additional relation which is of the highest intellectual importance,
inasmuch as upon it the whole structure of logic is reared. _The
principle of mediate predication or subsumption_ is only the axiom of
skipped intermediaries applied to a series of successive predications.
It expresses the fact that any earlier term in the series stands to any
later term in the same relation in which it stands to any intermediate
term; in other words, that _whatever has an attribute has all the
attributes of that attribute;_ or more briefly still, that _whatever
is of a kind is of that kind's kind._ A little explanation of this
statement will bring out all that it involves.
We learned in the chapter on Reasoning what our great motive is for
abstracting attributes and predicating them. It is that our varying
practical purposes require us to lay hold of different angles of the
reality at different times. But for these we should be satisfied to
'see it whole,' and always alike. The purpose, however, makes one
aspect essential; so, to avoid dispersion of the attention, we treat
the reality as if for the time being it were nothing but that aspect,
and we let its supernumerary determinations go. In short, we substitute
the aspect for the whole real thing. _For our purpose_ the aspect _can_
be substituted for the whole, and the two treated as the same; and the
word _is_ (which couples the whole with its aspect or attribute in the
categoric judgment) expresses (among other things) the identifying
operation performed. The predication-series _a_ is _b, b_ is _c,
c_ is _d_,... closely resembles for certain practical purposes the
equation-series _a = b, b = c, c = d_, etc.
But what is our purpose in predicating? Ultimately, it may be
anything we please; but proximately and immediately, it is always the
gratification of a certain curiosity as to whether the object in hand
is or is not _of a kind_ connected with that ultimate purpose. Usually
the connection is not obvious, and we only find that the object S is of
a kind connected with P, after first finding that it is of a kind M,
which itself is connected with P. Thus, to fix our ideas by an example,
we have a curiosity (our ultimate purpose being conquest over nature)
as to how Sirius may move. It is not obvious whether Sirius is a kind
of thing which moves in the line of sight or not. When, however, we
find it to be a kind of thing in whose spectrum the hydrogen-line is
shifted, and when we reflect that _that_ kind of thing is a kind of
thing which moves in the line of sight; we conclude that Sirius does
so move. Whatever Sirius's attribute is, Sirius is; its adjective's
adjective can supersede its own adjective in our thinking, and this
with no loss to our knowledge, _so long as we stick to the definite
purpose in view._
Now please note that this elimination of intermediary kinds and
transfer of _is_'s along the line, results from our insight into the
very meaning of the word _is_, and into the constitution of any series
of terms connected by that relation. It has naught to do with what
any particular thing is or is not; but, _whatever_ any given thing
may be, we see that it also is whatever _that_ is, indefinitely. To
grasp in one view a succession of _is_'s is to apprehend this relation
between the terms which they connect; just as to grasp a list of
successive equals is to apprehend their _mutual_ equality throughout.
The principle of mediate subsumption thus expresses relations of ideal
objects as such. It can be discovered by a mind left at leisure with
any set of meanings (however originally obtained), of which some are
predicable of others. The moment we string them in a serial line, that
moment we see that we can drop intermediaries, treat remote terms just
like near ones, and put a genus in the place of a species. This shows
that _the principle of mediate subsumption has nothing to do with the
particular order of our experiences, or with the outer coexistences and
sequences of terms._ Were it a mere outgrowth of habit and association,
we should be forced to regard it as having no universal validity; for
every hour of the day we meet things which we consider to be of this
kind or of that, but later learn that they have none of the kind's
properties, that they _do not_ belong to the kind's kind. Instead,
however, of correcting the principle by these cases, we correct the
cases by the principle. We say that if the thing we named an M has
not M's properties, then we were either mistaken in calling it an M,
or mistaken about M's properties; or else that it is no longer M, but
has changed. But we never say that it is an M without M's properties;
for by conceiving a thing as of the kind M I mean that it _shall_ have
M's properties, be of M's kind, even though I should never be able to
find in the real world anything which is an M. The principle emanates
from my perception of what a lot of successive is's _mean_. This
perception can no more be confirmed by one set, or weakened by another
set, of outer facts, than the perception that black is not white can be
confirmed by the fact that snow never blackens, or weakened by the fact
that photographer's paper blackens as soon as you lay it in the sun.
The abstract scheme of successive predications, extended indefinitely,
with all the possibilities of substitution which it involves, is thus
an immutable system of truth which flows from the very structure
and form of our thinking. _If_ any real terms ever do fit into such
a scheme, they will obey its laws; _whether_ they do is a question
as to nature's facts, the answer to which can only be empirically
ascertained. _Formal logic_ is the name of the Science which traces
in skeleton form all the remote relations of terms connected by
successive _is_'s with each other, and enumerates their possibilities
of mutual substitution. To our principle of mediate subsumption she has
given various formulations, of which the best is perhaps this broad
expression, that _the same can be substituted for the same in any
mental operation._[540]
The ordinary logical series contains but three terms--"Socrates, man,
mortal." But we also have 'Sorites'--Socrates, man, animal, machine,
run down, mortal, etc.--and it violates psychology to represent these
as syllogisms with terms suppressed. The ground of there being any
logic at all is our power to grasp any series as a whole, and the more
terms it holds the better. This synthetic consciousness of an uniform
direction of advance through a multiplicity of terms is, apparently,
what the brutes and lower men cannot accomplish, and what gives to us
our extraordinary power of ratiocinative thought. The mind which can
grasp a string of _is_'s as a whole--the objects linked by them may
be ideal or real, physical, mental, or symbolic, indifferently--can
also apply to it the principle of skipped intermediaries. _The
logic-list is thus in its origin and essential nature just like
those graded classificatory lists which we erewhile described._ The
'rational proposition' which lies at the basis of all reasoning, the
_dictum de omni et nullo_ in all the various forms in which it may be
expressed, the fundamental law of thought, is thus _only the result
of the function of comparison_ in a mind which has come by some lucky
variation to apprehend a series of more than two terms at once.[541]
So far, then, _both Systematic Classification and Logic are seen to
be incidental results of the mere capacity for discerning difference
and likeness,_ which capacity is a thing with which the _order of
experience_, properly so styled, has absolutely nothing to do.
* * * * *
But how comes it (it may next be asked) when systematic classifications
have so little ultimate theoretic importance--for the conceiving of
things according to their mere degrees of resemblance always yields to
other modes of conceiving when these can be obtained--that the logical
relations among things should form such a mighty engine for dealing
with the facts of life?
Chapter XXII already gave the reason (see p. 335, above). This world
_might_ be a world in which all things differed, and in which what
properties there were were ultimate and had no farther predicates.
In such a world there would be as many kinds as there were separate
things. We could never subsume a new thing under an old kind; or if we
could, no consequences would follow. Or, again, this might be a world
in which innumerable things were of a kind, but in which no concrete
thing remained of the same kind long, but all objects were in a flux.
Here again, though we could subsume and infer, our logic would be of no
practical use to us, for the subjects of our propositions would have
changed whilst we were talking. In such worlds, logical relations would
obtain, and be known (doubtless) as they are now, but they would form
a merely theoretic scheme and be of no use for the conduct of life.
But our world is no such world. It is a very peculiar world, and plays
right into logic's hands. _Some_ of the things, at least, which it
contains are of the same kind as other things; _some_ of them remain
always of the kind of which they once were; and some of the properties
of them cohere indissolubly and are always found together. _Which_
things these latter things are we learn by experience in the strict
sense of the word, and the results of the experience are embodied in
'empirical propositions.' Whenever such a thing is met with by us now,
our sagacity notes it to be of a certain kind; our learning immediately
recalls that kind's kind, and then _that_ kind's kind, and so on; so
that a moment's thinking may make us aware that the thing is of a kind
so remote that we could never have directly perceived the connection.
The flight to this last kind _over the heads of the intermediaries_ is
the essential feature of the intellectual operation here. Evidently it
is a pure outcome of our sense for apprehending serial increase; and,
unlike the several propositions themselves which make up the series
(and which may all be empirical), it has nothing to do with the time-
and space-order in which the things have been experienced.
MATHEMATICAL RELATIONS.
So much for the _a priori_ necessities called systematic classification
and logical inference. The other couplings of data which pass for _a
priori_ necessities of thought are the _mathematical_ judgments, and
certain metaphysical propositions. These latter we shall consider
farther on. As regards the mathematical judgments, they are all
'rational propositions' in the sense defined on p. 644, for they
express results of comparison and nothing more. The mathematical
sciences deal with similarities and equalities exclusively, and
not with coexistences and sequences. Hence they have, in the first
instance, no connection with the order of experience. The comparisons
of mathematics are between numbers and extensive magnitudes, giving
rise to arithmetic and geometry respectively.
* * * * *
_Number_ seems to signify primarily the strokes of our attention in
discriminating things. These strokes remain in the memory in groups,
large or small, and the groups can be compared. The discrimination is,
as we know, psychologically facilitated by the mobility of the thing
as a total (p. 173). But within each thing we discriminate parts; so
that the number of things which any one given phenomenon may be depends
in the last instance on our way of taking it. A globe is one, if
undivided; two, if composed of hemispheres. A sand-heap is one thing,
or twenty thousand things, as we may choose to count it. We amuse
ourselves by the counting of _mere_ strokes, to form rhythms, and these
we compare and name. Little by little in our minds the number-series is
formed. This, like all lists of terms in which there is a direction of
serial increase, carries with it the sense of those mediate relations
between its terms which we expressed by the axiom "the more than the
more is more than the less." That axiom seems, in fact, only a way of
stating that the terms do form an increasing series. But, in addition
to this, we are aware of certain other relations among our strokes of
counting. We may interrupt them where we like, and go on again. All
the while we feel that the interruption does not alter the strokes
themselves. We may count 12 straight through; or count 7 and pause,
and then count 5, but still the strokes will be the same. We thus
distinguish between our acts of counting and those of interrupting
or grouping, as between an unchanged matter and an operation of
mere shuffling performed on it. The matter is the original units or
strokes; which all modes of grouping or combining simply give us back
unchanged. In short, _combinations of numbers are combinations of their
units_, which is the fundamental axiom of arithmetic,[542] leading to
such consequences as that 7 + 5 = 8 + 4 because both = 12. The general
axiom of mediate equality, that equals of equals are equal, comes in
here.[543] The principle of constancy in our meanings, when applied to
strokes of counting, also gives rise to the axiom that the same number,
operated on (interrupted, grouped) in the same way will always give
the same result or be the same. How shouldn't it? Nothing is supposed
changed.
_Arithmetic and its fundamental principles are thus independent of our
experiences or of the order of the world._ The matter of arithmetic
is _mental matter_; its principles flow from the fact that the matter
forms a series, which can be cut into by us wherever we like without
the matter changing. The empiricist school has strangely tried to
interpret the truths of number as results of coexistences among
outward things. John Mill calls number a physical property of things.
'One,' according to Mill, means one sort of passive sensation which we
receive, 'two' another, 'three' a third. The same things, however, can
give us different number-sensations. Three things arranged thus, ---,
for example, impress us differently from three things arranged thus,
-_-. But experience tells us that every real object-group which can
be arranged in one of these ways can always be arranged in the other
also, and that 2 + 1 and 3 are thus modes of numbering things which
'coexist' invariably with each other. The indefeasibility of our belief
in their 'coexistence' (which is Mill's word for their equivalence)
is due solely to the enormous amount of experience we have of it. For
all things, whatever other sensations they may give us, give us at any
rate number-sensations. Those number-sensations which the same thing
may be successively made to arouse are the numbers which we deem equal
to each other; those which the same thing refuses to arouse are those
which we deem unequal.
