METAPHYSICS.[55]
"Mother Eddy" and her flock "in Science" derive a considerable part of
their income from a glib use of the word "Metaphysics." But what the
"Church Scientist" has omitted to learn about the real import of that word
would make a volume even larger than _Science and Health_.
As unreservedly admitted in our present essay, there is no trouble about a
spiritual derivation of the universe. In the declaratory, religious form,
the New Testament is a sufficient example of this doctrine. In the
philosophical form the names of Plato and Aristotle, both of whom
resolved all things into the principle of "Mind," summarized the subject
for the ancient world. The modern world has now given three hundred years
to the same theme, and, however well or ill aware of the fact, has reached
the same end, but wholly without the assistance of any pushing, dodging
adventuress, with a little set of abstract ideas and much screaming of
"Science."
Leaving lighter themes for the moment, let us venture on a brief survey of
this ground.
There are just two possible ways of analyzing things. One way is to set
the world with its particulars before the eye, look at it, and accept what
we see. Then we may go to work on phenomena, dissecting and generalizing.
This is the way of physics--a road that _never_ leads to _meta_-physics.
It is the common turnpike of material science--of "positivism." In it
travel all such men, say, as Dr. Ernst Haeckel: also all such men as the
late Parson John Jasper, the colored preacher of Virginia, who, seeing the
sun move round the earth, settled the fact in that way.
The one other way of dissecting the universe is to examine the _means_
through which things are presented to us, and thus to ascertain what
effect the means may have in the production and nature of the things. This
method of investigation has ultimated in what has been summed up as
"Scientific Idealism."
Scientific idealism is the knowledge which every one may get even from his
first lessons in optics, that things of matter--the objects of our five
senses--are constituted such through the structure and action of these
senses themselves. That is to say, material things--whatever we see or
feel, hear, taste or smell--while existent and real--while practically
what every one takes them to be--are _made so_ through _relativity_. Or,
as Kant put it, every "phenomenon"--meaning every object or fact of
sensation--is a "_re_-presentation"; that is, some lot of effects on our
sensuous nature, bound together into a unity of them, the unity thus
formed becoming an object of awareness, a "percept."
Scientific idealism does not question the given duality of the cosmos,
which appears to us as what we call "mind and matter." Here are _we_; out
there, indubitably apart from us, are other things, involving another
source. But scientific idealism has found that this source is itself quite
other than the things we connect with it, and can properly be described in
this connection only as _source of impact_. It has nothing to do with
matter, in the common acceptation. It enters _into_ matter, being the
ultimate non-ego, the objective background, of every phenomenon. But, in
all material things, this background is _transformed_ by contact with
subjective sense (in us or other organisms), and "matter" is really the
fusion, the compound, the third term, of these two elemental principles.
This momentous truth, though mystically reached in the old tenet of India
that "matter is illusion," and though touched understandingly by Carneades
in Greece, was first clearly seen, in the manner of modern science, by the
remarkably solid Englishman, Thomas Hobbes.
"Qualities called sensible" [said Hobbes] "are, in the object that causeth
them, but so many several motions of the matter by which it presseth our
organs diversely.... Because the image in vision, consisting of color and
shape, is the knowledge we have of the qualities of the object of that
sense, it is no hard matter for a man to fall into this opinion, that the
same color and shape are the very qualities themselves."
But, concluded Hobbes:
"The subject wherein color and image are inherent is not the object or
thing seen.... There is nothing without us (really) which we call an image
or color.... The said image or color is but an apparition unto us of _the
motion, agitation, or alteration, which the object worketh in the brain,
or spirits, or some internal substance of the head_.... As in vision, so
also in conceptions that arise from the other senses, the subject of their
inference is not the object, but the sentient."
When John Locke began his great "Essay" on _The Human Understanding_, and
posited mind in its first estate as a passive nonentity--a "blank
tablet"--he had no vital conception of scientific idealism. But, in the
patient thinking of twenty years, such a man could not fail to come upon
the law, though he saw it only in part, and did not work it out. This work
was carried a great way beyond him, by the acute and learned Bishop
Berkeley, who showed from practical science, especially through his
investigation of "vision," that nothing in the universe has any actual
being, apart from a universal element, that, wherever it may be posited,
can alone be called Mind.
