events’ to higher organisms and these to higher, until there emerged
the supreme Mammal, _who by and by had a theory of it all_, then the
primitive Amoebae which had in them the promise and the potency of all
this _were very wonderful Amoebae indeed_. There must have been more in
them than met the eye! _We must stock them, with initiatives at least.
We are taking a good deal as ‘given.’_” [Italics mine.]--J. H. Thomson,
_Introduction to Science_, p. 137.
[255] See Westermarck, vol. i. pp. 74, 93, 117, and chapter iii.
generally. The sentence further down in respect of the permanent
fact of the moral consciousness is from Hobhouse, vol. ii. p. 54. As
instances of the latter, Hobhouse talks of things like the “purity
of the home, truthfulness, hospitality, help”, etc., in Iran, of the
doctrine of Non-Resistance in Lao Tsze, of the high conception of
personal righteousness revealed in the _Book of the Dead_, of the
contributions of monotheism to ethics, etc. etc.
[256] Cf. p. 167.
[257] It may, I suppose, be possible to exaggerate here and to fall to
some extent into what Mr. Bradley and Nietzsche and others have thought
of as the “radical vice of all goodness”--its tendency to forget that
other things, like beauty and truth, may also be thought of as absolute
“values,” as revelations of the divine. What I am thinking of here is
simply the realm of fact that is implied, say, in the idea of Horace,
when he speaks of the upright man being undismayed even by the fall of
the heavens (_impavidum ferient ruinae_) or by the idea of the Stoic
sage that the virtuous man was as necessary to Jupiter as Jupiter could
be to him, or by the idea (attributed to Socrates) that if the rulers
of the universe do not prefer the just man to the unjust it is better
to die than to live. If against all this sort of thing one is reminded
by realism of the “splendid immoralism” of Nature, of its apparent
indifference to all good and ill desert, I can but reply, as I have
done elsewhere in this book, that the Nature of which physical science
speaks is an “abstraction” and an unreality, and that it matters,
therefore, very little whether such a Nature is, or is not, indifferent
to morality. We know, however, of no Nature apart from life, and mind,
and consciousness, and thought, and will. It is God, and not Nature,
who makes the sun to shine on the just and the unjust.
[258] By this “meaning” is to be understood firstly the effects
upon our appetitive and conative tendencies of the various specific
items (whether sensation, or affections, or emotions, or what not)
of our experience, the significance, that is to say, to our total
general activity of all the particular happenings and incidents of
our experience. Psychologists all tell us of the vast system of
“dispositions” with which our psychophysical organism is equipped at
birth, and through the help of which we interpret the sensations and
occurrences of our experience. And in addition to these dispositions
we have, in the case of the adult, the coming into play of the many
associations and memories that are acquired during the experiences of
a single lifetime. It is these various associations that interpret
to us the present and give it meaning. In a higher sense we might
interpret “meaning” as expressive of the higher predicates, like the
good and the beautiful and the true, that we apply to some things in
the world of our socialized experience. And in the highest sense we
might interpret it as the significance that we attach to human history
as distinguished from the mere course of events--the significance upon
which the philosophy of history reposes. See Eucken in the article upon
the _Philosophy of History_ in the “systematic” volume of Hinneberg’s
_Kultur der Gegenwart_.
[259] See our second chapter upon the different continental and British
representatives of the hypothetical treatment of scientific laws and
conceptions that is such a well-marked tendency of the present time. By
no one perhaps was this theory put more emphatically than by Windelband
(of Strassburg) in his _Präludien_ (1884) and in his _Geschichte
und Naturwissenschaft_ (1894). In the latter he contrasts the real
individuals and personalities with which the historians deal with the
impersonal abstractions of natural science. I fully subscribe to this
distinction, and think that it underlies a great deal of the thought of
recent times.
[260] See “truth and real existence” in the _Republic_, 508 D--Jowett’s
rendering of ἀλήθειά τε καὶ τὸ ὄν (“over which truth and real existence
are shining”). Also further in the same place, “The cause of science
and of truth,” αἰτίαν δ’ ἐπιστήμης οὖσαν καὶ ἀληθείας. In 389 E we read
that a “high value must be set on truth.” Of course to Plato “truth”
is also, and perhaps even primarily, real existence, as when he says
(_Rep._ 585), “that which has less of truth will also have less of
essence.” But in any case truth always means more for him than “mere
being,” or existence, or “appearance,” it is the highest form of being,
the object of “science,” the great discovery of the higher reason.
[261] To Professor Bosanquet, for example; see below, p. 213, note 2.
[262] _The Poetry of the Old Testament_, Professor A. R. Gordon.
[263] _Ibid._ p. 4.
[264] _The Poetry of the Old Testament_, p. 160.
[265] _Ibid._ pp. 183–184.
[266] It is this false conception of truth as a “datum” or “content”
that wrecks the whole of Mr. Bradley’s argument in _Appearance and
Reality_. See on the contrary the following quotation from Professor
Boyce Gibson (Eucken’s _Philosophy of Life_, p. 109) in respect of the
attitude of Eucken towards the idea of truth as a personal ideal. “The
ultimate criterion of truth is not the clearness and the distinctness
of our thinking, nor its correspondence with a reality external to it,
nor any other intellectualistic principle. It is spiritual fruitfulness
as invariably realized by the personal experient, invariably realized
as springing freshly and freely from the inexhaustible resources which
our freedom gains from its dependence upon God.”
[267] It is part of the greatness of Hegel, I think, to have sought to
include the truth of history and of the social order in the truth of
philosophy, or in spiritual truth generally. His error consists in not
allowing for the fresh revelations of truth that have come to the world
through the insight of individuals and through the actions and the
creations of original men.
[268] There is a sentence in the Metaphysics of which I cannot
but think at this point, and which so far at least as the
rationalist-pragmatist issue is concerned is really one of the deepest
and most instructive ideas in the whole history of philosophy. It is
one of Aristotle’s troublesome additional statements in reference
to something that he has just been discussing--in this case the
“object of desire” and the “object of thought.” And what he adds in
the present instance is this (Bk. xii. 7): “_The primary objects of
these two things are the same_”--τούτων τὰ πρῶτα τὰ αὐτά--rendered
by Smith and Ross “_the primary objects of thought and desire are
the same_.” The translation, of course, is a matter of some slight
difficulty, turning upon the proper interpretation of τὰ πρῶτα, “the
first things,” although, of course, the student soon becomes familiar
with what Aristotle means by “first things,” and “first philosophy,”
and “first in nature,” and “first for us,” and so on. Themistius in his
commentary on this passage (_Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca_, vol.
v. i-vi; _Themistius in Metaphysica_, 1072 and 17–30) puts it that “in
the case of immaterial existences the desirable and the intelligible
are the same--in primis vero principiis materiae non immixtis _idem
est desiderabile atque intelligibile_.” I am inclined to use this
great idea of the identity of the desirable and the intelligible--for
conscious, intelligent beings as the fundamental principle of the
true Humanism of which Pragmatism is in search. It is evidently in
this identity that Professor Bosanquet also believes in when he says:
“I am persuaded that if we critically understand what we really want
and need, we shall find it established by a straightforward argument”
(Preface to _Individuality and Value_. See the eighth chapter of this
book). It is certainly true that the constructive philosophy of which
we are in search to-day must leave no gap between thought and desire.
[269] I find an illustration or a confirmation of this thought in the
following piece of insight of Mr. Chesterton in regard to the “good,”
which is no doubt a “predicate” of our total thought and feeling and
volition. “Or, in other words, man cannot escape from God, _because
good is God in man; and insists on omniscience_” (_Victorian Age in
Literature_, p. 246--italics mine). A belief in goodness is certainly a
belief in an active goodness greater than our own; and it does raise a
desire for a comprehension of things.
[270] The reader will find a good deal in Professor Baldwin’s _Social
and Ethical Interpretations of Mental Development_ upon the relation
of truth and thought to desire, and also upon the social, or the
pragmatist or the experimental test of beliefs.
[271] See Chapter IX., in reference to Bergson’s “creative activity.”
[272] The reader who is anxious to obtain a working idea of the limits
of knowledge from a scientific point of view had better consult
such pieces of literature as Sir Oliver Lodge’s recent examination
of Haeckel’s _Riddle of the Universe_, Professor Ward’s _Naturalism
and Agnosticism_, Merz’s _History of European Thought during the
Nineteenth Century_, or Verworn’s _General Physiology_ (with its
interesting account of the different theories of the origin of life,
and its admission that after all we know matter only through mind and
sensation). Perusal of the most recent accessible literature upon this
whole subject will reveal the fact that these old questions about the
origin of life and motion, and about the nature of evolution, are still
as unsettled as they were in the last half of the last century. It is
not merely, however, of the actual limits of science at any one time
that we are obliged, as human beings, to think, but of the limits of
science in view of the fact that our knowledge comes to us _in part_,
under the conditions of space and time, and under the conditions of the
limits of our senses and of our understanding. Knowledge is certainly
limited in the light of what beings other than ourselves may know, and
in the light of what we would _like_ to know about the universe of life
and mind.
I do not think that this whole question of the limits of our knowledge
is such a burning question to-day as it was some years ago, there
being several reasons for this. One is that we live in an age of
specialization and discursiveness and “technic.” It is quite difficult
to meet with people who think that they may know, some day, everything,
from even some single point of view. And then the wide acceptance of
the hypothetical or the pragmatist conception of knowledge has caused
us to look upon the matter of the limits of science and knowledge as
a relative one, as always related to, and conditioned by, certain
points of view and certain assumptions. We are not even warranted, for
example, in thinking of mind and matter as separate in the old way, nor
can we separate the life of the individual from the life of the race,
nor the world from God, nor man from God, and so on. See an article by
the writer (in 1898 in the _Psy. Rev._) upon “Professor Titchener’s
View of the Self,” dealing with the actual, and the necessary limits,
of the point of view of Structural Psychology in regard to the “self.”
Also Professor Titchener’s reply to this article in a subsequent number
of the same review, and my own rejoinder.
[273] See Chapter II. p. 35.
[274] Despite what we spoke of in Chapter V. as its “subjectivism,” p.
134.
[275] That is to say, the simple truth that there is no “object”
without a “subject,” no “physical” world without a world of “psychical”
experiences on the part of some beings or some being. If our earth
existed before animated beings appeared upon it, it was only as a part
of some other “system” which we must think of as the object of some
mind or intelligence.
[276] See p. 235, note 2, in the Bergson chapter, where it is suggested
that to Bergson human perceptions do not, of course, exhaust matter.
[277] Among the many other good things in Mr. Marett’s admirable
_Anthropology_ (one of the freshest works upon the subject, suggestive
of the need, evidently felt in Oxford as well as elsewhere, of studying
philosophy and letters, and nearly everything else in the mental and
moral sciences, from the point of view of social anthropology) are the
clearness and the relevancy of illustration in his insistence upon the
importance of the “social factor” over all our thoughts of ourselves as
agents and students in the universe of things.” Payne shows us (p. 146)
“reason for believing _that the collective ‘we’ precedes ‘I’_ in the
order of linguistic evolution. To begin with, in America and elsewhere,
‘we’ may be inclusive and mean ‘all of us,’ or selective, meaning
‘some of us only.’ Hence a missionary must be very careful, and if he
is preaching, must use the inclusive ‘we’ in saying ‘we have sinned,’
whereas, in praying, he must use the selective ‘we,’ or God would be
included in the list of sinners. Similarly ‘I’ has a collective form
amongst some American languages; and this is ordinarily employed,
whereas the corresponding selective form is used only in special cases.
