“If we speak of existence as a society, then we must be careful to
remember that the individual unity of a society is just as real a
fact of experience as the individual unity of the members which
compose it, and that when we call the Absolute a society rather than
a self, we do not do so with any intention of casting doubt upon its
complete spiritual unity as an individual experience.”[18]
The Absolute has been stated in modern thought to be One, Many, Real,
and Personal or Social, and these terms of its qualification have
been successively arrived at.
W. James’s words ring hollow when he attempts to dissociate such a
conception from the reality of which it is the crown and inclusive
symbol, and type and essence. “I personally,” he says, “give up the
Absolute. I find it entangles me in metaphysical paradoxes that are
inacceptable.” He allows that there may be a God, though limited
in power and goodness, “one helper amongst others, _primus inter
pares_ in the midst of all the shapers of the great world’s fate.”
In such a system, as H. Jones has pointed out, “there is neither in
the universe nor in God any principle to inspire or guide, or in any
way to bring about the amelioration desired. The process is guided
by no end. The universe begins by being an aggregate of accidents,
pluralistic, discontinuous, irrational, and, of itself, cannot become
otherwise. There is nothing actual within to change its character.…
God is himself finite, helpless to bring about this great change, a
part, and no more, of a universe broken in fragments.”
Another form, and a very scholarly one, of the argument against
the existence of an Absolute has been stated by Bax in the “Roots
of Reality.” He appears to have reached the conclusion that the
_telos_, the goal of human thought, is not an Absolute involving
any notion of fixity, but that it may be conceived of as a “moving
synthesis.” He argues that everything of which we are conscious in
the universe is seen against a background which itself moves, and
is only realisable or distinguishable if it shifts upon something
relatively motionless behind it. He concludes, therefore, that by
analogy there is no Absolute, since what we perceive always implies
something against which we perceive it; thus that there is no goal by
which and at which the spirit of man can find rest. On his theory we
could never claim to reach the conception of an Absolute, though he
admits the progressive character of human thought, and the increasing
reach, lucidity, and depth of the human mind. The true answer to this
argument is that it proves exactly what it sets out to disprove.
As it is acknowledged that only the permanent or the relatively
permanent can produce the phenomena of change, so _the appearance
of the goal of thought as a moving synthesis would presuppose an
Absolute as a ground reality_.[19]
If in truth we were able to apprehend entirely the source of all
life and the background of all experience, we might say that it did
not exist for us _as an Absolute_, but the fact that whatever we
perceive postulates an unending series behind it, carries with it
the proof of an Absolute Infinite. (This conclusion is led up to by
the mathematician’s idea of the series of all finite and transfinite
ordinal numbers.) Some part of this argument has been already
suggested in Ormond’s “Foundations of Knowledge,” and so far was used
by Mr. Illingworth in the “Doctrine of the Trinity.”[20]
“From a deeper metaphysical point of view it is the concept of
evolution itself that must submit to the determination of knowledge,
for it will be found that in so far as it becomes epistemologically
necessary to ground relative processes in an Absolute experience,
just so far will it become necessary also to connect the evolutionary
aspect of the world itself with a ground reality that is stable,
and involves the flux of change only as transcending and including
it.”[21]
The further answer that any judgment, even the Pragmatist’s “judgment
of value,” implies an Absolute has been stated in his Oxford
Lectures[22] by Professor H. Jones.
(_b_) The next point we should like to work out is the relation of
fact to law. The Pragmatist denies scientific law and also logic,
and makes his appeal to facts. No conclusion can be drawn from that
denial except by the use of logic itself. If he consistently denied
logic, his position would be unassailable by logic, but he uses the
method he denies, and is thus open to attack. On the subject of the
Laws of Science the Pragmatist points out truly that there is no
actual continuity between a fact and a law. But laws are concepts,
the result of mental activities; they are themselves subject to the
laws of logic. “They were means, and you make them ends,” complains
the Pragmatist. That is just what nature herself does. She perfects
means, such as the means of supporting life, and then these become
ends. Language, again, is at first a means, and then becomes an end.
So does any science change its character to the onlooker. A law, too,
though it generalises facts, is a limit on absolute generalisation.
It thus stands midway between the abstraction and the fact. The
Pragmatist, however, opposes to law what he calls a new fact--what
should rather be called a hypothesis. He asserts that in every event,
action, experiment, there is a margin unseen and unrecognised by
us; that at every moment, therefore, the unknown, the unexpected,
may take shape and voice and denounce all our careful and reasoned
conclusions. “Why should the sun rise to-morrow because he has
risen to-day and yesterday?” asks the Pragmatist. “We are making
an enormous assumption,” he says, “in claiming the uniformity of
Nature and the principle of causality.” The Idealist answers that the
Pragmatist makes a larger assumption in doubting the truth of the
principles, which though relative and not absolute, still do work
out in practice, than the Idealist does in his act of faith. In fact,
the act of faith is rational as well as natural; it is the act of
doubting that is in this case due to a mere scholastic quibble. It is
the Idealist and not the Pragmatist who makes his appeal to the truth
of facts. Each day that the sun goes on rising finds the Idealist in
a better philosophical position and the Pragmatist in a worse, except
on the assumption that the link between man and the external world
is a false imagination. Let us emphasise:--It is the Pragmatist who
quibbles with logic, and the Idealist who appeals to facts.
(_c_) Now there are certain facts and certain deductions from facts,
well known to mathematicians, which we should like to quote here as
having a bearing on the theory of the Absolute, because they deal
with aspects of Infinity, and mark a connection between the world as
we know it and the concepts of the philosopher. All have the support
of science, and furnish the Idealist philosopher with examples which
support his theories, and strengthen his position in the face of the
Pragmatist attack. They have to do with the theory of Infinity as
shown in:--