It seems clear, therefore, that, of our two statements, the one which

comes nearest to expressing the fact of which we are immediately

certain is “I see a triangle”, because the other makes inferences to

something public, and thus goes beyond the bare datum. This is on the

assumption that we should not say “there is a black dot” when we see

a black dot which we attribute to eye-trouble and therefore suppose

that no one else can see. Let us therefore concentrate upon “I see a

triangle”, and ask ourselves whether the whole of this, or only part,

can be accepted as a primitive certainty.

A moment’s reflection shows that both “I” and “see” are words which

take us beyond what the momentary event reveals. Take “I” to begin

with. This is a word whose meaning evidently depends upon memory

and expectation. “I” means the person who had certain remembered

experiences and is expected to have certain future experiences. We

might say “I see a triangle now and I saw a square a moment ago.” The

word “I” has exactly the same meaning in its two occurrences in this

sentence, and therefore evidently has a meaning dependent upon memory.

Now it is our object to arrive at the contribution to your knowledge

which is made by seeing the triangle at the moment. Therefore, since

the word “I” takes you beyond this contribution, we must cut it out

if we want to find a correct verbal expression for what is added to

our knowledge by seeing the triangle. We will say “a triangle is being

seen”. This is at any rate one step nearer to what we are seeking.

But now we must deal with the word “seen”. As ordinarily used, this is

a causal word, suggesting something dependent upon the eyes. In this

sense, it obviously involves a mass of previous experience; a new-born

baby does not know that what it sees depends upon its eyes. However,

we could eliminate this. Obviously all objects of sight have a common

quality, which no objects of touch or hearing have; a visual object is

different from an auditory object, and so on. Therefore instead of

saying “a triangle is being seen”, we should say “there is a visual

triangle”. Of course the meanings of the words “visual” and “triangle”

can only be learnt by experience, but they are not _logically_

dependent upon experience. A being could be imagined which would know

the words at birth; such a being could express its datum in the words

“there is a visual triangle”. In any case, the problems remaining

belong to the study of concepts; we will therefore ignore them at

present.

Now in English the words “there is” are ambiguous. When I used them

before, saying, “there is a triangle”, I meant them in the sense of

“_voila_” or “_da ist_”. Now I mean them in the sense of “_il y a_”

or “_es giebt_”. One might express what is meant by saying “a visual

triangle exists”, but the word “exist” has all sorts of metaphysical

connotations that I wish to avoid. Perhaps it is best to say “occurs”.

We have now arrived at something which is just as true when your

perception is illusory as when it is correct. If you say “a visual

black dot is occurring”, you are speaking the truth, if there is one

in your field of vision. We have eliminated the suggestion that others

could see it, or that it could be touched, or that it is composed of

matter in the sense of physics. All these suggestions are present when

one says, in ordinary conversation, “there is a black dot”; they are

intended to be eliminated by the addition of the word “visual” and the

substitution of “is occurring” for “there is”. By these means we have

arrived at what is indubitable and intrinsic in the addition to your

knowledge derived from a visual datum.

We must now ask ourselves once more: Is there still a distinction,

within what is immediate and intrinsic, between the occurrence of a

visual datum and the cognition of it? Can we say, on the basis of

immediate experience, not only “a visual black dot occurs”, but also

“a visual black dot is cognised”? My feeling is that we cannot. When

we say that it is cognised, we seem to me to mean that it is part

of an experience, that is to say, that it can be remembered, or can

modify our habits, or, generally, can have what are called “mnemic”

effects. All this takes us beyond the immediate experience into the

realm of its causal relations. I see no reason to think that there is

any duality of subject and object in the occurrence itself, or that

it can properly be described as a case of “knowledge”. It gives rise

to knowledge, through memory, and through conscious or unconscious

inferences to the common correlates of such data. But in itself it

is not knowledge, and has no duality. The datum is a datum equally

for physics and for psychology; it is a meeting point of the two. It

is neither mental nor physical, just as a single name is neither in

alphabetical order nor in order of precedence; but it is part of the

raw material of both the mental and the physical worlds. This is the

theory which is called “neutral monism”, and is the one that I believe

to be true.

CHAPTER XX

CONSCIOUSNESS?

Twenty-three years have elapsed since William James startled the

world with his article entitled “Does ‘consciousness’ exist?” In this

article, reprinted in the volume called _Essays in Radical Empiricism_,

he set out the view that “there is only one primal stuff or material in

the world”, and that the word “consciousness” stands for a function,

not an entity. He holds that there are “thoughts”, which perform the

function of “knowing”, but that thoughts are not made of any different

“stuff” from that of which material objects are made. He thus laid

the foundations for what is called “neutral monism”, a view advocated

by most American realists. This is the view advocated in the present

volume. In this chapter, we have to ask ourselves whether there is

anything that we can call “consciousness” in any sense involving a

peculiar kind of stuff, or whether we can agree with William James that

there is no “inner duplicity” in the stuff of the world as we know it,

and that the separation of it into knowing and what is known does not

represent a fundamental dualism.

There are two very different meanings attached to the word

“consciousness” by those who use it. On the one hand, we are said to be

“conscious of” something; in this sense, “consciousness” is a relation.

On the other hand, “consciousness” may be regarded as a quality of

mental occurrences, not consisting in their relation to other things.

Let us take the first view first, since, in discussing it, we shall

find reasons for rejecting the second view.

What is the relation we call being “conscious of” something? Take the

difference between a person awake and a person asleep. The former

reacts to all kinds of stimuli to which the latter does not react; we

therefore say that the latter is not “conscious of” what is happening

in his neighbourhood. But even if the sleeper does react in a fashion,

for example, by turning away from the light, such a reaction does not

fall within what is commonly regarded as “knowledge” or “awareness”; we

should say that the sleeper turned over “unconsciously”. If he wakes

up sufficiently to speak intelligently, for instance to address the

disturber by name, we consider him “conscious”. So we do if we find

that he remembers the incident next morning. But common sense does

not regard any and every bodily movement in response to a stimulus as

evidence of “consciousness”. There is no doubt, I think, that common

sense regards certain kinds of response as evidence of some “mental”

process caused by the stimulus, and regards the “consciousness” as

residing in the inferred “mental” occurrence.

Sometimes, however, as in hypnotism and sleep-walking, people refuse

to admit “consciousness” even where many of the usual marks of it are

present. For this there are certain reasons. One of them is subsequent

lack of memory; another is lack of intelligence in what is being done.

If you offer a hypnotised patient a drink of ink, telling him it is

port wine, and he drinks it up with every sign of enjoyment, you say

that he is not “conscious”, because he does not react normally to

the nasty taste. It would seem better, however, to say that he is

conscious of the hypnotist and what he commands, though not of other

things of which he would be conscious in a normal condition. And lack

of subsequent memory is a very difficult criterion, since we normally

forget many things that have happened to us, and the sleep-walker’s

forgetting is only unusually complete. This is obviously a matter of

degree. Take next morning’s memories in the case of a man who was drunk

overnight. They become more and more vague as he reviews the later

hours of the evening, but there is no sharp line where they cease

abruptly. Thus, if memory is a test, consciousness must be a matter of

degree. I think that here, again, common sense regards a certain amount

of memory as necessary evidence to prove that there were “mental”

processes at the time of the acts in question, acts in sleep being

regarded as not involving “mind”, and other acts in certain abnormal

conditions being supposed to resemble those of sleep in this respect.

It follows that, if we are to find out what is commonly meant by

“consciousness”, we must ask ourselves what is meant by a “mental”

occurrence. Not every mental occurrence, however, is in question.

The only kinds concerned are those which seem to have relation to an

“object”. A feeling of pleasant drowsiness would commonly count as

“mental”, but does not involve “consciousness” of an “object”. It is

this supposed peculiar relation to an “object” that we have to examine.

We may take, as the best example, an ordinary act of perception. I

see, let us say, a table, and I am convinced that the table is outside

me, whereas my seeing of it is a “mental” occurrence, which is inside

me. In such a case I am “conscious” of the table--so at least common

sense would say. And since I cannot see without seeing something, this

relation to an “object” is of the very essence of seeing. The same

essential relation to an “object”, it would be said, is characteristic

of every kind of consciousness.

But when we begin to consider this view more closely, all sorts of

difficulties arise. We have already seen that, on grounds derived from

physics, the table itself, as a physical thing, cannot be regarded as

the object of our perception, if the object is something essential to

the existence of the perception. In suitable circumstances, we shall

have the same perception although there is no table. In fact, there

is no event outside the brain which _must_ exist whenever we “see

a table”. It seems preposterous to say that when we think we see a

table we really see a motion in our own brain. Hence we are led to the

conclusion that the “object” which is essential to the existence of

an act of perception is just as “mental” as the perceiving. In fact,

so this theory runs, the mental occurrence called “perceiving” is one

which contains within itself the relation of perceiver and perceived,

both sides of the relation being equally “mental”.

Now, however, there seems no longer any reason to suppose that there is

any essentially relational character about what occurs in us when we

perceive. The original reason for thinking so was the naively realistic

view that we see the actual table. If what we see is as mental as our

seeing, why distinguish between the two? The coloured pattern that

we see is not really “out there”, as we had supposed; it is in our

heads, if we are speaking of physical space. True, more than a coloured

pattern occurs when we “see a table”. There are tactual expectations or

images: there is probably belief in an external object; and afterwards

there may be memory or other “mnemic” effects. All this may be taken as

representing what the above theory took to be the “subject” side of an

act of perception, while the coloured pattern is what the theory took

to be the “object” side. But both sides are on a level as regards being

“mental”. And the relation between the two sides is not of such a kind

that the existence of the one logically demands the existence of the

other; on the contrary, the relation between the two sides is causal,

being dependent upon experience and the law of association.

If this is correct, what really happens when, as common sense would

say, we are conscious of a table, is more or less as follows. First

there is a physical process external to the body, producing a stimulus

to the eye which occurs rarely (not never) in the absence of an actual

physical table. Then there is a process in the eye, nerves, and brain,

and finally there is a coloured pattern. This coloured pattern, by the

law of association, gives rise to tactual and other expectations and

images; also, perhaps, to memories and other habits. But everything in

this whole series consists of a causally continuous chain of events

in space-time, and we have no reason to assert that the events in us

are so very different from the events outside us--as to this, we must

remain ignorant, since the outside events are only known as to their

abstract mathematical characteristics, which do not show whether these

events are like “thoughts” or unlike them.

It follows that “consciousness” cannot be defined either as a

peculiar kind of relation or as an intrinsic character belonging to

certain events and not to others. “Mental” events are not essentially

relational, and we do not know enough of the intrinsic character of

events outside us to say whether it does or does not differ from that

of “mental” events. But what makes us call a certain class of events

“mental” and distinguish them from other events is the combination

of sensitivity with associative reproduction. The more markedly this

combination exists, the more “mental” are the events concerned; thus

mentality is a matter of degree.

There is, however, a further point which must be discussed in this

connection, and that is “self-consciousness”, or awareness of our own

“mental” events. We already had occasion to touch on this in Chapter

XVI in connection with Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”. But I want

to discuss the question afresh in connection with “consciousness”.

