The proposition that things in themselves are unknowable finds a strong
argument in the statement that we can know relations only, that all
knowledge is relative. It is undoubtedly true that all knowledge is
relative and knowledge is a knowledge of relations. But what is a
relation? When I once proposed this question, I was answered:
“A relation is the connection between two things; it is that
something in which the one stands to the other, in short, it is
the betwixtness of things.”
This is exactly what a relation is not. From such a definition of
relation agnosticism will necessarily follow. It is a misstatement of
the case, and when we come to follow out the idea, we shall be led into
inextricable contradictions, and unless we revise the whole argument, we
shall have to confess that we are at our wit’s end.
The question, what is a relation? was one of the issues between the
two great mediæval schools of philosophy, the Nominalists and the
Realists.[45] The Nominalists answered: “A relation is a mere product of
the mind,” while the Realists declared that “a relation without which the
thing cannot be, is in the thing.”
Both schools relied upon Aristotle’s authority. Aristotle had declared
that matter is mere possibility of existence (it is δυνάμει ὄν) and form
is that which makes it real, the formal is the real, form is existence
or being (οὐσία). The metal of a statue, Aristotle says, is its matter,
the idea of the statue is its form, both together make the real statue.
The metal having had another form before, did not exist with the inherent
purpose of being this metal of the statue. The metal is the mere
potentiality of becoming a statue.[46] Hence, says Aristotle, not the
matter but the form constitutes the reality of the statue, the form is
that which is real, or that which makes actual, ἐνεργείᾳ ὄν, it is the
being in completeness or actuality, ἐνετλεχείᾳ ὄν, i. e. that which makes
a thing exist in its purpose (ἐν τέλει ἔχειν). If the formal alone is and
makes real, relations must be real. This is in favor of the Realists.
Yet Aristotle’s philosophy is not in every respect clearly worked out.
In fact there are two Aristotles, the one being a Platonist, the other
a naturalist, the one believing in universals, the other investigating
concrete things and taking individuals as real beings. But both
Aristotles and with them both parties of the schoolmen had no clear
conception of the nature of ideas, what they are, and what they purport,
and how we can discriminate between their subjective and objective
elements. Ideas have a meaning. Is their meaning purely mental or has it
an objective value? We say that it has.
The same Aristotle who considered the formal as that which makes real,
denied the objective existence of relations. He said that such qualities
as greater, or smaller, double or half, indeed all relations (the πρός τι
of things) did not belong to the things, but were added to them by the
thinking subject. Ergo relations are mere products of the mind, they have
no objective value. This was in favor of the Nominalists.
Now it is true that some relations are purely mental in so far as the
comparison upon which they rest is purely imaginary. An answer to the
question, Who was the greater, Alexander or Cæsar? depends upon the
standard of measurement which we create for the special purpose. Some
such relations have no objective value, they are not facts but a play of
imagination dependent on the recognition of the standard of measurement.
But how is it, if we express the relation between the gravity of a stone
and the whole mass of the earth as it manifests itself in the stone’s
fall? Is that also a mere product of the mind? Certainly Newton’s laws
describing gravitation in exact and mathematical formulas are a product
of the mind, but this product of the mind has an objective value, it has
a meaning, it describes facts, and these facts are certain relations
between certain things.
* * * * *
The fault of the modern misconception of relativity lies in the
assumption that the two or more things are considered as things in
themselves. We are apt to consider the gravity of two masses, of a stone
and of the earth, as a relation between two independent things. Here is
the stone and there is the earth and the relation is considered as some
third item, being the connection in which the one stands to the other.
In reality there are not two things and, in addition to them a
betweenness of the two things. The world is not a sum of things, not even
a system of things, but a whole indivisible entirety and what we call
things are abstractions which serve special purposes in the household of
cognition. All things consist as it were of innumerable relations to all
other things. When we abstract one special process which takes place in
the province of what we are wont to call _two_ things, we have to deal
with a relation.
