But now, since we are all such absolutists by instinct, what in our
quality of students of philosophy ought we to do about the fact? Shall
we espouse and indorse it? Or shall we treat it as a weakness of our
nature from which we must free ourselves, if we can?
I sincerely believe that the latter course is the only one we can
follow as reflective men. Objective evidence and certitude are
doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and
dream-visited planet are they found? I am, therefore, myself a
complete empiricist so far as my theory of human knowledge goes. I
live, to be sure, by the practical faith that we must go on
experiencing and thinking over our experience, for only thus can our
opinions grow more true; but to hold any one of them--I absolutely do
not care which--as if it never could be reinterpretable or corrigible,
I believe to be a tremendously mistaken attitude, and I think that the
whole history of philosophy will bear me out. There is but one
indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic
scepticism itself leaves {15} standing,--the truth that the present
phenomenon of consciousness exists. That, however, is the bare
starting-point of knowledge, the mere admission of a stuff to be
philosophized about. The various philosophies are but so many attempts
at expressing what this stuff really is. And if we repair to our
libraries what disagreement do we discover! Where is a certainly true
answer found? Apart from abstract propositions of comparison (such as
two and two are the same as four), propositions which tell us nothing
by themselves about concrete reality, we find no proposition ever
regarded by any one as evidently certain that has not either been
called a falsehood, or at least had its truth sincerely questioned by
some one else. The transcending of the axioms of geometry, not in play
but in earnest, by certain of our contemporaries (as Zöllner and
Charles H. Hinton), and the rejection of the whole Aristotelian logic
by the Hegelians, are striking instances in point.
No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon.
Some make the criterion external to the moment of perception, putting
it either in revelation, the _consensus gentium_, the instincts of the
heart, or the systematized experience of the race. Others make the
perceptive moment its own test,--Descartes, for instance, with his
clear and distinct ideas guaranteed by the veracity of God; Reid with
his 'common-sense;' and Kant with his forms of synthetic judgment _a
priori_. The inconceivability of the opposite; the capacity to be
verified by sense; the possession of complete organic unity or
self-relation, realized when a thing is its own other,--are standards
which, in turn, have been used. The much {16} lauded objective
evidence is never triumphantly there, it is a mere aspiration or
_Grenzbegriff_, marking the infinitely remote ideal of our thinking
life. To claim that certain truths now possess it, is simply to say
that when you think them true and they _are_ true, then their evidence
is objective, otherwise it is not. But practically one's conviction
that the evidence one goes by is of the real objective brand, is only
one more subjective opinion added to the lot. For what a contradictory
array of opinions have objective evidence and absolute certitude been
claimed! The world is rational through and through,--its existence is
an ultimate brute fact; there is a personal God,--a personal God is
inconceivable; there is an extra-mental physical world immediately
known,--the mind can only know its own ideas; a moral imperative
exists,--obligation is only the resultant of desires; a permanent
spiritual principle is in every one,--there are only shifting states of
mind; there is an endless chain of causes,--there is an absolute first
cause; an eternal necessity,--a freedom; a purpose,--no purpose; a
primal One,--a primal Many; a universal continuity,--an essential
discontinuity in things; an infinity,--no infinity. There is
this,--there is that; there is indeed nothing which some one has not
thought absolutely true, while his neighbor deemed it absolutely false;
and not an absolutist among them seems ever to have considered that the
trouble may all the time be essential, and that the intellect, even
with truth directly in its grasp, may have no infallible signal for
knowing whether it be truth or no. When, indeed, one remembers that
the most striking practical application to life of the doctrine of
objective certitude has been {17} the conscientious labors of the Holy
Office of the Inquisition, one feels less tempted than ever to lend the
doctrine a respectful ear.
But please observe, now, that when as empiricists we give up the
doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or
hope of truth itself. We still pin our faith on its existence, and
still believe that we gain an ever better position towards it by
systematically continuing to roll up experiences and think. Our great
difference from the scholastic lies in the way we face. The strength
of his system lies in the principles, the origin, the _terminus a quo_
of his thought; for us the strength is in the outcome, the upshot, the
_terminus ad quem_. Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to
decide. It matters not to an empiricist from what quarter an
hypothesis may come to him: he may have acquired it by fair means or by
foul; passion may have whispered or accident suggested it; but if the
total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is what he means
by its being true.