When the plain man sees “a table” in the presence of a philosopher, the

plain man can be driven, by the arguments we have repeatedly brought

forward, to admit that he cannot have complete certainty as to anything

outside himself. But if he does not lose his head or his temper, he

will remain certain that there is a coloured pattern, which may be in

him, but indubitably exists. No argument from logic or physics even

tends to show that he is mistaken in this; therefore there is no reason

why he should surrender his conviction. The argument about knowledge

in Chapter VIII showed that, accepting the usual views of physicists

as to causal laws, our knowledge becomes more certain as the causal

chain from object to reaction is shortened, and can only be quite

certain when the two are in the same place in space-time, or at least

contiguous. Thus we should expect that the highest grade of certainty

would belong to knowledge as to what happens in our own heads. And this

is exactly what we have when we are aware of our own “mental” events,

such as the existence of a coloured pattern when we thought we were

seeing a table.

We might, therefore, if we were anxious to preserve the word “mental”,

define a “mental” event as one that can be known with the highest

grade of certainty, because, in physical space-time, the event and the

knowing of it are contiguous. Thus “mental” events will be certain of

the events that occur in heads that have brains. They will not be _all_

events that occur in brains, but only such as cause a reaction of the

kind that can be called “knowledge”.

There are, however, still a number of difficult questions, to which, as

yet, a definitive answer cannot be given. When we “know” a thought of

our own, what happens? And do we know the thought in a more intimate

way than we know anything else? Knowledge of external events, as we

have seen, consists of a certain sensitivity to their presence, but

not in having in or before our minds anything similar to them, except

in certain abstract structural respects. Is knowledge of our own minds

equally abstract and indirect? Or is it something more analogous to

what we ordinarily imagine knowledge to be?

Take first the question: What happens when we “know” a thought of our

own? Taking the definition of “knowing” that we adopted in Chapter

VIII, we shall say: We “know” a thought of our own when an event in

our brain causes a characteristic reaction which is present when the

event occurs and not otherwise. In this sense, whenever we say, “I see

a table”, we are knowing a thought, since an event in our brain is the

only invariable antecedent of such a statement (assuming it to be made

truthfully). We may _think_ we are knowing a table, but this is an

error.

Thus the difference between introspective and other knowledge is only

in our intention and in the degree of certainty. When we say, “I see a

table”, we may intend to know an external object, but if so we may be

mistaken; we are, however, actually knowing the occurrence of a visual

percept. When we describe the same occurrence in the words “a certain

coloured pattern is occurring”, we have changed our intention and are

much more certain of being right. Thus all that differentiates our

reaction when it gives introspective knowledge from our reaction when

it gives knowledge of another kind is the elimination of a possible

source of error.

I come now to the question: Do we know our own thoughts in a more

intimate way than we know anything else? This is a question to which it

is difficult to give precision; it describes something that one _feels_

to be a problem without being able to say exactly what the problem

is. However, some things can be said which may serve to clear up our

feelings, if not our ideas.

Suppose you are asked to repeat after a man whatever he says, as a

test of your hearing. He says “how do you do?” and you repeat “how

do you do?” This is your knowledge-reaction, and you hear yourself

speaking. You can perceive that what you hear when you speak is

closely similar to what you hear when the other man speaks. This makes

you feel that your reaction reproduces accurately what you heard.

Your knowledge-reaction, in this case, is the cause of an occurrence

closely similar to the occurrence that you are knowing. Moreover, our

inveterate naive realism makes us think that what we said was what we

heard while we were speaking. This is, of course, an illusion, since

an elaborate chain of physical and physiological causation intervenes

between speaking and hearing oneself speak; nevertheless, the illusion

re-enforces our conviction that our knowledge, in such a case, is very

intimate. And it is, in fact, as intimate as it can hope to be, when

our knowledge-reaction reproduces the very event we are knowing, or

at least an event extremely similar to it. This _may_ be the case on

other occasions, but we can only know, with any certainty, that it

is the case when what is known is a percept. This accounts for the

fact that our most indubitable and complete knowledge is concerning

percepts, not concerning other mental events or events in the external

world. Our reaction to a sound can be to make a similar sound, and if

we are clever enough we can paint something very like what we see. But

we cannot show our knowledge of a pleasure by creating for ourselves

another very similar pleasure, nor of a desire by creating a similar

desire. Thus percepts are known with more accuracy and certainty than

anything else either in the outer world or in our own minds.

The conclusion we have reached in this chapter is that William James

was right in his views on “consciousness”. No mental occurrence has,

in its own intrinsic nature, that sort of relational character that

was implied in the opposition of subject and object, or of knower and

known. Nevertheless we can distinguish “mental” events from others,

and our most indubitable knowledge is concerned with a certain class

of mental events. We have arrived at this result by following out to

its logical conclusion the behaviourist definition of knowledge which

we gave in Chapter VIII. We have had to modify considerably the point

of view which originally led us to that definition, the modification

having been forced upon us by the physical knowledge which, starting

from a common-sense realism, has been gradually driven, through the

causal theory of perception, to a view of cognition far more subjective

than that from which physicists, like the rest of mankind, originally

set out. But I do not see how there can be any escape from this

development.

CHAPTER XXI

EMOTION, DESIRE, AND WILL

Hitherto, in our investigation of man from within, we have considered

only the cognitive aspect, which is, in fact, the most important to

philosophy. But now we must turn our attention to the other sides of

human nature. If we treat them more briefly than the cognitive side,

it is not because they are less important, but because their main

importance is practical and our task is theoretical. Let us begin with

the emotions.

The theory of the emotions has been radically transformed by the

discovery of the part played by the ductless glands. Cannon’s _Bodily

Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage_ is a book whose teaching

has come to be widely known, though not more so than its importance

warrants. It appears that certain secretions from the glands into the

blood are the essential physiological conditions of the emotions.

Some people say that the physiological changes correlated with these

secretions _are_ the emotions. I think this view must be received with

some caution. As everyone knows, the adrenal glands secrete adrenin,

which produces the bodily symptoms of fear or rage. On one occasion my

dentist injected a considerable amount of this substance into my blood,

in the course of administering a local anæsthetic. I turned pale and

trembled, and my heart beat violently; the bodily symptoms of fear were

present, as the books said they should be, but it was quite obvious to

me that I was not actually feeling fear. I should have had the same

bodily symptoms in the presence of a tyrant about to condemn me to

death, but there would have been something extra which was absent when

I was in the dentist’s chair. What was different was the cognitive

part: I did not feel fear because I knew there was nothing to be afraid

of. In normal life, the adrenal glands are stimulated by the perception

of an object which is frightful or enraging; thus there is already a

cognitive element present. The fear or rage attaches itself to the

object which has stimulated the glands, and the full emotion arises.

But when adrenin is artificially administered, this cognitive element

is absent, and the emotion in its entirety fails to arise. Probably if

it were administered in sleep it would produce a dream of terror, in

which the dreamer’s imagination would supply an object for fear. The

same thing might happen on waking life with animals or young children.

But with an adult of average rationality, the knowledge that there is

nothing to be afraid of inhibits the full development of the emotion.

Fear and rage are both active emotions, demanding a certain kind of

behaviour towards an object; when this behaviour is obviously not

called for, it is impossible to feel either emotion fully.

There are, however, other emotions, such as melancholy, which do not

demand an object. These, presumably, can be caused in their entirety

by administering the proper secretions. A disordered liver may cause

melancholy which is not relieved by knowledge of its source. The

emotions which do not require an object are those which do not call for

any appropriate line of action.

Emotions are subject to “conditioning”, so that the stimuli which call

them out become more various as a result of experience. Dr. Watson has

found only two original stimuli to fear in young infants, namely loud

noises, and lack of support; but anything associated with either of

these may become terrifying.

The separation of an emotional element in our integral reaction to a

situation is more or less artificial. No doubt there is a definite

physiological concomitant, namely stimulation of a gland; but fear,

for example, involves a mode of action towards an object, for which

mode of action the secretion of adrenin is helpful. There is,

however, something in common among a number of occasions that have a

given emotional tone; this may be seen from the fact that they are

associated. When we are feeling some emotion strongly, we tend to think

of other occasions when we have had similar feelings. Association by

means of emotional similarity is a characteristic of a great deal of

poetry. And this accounts for the fact that, if our blood is in a state

usually associated with terror, we shall, if our critical faculty is in

abeyance, be very likely to imagine some cause of fear so vividly as to

believe that it is really present:

In the night, imagining some fear,

How easy is a bush supposed a bear.

But in a rational man, if he is not drunk or sleepy, other associations

are too strong for this production of imaginary terrors. That is why it

is possible to show the physical symptoms of fear under the influence

of adrenin, without actually feeling the emotion.

The emotions are what makes life interesting, and what makes us feel it

important. From this point of view, they are the most valuable element

in human existence. But when, as in philosophy, we are trying to

understand the world, they appear rather as a hindrance. They generate

irrational opinions, since emotional associations seldom correspond

with collocations in the external world. They cause us to view the

universe in the mirror of our moods, as now bright, now dim, according

to the state of the mirror. With the sole exception of curiosity, the

emotions are on the whole a hindrance to the intellectual life, though

the degree of vigour required for successful thinking is likely to be

correlated with a considerable susceptibility to emotion. If I say

little about the emotions in this book, it is not from under-estimating

their human importance, but solely because the task upon which we are

engaged is theoretical rather than practical: to understand the world,

not to change it. And if emotion determines the ends we shall pursue,

knowledge is what gives us the power to realise them. Even from the

practical point of view, the advancement of knowledge is more useful

than anything else that lies within human power.

I come now to the subject of _desire_, which we considered from a

behaviourist standpoint in Chapter III. I want now to ask whether there

is anything to be added from an introspective point of view.

Let us again remind ourselves that there is an element of artificiality

in isolating elements within the one process leading from stimulus to

reaction. Whenever a stimulus produces a reaction, we may consider the

reaction as the effect of the stimulus, or as the cause of further

effects. The former is the natural way of viewing the reaction when we

are concerned with knowledge; the latter is the natural way when we are

concerned with desire and will. In desire, we wish to change something

in ourselves or in our environment or both. The question is: What can

we discover introspectively about desire?

I think that here, as in the case of knowledge, the purely

behaviouristic account is more important causally than the

introspective account, and applies over a much wider range. Desire as

a characteristic of behaviour, as considered in Chapter III, begins

very low in the scale of evolution, and remains, even in human beings,

the whole of what can be discovered in a large number of instances.

The Freudian “unconscious” desires give a formula which is useful as

explaining causally a number of acts, but these desires do not exist as

anything except ways of behaving. Some desires, on the other hand, are

conscious and explicit. What, exactly, is added in these last that is

not present in the others?

Let us take some stock instance, say, Demosthenes desiring to become

a great orator. This was a desire of which he was conscious, and

in accordance with which he deliberately moulded his actions. One

may suppose, to begin with, a merely behaviouristic tendency to do

such things as seemed likely to impress his companions. This is

a practically universal characteristic of human nature, which is

displayed naively by children. Then come attempts, just like those of

rats in mazes, to reach the goal; wrong turnings, leading to derision;

right turnings, leading to a brief nibble at the cheese of admiration.

Self-observation, still of a behaviourist kind, may lead to the

formula: I want to be admired. At this point the desire has become

“conscious”. When this point has been reached, knowledge can be brought

to bear on the problem of achieving the desired end. By association,

the means come to be desired also. And so Demosthenes arrives at the

decision to subject himself to a difficult training as an orator, since

this seems the best way of achieving his end. The whole development

is closely analogous to that of explicit knowledge out of mere

sensitivity; it is, indeed, part of the very same evolution. We cannot,

in our integral reaction to a situation, separate out one event as

knowledge and another as desire; both knowledge and desire are features

which characterise the reaction, but do not exist in isolation.