Thus, if the question be ‘Who will help?’ the Apache will reply,
‘I-amongst-others,’ ‘I-for-one’; but if he were recounting his personal
exploits, he says _sheedah_, ‘I-by-myself,’ to show they were wholly
his own. Here we seem to have _group-consciousness holding its own
against individual self-consciousness, as being for primitive folk on
the whole the more normal attitude of mind_.” It is indeed to be hoped
that, in the future, philosophy, by discarding its abstractionism and
its (closely allied) solipsism, will do its share in making this “group
consciousness,” this consciousness of our being indeed “fellow-workers”
with all men, once again a property of our minds and our thoughts.
[278] One of Professor James’s last books is called _A Pluralistic
Universe_, and both he and Professor Dewey have always written under
the pressure of the sociological interest of modern times. In short, it
is obvious that the “reality” underlying the entire pragmatist polemic
against the hypothetical character of the reading of the world afforded
us by the sciences, is the social and personal life that is the deepest
thing in our experience.
[279] This idea of a “world of inter-subjective intercourse,” although
now a commonplace of sociology, was first expressed for the writer in
the first series of the _Gifford Lectures_ of Professor James Ward
upon “Naturalism and Agnosticism,” in chapters xv. and xvi. The first
of these chapters deals with “Experience and Life,” and the second
with the “inter-subjective intercourse” that is really presupposed in
the so-called individual experience of which the old psychology used
to make so much. The reader who wishes to follow out a development of
this idea of a “world of inter-subjective intercourse” cannot do better
than follow the argument of Professor Ward’s second series of _Gifford
Lectures_ (“The Realm of Ends,” or “Pluralism and Theism”), in which he
will find a Humanism and Theism that is at least akin to the theodicy,
or the natural theology, of which we might suppose Pragmatism to be
enamoured. The double series of these Lectures might well be referred
to as an instance of the kind of classical English work in philosophy
of which we have spoken as not falling into the extremes either of
Pragmatism or of Rationalism. The strong point of the “Realm of Ends,”
from the point of view of this book upon Pragmatism and Idealism, is
that it moves from first to last in the reality of that world to which
the science and the philosophy of the day both seem to point the way.
In opposition to “subjectivism” it teaches a Humanism and a Pluralism
that we recognise as an expression of the realities of the world of our
common life and our common efforts, and from this Humanism it proceeds
to a Theism which its author seeks to defend from many of the familiar
difficulties of Naturalism. Were the writer concerned with the matter
of the development and the elaboration of the philosophy that seems to
have precipitated itself into his mind after some years of reflection
on the issues between the realists and the idealists, between the
rationalists and the pragmatists, he would have to begin by saying
that its outlines are at least represented for him in the theistic and
pluralistic philosophy of Professor Ward.
[280] According to Professor Dawes Hicks in the _Hibbert Journal_
for April 1913, there is a great deal in the articles of Professor
Alexander on “Collective Willing and Truth” that supports some of
the positions I am here attempting to indicate, as part of the
outcome of the pragmatist-rationalist controversy. “Both goodness
and truth depend, in the first place, on the recognition by one man
of consciousness in others, and, secondly, upon intersubjective
intercourse” (p. 658).
[281] I owe this reference (which I have attempted to verify) to a
suggestive and ingenious book (_The New Word_, by Mr. Allen Upward)
lent to me by a Montreal friend. Skeat, in his Dictionary, gives as the
meaning of truth, “_firm, established, certain, honest, faithful_,”
connecting it with A.S. _tréou_, _tryw_ (“preservation of a compact”),
Teut. _trewa_, saying that the “root” is “unknown.” I suppose that
similar things might be said about the Greek word ἐτεόν in its
different forms, which Liddel and Scott connect with “Sans., _satyas_
(_verus_), O. Nor. _Sannr_, A.S. _sóth_ (sooth).” All this seems to
justify the idea of the social confirmation of truth for which I am
inclined to stand, and the connexion of intellectual truth with ethical
truth, with the truth of human life. I agree with Lotze that truths do
not float above, or over, or between, things, but that they exist only
in the thought of a thinker, in so far as he thinks, or in the action
of a living being in the moment of his action--the _Microcosmos_ as
quoted in Eisler, article “_Wahrheit_” in the _Wörterbuch_. The Truth
for man would be the coherence of his knowledge and his beliefs, and
there is no abstract truth, or truth in and for itself, no impersonal
“whole” of truth.
[282] As in the Hegelian dialectic.
[283] There is another important thing to think of in connexion with
this sociological character of Pragmatism. It is a characteristic
that may be used to overcome what we have elsewhere talked of as
its “subjectivism” and its “individualism,” and its revolutionary
tendencies. It is, we might urge, a social and a collective standard
of truth that Pragmatism has in view when it thinks of “consequences”
and of the test of truth. Lalande takes up this idea in an article in
the _Revue Philosophique_ (1906) on “Pragmatisme et Pragmaticisme,”
pointing out that Dr. Peirce would apparently tend to base his
pragmatism on the subordination of individual to collective thought.
Dr. Schiller too, I think, contemplates this social test of truth in
his would-be revival of the philosophy of Protagoras--that man is the
measure of reality--for man.
[284] See below, p. 197, where we speak of this “mediation” as the
first fact for Professor Bosanquet as a prominent “Neo-Hegelian”
rationalist.
[285] I have been asked by a friendly critic if I would include
“inference” in this “real thought.” I certainly would, because in
all real inference we are, or ought to be, concerned with a real
subject-matter, a set of relations among realities of one kind
or another. Possibly all students in all subjects (especially in
philosophy) have lost time in following out a set of inferences in and
for themselves. But such a procedure is justified by the increased
power that we get over the real subject-matter of our thought. When
thought cannot be thus checked by the idea of such increased power, it
is idle thought.
[286] I am thinking, of course, of the entire revolutionary and radical
social philosophy that harks back (in theory at least) to the “Social
Contract” and to the State of Nature philosophy of Rousseau and his
associates and predecessors.
[287] See p. 184 of Chapter VII., where I speak of the ability to do
this as the invariable possession of the successful American teacher of
philosophy.
[288] An equivalent of it, of course, exists in many sayings, in many
countries, in the conception of the task of the metaphysician as that
of “a blind man in a dark room hunting for a black cat which--is
not there,” reproduced by Sir Ray Lankester in the recent book of
H. S. R. Eliot, _Modern Science and the Illusions of Bergson_. There is
generally an error or a fallacy in such descriptions of philosophy--in
this Lankester story the error that the secret of the world is a kind
of “thing in itself” out of all relation to everything we know and
experience--the very error against which the pragmatists are protesting.
[289] Mr. Bertrand Russell, for example, seems to me to have the
prejudice that philosophy is at its best only when occupied with
studies which (like the mathematics of his affections) are as remote as
possible from human life. “Real life is,” he says, “to most men a long
second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible;
but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical
limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid
edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect form from which
all great work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from
the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created
an ordered cosmos where pure thought can dwell as in its natural
home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from
the dreary exile of the actual world.” I cannot--as I have indicated
elsewhere in regard to Mr. Russell--see for one moment how there is any
justification for looking upon this “ordered cosmos” of mathematical
physics as anything other than an abstraction from the real world with
which we are acquainted. It is the creation of only one of our many
human interests. And I cannot see that the thought that occupies itself
with this world is any nobler than the thought that occupies itself
with the more complex worlds of life, and of birth and death, and of
knowledge and feeling and conduct. Mr. Russell might remember, for one
thing, that there have been men (Spinoza among them) who have attempted
to treat of human passions under the light of ascertainable laws,
and that it is (to say the very least) as legitimate for philosophy
to seek for reason and law in human life, and in the evolution of
human history, as in the abstract world of physical and mathematical
science. Can, too, a mathematical philosophy afford any final haven
for the spirit of man, without an examination of the _mind_ of the
mathematician and of the nature of the concepts and symbols that
he uses in his researches? There is a whole world of dispute and
discussion about all these things.
[290] I have in view in fact only (or mainly) such American
characteristics as may be thought of in connexion with the newer
intellectual and social atmosphere of the present time, the
atmosphere that impresses the visitor and the resident from the old
world, the atmosphere to the creation of which he himself and his
fellow-immigrants have contributed, as well as the native-born American
of two generations ago--to go no further back. I mean that anything
like a far-reaching analysis or consideration of the great qualities
that go to make up the “soul” of the United States is, of course,
altogether beyond the sphere of my attention for the present. I fully
subscribe, in short, to the truth of the following words of Professor
Santayana, one of the most scholarly and competent American students
(both of philosophy and of life) of the passing generation: “America
is not simply a young country with an old mentality; it is a country
with two mentalities, one a survival of the beliefs and standards of
the fathers, the other an expression of the instincts, practice, and
discoveries of the younger generation. In all the higher things of
the mind--in religion, literature, in the moral emotions, it is the
hereditary spirit that still prevails, so much so, that Mr. Bernard
Shaw finds that America is a hundred years behind the times.”--“The
Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” in _Winds of Doctrine_ (p.
187).
[291] A contemporary American authority, Professor Bliss Perry, in
his book upon _The American Mind_ naturally singles out radicalism
as one of the well-marked characteristics of Americans. Among the
other characteristics of which he speaks are those of the “love of
exaggeration,” “idealism,” “optimism,” “individualism,” “public
spirit.” I refer, I think, to nearly all these things in my pages,
although of course I had not the benefit of Professor Perry’s book in
writing the present chapter.
[292] I am certainly one of those who insist that we must think of
America as (despite some appearances to the contrary--appearances
to be seen also, for example, in the West of Canada) fundamentally
a religious country. It was founded upon certain great religious
ideas that were a highly important counterpart to some of the
eighteenth-century fallacies about liberty and equality that exercised
their influence upon the fathers of the republic.
[293] He has recently published a volume dealing especially with the
contributions of Biology and Darwinism to philosophy.
[294] See p. 252.
[295] The crucial characteristics of the Presidential campaign of 1912
clearly showed this.
[296] We can see this in the many valuable studies and addresses of
Professor Dewey upon educational and social problems.
[297] It is this fact, or the body of fact and tendency upon which
it rests, that causes Americans and all who know them or observe
them, to think and speak of the _apparently_ purely “economic” or
“business-like” character of the greater part of their activities.
Let me quote Professor Bliss Perry here ... “_the overwhelming
preponderance of the unmitigated business-man face_ [italics mine],
the consummate monotonous commonness of the pushing male crowd” (p.
158). “There exists, in other words, _in all classes of American
society to-day_, just as there existed during the Revolution, during
the ‘transcendental’ movement, in the Civil War, an immense mass of
unspiritualised, unvitalised American manhood and womanhood” (p. 160).
[298] And this despite of what I have called elsewhere the comparative
failure of Pragmatism to give a rational, and tenable account of
“personality” and of the “self.”
[299] At the moment of his death (_scribens est mortuus_) James was
undoubtedly throughout the world the most talked-about English-speaking
philosopher, and nowhere more so than in Germany, the home of the
transcendentalism that he so doughtily and brilliantly attacked.
Stein says, for example, in his article upon “Pragmatism” (_Archiv
für Philosophie_, 14, 1907, II. Ab.), that we “have had nothing like
it since Schopenhauer.” I have often thought that James and his work,
along with the life and work of other notable American thinkers (and
along with the “lead” that America now certainly has over at least
England in some departments of study, like political and economic
science, experimental psychology, and so on), are part of the debt
America owed, some decades ago, to the Old World in the matter of the
training of many of her best professors--a debt she has long since
cancelled and overpaid. Readers, by the way, who desire more authentic
information about James and his work than the present writer is either
capable, or desirous, of giving in this book, may peruse either the
recent work of Professor Perry of Harvard upon _Present Philosophical
Tendencies_, or the work of M. Flournoy already spoken of. Boutroux has
a fine appreciation of the value of James’s philosophical work in the
work to which I have already referred. And there was naturally a crop
of invaluable articles upon James in the American reviews shortly after
his death.
