by law; if every fact were not only individually but also generically
different from every other fact, so that no single fact had anything in
common with other facts; if they thus had no features in common, there
would exist no general properties, and we could form no concepts of
_genera_; facts would vary radically and totally, without exhibiting
regularities or uniformities other than such as might occasionally and
without any reason incidentally originate by haphazard,—in short, if
our world were a world of chance and not of law, there would be no
criterion of truth. Our world, however, is a world of law and not of
chance. Thus all facts, although individually different, are found
generically to agree among themselves. No two atoms are, with regard to
their position, the same at a given moment; all of them are different
somehow in their operation and effectiveness. Nevertheless every one of
them moves in strict accordance with exactly the same law of causation.
There is not the least change taking place in the universe which is not
the precise effect of a special cause. There is rigidity in mutability,
unity in variety, determinateness in irregularity, law in freedom,
order in anarchy. The unity of law, which in its oneness is comprised
in the universality of causation, is so perfect that the different
facts cannot be thought of as being generically different. However much
they differ specifically, they represent the action of the same law,
and this same oneness of nature is the basis of all monism.
Monism of this kind, it has been remarked by a critic of ours,[54] is
identical with philosophy. Certainly it is. Every philosophy is or
at least attempts to be monism, and in so far only as a philosophy
recognises monism does it possess a criterion of truth. This monism may
be based upon a correct or a mistaken conception of unity. Upon the
correctness of this monism will depend the correctness of the criterion
of truth. But it must be understood that without a monism there can be
no criterion of truth, and philosophy must become either scepticism,
mysticism, or agnosticism.
[54] _The Nation_ quotes the following passage from a former
essay of mine: "The philosophy of the future will be a
philosophy of facts, it will be _positivism_; and in so far
as a unitary systematisation of facts is the aim and ideal
of all science, it will be _monism_." _The Nation_ rejects
this definition of monism and adds: "The search for a unitary
conception of the world or for a unitary systematisation of
science would be a good definition of _philosophy_; and with
this good old word at hand we want no other."
Very well. Call that which we call monism or a unitary
systematisation of knowledge, "philosophy"; we will not
quarrel about names—_dummodo conveniamus in re_. We agree
perfectly with our critic; for we also maintain that monism
(at least, what we consider monism) is philosophy; it is _the_
philosophy.
What then is the criterion of truth for a single fact, be it a
sensation, a perception, or an observation? It is this, that if the
observation be repeated under the same circumstances it will, to the
extent that the circumstances are the same, be again the same; the
observer will always make the same observation.
This maxim will do for a statement of facts. If according to this maxim
we are in the position to ascertain that the same observation can be
made again and again under certain conditions, we gain the assurance
that we have to deal with a fact of some kind. But how shall we inquire
into the correctness of the interpretation of the fact?
* * * * *
Every living creature and furthermore among human beings every
individual man has an idiosyncracy of his own. How can we avoid the
errors arising therefrom? We substitute other observers so that we can
detect to what extent the individual way of observation influences the
result of the experiment. Thus we shall find that some persons are
color-blind with reference to red or to green, and we can in this way
explain certain mistakes caused by such conditions.
Supposing that all human beings were color-blind we should consider
this state as normal; and the discovery of science that certain colors
which appear alike to us, are after all, considering their wave-lengths
and other qualities, more different than certain other tints which are
easily discerned by the eye, would be an unexpected surprise. It would
to some extent be analogous to the well-known fact that there are rays
of light which are not perceptible to the eye, namely, the so-called
chemical rays; their existence has been discovered by their chemical
effects.
It might be, although it is not probable, that what appears green to me
and what I call green, may appear different to other people, perhaps
gray, red, or brown, or some other color that I know not of: yet
other people will—just as much as I do—call that peculiar sensation
green which they experience under the same conditions, for instance,
when seeing the fresh leaves of a tree. It is quite indifferent how
variegated in single minds the feelings may be that accompany each kind
of sensation. So long as they have for every special objective state a
special analogue, they can map out in their minds their surroundings,
they can have a correct representation of the world, and so long as
they employ the same symbols (words or other signs) for indicating
the same objective states, it is quite indifferent whether or not the
feelings that are produced in the process of observation vary. It would
make no more difference for the general purpose of mental operations,
than it would if we were to employ Roman letters, or Italics, or Greek
or Hebrew characters to designate the lines and points in explaining a
mathematical figure. The main thing is that certain points are marked
and represented by some sign which stands for this or that point and
for that alone.
To cite another example in illustration of the subjective element of
feeling in cognition, we may compare our knowledge of the world to
the map of a city. The map may be printed in black, green, red, blue,
or any other color. The color in which the map is printed represents
the subjective element of feeling, while the form of the lines, their
geometrical configuration, contains the objective element of the things
represented. The map is good, i. e. its representations are true, if
the squares and the streets of the city stand in the same relation
among each other, as the little blocks and divisions on the map do.