In explicit conscious desire there is always an object, just as there

is in explicit conscious perception; we desire some event or some state

of affairs. But in the primitive condition out of which explicit desire

is evolved, this is not the case. We have a state of affairs which may

be said to involve discomfort, and activities of various sorts until a

certain different state of affairs is achieved, or fatigue supervenes,

or some other interest causes a distraction. These activities will

be such as to achieve the new state of affairs quickly if there has

been previous experience of a relevant kind. When we reach the level

of explicit conscious desire, it seems as if we were being attracted

to a goal, but we are really still pushed from behind. The attraction

to the goal is a shorthand way of describing the effects of learning

together with the fact that our efforts will continue till the goal

is achieved, provided the time required is not too long. There are

feelings of various kinds connected with desire, and in the case of

familiar desires, such as hunger, these feelings become associated

with what we know will cause the desire to cease. But I see no more

reason in the case of desire than in the case of knowledge to admit

an _essentially_ relational occurrence such as many suppose desire to

be. Only experience, memory and association--so I should say--confer

objects upon desire, which are initially blind tendencies to certain

kinds of activity.

It remains to say a few words about “will”. There is a sense in

which will is an observable phenomena, and another in which it is a

metaphysical superstition. It is obvious that I can say, “I will hold

my breath for thirty seconds”, and proceed to do so; that I can say, “I

will go to America”, and proceed to do so; and so on. In this sense,

will is an observable phenomenon. But as a faculty, as a separable

occurrence, it is, I think, a delusion. To make this clear, it will be

necessary to examine the observable phenomenon.

Very young infants do not appear to have anything that could be called

“will”. Their movements, at first, are reflexes, and are explicable,

where they first cease to be reflexes, by the law of conditioned

reflexes. One observes, however, something that looks very like will

when the child learns control over fingers and toes. It seems clear,

in watching this process, that, after some experience of involuntary

movements, the child discovers how to think of a movement first

and then make the movement, and that this discovery is exceedingly

pleasurable. We know that, in adult life, a deliberate movement is one

which we think of before we make it. Obviously we cannot think of a

movement unless we have previously made it; it follows that no movement

can be voluntary unless it has previously been involuntary. I think

that, as William James suggested, a voluntary movement is merely one

which is preceded by the thought of it, and has the thought of it as an

essential part of its cause.

When I say this, I do not mean to take any particular view as to what

constitutes “thinking”. It may consist almost entirely of talking, as

Dr. Watson holds; or it may be something more. That is not the point

at present. The point is that, whatever philosophy one may adopt, there

certainly is an occurrence which is described by ordinary people as

“thinking of getting up in the morning”, or “thinking of” any other

bodily movement. Whatever the analysis of this occurrence may be, it is

an essential part of the cause of any movement which can be attributed

to the “will”.

It is true, of course, that we may think of a movement without

performing it. This is analogous to imagining a state of affairs

without believing in it; each is a rather sophisticated and late

development. Each will only happen when we think of several things

at once, and one of them interferes with another. It may, I think,

be assumed that, whenever we think of a possible movement, we have a

tendency to perform it, and are only restrained, if at all, by some

thought, or other circumstance, having a contrary tendency.

If this is the case, there is nothing at all mysterious about the will.

Whatever may constitute “thinking of” a movement, it is certainly

something associated with the movement itself; therefore, by the usual

law of learned reactions we should expect that thinking of a movement

would tend to cause it to occur. This, I should say, is the essence of

will.

Emphatic cases of volition, where we decide after a period of

deliberation, are merely examples of conflicting forces. You may have

both pleasant and unpleasant associations with some place that you are

thinking of going to; this may cause you to hesitate, until one or

other association proves the stronger. There may be more than this in

volition, but I cannot see any good ground for believing that there is.

CHAPTER XXII

ETHICS

Ethics is traditionally a department of philosophy, and that is my

reason for discussing it. I hardly think myself that it ought to be

included in the domain of philosophy, but to prove this would take as

long as to discuss the subject itself, and would be less interesting.

As a provisional definition, we may take ethics to consist of general

principles which help to determine rules of conduct. It is not the

business of ethics to say how a person should act in such and such

specific circumstances; that is the province of casuistry. The

word “casuistry” has acquired bad connotations, as a result of the

Protestant and Jansenist attacks on the Jesuits. But in its old and

proper sense it represents a perfectly legitimate study. Take, say,

the question: In what circumstances is it right to tell a lie? Some

people, unthinkingly, would say: Never! But this answer cannot be

seriously defended. Everybody admits that you should lie if you meet a

homicidal maniac pursuing a man with a view to murdering him, and he

asks you whether the man has passed your way. It is admitted that lying

is a legitimate branch of the art of warfare; also that priests may

lie to guard the secrets of the confessional, and doctors to protect

the professional confidences of their patients. All such questions

belong to casuistry in the old sense, and it is evident that they are

questions deserving to be asked and answered. But they do not belong to

ethics in the sense in which this study has been included in philosophy.

It is not the business of ethics to arrive at actual rules of conduct,

such as: “Thou shalt not steal”. This is the province of morals. Ethics

is expected to provide a basis from which such rules can be deduced.

The rules of morals differ according to the age, the race, and the

creed of the community concerned, to an extent that is hardly realised

by those who have neither travelled nor studied anthropology. Even

within a homogeneous community differences of opinion arise. Should a

man kill his wife’s lover? The Church says no, the law says no, and

common sense says no; yet many people would say yes, and juries often

refuse to condemn. These doubtful cases arise when a moral rule is

in process of changing. But ethics is concerned with something more

general than moral rules, and less subject to change. It is true that,

in a given community, an ethic which does not lead to the moral rules

accepted by that community is considered immoral. It does not, of

course, follow that such an ethic is in fact false, since the moral

rules of that community may be undesirable. Some tribes of head-hunters

hold that no man should marry until he can bring to the wedding the

head of an enemy slain by himself. Those who question this moral

rule are held to be encouraging licence and lowering the standard of

manliness. Nevertheless, we should not demand of an ethic that it

should justify the moral rules of head-hunters.

Perhaps the best way to approach the subject of ethics is to ask what

is meant when a person says: “You _ought_ to do so-and-so” or “I

_ought_ to do so-and-so”. Primarily, a sentence of this sort has an

emotional content; it means “this is the act towards which I feel the

emotion of approval”. But we do not wish to leave the matter there; we

want to find something more objective and systematic and constant than

a personal emotion. The ethical teacher says: “You ought to approve

acts of such-and-such kinds”. He generally gives reasons for this view,

and we have to examine what sorts of reasons are possible. We are here

on very ancient ground. Socrates was concerned mainly with ethics;

Plato and Aristotle both discussed the subject at length; before their

time, Confucius and Buddha had each founded a religion consisting

almost entirely of ethical teaching, though in the case of Buddhism

there was afterwards a growth of theological doctrine. The views of

the ancients on ethics are better worth studying than their views on

(say) physical science; the subject has not yet proved amenable to

exact reasoning, and we cannot boast that the moderns have as yet

rendered their predecessors obsolete.

Historically, virtue consisted at first of obedience to authority,

whether that of the gods, the government, or custom. Those who

disobeyed authority suffered obvious penalties. This is still the view

of Hegel, to whom virtue consists in obedience to the State. There

are, however, different forms of this theory, and the objections to

them are different. In its more primitive form, the theory is unaware

that different authorities take different views as to what constitutes

virtue, and it therefore universalises the practice of the community

in which the theoriser lives. When other ages and nations are found to

have different customs, these are condemned as abominations. Let us

consider this view first.

The view we are now to examine is the theory that there are certain

rules of conduct--_e.g._ the Decalogue--which determine virtue in all

situations. The person who keeps all the rules is perfectly virtuous;

the person who fails in this is wicked in proportion to the frequency

of his failures. There are several objections to this as the basis

of ethics. In the first place, the rules can hardly cover the whole

field of human conduct; _e.g._ there is nothing in the Decalogue to

show whether we ought to have a gold standard or not. Accordingly

those who hold this view regard some questions as “moral issues”,

while others have not this character. That means, in practice, that in

regard to “moral issues” we ought to act in a certain way, regardless

of consequences, while in other matters we ought to consider which

course will do the most good. Thus in effect we are driven to adopt two

different ethical systems, one where the code has spoken, the other

where it is silent. This is unsatisfactory to a philosopher.

The second objection to such a view is suggested by the first. We all

feel that certain results are desirable, and others undesirable; but

a code of conduct which takes no account of circumstances will have

sometimes the sort of consequences we think desirable, and sometimes

the sort we think undesirable. Take, _e.g._ the precept “Thou shalt

not kill”. All respectable people hold that this does not apply when

the State orders a person to kill; on this ground among others, the

New York School Board recently refused to sanction the teaching of the

Decalogue in schools.

A third objection is that it may be asked how the moral rules are

known. The usual answer, historically, is that they are known by

revelation and tradition. But these are extra-philosophical sources of

knowledge. The philosopher cannot but observe that there have been many

revelations, and that it is not clear why he should adopt one rather

than another. To this it may be replied that conscience is a personal

revelation to each individual, and invariably tells him what is right

and what is wrong. The difficulty of this view is that conscience

changes from age to age. Most people nowadays consider it wrong to burn

a man alive for disagreeing with them in metaphysics, but formerly this

was held to be a highly meritorious act, provided it was done in the

interests of the right metaphysics. No one who has studied the history

of moral ideas can regard conscience as invariably right. Thus we are

driven to abandon the attempt to define virtue by means of a set of

rules of conduct.

There is, however, another form of the view that virtue consists in

obedience to authority. This may be called “the administrator’s ethic”.

A Roman or Anglo-Indian pro-consul would define virtue as obedience to

the moral code of the community to which a man happens to belong. No

matter how moral codes may differ, a man should always obey that of

his own time and place and creed. A Mohammedan, for instance, would

not be regarded as wicked for practising polygamy, but an Englishman

would, even if he lived in a Mohammedan country. This view makes social

conformity the essence of virtue; or, as with Hegel, regards virtue as

obedience to the government. The difficulty of such theories is that

they make it impossible to apply ethical predicates to authority: we

cannot find any meaning for the statement that a custom is good or that

the government is bad. The view is appropriate to despots and their

willing slaves; it cannot survive in a progressive democracy.

We come a little nearer to a correct view when we define right conduct

by the motive or state of mind of the agent. According to this theory,

acts inspired by certain emotions are good, and those inspired by

certain other emotions are bad. Mystics hold this view, and have

accordingly a certain contempt for the letter of the law. Broadly

speaking, it would be held that acts inspired by love are good, and

those inspired by hate are bad. In practice, I hold this view to be

right; but philosophically I regard it as deducible from something more

fundamental.

All the theories we have hitherto considered are opposed to those which

judge the rightness or wrongness of conduct by its consequences. Of

these the most famous is the utilitarian philosophy, which maintained

that happiness is the good, and that we ought to act so as to maximise

the balance of happiness over unhappiness in the world. I should not

myself regard happiness as an adequate definition of the good, but I

should agree that conduct ought to be judged by its consequences. I do

not mean, of course, that in every practical exigency of daily life

we should attempt to think out the results of this or that line of

conduct, because, if we did, the opportunity for action would often

be past before our calculations were finished. But I do mean that

the received moral code, in so far as it is taught in education and

embodied in public opinion or the criminal law, should be carefully

examined in each generation, to see whether it still serves to achieve

desirable ends, and, if not, in what respects it needs to be amended.