[300] Think alone, for example, of what James says he learnt there
from a teacher like Agassiz: “The hours I spent with Agassiz so taught
me the difference between all possible abstractionists and all livers
in the light of the world’s concrete fulness that I have never been
able to forget it.”--From an article upon James in the _Journal of
Philosophy_, ix. p. 527.
[301] While this book was passing through the press my eye fell upon
the following words of Professor Santayana in respect of this very
personality of James: “It was his personal spontaneity, similar to that
of Emerson, and his personal vitality similar to that of nobody else.
Conviction and ideas came to him, so to speak, from the subsoil. He had
a prophetic sympathy with the dawning sentiments of the age, with the
moods of the dumb majority. His way of thinking and feeling represents
the true America, and represented in a measure the whole ultra-modern
radical world” (_Winds of Doctrine_, p. 205).
[302] Including, say, the facilities of a completely indexed and
authenticated estimate of the work that has been done in different
countries upon his particular subject. It is easy to see that the habit
and the possibility of work in an environment such as this [and again
and again its system and its facilities simply stagger the European]
is a thing of the greatest value to the American professor so far as
the idea of his own best possible contribution to his age is concerned.
Should he merely do over again what others have done? Or shall he
try to work in a really new field? Or shall he give himself to the
work of real teaching, to the training of competent men, or to the
“organization” of his subject with his public? It must be admitted,
I think, that the average American professor is a better teacher and
guide in his subject than his average colleague in many places in
Europe. Hence the justifiable discontent of many American students with
what they occasionally find abroad in the way of academic facilities
for investigation and advanced study.
[303] The latter (it is perhaps needless to state) have long been
perfectly evident to all American teachers of the first rank in the
shape, say, of the worthless “research” that is often represented in
theses and studies handed in for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy,
or for other purposes. Anything that seems to be “work done,” anything
that has attained to some “consequences” or other, has often been
published as studies and researches, and this despite the valuable
things that are to be associated with the idea of the pragmatist
element in American scholarship. The faults, too, of the undue
specialization that still obtains in many American institutions is
also, as I have indicated, becoming more and more apparent to American
authorities.
[304] I cannot see why idealists should have been so slow to accord
to Pragmatism the element of truth in this idea, and to admit that it
connects the pragmatist philosophy of “consequences” with the idealist
“value-philosophy.”
[305] The greater part, for example, of our British teaching and
writing about Kant and Hegel has taken little or no recognition of
the peculiar intellectual and social atmosphere under which Criticism
and Transcendentalism became intelligible and influential in Germany
and elsewhere, or of the equally important matter of the very
different ways in which the Kantian and the Hegelian philosophies
were interpreted by different schools and different tendencies of
thought. A similar thing might, I think, too, be said of the unduly
“intellectualistic” manner in which the teachings of Plato and
Aristotle have often been presented to our British students--under the
influence partly of Hegelianism and partly of the _doctrinairism_ and
the intellectualism of our academic Humanism since the time of the
Renaissance. Hence the great importance in Greek philosophy of such a
recent work as that of F. M. Cornford upon the relation of Religion
to Philosophy (_From Religion to Philosophy_, Arnold, 1912), or of
Professor Burnet’s well-known _Early Greek Philosophy_.
[306] As suggestive of the scant respect for authorities felt by the
active-minded American student, I may refer to the boast of Papini that
Pragmatism appeals to the virile and the proud-spirited who do not wish
to accept their thought from the past.
[307] I am thinking of such events as the “World’s Parliament of
Religions” (in Chicago in 1893), the recent international conferences
upon “ethical instruction in different countries,” upon “racial
problems,” upon “missions,” etc. It would be idle to think that such
attempts at the organisation of the knowledge and the effort of
the thinking people in the world are quite devoid of philosophical
importance. One has only to study, say, von Hartmann, or modern social
reform, to be convinced of the contrary.
[308] I trust I may be pardoned if I venture to suggest that in
opposition to the democratic attitude of Pragmatism to the ordinary
facts of life, and to the ordinary (but often heroic) life of ordinary
men, the view of man and the universe that is taken in such an
important idealistic book as Dr. Bosanquet’s _Individuality and Value_
is doubtless unduly aristocratic or intellectualistic. It speaks
rather of the Greek view of life than of the modern democratic view.
As an expression of the _quasi_ democratic attitude of James even in
philosophy, we may cite the following: “In this real world of sweat and
dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is noble, that ought to
count as a presumption its truth, as a philosophical disqualification.
The Prince of Darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but
whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.
His menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials.”
[Having rewritten this quotation two or three times, I have lost the
reference to its place in James’s writings. It is one of the three
books upon Pragmatism and Pluralism.]
[309] We may quote, I think, the following passage from Professor
Perry to show that the open-mindedness of James was not merely a
temperamental and an American characteristic in his case, but a
quality or attitude that rested upon an intellectual conviction in
respect of the function of ideas. “Since it is their office [_i.e._
the office of ideas] to pave the way for direct knowledge, or to be
temporarily substituted for it, then efficiency is conditioned by
their _unobtrusiveness, by the readiness with which they subordinate
themselves_. The commonest case of an idea in James’s sense is the
word, and the most notable example of his pragmatic or empirical
method is his own scrupulous avoidance of verbalism. It follows that
since ideas are in and of themselves of no cognitive value, since
they are essentially instrumental, they _are always on trial_, and
‘liable to modification in the course of future experience.’”--_Present
Philosophical Tendencies_, p. 364 (italics mine).
[310] It is known to all students that some of the more important
writings of this prince of thinkers cannot be intelligibly approached
without a long preliminary study of the peculiar “dressing up,” or
transformation, to which he subjects the various facts of life and
existence. And the same thing is true (to a more modified extent) of
the writings of Kant.
[311] See the wise remark, in this very connexion, of the possible
service of philosophy to-day, of Dr. Bosanquet, reproduced upon p. 226.
And then, again, we must remember that an unduly pragmatist view of
life would tend to make people impervious to ideas that transcend the
range and the level of their ordinary interests and activities.
[312] Cf. the following from Professor Pace’s Preface to _Introduction
to Philosophy_, by Charles A. Dubray. “In Catholic colleges, importance
has always been attached to the study of philosophy both as a means
of culture and as a source of information regarding the great truths
which are influential in supporting Christian belief and in shaping
character.” Of course these same words might be used as descriptive of
what Professor Santayana calls the “older tradition” in _all_ American
colleges. It is interesting, by the way, to note also the pragmatist
touch in the same Preface to this Catholic manual. “But if this
training is to be successful, philosophy must be presented, not as a
complex of abstruse speculations on far-off inaccessible topics, but as
a system of truths that enter with vital consequence into our ordinary
thinking and our everyday conduct.”
[313] See p. 136.
[314] See above, p. 34 and p. 165.
[315] It is not, however, “rest” that the pragmatists want, even in
heaven, but renewed opportunities for achievement. “‘_There shall
be news_,’ W. James was fond of saying with rapture, quoting from
the unpublished poem of a new friend, ‘there shall be _news in
heaven_.’”--Professor Santayana in _Winds of Doctrine_, p. 209.
[316] In using this expression I am acutely conscious of its
limitations and of its misleading character. There is nothing in which
Americans so thoroughly believe as _knowledge_ and _instruction_ and
_information_. A belief in education is in fact _the one prevailing
religion of the country_--the one thing in which _all_ classes, without
any exception, unfeignedly _believe_, and for which the entire country
makes enormous sacrifices.
[317] In using this expression I am not blind to such outstanding
characteristics of American life as (1) the enormous amount of
preventive philanthropy that exists in the United States; (2) the
well-known system of checks in the governmental machinery of the
country; (3) the readiness with which Americans fly to legislation for
the cure of evils; (4) the American sensitiveness to pain and their
hesitation about the infliction of suffering or punishment, etc. Nor
do I forget the sacrifice of life entailed by modern necessities and
modern inventions in countries other than America. I simply mean that
owing to the constant stream of immigration, and to the spirit of
youthfulness that pervades the country, the willingness of people to
make experiments with themselves and their lives is one of the many
remarkable things about the United States.
[318] See p. 117.
[319] And this despite the enormous amount of work that has been done
by American biologists upon the “factors” of evolution, and upon a true
interpretation of Darwinism and of Weismannism and of the evolutionary
theory generally.
[320] Even Professor James, for example, dismissed (far too readily,
in my opinion) as a “sociological romance” a well-known book
(published both in French and in English) by Professor Schinz entitled
_Anti-Pragmatism_. Although in some respects a superficial and
exaggerated piece of work, this book did discover certain important
things about Pragmatism and about its relation to American life.
[321] It is probably a perception of this truth that has led Dr.
Bosanquet to express the opinion that the whole pragmatist issue may
be settled by an examination of the notion of “satisfaction.” He
must mean, I think, that satisfaction is impossible to man without
a recognition of many of the ideal factors that are almost entirely
neglected by the pragmatists--except by Bergson, if it be fair to call
him a pragmatist.
[322] Bourdeau, for example, has suggested that its God is not really
God, but merely an old domestic servant destined to do us personal
services---help us to carry our trunk and our cross in the midst of
sweat and dirt. He is not a gentleman even. “No wonder,” he adds, “it
was condemned at Rome.” See his _Pragmatisme et Modernisme_, p. 82.
[323] I am thinking here of the words in the Constitution of the
State of California (they are printed in Mr. Bryce’s _American
Commonwealth_--at least in the earlier editions) to the effect that it
is the natural right of all men to seek and to “_obtain_ [!]” happiness.
[324] “_Epigramme_,” Venice, 1790. [“I could never abide any of those
freedom-gospellers. All that they ever wanted was to get things running
so as to suit themselves. If you are anxious to set people free, just
make a beginning by trying to serve them. The simplest attempt will
teach you how dangerous this effort may be.”]
[325] See Chapter IX.
[326] On what grounds does Professor Bosanquet think of “compensating
justice” as a naïve idea? It is on the contrary one of the highest and
deepest, and one of the most comprehensive to which the human mind has
ever attained--giving rise to the various theogonies and theodicies and
religious systems of mankind. It is at the bottom, for example, of the
theodicy and the philosophy of Leibniz, the founder of the Rationalism
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe.
[327] Could any system of ethics which took such an impossible and such
a belated conception of the individual be regarded as ethics at all?
[328] I do not think that this is a fair preliminary description of
the problem of teleology. A person who believes in the realization
of purpose in some experiences with which he thinks himself to be
acquainted does not plead for the guidance of the universe by finite
minds, but simply for a view of it that shall include the truth of
human purposes. And of course there may be in the universe beings other
than ourselves who also realize purposes.
[329] Italics and exclamation mine.
[330] Italics mine. There is a large element of truth in this great
idea of Professor Bosanquet’s, connecting [for our purposes] his
philosophy with the theism and the personalism for which we are
contending as the only true and real basis for Humanism.
[331] Readers who remember Green’s _Prolegomena to Ethics_ will
remember that it is one of the difficulties of that remarkable, but
one-sided, production (exposed, I think, with many other defects in
Professor Taylor’s brilliant, but unduly intellectualistic _Problem
of Conduct_) that it also seems to teach a kind of “Determinism”
in ethics, in what our nature is unduly communicated to us by the
Absolute, or the “Eternal Consciousness.” This whole way of looking at
things must largely be abandoned to-day.
