THE ABSOLUTE
A comparison of the two theories of truth examined in the last chapter
will show that, whereas both rest on a logical quality in ideas, the
first depends on an external view taken by the mind of an independent
non-mental reality, whereas the second depends on the discovery of an
inner meaning in experience itself. It is this inner meaning of
experience that we seek to know when asking any question concerning
reality. It is the development of this view, and what it implies as to
the ultimate nature of reality and truth, that we are now to examine.
When we ask questions about reality, we assume in the very inquiry that
reality is of a nature that experience reveals. Reality in its
ultimate nature may be logical--that is to say, of the nature of
reason, or it may {29} be non-logical--that is to say, of the nature of
feeling or will; but in either case it must be a nature of which
conscious experience can give us knowledge. If indeed we hold the view
which philosophers have often endeavoured to formulate, that reality is
unknowable, then there is no more to be said; for, whatever the picture
or the blank for a picture by which the mind tries to present this
unknowable reality, there can be no question in relation to it of the
nature and meaning of truth. An unknowable reality, as we shall show
later on, is to all intents and purposes non-existent reality. On the
other hand, if thinking leads to the knowledge of reality that we call
truth, it is because being and knowing are ultimately one, and this
unity can only be in conscious experience. This is the axiom on which
the idealist argument is based.
The theory of the Absolute is a logical argument of great dialectical
force. It is not an exaggeration to say that it is the greatest
dialectical triumph of modern philosophy. It is the most successful
expression of idealism. That this is not an extravagant estimate is
shown, I think, by the fact that, widespread and determined as is the
opposition it has had to encounter, criticism has been directed not so
much against its logic as against the basis of intellectualism on which
it rests. The very boldness of its claim and brilliance of its triumph
lead to the suspicion that the intellect cannot be the sole determining
factor of the ultimate nature of reality.
It will be easier to understand the theory of the Absolute if we first
of all notice, for the sake of afterwards comparing it, another
argument very famous in the history of philosophy--the argument to
prove the existence of God named after St. Anselm of Canterbury. {30}
It runs thus: We have in God the idea of a perfect being; the idea of a
perfect being includes the existence of that being, for not to exist is
to fall short of perfection; therefore God exists. The theological
form of this argument need raise no prejudice against it. It is of
very great intrinsic importance, and if it is wrong it is not easy to
point out wherein the fallacy lies. It may, of course, be denied that
we have or can have the idea of a perfect being--that is to say, that
we can present that idea to the mind with a positive content or meaning
as distinct from a merely negative or limiting idea. But this is
practically to admit the driving force of the argument, namely, that
there may be an idea of whose content or meaning existence forms part.
With regard to everything else the idea of existing is not existence.
There is absolutely no difference between the idea of a hundred dollars
and the idea of a hundred dollars existing, but there is the whole
difference between thought and reality in the idea of the hundred
dollars existing and the existence of the hundred dollars. Their
actual existence in no way depends on the perfection or imperfection of
my idea, nor in the inclusion of their existence in my idea. This is
sufficiently obvious in every case in which we are dealing with
perceptual reality, and in which we can, in the words of the
philosopher Hume, produce the impression which gives rise to the idea.
But there are some objects which by their very nature will not submit
to this test. No man hath seen God at any time, not because God is an
object existing under conditions and circumstances of place and time
impossible for us to realise by reason of the limitations of our finite
existence, but because God is an object in a different sense from that
which has a place in the perceptual order, and therefore it is affirmed
of God that the {31} idea involves existence. God is not an object of
perception, either actual or possible; nor in the strict sense is God a
concept--that is to say, a universal of which there may be particulars.
He is in a special sense the object of reason. If we believe that
there is a God, it is because our reason tells us that there must be.
God, in philosophy, is the idea of necessary existence, and the
argument runs: God must be, therefore is. If, then, we exclude from
the idea of God every mythological and theological element--if we mean
not Zeus nor Jehovah nor Brahma, but the first principle of
existence--then we may find in the St. Anselm argument the very ground
of theism.
I have explained this argument, which is of the class called
ontological because it is concerned with the fundamental question of
being, in order to give an instance of the kind of argument that has
given us the theory of the Absolute. I will now try to set that theory
before the reader, asking only that he will put himself into the
position of a plain man with no special acquaintance with philosophy,
but reflective and anxious to interpret the meaning of his ordinary
experience.
We have already seen that thinking is the questioning of experience,
and that the moment it begins it gives rise to a distinction between
appearance and reality. It is the asking _what?_ of every _that_ of
felt experience to which the mind attends. The world in which we find
ourselves is extended all around us in space and full of things which
affect us in various ways: some give us pleasure, others give us pain,
and we ourselves are things that affect other things as well as being
ourselves affected by them. When we think about the things in the
world in order to discover _what_ they really are, we very soon find
that we are liable to illusion and error. {32} Things turn out on
examination to be very different to what we first imagined them to be.