The moral code, in short, like the legal code, should adapt itself to

changing circumstances, keeping the public good always as its motive.

If so, we have to consider in what the public good consists.

According to this view, “right conduct” is not an autonomous concept,

but means “conduct calculated to produce desirable results”. It will be

right, let us say, to act so as to make people happy and intelligent,

but wrong to act so as to make them unhappy and stupid. We have to

ask ourselves how we can discover what constitutes the ends of right

conduct.

There is a view, advocated, _e.g._ by Dr. G. E. Moore, that “good” is

an indefinable notion, and that we know _a priori_ certain general

propositions about the kinds of things that are good on their own

account. Such things as happiness, knowledge, appreciation of beauty,

are known to be good, according to Dr. Moore; it is also known that we

ought to act so as to create what is good and prevent what is bad. I

formerly held this view myself, but I was led to abandon it, partly by

Mr. Santayana’s _Winds of Doctrine_. I now think that good and bad are

derivative from desire. I do not mean quite simply that the good is the

desired, because men’s desires conflict, and “good” is, to my mind,

mainly a social concept, designed to find an issue from this conflict.

The conflict, however, is not only between the desires of different

men, but between incompatible desires of one man at different times,

or even at the same time, and even if he is solitary, like Robinson

Crusoe. Let us see how the concept of “good” emerges from reflection or

conflicts of desires.

We will begin with Robinson Crusoe. In him there will be conflicts,

for example, between fatigue and hunger, particularly between fatigue

at one time and foreseen hunger at another. The effort which he will

require in order to work when he is tired with a view to providing

food on another occasion has all the characteristics of what is called

a moral effort: we think better of a man who makes the effort than of

one who does not, and the making of it requires self-control. For some

reason, this sort of thing is called, not morals, but “morale”; the

distinction, however, seems to me illusory. Robinson Crusoe is bound

to realise that he has many desires, each of which is stronger at one

time than at another, and that, if he acts always upon the one that

is strongest at the moment, he may defeat others that are stronger in

the long run. So far, only intelligence is involved; but one may assume

that, with the progress of intelligence, there goes a growing desire

for a harmonious life, _i.e._ a life in which action is dominated by

consistent quasi-permanent desires. Again: some desires, in addition to

the desire for a harmonious life, are more likely to lead to harmony

then certain other desires. Intellectual curiosity, _e.g._ affords a

mild diffused satisfaction, whereas drugs provide ecstasy followed by

despair. If we arrive unexpectedly in Robinson Crusoe’s island and find

him studying botany, we shall think better of him than if we find him

dead drunk on his last bottle of whisky. All this belongs to morals,

although it is purely self-regarding.

When we come to considering men in society, moral questions become

both more important and more difficult, because conflicts between

the desires of different persons are harder to resolve than internal

conflicts among the desires of one person. There are some distinctions

to be made. First, there is the difference between the point of view

of the neutral authority contemplating a squabble in which it is not

interested, and the point of view of the disputants themselves. Then

there is the distinction between what we wish people to _do_, and what

we wish them to _feel_ in the way of emotions and desires.

The view of authority everywhere is that squabbles to which it is not a

party are undesirable, but that in the squabbles to which it is a party

virtue consists in promoting the victory of authority. In the latter

respect, it is acting, not as an authority, but merely as a combination

of quarrelsome individuals who think it more profitable to quarrel

with outsiders than with each other; we will therefore ignore this

aspect of authority, and consider its action only when it is a neutral.

In this case, it aims at preventing quarrels by punishing those who

begin them, or sometimes by punishing both parties. Monsieur Huc, the

Jesuit missionary who wrote a fascinating account of his travels in

China, Tartary, and Tibet about eighty years ago, relates an amusing

conversation he had with a mandarin. Monsieur Huc had remarked that

Chinese justice was dilatory, expensive, and corrupt. The mandarin

explained that it had been made so in obedience to an Imperial edict,

setting forth that the subjects of the Son of Heaven had become too

much addicted to litigation, and must be led to abandon this practice.

The rescript then proceeded to suggest to magistrates and judges

the desirability of the above defects as a means of diminishing the

number of law-suits. It appeared that the Emperor’s commands had been

faithfully obeyed in this respect--more so than in some others.

Another method adopted by public authorities to prevent the impulse

towards internal quarrels is the creation of _esprit de corps_, public

spirit, patriotism, etc., _i.e._ a concentration of quarrelsome

impulses or persons outside the group over which it rules. Such a

method, obviously, is partial and external; it would not be open to a

world-wide democratic authority, should this ever come into existence.

Such an authority would have to adopt better methods of producing

harmony; it would also have a higher claim to the obedience of citizens

than some authorities have at present.

What can we say from the point of view of the disputants themselves? It

is of course obvious that there will be a greater _total_ satisfaction

when two people’s desires harmonise than when they conflict, but that

is not an argument which can be used to people who in fact hate each

other. One can argue that the one who is going to be beaten would do

well to give way, but each will think that he himself is going to be

victorious. One can argue that there is more happiness to be derived

from love than from hate, but people cannot love to order, and there is

no satisfaction to be derived from an insincere love. Nor is it always

true in an individual case that love brings more happiness than hate.

During and immediately after the war, those who hated the Germans were

happier than those who still regarded them as human beings, because

they could feel that what was being done served a good purpose. I

think, therefore, that certain departments of morals, and those the

most important, cannot be inculcated from a personal point of view, but

only from the point of view of a neutral authority. That is why I said

that ethics is mainly social.

The attitude of a neutral authority would, it seems to me, be this:

Men desire all sorts of things, and in themselves all desires,

taken singly, are on a level, _i.e._ there is no reason to prefer

the satisfaction of one to the satisfaction of another. But when we

consider not a single desire but a group of desires, there is this

difference, that sometimes all the desires in a group can be satisfied,

whereas in other cases the satisfaction of some of the desires in

the group is incompatible with that of others. If A and B desire to

marry each other, both can have what they want, but if they desire to

kill each other, at most one can succeed, unless they are Kilkenny

cats. Therefore the former pair of desires is socially preferable to

the latter. Now our desires are a product of three factors: native

disposition, education, and present circumstances. The first factor is

difficult to deal with at present, for lack of knowledge. The third is

brought into operation by means of the criminal law, economic motives,

and social praise and blame, which make it on the whole to the interest

of an individual in a community to promote the interests of the

dominant group in that community. But this is done in an external way,

not by creating good desires, but by producing a conflict of greed and

fear in which it is hoped that fear will win. The really vital method

is education, in the large sense in which it includes care of the body

and habit-formation in the first few years. By means of education,

men’s desires can be changed, so that they act spontaneously in a

social fashion. To force a man to curb his desires, as we do by the

criminal law, is not nearly so satisfactory as to cause him genuinely

to feel the desires which promote socially harmonious conduct.

And this brings me to the last point with which we are concerned,

namely, the distinction between feeling and doing. No doubt, from a

social point of view the important thing is what a man does, but it is

impossible to cause a man to do the right things consistently unless he

has the right desires. And the right desires cannot be produced merely

by praising them or by desiring to have them; the technique of moral

education is not one of exhortation or _explicit_ moral instruction.

We can now state the ethic at which we have arrived in abstract terms.

Primarily, we call something “good” when we desire it, and “bad” when

we have an aversion from it. But our use of words is more constant than

our desires, and therefore we shall continue to call a thing good even

at moments when we are not actually desiring it, just as we always

call grass green though it sometimes looks yellow. And the laudatory

associations of the word “good” may generate a desire which would not

otherwise exist: we may want to eat caviare merely because we are told

that it is good. Moreover the use of words is social, and therefore

we learn only to call a thing good, except in rare circumstances, if

most of the people we associate with are also willing to call it good.

Thus “good” comes to apply to things desired by the whole of a social

group. It is evident, therefore, that there can be more good in a world

where the desires of different individuals harmonise than in one where

they conflict. The supreme moral rule should, therefore, be: _Act so

as to produce harmonious rather than discordant desires_. This rule

will apply wherever a man’s influence extends: within himself, in his

family, his city, his country, even the world as a whole, if he is able

to influence it.

There will be two main methods to this end: first, to produce social

institutions under which the interests of different individuals or

groups conflict as little as possible; second, to educate individuals

in such a way that their desires can be harmonised with each other and

with the desires of their neighbours. As to the first method, I shall

say nothing further, since the questions that arise belong to politics

and economics. As to the second, the important period is the formative

period of childhood, during which there should be health, happiness,

freedom, and a gradual growth of self-discipline through opportunities

for difficult achievement of a sort which is useful and yet satisfies

the impulse towards mastery of the environment. The desire for power,

which is present in most people and strongest in the most vigorous,

should be directed towards power over things rather than over people.

It is clear that, if harmonious desires are what we should seek, love

is better than hate, since, when two people love each other, both

can be satisfied, whereas when they hate each other one at most can

achieve the object of his desire. It is obvious also that desire for

knowledge is to be encouraged, since the knowledge that a man acquires

is not obtained by taking it away from some one else; but a desire for

(say) large landed estates can only be satisfied in a small minority.

Desire for power over other people is a potent source of conflict,

and is therefore to be discouraged; a respect for the liberty of

others is one of the things that ought to be developed by the right

kind of education. The impulse towards personal achievement ought to

go into such things as artistic creation or scientific discovery or

the promotion of useful institutions--in a word, into activities that

are creative rather than possessive. Knowledge, which may do positive

harm where men’s desires conflict (for example, by showing how to make

war more deadly), will have only good results in a world where men’s

desires harmonise, since it tends to show how their common desires are

to be realised.

The conclusion may be summed up in a single phrase: _The good life is

one inspired by love and guided by knowledge_.[11]

[11] Cf. _What I Believe_, by the present author--To-day and

To-morrow Series.

PART IV

THE UNIVERSE

CHAPTER XXIII

SOME GREAT PHILOSOPHIES OF THE PAST

Our discussions, hitherto, have been concerned very largely with

Man, but Man on his own account is not the true subject-matter of

philosophy. What concerns philosophy is the universe as a whole; Man

demands consideration solely as the instrument by means of which we

acquire knowledge of the universe. And that is why it is human beings

as capable of knowledge that have concerned us mainly in past chapters,

rather than as centres of will or of emotion. We are not in the mood

proper to philosophy so long as we are interested in the world only as

it affects human beings; the philosophic spirit demands an interest in

the world for its own sake. But since we apprehend the world through

our own senses, and think about it with our own intellect, the picture

that we acquire is inevitably coloured by the personal medium through

which it comes to us. Consequently we have to study this medium,

namely ourselves, in order to find out, if we can, what elements in

our picture of the world are contributed by us, and what elements we

may accept as representative of outside fact. Previous chapters have

studied cognition, both as an outwardly observable reaction, and as

it appears to introspection. In the chapters that remain, we shall

be concerned with what we can know about the universe, in view of

the nature of the instrument that we have to employ. I do not think

we can know as much as many philosophers of the past have supposed,

but I think it is worth while to have in our minds an outline of

their systems. I shall therefore begin by setting forth a few typical

philosophical constructions of earlier centuries.