[332] See below, p. 226.
[333] It is, I am inclined to think, the existence of this
contradiction in Dr. Bosanquet’s Lectures that will cause the average
intelligent person to turn away from them as not affording an adequate
account of the reality of the world of persons and things with which
he knows himself to be directly and indirectly acquainted. Another
way of stating the same thing would be to say that Absolutism fails
to take any adequate recognition of that most serious contradiction
(or “defect”) in our experience of which we have already spoken as
the great dualism of modern times, the opposition between reason and
faith an opposition that is not relieved either by the greatest of
the continually increasing discoveries of science, or by any, or all,
of the systems of all the thinkers. Hegelianism in general assures us
that from the point of view of a “higher synthesis” this opposition
does not exist or that it is somehow “transcended.” And its method of
effecting this synthesis is to convert the opposition between faith
and reason into the opposition between what it calls “Understanding”
and what it calls “Reason” [an opposition that is to some extent a
fictitious one, “reason” being, to begin with, but another name for
our power of framing general conceptions or notions, and not therefore
different from “understanding”]. It removes, that is to say, the
opposition between two different phases or aspects of our experience
by denying the existence of one of them altogether. It changes the
opposition between knowledge and faith into an opposition between an
alleged lower and an alleged higher way of _knowing_. This alleged
higher way of knowing, however, is, when we look into it, but the old
ideal of the perfect demonstration of _all the supposed contents_ of
our knowledge (principles and facts alike) that has haunted modern
philosophy from the time of Descartes. It is an unattainable ideal
because no philosophy in the world can begin without some assumption
(either of “fact” or of principle), and because our knowledge of
the world comes to us in a piecemeal fashion--under the conditions
of time and space. A fact prior to all the issues of the demand of
Rationalism for a supposedly perfect demonstration is the _existence
of the conscious beings_ (Dr. Bosanquet himself, for example) who
seek this supposed certainty in order that they may act better--in
ignorance of the fact that complete initial certainty on our part as
to all the issues and aspects of our actions would tend to destroy
the personal character of our choice as moral agents, as beings who
may occasionally act beyond the given and the calculable, and set up
precedents and ideals for ourselves and for others--for humanity. It is
this underlying faith then in the reality of our moral and spiritual
nature that we would alone oppose (and only in a relative sense) to
the supposed certainties of a completely rational, or _a priori_,
demonstration, the whole contention of humanism being that it is in the
interests of the former reality that the latter certainties exist. The
apparent opposition between faith and reason would be surmounted by a
philosophy that should make consciousness of ourselves _as persons_ the
primal certainty, and all other forms of consciousness or of knowledge
secondary and tributary, as it were, to this.
[334] I am aware that there is a difference between the “universal”
of ordinary formal logic and Dr. Bosanquet’s (or Hegel’s) “concrete
universal,” but it is needless for me to think of it here. Dr.
Bosanquet uses in his Lectures the phrase “logical universal” for his
“concrete universal” or his principle of positive coherence. It is
always logical coherence that he has in view.
[335] “For everywhere it is creative Logic, the nature of the whole
working in the detail, which constitutes experience, and is appreciable
in so far as experience has value.” Now Logic of itself does not thus
“work” or “do” anything. It is men or persons who do things by the help
of logic and reasoning and other things--realities and forces, etc.
[336] Cf. p. 31. “We are minds,” he says, “_i.e._ living microcosms,
not with hard and fast limits, but determined by our range and powers
which fluctuate very greatly.” My point simply is that this is too
intellectualistic a conception of man’s personality. We have minds, but
we are not minds.
[337] See p. 192. “But as the self is essentially a world of content
engaged in certain transformations”; and p. 193, “a conscious being
... is a world ... in which the Absolute begins to reveal its proper
nature.” How can a “world of content” [that is to say, the “sphere of
discourse” of what some person is thinking for some purpose or other]
be “engaged” in certain transformations? It is the _person_, or the
thinker, who is transforming the various data of his experience for his
purposes as a man among men. It is time that philosophy ceased to make
itself ridiculous by calmly writing down such abstractions as if they
were facts.
[338] Cf. “Mind as the significance and interpretation of reality,” p.
27.
[339] “Mind has nothing of its own but the active form of totality,
everything positive it draws from Nature.”
[340] This again is an abstraction, and how on earth can it be said
that “mind” and conscious life “reflect” merely certain abstractions
(or creations) of their own? They have invented such terms as “content”
for certain purposes, and their own being and nature is therefore more
than these terms. Mind is not a “content”; it makes all other things
“contents” for itself.
[341] It has even there, according to Dr. Bosanquet, only its purely
theoretic function of working after its own perfection in the way of
attaining to a logical “universal.” “The peculiarity of mind for us,
is to be a world of experience working itself out towards harmony and
completeness.” This is simply not true.
[342] “Finite consciousness, whether animal or human, did not make its
body.”
[343] “Thus there is nothing in mind _which the physical counterpart
cannot represent_.” (Italics mine.)
[344] “What we call the individual, then, is not a fixed essence, but a
living world of content representing a certain range of externality.”
P. 289.
[345] “The _system of the universe_, as was said in an earlier
Lecture, might be described as _a representative system_. Nature, or
externality[!] lives in the lives of conscious beings. (Italics mine.)
[346] “Spirit is a light, a focus, a significance[!] which can only be
by contact with a ‘nature’ an external world.”
[347] “For, on the other hand, it has been urged and we feel,
that it is _thought which constructs and sustains the fabric of
experience_, and that it is thought-determinations which invest
even sense-experience _with its value_ and _its meaning_. . . . The
ultimate tendency of thought, we have seen, is not to generalise, but
to _constitute a world_,” p. 55. Again, “the true office of thought,
we begin to see, _is to build up_, _to inspire with meaning_, _to
intensify_, _to vivify_. The object which thought, in the true sense,
has worked upon, is not a relic of decaying sense, _but is a living
world_, analogous to a perception of the beautiful, in which every
thought-determination adds fresh point and deeper bearing to every
element of the whole,” p. 58. And on p. 178 he says that he sees
no objection to an idealist recognising the “use made of” “laws”
and “_dispositions_” in recent psychology. [How one wishes that Dr.
Bosanquet had really worked into his philosophy the idea that every
mental “element” is in a sense a “disposition” to _activity_!] Some
of these statements of Dr. Bosanquet’s have almost a pragmatist ring
about them, a suggestion of a _living_ and dynamic (rather than a
merely intellectualistic) conception of thought. They may therefore be
associated by the reader with the concessions to Pragmatism by other
rationalists of which we spoke in an early chapter (see p. 74).
[348] See Chapter III. p. 90.
[349] I must say that apart from any questions in detail about
this rejection of teleology by Dr. Bosanquet, there is something
inexplicable about it to me. He cannot retain his own great notion of
“wholeness” without the idea of “end,” because “wholeness” is a demand
of thought that is guided by some idea of purpose or end.
[350] See p. 90.
[351] Italics mine.
[352] P. 225.
[353] See p. 90.
[354] Having already given instances of this abstractionism in the
case of such things as the “self” and the “universal” and “spirit,” it
will suffice to point out here in addition (1) its tendency to talk of
“experience” and “experiences” _as if there could be such things apart
from the prior real existence of the experients or the experiencing
persons_ with whom we are acquainted in our daily life, and (2) its
tendency to talk of getting at “the heart of actual life and love” in a
“system” which leaves no place for the real existence of either gods or
men who live and love. And then I trust that it may not be regarded as
an impertinence to allege as another puzzling piece of abstractionism
on the part of Dr. Bosanquet, that he has allowed himself to speak and
think in his book as if his theory of the “concrete universal” were
practically a new thing in the thought of our time--apart altogether,
that is to say, from the important work in this same direction of other
Neo-Hegelian writers, and apart, too, from the unique work of Hegel in
the same connexion.
[355] See below, p. 230.
[356] This is revealed in the main in its exposition of the world
as the logical system of a single complete individual experience--a
tendency that students of philosophy know to exist in Neo-Hegelianism
generally from Green to Bradley. I admit that this tendency is
literally a different thing from solipsism in the ordinary sense, as
the inability of a particular finite person to prove to himself that
any person or thing exists except himself. It is still, however, it
seems to me, possible to regard as solipsistic the tendency to set
forth the universe as the experience, or the thought, of a single
experient or a single thinker, even although the impersonalism of Dr.
Bosanquet’s logical “whole” conflicts somewhat with the individuality
of his Absolute.
[357] Cf. p. 160.
[358] The well-known inability of Mr. Bradley, for example, to be
content with the reality of any portion or any phase of reality that
falls short of what he regards as absolute reality, and with the merely
relative meaning that he attaches to any category of the “finite.”
Also the well-known Neo-Hegelian tendency to make an opponent forge
the weapon by which he is to be dislodged from any particular point
of view. In the case of Dr. Bosanquet this tendency takes the form
of making out any one who holds to a belief in the real existence of
finite conscious persons to hold the absurd position of believing in
“an impervious and isolated self,” a thing, of course, that no one who
knows anything about biology or ethics, or social psychology, really
does.
[359] As another instance of Dr. Bosanquet’s unintentional unfairness
to his opponents, I would note his positive injustice to Theism as
such. What many of us think of (however imperfectly) and believe in
as God is invariably to him “a theistic Demiurge in his blankness and
isolation.” I do not believe in such an abstract Demiurge any more
than I believe in the separate, isolated self that he conjures up to
his mind when he thinks of personality. The problem of the twentieth
century may well be what Dr. Ward has signalised as the relation of God
to the “Absolute” of the Hegelian metaphysicians, but this suggestion
simply means to me the discovery on the part of philosophers of terms
and concepts more adequate to the Supreme Being than either the
Absolute, or the external deity rejected by Dr. Bosanquet.
[360] Stéphane Mallarmé, according to Nordau in _Degeneration_, p. 103.
[361] And the general reader must remember that the “whole” is always
(with all due respect to his high dialectic ability and his high
temper of mind and his scholarship) a kind of _ignis fatuus_ in Dr.
Bosanquet’s book, a kind of shadow thrown by the lamps and the tools of
his own choosing in his Quixotic search. The “whole” is the “perfected
individuality” of the individual who sets out to find truth in this
great world of ours with all its _real possibilities_ of gain and loss.
It is the completion of the “system” of truth to which the truth-seeker
would fain reduce the entire universe, that becomes for him (for the
time being) the mere “subject-matter” of his thought. It is, that is
to say, in both cases, a purely formal conception--an abstraction,
although to Dr. Bosanquet it is the reality implied in the very
existence and activity of the individual thinker. But the latter is
the case to him only because he looks upon man as _existing to think_
instead of as _thinking to exist_.
[362] That is to say, for the scholar and the lover of Dante and
Dante’s world.
[363] For he was not merely a “mind,” reflecting “Italy” and “minds”
and “experiences.”
[364] And that, we might add, is still kept alive by some of our
humanists and educators of to-day as the ideal for both primary and
secondary education.
[365] This is a thing that the beginner is taught in lectures
introductory to the study of the philosophy of Kant--in regard to
Kant’s relation to the barren, dogmatic formalism of Wolff--a one-sided
interpreter of the philosophy of Leibniz. I am quite aware that Dr.