Our ideas, by which we try to understand the reality of things are just
so many attempts to correct and set right our illusions and errors.
And so the question arises, how far are our ideas about things truths
about reality? It is very soon evident that there are some qualities
of things that give rise to illusion and error much more readily than
others. The spatial qualities of things, solidity, shape, size, seem
to be real in a way that does not admit of doubt. We seem able to
apply to these qualities a test that is definite and absolute. On the
other hand, there seem to be effects of these things in us such as
their colour, taste, odour, sound, coldness, or heat, qualities that
are incessantly changing and a fruitful source of illusion and error.
We therefore distinguish the spatial qualities as primary, and consider
that they are the real things and different from their effects, which
we call their secondary qualities. And this is, perhaps, our most
ordinary test of reality. If, for example, we should think that
something we see is an unreal phantom, or a ghost, or some kind of
hallucination, and on going up to it find that it does actually occupy
space, we correct our opinion and say the thing is real. But the
spatial or primary qualities of a thing, although they may seem more
permanent and more essential to the reality of the thing than the
secondary qualities, are nevertheless only qualities. They are not the
thing itself, but ways in which it affects us. It seems to us that
these qualities must inhere in or belong to the thing, and so we try to
form the idea of the real thing as a substance or substratum which has
the qualities. This was a generally accepted notion until Berkeley
(1685-1763) showed how contradictory it is. So {33} simple and
convincing was his criticism of the notion, that never since has
material substance been put forward as an explanation of the reality of
the things we perceive. All that he did was to show how impossible and
contradictory it is to think that the reality of that which we perceive
is something in its nature imperceptible, for such must material
substance be apart from its sense qualities. How can that which we
perceive be something imperceptible? And if we reflect on it, we shall
surely agree that it is so--by the thing we mean its qualities, and
apart from the qualities there is no thing. We must try, then, in some
other way to reach the reality.
What, we shall now ask, can it be that binds together these sense
qualities so that we speak of them as a thing? There are two elements
that seem to enter into everything whatever that comes into our
experience, and which it seems to us would remain if everything in the
universe were annihilated. These are space and time. Are they
reality? Here we are met with a new kind of difficulty. It was
possible to dismiss material substance as a false idea, an idea of
something whose existence is impossible; but space and time are
certainly not false ideas. The difficulty about them is that we cannot
make our thought of them consistent--they are ideas that contain a
self-contradiction, or at least that lead to a self-contradiction when
we affirm them of reality. With the ideas of space and time are
closely linked the ideas of change, of movement, of causation, of
quality and quantity, and all of these exhibit this same puzzling
characteristic, that they seem to make us affirm what we deny and deny
what we affirm. I might fill this little book with illustrations of
the paradoxes that are involved in these ordinary working ideas.
Everyone is familiar with the difficulty involved in the {34} idea of
time. We must think there was a beginning, and we cannot think that
there was any moment to which there was no before. So also with space,
it is an infinite extension which we can only think of as a beyond to
every limit. This receding limit of the infinitely extensible space
involves the character of infinite divisibility, for if there are an
infinite number of points from which straight lines can be drawn
without intersecting one another to any fixed point there is therefore
no smallest space that cannot be further divided. The contradictions
that follow from these demonstrable contents of the idea of space are
endless. The relation of time to space is another source of
contradictory ideas. I shall perhaps, however, best make the meaning
of this self-contradictory character of our ordinary ideas clear by
following out a definite illustration. What is known as the antinomy
of motion is probably familiar to everyone from the well-known paradox
of the Greek philosopher Zeno. The flying arrow, he said, does not
move, because if it did it would be in two places at one and the same
time, and that is impossible. I will now put this same paradox of
movement in a form which, so far as I know, it has not been presented
before. My illustration will involve the idea of causation as well as
that of movement. If we suppose a space to be fully occupied, we shall
agree that nothing within that space can move without thereby
displacing whatever occupies the position into which it moves. That is
to say, the movement of any occupant of one position must cause the
displacement of the occupant of the new position into which he moves.
But on the other hand it is equally clear that the displacement of the
occupant of the new position is a prior condition of the possibility of
the movement of {35} the mover, for nothing can move unless there is an
unoccupied place for it to move into, and there is no unoccupied place
unless it has been vacated by its occupant before the movement begins.