Modern philosophy is generally taken as beginning with Descartes,

who flourished in the first half of the seventeenth century. We have

already had occasion, in Chapter XVI, to consider his argument “I

think, therefore, I am”, but now we will deal with him somewhat more

generally. He inaugurated two movements, one in metaphysics, one in

theory of knowledge. In metaphysics, he emphasised the gulf between

mind and matter, or between soul and body; in theory of knowledge he

advocated a critical scrutiny of premises. These two movements had

different histories, each of them interesting. The science of dynamics

was rapidly developing in Descartes’ time, and seemed to show that the

motions of matter could be calculated mathematically, given sufficient

data. As the motions of matter include our bodily acts, even speaking

and writing, it seemed as if the consequence must be a materialistic

theory of human behaviour. This consequence, however, was distasteful

to most philosophers, and they therefore invented various ways of

escaping from it. Descartes himself thought that the will could have

certain direct physical effects. He thought that the brain contains a

fluid called the “animal spirits”, and that the will could influence

the direction of its motion, though not the velocity. In this way he

was still able to hold that the will is effective in the manner in

which common sense supposes it to be. But this view did not fit in at

all well with the rest of his philosophy. He held that, apart from the

Supreme Substance, namely God, there are two created substances, mind

and matter; that the essence of mind is thought, and that the essence

of matter is extension. He made these two substances so different

that interaction between them became difficult to understand, and his

followers decided that there is never any effect either of mind on

matter or of matter on mind.

The motives for this development were various; perhaps the most

important was the development of physics immediately after Descartes’

time. A law was discovered called the “conservation of momentum”. This

states that, if a system of bodies is in any sort of motion, and is

free from outside influences, the amount of motion _in any direction_

is constant. This showed that the kind of action of the will on the

“animal spirits” which Descartes had assumed was contrary to the

principles of dynamics. It seemed to follow that mind cannot influence

matter, and it was inferred that matter cannot influence mind, since

the two were regarded as co-equal substances. It was held that each

goes it own way, according to its own laws. The fact that our arm moves

when we will it to move was regarded as analogous to the fact that two

perfectly accurate clocks strike at the same moment, though neither

has any effect upon the other. The series of mental events and the

series of physical events were parallel, each going at the same rate as

the other, therefore they continued to synchronise, in spite of their

independence of each other.

Spinoza sought to make this parallelism less mysterious by denying

that there are two separate substances, mind and matter. He maintained

that there is only one substance, of which thought and extension are

attributes. But there seemed still no good reason why the events

belonging to the two attributes should develop along parallel lines.

Spinoza is in many ways one of the greatest philosophers, but his

greatness is rather ethical than metaphysical. Accordingly he was

regarded by contemporaries as a profound metaphysician but a very

wicked man.

The notion of the impossibility of interaction between mind and body

has persisted down to our own day. One still hears of “psychophysical

parallelism”, according to which to every state of the brain a state of

mind _corresponds_ and vice versa, without either acting on the other.

This whole point of view, though not exactly that of Descartes, derives

from him. It has a number of sources, religious, metaphysical, and

scientific; but there seems no ground whatever for regarding it as true.

Take, first, the rigid determinism of traditional physics, which was

to have been avoided. Spinoza rightly perceived that this could not

be avoided by such methods, and therefore accepted determinism in

the psychical as in the physical realm. If everything we _say_ is

determined by physical causes, our thoughts are only free when we

tell lies: so long as we say what we think, our thoughts also can be

inferred from physics. The philosophy which I advocate escapes this

consequence in several ways. In the first place, causality does not

involve _compulsion_, but only a law of sequence: if physical and

mental events run parallel, either may with equal justice be regarded

as causing the other, and there is no sense in speaking of them as

causally independent. Thus the Cartesian dualism does not have the

pleasant consequences which were intended. In the second place, modern

physics has become less deterministic than the physics of the past

few centuries. We do not know, _e.g._ what makes a radio-active atom

explode or an electron jump from a larger to a smaller orbit. In these

matters we only know statistical averages.

Take next the view that mind and matter are quite disparate. This we

have criticised already. It rests upon a notion that we know much

more about matter than we do, and in particular upon the belief that

the space of physics can be identified with the space of sensible

experience. This belief is absent in Leibniz, who, however, never quite

realised what his own view was. It is not absent in Kant, who realised

that the space of sensible experience is subjective, and inferred

that the space of physics is subjective. Since Kant, no one seems to

have thought clearly about space until Einstein and Minkowski. The

separation of physical and sensible space, logically carried out, shows

the groundlessness of traditional views about mind and matter. This

part of Descartes’ philosophy, therefore, though it accelerated the

progress of physics, must be regarded as metaphysically an aberration.

The other part of Descartes’ philosophy, namely, the emphasis upon

methodical doubt, and consequently upon theory of knowledge, has

been more fruitful. The beginning of a philosophic attitude is the

realisation that we do not know as much as we think we do, and to this

Descartes contributed notably. We have seen that he set to work to

doubt all he could, but found he could not doubt his own existence,

which he therefore took as the starting-point of his constructive

system. He supposed that the most certain fact in the world is “I

think”. This was unfortunate, since it gave a subjective bias to modern

philosophy. As a matter of fact, “I” seems to be only a string of

events, each of which separately is more certain than the whole. And

“think” is a word which Descartes accepted as indefinable, but which

really covers complicated relations between events. When is an event

a “thought”? Is there some intrinsic characteristic which makes it a

thought? Descartes would say yes, and so would most philosophers. I

should say no. Take, _e.g._ a visual and an auditory sensation. Both

are “thoughts” in Descartes’ sense, but what have they in common? Two

visual sensations _have_ an indefinable common quality, viz. that

which makes them visual. Two auditory sensations likewise. But a

visual and an auditory sensation have in common, if I am not mistaken,

no intrinsic property, but a certain capacity for being _known_

without inference. This amounts to saying that they are mnemic causes

of a certain kind of event, called a cognition, and that they have

moreover, a certain formal similarity to the cognition which they

cause. Therefore, instead of taking the general “I think” as our basis,

we ought to take the particular occurrences which are known without

inference, among which sensations (or rather “perceptions”) will be

included. These occurrences, as we have already seen, may be regarded

with equal justice as physical and mental: they are parts of chains of

physical causation, and they have mnemic effects which are cognitions.

The former fact makes us call them physical, the latter mental, both

quite truly. It is the particular events which are certain, not the

“I think” which Descartes made the basis of his philosophy. It is not

correct to regard the ultimate certainties as “subjective”, except in

the sense that they are events in that part of space-time in which our

body is--and our mind also, I should say.

A new turn was given to the Cartesian type of metaphysics by Leibniz

(1646–1716), who, like Descartes, was supremely eminent both in

mathematics and in philosophy. Leibniz rejected the view that there

is only one substance, as Spinoza held, or only two other than God,

as the orthodox followers of Descartes maintained. He also rejected

the dualism of mind and matter, holding that there are innumerable

substances all in a greater or less degree mental, and none in any

degree material. He maintained that every substance is immortal, and

that there is no interaction between one substance and another--this

last being a view derived from the Cartesian independence of mind

and matter. He also extended to his many substances the belief in

parallelism which had existed for the two substances of the Cartesians.

He called his substances “monads”, and maintained that every monad

mirrors the universe, and develops along lines which correspond, point

by point, with those along which every other monad is developing. A

man’s soul or mind is a single monad, while his body is a collection of

monads, each mental in some degree, but less so than the monad which

is his soul. Inferior monads mirror the world in a more confused way

than higher ones do, but there is some element of confusion in the

perceptions of even the most superior monads. Every monad mirrors the

world from its own point of view, and the difference between points of

view is compared to a difference of perspective. “Matter” is a confused

way of perceiving a number of monads; if we perceived clearly, we

should see that there is no such thing as matter.

Leibniz’s system had great merits and great demerits. The theory that

“matter” is a confused way of perceiving something non-material was

an advance upon anything to be found in his predecessors. He had,

though only semi-consciously, the distinction between physical and

perceptual space: there is space in each monad’s picture of the world,

and there is also the assemblage or pattern of “points of view”. The

latter corresponds to what I have called “physical space”, the former

to “perceptual space”. Leibniz maintained, as against Newton, that

space and time consists only of relations--a view which has achieved a

definitive triumph in Einstein’s theory of relativity. The weak point

of his system was what he called the “pre-established harmony”, in

virtue of which all the monads (so to speak) kept step, in spite of

the fact that they were “windowless” and never acted upon each other.

Perception, for Leibniz, was not an effect of the object perceived, but

a modification arising in the perceiving monad and running parallel

with what was happening in the perceived object. This view would

never have seemed plausible but for the anterior Cartesian theory of

the mutual independence of mind and matter. And if Leibniz himself

developed, as he believed, in complete independence of all other

created things, it is not clear what good reasons he could have had for

believing in the existence of anything except himself, since, by his

own theory, his experiences would remain unchanged if everything else

were annihilated. In fact, he was only able to refute this possibility

by bringing in theological considerations, which, whether valid or

not, are out of place in philosophy. For this reason, his doctrines,

ingenious as they were, found little acceptance in France and England,

though in Germany they prevailed, in a modified form, until the time of

Kant.

The systems of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz have one very important

characteristic in common, namely, that they all depend upon the

category of “substance”. This is a concept which has developed out of

the common-sense notion of “thing”. A “substance” is that which has

qualities, and is in general supposed to be indestructible, though

it is difficult to see why. It acquired its hold over metaphysicians

partly because both matter and the soul were held to be immortal, and

partly through a hasty transference to reality of ideas derived from

grammar. We say “Peter is running”, “Peter is talking”, “Peter is

eating”, and so on. We think that there is one entity, Peter, who does

all these things, and that none of them could be done unless there were

someone to do them, but that Peter might quite well do none of them.

Similarly we assign qualities to Peter: we say he is wise and tall

and blond and so on. All these qualities, we feel, cannot subsist by

themselves in the void, but only when there is a subject to which they

belong; but Peter would remain Peter even if he became foolish and

short and dyed his hair. Thus Peter, who is regarded as a “substance”,

is self-subsistent as compared with his qualities and states, and he

preserves his substantial identity throughout all sorts of changes.

Similarly in the material world an atom is supposed (or rather was

supposed until recently) to preserve its identity throughout all time,

however it might move and whatever combinations it might form with

other atoms. The concept of “motion”, upon which all physics seemed to

depend, was only strictly applicable to a substance which preserves

its identity while changing its spatial relations to other substances;

thus “substance” acquired an even firmer hold upon physics than upon

metaphysics.

Nevertheless, the notion of “substance”, at any rate in any sense

involving permanence, must be shut out from our thoughts if we are to

achieve a philosophy in any way adequate either to modern physics or

to modern psychology. Modern physics, both in the theory of relativity

and in the Heisenberg-Schrödinger theories of atomic structure, has

reduced “matter” to a system of events, each of which lasts only for a

very short time. To treat an electron or a proton as a single entity

has become as wrong-headed as it would be to treat the population of

London or New York as a single entity. And in psychology, equally,

the “ego” has disappeared as an ultimate conception, and the unity

of a personality has become a peculiar causal nexus among a series

of events. In this respect, grammar and ordinary language have been

shown to be bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written

showing the influence of syntax on philosophy; in such a book, the

author could trace in detail the influence of the subject-predicate

structure of sentences upon European thought, more particularly in

this matter of “substance”. And it must be understood that the same

reasons which lead to the rejection of substance lead also to the

rejection of “things” and “persons” as ultimately valid concepts. I

say “I sit at my table”, but I ought to say: “One of a certain string

of events causally connected in the sort of way that makes the whole

series that is called a ‘person’ has a certain spatial relation to one

of another string of events causally connected with each other in a

different way and having a spatial configuration of the sort denoted

by the word ‘table’”. I do not say so, because life is too short; but

that is what I should say if I were a true philosopher. Apart from

any other grounds, the inadequacy of the notion of “substance” would

lead us to regard the philosophy of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz as

incompatible with modern science. There is of course in all three, a

great deal that does not depend upon “substance”, and that still has

value; but “substance” supplied the framework and a good deal of the

argumentation, and therefore introduces a fatal defect into these three

great systems.