Bosanquet does not merely use the Principle of Non-Contradiction in
the aggressive, or polemical, manner of Mr. Bradley in _Appearance and
Reality_. The principle of positive coherence at which he aims, begins,
to some extent, where Mr. Bradley stopped. But it is still the idea of
consistency or inconsistency, with certain presuppositions of his own,
that rules his thinking; it determines, from the very outset of his
Lectures, what he accepts and what he rejects.
[366] See p. 152 and p. 156, note 2.
[367] I use this word “must” in a logical as well as in an ethical
sense, seeing that all judgment implies a belief in the reality of a
world of persons independent of the mere fact of “judgment” as a piece
of mental process.
[368] See p. 145.
[369] On p. 345 the words are: “_When we consider the naïve or
elementary life of morality and religion_”; and on p. 346: “_The
naïve, or simple self of every-day morality and religion_,” and the
marginal heading of the page upon which these words occur is “_The
naïve good self compared to grasp of a fundamental principle alone_.”
Could anything more clearly indicate what the Kantians call a confusion
of categories [in the case in point the categories of “goodness” and
the categories of “truth”] or what Aristotle calls a μετάβασις εἰς
ἄλλο γένος, the unconscious treatment of one order of facts by the
terms and conceptions of another order of facts. To Dr. Bosanquet
as the Neo-Hellenist that he is in his professed creed, badness is
practically stupidity, and “lack of unification of life,” and “failure
of theoretical grasp.” This confusion between goodness and wisdom is
again indicated on p. 347 in the words: “_A man is good in so far as
his being is ‘unified at’ all in any sphere of wisdom or activity_.”
[This is simply not true, and its falsity is a more unforgivable
thing in the case of Dr. Bosanquet than it is in the case of the
pragmatists who also tend to make the ‘moral’ a kind of ‘unification’
or ‘effectiveness’ in ‘purpose.’] As a proof of Dr. Bosanquet’s
transformation of the facts of the ethical life in the interest of
logical theory, we can point to p. 334: “_Our actions and ideas issue
from our world as a conclusion from its premises, or as a poem from its
author’s spirit_,” or to p. 53, where it is definitely stated that the
“_self, as it happens to be_,” cannot, in any of its “three aspects,”
“_serve as a test of reality_.” To do the latter, it must, in his
opinion, follow the law of the “universal,” _i.e._ _become a logical
conception_. Now of course (1) _it is not the self “as it happens to
be”_ that is chiefly dealt with in ethics, but rather the _self as
it ought to be_. And (2) the ethical self, or the “person,” does not
follow the “law of the universal” [a logical law] but the law of right
and wrong [an ethical law]. As a proof of the subordination of the
facts of conduct to the facts of aesthetics, we may take the words on
p. 348 where aesthetic excellence is said to be “_goodness in the wider
or_ (‘_shall we say_’) _in the narrower sense_.” Now the distinction
between ethics and aesthetics is not one of degree, but one of kind.
And as another illustration of his tendency to transform ethical facts
in the light of a metaphysical, or a logical, theory [they are the
same thing to him] we may quote the emphatic declaration on p. 356:
“_Our effort has been to bring the conception of moral_ and individual
initiative _nearer to the idea of logical determination_,” or the
equally outspoken declaration on p. 353: “_But metaphysical theory,
viewing the self in its essential basis_ of moral solidarity with the
natural and social world ... _cannot admit_ that the independence
of the self, _though a fact, is more than a partial fact_.” Or the
words at the top of this same page: “The primary principle _that
should govern the whole discussion_ is this, that the attitude of
moral judgment and responsibility for decisions _is only one among
other attitudes_ and spheres of experience.” These last words alone
would prove definitely the non-ethical character of “Individuality
and Value.” The ethical life is to its author only a “_quatenus
consideratur_,” only a possible point of view, only an aspect of
reality, only an aspect, therefore, of a “logical system.” Now if the
ethical life of the world is to count for anything at all, it may be
said that the ethical life is no mere aspect of the life of the self,
and no mere aspect of the life of the world, seeing that “nature” in
the sense of mere “physical nature” does not come into the sphere of
morality at all. It is rather the activity of the “whole self,” or
the “normative” reflection of the self as a whole upon all the merely
partial or subordinate aspects of its activity, upon bodily life,
economic life, intellectual activity, and so on that constitutes the
world of morality.
[370] See p. 147, and p. 244.
[371] Good and evil to Dr. Bosanquet are two quasi-rational systems
in active antagonism as claiming to attach different “principles and
predicates” to identical data. The essence of their antagonism to Dr.
Bosanquet is not, however, that evil is contemplated, as it must be
sooner or later, in repentance for example as _wrong_, but rather that
the “evil” is an imperfect “_logical_ striving (p. 351) of the self
_after unity_” which is in “contradiction with a _fuller_ and sounder
striving” after the same. The evil self is to him merely the vehicle of
a logical contradiction in the self.
[372] This is seen in his admission (on p. 351) that the “bad will” no
less than the “good will” is a logical necessity, when taken along with
his doctrine about mind and body, his doctrine of the “dependence” (p.
318) of the finite individual upon the external mechanical world. Dr.
Bosanquet, of course, thinks that even in this apparent Determinism
he is justifiably supplementing the ordinary ideas about the “self”
as “creative” and “originative” (p. 354), by the wider recognition
that I am more or less completely doing the work of the “universe”
as a “member” in a “greater self.” And he adds in the same sentence
the words that “_I am in a large measure continuous with the greater_
(p. 355) _self_,” and “_dyed with its colours_”--a further step in
Determinism, as it were, and a step which, with the preceding one to
which we have just referred, no critic can fail to connect with the
Determinism that we have already found to be implicated in his doctrine
of the “self,” and in his general doctrine that the “external” must be
frankly accepted as a factor in the universe.
[373] By the “spectator” fallacy we mean his tendency to talk and think
of the self as it is for a spectator or student, looking at matters
from the outside, and not as the self is for the man himself.
[374] Wollaston is the English ethical philosopher who, according to
Leslie Stephen’s account, thought, after thirty years of meditation,
that the only reason he had for not breaking his wife’s head with a
stick was, that this would be tantamount to a denial that his wife was
his wife.
[375] See _Idola Theatri_ by Henry Sturt (the editor of the well-known
“Personal Idealism” volume) of Oxford--a book that enumerates and
examines many of the fallacies of the Neo-Hegelian school. Mr. Sturt’s
first chapter is entitled the “Passive Fallacy,” which he calls, with
some degree of justice, the prime mistake of the idealistic philosophy,
meaning by this the “ignoring” of the “kinetic” and the “dynamic”
character of our experience.
[376] It is Natural Theology that is the subject proper of the _Gifford
Lectures_.
[377] See p. 149 of Chapter VI.
[378] With, we might almost say, the pragmatists and the humanists.
[379] This is really their main distinguishing characteristic and merit.
[380] See p. 162.
[381] “Indeed, I do not conceal my belief that in the main the work has
been done.”--_Preface._
[382] I think that the confession is a praiseworthy one in view of the
fact of the prejudice of Rationalism, that philosophy has nothing to do
with convictions but only with knowledge.
[383] By belief I have understood throughout this book simply man’s
working sense for reality, and I am inclined to think that this is
almost the best definition that could be given of it--our working sense
for reality. It is at least, despite its apparent evasiveness, most in
harmony with the pragmatist-humanist inclusion of will elements and
feeling elements in our knowledge and in our apprehension of reality.
It is also in harmony with the conception of reality which may, in my
opinion, be extracted from both Pragmatism and Idealism--that reality
is what it proves itself to be in the daily transformation of our
experience. By the retention of the term “working” in this attempted
definition I express my agreement with the idea that action, and the
willingness to act, is an essential element in belief. The outstanding
positions in the definitions of belief that are generally given in
philosophical dictionaries are, firstly, that belief is a conviction
or subjective apprehension of truth or reality in distinction from
demonstrable knowledge or direct evidence; and, secondly, that feeling
elements and action elements enter into it. I am inclined to think that
the sharp antithesis between belief and knowledge, or the tendency of
philosophical books to emphasise the difference between belief and
knowledge, is a characteristic, or consequence, of our modern way
of looking at things, of our break with the unfortunate, medieval
conception of faith and of the higher reason. The study of the facts
either of the history of religion or of the history of science, will
convince us, I think, that it is always belief, and that it still
is belief (as the working sense for reality), that is man’s measure
of reality, our knowledge about the universe being at all times
but a more or less perfect working out of our beliefs and of their
implications--of our sense of the different ways in which the world
affects us, and of the ways in which we are affected towards it. Nor do
I think, as I have indicated in different places, that “reality” can
be defined apart from belief, reality being that in which we believe
for all purposes, theoretical and practical and emotional. In the
conception of reality as a world of intersubjective intercourse in
which beings, or persons at different stages of development, share in a
common spiritual life, we have attained so far (and only so far) to the
truth that is common to an idealism of the type of Dr. Bosanquet’s, and
to pragmatist-humanism when properly developed and interpreted. There
are, I find, upon thinking of the matter, any number of philosophers
and thinkers who interpret belief, in the larger sense of the term,
as our complete and final estimate of reality, and as therefore not
exclusive of, but inclusive of knowledge in the ordinary sense of the
term.
[384] He even says in the Abstract of his first lecture upon the
“Central Experiences,” that Lord Gifford’s desire that his lecturers
should “try to communicate” a “grave experience” is the demand that
“introduces us to the double task of philosophy. It [philosophy] needs
the best of logic, but also the best of life, and neither can be had in
philosophy without the other.”
[385] _Treatise upon Human Nature_, sect. vii. (Green and Grose, i.
547).
[386] I had originally the idea of calling this chapter by the more
modest title of a note upon “pragmatist elements” in the teaching of
Bergson. I have allowed myself to call it a chapter partly for the sake
of symmetry, and partly because the footnotes and the criticism (of his
Idealism) have carried it beyond the limits of a note. I find, too, (as
I have partly indicated in my preface) in the teaching of Bergson so
many things that make up almost the very body of truth and fact upon
which Pragmatism, and Humanism, and Idealism all repose (or ought to
repose) that I quote them directly in my footnotes. They indicate to
me the scope and the territory of my entire subject. And they are a
confirmation to me of much that I had myself arrived at before I read a
line of Bergson.
[387] “Our intelligence, as it leaves the hands of nature, has for its
chief object the unorganised solid” (_Creative Evolution_, p. 162); “of
immobility alone does the intellect form a clear idea” (_ibid._ 164).
“The aspect of life that is accessible to the intellect--as indeed to
our senses, of which our intellect is the extension--is that which
offers a hold to action” (_ibid._ 170). “We see that the intellect, so
skilful in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches
the living. Whether it wants to treat the life of the body or the
life of the mind, it proceeds with the rigour, the stiffness, and the
brutality of the instrument _not designed_ for such use. The history
of hygiene or of pedagogy teaches us much in this matter. When we
think of the cardinal, urgent, and constant need we have to preserve
our bodies and to raise our souls, of the special facilities given to
each of us in this field to experiment continually on ourselves and on
others, of the palpable injury by which the wrongness of a medical or
a pedagogical practice is made manifest and punished at once, we are
amazed at the stupidity and especially at the persistence of errors.
We may easily find their origin in the natural obstinacy _with which
we treat the living like the lifeless_, and think all reality, however
fluid, under the form of the sharply-defined solid. _We are at ease
only in the discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead. The intellect
is characterised by a natural inability to comprehend life_” (_Creative
Evolution_, p. 174). (Italics mine.)
