What is the task which philosophers set themselves to perform; and why
do they philosophize at all? Almost every one will immediately reply:
They desire to attain a conception of the frame of things which shall
on the whole be more rational than that somewhat chaotic view which
every one by nature carries about with him under his hat. But suppose
this rational conception attained, how is the philosopher to recognize
it for what it is, and not let it slip through ignorance? The only
answer can be that he will recognize its rationality as he recognizes
everything else, by certain subjective marks with which it affects him.
When he gets the marks, he may know that he has got the rationality.
What, then, are the marks? A strong feeling of ease, peace, rest, is
one of them. The transition from a state of puzzle and perplexity to
rational comprehension is full of lively relief and pleasure.
But this relief seems to be a negative rather than a positive
character. Shall we then say that the feeling of rationality is
constituted merely by the absence {64} of any feeling of irrationality?
I think there are very good grounds for upholding such a view. All
feeling whatever, in the light of certain recent psychological
speculations, seems to depend for its physical condition not on simple
discharge of nerve-currents, but on their discharge under arrest,
impediment, or resistance. Just as we feel no particular pleasure when
we breathe freely, but a very intense feeling of distress when the
respiratory motions are prevented,--so any unobstructed tendency to
action discharges itself without the production of much cogitative
accompaniment, and any perfectly fluent course of thought awakens but
little feeling; but when the movement is inhibited, or when the thought
meets with difficulties, we experience distress. It is only when the
distress is upon us that we can be said to strive, to crave, or to
aspire. When enjoying plenary freedom either in the way of motion or
of thought, we are in a sort of anaesthetic state in which we might say
with Walt Whitman, if we cared to say anything about ourselves at such
times, "I am sufficient as I am." This feeling of the sufficiency of
the present moment, of its absoluteness,--this absence of all need to
explain it, account for it, or justify it,--is what I call the
Sentiment of Rationality. As soon, in short, as we are enabled from
any cause whatever to think with perfect fluency, the thing we think of
seems to us _pro tanto_ rational.
Whatever modes of conceiving the cosmos facilitate this fluency,
produce the sentiment of rationality. Conceived in such modes, being
vouches for itself and needs no further philosophic formulation. But
this fluency may be obtained in various ways; and first I will take up
the theoretic way.
{65}
The facts of the world in their sensible diversity are always before
us, but our theoretic need is that they should be conceived in a way
that reduces their manifoldness to simplicity. Our pleasure at finding
that a chaos of facts is the expression of a single underlying fact is
like the relief of the musician at resolving a confused mass of sound
into melodic or harmonic order. The simplified result is handled with
far less mental effort than the original data; and a philosophic
conception of nature is thus in no metaphorical sense a labor-saving
contrivance. The passion for parsimony, for economy of means in
thought, is the philosophic passion _par excellence_; and any character
or aspect of the world's phenomena which gathers up their diversity
into monotony will gratify that passion, and in the philosopher's mind
stand for that essence of things compared with which all their other
determinations may by him be overlooked.
More universality or extensiveness is, then, one mark which the
philosopher's conceptions must possess. Unless they apply to an
enormous number of cases they will not bring him relief. The knowledge
of things by their causes, which is often given as a definition of
rational knowledge, is useless to him unless the causes converge to a
minimum number, while still producing the maximum number of effects.
The more multiple then are the instances, the more flowingly does his
mind rove from fact to fact. The phenomenal transitions are no real
transitions; each item is the same old friend with a slightly altered
dress.
Who does not feel the charm of thinking that the moon and the apple
are, as far as their relation to the {66} earth goes, identical; of
knowing respiration and combustion to be one; of understanding that the
balloon rises by the same law whereby the stone sinks; of feeling that
the warmth in one's palm when one rubs one's sleeve is identical with
the motion which the friction checks; of recognizing the difference
between beast and fish to be only a higher degree of that between human
father and son; of believing our strength when we climb the mountain or
fell the tree to be no other than the strength of the sun's rays which
made the corn grow out of which we got our morning meal?
But alongside of this passion for simplification there exists a sister
passion, which in some minds--though they perhaps form the minority--is
its rival. This is the passion for distinguishing; it is the impulse
to be _acquainted_ with the parts rather than to comprehend the whole.
Loyalty to clearness and integrity of perception, dislike of blurred
outlines, of vague identifications, are its characteristics. It loves
to recognize particulars in their full completeness, and the more of
these it can carry the happier it is. It prefers any amount of
incoherence, abruptness, and fragmentariness (so long as the literal
details of the separate facts are saved) to an abstract way of
conceiving things that, while it simplifies them, dissolves away at the
same time their concrete fulness. Clearness and simplicity thus set up
rival claims, and make a real dilemma for the thinker.
A man's philosophic attitude is determined by the balance in him of
these two cravings. No system of philosophy can hope to be universally
accepted among men which grossly violates either need, or {67} entirely
subordinates the one to the other. The fate of Spinosa, with his
barren union of all things in one substance, on the one hand; that of
Hume, with his equally barren 'looseness and separateness' of
everything, on the other,--neither philosopher owning any strict and
systematic disciples to-day, each being to posterity a warning as well
as a stimulus,--show us that the only possible philosophy must be a
compromise between an abstract monotony and a concrete heterogeneity.
But the only way to mediate between diversity and unity is to class the
diverse items as cases of a common essence which you discover in them.