I come now to the triad of British philosophers, Locke, Berkeley, and

Hume--English, Irish, and Scotch respectively. Perhaps from patriotic

bias or from community of national temperament, I find more that I

can accept, and regard as still important, in the writings of these

three than in the philosophy of their continental predecessors. Their

constructions are less ambitious, their arguments more detailed, and

their methods more empirical; in all these respects they show more

kinship with the modern scientific outlook. On the other hand, Locke

and Hume, if not Berkeley, approach philosophy too exclusively from

the side of psychology, and are concerned to study Man rather than the

universe.

Locke was a contemporary and friend of Newton; his great book, _An

Essay concerning Human Understanding_, was published at almost the

same moment as Newton’s _Principia_. His influence has been enormous,

greater, in fact, than his abilities would seem to warrant; and this

influence was not only philosophical, but quite as much political and

social. He was one of the creators of eighteenth century liberalism:

democracy, religious toleration, freedom of economic enterprise,

educational progress, all owe much to him. The English Revolution of

1688 embodied his ideas; the American Revolution of 1776 and the

French Revolution of 1789 expressed what had grown, in a century, out

of his teaching. And in all these movements, philosophy and politics

went hand in hand. Thus the practical success of Locke’s ideas has been

extraordinary.

When, knowing all this, one comes to read Locke himself, it is

difficult to resist a feeling of disappointment. He is sensible,

enlightened, minute, but uninspired and (to moderns) uninspiring.

One has to remember that his contemporaries found common sense

exhilarating after a century of wars of religion and a long struggle

with obscurantism. Locke combatted the doctrine of “innate ideas”,

according to which we learned only certain things by experience,

but possessed our abstract knowledge in virtue of our congenital

constitution. He regarded the mind at birth as a wax tablet, upon which

experience proceeded to write. Undoubtedly he was, in this matter,

more in the right than his opponents, although the terms in which the

controversy was waged are not such as a modern could employ. We should

say that the innate apparatus of man consists of “reflexes” rather than

“ideas”; also that our sense-organs, our glands, and our muscles lead

to responses of certain kinds, in which our own organisation plays a

part of the same importance as that played by the external stimulus.

The element in our knowledge-responses that corresponds to our own

bodily organisation might, perhaps, be regarded as representing what

Locke’s opponents meant by “innate”. But it does not represent this

at all accurately so far as our feelings towards it are concerned.

The “innate” ideas were the ideas to be proud of; they embraced pure

mathematics, natural theology, and ethics. But nobody is proud of

sneezing or coughing. And when Locke tried to show, in detail, how our

knowledge is generated by experience, he was liberating philosophy from

a great deal of useless lumber, even if his own doctrines were not

altogether such as we can now accept.

Locke used his own principles only in ways consistent with common

sense; Berkeley and Hume both pushed them to paradoxical conclusions.

The philosophy of Berkeley, to my mind, has not received quite the

attention and respect that it deserves--not that I agree with it,

but that I think it ingenious and harder to refute than is often

supposed. Berkeley, as everyone knows, denied the reality of matter,

and maintained that everything is mental. In the former respect I

agree with him, though not for his reasons; in the latter respect, I

think his argument unsound and his conclusion improbable, though not

certainly false. However, I will leave the development of my own views

to a later chapter, and confine myself to Berkeley’s argument.

Berkeley contended that when, for example, you “see a tree”, all

that you really _know_ to be happening is in you, and is mental. The

colour that you see, as Locke had already argued, does not belong to

the physical world, but is an effect upon you, produced, according

to Locke, by a physical stimulus. Locke held that the purely spatial

properties of perceived objects really belong to the objects, whereas

such things as colour, softness, sound, etc., are effects in us.

Berkeley went further, and argued that the spatial properties of

perceived objects are no exception. Thus the object perceived is

composed entirely of “mental” constituents, and there is no reason to

believe in the existence of anything not mental. He did not wish to

admit that a tree ceases to exist when we do not look at it, so he

maintained that it acquires permanence through being an idea in the

mind of God. It is still only an “idea”, but not one whose existence

depends upon the accidents of our perceptions.

The real objection to Berkeley’s view is rather physical than

metaphysical. Light and sound take time to travel from their sources

to the percipient, and one must suppose that something is happening

along the route by which they travel. What is happening along the route

is presumably not “mental”, for, as we have seen, “mental” events are

those that have peculiar mnemic effects which are connected with living

tissue. Therefore, although Berkeley is right in saying that the events

we know immediately are mental, it is highly probable that he is wrong

as to the events which we infer in places where there are no living

bodies. In saying this, however, we are anticipating the results of a

fuller discussion in a later chapter.

Hume, proceeding from a starting-point essentially similar to that

of Locke and Berkeley, arrived at conclusions so sceptical that all

subsequent philosophers have shied away from them. He denied the

existence of the Self, questioned the validity of induction, and

doubted whether causal laws could be applied to anything except our own

mental processes. He is one of the very few philosophers not concerned

to establish any positive conclusions. To a great extent, I think, we

must admit the validity of his reasons for refusing to feel the usual

certainties. As regards the Self, he was almost certainly right. As we

have already argued, a person is not a single entity, but a series of

events linked together by peculiar causal laws. As regards induction,

the question is very difficult, and I shall devote a subsequent chapter

to it. As regards causal laws, the question, as we shall find later, is

the same as the question of induction. On both points Hume’s doubts are

not to be lightly dismissed.

The usual modern criticism of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume is that they

were unduly “atomistic”. They thought of the mind as a collection of

“ideas”, each as hard and separate as a billiard-ball. They had not

the conception of continuous change or of integral processes; their

causal units were too small. As we have already seen in connection with

_Gestaltpsychologie_ and with sentences, the causal unit is often a

configuration which cannot be broken up without losing its distinctive

causal properties. In this sense, it is true that the traditional

British philosophy was too atomistic. But in another sense I do not

think it is true, and I think much modern philosophy is confused on

this point. Although a configuration may lose its _causal_ properties

when broken up into its elements, it nevertheless does consist of

these elements related in certain ways; analysis into “atoms” is

perfectly valid, so long as it is not assumed that the causal efficacy

of the whole is compounded out of the separate effects of the separate

atoms. It is because I hold this view that I call the philosophy which

I advocate “logical atomism”. And to this extent I regard Locke,

Berkeley, and Hume as in the right as against their modern critics. But

this also is a topic which will be resumed in a later chapter.

Hume’s criticism of the notion of cause was what led Kant to his new

departure. Kant’s philosophy is difficult and obscure, and philosophers

still dispute as to what he meant. Those who disagree with him are held

by his supporters to have misunderstood him; I must therefore warn the

reader that what follows is my view of what he meant, and that there is

no agreed view.

Kant maintained that, in virtue of our mental constitution, we deal

with the raw material of sense-impressions by means of certain

“categories” and by arranging it in space and time. Both the categories

and the space-time arrangement are supplied by us, and do not belong to

the world except as known by us. But since our mental constitution is

a constant datum, all phenomena _as known_ will be spatio-temporal and

will conform to the categories. Among the latter “cause” is the most

important. Thus although there may be no cause in the world as it is

in itself (a point on which Kant was inconsistent in the interest of

morals), yet phenomena, _i.e._ things as they seem to us, will always

have other phenomena as their causes. And although there is no time in

the real world, things as they appear to us will be some earlier and

some later. Space, again is supplied by us, and therefore geometry can

be known _a priori_, without our having to study the outer world. Kant

thought that Euclidean geometry was quite certainly true, although it

could not be proved by logic alone, since Euclid’s axioms could be

denied without self-contradiction.

It was on this question of geometry that the weakness of Kant’s

system first became obvious. It was found that we have no grounds for

regarding Euclidean geometry as quite true. Since Einstein, we have

positive grounds for regarding it as not quite true. It appears that

geometry is just as empirical as geography. We depend upon observation

if we want to know whether the sum of the angles of a triangle is two

right angles just as much as if we want to know how much land there is

in the western hemisphere.

With regard to the “categories” there are equally great difficulties.

Let us take “cause” as our illustration. We see lightning, and then we

hear thunder; as phenomena, our seeing and hearing are connected as

cause and effect. But we must not--if we are to take the subjectivity

of “cause” seriously--suppose that our seeing or our hearing has an

outside cause. In that case, we have no reason to suppose that there

is anything outside ourselves. Nay, more: what _really_ happens when

we see is not, according to Kant, what we perceive by introspection;

what really happens is something without a date, without a position

in space, without causes and without effects. Thus we do not know

ourselves any better than we know the outside world. Space and time

and the categories interpose a mirage of illusion which cannot be

penetrated at any point. As an answer to Hume’s scepticism, this

seems a somewhat unsuccessful effort. And Kant himself, later, in the

_Critique of Practical Reason_, demolished much of his own edifice,

because he thought that ethics at least must have validity in the

“real” world. This part of his philosophy, however, is usually ignored

by his followers or apologetically minimised.

Kant gave a new turn to an old philosophical controversy, as to how

far our knowledge is _a priori_ and how far it is based on experience.

Kant admitted that without experience we could know nothing, and that

what we know is only valid within the realm of experience. But he held

that the general framework of our knowledge is _a priori_ in the sense

that it is not proved by means of particular facts of experience, but

represents the conditions to which phenomena have to conform in order

to be capable of being experienced. Before his day, the tendency had

been for continental philosophers to regard almost everything as

_a priori_ while British philosophers regarded almost everything as

empirical. But both sides thought that what is _a priori_ can be proved

by logic, at least in theory, whereas Kant held that mathematics is

_a priori_ and yet “synthetic”, _i.e._ not capable of being proved

by logic. In this he was misled by geometry. Euclidean geometry,

considered as true, is “synthetic” but not _a priori_; considered

merely as deducing consequences from premisses, it is _a priori_

but not “synthetic”. The geometry of the actual world, as required

by engineers, is empirical; the geometry of pure mathematics, which

does not inquire into the truth of the axioms but merely shows their

implications, is an exercise in pure logic.

It should be said, however, that, if the correct analysis of knowledge

bears any resemblance at all to that which has been suggested in this

book, the whole controversy between empiricists and apriorists becomes

more or less unreal. All beliefs are _caused_ by external stimuli; when

they are as particular as the stimuli they are of the sort which an

empiricist might regard as _proved_ by experience, but when they are

more general difficulties arise. A foreigner arrives in America and

sees the immigration officials, who lead him to the generalisation that

all Americans are rude; but a few minutes later the porter upsets this

induction in the hope of a tip. Thus sometimes a given belief will be

caused by one event and destroyed by another. If all the events in a

man’s life, so far as they affect the belief in question, are such as

to cause it, he counts the belief true. The more general a belief is,

the more events are relevant to it, and therefore the more difficult

it is for it to be such as a man will long consider true. Roughly

speaking, the beliefs which count as _a priori_ will be those which

well might have been upset by subsequent events, but in fact were

confirmed. Here as elsewhere we are driven to the view that theory of

knowledge is not so fundamental as it has been considered since Kant.