We have therefore the clear contradiction that a thing can only move
when something else which it causes to move has already moved. Now if
we reflect on it we shall see that this is exactly the position we
occupy in our three-dimensional space. The space which surrounds us is
occupied, and therefore we cannot move until a way is made clear for
us, and nothing makes way for us unless we move. We cannot move
through stone walls because we cannot displace solid matter, but we can
move through air and water because we are able to displace these. The
problem is the same. My movement displaces the air, but there is no
movement until the air is displaced. Can we escape the contradiction
by supposing the displacement is the cause and the movement the effect.
Are we, like people in a theatre queue, only able to move from behind
forward as the place is vacated for us in front? In that case we
should be driven to the incredible supposition that the original cause
or condition of our movement is the previous movement of something at
the outskirts of our occupied space, that this somewhat moving into the
void made possible the movement of the occupant of the space next
adjoining, and so on until after a lapse of time which may be ages,
which may indeed be infinite, the possibility of movement is opened to
us. In fact we must believe that the effect of our movement--namely,
the displacement of the previous occupants from the positions we occupy
in moving--happened before it was caused. Now it is impossible for us
to believe either of the only two alternatives--either that we do not
really move but only {36} appear to do so, or that the displacement our
movement causes really precedes the movement. When we meet with a
direct self-contradiction in our thoughts about anything, we can only
suppose that that about which we are thinking is in its nature
nonsensical, or else that our ideas about it are wrong.
It may perhaps be thought that the whole difficulty arises simply
because what we are trying to think consistently about is a reality
that is external to us. Space and time, movement, cause and effect are
ideas that apply to a world outside and independent of the mind that
tries to think it. May not this be the reason of our failure and the
whole explanation of the seeming contradiction? If we turn our
thoughts inward upon our own being and think of the self, the I, the
real subject of experience, then surely where thought is at home and
its object is mental not physical, we shall know reality. It is not
so. The same self-contradiction characterises our ideas when we try to
present the real object of inner perception as when we try to present
the real object of external perception. Not, of course, that it is
possible to doubt the reality of our own existence, but that we fail
altogether to express the meaning of the self we so surely know to
exist in any idea which does not fall into self-contradiction. As in
the case of the thing and its qualities, we think that there is
something distinct from the qualities in which they inhere and yet find
ourselves unable to present to the mind any consistent idea of such
thing, so we think that there must be some substance or basis of
personal identity, some real self which _has_ the successive changing
conscious states, which has the character which distinguishes our
actions as personal but which nevertheless _is_ not itself these
things. The self-contradiction {37} in the idea of self, or I, or
subject, is that it both cannot change and is always changing. As
unchanging, we distinguish it from our body, which is an external
object among other objects and is different from other objects only in
the more direct and intimate relation in which it stands to us. The
body is always changing; never for two successive moments is it exactly
the same combination of chemical elements. We distinguish also ourself
from that consciousness which is memory, the awareness of past
experience, from present feelings, desires, thoughts, and
strivings--these, we say, belong to the self but are not it. The self
must have qualities and dwell in the body, guiding, directing, and
controlling it, yet this self we never perceive, nor can we conceive
it, for our idea of it is of a reality that changes and is yet
unchangeable.
There is, however, one idea--an idea to which we have already
alluded--that seems to offer us an escape from the whole of this
logical difficulty, the idea that reality is unknowable. May not the
contradictoriness of our ideas be due to this fact, that our knowledge
is entirely of phenomena, of appearances of things, and not of things
as they are in themselves? By a thing-in-itself we do not mean a
reality that dwells apart in a universe of its own, out of any relation
whatever to our universe. There may or may not be such realities, and
whether there are or not is purely irrelevant to any question of the
nature of reality in our universe. The thing-in-itself is the
unknowable reality of the thing we know. We conceive it as existing in
complete abstraction from every aspect or relation of it that
constitutes knowledge of it in another. The self-contradiction of such
an idea is not difficult to show, quite apart from any consideration of
its utter futility as an {38} explanation. The thing-in-itself either
is or else it is not the reality of phenomena. If it is, then,
inasmuch as the phenomena reveal it, it is neither in-itself nor
unknowable. If, on the other hand, it is not, if it is unrelated in
any way to phenomena, then it is not only unknowable--it does not exist
to be known. It is an idea without any content or meaning, and
therefore indistinguishable from nothing. It is simply saying of one
and the same thing that it must be and that there is nothing that it
can be.
While, then, there is no actual thing that we experience, whether it be
an object outside of us or an object within us, of which we can say
this is not a phenomenon or appearance of reality but the actual
reality itself, we cannot also say that we do not know reality, because
if we had no idea, no criterion, of reality we could never know that
anything was only an appearance. It is this fact--the fact that we
undoubtedly possess, in the very process of thinking itself, a
criterion of reality--that the idealist argument lays hold of as the
basis of its doctrine. The mere fact seems, at first sight, barren and
unpromising enough, but the idealist does not find it so. Possessed of
this principle, logic, which has seemed till now purely destructive,
becomes in his hands creative, and gives form and meaning to an object
of pure reason.