This is as clear a restatement as I can make of Mill's doctrine.[544]
And its failure is written upon its front. Woe to arithmetic, were such
the only grounds for its validity! The same real things are countable
in numberless ways, and pass from one numerical form, not only to
its equivalent (as Mill implies), but to its other, as the sport of
physical accidents or of our mode of attending may decide. How could
our notion that one and one are eternally and necessarily two ever
maintain itself in a world where every time we add one drop of water to
another we get not two but one again? in a world where every time we
add a drop to a crumb of quicklime we get a dozen or more?--had it no
better warrant than such experiences? At most we could then say that
one and one are _usually_ two. Our arithmetical propositions would
never have the confident tone which they now possess. That confident
tone is due to the fact that they deal with abstract and ideal numbers
exclusively. _What we mean_ by one plus one _is_ two; we _make_ two out
of it; and it would mean two still even in a world where _physically_
(according to a conceit of Mill's) a third thing was engendered every
time one thing came together with another. We are masters of our
meanings, and discriminate between the things we mean and our ways of
taking them, between our strokes of numeration themselves, and our
bundlings and separatings thereof.
Mill ought not only to have said, "All things are numbered." He
ought, in order to prove his point, to have shown that they are
_unequivocally_ numbered, which they notoriously are not. Only the
abstract numbers themselves are unequivocal, only those which we create
mentally and hold fast to as ideal objects always the same. A concrete
natural thing can always be numbered in a great variety of ways. "We
need only conceive a thing divided into four equal parts (and all
things may be conceived as so divided)," as Mill is himself compelled
to say, to find the number four in it, and so on.
The relation of numbers to experience is just like that of 'kinds'
in logic. So long as an experience will keep its kind we can handle
it by logic. So long as it will keep its number we can deal with it
by arithmetic. _Sensibly_, however, things are constantly changing
their numbers, just as they are changing their kinds. They are forever
breaking apart and fusing. Compounds and their elements are never
numerically identical, for the elements are sensibly many and the
compounds sensibly one. Unless our arithmetic is to remain without
application to life, we must somehow _make_ more numerical continuity
than we spontaneously find. Accordingly Lavoisier discovers his
weight-units which remain the same in compounds and elements, though
volume-units and quality-units all have changed. A great discovery!
And modern science outdoes it by denying that compounds exist at all.
There is no such thing as 'water' for 'science;' that is only a handy
name for H_{2} and O when they have got into the position H-O-H, and
then affect our senses in a novel way. The modern theories of atoms,
of heat, and of gases are, in fact, only intensely artificial devices
for gaining that constancy in the numbers of things which sensible
experience will not show. "Sensible things are not the things for
me," says Science, "because in their changes they will not keep their
numbers the same. Sensible qualities are not the qualities for me,
because they can with difficulty be numbered at all. These hypothetic
atoms, however, are the things, these hypothetic masses and velocities
are the qualities for me; they will stay numbered all the time."
By such elaborate inventions, and at such a cost to the imagination, do
men succeed in making for themselves a world in which real things shall
be coerced _per fas aut nefas_ under arithmetical law.
* * * * *
The other branch of mathematics is _geometry_. Its objects are also
ideal creations. Whether nature contain circles or not, I can know what
I mean by a circle and can stick to my meaning; and when I mean two
circles I mean two things of an identical kind. The axiom of constant
results (see above, p. 645) holds in geometry. The same forms,
treated in the same way (added, subtracted, or compared), give the
same results--how shouldn't they? The axioms of mediate comparison (p.
645), of logic (p. 648), and of number (p. 654) all apply to the
forms which we imagine in space, inasmuch as these resemble or differ
from each other, form kinds, and are numerable things. But in addition
to these general principles, which are true of space-forms only as they
are of other mental conceptions, there are certain axioms relative to
space-forms exclusively, which we must briefly consider.
Three of them give marks of identity among straight lines, planes,
and parallels. Straight lines which have two points, planes which
have three points, parallels to a given line which have one point, in
common, coalesce throughout. Some say that the certainty of our belief
in these axioms is due to repeated experiences of their truth; others
that it is due to an intuitive acquaintance with the properties of
space. It is neither. We experience lines enough which pass through
two points only to separate again, only we won't call them straight.
Similarly of planes and parallels. We have a definite idea of what we
mean by each of these words; and when something different is offered
us, we see the difference. Straight lines, planes, and parallels,
as they figure in geometry, are mere inventions of our faculty for
apprehending serial increase. The farther continuations of these forms,
we say, _shall_ bear the same relation to their last visible parts
which these did to still earlier parts. It thus follows (from that
axiom of skipped intermediaries which obtains in all regular series)
that parts of these figures separated by other parts must agree in
direction, just as contiguous parts do. This uniformity of direction
throughout is, in fact, all that makes us care for these forms, gives
them their beauty, and stamps them into fixed conceptions in our mind.
But obviously if two lines, or two planes, with a common segment,
were to part company beyond the segment, it could only be because the
direction of at least one of them had changed. Parting company in lines
and planes _means_ changing direction, means assuming a new relation
to the parts that pre-exist; and assuming a new relation means ceasing
to be straight or plane. If we mean by a parallel a line that will
never meet a second line; and if we have one such line drawn through a
point, any new line drawn through that point which does not coalesce
with the first must be inclined to it, and if inclined to it must
approach the second, i.e., cease to be parallel with it. No properties
of outlying space need come in here: only a definite conception of
uniform direction, and constancy in sticking to one's point.
The other two axioms peculiar to geometry are that figures can be
moved in space without change, and that no variation in the way of
subdividing a given amount of space alters its total quantity.[545]
This last axiom is similar to what we found to obtain in numbers. 'The
whole is equal to its parts' is an abridged way of expressing it. A man
is not the same biological whole if we cut him in two at the neck as if
we divide him at the ankles; but geometrically he is the same whole,
no matter in which place we cut him. The axiom about figures being
movable in space is rather a postulate than an axiom. _So far as they
are_ so movable, then certain fixed equalities and differences obtain
between forms, _no matter where placed_. But if translation through
space warped or magnified forms, then the relations of equality, etc.,
would always have to be expressed with a position-qualification added.
A geometry as absolutely certain as ours could be invented on the
supposition of such a space, if the laws of its warping and deformation
were fixed. It would, however, be much more complicated than our
geometry, which makes the simplest possible supposition; and finds,
luckily enough, that it is a supposition with which the space of our
experience seems to agree.
By means of these principles, all playing into each other's hands, the
mutual equivalences of an immense number of forms can be traced, even
of such as at first sight bear hardly any resemblance to each other.
We move and turn them mentally, and find that parts of them will
superpose. We add imaginary lines which subdivide or enlarge them, and
find that the new figures resemble each other in ways which show us
that the old ones are equivalent too. We thus end by expressing all
sorts of forms in terms of other forms, enlarging our knowledge of the
kinds of things which certain other kinds of things are, or to which
they are equivalent.
The result is a new system of mental objects which can be treated
as identical for certain purposes, a new series of _is_'s almost
indefinitely prolonged, just like the series of equivalencies among
numbers, part of which the multiplication-table expresses. And all this
is in the first instance regardless of the coexistences and sequences
of nature, and regardless of whether the figures we speak of have ever
been outwardly experienced or not.
CONSCIOUSNESS OF SERIES IS THE BASIS OF RATIONALITY.
Classification, logic, and mathematics all result, then, from the mere
play of the mind comparing its conceptions, no matter whence the latter
may have come. The essential condition for the formation of all these
sciences is that we should have grown capable of apprehending series
as such, and of distinguishing them as homogeneous or heterogeneous,
and as possessing definite directions of what I have called 'increase.'
This consciousness of series is a human perfection which has been
gradually evolved, and which varies greatly from man to man. There is
no accounting for it as a result of habitual associations among outward
impressions, so we must simply ascribe it to the factors, whatever they
be, of inward cerebral growth. Once this consciousness attained to,
however, _mediate_ thought becomes possible; with our very awareness of
a series may go an awareness that dropping terms out of it will leave
identical relations between the terms that remain; and thus arises a
perception of relations between things so naturally separate that we
should otherwise never have compared them together at all.
The axiom of skipped intermediaries applies, however, only to certain
particular series, and among them to those which we have considered,
in which the recurring relation is either of difference, of likeness,
of kind, of numerical addition, or of prolongation in the same linear
or plane direction. It is therefore not a purely formal law of
thinking, but flows from the nature of the matters thought about. It
will not do to say universally that in all series of homogeneously
related terms the remote members are related to each other as the near
ones are; for that will often be untrue. The series A is not B is
not C is not D.... does not permit the relation to be traced between
remote terms. From two negations no inference can be drawn. Nor, to
become more concrete, does the lover of a woman generally love her
beloved, or the contradictor of a contradictor contradict whomever
he contradicts. The slayer of a slayer does not slay the latter's
victim; the acquaintances or enemies of a man need not be each other's
acquaintances or enemies; nor are two things which are on top of a
third thing necessarily on top of each other.
All skipping of intermediaries and transfer of relations occurs
within homogeneous series. But not all homogeneous series allow of
intermediaries being skipped and relations transferred. It depends on
which series they are, on what relations they contain.[546] Let it
not be said that it is a mere matter of verbal association, due to
the fact that language sometimes permits us to transfer the _name_ of
a relation over skipped intermediaries, and sometimes does not; as
where we call men 'progenitors' of their remote as well as of their
immediate posterity, but refuse to call them 'fathers' thereof. There
are relations which are _intrinsically_ transferable, whilst others are
not. The relation of _condition_, e.g., is intrinsically transferable.
What conditions a condition conditions what it conditions--"cause of
cause is cause of effect." The relations of negation and _frustration,_
on the other hand, are not transferable: what frustrates a frustration
does not frustrate what it frustrates. No changes of terminology would
annul the intimate difference between these two cases.
Nothing but the clear sight of the ideas themselves shows whether
the axiom of skipped intermediaries applies to them or not. Their
connections, immediate and remote, flow from their inward natures.
We try to consider them in certain ways, to bring them into certain
relations, and we find that sometimes we can and sometimes we cannot
_The question whether there are or are not inward and essential
connections between conceived objects as such, really is the same
thing as the question whether we can get any new perception from
mentally coupling them together, or pass from one to another by a
mental operation which gives a result._ In the case of some ideas and
operations we get a result; but no result in the case of others. Where
a result comes, it is due exclusively to the _nature_ of the ideas and
of the operation. Take blueness and yellowness, for example. We can
operate on them in some ways, but not in other ways. We can compare
them; but we cannot add one to or subtract it from the other. We can
refer them to a common kind, color; but we cannot make one a kind of
the other, or infer one from the other. This has nothing to do with
experience. For we _can_ add blue _pigment_ to yellow _pigment_, and
subtract it again, and get a result both times. Only we know perfectly
that this is no addition or subtraction of the blue and yellow
qualities or natures themselves.[547]
* * * * *
There is thus no denying the fact that _the mind is filled with
necessary and eternal relations which it finds between certain of its
ideal conceptions, and which form a determinate system, independent
of the order of frequency in which experience may have associated the
conception's originals in time and space._
Shall we continue to call these sciences 'intuitive,' innate,' or '_a
priori_' bodies of truth, or not?[548] Personally I should like to
do so. But I hesitate to use the terms, on account of the odium which
controversial history has made the whole of their connotation for many
worthy persons. The most politic way not to alienate these readers is
to flourish the name of the immortal Locke. For in truth I have done
nothing more in the previous pages than to make a little more explicit
the teachings of Locke's fourth book:
"The immutability of the same relations between the same immutable
things is now the idea that shows him that if the three angles of a
triangle were once equal to two right angles, they will always be
equal to two right ones. And hence he comes to be certain that what
was once true in the case is always true; what ideas once agreed will
always agree.... Upon this ground it is that particular demonstrations
in mathematics afford general knowledge. If, then, the perception that
the same ideas will eternally have the same habitudes and relations
be not a sufficient ground of knowledge, there could be no knowledge
of general propositions in mathematics.... All general knowledge lies
only in our own thoughts, and consists barely in the contemplation of
our abstract ideas. Wherever we perceive any agreement or disagreement
amongst them, there we have general knowledge; and by putting the
names of those ideas together accordingly in propositions, can with
certainty pronounce general truths.... What is once known of such
ideas will be perpetually and forever true. So that, as to all general
knowledge, we must search and find it only in our own minds and it
is only the examining of our own ideas that furnisheth us with that.