Whether the map is printed in green or blue will make no difference so
long as we find everything we want to know about the city represented
in a way such that we should be able to set ourselves aright and to
find our bearings if we went astray.
The subjective element in mind is not of one half the importance
generally attributed to it. The objective element, being that which is
represented, is paramount, and it is the aspiration of all the sciences
to concentrate their entire attention upon the objective features of
observation. Objective truth is what we want, and objective truth is
identical with a scientific description of facts.
* * * * *
What then is the criterion of objective truth for the interpretation
of facts? Is it not wanting? May it not be that a person, Mr. A., will
under given circumstances regularly see a ghost. Indeed we do not doubt
that he will, and we can even prove it by experiment. This being so, is
not the interpretation of facts as to whether the phenomenon is a real
ghost or a mere vision, beyond any criterion of truth?
If the methods of science are reliable, (and they have been justified
by their brilliant success,) we have indeed a criterion for the
interpretation of facts; and this criterion for the interpretation of
facts, no less than the criterion of single observations is based upon
monism. If the world is really a universe, if there is oneness in the
All, if there is a unity of law throughout nature, our interpretations
of the different facts must agree among themselves. They cannot
and should not contradict one another; and whenever they do, it
is a certain sign that somewhere there is something wrong in our
interpretation of facts.
Philosophy has ceased to be a metaphysical world-theory. The
interpretation of facts no longer means a hypothetical assumption which
will square all the irregularities among facts that we are unable to
account for, but simply a methodical systematisation of facts, enabling
us to recognise the sameness of law in the irregularities apparent in
innumerable individual instances. Interpretation in this sense means
harmonisation; it means an orderly arrangement; classification with due
discrimination. An explanation of natural phenomena is not the carrying
of an hypothesis in to facts out of the realms of our imagination, out
of depths unknown, by what might be styled revelation or inspiration,
but it is a comparison of facts with facts. The hypothesis we apply to
facts must come from facts and must cover facts. That element in an
hypothesis which does not cover facts is redundant as an explanation;
it is useless as such, or even dangerous; and unless it serves as an
aid to thought where ignorance of facts requires some assistance, some
allegorical symbol, some auxiliary construction,—unless it is to the
scientist what crutches are to the lame,—it must be dropped.
Accordingly, the criterion of truth is the perfect agreement of
all facts, of all interpretations and explanations of facts among
themselves. If two facts (such as we conceive them) do not agree with
each other, we must revise them; and it may be stated as a matter
of experience, that our mind will find no peace until a monistic
conception is reached. A monistic conception is the perfect agreement
of all facts in a methodical system, so that the same law is recognised
to prevail in all instances, and the most different events are
conceived as acting under different conditions yet in accord with the
same law.
* * * * *
It does not lie within the scope of this essay to enter upon the
practical application of the principle which we have set forth as the
criterion of truth. One hint only may be supplied, to point out the
most obvious maxim derivable from it—a maxim that is instinctively
obeyed by all scientists and has often been popularly expressed in the
sentence: An ounce of fact is worth a hundred pounds of hypothesis,
or of any interpretation of facts. All the theories in the world,
scientific and economical, our dearest ideals not excepted, and all the
most ingenious hypotheses have no value unless they have been derived
from, and agree with, the laws that live in the facts of our experience.
The trouble of applying this rule lies mainly in the difficulty
of distinguishing between facts and our interpretation of facts.
Considering that mind is representativeness in feelings we have to
analyse the mind in order to come down to objective facts. The percept
of a tree is not the tree; it is an interpretation of a group of
facts; it is a mental picture produced by a synthesis of sensations,
the latter being caused by sense-impressions. Considering that all
the images, ideas, abstract concepts, and theories of which our mind
consists are not the facts represented by them but their several
interpretations, we at once see how careful we have to be for purposes
of philosophical and scientific exactness in the statement of facts.
* * * * *
On this occasion, a few critical remarks concerning the leading essay
of this number, "The Architecture of Theories," by Mr. Charles S.
Peirce, may be added. Mr. Peirce is one of our subtlest thinkers
and logicians, and it is incumbent upon one to reflect twice before
criticising any sentence of a man who writes upon the most recondite
topics,—upon what I should call the higher mathematics, the
differential and integral calculus of logic,—with ease and masterly
accuracy. Mr. Peirce's essay "The Architecture of Theories,"[55]
presented in this number of _The Monist_, is the first publication of
his in which he propounds not mere criticism or the discussion of
abstruse logical subjects, but his own positive opinion, presenting in
great and clear outlines the foundations of his philosophy.