The criterion of reality is self-consistency. We cannot think that
anything is ultimately real which has its ground of existence in
something else. A real thing is that which can be explained without
reference to some other thing. Reality, therefore, is completely
self-contained existence, not merely dependent existence.
Contradictions cannot be true. If we have to affirm a contradiction of
anything, it must be due to an {39} appearance, and the reality must
reconcile the contradiction. The idea of reality, therefore, is the
idea of perfect harmony. Knowing, then, what reality is, can we say
that there is any actual object of thought that conforms to it? And
have we in our limited experience anything that will guide us to the
attainment of this object? The idealist is confident that we have.
Some things seem to us to possess a far higher degree of reality than
others, just because they conform in a greater degree to this ideal of
harmonious existence. It is when we compare the reality of physical
things with the reality of mental things that the contrast is most
striking, and in it we have the clue to the nature of the higher
reality. Physical reality may seem, and indeed in a certain sense is,
the basis of existence, but when we try to think out the meaning of
physical reality, it becomes increasingly abstract, and we seem unable
to set any actual limit to prevent it dissipating into nothing. In
physical science we never have before us an actual element, either
matter or energy, in which we can recognise, however far below the
limit of perceivability, the ultimate stuff of which the universe is
composed. Science has simply to arrest the dissipation by boldly
assuming a matter that is the substance and foundation of reality and
an energy that is the ultimate cause of the evolution of the universe.
On the other hand, when we consider mental existence, the pursuit of
reality is in an exactly contrary direction. There, the more concrete,
the more comprehensive, the more individual a thing is, the greater
degree of reality it seems to have. In the spiritual realm, by which
we mean, not some supposed supra-mundane sphere, but the world of
values, the world in which ideas have reality, in which we live our
rational life, reality is always sought in a {40} higher and higher
individuality. The principle of individuality is that the whole is
more real than the parts. An individual human being, for example, is a
whole, an indivisible organic unity, not merely an aggregation of
physiological organs with special functions, nor are these a mere
collection of special cells, nor these a mere concourse of chemical
elements. The State as a community is an individual organic unity with
a reality that is more than the mere total of the reality of individual
citizens who compose it. It is this principle of individuality that is
the true criterion of reality. It is this principle that, while it
leads us to seek the unity in an individuality ever higher and more
complete than we have attained, at the same time explains the
discrepancy of our partial view, explains contradictions as the
necessary result of the effort to understand the parts in independence
of the whole which gives to them their reality. Thus, while on the one
hand the scientific search for reality is ever towards greater
simplicity and abstractness, a simplicity whose ideal limit is zero,
the philosophical search for reality is ever towards greater
concreteness, towards full comprehensiveness, and its ideal limit is
the whole universe as one perfect and completely harmonious individual.
This idea of full reality is the Absolute. There are not two
realities, one material and the other spiritual; the material and the
spiritual are two directions in which we may seek the one reality, but
there is only one pathway by which we shall find it.
The Absolute is the whole universe not in its aspect of an aggregate of
infinitely diverse separate elements, whether these are material or
spiritual, but in its aspect of an individual whole and in its nature
as a whole. This nature of the whole is to be individual--only in {41}
the individual are contradictions reconciled. Is the Absolute more
than an idea? Does it actually exist? Clearly we cannot claim to know
it by direct experience, by acquaintance; it is not a _that_ of which
we can ask _what_? It is the object of reason itself, therefore we
know that it must be. Also we know that it can be; it is a possible
object in the logical meaning that it is not a self-contradictory idea,
like every other idea that we can have. It is not self-contradictory,
for it is itself the idea of that which is consistent. Therefore,
argues the idealist, it is, for that which must be, and can be, surely
exists. The reader will now understand why I introduced this account
of the Absolute with a description for comparison of the St. Anselm
proof of the existence of God.
There is one further question. Whether the Absolute does or does not
exist, is it, either in idea or reality, of any use to us? The reply
is that its value lies in this, that it reveals to us the nature of
reality and the meaning of truth. Logic is the creative power of
thought which leads us to the discovery of higher and higher degrees of
reality. The Satyr, in the fable, drove his guest from his shelter
because the man blew into his hands to warm them, and into his porridge
to cool it. The Satyr could not reconcile the contradiction that one
could with the same breath blow hot and cold. Nor would he reconcile
it ever, so long as he sought truth as correspondence. Truth would
have shown the facts coherent by reconciling the contradiction in a
higher reality.
{42}