Truths belonging to essences of things (that is, to abstract ideas)
are eternal, and are to be found out only by the contemplation of
those essences.... Knowledge is the consequence of the ideas (be they
what they will) that are in our minds, producing there certain general
propositions.... Such propositions are therefore called 'eternal
truths,'... because, being once made about abstract ideas so as to
be true, they will, whenever they can be supposed to be made again,
at any time past or to come, by a mind having those ideas, always
actually be true. For names being supposed to stand perpetually for
the same ideas, and the same ideas having immutably the same habitudes
one to another, propositions concerning any abstract ideas that are
once true must needs be eternal verities."
But what are these eternal verities, these 'agreements,' which the
mind discovers by barely considering its own fixed meanings, except
what I have said?--relations of likeness and difference, immediate or
mediate, between the terms of certain series. Classification is serial
comparison, logic mediate subsumption, arithmetic mediate equality of
different bundles of attention-strokes, geometry mediate equality of
different ways of carving space. None of these eternal verities has
anything to say about facts, about what is or is not in the world.
Logic does not say whether Socrates, men, mortals or immortals _exist_;
arithmetic does not tell us where her 7's, 5's, and 12's are to be
_found_; geometry affirms not that circles and rectangles are _real_.
All that these sciences make us sure of is, that _if_ these things are
anywhere to be found, the eternal verities will obtain of them. Locke
accordingly never tires of telling us that the
"universal propositions of whose truth or falsehood we can have
certain knowledge, concern not existence.... These universal and
self-evident principles, being only our constant, clear, and distinct
knowledge of our own ideas more general or comprehensive, can assure
us of nothing that passes without the mind; their certainty is founded
only upon the knowledge of each idea by itself, and of its distinction
from others; about which we cannot be mistaken whilst they are in
our minds.... The mathematician considers the truth and properties
belonging to a rectangle or circle only as they are in idea in his
own mind. For it is possible he never found either of them existing
mathematically, i.e., precisely true, in his life. But yet the
knowledge he has of any truths or properties belonging to a circle, or
any other mathematical figure, are nevertheless true and certain even
of real things existing; because real things are no farther concerned
nor intended to be meant by any such propositions, than as things
really agree to those archetypes in his mind. Is it true of the idea
of a triangle, that its three angles are equal to two right ones? It
is true also of a triangle wherever it really exists. Whatever other
figure exists that is not exactly answerable to that idea in his mind
is not at all concerned in that proposition. And therefore he is
certain all his knowledge concerning such ideas is real knowledge:
because, intending things no farther than they agree with those his
ideas, he is sure what he knows concerning those figures when they
have barely an ideal existence in his mind will hold true of them also
when they have a real existence in matter." But "that any or what
bodies do exist, that we are left to our senses to discover to us as
far as they can."[549]
Locke accordingly distinguishes between 'mental truth' and 'real
truth.'[550] The former is intuitively certain; the latter dependent
on experience. Only _hypothetically_ can we affirm intuitive truths
of real things--by _supposing_, namely, that real things exist
which correspond exactly with the ideal subjects of the intuitive
propositions.
If our senses corroborate the supposition all goes well. But note
the strange descent in Locke's hands of the dignity of _a priori_
propositions. By the ancients they were considered, without farther
question, to reveal the constitution of Reality. Archetypal things
existed, it was assumed, in the relations in which we had to think
them. The mind's necessities were a warrant for those of Being; and
it was not till Descartes' time that scepticism had so advanced (in
'dogmatic' circles) that the warrant must itself be warranted, and
the veracity of the Deity invoked as a reason for holding fast to our
natural beliefs.
But the intuitive propositions of Locke leave us as regards outer
reality none the better for their possession. We still have to "go
to our senses" to find what the reality is. The vindication of the
intuitionist position is thus a barren victory. The eternal verities
which the very structure of our mind lays hold of do not necessarily
themselves lay hold on extra-mental being, nor have they, as Kant
pretended later,[551] a legislating character even for all possible
experience. They are primarily interesting only as subjective facts.
They stand waiting in the mind, forming a beautiful ideal network; and
the most we can say is that we _hope_ to discover outer realities over
which the network may be flung so that ideal and real may coincide.
* * * * *
And this brings us back to 'science' from which we diverted our
attention so long ago (see p. 640). Science thinks that she has
discovered the outer realities in question. Atoms and ether, with
no properties but masses and velocities expressible by numbers, and
paths expressible by analytic formulas, these at last are things
over which the mathematico-logical network may be flung, and by
supposing which instead of sensible phenomena science becomes yearly
more able to manufacture for herself a world about which rational
propositions may be framed. Sensible phenomena are pure delusions for
the mechanical philosophy. The 'things' and qualities we instinctively
believe in do not exist. The only realities are swarming solids in
everlasting motion, undulatory or continued, whose expressionless
and meaningless changes of position form the history of the world,
and are deducible from initial collocations and habits of movement
hypothetically assumed. Thousands of years ago men started to cast
the chaos of nature's sequences and juxtapositions into a form that
might seem intelligible. Many were their ideal prototypes of rational
order: teleological and æsthetic ties between things, causal and
substantial bonds, as well as logical and mathematical relations. The
most promising of these ideal systems at first were of course the
richer ones, the sentimental ones. The baldest and least promising were
the mathematical ones; but the history of the latter's application
is a history of steadily advancing successes, whilst that of the
sentimentally richer systems is one of relative sterility and
failure.[552] Take those aspects of phenomena which interest you as a
human being most, and class the phenomena as perfect and imperfect, as
ends and means to ends, as high and low, beautiful and ugly, positive
and negative, harmonious and discordant, fit and unfit, natural and
unnatural, etc., and barren are all your results. In the ideal world
the kind 'precious' has characteristic properties. What is precious
should be preserved; unworthy things should be sacrificed for its sake;
exceptions made on its account; its preciousness is a reason for other
things' actions, and the like. But none of these things need happen to
your 'precious' object in the real world. Call the things of nature as
much as you like by sentimental, moral, and æsthetic names, no natural
consequences follow from the naming. They may be of the kinds you
allege, but they are not of '_the kind's kind_': and the last great
system-maker of this sort, Hegel, was obliged explicitly to repudiate
logic in order to make any inferences at all from the names he called
things by.
* * * * *
But when you give things mathematical and mechanical names and call
them just so many solids in just such positions, describing just
such paths with just such velocities, all is changed. Your sagacity
finds its reward in the verification by nature of all the deductions
which you may next proceed to make. Your 'things' realize all the
_consequences_ of the names by which you classed them. The modern
mechanico-physical philosophy of which we are all so proud, because
it includes the nebular cosmogony, the conservation of energy, the
kinetic theory of heat and gases, etc., etc., begins by saying that
the _only_ facts are collocations and motions of primordial solids,
and the only laws the changes of motion which changes in collocation
bring. The ideal which this philosophy strives after is a mathematical
world-formula, by which, if all the collocations and motions at a
given moment were known, it would be possible to reckon those of
any wished-for future moment, by simply considering the necessary
geometrical, arithmetical, and logical implications. Once we have the
world in this bare shape, we can fling our net of _a priori_ relations
over all its terms, and pass from one of its phases to another by
inward thought-necessity. Of course it is a world with a very minimum
of rational _stuff_. The sentimental facts and relations are butchered
at a blow. But the rationality yielded is so superbly complete in
_form_ that to many minds this atones for the loss, and reconciles
the thinker to the notion of a purposeless universe, in which all the
things and qualities men love, _dulcissima mundi nomina_, are but
illusions of our fancy attached to accidental clouds of dust which will
be dissipated by the eternal cosmic weather as carelessly as they were
formed.
The popular notion that 'Science' is forced on the mind _ab extra_,
and that our interests have nothing to do with its constructions, is
utterly absurd. The craving to believe that the things of the world
belong to kinds which are related by inward rationality together, is
the parent of Science as well as of sentimental philosophy; and the
original investigator always preserves a healthy sense of how plastic
the materials are in his hands.
"Once for all," says Helmholtz in beginning that little work of
his which laid the foundations of the 'conservation of energy,'
"it is the task of the physical sciences to seek for laws by which
particular processes in nature may be referred to general rules,
and deduced from such again. Such rules (for example the laws of
reflection or refraction of light, or that of Mariotte and Gay-Lussac
for gas-volumes) are evidently nothing but generic-concepts for
embracing whole classes of phenomena. The search for them is the
business of the experimental division of our Science. Its theoretic
division, on the other hand, tries to discover the unknown causes of
processes from their visible effects; tries to understand them by
the law of causality.... The ultimate goal of theoretic physics is
to find the last _unchanging_ causes of the processes in Nature.
Whether all processes be really ascribable to such causes, whether,
in other words, _nature be completely intelligible,_ or whether there
be changes which would elude the law of a necessary causality, and
fall into a realm of spontaneity or freedom, is not here the place
to determine; but at any rate it is clear that the Science whose aim
it is to make nature appear intelligible [_die Natur zu begreifen_]
must start with the _assumption_ of her intelligibility, and draw
consequences in conformity with this assumption, until irrefutable
facts show the limitations of this method.... The postulate that
natural phenomena must be reduced to changeless ultimate causes next
shapes itself so that _forces unchanged by time_ must be found to
be these causes. Now in Science we have already found portions of
matter with changeless forces (indestructible qualities), and called
them (chemical) elements. If, then, we imagine the world composed of
elements with inalterable qualities, the only changes that can remain
possible in such a world are spatial changes, i.e. movements, and
the only outer relations which can modify the action of the forces
are spatial too, or, in other words, the forces are motor forces
dependent for their effect only on spatial relations. More exactly
still: The phenomena of nature must be reduced to [_zurückgeführt_,
conceived as, classed as] motions of material points with inalterable
motor forces acting according to space-relations alone.... But points
have no mutual space-relations except their distance,... and a motor
force which they exert upon each other can cause nothing but a change
of distance--i.e. be an attractive or a repulsive force.... And its
intensity can only depend on distance. So that at last the task of
Physics resolves itself into this, to refer phenomena to inalterable
attractive and repulsive forces whose intensity varies with distance.
The solution of this task would at the same time be the condition of
Nature's complete intelligibility."[553]
The subjective interest leading to the assumption could not be more
candidly expressed. What makes the assumption 'scientific' and not
merely poetic, what makes a Helmholtz and his kin _discoverers_, is
that the things of Nature turn out to act as if they _were_ of the
kind assumed. They behave as such mere drawing and driving atoms would
behave; and so far as they have been distinctly enough translated into
molecular terms to test the point, so far a certain fantastically ideal
object, namely, the mathematical sum containing their mutual distances
and velocities, is found to be constant throughout all their movements.
This sum is called the total energy of the molecules considered. Its
constancy or 'conservation' gives the name to the hypothesis of
molecules and central forces from which it was logically deduced.
Take any other mathematico-mechanical theory and it is the same.