There is one more traditional controversy which I wish to consider,

namely, that between monists and pluralists. Is the universe one,

or is it many? If many, how intimately are they interconnected? The

monistic view is very old: it is already complete in Parmenides (fifth

century B.C.). It is fully developed in Spinoza, Hegel, and Bradley.

The pluralistic view, on the other hand, is found in Heraclitus,

the atomists, Leibniz, and the British empiricists. For the sake of

definiteness, let us take the monistic view as found in Bradley, who

is in the main a follower of Hegel. He maintains that every judgment

consists in assigning a predicate to Reality as a whole: the whole is

the subject of every predicate. Suppose you start by saying “Tommy

has a cold in the head”. This may not _seem_ to be a statement about

the universe as a whole, but according to Bradley it is. If I may

be allowed to set forth his argument in popular language which his

followers might resent, I should put it something like this: First of

all, who is Tommy? He is a person with a certain nature, distinguished

from other persons by that nature; he may resemble others in many

respects, but not in all, so that you cannot really explain who Tommy

is unless you set forth all his characteristics. But when you try to

do this, you are taken beyond Tommy: he is characterised by relations

to his environment. He is affectionate or rebellious or thirsty, noisy

or quiet, and so on; all of these qualities involve his relations

to others. If you try to define Tommy without mentioning anything

outside him, you will find this quite impossible; therefore he is not a

self-subsistent being, but an unsubstantial fragment of the world. The

same thing applies even more obviously to his nose and his cold. How do

you know he has a cold? Because material substances of a certain kind

pass from his nose to his handkerchief, which would not be possible

if he alone existed. But now, when you take in the environment with a

view to defining Tommy and his nose and his cold, you find that you

cannot define his immediate environment without taking account of its

environment, and so on, until at last you have been forced to include

the whole world. Therefore Tommy’s cold is in reality a property of

the world, since nothing short of the world is sufficiently substantial

to have properties.

We may put the argument in a more abstract form. Everything which is

part of the world is constituted, in part, by its relations to other

things; but relations cannot be real. Bradley’s argument against

relations is as follows. First he argues that, if there are relations,

there must be qualities between which they hold. This part of the

argument need not detain us. He then proceeds:

“But how the relation can stand to the qualities is, on the other

side, unintelligible. If it is nothing to the qualities, then they

are not related at all; and, if so, as we saw, they have ceased to

be qualities, and their relation is a nonentity. But if it is to be

something to them, then clearly we shall require a _new_-connecting

relation. For the relation hardly can be the mere adjective of one or

both of its terms; or, at least, as such it seems indefensible. And,

being something itself, if it does not itself bear a relation to the

terms, in what intelligible way will it succeed in being anything to

them? But here again we are hurried off into the eddy of a hopeless

process, since we are forced to go on finding new relations without

end. The links are united by a link, and this bond of union is a link

which also has two ends; and these require each a fresh link to connect

them with the old. The problem is to find how the relation can stand to

its qualities, and this problem is insoluble.”

I cannot deal adequately with this argument without abstruse

technicalities which would be out of place. I will, however, point out

what seems to me the essential error. Bradley conceives a relation as

something just as substantial as its terms, and not radically different

in kind. The analogy of the chain with links should make us suspicious,

since it clearly proves, if it is valid, that chains are impossible,

and yet, as a fact, they exist. There is not a word in his argument

which would not apply to physical chains. The successive links are

united not by another link, but by a spatial relation. I think Bradley

has been misled, unconsciously, by a circumstance to which I alluded

in an earlier chapter, namely, the fact that the _word_ for a relation

is as substantial as the _words_ for its terms. Suppose A and B are

two events, and A precedes B. In the proposition “A precedes B”, the

word “precedes” is just as substantial as the words “A” and “B”. The

relation of the _two_ events A and B is represented, in language, by

the time or space order of the _three_ words “A”, “precedes”, and

“B”. But this order is an actual relation, not a word for relation.

The first step in Bradley’s regress does actually have to be taken in

giving verbal expression to a relation, and the word for a relation

does have to be related to the words for its terms. But this is a

linguistic, not a metaphysical, fact, and the regress does not have to

go any further.

It should be added that, as Bradley himself recognises, his

difficulties break out afresh when he comes to consider the relation of

subject and predicate when a character is assigned to Reality, and that

he is therefore compelled to conclude that _no_ truth is quite true.

A conclusion of this sort, based upon an extremely abstract argument,

makes it natural to suspect that there is some error in the argument.

Pluralism is the view of science and common sense, and is therefore

to be accepted if the arguments against it are not conclusive. For

my part, I have no doubt whatever that it is the true view, and that

monism is derived from a faulty logic inspired by mysticism. This logic

dominates the philosophy of Hegel and his followers; it is also the

essential basis of Bergson’s system, although it is seldom mentioned in

his writings. When it is rejected, ambitious metaphysical systems such

as those of the past are seen to be impossible.

CHAPTER XXIV

TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD

The question of truth and falsehood has been wrapped in unnecessary

mystery owing to a number of causes. In the first place, people wish to

think that their beliefs are more apt to be true than false, so that

they seek a theory that will show that truth is normal and falsehood

more or less accidental. In the second place, people are very vague as

to what they mean by “belief” or “judgment”, though persuaded that they

know beliefs or judgments to be the objects to which the predicates

“true” or “false” apply. In the third place, there is a tendency to

use “truth” with a big T in the grand sense, as something noble and

splendid and worthy of adoration. This gets people into a frame of mind

in which they become unable to think. But just as the grave-diggers in

_Hamlet_ became familiar with skulls, so logicians become familiar with

truth. “The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense,” says

Hamlet. Therefore it is not from the logician that awe before truth is

to be expected.

There are two questions in our present subject: (1) What are the

objects to which the predicates “true” and “false” apply? (2) What is

the difference between such as are true and such as are false? We will

begin with the first of these questions.

_Prima facie_, “true” and “false” apply to statements, whether in

speech or in writing. By extension, they are supposed to apply to the

beliefs expressed in those statements, and also to hypotheses which are

entertained without being believed or disbelieved. But let us first

consider the truth and falsehood of statements, following our practice

of going as far as we can with the behaviourists before falling back on

introspection. We considered the meaning of words earlier; now we have

to consider sentences. Of course a sentence may consist of a single

word, or of a wink; but generally it consists of several words. In

that case, it has a meaning which is a function of the meanings of the

separate words and their order. A sentence which has no meaning is not

true or false; thus it is only sentences as vehicles of a certain sort

of meaning that have truth or falsehood. We have therefore to examine

the meaning of a sentence.

Let us take some very humble example. Suppose you look in a time-table

and find it there stated that a passenger train leaves King’s Cross for

Edinburgh at 10 A.M. What is the meaning of this assertion? I shudder

when I think of its complexity. If I were to try to develop the theme

adequately, I should be occupied with nothing else till the end of

the present volume, and then I should have only touched the fringe of

the subject. Take first the social aspect: it is not essential that

anybody but the engineer and fireman should travel by the train, though

it is essential that others should be _able_ to travel by it if they

fulfil certain conditions. It is not essential that the train should

reach Edinburgh: the statement remains true if there is an accident or

breakdown on the way. But it is essential that the management of the

railway should intend it to reach Edinburgh. Take next the physical

aspect: it is not essential, or even possible, that the train should

start _exactly_ at ten; one might perhaps say that it must not start

more than ten seconds before its time or more than fifty seconds after,

but these limits cannot be laid down rigidly. In countries where

unpunctuality is common they would be much wider. Then we must consider

what we mean by “starting”, which no one can define unless he has

learnt the infinitesimal calculus. Then we consider the definitions of

King’s Cross and Edinburgh, both of which are more or less vague terms.

Then we must consider what is meant by a “train”. Here there will be

first of all complicated legal questions; what constitutes fulfilment

of a railway company’s obligations in the way of running “trains”? Then

there are questions as to the constitution of matter, since evidently

a train is a piece of matter; also of course there are questions as

to methods of estimating Greenwich time at King’s Cross. Most of the

above points have to do with the meaning of single words, not with the

meaning of the whole sentence. It is obvious that the ordinary mortal

does not trouble about such complications when he uses the words: to

him a word has a meaning very far from precise, and he does not try to

exclude marginal cases. It is the search for precision that introduces

complications. We think we attach a meaning to the word “man”, but we

don’t know whether to include Pithecanthropus Erectus. To this extent,

the meaning of the word is vague.

As knowledge increases, words acquire meanings which are more precise

and more complex; new words have to be introduced to express the less

complex constituents which have been discovered. A word is intended to

describe something in the world; at first it does so very badly, but

afterwards it gradually improves. Thus single words embody knowledge,

although they do not make assertions.

In an ideal logical language, there will be words of different kinds.

First, proper names. Of these, however, there are no examples in

actual language. The words which are _called_ proper names describe

collections, which are always defined by some characteristic;

thus assertions about “Peter” are really about everything that is

“Peterish”. To get a true proper name, we should have to get to a

single particular or a set of particulars defined by enumeration,

not by a common quality. Since we cannot acquire knowledge of actual

particulars, the words we use denote, in the best language we can make,

either adjectives or relations between two or more terms. In addition

to these, there are words indicative of structure: _e.g._ in “A is

greater than B”, the words “is” and “than” have no separate meaning,

but merely serve to show the “sense” of the relation “greater”, _i.e._

that it goes from A to B, not from B to A.

Strictly speaking, we are still simplifying. True adjectives and

relations will require particulars for their terms; the sort of

adjectives we can know, such as “blue” and “round”, will not be

applicable to particulars. They are therefore analogous to the

adjective “populous” applied to a town. To say “this town is populous”

means “many people live in this town”. A similar transformation would

be demanded by logic in all the adjectives and relations we can know

empirically. That is to say, no word that we can understand would occur

in a grammatically correct account of the universe.

Leaving on one side the vagueness and inaccuracy of words, let us ask

ourselves; in what circumstances do we feel convinced that we know a

statement to be true or false as the case may be? A present statement

will be regarded as true if, _e.g._ it agrees with recollection or

perception; a past statement, if it raised expectations now confirmed.

I do not mean to say that these are the only grounds upon which we

regard statements as true; I mean that they are simple and typical,

and worth examining. If you say “it was raining this morning”, I may

recollect that it was or that it wasn’t. One may perhaps say that the

words “this morning” are associated for me with the word “raining” or

with the words “not raining”. According to which occurs, I judge your

statement true or false. If I have neither association, I do not judge

your statement either true or false unless I have material for an

inference; and I do not wish to consider inference yet. If you say “the

lights have gone out”, when I can see the lights shining, I judge that

you speak falsely, because my perception is associated with the words

“lights shining”. If you say “the lights will go out in a minute”, you

produce a certain familiar kind of tension called “expectation”, and

after a time you produce a judgment that you spoke falsely (if the

lights do not go out). These are the ordinary _direct_ ways of deciding

on the truth or falsehood of statements about past, present, or future.