[388] “I look and I think I see, I listen and I think I hear, I examine
myself and I think I am reading the very depths of my heart. But what
I see and hear of the outer world is purely and simply a _selection
made by my senses to serve as a light to my conduct_; what I know of
myself is what comes to the surface, what participates in my actions.
My senses and my consciousness, therefore, give me no more than a
_practical simplification_ of reality in the vision they furnish me
of myself and of things, the differences that are useless to man are
obliterated, the resemblances that are useful to him are emphasised;
ways are traced out for me in advance along which my activity is to
travel. These ways are the ways which all mankind has trod before
me. Things have been classified with a view to the use I can derive
from them” (_Laughter_, p. 151). “Life implies the acceptance of the
_utilitarian_ side of things in order to respond to them by appropriate
reactions; all other impressions must be dimmed or else reach us vague
and blurred” (_ibid._ p. 131). These last words give us a glimpse of a
very important part of Bergson’s teaching--his idea, namely (Voltaire
has it in his _Micromégas_), that “matter” is greater than our
perceptions, that our perceptions reveal to us only those aspects of
the physical universe with which we are practically concerned.
[389] Some years ago psychologists began to distinguish a “structural”
from a “functional” psychology, meaning by the former what is otherwise
called Psycho-Physics or (to some extent) Experimental Psychology.
[390] Cf. “At first sight it may seem prudent to leave the
consideration of facts to positive science, to let physics and
chemistry busy themselves with matter, the biological and psychological
sciences _with life_. The task of the philosopher is then clearly
defined. _He takes facts and laws_ from the _scientist’s hand_, and
whether he tries to go beyond them in order to reach their deeper
causes, or whether he thinks it impossible to go further, and even
proves it by the analysis of scientific knowledge, in both cases he
has for _the facts and relations, handed over by science, the sort of
respect that is due to a final verdict_. To this knowledge he adds a
critique of the faculty of knowing, and also, if he thinks proper, a
metaphysic; but the _matter_ of knowledge he regards as the affair of
science, and not of philosophy” (_Creative Evolution_, pp. 204–5). [All
this represents only too faithfully what even some of our Neo-Kantians
have been saying, and teaching, although there is an error in their
whole procedure here.]
[391] Schopenhauer’s phrase. See my book upon _Schopenhauer’s System_.
[392] It is chiefly in _Matter and Memory_ (in which, by the way, there
are pages and pages of criticism of the rationalism of philosophy that
are as valuable as anything we have in philosophy since the time of
Descartes--Kant not excepted) that we are to look for the detailed
philosophy of sensation and of perception, and the detailed philosophy
of science upon which this protest of Bergson’s against the excesses
of “conceptualism” rests. I indicate, too, at different places in this
chapter some of the other special considerations upon which it rests.
The gist of the whole is to be found, perhaps, in his contention that
our science and our philosophy of the past centuries have both regarded
“perception” as teaching us (somehow) what things _are_ independently
of their effect upon us, and of their place in the moving equilibrium
of things--the truth being on the contrary (with Pragmatism and
Humanism) that our knowledge has throughout a necessary relation to
ourselves and to our place in the universe, and to our liberation from
matter in the life of the spirit.
[393] He expresses this idea in the following way in the Introduction
to _Matter and Memory_: “Psychology has for its object the study
of the human mind for practical utility,” whereas in “metaphysics”
we see “this same mind striving (the idea, as we say elsewhere, is
not free from difficulty) to transcend the conditions of useful
action and to come back to itself _as to a pure creative energy_.”
Or in the following sentences from his _Creative Evolution_: “We
must remember that philosophy, as we define it, _has not yet become
completely conscious of itself_. Physics understands its role when it
pushes matter into the direction of spatiality; but has metaphysics
understood its role when it has simply trodden the steps of physics,
in the chimerical hope of going farther in the same direction? _Should
not its own task be, on the contrary, to remount the incline that
physics descends, to bring matters back to its origins, and to build
up progressively a cosmology which would be, so to speak, a reversed
psychology._ All that which seems _positive_ to the physicist and
to the geometrician would become, from this new point of view, an
interruption or inversion of the true positivity which _would have to
be defined in psychological terms_” (pp. 219–20, italics mine).
[394] As an indication of what the acceptance of the dynamic instead
of the static view of matter on the part of Bergson means, I cite the
phrase (or the conception) on p. 82 of _Matter and Memory_, the effect
that “_matter is here as elsewhere the vehicle of an action_,” or the
even more emphatic declaration on p. 261 of _Creative Evolution_,
“_There are no things, there are only actions_.” It is impossible, of
course, that these mere extracts can convey to the mind of the casual
reader the same significance that they obtain in their setting in the
pages of Bergson, although it is surely almost a matter of common
knowledge about his teaching, that one of the first things it does is
to begin with the same activistic or “actionistic” view of nature and
matter that seems to be the stock in trade of the physics of our time
since the discoveries pertaining to radio-activity, etc. Being only
a layman in such matters, I may be excused for quoting from a recent
booklet (whose very presence in the series in which it appears is to
people like myself a guarantee of its scientific reliability) in which
I find this same activistic view of matter that I find in Bergson.
“What are the processes by which the primary rock material is shifted?
There is the wind that, etc. etc.... There are the streams and rivers
that, etc.... There is the sea constantly wearing away, etc.... Then
there are ‘subtle’ physical and ‘chemical’ forces. And the action
of plants.... Hence by various mechanical, organic, and chemical
processes the materials originally scattered through the rocks of the
earth’s crust, and floating in the air or water, are collected into
layers and form beds of sand, clay, limestone, salt, and the various
mineral fuels, including peat and coal” (_The Making of the Earth_, by
Professor Gregory, F.R.S., of Glasgow University: Williams and Norgate).
It is only right to state here, or to remind the reader in this matter
of a “dynamic” view of matter, that Bergson not only dissipates matter
into force or energy or activity (as do the physicists of to-day),
but also actually credits the world of matter and life with a kind of
consciousness (and why not be courageous about it?) in which what I
have already called the “susceptibility of everything to everything
else,” or the _action_ of everything upon everything else, becomes
credible and intelligible. “_No doubt, also, the material universe
itself, defined as the totality of images, is a kind of consciousness
in which everything compensates and neutralises everything else, a
consciousness of which all the potential parts, balancing each other
by a reaction which is always equal to the action, reciprocally hinder
each from standing out_” (_Matter and Memory_, p. 313).
[395] See Chapter III., and also the references to Mach, Ostwald,
Poincaré, and others, in the second chapter and elsewhere.
[396] “There is no intelligence in which some traces of instinct are
not to be discovered, more, no instinct that is not surrounded with a
fringe of intelligence” (_Creative Evolution_, p. 143).
[397] “We will not dwell here upon a point we have dealt with in former
works. Let us merely recall that a theory [the theory of contemporary
physiological psychology] such as that according to which consciousness
is attached to certain neurons, and is thrown off from their work
like a phosphorescence, may be accepted by the scientist for the
detail of analysis; _it is a convenient mode of expression. But it is
nothing else. In reality, a living being is a centre of action._ It
represents a certain sum of contingency entering into the world, that
is to say, a certain quantity of possible action--a quantity variable
with individuals and especially with species. The nervous system of
an animal marks out the flexible lines on which its action will run
(although the potential energy is accumulated in the muscles rather
than in the nervous system itself); its nervous centres indicate, by
their development and their configuration, the more or less extended
choice it will have among more or less numerous and complicated
actions. Now, since the awakening of consciousness in a living creature
is the more complete, the greater the latitude of choice allowed to it
and the larger the amount of action bestowed upon it, it is clear that
the development of consciousness will appear to be dependent on that of
the nervous centres. On the other hand, every state of consciousness
being, in one aspect of it, a question put to the motor activity and
even the beginning of a reply, there is no psychical event that does
not imply the entry into play of the cortical mechanisms. Everything
seems, therefore, to happen _as if_ consciousness sprang from the
brain, and _as if_ the detail of conscious activity were modelled on
that of the cerebral activity. In reality consciousness does not spring
from the brain, but brain and consciousness correspond because equally
they measure ... the quantity of _choice_ that the living being has at
its disposal” (_Creative Evolution_, pp. 266–7).
[398] “Instead of starting from _affection_ [or ‘sensation’ in the
old sense of the haphazard sensation] of which we can say nothing,
since there is no reason why it should be what it is rather than
anything else, we start from _action_, that is to say, from our power
of effecting changes in things, a faculty attested by consciousness,
and towards which all the powers of the organised body are seen to
converge. So we place ourselves at once in the midst of extended images
[to Bergson as an idealist things are at the same time images or ideas
for a consciousness in other things, or in us, or in beings other
than ourselves], and in this material universe we perceive centres of
indetermination characteristic of life” (_Matter and Memory_, p. 67).
[399] Cf. the words in the Preface to _Matter and Memory_: “_The whole
personality, which, normally narrowed down by action, expands with the
unscrewing of the vice in which it has allowed itself to be squeezed_,”
or the words in the same place about the task of metaphysics being the
attempt of the “_mind striving to transcend the conditions of useful
action_.”
[400] We refer elsewhere in this chapter to Bergson’s idea that living
beings are “centres of indetermination,” that is to say, creatures who
hold their place in nature and that of their species by “persisting
in their own being” (the language of Spinoza) by acting and reacting
upon some of the many forces of nature that act upon them, and by
avoiding the action of other forces and other animals. “They allow to
pass through them,” he says, “so to speak, those external influences
which are indifferent to them; the others isolated become ‘perceptions’
by their very isolation” (_Matter and Memory_, pp. 28, 29). We also
refer to Bergson’s idea that the life-force has expressed itself along
different grades of being (mineral, animal, and so on). Both these
ideas are a partial explanation of what we mean by the presence of
a spiritual activity in both inanimate and animate nature. So also
is Bergson’s idea that the purely mechanical explanation either of
nature or of life is but a device of the intellect for the purposes of
description. More specifically it is expressed, too, in his idea that
“Our representation of matter is the measure of our possible action
upon bodies; it results from the discarding of what has no interest for
our needs, or more generally for our functions” (_Matter and Memory_,
p. 30), or that “Consciousness” is just this choice of “attaining to”
or attending to “certain parts and certain aspects of those parts” of
the “material universe” (_ibid._ p. 31), or that “sense-perception” is
an “elementary question to my motor activity.” “The truth is that my
nervous system, interposed between the objects which affect my body
and those which I can influence, is a mere conductor, transmitting,
sending back, or inhibiting movement. This conductor is composed of
an enormous number of threads which stretch from the periphery to the
centre, and from the centre to the periphery. As many threads pass from
the periphery to the centre, so many points of space are there able
to make an appeal to my will, and to put, so to speak, _an elementary
question to my motor activity. Every such question is what is termed a
perception_” (_ibid._ 40, 41; italics mine). Or, as he puts it, on p.
313, “No doubt the choice of perception from among images in general
is the effect of a _discernment which foreshadows spirit_.... But to
touch the reality of spirit we must place ourselves at the _point
where an individual consciousness_, continuing and retaining the past
in a present enriched by it, _thus escapes the law of necessity_, the
law which ordains that the past shall ever follow itself in a present
which merely repeats it in another form, and that all things shall
ever be flowing away. _When we pass from pure perception to memory, we
definitely abandon matter for spirit._”
[401] Bergson is always able to detect the relapses even of “mechanism”
and of the mechanical philosophy of science into “finalism,” as
when he says on p. 72 of his _Creative Evolution_, “To sum up, if
the accidental variations that bring about evolution are insensible
variations, some good genius must be appealed to--the genius of the
future species--in order to preserve and accumulate these variations,
for “selection” will not look after this. If, on the other hand, the
accidental variations are sudden, then, for the previous function to go
on, or for a new function to take its place, all the changes that have
happened together must be complementary. So we have to fall back on the
good genius again to obtain the convergence of simultaneous changes,
as before to be assured of the continuity of direction of successive
variations.”