They are all translations of sensible experiences into other forms,
substitutions of items between which ideal relations of kind, number,
form, equality, etc., obtain, for items between which no such relations
obtain; coupled with declarations that the experienced form is
false and the ideal form true, declarations which are justified by
the appearance of new sensible experiences at just those times and
places at which we logically infer that their ideal correlates ought
to be. Wave-hypotheses thus make us predict rings of darkness and
color, distortions, dispersions, changes of pitch in sonorous bodies
moving from us, etc.; molecule-hypotheses lead to predictions of
vapor-density, freezing point, etc.,--all which predictions fall true.
Thus the world grows more orderly and rational to the mind, which
passes from one feature of it to another by deductive necessity, as
soon as it conceives it as made up of so few and so simple phenomena as
bodies with no properties but number and movement to and fro.
METAPHYSICAL AXIOMS.
But alongside of these ideal relations between terms which the world
verifies, there are other ideal relations not as yet so verified. I
refer to those propositions (no longer expressing mere results of
comparison) which are formulated in such metaphysical and æsthetic
axioms as "The Principle of things is one;" "The quantity of existence
is unchanged;" "Nature is simple and invariable;" "Nature acts by the
shortest ways;" "_Ex nihilo nihil fit;_" "Nothing can be evolved which
was not involved;" "Whatever is in the effect must be in the cause;" "A
thing can only work where it is;" "A thing can only affect another of
its own kind;" "_Cessante causa, cessat et effectus;_" "Nature makes
no leaps;" "Things belong to discrete and permanent kinds;" "Nothing
is or happens without a reason;" "The world is throughout rationally
intelligible;" etc., etc., etc. Such principles as these, which might
be multiplied to satiety,[554] are properly to be called _postulates of
rationality_, not propositions of fact. If nature _did_ obey them, she
_would_ be _pro tanto_ more intelligible; and we seek meanwhile so to
conceive her phenomena as to show that she does obey them. To a certain
extent we succeed. For example, instead of the 'quantity of existence'
so vaguely postulated as unchanged, Nature allows us to suppose that
curious sum of distances and velocities which for want of a better
term we call 'energy.' For the effect being 'contained in the cause,'
nature lets us substitute 'the effect _is_ the cause,' so soon as she
lets us conceive both effect and cause as the same molecules, in two
successive positions.--But all around these incipient successes (as all
around the molecular world, so soon as we add to it as its 'effects'
those illusory 'things' of common-sense which we had to butcher for its
sake), there still spreads a vast field of irrationalized fact whose
items simply _are_ together, and from one to another of which we can
pass by no ideally 'rational' way.
It is not that these more metaphysical postulates of rationality are
absolutely barren--though barren enough they were when used, as the
scholastics used them, as immediate propositions of fact.[555] They
have a fertility as ideals, and keep us uneasy and striving always to
recast the world of sense until its lines become more congruent with
theirs. Take for example the principle that 'nothing can happen without
a cause.' We have no definite idea of what we mean by cause, or of
what causality consists in. But the principle expresses a demand for
_some_ deeper sort of inward connection between phenomena than their
merely habitual time-sequence seems to us to be. The word 'cause' is,
in short, an altar to an unknown god; an empty pedestal still marking
the place of a hoped-for statue. _Any_ really inward belonging-together
of the sequent terms, if discovered, would be accepted as what the
word cause was meant to stand for. So we seek, and seek; and in the
molecular systems we find a sort of inward belonging in the notion of
identity of matter with change of collocation. Perhaps by still seeking
we may find other sorts of inward belonging, even between the molecules
and those 'secondary qualities,' etc., which they produce upon our
minds.
It cannot be too often repeated that the triumphant application of
any one of our ideal systems of rational relations to the real world
justifies our hope that other systems may be found also applicable.
Metaphysics should take heart from the example of physics, simply
confessing that hers is the longer task. Nature _may_ be remodelled,
nay, certainly will be remodelled, far beyond the point at present
reached. Just how far?--is a question which only the whole future
history of Science and Philosophy can answer.[556] Our task being
Psychology, we cannot even cross the threshold of that larger problem.
* * * * *
Besides the mental structure which results in such metaphysical
principles as those just considered, there is a mental structure which
expresses itself in
ÆSTHETIC AND MORAL PRINCIPLES.
The æsthetic principles are at bottom such axioms as that a note sounds
good with its third and fifth, or that potatoes need salt. We are once
for all so made that when certain impressions come before our mind, one
of them will seem to call for or repel the others as its companions.
To a certain extent the principle of habit will explain these æsthetic
connections. When a conjunction is repeatedly experienced, the cohesion
of its terms grows grateful, or at least their disruption grows
unpleasant. But to explain _all_ æsthetic judgments in this way would
be absurd; for it is notorious how seldom natural experiences come up
to our æsthetic demands. Many of the so-called metaphysical principles
are at bottom only expressions of æsthetic feeling. Nature is simple
and invariable; makes no leaps, or makes nothing but leaps; is
rationally intelligible; neither increases nor diminishes in quantity;
flows from one principle, etc., etc.,--what do all such principles
express save our sense of how pleasantly our intellect would feel if
it had a Nature of that sort to deal with? The subjectivity of which
feeling is of course quite compatible with Nature also turning out
objectively to be of that sort, later on.
The _moral_ principles which our mental structure engenders are quite
as little explicable _in toto_ by habitual experiences having bred
inner cohesions. Rightness is not _mere_ usualness, wrongness not
_mere_ oddity, however numerous the facts which might be invoked
to prove such identity. Nor are the moral judgments those most
invariably and emphatically impressed on us by public opinion. The most
characteristically and peculiarly moral judgments that a man is ever
called on to make are in unprecedented cases and lonely emergencies,
where no popular rhetorical maxims can avail, and the hidden oracle
alone can speak; and it speaks often in favor of conduct quite unusual,
and suicidal as far as gaining popular approbation goes. The forces
which conspire to this resultant are subtle harmonies and discords
between the elementary ideas which form the data of the case. Some
of these harmonies, no doubt, have to do with habit; but in respect
to most of them our sensibility must assuredly be a phenomenon of
supernumerary order, correlated with a brain-function quite as
secondary as that which takes cognizance of the diverse excellence
of elaborate musical compositions. No more than the higher musical
sensibility can the higher moral sensibility be accounted for by the
frequency with which outer relations have cohered.[557] Take judgments
of justice or equity, for example. Instinctively, one judges everything
differently, according as it pertains to one's self or to some one
else. Empirically one notices that everybody else does the same. But
little by little there dawns in one the judgment "nothing can be right
for me which would not be right for another similarly placed;" or "the
fulfilment of my desires is intrinsically no more imperative than that
of anyone else's;" or "what it is reasonable that another should do for
me, it is also reasonable that I should do for him;"[558] and forthwith
the whole mass of the habitual gets overturned. It gets _seriously_
overturned only in a few fanatical heads. But its overturning is
due to a back-door and not to a front-door process. Some minds are
preternaturally sensitive to logical consistency and inconsistency.
When they have ranked a thing under a kind, they _must_ treat it as
of that kind's kind, or feel all out of tune. In many respects we do
class ourselves with other men, and call them and ourselves by a common
name. They agree with us in having the same Heavenly Father, in not
being consulted about their birth, in not being themselves to thank
or blame for their natural gifts, in having the same desires and pains
and pleasures, in short in a host of fundamental relations. Hence, _if
these things be our essence,_ we should be substitutable for other men,
and they for us, in any proposition in which either of us is involved.
The more fundamental and common the essence chosen, and the more
simple the reasoning,[559] the more wildly radical and unconditional
will the justice be which is aspired to. Life is one long struggle
between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and
opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them
as individual facts. The logical stickler for justice always seems
pedantic and mechanical to the man who goes by tact and the particular
instance, and who usually makes a poor show at argument. Sometimes
the abstract conceiver's way is better, sometimes that of the man of
instinct. But just as in our study of reasoning we found it impossible
to lay down any mark whereby to distinguish _right_ conception of a
concrete case from _confusion_ (see pp. 336, 350), so here we can
give no general rule for deciding when it is morally useful to treat a
concrete case as _sui generis_, and when to lump it with others in an
abstract class.[560]
An adequate treatment of the way in which we come by our æsthetic
and moral judgments would require a separate chapter, which I cannot
conveniently include in this book. Suffice it that these judgments
express inner harmonies and discords between objects of thought;
and that whilst outer cohesions frequently repeated will often seem
harmonious, all harmonies are not thus engendered, but our feeling
of many of them is a secondary and incidental function of the mind.
Where harmonies are asserted of the real world, they are obviously
mere postulates of rationality, so far as they transcend experience.
Such postulates are exemplified by the ethical propositions that the
individual and universal good are one, and that happiness and goodness
are bound to coalesce in the same subject.
SUMMARY OF WHAT PRECEDES.
I will now sum up our progress so far by a short summary of the most
important conclusions which we have reached.
The mind has a native structure in this sense, that certain of its
objects, if considered together in certain ways, give definite results;
and that no other ways of considering, and no other results, are
possible if the same objects be taken.
The results are 'relations' which are all expressed by judgments of
subsumption and of comparison.
The judgments of subsumption are themselves subsumed under the _laws of
logic_.
Those of comparison are expressed in _classifications_, and in the
_sciences of arithmetic and geometry_.
Mr. Spencer's opinion that our consciousness of classificatory,
logical, and mathematical relations between ideas is due to the
frequency with which the corresponding 'outer relations' have impressed
our minds, is unintelligible.
Our consciousness of these relations, no doubt, has a natural genesis.
But it is to be sought rather in the inner forces which have made the
brain grow, than in any mere paths of 'frequent' association which
outer stimuli may have ploughed in that organ.
But let our sense for these relations have arisen as it may, the
relations themselves form a fixed system of lines of cleavage, so to
speak, in the mind, by which we naturally pass from one object to
another; and the objects connected by these lines of cleavage are
often not connected by any regular time- and space-associations. We
distinguish, therefore, between the empirical order of things, and this
their rational order of comparison; and, so far as possible, we seek to
translate the former into the latter, as being the more congenial of
the two to our intellect.
Any classification of things into kinds (especially if the kinds form
series, or if they successively involve each other) is a more rational
way of conceiving the things than is that mere juxtaposition or
separation of them as individuals in time and space which is the order
of their crude perception. Any assimilation of things to terms between
which such classificatory relations, with their remote and mediate
transactions, obtain, is a way of bringing the things into a more
rational scheme.
Solids in motion are such terms; and the mechanical philosophy is only
a way of conceiving nature so as to arrange its items along some of the
more natural lines of cleavage of our mental structure.
Other natural lines are the moral and æsthetic relations. Philosophy is
still seeking to conceive things so that these relations also may seem
to obtain between them.
As long as things have not successfully been so conceived, the moral
and æsthetic relations obtain only between _entia rationis_, terms in
the mind; and the moral and æsthetic principles remain but postulates,
not propositions, with regard to the real world outside.
There is thus a large body of _a priori_ or intuitively necessary
truths. As a rule, these are truths of _comparison_ only, and in the
first instance they express relations between merely mental terms.
Nature, however, acts as if some of her realities were identical with
these mental terms. So far as she does this, we can make _a priori_
propositions concerning natural fact. The aim of both science and
philosophy is to make the identifiable terms more numerous. So far it
has proved easier to identify nature's things with mental terms of the
mechanical than with mental terms of the sentimental order.
The widest postulate of rationality is that the world _is_ rationally
intelligible throughout, after the pattern of _some_ ideal system.