[55] The term "architecture of theories" seems inappropriate
from the standpoint of a positive conception of the world.
Many monisms have been constructed in the way Mr. Peirce
so well describes in his comparison of these philosophical
systems to the building a house of one and the same material,
for instance _papier mâché_, with roof of roofing paper,
foundations of paste-board, windows of paraffined paper, etc.,
etc. Philosophy, however, is not a construction of a theory
comparable to the building of an edifice; it is rather the
mapping out of the house in which we live for the purpose of
orientation.
The world-conception of Mr. Peirce agrees in one fundamental maxim
with our own, but it disagrees with the latter in the main and most
important application of this maxim. Mr. Peirce says, "Law is _par
excellence_ the thing that wants a reason." This maxim was the guiding
star of our inquiry into the fundamental problems of philosophy.[56]
The world considered as a universe displaying in all its innumerable
actions one and the same law is called a cosmos; if considered as a
heap of processes with no common law pervading them it is called a
chaos. We found in our inquiry into the forms of existence that the
laws of form possess intrinsic necessity. The laws of the form of
existence are represented in the laws of formal thought (arithmetic,
mathematics, logic, mechanics, and pure natural science). So long as
the formal laws hold good, (and we have found in the chapter "Form and
Formal Thought" that they will hold good under all circumstances,)
any kind of world, whatever materially or dynamically it be, must be
a cosmos, and cannot be a chaos. We can imagine that we had a world
consisting of some other substance and being different either in the
amount or in the action of its energy to this world of ours, but we
cannot imagine that a world should exist which does not exhibit the
harmony of form, and is not regulated as it were by the formal laws
of existence. One plus one would be two in any kind of a world, and
obviously all the other more complex statements of formal laws would
remain true with the same intrinsic necessity. The truth 'one plus one
makes two' contains the universal applicability of causation and of
the conservation of matter and energy. Taking this ground we arrived
at the conclusion that the world is a cosmos: there is no chaos and
there never has been a chaos. A chaos, in the sense of an absolute
non-existence of law, is an impossibility.
[56] See the author's _Fundamental Problems_.
Accordingly, we cannot agree with Mr. Peirce that the occurrence of
chance "calls for no particular explanation." There is no chance,
if chance means absence of law. Chance, if the word be admissible,
is a mere subjective conception produced by limited knowledge and
signifying a state of things not determinable with the means of
knowledge at our disposal. Law once recognised is the death of chance
(in the objective sense of the word); and chance, or sport, or chaos,
or indeterminacy, or whatever one may call the absence or at least
the imperfect cogency of law, far from "calling for no particular
explanation," must be classed _prima facie_ among those theories that
are _per se_ impossible: These conceptions whether applied to the
world at large or to special processes of nature are in contradiction
to those interpretations and systematised statements of facts which
are most fundamental, most reliable, most indispensable and universal.
Whatever generalisation the theory of evolution may be capable of, it
is certainly not capable of being applied to law. The formal order of
Nature and especially the mechanical laws of physics cannot be thought
of as having been developed out of a state of sportive chance; they
must be considered as having always been the same as they are now: they
are eternal.[57]
[57] Mr. Peirce seems to define Mind as sportive chance; for
according to his theory, as soon as sportiveness assumes fixed
habits, it settles into the mechanical motions which physical
science observes in gravitating masses; and matter is thus
defined as "effete mind."
In stating this difference of opinion, I apprehend a possibility that
although Mr. Peirce has stated his case with most admirable and I
should say unequivocal clearness, I have misunderstood his views. In a
former article of his, Mr. Peirce makes a statement concerning Nature
considered as a possible chaos, which seems to concur rather with my
views on the subject than with his own. Mr. Peirce says in his fourth
Paper on the "Illustrations of the Logic of Science":
"If there be any way of enumerating the possibilities of
Nature so as to make them equally probable, it is clearly
one which should make one arrangement or combination of the
elements of Nature as probable as another.... It would be to
assume that Nature is a pure chaos, or chance combination of
independent elements, in which reasoning from one fact to
another would be impossible; and since, as we shall hereafter
see, there is no judgment of pure observation without
reasoning, it would be to suppose all human cognition illusory
and no real knowledge possible. It would be to suppose that
if we have found the order of Nature more or less regular in
the past, this has been by a pure run of luck which we may
expect is now at an end. Now, it may be we have no scintilla
of proof to the contrary, but reason is unnecessary in
reference to that belief which is of all the most settled,
which nobody doubts or can doubt, and which he who should deny
would stultify himself in so doing.
