Let us recapitulate the results gained in the previous chapters. The
world appears to man as a multiplicity, as an aggregate of separate
entities. He himself is one of these entities, a thing among
things. Of this structure of the world we say simply that it is
given, and inasmuch as we do not construct it by conscious activity,
but simply find it, we say that it consists of percepts. Within this
world of percepts we perceive ourselves. This percept of Self would
remain merely one among many other percepts, did it not give rise to
something which proves capable of connecting all percepts one with
another and, therefore, the aggregate of all other percepts with the
percept of Self. This something which emerges is no longer a mere
percept; neither is it, like percepts, simply given. It is produced
by our activity. It appears, in the first instance, bound up with
what each of us perceives as his Self. In its inner significance,
however, it transcends the Self. It adds to the separate percepts
ideal determinations, which, however, are related to one another,
and which are grounded in a whole. What self-perception yields
is ideally determined by this something in the same way as all
other percepts, and placed as subject, or "I," over against the
objects. This something is thought, and the ideal determinations
are the concepts and ideas. Thought, therefore, first manifests
itself in connection with the percept of self. But it is not merely
subjective, for the Self characterises itself as subject only with
the help of thought. This relation of the Self to itself by means
of thought is one of the fundamental determinations of our personal
lives. Through it we lead a purely ideal existence. By means of it
we are aware of ourselves as thinking beings. This determination of
our lives would remain a purely conceptual (logical) one, if it were
not supplemented by other determinations of our Selves. Our lives
would then exhaust themselves in establishing ideal connections
between percepts themselves, and between them and ourselves. If we
call this establishment of an ideal relation an "act of cognition,"
and the resulting condition of ourselves "knowledge," then, assuming
the above supposition to be true, we should have to consider ourselves
as beings who merely apprehend or know.
The supposition is, however, untrue. We relate percepts to ourselves
not merely ideally, through concepts, but also, as we have already
seen, through feeling. In short, the content of our lives is not merely
conceptual. The Naïve Realist holds that the personality actually
lives more genuinely in the life of feeling than in the purely ideal
activity of knowledge. From his point of view he is quite right in
interpreting the matter in this way. Feeling plays on the subjective
side exactly the part which percepts play on the objective side. From
the principle of Naïve Realism, that everything is real which can be
perceived, it follows that feeling is the guarantee of the reality of
one's own personality. Monism, however, must bestow on feeling the
same supplementation which it considers necessary for percepts, if
these are to stand to us for reality in its full nature. For Monism,
feeling is an incomplete reality, which, in the form in which it
first appears to us, lacks as yet its second factor, the concept or
idea. This is why, in actual life, feelings, like percepts, appear
prior to knowledge. At first, we have merely a feeling of existence;
and it is only in the course of our gradual development, that we
attain to the point at which the concept of Self emerges from within
the blind mass of feelings which fills our existence. However, what
for us does not appear until later, is from the first indissolubly
bound up with our feelings. This is how the naïve man comes to believe
that in feeling he grasps existence immediately, in knowledge only
mediately. The development of the affective life, therefore, appears
to him more important than anything else. Not until he has grasped
the unity of the world through feeling will he believe that he has
comprehended it. He attempts to make feeling rather than thought
the instrument of knowledge. Now a feeling is entirely individual,
something equivalent to a percept. Hence a philosophy of feeling
makes a cosmic principle out of something which has significance only
within my own personality. Anyone who holds this view attempts to
infuse his own self into the whole world. What the Monist strives to
grasp by means of concepts the philosopher of feeling tries to attain
through feeling, and he looks on his own felt union with objects as
more immediate than knowledge.
The tendency just described, the philosophy of feeling, is
Mysticism. The error in this view is that it seeks to possess by
immediate experience what must be known, that it seeks to develop
feeling, which is individual, into a universal principle.
A feeling is a purely individual activity. It is the relation of
the external world to the subject, in so far as this relation finds
expression in a purely subjective experience.
There is yet another expression of human personality. The Self, through
thought, takes part in the universal world-life. Through thought it
establishes purely ideal (conceptual) relations between percepts and
itself, and between itself and percepts. In feeling, it has immediate
experience of the relation of objects to itself as subject. In will,
the opposite is the case. In volition, we are concerned once more with
a percept, viz., that of the individual relation of the self to what
is objective. Whatever in the act of will is not an ideal factor,
is just as much mere object of perception as is any object in the
external world.
Nevertheless, the Naïve Realist believes here again that he has
before him something far more real than can ever be attained by
thought. He sees in the will an element in which he is immediately
aware of an activity, a causation, in contrast with thought which
afterwards grasps this activity in conceptual form. On this view, the
realisation by the Self of its will is a process which is experienced
immediately. The adherent of this philosophy believes that in the will
he has really got hold of one end of reality. Whereas he can follow
other occurrences only from the outside by means of perception,
he is confident that in his will he experiences a real process
quite immediately. The mode of existence presented to him by the
will within himself becomes for him the fundamental reality of the
universe. His own will appears to him as a special case of the general
world-process; hence the latter is conceived as a universal will. The
will becomes the principle of reality just as, in Mysticism, feeling
becomes the principle of knowledge. This kind of theory is called
Voluntarism (Thelism). It makes something which can be experienced
only individually the dominant factor of the world.
Voluntarism can as little be called scientific as can Mysticism. For
both assert that the conceptual interpretation of the world is
inadequate. Both demand, in addition to a principle of being which is
ideal, also a principle which is real. But as perception is our only
means of apprehending these so-called real principles, the assertion
of Mysticism and Voluntarism coincides with the view that we have
two sources of knowledge, viz., thought and perception, the latter
finding individual expression as will and feeling. Since the immediate
experiences which flow from the one source cannot be directly absorbed
into the thoughts which flow from the other, perception (immediate
experience) and thought remain side by side, without any higher
form of experience to mediate between them. Beside the conceptual
principle to which we attain by means of knowledge, there is also
a real principle which must be immediately experienced. In other
words, Mysticism and Voluntarism are both forms of Naïve Realism,
because they subscribe to the doctrine that the immediately perceived
(experienced) is real. Compared with Naïve Realism in its primitive
form, they are guilty of the yet further inconsistency of accepting
one definite form of perception (feeling, respectively will) as the
exclusive means of knowing reality. Yet they can do this only so
long as they cling to the general principle that everything that is
perceived is real. They ought, therefore, to attach an equal value
to external perception for purposes of knowledge.
Voluntarism turns into Metaphysical Realism, when it asserts the
existence of will also in those spheres of reality in which will can no
longer, as in the individual subject, be immediately experienced. It
assumes hypothetically that a principle holds outside subjective
experience, for the existence of which, nevertheless, subjective
experience is the sole criterion. As a form of Metaphysical Realism,
Voluntarism is open to the criticism developed in the preceding
chapter, a criticism which makes it necessary to overcome the
contradictory element in every form of Metaphysical Realism, and to
recognise that the will is a universal world-process only in so far
as it is ideally related to the rest of the world.