The whole war of the philosophies is over that point of faith. Some
say they can see their way already to the rationality; others that
it is hopeless in any other but the mechanical way. To some the
very fact that there is a world at all seems irrational. Nonentity
would be a more natural thing than existence, for these minds. One
philosopher at least says that the relatedness of things to each other
is irrational anyhow, and that a world of relations can never be made
intelligible.[561]
With this I may be assumed to have completed the programme which I
announced at the beginning of the chapter, so far as the _theoretic_
part of our organic mental structure goes. It can be due neither to
our own nor to our ancestors' experience. I now pass to those practical
parts of our organic mental structure. Things are a little different
here; and our conclusion, though it lies in the same direction, can be
by no means as confidently expressed.
To be as short and simple as possible, I will take the case of
instincts, and, supposing the reader to be familiar with Chapter
XXIV, I will plunge _in medias res_.
THE ORIGIN OF INSTINCTS.
Instincts must have been either
1) Each specially created in complete form, or
2) Gradually evolved.
As the first alternative is nowadays obsolete, I proceed directly to
the second. The two most prominent suggestions as to the way in which
instincts may have been evolved are associated with the names of
Lamarck and Darwin.
Lamarck's statement is that animals have _wants_, and contract, to
satisfy them, _habits_ which transform themselves gradually into
so many propensities which they can neither resist nor change.
These _propensities_, once acquired, propagate themselves by way
of transmission to the young, so that they come to exist in new
individuals, anteriorly to all exercise. Thus are the same emotions,
the same habits, the same _instincts_, perpetuated without variation
from one generation to another, so long as the outward conditions of
existence remain the same.[562] Mr. Lewes calls this the theory of
'lapsed intelligence.' Mr. Spencer's words are clearer than Lamarck's,
so that I will quote from him:[563]
"Setting out with the unquestionable assumption, that every new form
of emotion making its appearance in the individual or the race is a
modification of some pre-existing emotion, or a compounding of several
pre-existing emotions, we should be greatly aided by knowing what
always are the pre-existing emotions. When, for example, we find that
very few, if any, of the lower animals show any love of accumulation,
and that this feeling is absent in infancy; when we see that an infant
in arms exhibits anger, fear, wonder, while yet it manifests no desire
of permanent possession; and that a brute which has no acquisitive
emotion can nevertheless feel attachment, jealousy, love of
approbation,--we may suspect that the feeling which property satisfies
is compounded out of simpler and deeper feelings. We may conclude
that as when a dog hides a bone there must exist in him a prospective
gratification of hunger, so there must similarly, at first, in all
cases where anything is secured or taken possession of, exist an
ideal excitement of the feeling which that thing will gratify. We may
further conclude that when the intelligence is such that a variety of
objects come to be utilized for different purposes; when, as among
savages, divers wants are satisfied through the articles appropriated
for weapons, shelter, clothing, ornament,--the act of appropriating
comes to be one constantly involving agreeable associations, and one
which is therefore pleasurable, irrespective of the end subserved.
And when, as in civilized life, the property acquired is of a kind
not conducing to one order of gratifications, but is capable of
ministering to all gratifications, the pleasure of acquiring property
grows more distinct from each of the various pleasures subserved--is
more completely differentiated into a separate emotion.[564] It is
well known that on newly-discovered islands not inhabited by man,
birds are so devoid of fear as to allow themselves to be knocked over
with sticks, but that in the course of generations they acquire
such a dread of man as to fly on his approach, and that this dread
is manifested by young as well as old. Now unless this change be
ascribed to the killing off of the least fearful, and the preservation
and multiplication of the more fearful, which, considering the small
number killed by man, is an inadequate cause, it must be ascribed to
accumulated experiences, and each experience must be held to have a
share in producing it. We must conclude that in each bird that escapes
with injuries inflicted by man, or is alarmed by the outcries of other
members of the flock,... there is established an association of ideas
between the human aspect and the pains, direct and indirect, suffered
from human agency. And we must further conclude that the state of
consciousness which impels the bird to take flight is at first nothing
more than an ideal reproduction of those painful impressions which
before followed man's approach; that such ideal reproduction becomes
more vivid and more massive as the painful experiences, direct or
sympathetic, increase; and that thus the emotion, in its incipient
state, is nothing else than an aggregation of the revived pains
before experienced. As, in the course of generations, the young birds
of this race begin to display a fear of man before they have been
injured by him, it is an unavoidable inference that the nervous system
of the race has been organically modified by these experiences; we
have no choice but to conclude that when a young bird is thus led
to fly, it is because the impression produced on its senses by the
approaching man entails, through an incipiently reflex action, a
partial excitement of all those nerves which, in its ancestors, had
been excited under the like conditions; that this partial excitement
has its accompanying painful consciousness; and that the vague painful
consciousness thus arising constitutes emotion proper--_emotion
undecomposable into specific experiences, and therefore seemingly
homogeneous. If such be the explanation of the fact in this case, then
it is in all cases. If the emotion is so generated here, then it is
so generated throughout._ If so, we must perforce conclude that the
emotional modifications displayed by different nations, and those
higher emotions by which civilized are distinguished from savage,
are to be accounted for on the same principle. And, concluding this,
we are led strongly to suspect that the emotions in general have
severally thus originated."[565]
Obviously the word 'emotion' here means instinct as well,--the actions
we call instinctive are expressions or manifestations of the emotions
whose genesis Mr. Spencer describes. Now if habit could thus bear fruit
outside the individual life, and if the modifications so painfully
acquired by the parents' nervous systems could be found ready-made
at birth in those of the young, it would be hard to overestimate
the importance, both practical and theoretical, of such an extension
of its sway. In principle, instincts would then be assimilated to
'secondarily-automatic' habits, and the origin of many of them out
of tentative experiments made during ancestral lives, perfected by
repetition, addition, and association through successive generations,
would be a comparatively simple thing to understand.
Contemporary students of instinct have accordingly been alert to
discover all the facts which would seem to establish the possibility
of such an explanation. The list is not very long, considering what a
burden of conclusions it has to bear. Let acquisitiveness and fear of
man, as just argued for by Spencer, lead it off. Other cases of the
latter sort are the increased shyness of the woodcock noticed to have
occurred within sixty years' observation by Mr. T. A. Knight, and the
greater shyness everywhere shown by large than by small birds, to which
Darwin has called attention. Then we may add--
The propensities of 'pointing,' 'retrieving,' etc., in sporting dogs,
which seem partly, at any rate, to be due to training, but which in
well-bred stock are all but innate. It is in these breeds considered
bad for a litter of young if its sire or dam have not been trained in
the field.
Docility of domestic breeds of horses and cattle.
Tameness of young of tame rabbit--young wild rabbits being invincibly
timid.
Young foxes are most wary in those places where they are most severely
hunted.
Wild ducks, hatched out by tame ones, fly off. But if kept close for
some generations, the young are said to become tame.[566]
Young savages at a certain age will revert to the woods.
English greyhounds taken to the high plateau of Mexico could not at
first run well, on account of rarefied air. Their whelps entirely got
over the difficulty.
Mr. Lewes somewhere[567] tells of a terrier pup whose parents had been
taught to 'beg,' and who constantly threw himself spontaneously into
the begging attitude. Darwin tells of a French orphan-child, brought up
out of France, yet _shrugging_ like his ancestors.[568]
Musical ability often increases from generation to generation in the
families of musicians.
The hereditarily epileptic guinea-pigs of Brown-Séquard, whose parents
had become epileptic through surgical operations on the spinal cord or
sciatic nerve. The adults often lose some of their hind toes, and the
young, in addition to being epileptic, are frequently born with the
corresponding toes lacking. The offspring of guinea-pigs whose cervical
sympathetic nerve has been cut on one side will have the ear larger,
the eyeball smaller, etc., just like their parents after the operation.
Puncture of the 'restiform body' of the medulla will, in the same
animal, congest and enlarge one eye, and cause gangrene of one ear. In
the young of such parents the same symptoms occur.
Physical refinement, delicate hands and feet, etc., appear in families
well-bred and rich for several generations.
The 'nervous' temperament also develops in the descendants of sedentary
brain-working people.
Inebriates produce offspring in various ways degenerate.
Nearsightedness is produced by indoor occupation for generations. It
has been found in Europe much more frequent among schoolchildren in
towns than among children of the same age in the country.
These latter cases are of the inheritance of structural rather than of
functional peculiarities. But as structure gives rise to function it
may be said that the principle is the same. Amongst other inheritances
of adaptive[569] structural change may be mentioned:
The 'Yankee' type.
Scrofula, rickets, and other diseases of bad conditions of life.
The udders and permanent milk of the domestic breeds of cow.
The 'fancy' rabbit's ears, drooping through lack of need to erect them.
Dog's, ass's, etc., in some breeds ditto.
The obsolete eyes of mole and various cave-dwelling animals.
The diminished size of the wing-bones of domesticated ducks, due to
ancestral disuse of flight.[570]
These are about all the facts which, by one author or another, have
been invoked as evidence in favor of the 'lapsed intelligence' theory
of the origin of instincts.
* * * * *
Mr. Darwin's theory is that of the natural selection of accidentally
produced tendencies to action.
"It would," says he, "be the most serious error to suppose that
the greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in
one generation, and then transmitted by inheritance in succeeding
generations. It can clearly be shown that the most wonderful instincts
with which we are acquainted, namely, those of the hive-bee and
of many ants, could not possibly have been thus acquired.[571] It
will be universally admitted that instincts are as important as
corporeal structure for the welfare of each species, under its present
conditions of life. Under changed conditions of life, it is at least
possible that slight modifications of instinct might be profitable
to a species; and if it can be shown that instincts do vary ever so
little, then I can see no difficulty in natural selection preserving
and continually accumulating variations of instinct to any extent
that may be profitable. It is thus, as I believe, that all the most
complex and wonderful instincts have arisen.... I believe that the
effects of habit are of quite subordinate importance to the effects of
the natural selection of what may be called accidental variations of
instincts;--that is, of variations produced by the same unknown causes
which produce slight deviations of bodily structure."[572]
The evidence for Mr. Darwin's view is too complex to be given in
this place. To my own mind it is quite convincing. If, with the
Darwinian theory in mind, one re-reads the list of examples given in
favor of the Lamarckian theory, one finds that many of the cases are
irrelevant, and that some make for one side as well as for the other.
This is so obvious in many of the cases that it is needless to point
it out in detail. The shrugging child and the begging pup, e.g.,
prove somewhat too much. They are examples so unique as to suggest
spontaneous variation rather than inherited habit. In other cases the
observations much need corroboration, e.g., the effects of not training
for a generation in sporting dogs and race-horses, the difference
between young wild rabbits born in captivity and young tame ones, the
cumulative effect of many generations of captivity on wild ducks, etc.
Similarly, the increased wariness of the large birds, of those on
islands frequented by men, of the woodcock, of the foxes, may be due
to the fact that the bolder families have been killed off, and left
none but the naturally timid behind, or simply to the individual
experience of older birds being imparted by example to the young
so that a new _educational tradition_ has occurred.--The cases of
physical refinement, nervous temperament, Yankee type, etc., also need
much more discriminating treatment than they have yet received from
the Lamarckians. There is no real evidence that physical refinement
and nervosity tend to accumulate from generation to generation in
aristocratic or intellectual families; nor is there any that the
change in that direction which Europeans transplanted to America
undergo is not all completed in the first generation of children bred
on our soil. To my mind, the facts all point that way. Similarly the
better breathing of the greyhounds born in Mexico was surely due to a
post-natal adaptation of the pups' thorax to the rarer air.