[402] We must remember that to Bergson evolution has taken place along
different lines--those of Automatism (in plant-life), Instinct (in
animal life), and Intelligence (in human life and the higher animals),
and that along none of those lines are we to fall into the errors
either of materialism, or of “Darwinism” (the belief in “accidental
variations”), or of the “design-philosophy,” or even of theories like
“neo-Lamarckianism” or neo-vitalism. To him all these philosophies are
but imperfect and hypothetical attempts to grasp “movement” and “life”
which both “_transcend finality, if we understand by finality the
realisation of an idea conceived or conceivable in advance_” (_Creative
Evolution_, p. 236).
[403] “Paleyism” or “Miltonism” are still good names for the thing, I
have read in some competent book upon Evolution.
[404] See below, p. 261.
[405] To Bergson concepts are just as hypothetical in the realm of
science, as they are to thinkers like Mach and Poincaré, and Professor
Ward of Cambridge. See the following, for example, from _Matter and
Memory_ (p. 263): “We shall never explain by means of particles,
whatever these may be, the simple properties of matter; at most we can
thus follow out into corpuscles as artificial as the _corpus_, the body
itself--the actions and reactions of this body with regard to all the
others. This is precisely the object of chemistry. It studies bodies
rather than _matter_; and so we understand why it stops at the atom,
which is still endowed with the general properties of matter. But the
materiality of the atom dissolves more and more under the eyes of the
physicist. We have no reason, for instance, for representing the atom
to ourselves as a solid, rather than as a liquid or gaseous, nor for
picturing the reciprocal action of atoms by shocks rather than in any
other way.” Or, the following characteristic passage from the same book
(p. 280) in respect of the hypothetical character of the concepts of
“pure _time_” and “pure _space_”: “Homogeneous _space_ and homogeneous
_time_ are then neither properties of things nor essential conditions
of our faculty of knowing them; they express, in an abstract form,
the double work of solidification and of division, which we effect on
the moving continuity of the real in order to obtain there a fulcrum
for our action, in order to fix within it starting-points for our
operation, in short, to introduce into it real changes. They are the
_diagrammatic designs_ of our eventual action upon matter.”
[406] Like his celebrated contemporary Eucken, and like many other
thinkers of their time, Bergson is profoundly convinced of the
one-sidedness of the so-called scientific culture of our day, and of
the error of any and all conceptions of education and of social policy
that are based upon it. Although I refer below to the limitations of
his view that the intellect is adapted only to matter and to mechanical
construction, I append the following quotation as symptomatic of
his value as a spiritual teacher in our scientific age: “As regards
human intelligence (_Creative Evolution_, pp. 145–6) it has not been
sufficiently noted that mechanical invention has been from the first
its essential feature, _that even to-day our social life gravitates
around the manufacture and use of artificial instruments_.... This
we hardly realise, _because it takes longer to change ourselves than
to change our tools_.... In thousands of years, when seen from the
distance, _only the broad lines of our present age will be visible_,
our wars and our revolutions will count for little, even supposing they
are remembered at all, but the steam-engine, and the procession of
inventions of every kind that accompanied it, will perhaps be spoken of
as we speak of the bronze or of the chipped stone of prehistoric times;
it will serve to define an age.”
[407] I find this in Bergson’s whole attribution of much of our
“perceptual” and “scientific” knowledge of things to the “needs of
action,” and in the detailed reasons that we attempt on pp. 236–238 to
indicate for his polemic against rationalism.
[408] This confirmation I find in Bergson’s whole philosophy of
perception and sensation referred to on p. 236, and in his idea of a
living being as a “centre of action” or “a centre of indetermination.”
In fact it is obvious that he is one of the very greatest of the
upholders of the “freedom” of the life of the individual, and of the
fact that each new individual contributes something new of its own to
the sum-total of existence, to the life of its species, and to the life
of the world. Of course there is no more an explanation in his teaching
of the causes of “variation” or the differences at birth between the
off-spring of men and of animals, than there is in the philosophy of
Darwin.
[409] The idea of this necessity is confirmed in Bergson’s whole
philosophy of man’s life as a life of action, as a constant surmounting
of obstacles, as a life that reacts in its own way upon the life
of nature, upon the life of the human species as such, upon the
infinite life and energy and “love” of God--if we may soar to this
great thought. See, for example, what he writes in explanation of
the “discordance” of which he speaks thus: “Our freedom, in the very
movements by which it is affirmed, creates the growing habits that
will stifle it if it fails to renew itself by a constant effort: it
is dogged by automatism. The letter kills the spirit. And our most
ardent enthusiasm, as soon as it is externalised into action, is so
naturally congealed into the cold calculation of interest or vanity,
the one takes so easily the shape of the other, that we might confuse
them together, doubt our sincerity, deny goodness and love.” The
explanatory words are the following. [They are quite typical of the
kind of philosophy of life that Bergson thinks of as alone worthy of
the name of a philosophy of the living. And the reference to “love,”
as the highest “dynamic” force in this world of ours, occurs at their
close.] “The profound cause of this discordance lies in an irremediable
difference of rhythm. Life is general, is mobility itself; particular
manifestations of life accept this mobility reluctantly, and constantly
lag behind. It is always going ahead; they want to mark time. Evolution
in general would fain go on in a straight line; each special evolution
is a kind of circle. Like eddies of dust raised by the wind as it
passes, the living turn on themselves, borne up by the great blast of
life. They are therefore relatively stable, and counterfeit immobility
so well that we treat each of them as a _thing_ rather than as a
_progress_, forgetting that the very permanence of their form is only
the outline of a movement. At times, however, in a fleeting vision,
the invisible breath that bears them is materialised before our eyes.
We have this _sudden illumination before certain forms of maternal
love_, so striking and in most animals so touching, observable even in
the solicitude of the plant for its seed. This _love, in which some
have seen the great mystery of life, may possibly deliver us life’s
secret_. It shows us each generation leaning over the generation that
shall follow. It allows us a glimpse of the fact that the living being
is above all a thoroughfare, and that the essence of life is in the
movement by which life is transmitted” (_Creative Evolution_, pp.
134–5; italics mine). It is surely needless to point out how much truer
to human nature, truer therefore to an important part of reality, this
life-philosophy is than the abstractionism of Professor Bosanquet in
the preceding chapter.
[410] This insistence is, I think, amply confirmed by the very
fact of the _immediate_ contact with life and reality indicated
in the quotation that is given in the preceding note upon the
“motive-awakening,” or the “dynamic” character of the philosophy of
Bergson. It is also confirmed in his manifest insistence upon the one
fact that all philosophy must assume (and has for ever assumed) the
fact of life, the fact of the life and thought of God that underlies
all our life and all our thought.
[411] This position of the pragmatists is certainly confirmed by
Bergson’s entire doctrine of the brain and of the intellect--that
their main service is, in the first instance, to interpret the
“life” of things, its relation to our own will and to our practical
activity. I have suggested, too, in this chapter that it is obviously a
characteristic, or a consequence, of the philosophy of Bergson that our
highest thought about ourselves and about the world should be relative
to, and provocative, of our highest emotion.
[412] It is only with some degree of care and reservation that I wish
to refer to any apparent confirmation of this idea by Bergson. And, as
always, I object to the idea of any ultimate separation or “dualism”
between faith and knowledge--faith being implied in all “knowledge.”
There is no opposition in Bergson, or in the principles of his
philosophy, between faith and knowledge; it is rather his idea that
“the faculty of _seeing_ should be made one with the act of _willing_”
(_Creative Evolution_, 250; his italics), and that “philosophy” should
“proceed, _with the powers of conceptual thought alone, to the ideal
reconstruction of all things, even of life_” (_C.E._ xi.; italics
mine). My reasons for finding in his writings a confirmation of the
idea that it is indeed our rational and spiritual faith, rather than
our demonstrable knowledge, that is to us the measure of truth and
reality, are such considerations as the following (in addition to
those of the clauses just quoted), his close association between the
intellectual and the “volitional,” his general faith in “creative
evolution,” in the idea that our “consciousness” means for us “new
choices” and (real) “new possibilities,” his faith in the higher
intuitions of the mind, in the spiritual nature of man, his belief that
the building up of the true philosophy of the future will involve “the
collective and progressive effort of many thinkers, of many observers
also, completing, correcting, and improving one another” (_C.E._ xiv.),
etc. etc.
[413] See below, p. 257, note 1.
[414] See p. 14 in reference to Dr. Schiller’s suggestion that
“freedom” may “pervade the universe.”
[415] “From time to time, however, in a fit of absent-mindedness,
nature raises up souls that are more detached from life.... Were this
detachment complete, did the soul no longer cleave to action by any of
its perceptions, it would be the soul of an artist such as the world
has never yet seen” (_Laughter_, p. 154).
[416] Cf. p. 235.
[417] Cf. “We must break with scientific habits which are adapted to
the fundamental requirements of thought, _we must do violence to the
mind, go counter to the natural bent of the intellect_. But that is
just the function of philosophy” (_Creative Evolution_, p. 31).
[418] “So art, whether it be painting or sculpture, poetry or music,
has no other object than to brush aside the utilitarian symbols,
the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short,
everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to
face with reality itself” (_Laughter_, p. 157). It is true that if
we read further on this page, and elsewhere in Bergson, we will be
able to see that there is for him in art and in the spiritual life a
kind of intelligence and knowledge. But it is difficult to work out
an expression or a characterisation of this intelligence and this
knowledge. “Art,” he says, “is only a more direct vision of reality.”
And again: “Realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and
it is only through ideality that we can resume contact with reality”
(_ibid._).
[419] It is only fair to Bergson to remember that he is himself aware
of the appearances of this dualism in his writings, that he apologises
as it were for them, intending the distinction to be, not absolute, but
relative. “Let us say at the outset that the distinctions we are going
to make will be too sharply drawn, just because we wish to define in
instinct what is instinctive, and in intelligence what is intelligent,
_whereas all concrete instinct is mingled with intelligence, as all
real intelligence is penetrated by instinct. Moreover_ [this is quite
an important expression of Bergson’s objection to the old “faculty”
psychology], _neither intelligence nor instinct lends itself to rigid
definition; they are tendencies and not things_. Also it must not be
forgotten that ... we are considering intelligence and _instinct as
going out of life_ which deposits them along its course” (_Creative
Evolution_, p. 143).
[420] He talks in the _Creative Evolution_ of a “real time” and a “pure
duration” of a real duration that “bites” into things and leaves on
them the mark of its tooth, of a “ceaseless upspringing of something
new,” of “our progress in pure duration,” or a “movement which creates
at once the intellectuality of mind and the materiality of things”
(p. 217). I have no hesitation in saying that all this is unthinkable
to me, and that it might indeed be criticised by Rationalism as
inconsistent with our highest and most real view of things.
[421] He admits himself that “If our analysis is correct, it is
consciousness, or rather supra-consciousness that is at the origin of
life” (_Creative Evolution_, p. 275).
[422] “Now, if the same kind of action is going on everywhere, whether
it is that which is striving to remake itself, I simply express this
probable similitude when I speak of a centre _from which worlds shoot
out as rockets in a fireworks display_--provided, however, _that I do
not present_ [there is a great idea here, a true piece of ‘Kantianism’]
this centre as a _thing_, but as a continuity of shooting out. God thus
defined _has nothing of the already made. He is unceasing life, action,
freedom._ Creation so conceived is not a mystery; we experience it in
ourselves when we act freely” (_Creative Evolution_, p. 262).