There are no relations of themselves and there are no things of
themselves. Relations describe certain features of reality obtaining
between what we call two or more things, and in this description all
other features of which the real things consist are purposely omitted.
There is no quality of things but it is at the same time a quality of
relation. Every quality of a thing characterises it under a certain
condition; it appears as an effect upon something and thus it is actual
as a relation. Cognition analyses things into bundles of relations and
all these relations together make up the things.
The modern idea that we can know relations only and that there are
things in themselves which are unknowable is an old error inherited
from mediæval scholasticism, and its roots can be traced back to the
philosophy of Aristotle. The difficulty disappears as soon as we
consider the whole world (ourselves included) as an interacting whole,
and that the conceptions “things” and “relations” have been invented
for describing certain of its parts and certain of its interactions or
interconnections.
If we push the idea of things in themselves to the ultimate extreme
we arrive at the atomistic conception of the universe. _Atoms are the
things in themselves reduced to the point system._ If we consider the
world as a heap of innumerable atoms, we are at a loss how to explain
the interaction among these atoms. The atomist universalises the
substance-abstraction and will be disappointed afterwards not to be able
to deduce from his universalisation other qualities which are found in
reality, such as the relations of things, their interconnections, their
spontaneity of motion, the life of organised beings, and the mind of
thinking creatures.
Ideas are symbols and symbols have a meaning. The whole realm of
mental representations may be viewed in their symbolism or in their
significance. Considering their symbolism, ideas of things as well as of
relations, are products of the mind, considering their meaning, ideas
represent realities; in other words: their contents or that which they
signify is real.
It appears that neither Nominalism nor Realism is right; yet if we
stretch them only a little, if we are allowed to interpret them in the
light of a monistic world-conception, both are right. They cease to
be contradictory and become complementary. Universals are real, say
the Realists, i. e. the forms and relations of things are actualities.
Universals are names, say the Nominalists, i. e. the relations and forms
in which we describe the world are mental symbols.
The Realists had the misfortune to defeat the Nominalists entirely,
and thus had a chance to insist upon being right in every respect. All
opposition having ceased, the errors of Realism grew in extraordinary
exuberance. Nominalism in the mean time raised its head in opposition to
the recognised authority of the church as well as the schools, slowly
yet powerfully and irresistibly. The errors and the tyranny of Realism
gave strength to the Nominalistic movement which reached its height in
Kant’s philosophy. The Realists had gone to the extreme of declaring
that universals were things, real substances, independent of single and
concrete objects, and the Nominalists on the other hand, represented
by Kant, went so far as to declare that all relations, time and space
included were _mere_ products of the mind.
If the relations are mere products of the mind, all knowledge being
a knowledge of relations, knowledge becomes impossible. That last
consequence was drawn by Kant and is emphatically insisted upon by
agnosticism.
There is but one world-conception that can dispense with these
conclusions: it is that View which conceives of the All as a whole; and
of knowledge as a description of its parts, qualities, and relations,
ever mindful on the one hand that the parts are parts, that qualities
and relations are certain features only, not entire realities, or
isolated entities, and that the symbols thereof frequently overlap each
other; on the other hand that there is nothing absolute,[47] and that
there are no things in themselves.
The relativity of knowledge, whether we conceive of it as the relativity
of the object to the subject in general or as an appreciation of the fact
that all knowledge gives and can give information of relations only, does
not lead to the conclusion that knowledge is impossible. Relativity is a
fundamental feature of knowledge, and we shall understand that it must be
so if we consider that reality itself is a great system of relations.
* * * * *
The interconnection of all things with all things appears to be so
complete, that if we intended to explain or understand one single fact
fully and exhaustively in all its relations, past, present, and future,
we should be obliged to give a complete description of the universe. Says
Tennyson:
“Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;—
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.”
We might address in the same way anything else, an atom of hydrogen, a
grain of sand as well as the sun, the action of a tiny speck of irritable
protoplasm as well as the soul of man.