Distinct neurotic _degeneration_ may undoubtedly accumulate from
parent to child, and as the parent usually in this case grows worse
by his own irregular habits of life, the temptation lies near to
ascribe the child's deterioration to this cause. This, again, is a
hasty conclusion. For neurotic degeneration is unquestionably a
disease whose original causes are unknown; and like other 'accidental
variations' it is hereditary. But it ultimately ends in sterility; and
it seems to me quite unfair to draw any conclusions from its natural
history in favor of the transmission of acquired peculiarities. Nor
does the degeneration of the children of alcoholics prove anything in
favor of their having inherited the shattered nervous system which
the alcohol has induced in their parents: because the poison usually
has a chance to directly affect their own bodies before birth, by
acting on the germinal matter from which they are formed whilst it
is still nourished by the alcoholized blood of the parent. In many
cases, moreover, the parental alcoholics are themselves degenerates
neurotically, and the drink-habit is only a symptom of their disease,
which in some form or other they also propagate to their children.
There remain the inherited mutilations of the guinea-pig. But these are
such startling exceptions to the ordinary rule with animals that they
should hardly be used as examples of a typical process. The docility of
domestic cattle is certainly in part due to man's selection, etc., etc.
In a word, the proofs form rather a beggarly array.
Add to this that the writers who have tried to carry out the theory of
transmitted habit with any detail are always obliged _somewhere_ to
admit inexplicable variation. Thus Spencer allows that
"Sociality can begin only where, through some slight variation, there
is less tendency than usual for the individuals to disperse.... That
slight variations of mental nature, sufficient to initiate this
process, may be fairly assumed, all our domestic animals show us:
differences in their characters and likings are conspicuous. Sociality
having thus commenced, and survival of the fittest tending ever to
maintain and increase it, it will be further strengthened by the
inherited effects of habit."[573] Again, in writing of the pleasure
of pity, Mr. Spencer says: "This feeling is not one that has arisen
through the inherited effects of experiences, but belongs to a quite
different group, traceable to the survival of the fittest simply--to
the natural selection of incidental variations. In this group are
included all the bodily appetites, together with those simpler
instincts, sexual and parental, by which every race is maintained; and
which must exist before the higher processes of mental evolution can
commence."[574]
The inheritance of tricks of manner and trifling peculiarities, such
as handwriting, certain odd gestures when pleased, peculiar movements
during sleep, etc., have also been quoted in favor of the theory of
transmission of acquired habits. Strangely enough; for of all things in
the world these tricks seem most like idiosyncratic variations. They
are usually defects or oddities which the education of the individual,
the pressure of what is really _acquired_ by him, would counteract, but
which are too native to be repressed, and breaks through all artificial
barriers, in his children as well as in himself.
* * * * *
I leave my text practically just as it was written in 1885. I proceeded
at that time to draw a tentative conclusion to the effect that the
origin of _most_ of our instincts must certainly be deemed fruits of
the back-door method of genesis, and not of ancestral experience in the
proper meaning of the term. Whether acquired ancestral habits played
any part at all in their production was still an open question in which
it would be as rash to affirm as to deny. Already before that time,
however, Professor Weismann of Freiburg had begun a very serious attack
upon the Lamarckian theory,[575] and his polemic has at last excited
such a widespread interest among naturalists that the whilom almost
unhesitatingly accepted theory seems almost on the point of being
abandoned.
I will therefore add some of Weismann's criticisms of the supposed
evidence to my own. In the first place, he has a captivating theory of
descent of his own,[576] which makes him think it _a priori_ impossible
that any peculiarity acquired during lifetime by the parent should be
transmitted to the germ. Into the nature of that theory this is not
the place to go. Suffice to say that it has made him a keener critic
of Lamarck's and Spencer's theory than he otherwise might have been.
The only way in which the germinal products can be influenced whilst
in the body of the parent is, according to Weismann, by good or bad
nutrition. Through this they may degenerate in various ways or lose
vitality altogether. They may also be infected through the blood by
small-pox, syphilis, or other virulent diseases, and otherwise be
poisoned. But peculiarities of neural structure and habit in the
parents _which the parents themselves were not born with_, they can
never acquire unless perhaps accidentally through some coincidental
variation of their own. _Accidental_ variations develop of course into
idiosyncrasies which tend to pass to later generations in virtue of the
well-known law which no one doubts.
Referring to the often-heard assertion that the increase of talent
found in certain families from one generation to another is due to
the transmitted effects of _exercise_ of the faculty concerned (the
Bachs, the Bernoullis, Mozart, etc.), he sensibly remarks, that the
talent being kept in exercise, it ought to have gone on growing for
an indefinite number of generations. As a matter of fact, it quickly
reaches a maximum, and then we hear no more of it, which is what
happens always when an idiosyncrasy is exposed to the effects of
miscellaneous intermarriage.
The hereditary epilepsy and other degenerations of the operated
guinea-pigs are explained by Professor Weismann as results of
_infection_ of the young by the parent's blood. The latter he supposes
to undergo a pathologic change in consequence of the original
traumatic injury. The obsolescence of disused organs he explains
very satisfactorily, without invoking any transmission of the direct
effects of disuse, by his theory of _panmixy_, for which I must refer
to his own writings. Finally, he criticises searchingly the stories we
occasionally hear of inherited mutilations in animals (dogs' ears and
tails, etc.), and cites a prolonged series of experiments of his own
on mice, which he bred for many generations, cutting off both parental
tails each time, without interfering in the least with the length of
tail with which the young continued to be born.
The strongest argument, after all, in favor of the Lamarckian theory
remains the _a priori_ one urged by Spencer in his little work (much
the solidest thing, by the way, which he has ever written) 'The Factors
of Organic Evolution.' Since, says Mr. Spencer, the accidental
variations of all parts of the body are independent of each other,
if the entire organization of animals were due to such accidental
variations alone, the amount of mutual adaptation and harmony that we
now find there could hardly possibly have come about in any finite
time. We must rather suppose that the divers varying parts _brought_
the other parts into harmony with themselves by _exercising them ad
hoc_, and that the effects of the exercise remained and were passed
on to the young. This forms, of course, a great _presumption_ against
the all-sufficiency of the view of selection of accidental variations
exclusively. But it must be admitted that in favor of the contrary
view, that adaptive changes are inherited, we have as yet perhaps not
one single unequivocal item of positive proof.
* * * * *
I must therefore end this chapter on the genesis of our mental
structure by reaffirming my conviction that the so-called
Experience-philosophy has failed to prove its point. No more if we
take ancestral experiences into account than if we limit ourselves to
those of the individual after birth, can we believe that the couplings
of terms within the mind are simple copies of corresponding couplings
impressed upon it by the environment. This indeed is true of a small
part of our cognitions. But so far as logical and mathematical,
ethical, æsthetical, and metaphysical propositions go, such an
assertion is not only untrue but altogether unintelligible; for these
propositions say nothing about the time- and space-order of things, and
it is hard to understand how such shallow and vague accounts of them as
Mill's and Spencer's could ever have been given by thinking men.
The causes of our mental structure are doubtless natural, and
connected, like all our other peculiarities, with those of our nervous
structure. Our interests, our tendencies of attention, our motor
impulses, the æsthetic, moral, and theoretic combinations we delight
in, the extent of our power of apprehending schemes of relation, just
like the elementary relations themselves, time, space, difference and
similarity, and the elementary kinds of feeling, have all grown up in
ways of which at present we can give no account. Even in the clearest
parts of Psychology our insight is insignificant enough. And the more
sincerely one seeks to trace the actual course of _psychogenesis_,
the steps by which as a race we may have come by the peculiar mental
attributes which we possess, the more clearly one perceives "the slowly
gathering twilight close in utter night."
THE END.
* * * * *
[526] 'Accidental' in the Darwinian sense, as belonging to a cycle of
causation inaccessible to the present order of research.
[527] The passage is in § 207 of the Principles of Psychology, at
the end of the chapter entitled 'Reason.' I italicize certain words
in order to show that the essence of this explanation is to demand
_numerically frequent_ experiences. The bearing of this remark will
later appear. (Cf. pp. 641-2, _infra_.)
[528] Principles of Biology, part iii. chaps. xi, xii.--Goltz and Loeb
have found that dogs become mild in character when their occipital,
and fierce when their frontal, brain-lobes are cut off. "A dog which
originally was cross in an extreme degree, never suffering himself
to be touched, and even refusing, after two days' fasting, to take a
piece of bread from my hand, became, after a bilateral operation on
the occipital lobes, perfectly trustful and harmless. He underwent
five operations on these parts.... Each one of them made him more
good-natured; so that at last (just as Goltz observed of his dogs) he
would let other dogs take away the very bones which he was gnawing"
(Loeb, Pflüger's Archiv, xxxix. 300). A course of kind treatment and
training might have had a similar effect. But how absurd to call two
such different causes by the same name, and to say both times that
the beast's 'experience of outer relations' is what educates him to
good-nature. This, however, is virtually what all writers do who ignore
the distinction between the 'front-door' and the back-door' manners of
producing mental change.
One of the most striking of these back-door affections is
_susceptibility to the charm of drunkenness_. This (taking drunkenness
in the broadest sense, as teetotalers use the word) is one of the
deepest functions of human nature. Half of both the poetry and the
tragedy of human life would vanish if alcohol were taken away. As it
is, the thirst for it is such that in the United States the cash-value
of its sales amounts to that of the sales of meat and of bread put
together. And yet what ancestral 'outer relation' is responsible
for this peculiar reaction of ours? The only 'outer relation' could
be the alcohol itself, which, comparatively speaking, came into the
environment but yesterday, and which, so far from creating, is tending
to eradicate, the love of itself from our mental structure, by letting
only those families of men survive in whom it is not strong. The love
of drunkenness is a purely accidental susceptibility of a brain,
evolved for entirely different uses, and its causes are to be sought
in the molecular realm, rather than in any possible order of 'outer
relations.'
[529] Mr. Grant Allen, in a brilliant article entitled Idiosyncrasy
(Mind, viii. 498), seeks to show that accidental morphological changes
in the brain cannot possibly be imagined to result in any mental
change of a sort which would _fit the animal to its environment_.
If spontaneous variation ever works on the brain, its product, says
Mr. Allen, ought to be an idiot or a raving madman, not a minister
and interpreter of Nature. Only the environment can change us in the
direction of accommodation _to itself_. But I think we ought to know
a little better just what the molecular changes in the brain are on
which thought depends, before we talk so confidently about what the
effect can be of their possible variations. Mr. Allen, it should be
said, has made a laudable effort to conceive them distinctly. To me
his conception remains too purely anatomical. Meanwhile this essay
and another by the same author in the Atlantic Monthly are probably
as serious attempts as any that have been made towards applying the
Spencerian theory in a radical way to the facts of human history.
[530] In my own previous chapters on habit, memory, association, and
perception, justice has been done to all these facts.
[531] "The order of nature, as perceived at a first glance, presents
at every instant a chaos followed by another chaos. We must decompose
each chaos into single facts. We must learn to see in the chaotic
antecedent a multitude of distinct antecedents, in the chaotic
consequent a multitude of distinct consequents. This, supposing it
done, will not of itself tell us on which of the antecedents each
consequent is invariably attendant. To determine that point, we must
endeavor to effect a separation of the facts from one another, not in
our minds only, but in nature. The mental analysis, however, must take
place first. And every one knows that in the mode of performing it, one
intellect differs immensely from another." (J. S. Mill, Logic, bk. iii.
chap. vii. § 1.)
