an
experience depends upon a context coming to it, it follows that the sum
total of all experiences, having no context, can not strictly be called
conscious at all. It is a _that_, an Absolute, a 'pure' experience on an
enormous scale, undifferentiated and undifferentiable into thought and
thing. This the post-Kantian idealists have always practically
acknowledged by calling their doctrine an _Identitaetsphilosophie_. The
question of the _Beseelung_ of the All of things ought not, then, even
to be asked. No more ought the question of its _truth_ to be asked, for
truth is a relation inside of the sum total, obtaining between thoughts
and something else, and thoughts, as we have seen, can only be
contextual things. In these respects the pure experiences of our
philosophy are, in themselves considered, so many little absolutes, the
philosophy of pure experience being only a more comminuted
_Identitaetsphilosophie_.[73]
Meanwhile, a pure experience can be postulated with any amount whatever
of span or field. If it exert the retrospective and appropriative
function on any other piece of experience, the latter thereby enters
into its own conscious stream. And in this operation time intervals make
no essential difference. After sleeping, my retrospection is as perfect
as it is between two successive waking moments of my time. Accordingly
if, millions of years later, a similarly retrospective experience should
anyhow come to birth, my present thought would form a genuine portion of
its long-span conscious life. 'Form a portion,' I say, but not in the
sense that the two things could be entitatively or substantively
one--they cannot, for they are numerically discrete facts--but only in
the sense that the _functions_ of my present thought, its knowledge, its
purpose, its content and 'consciousness,' in short, being inherited,
would be continued practically unchanged. Speculations like Fechner's,
of an Earth-soul, of wider spans of consciousness enveloping narrower
ones throughout the cosmos, are, therefore, philosophically quite in
order, provided they distinguish the functional from the entitative
point of view, and do not treat the minor consciousness under discussion
as a kind of standing material of which the wider ones _consist_.[74]
FOOTNOTES:
[68] [Reprinted from _The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and
Scientific Methods_, vol. II, No. 7, March 30, 1905.]
[69] "A World of Pure Experience," above, pp. 39-91.
[70] [For an explanation of this expression, see above, p. 32.]
[71] I call them 'passing thoughts' in the book--the passage in point
goes from pages 330 to 342 of vol. I.
[72] Shadworth Hodgson has laid great stress on the fact that the
minimum of consciousness demands two subfeelings, of which the second
retrospects the first. (Cf. the section 'Analysis of Minima' in his
_Philosophy of Reflection_, vol. I, p. 248; also the chapter entitled
'The Moment of Experience' in his _Metaphysic of Experience_, vol. I, p.
34.) 'We live forward, but we understand backward' is a phrase of
Kierkegaard's which Hoeffding quotes. [H. Hoeffding: "A Philosophical
Confession," _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods_,
vol. II, 1905, p. 86.]
[73] [Cf. below, pp. 197, 202.]
[74] [Cf. _A Pluralistic Universe_, Lect. IV, 'Concerning Fechner,' and
Lect. V, 'The Compounding of Consciousness.']
V
THE PLACE OF AFFECTIONAL FACTS IN A WORLD OF PURE EXPERIENCE[75]
Common sense and popular philosophy are as dualistic as it is possible
to be. Thoughts, we all naturally think, are made of one kind of
substance, and things of another. Consciousness, flowing inside of us in
the forms of conception or judgment, or concentrating itself in the
shape of passion or emotion, can be directly felt as the spiritual
activity which it is, and known in contrast with the space-filling
objective 'content' which it envelopes and accompanies. In opposition to
this dualistic philosophy, I tried, in [the first essay] to show that
thoughts and things are absolutely homogeneous as to their material, and
that their opposition is only one of relation and of function. There is
no thought-stuff different from thing-stuff, I said; but the same
identical piece of 'pure experience' (which was the name I gave to the
_materia prima_ of everything) can stand alternately for a 'fact of
consciousness' or for a physical reality, according as it is taken in
one context or in another. For the right understanding of what follows,
I shall have to presuppose that the reader will have read that
[essay].[76]
The commonest objection which the doctrine there laid down runs up
against is drawn from the existence of our 'affections.' In our
pleasures and pains, our loves and fears and angers, in the beauty,
comicality, importance or preciousness of certain objects and
situations, we have, I am told by many critics, a great realm of
experience intuitively recognized as spiritual, made, and felt to be
made, of consciousness exclusively, and different in nature from the
space-filling kind of being which is enjoyed by physical objects. In
Section VII. of [the first essay], I treated of this class of
experiences very inadequately, because I had to be so brief. I now
return to the subject, because I believe that, so far from invalidating
my general thesis, these phenomena, when properly analyzed, afford it
powerful support.
The central point of the pure-experience theory is that 'outer' and
'inner' are names for two groups into which we sort experiences
according to the way in which they act upon their neighbors. Any one
'content,' such as _hard_, let us say, can be assigned to either group.
In the outer group it is 'strong,' it acts 'energetically' and
aggressively. Here whatever is hard interferes with the space its
neighbors occupy. It dents them; is impenetrable by them; and we call
the hardness then a physical hardness. In the mind, on the contrary, the
hard thing is nowhere in particular, it dents nothing, it suffuses
through its mental neighbors, as it were, and interpenetrates them.
Taken in this group we call both it and them 'ideas' or 'sensations';
and the basis of the two groups respectively is the different type of
interrelation, the mutual impenetrability, on the one hand, and the
lack of physical interference and interaction, on the other.
That what in itself is one and the same entity should be able to
function thus differently in different contexts is a natural consequence
of the extremely complex reticulations in which our experiences come. To
her offspring a tigress is tender, but cruel to every other living
thing--both cruel and tender, therefore, at once. A mass in movement
resists every force that operates contrariwise to its own direction, but
to forces that pursue the same direction, or come in at right angles, it
is absolutely inert. It is thus both energetic and inert; and the same
is true (if you vary the associates properly) of every other piece of
experience. It is only towards certain specific groups of associates
that the physical energies, as we call them, of a content are put forth.
In another group it may be quite inert.