[423] See p. 155, note 1.
[424] It is somewhat difficult, and it is not necessary for our
purposes, to explain what might be meant by the “Idealism” of
Bergson--at least in the sense of a cosmology, a theory of the “real.”
It is claimed for him, and he claims for himself that he is in a
sense both an “idealist” and a “realist,” believing at once (1) that
matter is an “abstraction” (an unreality), and (2) that there is more
in matter than the qualities revealed by our perceptions. [We must
remember that he objects to the idea of qualities in things in the old
static sense. “_There are no things; there are only actions._”] What we
might mean by his initial idealism is the following: “_Matter, in our
view_, is an aggregate of images. And by ‘image’ we mean [_Matter and
Memory_, the Introduction] a certain existence which is more than that
which the idealist calls a _representation_, but less than that which
the realist calls a _thing_--an existence placed half-way between the
‘thing’ and the ‘representation.’ This conception of matter is simply
that of common sense.” ... “For common sense, then, the object exists
in itself, and, on the other hand, the object is in itself pictorial,
as we perceive it: _image it is, but a self-existing image_.” Now, this
very idea of a “self-existing image” implies to me the whole idealism
of philosophy, and Bergson is not free of it. And, of course, as we
have surely seen, his “creative-evolution” philosophy is a stupendous
piece of idealism, but an idealism moreover to which the science of the
day is also inclining.
[425] There is so much that is positive and valuable in his teaching,
that he is but little affected by formal criticism.
[426] Cf. “We have now enumerated a few of the essential features of
human intelligence. But we have hitherto considered the individual in
isolation, without taking account of social life. _In reality man is
a being who lives in society._ If it be true [even] that the human
intellect aims at fabrication, we must add that, for that as well as
other purposes, it is associated with _other intellects_. Now it is
difficult to imagine a society whose members do not communicate by
signs,” etc. etc. (_Creative Evolution_, p. 166). Indeed all readers
of Bergson know that he is constantly making use of the social factor
and of “co-operation” by way of accounting for the general advance
of mankind. It may be appropriate in this same connexion to cite the
magnificent passage towards the close of _Creative Evolution_ in which
he rises to the very heights of the idea [Schopenhauer and Hartmann had
it before him, and also before the socialists and the collectivists]
of humanity’s being possibly able to surmount even the greatest of the
obstacles that beset it in its onward path: “As the smallest grain of
dust [_Creative Evolution_, pp. 285–6] is bound up with our entire
solar system, drawn along with it in that undivided movement of descent
which is materiality itself, so all organised beings, from the humblest
to the highest, ... do but evidence a single impulsion, the inverse
of the movement of matter, and in itself indivisible. All the living
hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal
takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of
humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside
and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge to beat down
every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even
death.”
[427] Cf. p. 160 and p. 262.
[428] He comes in sight of some of them, as he often does of so many
things. “It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may call,
as we will [_C.E._, p. 281], man or superman, had sought to realise
himself, and had succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on
the way. The losses are represented by the rest of the animal world,
and even by the vegetable world, at least in what these have that is
positive and above the accidents of evolution.”
[429] From what has been said in this chapter about Bergson, and from
the remarks that were made in the second chapter about Renouvier and
the French Critical Philosophy, the reader may perhaps be willing
to admit that our Anglo-American Transcendental philosophy would
perhaps not have been so abstract and so rationalistic had it devoted
more attention, than it has evidently given, to some of the more
representative French thinkers of the nineteenth century.
[430] We must remember that nowhere in his writings does Bergson claim
any great originality for his many illuminative points of view. He
is at once far too much of a catholic scholar (in the matter of the
history of philosophy, say), and far too much of a scientist (a man
in living touch with the realities and the theories of the science of
the day) for this. His findings about life and mind are the outcome
of a broad study of the considerations of science and of history and
of criticism. By way, for example, of a quotation from a scientific
work upon biology that seems to me to reveal some apparent basis in
fact (as seen by naturalists) for the “creative evolution” upon which
Bergson bases his philosophy, I append the following: “We have gone
far enough to see that the development of an organism from an egg is a
_truly wonderful process_. We need but go back again and look at the
marvellous simplicity of the egg to be convinced of it. Not only do
cells _differentiate_, but cell-groups _act together like well-drilled
battalions_, cleaving apart here, fusing together there, forming
protective coverings or communicating channels, _apparently creating
out of nothing_, a whole set of nutritive and reproductive organs, all
in orderly and progressive sequence, producing in the end that orderly
disposed cell aggregate, that individual life unit which we know as
an earthworm. Although _the forces involved are beyond our ken_, the
grosser processes are evident” (Needham, _General Biology_, p. 175;
italics mine). Of course it is evident from his books that Bergson
does not take much account of such difficult facts and topics as the
mistakes of instinct, etc. And I have just spoken of his optimistic
avoidance of some of the deeper problems of the moral and spiritual
life of man.
[431] “This amounts to saying that the _theory of knowledge_ and
_theory of life_ seem to us inseparable [_Creative Evolution_, p.
xiii.; italics Bergson’s]. A theory of life that is not accompanied
by a criticism of knowledge is obliged to accept, as they stand, the
concepts which the understanding puts at its disposal: it can but
enclose the facts, willing or not, in pre-existing frames which it
regards as ultimate. It thus obtains a symbolism which is convenient,
perhaps even necessary to positive science, but not a direct vision of
its object.”
[432] I more than agree with Bergson that our whole modern philosophy
since Descartes has been unduly influenced by physics and mathematics.
And I deplore the fact that the “New Realism” which has come upon us
by way of a reaction (see p. 53) from the subjectivism of Pragmatism,
should be travelling apparently in this backward direction--away,
to say the very least, from some of the things clearly seen even by
biologists and psychologists. See p. 144.
[433] As I have indicated in my Preface, I am certainly the last person
in the world to affect to disparage the importance of the thin end of
the wedge of Critical Idealism introduced into the English-speaking
world by Green and the Cairds, and their first followers (like the
writers in the old Seth-Haldane, _Essays on Philosophical Criticism_).
Their theory of knowledge, or “epistemology,” was simply everything
to the impoverished condition of our philosophy at the time, but, as
Bergson points out, it still left many of us [the fault perhaps was our
own, to some extent] in the position of “taking” the scientific reading
of the world _as so far true_, and of thinking that we had done well in
philosophy when we simply partly “transformed” it. The really important
thing was to see _with this epistemology_ that the scientific reading
of the world is not in any sense initial “fact” for philosophy.
INDEX
Absolutism, 13, chap. viii.
Action, 91 _n._, 105, chap. iv.
Activity-Experience, 105, 109
Alexander, S., 163
Anti-Intellectualism, 73, 239
Appearance and Reality, 84
Arcesilaus, 155
Aristotle, 155
Armstrong (Prof.), 49 _n._
Attention, 119
Augustine, 107
Avenarius, 41
Bain, 120
Baldwin, J. M., 156, 110 _n._
Bawden (Prof.), 17, 85
Belief, 64, 65, 229 _n._, 251
Bergson, 72, 104, 126
Berthelot, 117
Blondel, 32, 34
Bosanquet, B., 110, 185, chap. viii.
Bourdeau, 26, 133 _n._, 193
Boyce-Gibson (Prof.), 154
Bradley, F. H., 74, 75, 91
Browning, R., 117
Brunschvig, 30
Bryce, James, 193
Butler, 119
Caird, E., 112
Carlyle, 125
Chesterton, W. K., 117, 156
Cohen, 48 _n._
Common-sense Beliefs, 7
Common-sense Philosophy, 117
Comte, 120
Contemplation, 96
Cornford, 184
Curtis (Prof. M. M.), 22
Dawes-Hicks (Prof.), 163
De Maistre, 170
Descartes, 66, 121
Desjardins, P., 37
Dewey, J., 16, 17, 37, 62, 147, 173, 175
Du Bois Reymond, 110
Duncan (Prof.), 122
Duns Scotus, 119
Eleutheropulos, 43
Elliot, H. S. R., 66
Epicureanism, 118
Eucken, 39, 154
Ewald (Dr.), 44, 48
Flournoy, 180
Fouillée, 37 _n._
Fraser, A. C., 112
Futurism, 26
Geddes, P., 123
Goethe, 195, 215
Gordon, A., 152–3
Green, T. H., 199
Gregory (Prof.), 24
Inge (Dean), 29, 31
Invention, 192
James, W., 3, 4, 24, 35, 39, 45, 50, 65, 135, 182, 192 _n._
Jerusalem, W., 43
Joachim, 56
Jones, Sir H., 56
Joseph, 57
Kant, 119, 121, 247
Kant and Hegel, 183
Knox (Capt.), 15
Lalande, A., 29, 33, 164
Lankester (Sir R.), 167
Lecky, 70
Leighton (Prof.), 133
Le Roy, 31
Locke, 61, 119
Lovejoy (Prof.), 49
MacEachran (Prof.), 49 _n._
Mach, 40
Mackenzie, J. S., 112
Maeterlinck, 90
Mallarmé, 214
Marett, 160
Mastermann, G. F. G., 118
M’Dougall, 104
McTaggart, J. M. E., 92
Meaning, 21, 51, 149
Mellone, 57
Merz, 157
Münsterberg, 46
Natorp, 48
Needham (Prof.), 101, 260
New Realism, 53
Nietzsche, 118, 139, 151
Ostwald, 40, 41
Pace (Prof.), 187
Paleyism, 247
Papini, 24, 135
Pascal, 119
Pater, W., 124
Peirce, 3, 22
Perry (Prof.), 53, 185
Perry, Bliss, 171, 179
Plato, 57, 61, 121, 150, 151
Pluralism, 87
Poincaré, 30
Pradines, 36 _n._
Pragmatism, and American philosophy, 49, chap. vii.;
and British thought, 54;
and French thought, 28;
and German thought, 38;
and Italian thought, 23;
a democratic doctrine, 105;
its ethics, 136;
its pluralism, 162;
its sociological character, 164, 262;
its theory of knowledge, 131;
its theory of truth, 127;
its theory of reality, 135
Pratt (Prof.), 51, 127
Radical Empiricism, 85
Renan, 110
Renouvier, 29
Rey, 31
Riley, W., 26 _n._
Ritzsche, 45
Royce, J., 54
Russell, B., 61, 66 _n._, 169
Santayana, 171, 181, 190
Schellwien, 44
Schiller, F. C. S., 12, 14, 16, 132, 133
Schinz, 192 _n._
Schopenhauer, 28, 119, 151, 260
Seth, James, 14 _n._
Seth-Haldane, 260
Shaw, Bernard, 124
Sidgwick, H., 56, 118, 119 _n._, 140
Sigwart, 42
Simmel, 44
Spencer, 41 _n._
Starbuck, 28
Stoicism, 118
Stout, G. F., 55
Subjective Idealism, 259
Taylor, A. E., 57, 77, 78, 199 _n._, 219
Teleology, 88, 198
Tertullian, 119
Theism, 215 _n._
Themistius, 155
Thompson, J. H., 144
Titchener, 157
Truth, 59, 81, 163
Tufts, 147
Tyndall, 110
Vaihinger, 39
Walker, L. J., 31
Ward, James, 30, 55, 143, 162
Wells, H. G., 123
Westermarck, 145
Windelband, 46, 150
Wollaston, 224
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
Transcriber’s Notes
Inconsistent punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
The index was not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page
references.