"The relative probability of this or that arrangement of
Nature is something which we should have a right to talk about
if universes were as plenty as blackberries, if we could put
a quantity of them in a bag, shake them well up, draw out a
sample, and examine them to see what proportion of them had
one arrangement and what proportion another. But, even in
that case, a higher universe would contain us, in regard to
whose arrangements the conception of probability could have no
applicability."
I rest the case here in the hope that the statement of both sides of
the problem will contribute to elucidate truth.
EDITOR.
FIVE SOULS WITH BUT A SINGLE THOUGHT.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL LIFE OF THE STAR-FISH.
The investigation of the psychical faculties of animals is comparable
to a journey into fairy-land. We do not know, and according to Du
Bois-Reymond, we shall never know, how our own mental activity has
originated, yet in spite of this we deliberately form theories and
opinions concerning the psychical powers and faculties of other beings
that in point of nervous organisation are perhaps altogether different
from us! The ancients wisely limited themselves to expressing the
intelligence of animals in the form of instructive fables, and in the
famous park of Versailles the charming idea was actually carried out of
representing the fables of Æsop in a so-called labyrinth, every turn
of the intricate lanes of which led to a different group of animals
whose speech was symbolised by streams of water spouting from their
mouths, and the purport of their imagined utterances was to be read in
golden letters upon marble tablets placed at the side. How often have
I wandered over the scene of those long since ruined mazes and have
thought of the deep meaning that frequently lies in childish pastime of
this kind.
But labyrinth aside—when we see an animal perform before our eyes
purposive acts; and we recognise that our own thought operates in
accordance with definite, rigorous laws; we shall still have to say
to ourselves that a comparative animal psychology is after all not
necessarily so hopeless a thing as one might be led to believe from the
bold, and yet faint-hearted, "Ignorabimus" of the distinguished Berlin
physiologist. And as a matter of fact the range of insight obtained
in very recent times into this very field is highly encouraging. On
this occasion I should like to select for discussion one of the most
remarkable of questions, that, namely, which concerns the psychical
activity of _many-souled_ animals.
Quite a stir was made some years ago in the scientific world when
Haeckel began to philosophise about the souls of cells, or so-called
plastidule-souls; for it was patent that the course of life in the
individual single cell of an animal or vegetable body flowed on in
such strict conformity with reason that it was logically necessary to
posit the presence of psychical guidance in the instance in question as
much as in the case of composite cellular colonies in higher organic
beings,—especially since every single one of these composite organisms
begins its life as a simple cell, from which the others afterward
spring. The wide-spread opposition that Haeckel's view met with, must
be regarded as the result of current and common ignorance of the
history of philosophy; since otherwise it must have been known that
the idea of a cell-soul or a germ-soul which controls the development
of the young, has been propounded by innumerable philosophers, and
that it was proclaimed by Daniel Sennert, of Wittenberg, who died in
1637, with perfect consistency as the foundation of all psychological
knowledge. Many beings, such as Algæ, Fungi, and Infusoria, never in
their lives get beyond the state of a single cell, and yet under the
microscope we may observe them seeking light, capturing prey, and in
the majority of cases founding families. And when the Genevan Trembley
discovered, in 1740, the fact of the divisibility of fresh-water Polyps
and showed that after cutting them up every piece grew and developed
into a new individual endowed with sensation, will, and other psychical
capacities, philosophers began to debate whether there were initially
present in every divisible polyp a number of souls in the germinal
state, or, if such were not the case, whether the simple soul of a
polyp possessed the property of divisibility. The Leipsic theologian
Crusius, who died in 1775, declared in favor of the presence in every
polyp of a plurality of germinal souls; the Dutch insect anatomist,
Peter Lyonnet (died 1796) declared in favor of the divisibility of the
single polyp soul.
[Illustration: Fig. 1.—STAR-FISH. (After Haeckel.)]
But let us pass by these subtle speculations to turn to a class of
animals in the case of which we may speak with more propriety than
in the case of polyps and other zoöphytes of a plural soul, since
physically and psychically they act in every respect as if they had
grown together out of five or more individuals,—I mean the Echinoderms
in general and the Star-fish (_Asteroidea_) in particular. In the
following paragraphs, for the sake of brevity, I shall speak of only
five-rayed star-fishes, because the sacred number five is the one that
lies at the basis of the physical structure of the great majority of
star-fishes developed from the egg, and of all other echinoderms,
although there really do occur star-fishes which are supplied, some
with more and some with less than five rays,—single rays often being
cast off and a larger number growing out in their places,—and although
many species are regularly and normally supplied with more than five
rays. From visits to the sea-shore or to aquariums, at any rate from
pictures, my readers all know how a star-fish in general looks. In the
first cut which accompanies this article a number of echinoderms are
presented. The star-fish is in the centre to the left. It resembles the
decorative star of an Order, and has short or long, broad or slender
rays, as the case may be, and a disc-shaped central body.