[532] I quote from an address entitled 'Reflex Action and Theism,'
published in the 'Unitarian Review' for November 1881, and translated
in the Critique Philosophique for January and February 1882. "The
conceiving or theorizing faculty works exclusively for the sake of
ends that do not exist at all in the world of the impressions received
by way of our senses, but are set by our emotional and practical
subjectivity. It is a transformer of the world of our impressions
into a totally different world, the world of our conception; and the
transformation is effected in the interests of our volitional nature,
and for no other purpose whatsoever. Destroy the volitional nature,
the definite subjective purposes, preferences, fondness for certain
effects, forms, orders, and not the slightest motive would remain for
the brute order of our experience to be remodelled at all. But, as we
have the elaborate volitional constitution we do have, the remodelling
must be effected, there is no escape. The world's contents are _given_
to each of us in an order so foreign to our subjective interests that
we can hardly by an effort of the imagination picture to ourselves what
it is like. We have to break that order altogether, and by picking out
from it the items that concern us, and connecting them with others far
away, which we say 'belong' with them, we are able to make out definite
threads of sequence and tendency, to foresee particular liabilities and
get ready for them, to enjoy simplicity and harmony in the place of
what was chaos. Is not the sum of your actual experience taken at this
moment and impartially added together an utter chaos? The strains of my
voice, the lights and shades inside the room and out, the murmur of the
wind, the ticking of the clock, the various organic feelings you may
happen individually to possess, do these make a whole at all? Is it not
the only condition of your mental sanity in the midst of them that most
of them should become non-existent for you, and that a few others--the
sounds, I hope, which I am uttering--should evoke from places in
your memory, that have nothing to do with this scene, associates
fitted to combine with them in what we call a rational train of
thought?--rational because it leads to a conclusion we have some organ
to appreciate. We have no organ or faculty to appreciate the simply
given order. The real world as it is given at this moment is the sum
total of all its beings and events now. But can we think of such a sum?
Can we realize for an instant what a cross-section of all existence at
a definite point of time would be? While I talk and the flies buzz, a
sea gull catches a fish at the mouth of the Amazon, a tree falls in
the Adirondack wilderness, a man sneezes in Germany, a horse dies in
Tartary, and twins are born in France. What does that mean? Does the
contemporaneity of these events with each other and with a million more
as disjointed as they form a rational bond between them, and unite them
into anything that means for us a world? Yet just such a collateral
contemporaneity, and nothing else, is the _real_ order of the world. It
is an order with which we have nothing to do but to get away from it as
fast as possible. As I said, we break it: we break it into histories,
and we break it into arts, and we break it into sciences; and then we
begin to feel at home. We make ten thousand separate serial orders of
it. On any one of these, we may react as if the rest did not exist.
We discover among its parts relations that were never given to sense
at all,--mathematical relations, tangents, squares, and roots and
logarithmic functions,--and out of an infinite number of these we call
certain ones essential and lawgiving, and ignore the rest. Essential
these relations are, but only _for our purpose_, the other relations
being just as real and present as they; and our purpose is to _conceive
simply_ and _to foresee_. Are not simple conception and prevision
subjective ends, pure and simple? They are the ends of what we call
science; and the miracle of miracles, a miracle not yet exhaustively
cleared up by any philosophy, is that the given order lends itself to
the remodelling. It shows itself plastic to many of our scientific,
to many of our æsthetic, to many of our practical purposes and ends."
Cf. also Hodgson: Philos. of Refl., ch. v; Lotze: Logik, §§ 342-351;
Sigwart: Logik, §§ 60-63, 105.
[533] In an article entitled 'Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the
Environment,' published in the Atlantic Monthly for October 1880,
the reader will find some ampler illustrations of these remarks.
I have there tried to show that both mental and social evolution
are to be conceived after the Darwinian fashion, and that the
function of the environment properly so called is much more that of
_selecting_ forms, produced by invisible forces, than _producing_
of such forms,--producing being the only function thought of by the
pre-Darwinian evolutionists, and the only one on which stress is laid
by such contemporary ones as Mr. Spencer and Mr. Allen.
[534] "It is perfectly true that our world of experience begins with
such associations as lead us to expect that what has happened to us
will happen again. These associations lead the babe to look for milk
from its nurse and not from its father, the child to believe that the
apple he sees will taste good; and whilst they make him wish for it,
they make him fear the bottle which contains his bitter medicine.
But whereas a part of these associations grows confirmed by frequent
repetition, another part is destroyed by contradictory experiences; and
the world becomes divided for us into two provinces, one in which we
are at home and anticipate with confidence always the same sequences;
another filled with alternating, variable, accidental occurrences....
"Accident is, in a wide sphere, such an every-day matter that we need
not be surprised if it sometimes invades the territory where order
is the rule. And one personification or another of the capricious
power of chance easily helps us over the difficulties which further
reflection might find in the exceptions. Yes, indeed, Exception has a
peculiar fascination; it is a subject of astonishment, a θαῦμα, and the
credulity with which in this first stage of pure association we adopt
our supposed rules is matched by the equal credulity with which we
adopt the miracles that interfere with them.
"The whole history of popular beliefs about nature refutes the
notion that the thought of an universal physical order can possibly
have arisen through the purely passive reception and association of
particular perceptions. Indubitable as it is that all men infer from
known cases to unknown, it is equally certain that this procedure,
if restricted to the phenomenal materials that spontaneously offer
themselves, would never have led to the belief in a general uniformity,
but only to the belief that law and lawlessness rule the world in
motley alternation. From the point of view of strict empiricism nothing
exists but the sum of particular perceptions with their coincidences on
the one hand, their contradictions on the other.
"That there is more order in the world than appears at first sight is
not discovered till the order is looked for. The first impulse to look
for it proceeds from practical needs: where ends must be attained, we
must know trustworthy means which infallibly possess a property or
produce a result. But the practical need is only the first occasion
for our reflection on the conditions of a true knowledge; even were
there no such need, motives would still be present to carry us beyond
the stage of mere association. For not with an equal interest, or
rather with an equal lack of interest, does man contemplate those
natural processes in which like is joined to like, and those in which
like and unlike are joined; the former processes harmonize with the
conditions of his thinking, the latter do not; in the former his
concepts, judgments, inferences apply to realities, in the latter they
have no such application. And thus the intellectual satisfaction which
at first comes to him without reflection, at last excites in him the
conscious wish to find realized throughout the entire phenomenal world
those rational continuities, uniformities, and necessities which are
the fundamental element and guiding principle of his own thought." (C.
Sigwart: Logik, ii. 380-2.)
[535] Cf. Hodgson: Philosophy of Reflection, book ii, chap. v.
[536] The aspiration to be 'scientific' is such an idol of the tribe to
the present generation, is so sucked in with his mother's milk by every
one of us, that we find it hard to conceive of a creature who should
not feel it, and harder still to treat it freely as the altogether
peculiar and one-sided subjective interest which it is. But as a matter
of fact, few even of the cultivated members of the race have shared
it; it was invented but a generation or two ago. In the middle ages
it meant only impious magic; and the way in which it even now strikes
orientals is charmingly shown in the letter of a Turkish cadi to an
English traveller asking him for statistical information, which Sir A.
Bayard prints at the end of his 'Nineveh and Babylon.' The document is
too full of edification not to be given in full. It runs thus:
"_My Illustrious Friend, and Joy of my Liver!_
"The thing you ask of me is both difficult and useless. Although I have
passed all my days in this place, I have neither counted the houses nor
inquired into the number of the inhabitants; and as to what one person
loads on his mules and the other stows away in the bottom of his ship,
that is no business of mine. But, above all, as to the previous history
of this city, God only knows the amount of dirt and confusion that the
infidels may have eaten before the coming of the sword of Islam. It
were unprofitable for us to inquire into it.
"O my soul! O my lamb! seek not after the things which concern thee
not. Thou camest unto us and we welcomed thee: go in peace.
"Of a truth thou hast spoken many words; and there is no harm done, or
the speaker is one and the listener is another. After the fashion of
thy people thou hast wandered from one place to another, until thou
art happy and content in none. We (praise be to God) were born here,
and never desire to quit it. Is it possible, then, that the idea of a
general intercourse between mankind should make any impression on our
understandings? God forbid!
"Listen, O my son! There is no wisdom equal unto the belief in God! He
created the world, and shall we liken ourselves unto Him in seeking to
penetrate into the mysteries of His creation? Shall we say, Behold this
star spinneth round that star, and this other star with a tail goeth
and cometh in so many years! Let it go! He from whose hand it came will
guide and direct it.
"But thou wilt say unto me, Stand aside, O man, for I am more learned
than thou art, and have seen more things. If thou thinkest that thou
art in this respect better than I am, thou art welcome. I praise God
that I seek not that which I require not. Thou art learned in the
things I care not for; and as for that which thou hast seen, I spit
upon it. Will much knowledge create thee a double belly, or wilt thou
seek Paradise with thine eyes?
"O my friend! if thou wilt be happy, say, There is no God but God! Do
no evil, and thus wilt thou fear neither man nor death: for surely
thine hour will come!
"The meek in spirit (El Fakir)
"IMAUM ALI ZADI."
[537] "Though a man in a fever should from sugar have a bitter taste
which at another time would produce a sweet one, yet the idea of
bitter in that man's mind would be as clear and distinct from the idea
of sweet as if he had tasted only gall. Nor does it make any more
confusion between the two ideas of sweet and bitter that the same sort
of body produces at one time one and at another time another idea by
the taste, than it makes a confusion in two ideas of white and sweet,
or white and round, that the same piece of sugar produces them both in
the mind at the same time." Locke's Essay, bk. ii. ch. xi. § 3.
[538] Cf. Bradley, Logic, p. 226.
[539] This apprehension of them as forming a single system is what
Mr. Bradley means by the act of _construction_ which underlies all
reasoning. The awareness, which then supervenes, of the additional
relation of which I speak in the next paragraph of my text, is what
this author calls the act of _inspection_. Cf. Principles of Logic, bk.
ii. pt. i. chap. iii.
[540] Realities fall under this only so far as they prove to _be_
the same. So far as they cannot be substituted for each other, for
the purpose in hand, so far they are not the same; though for other
purposes and in other respects they might be substituted, and then be
treated as the same. Apart from purpose, of course, no realities ever
are absolutely and exactly the same.
[541] A mind, in other words, which has got _beyond_ the merely
_dichotomic_ style of thought which Wundt alleges to be the essential
form of human thinking (Physiol. Psych., ii. 312).
[542] Said to be expressed by Grassman in the fundamental Axiom of
Arithmetic (_a_ + _b_) + 1 = _a_ + (_b_ + 1).
[543] Compare Helmholtz's more technically expressed Essay Zählen u.
Messen, in the Philosophische Aufsätze, Ed. Zeller gewidmet (Leipzig,
1887), p. 17.
[544] For the original statements, cf. J. S. Mill's Logic, bk. ii.
chap. vi. §§ 2, 3; and bk. iii. chap. xxiv. § 5.
[545] The subdivision itself consumes none of the space. In all
practical experience our subdivisions do consume space. They consume it
in our geometrical figures. But for simplicity's sake, in geometry we
postulate subdivisions which violate experience and consume none of it.
[546] Cf. A. de Morgan: Syllabus of a proposed System of Logic (1860),
pp. 46-56.
[547] Cf. Locke's Essay, bk. ii. chap. xvii. § 6.
[548] Some readers may expect me to plunge into the old debate as to
whether the _a priori_ truths are 'analytic' or 'synthetic.' It seems
to me that the distinction is one of Kant's most unhappy legacies,
for the reason that it is impossible to make it sharp. No one will
say that such analytic judgments as "equidistant lines can nowhere
meet" are _pure_ tautologies. The predicate is a somewhat new way of
conceiving as well as of naming the subject. There is _something_
'ampliative' in our greatest truisms, our state of mind is richer after
than before we have uttered them. This being the case, the question
"at what point does the new state of mind cease to be _implicit_ in
the old?" is too vague to be answered. The only sharp way of defining
synthetic propositions would be to say that they express a relation
between _two data_ at least. But it is hard to find any proposition
which cannot be construed as doing this. Even verbal definitions do it.