Classification of things into extensive 'kinds' is thus the first step;
and classification of their relations and conduct into extensive 'laws'
is the last step, in their philosophic unification. A completed
theoretic philosophy can thus never be anything more than a completed
classification of the world's ingredients; and its results must always
be abstract, since the basis of every classification is the abstract
essence embedded in the living fact,--the rest of the living fact being
for the time ignored by the classifier. This means that none of our
explanations are complete. They subsume things under heads wider or
more familiar; but the last heads, whether of things or of their
connections, are mere abstract genera, data which we just find in
things and write down.
When, for example, we think that we have rationally explained the
connection of the facts _A_ and _B_ by classing both under their common
attribute _x_, it is obvious that we have really explained only so much
of these items as _is x_. To explain the connection of choke-damp and
suffocation by the lack of oxygen is {68} to leave untouched all the
other peculiarities both of choke-damp and of suffocation,--such as
convulsions and agony on the one hand, density and explosibility on the
other. In a word, so far as _A_ and _B_ contain _l_, _m_, _n_, and
_o_, _p_, _q,_ respectively, in addition to _x_, they are not explained
by _x_. Each additional particularity makes its distinct appeal. A
single explanation of a fact only explains it from a single point of
view. The entire fact is not accounted for until each and all of its
characters have been classed with their likes elsewhere. To apply this
now to the case of the universe, we see that the explanation of the
world by molecular movements explains it only so far as it actually
_is_ such movements. To invoke the 'Unknowable' explains only so much
as is unknowable, 'Thought' only so much as is thought, 'God' only so
much as is God. _Which_ thought? _Which_ God?--are questions that
have to be answered by bringing in again the residual data from which
the general term was abstracted. All those data that cannot be
analytically identified with the attribute invoked as universal
principle, remain as independent kinds or natures, associated
empirically with the said attribute but devoid of rational kinship with
it.
Hence the unsatisfactoriness of all our speculations. On the one hand,
so far as they retain any multiplicity in their terms, they fail to get
us out of the empirical sand-heap world; on the other, so far as they
eliminate multiplicity the practical man despises their empty
barrenness. The most they can say is that the elements of the world
are such and such, and that each is identical with itself wherever
found; but the question Where is it found? the practical man is left to
answer by his own wit. Which, of all the {69} essences, shall here and
now be held the essence of this concrete thing, the fundamental
philosophy never attempts to decide. We are thus led to the conclusion
that the simple classification of things is, on the one hand, the best
possible theoretic philosophy, but is, on the other, a most miserable
and inadequate substitute for the fulness of the truth. It is a
monstrous abridgment of life, which, like all abridgments is got by the
absolute loss and casting out of real matter. This is why so few human
beings truly care for philosophy. The particular determinations which
she ignores are the real matter exciting needs, quite as potent and
authoritative as hers. What does the moral enthusiast care for
philosophical ethics? Why does the _AEsthetik_ of every German
philosopher appear to the artist an abomination of desolation?
Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie
Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.
The entire man, who feels all needs by turns, will take nothing as an
equivalent for life but the fulness of living itself. Since the
essences of things are as a matter of fact disseminated through the
whole extent of time and space, it is in their spread-outness and
alternation that he will enjoy them. When weary of the concrete clash
and dust and pettiness, he will refresh himself by a bath in the
eternal springs, or fortify himself by a look at the immutable natures.
But he will only be a visitor, not a dweller in the region; he will
never carry the philosophic yoke upon his shoulders, and when tired of
the gray monotony of her problems and insipid spaciousness of her
results, will always escape gleefully into the teeming and dramatic
richness of the concrete world.
{70}
So our study turns back here to its beginning. Every way of
classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular
purpose. Conceptions, 'kinds,' are teleological instruments. No
abstract concept can be a valid substitute for a concrete reality
except with reference to a particular interest in the conceiver. The
interest of theoretic rationality, the relief of identification, is but
one of a thousand human purposes. When others rear their heads, it
must pack up its little bundle and retire till its turn recurs. The
exaggerated dignity and value that philosophers have claimed for their
solutions is thus greatly reduced. The only virtue their theoretic
conception need have is simplicity, and a simple conception is an
equivalent for the world only so far as the world is simple,--the world
meanwhile, whatever simplicity it may harbor, being also a mightily
complex affair. Enough simplicity remains, however, and enough urgency
in our craving to reach it, to make the theoretic function one of the
most invincible of human impulses. The quest of the fewest elements of
things is an ideal that some will follow, as long as there are men to
think at all.
But suppose the goal attained. Suppose that at last we have a system
unified in the sense that has been explained. Our world can now be
conceived simply, and our mind enjoys the relief. Our universal
concept has made the concrete chaos rational. But now I ask, Can that
which is the ground of rationality in all else be itself properly
called rational? It would seem at first sight that it might. One is
tempted at any rate to say that, since the craving for rationality is
appeased by the identification of one {71} thing with another, a datum
which left nothing else outstanding might quench that craving
definitively, or be rational _in se_. No otherness being left to annoy
us, we should sit down at peace. In other words, as the theoretic
tranquillity of the boor results from his spinning no further
considerations about his chaotic universe, so any datum whatever
(provided it were simple, clear, and ultimate) ought to banish puzzle
from the universe of the philosopher and confer peace, inasmuch as
there would then be for him absolutely no further considerations to
spin.