Since Berkeley, no philosophical thinker, perhaps, of any significance,
anywhere in the world, has questioned the "ideality" of "material things."
Even Reid, as the philosopher of "common sense," declared that
"No man can conceive any sensation to resemble any known quality of
bodies. Nor can any man show, by any good argument, that all our
sensations might not have been as they are, though no body, nor quality of
body, had ever existed."
Hume's comprehension of Scientific idealism was complete to his day, and
was completely stated. He said:
"'Tis not our body we perceive when we regard our limbs and members, but
certain impressions which enter by the senses; so that the ascribing a
real and corporeal existence to these impressions, or to their objects, is
an act of the mind difficult to explain."
The idealism of recent "materialistic" philosophers, such as Herbert
Spencer and the school of "Positivists," has been most carefully expressed
by John Stuart Mill, in his statement that "Matter is a Permanent
Possibility of Sensation."
"If" [said Mr. Mill] "I am asked whether I believe in matter, I ask
whether the questioner accepts this definition of it. If he does, I
believe in matter; and so do all Berkeleians. In any other sense than this
I do not."
For an easy, popular view of the principle of scientific idealism, perhaps
nothing has been better said than by Thomas Carlyle, in his review of
Novalis.
"To a transcendentalist [says Carlyle] matter has an existence, but only
as a phenomenon. Were _we_ not there, neither would _it_ be there: it is a
mere relation, or rather the result of a relation between our living souls
and the great First Cause; and depends for its apparent qualities on our
bodily and mental organs; having itself no intrinsic qualities; being, in
the common sense of the word, nothing. The tree is green and hard, not of
its own natural virtue, but simply because my eye and my hand are
fashioned so as to discern such and such appearances under such and such
conditions. Nay, as an idealist might say, even on the most popular
grounds, _must_ it not be so? Bring a sentient being with eyes a little
different, fingers ten times harder than mine, and to him that thing which
I call tree shall be yellow and soft, as truly as to me it is green and
hard. Form the nervous structure in all points the reverse of mine, and
this same tree shall not be combustible and heat-producing, but dissoluble
and cold-producing; not high and convex, but deep and concave; shall
simply have _all_ properties exactly the reverse of those attributed to
it. There is no tree there; but only a manifestation of power from
something which is not _I_. The same is true of material nature at large,
of the whole visible universe, with all its movements, figures, accidents
and qualities."
Scientific idealism, as far as we have gone with it, has now become one of
the "_exact_" sciences--as much so as physics. It has been simply the
result of continuous and innumerable experiments in natural philosophy,
for three centuries. There is no need of going into these physical
particulars, after they have been put into the school-books of children
and explained in popular lectures. One more quotation must suffice. Mr. G.
H. Lewes, in his _Biographical History of Philosophy_, tells us that
"The radical error of those who believe that we perceive things _as they
are_, consists in mistaking a metaphor for a fact, and believing that the
mind is a mirror in which external objects are reflected. But, as Bacon
finely says, 'The human understanding is like an _unequal mirror_ to the
rays of things, which, _mixing its own nature with the nature of things,
distorts and perverts them_.' We attribute heat to fire, and color to the
flower, heat and color being states of our consciousness, occasioned by
the fire and the flower under certain conditions. Perception is nothing
more than a _state of the percipient_, a state of consciousness.... Of
every change in our sensation we are conscious, and in time we learn to
give definite names and forms to the causes of these changes. But in the
fact of consciousness there is nothing _beyond_ consciousness. In our
perceptions we are conscious only of the changes which have taken place
within us.... All we can do is to identify certain _external appearances_
with certain internal changes.... We conclude, therefore, that the world
_per se_ in nowise resembles the world as it appears to us. Perception is
an Effect; and its truth is not the truth of _resemblance_, but of
_relation_.... Light, color, sound, taste, are all states of
Consciousness; what they are beyond consciousness ... we cannot know, we
cannot imagine, because we can only conceive them _as_ we know them.
Light, with its myriad forms and colors--Sound, with its thousand-fold
life--make Nature what Nature appears to us. But they do not exist, _as
such_, apart from our consciousness; they are investitures with which we
clothe the world. Nature, in her insentient solitude is an eternal
Darkness--an eternal Silence."