It is necessary to distinguish between direct and indirect grounds

for accepting or rejecting statements. Pragmatism considers only

indirect grounds. Broadly speaking, it considers a statement false when

the consequences of accepting it are unfortunate. But this belongs

to the region of inference. I ask you the way to the station, you

tell me wrong, and I miss my train; I then _infer_ that you told me

wrong. But if you say “the lights are out” when I see them shining,

I reject your statement without inference. In this case, something

in my present circumstances is associated with words different from

yours, and different in ways which I have learnt to regard as involving

incompatibility. The ultimate test of falsehood is _never_, so I think,

the nature of the consequences of a belief, but the association between

words and sensible or remembered facts. A belief is “verified” when a

situation arises which gives a feeling of expectedness in connection

with it; it is falsified when the feeling is one of surprise. But

this only applies to beliefs which await some future contingency for

verification or refutation. A belief which is an immediate reaction

to a situation--_e.g._ when you are waiting for a race to begin and

presently you say “they’re off”--has no need of verification, but

verifies other beliefs. And even where the confirmation of a belief is

in the future, it is the expectedness, not the pleasantness, of the

consequences that confirms the truth of the belief.

I think it is a mistake to treat “belief” as one kind of occurrence,

as is done in traditional psychology. The sort of belief which is

based upon memory or perception alone differs from the sort which

involves expectation. When you find in the time-table that a train

leaves King’s Cross at ten, your belief that this statement occurs in

the time-table does not await future confirmation, but your belief

about the train does: you may go to King’s Cross and see the train

start. A belief which concerns an event may be a recollection, a

perception, or an expectation. It may be none of these, in the case of

an event which you have not seen and do not expect to see--_e.g._ Cæsar

crossing the Rubicon, or the abolition of the House of Lords. But

such beliefs always involve inference. I do not at this stage consider

logical and mathematical beliefs, some of which must be, _in a sense_,

non-inferential. But I think we shall find that this sense is different

from that in which memories and perceptions are non-inferential.

A belief, I should say, interpreted narrowly, is a form of words

related to an emotion of one of several kinds. (I shall give a broader

meaning later.) The emotion is different according as the belief

embodies a reminiscence, a perception, an expectation, or something

outside the experience of the believer. Moreover, a form of words

is not essential. Where the emotion is present, and leads to action

relevant to some feature of the environment, there may be said to be

a belief. The fundamental test of a belief, of no matter what sort,

is that it causes some event which actually takes place to arouse

the emotion of expectedness or its opposite. I do not now attempt to

decide what an emotion is. Dr. Watson gives a behaviouristic account

of emotions, which would, if adopted, make my definition of “belief”

purely behaviouristic. I have framed the definition so as not to

involve a decision on the question of introspection.

The subject of truth and falsehood may be subdivided as follows:

A. _Formal Theory._--Given the meanings of the component words, what

decides whether a sentence is true or false?

B. _Causal Theory._--Can we distinguish between truth and falsehood

by (_a_) their causes, (_b_) their effects?

C. _Individual and Social Elements._--A statement is a social

occurrence, a belief is something individual.

How can we define a belief, and what is it when not composed of

words?

D. _Consistency and Truth._--Can we get outside the circle of

beliefs or statements to something else which shows them true,

not merely consistent? In other words, what possible relation is

there between propositions and facts?

It is very hard to disentangle these questions. The first question,

as to formal theories, leads to the fourth, as to the relations of

propositions to facts. _E.g._ “Brutus killed Cæsar” is true because

of a certain fact; what fact? The fact that Brutus killed Cæsar. This

keeps us in the verbal realm, and does not get us outside it to some

realm of non-verbal fact by which verbal statements can be verified.

Hence our fourth problem arises. But this leads us to our second

problem, as to causes and effects of what is true or false, for it

is here that we shall naturally look for the vital relation between

propositions and facts. And here again we must distinguish between

_thinking_ truly and _speaking_ truly. The former is an individual

affair, the latter a social affair. Thus all our problems hang together.

I will begin with C, the difference between a belief and a statement.

By a “statement” I mean a form of words, uttered or written, with a

view to being heard or read by some other person or persons, and not

a question, interjection, or command, but such as we should call an

assertion. As to the question what forms of words are assertions, that

is one for the grammarian and differs from language to language. But

perhaps we can say rather more than that. The distinction, however,

between an assertion and an imperative is not sharp. In England,

notices say “Visitors are requested not to walk on the grass”. In

America, they say “Keep off! This means you.” Effectively, the two have

the same meaning: yet the English notice consists only of a statement,

while the American notice consists of an imperative followed by a

statement which must be false if read by more than one person. In so

far as statements are intended to influence the conduct of others, they

partake of the nature of imperatives or requests. Their characteristic,

however, is that they endeavour to effect their aim by producing a

_belief_ which may or may not exist in the mind of the speaker. Often,

however, they _express_ a belief, without stopping to consider the

effect upon others. Thus a statement may be defined as a form of words

which either expresses a belief or is intended to create one. Our next

step, therefore, must be the definition of “belief”.

“Belief” is a word which will be quite differently defined if we take

an analytic point of view from the way in which we shall define it if

we regard the matter causally. From the point of view of science, the

causal point of view is the more important. Beliefs influence action

in certain ways; what influences action in these ways may be called a

belief, even if, analytically, it does not much resemble what would

ordinarily be so called. We may therefore widen our previous definition

of belief. Consider a man who goes to the house where his friend used

to live, and, finding he has moved, says, “I _thought_ he still lived

here”, whereas he acted merely from habit without thought. If we are

going to use words causally, we ought to say that this man had a

“belief” and therefore a “belief” will be merely a characteristic of

a string of actions. We shall have to say: A man “believes” a certain

proposition _p_ if, whenever he is aiming at any result to which _p_

is relevant, he acts in a manner calculated to achieve the result if

_p_ is true, but not otherwise. Sometimes this gives definite results,

sometimes not. When you call a telephone number, it is clear that you

believe that to be the number of the subscriber you want. But whether

you believe in the conservation of energy or a future life may be

harder to decide. You may hold a belief in some contexts and not in

others; for we do not think in accordance with the so-called “Laws

of Thought”. “Belief” like all the other categories of traditional

psychology, is a notion incapable of precision.

This brings me to the question whether the truth or falsehood of a

belief can be determined either by its causes or by its effects. There

is, however, a preliminary difficulty. I said just now that A believes

_p_ if he acts in a way which will achieve his ends if _p_ is _true_.

I therefore assumed that we know what is meant by “truth”. I assumed,

to be definite, that we know what is meant by “truth” as applied to

a form of words. The argument was as follows: From observation of

a person’s acts, you infer his beliefs, by a process which may be

elaborate as the discovery of Kepler’s Laws from the observed motions

of the planets. His “beliefs” are not assumed to be “states of mind”,

but merely characteristics of series of actions. These beliefs, when

ascertained by observation, can be expressed in words; you can say,

_e.g._ “This person believes that there is a train from King’s Cross at

10 A.M.” Having once expressed the belief in words of which the meaning

is known, you have arrived at the stage where formal theories are

applicable. Words of known meaning, put together according to a known

syntax, are true or false in virtue of some fact, and their relation to

this fact results logically from the meanings of the separate words and

the laws of syntax. This is where logic is strong.

It will be seen that, according to what we have said, truth is

applicable primarily to a form of words, and only derivatively to

a belief. A form of words is a social phenomenon, therefore the

fundamental form of truth must be social. A form of words is true when

it has a certain relation to a certain fact. What relation to what

fact? I think the fundamental relation is this: a form of words is true

if a person who knows the language is led to that form of words when

he finds himself in an environment which contains features that are

the meanings of those words, and these features produce reactions in

him sufficiently strong for him to use words which mean them. Thus “a

train leaves King’s Cross at 10 A.M.” is true if a person can be led

to say, “It is now 10 A.M., this is King’s Cross, and I see a train

starting”. The environment causes words, and words directly caused by

the environment (if they are statements) are “true”. What is called

“verification” in science consists in putting oneself in a situation

where words previously used for other reasons result directly from

the environment. Of course, given this basis, there are innumerable

indirect ways of verifying statements, but all, I think, depend upon

this direct way.

The above theory may be thought very odd, but it is partly designed

to meet the fourth of our previous questions, namely, “How can we get

outside words to the facts which make them true or false?” Obviously we

cannot do this within logic, which is imprisoned in the realm of words;

we can only do it by considering the relations of words to our other

experiences, and these relations, in so far as they are relevant, can

hardly be other than causal. I think the above theory, as it stands,

is too crude to be quite true. We must also bring in such things as

expectedness, which we discussed earlier. But I believe that the

definition of truth or falsehood will have to be sought along some such

lines as I have indicated.

I want in conclusion to indulge in two speculations. The first concerns

a possible reconciliation of behaviourism and logic. It is clear that,

when we have a problem to solve, we do not always solve it as the rat

does, by means of random movements; we often solve it by “thinking”,

_i.e._ by a process in which we are not making any overt movements.

The same thing was sometimes true of Köhler’s chimpanzees. Now what is

involved in the possibility of solving a problem by verbal thinking?

We put words together in various ways which are not wholly random, but

limited by previous knowledge of the _sort_ of phrase that is likely to

contain a solution of our problem. At last we hit upon a phrase which

seems to give what we want. We then proceed to an overt action of the

kind indicated by the phrase; if it succeeds, our problem is solved.

Now this process is only intelligible if there is some connection

between the laws of syntax and the laws of physics--using “syntax”

in a psychological rather than a grammatical sense. I think this

connection is _assumed_ in logic and ordinary philosophy, but it ought

to be treated as a problem requiring investigation by behaviourist

methods. I lay no stress on this suggestion, except as giving a hint

for future investigations. But I cannot think that the behaviourist has

gone far towards the solution of his problem until he has succeeded in

establishing a connection between syntax and physics. Without this,

the efficacy of “thought” cannot be explained on his principles.

My second speculation is as to the limitations which the structure

of language imposes upon the extent of our possible knowledge of

the world. I am inclined to think that quite important metaphysical

conclusions, of a more or less sceptical kind, can be drawn from simple

considerations as to the relation between language and things. A spoken

sentence consists of a temporal series of events; a written sentence

is a spatial series of bits of matter. Thus it is not surprising that

language can represent the course of events in the physical world;

it can, in fact, make a map of the physical world, preserving its

structure in a more manageable form, and it can do this because it

consists of physical events. But if there were such a world as the

mystic postulates, it would have a structure different from that of

language, and would therefore be incapable of being verbally described.

It is fairly clear that nothing verbal can conform or confute this

hypothesis.

A great deal of the confusion about relations which has prevailed in

practically all philosophies comes from the fact that relations are

indicated, not by relations, but by words which are as substantial as

other words. Consequently, in thinking about relations, we constantly

hover between the unsubstantiality of the relation itself and the

substantiality of the word. Take, say, the fact that lightning precedes

thunder. We saw earlier that to express this by a language closely

reproducing the structure of the fact, we should have to say simply:

“lightning, thunder”, where the fact that the first word precedes the

second means that what the first word means precedes what the second

word means. But even if we adopted this method for temporal order, we

should still need words for all other relations, because we could not

without intolerable ambiguity symbolise them also by the order of our

words. When we say “lightning precedes thunder”, the word “precedes”

has a quite different relation to what it means from that which the

words “lightning” and “thunder” have to what they respectively mean.

Wittgenstein[12] says that what really happens is that we establish a

relation between the word “lightning” and the word “thunder”, namely

the relation of having the word “precedes” between them. In this way he

causes relations to be symbolised by relations. But although this may

be quite correct, it is sufficiently odd to make it not surprising that

people have thought the word “precedes” means a relation in the same

sense in which “lightning” means a kind of event. This view, however,

must be incorrect. I think it has usually been held unconsciously, and

has produced many confusions about relations which cease when it is

exposed to the light of day--for example, those which lead Bradley to

condemn relations.

[12] _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_ (Kegan Paul).