Such painstaking attempts as that latest one by Mr. D. G. Thompson to
prove all necessary judgments to be analytic (System of Psychology, ii.
pp. 232 ff.) seem accordingly but _nugæ difficiles_, and little better
than wastes of ink and paper. All philosophic interest vanishes from
the question, the moment one ceases to ascribe to _any a priori_ truths
(whether analytic or synthetic) that "legislative character for all
possible experience" which Kant believed in. We ourselves have denied
such legislative character, and contended that it was for experience
itself to prove whether its data can or cannot be assimilated to
those ideal terms between which _a priori_ relations obtain. The
analytic-synthetic debate is thus for us devoid of all significance.
On the whole, the best recent treatment of the question known to me is
in one of A. Spir's works, his Denken und Wirklichkeit, I think, but I
cannot now find the page.
[549] Book iv. chaps. ix. § 1; vii. 14.
[550] Chap. v. §§ 6, 8.
[551] Kant, by the way, made a strange tactical blunder in his way
of showing that the forms of our necessary thought are underived
from experience. He insisted on thought-forms with which experience
largely _agrees_, forgetting that the only forms which could not by any
possibility be the results of experience would be such as experience
_violated_. The first thing a Kantian ought to do is to discover forms
of judgment to which _no_ order in 'things' runs parallel. These would
indeed be features native to the mind. I owe this remark to Herr A.
Spir, in whose 'Denken und Wirklichkeit' it is somewhere contained. I
have myself already to some extent proceeded, and in the pages which
follow shall proceed still farther, to show the originality of the
mind's structure in this way.
[552] Yet even so late as Berkeley's time one could write: "As in
reading other books a wise man will choose to fix his thoughts on the
sense and apply it to use, rather than lay them out in grammatical
remarks on the language: so in perusing the volume of nature methinks
it is beneath the dignity of the mind to affect an exactness in
reducing each particular phenomenon to general rules, or showing how it
follows from them. We should propose to ourselves nobler views, namely,
to recreate and exalt the mind with a prospect of the beauty, order,
extent, and variety of natural things: hence, by proper inferences, to
enlarge our notions of the grandeur, wisdom, and beneficence of the
Creator," etc., etc., etc. (Principles of Human Knowledge, § 109.)
[553] Die Erhaltung der Kraft (1847), pp. 2-6.
[554] Perhaps the most influential of all these postulates is that the
nature of the world must be such that sweeping statements may be made
about it.
[555] Consider, e.g., the use of the axioms '_nemo potest supra
seipsum_,' and '_nemo dat quod non habet_,' in this refutation of
'Darwinism,' which I take from the much-used scholastic compendium
of Logic and Metaphysics of Liberatore, 3d ed. (Rome, 1880): "Hæc
hypothesis... aperte contradicit principiis Metaphysicæ, quæ docent
essentias rerum esse immutabiles, et effectum non posse superare
causam. Et sane, quando, juxta Darwin, species inferior se evolvit in
superiorem, unde trahit maiorem illam nobilitatem? Ex ejus carentia.
At nihil dat quod non habet; et minus gignere nequit plus, aut negatio
positionem. Præterea in transformatione quæ fingitur, nature prioris
speciei, servatur aut destruitur? Si primum, mutatio erit tantum
accidentalis, qualem reapse videmus in diversis stirpibus animantium.
Sin alterum asseritur, ut reapse fert hypothesis darwiniana, res
tenderet ad seipsam destruendam; cum contra omnia naturaliter tendant
ad sui conservationem, et nonnisi per actionem contrarii agentis
corruant." It is merely a question of fact whether these ideally proper
relations do or do not obtain between animal and vegetable ancestors
and descendants. If they do not, what happens? simply this, that we
cannot continue to class animal and vegetal facts under the _kinds_
between which those ideal relations obtain. Thus, we can no longer call
animal breeds by the name of 'species'; cannot call generating a kind
of 'giving,' or treat a descendant as an 'effect' of his ancestor.
The ideal scheme of terms and relations can remain, if you like; but
it must remain purely mental, and without application to life, which
'gangs its ain gait' regardless of ideal schemes. Most of us, however,
would prefer to doubt whether such abstract axioms as that 'a thing
cannot tend to its own destruction' express ideal relations of an
important sort at all.
[556] Compare A. Riehl: Der Philosophische Kriticismus, Bd. ii. Thl. i
Abschn. i. Cap. iii. § 6.
[557] As one example out of a thousand of exceptionally delicate
idiosyncrasy in this regard, take this: "I must quit society. I would
rather undergo twice the danger from beasts and ten times the danger
from rocks. It is not pain, it is not death, that I dread,--it is the
hatred of a man; there is something in it so shocking that I would
rather submit to any injury than incur or increase the hatred of a man
by revenging it.... Another sufficient reason for suicide is that I was
this morning out of temper with Mrs. Douglas (for no fault of hers). I
did not betray myself in the least, but I reflected that to be exposed
to the possibility of such an event once a year, was evil enough to
render life intolerable. The disgrace of using an impatient word is
to me overpowering." (Elton Hammond, quoted in Henry Crabb Robinson's
Diary, vol. i. p. 424.)
[558] Compare H. Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, bk. iii. chap. xiii. § 3.
[559] A gentleman told me that he had a conclusive argument for opening
the Harvard Medical School to women. It was this: "Are not women
human?"--Which major premise of course had to be granted. "Then are
they not entitled to all the rights of humanity?" My friend said that
he had never met anyone who could successfully meet this reasoning.
[560] You reach the Mephistophelian point of view as well as the point
of view of justice by treating cases as if they belonged rigorously to
abstract classes. Pure rationalism, complete immunity from prejudice,
consists in refusing to see that the case before one is absolutely
unique. It is always possible to treat the country of one's nativity,
the house of one's fathers, the bed in which one's mother died, nay,
the mother herself if need be, on a naked equality with all other
specimens of so many respective genera. It shows the world in a
clear frosty light from which all fuliginous mists of affection, all
swamp-lights of sentimentality, are absent. Straight and immediate
action becomes easy then--witness a Napoleon's or a Frederick's career.
But the question always remains, "Are not the mists and vapors _worth_
retaining?" The illogical refusal to treat certain concretes by the
mere law of their genus has made the drama of human history. The
obstinate insisting that tweedledum is _not_ tweedledee is the bone and
marrow of life. Look at the Jews and the Scots, with their miserable
factions and sectarian disputes, their loyalties and patriotisms and
exclusions,--their annals now become a classic heritage, because men
of genius took part and sang in them. A thing is important if any
one _think_ it important. The process of history consists in certain
folks becoming possessed of the mania that certain special things are
important infinitely, whilst other folks cannot agree in the belief.
The Shah of Persia refused to be taken to the Derby Day, saying "It is
already known to me that one horse can run faster than another." He
made the question "_which_ horse?" immaterial. Any question can be made
immaterial by subsuming all its answers under a common head. Imagine
what college ball-games and races would be if the teams were to forget
the absolute distinctness of Harvard from Yale and think of both as
One in the higher genus College. The sovereign road to indifference,
whether to evils or to goods, lies in the thought of the higher
genus. "When we have meat before us," says Marcus Aurelius, seeking
indifference to _that_ kind of good, "we must receive the impression
that this is the dead body of a fish, and this is the dead body of
a bird or of a pig; and again that this Falernian is only a little
grape-juice, and this purple robe some sheep's wool dyed with the blood
of a shell-fish. Such, then, are these impressions, and they reach the
things themselves and penetrate them, and we see what kind of things
they are. Just in the same way ought we to act through life, and where
there are things which appear most worthy of our approbation, we ought
to lay them bare and look at their worthlessness and strip them of all
the words by which they are exalted." (Long's Translation, vi. 13.)
[561] "_An sich, in seinem eignen Wesen, ist jedes reale Object mit
sich selbst identisch und unbedingt_"--that is, the "_allgemeinste
Einsicht a priori_" and the "_allgemeinste aus Erfahrung_" is "_Alles
erkennbare ist bedingt_." (A. Spir: Denken und Wirklichkeit. Compare
also Herbart and Hegel.)
[562] Philosophie Zoölogique, 3me partie, chap. v., 'de l'Instinct.'
[563] It should be said that Mr. Spencer's most formal utterance about
instinct is in his Principles of Psychology, in the chapter under
that name. Dr. Romanes has reformulated and criticised the doctrine
of this chapter in his Mental Evolution in Animals, chapter xvii.
I must confess my inability to state its vagueness in intelligible
terms. It treats instincts as a further development of reflex actions,
and as forerunners of intelligence,--which is probably true of many.
But when it ascribes their formation to the mere 'multiplication
of experiences,' which, at first simple, mould the nervous system
to 'correspond to outer relations' by simple reflex actions, and,
afterwards complex, make it 'correspond' by 'compound reflex actions,'
it becomes too mysterious to follow without more of a key than is
given. The whole thing becomes perfectly simple if we suppose the
reflex actions to be accidental inborn idiosyncrasies preserved.
[564] This account of acquisitiveness differs from our own. Without
denying the associationist account to be a true description of a great
deal of our proprietary feeling, we admitted in addition an entirely
primitive form of desire. (See above, p. 420 ff.) The reader must
decide as to the plausibilities of the case. Certainly appearances are
in favor of there being in us _some_ cupidities quite disconnected
with the ulterior uses of the things appropriated. The source of their
fascination lies in their appeal to our æsthetic sense, and we wish
thereupon simply to _own_ them. Glittering, hard, metallic, odd, pretty
things; curious things especially; natural objects that look as if they
were artificial, or that mimic other objects,--these form a class of
things which human beings snatch at as magpies snatch rags. They simply
fascinate us. What house does not contain some drawer or cupboard full
of senseless odds and ends of this sort, with which nobody knows what
to do, but which a blind instinct saves from the ash-barrel? Witness
people returning from a walk on the sea-shore or in the woods, each
carrying some _lusus naturæ_ in the shape of stone or shell, or strip
of bark or odd-shaped fungus, which litter the house and grow daily
more unsightly, until at last reason triumphs over blind propensity and
sweeps them away.
[565] Review of Bain in H. Spencer: Illustrations of Universal Progress
(New York, 1864), pp. 311, 315.
[566] Ribot: De l'Herédité, 2me éd. p. 26.
[567] Quoted (without reference) in Spencer's Biology, vol. i. p. 247.
[568] Expression of Emotions (N. Y.), p. 287.
[569] 'Adaptive' changes are those produced by the direct effect of
outward conditions on an organ or organism. Sunburned complexion, horny
hands, muscular toughness, are illustrations.
[570] For these and other facts cf. Th. Ribot: De l'Hérédité; W. B.
Carpenter: Contemporary Review, vol. 21, p. 295, 779, 867; H. Spencer:
Princ. of Biol. pt. ii. ch. v, viii, ix, x; pt. iii. ch. xi, xii; C.
Darwin: Animals and Plants under Domestication, ch. xii, xiii. xiv;
Sam'l Butler: Life and Habit; T. A. Knight: Philos. Trans. 1837; E.
Dupuy: Popular Science Monthly, vol. xi. p. 332; F. Papillon; Nature
and Life, p. 330; Crothers, in Pop. Sci. M., Jan. (or Feb.) 1889.
[571] [Because, being exhibited by neuter insects, the effects of mere
practice cannot accumulate from one generation to another.--W. J.]
[572] Origin of Species, chap. vii.
[573] Princ. of Psychol., ii. 561.
[574] _Ibid._ p. 263.
[575] Ueber die Vererbung (Jena, 1883). Prof. Weismann's Essays on
Heredity have recently (1889) been published in English in a collected
form.
[576] Best expressed in the Essay on the _Continuitat des Keimplasmas_
(1885).