In modern thought, ever since Descartes introduced into the conception
of all-comprising nature that perplexing distinction between thinking
and extended substance, the problem of reconciling so radical a dualism
has formed the main task of those who have busied themselves with
philosophical interpretation.
In the light of the Cartesian system there seemed to exist two entirely
disparate, independent worlds; the one in individual consciousness, the
other outside of it; the one made of mental, the other of material stuff.
How to conceive these two antithetical worlds, as interdependent
constituents of one and the same unitary nature is, after many discarded
attempts, still the principal endeavor of systematic thinking.
Every student of philosophy knows how Descartes himself ascribed the
evident concordance and intercommunication of the two worlds to the
miraculous decree and intervention of the Deity; how Spinoza sought to
overcome the distracting dilemma by proving that the two substances are
but attributes of one single absolute substance; how Leibnitz made both
realms, that of inwardness and that of outwardness, form a consistent
universe and keep consonant time by means of a divinely pre-established
harmony; and how numbers of less illustrious devices likewise failed to
gain general acceptance.
A more important part in the development of modern thought was played by
those other attempts, which strove to reach a monistic interpretation
by showing that nature in all its manifestations is constituted, either
solely by mind and its original endowments; or, on the contrary, solely
by matter and its original endowments. Thinkers versed in physical
science felt inclined to look upon the material world as the matrix of
all natural occurrences; while those versed in psychical science were apt
to conceive the mental world as containing within itself all there is of
nature.
The physical hypothesis has proved its eminent efficiency by leading to
a vastly more correct and faithful knowledge of the perceptible universe
than had ever been previously attained.
Still, from the psychical standpoint it became nevertheless evident
beyond contention, that all so-called qualities of matter, all that
in any way enters into our perception of it, is composed of nothing
but mental constituents. And this means simply, that, whatever we
are actually conscious of, must of necessity form part of our own
consciousness, and not of anything outside of it.
As to the truth of this fundamental psychological conception there is no
longer any dispute among philosophers. But there remains to be solved
the all-important question, whether or not there exists outside this
consciousness of ours, either beyond its peripheral, perceptual range,
or beyond its central, conceptual sphere, another world which it merely
symbolically reveals. And in case such another extra-conscious world is
found actually to exist, how it comes to constitute, together with the
world of consciousness, that unitary system of being of which we mentally
and bodily seem to form part.
Professor Dewey in a series of articles in _Mind_ (Nos. 41, 42, 49,
57) and in one recently published in this journal (Vol. II, No. 1)
advocates—more profoundly and consistently than has been done before
by any Neo-Kantian or Neo-Hegelian—the view, that consciousness itself
intuits all phenomena of nature by force of its own intrinsic activity,
imparting to them their significance as knowledge by discriminating
their specific position and value within its own all-comprising organic
totality of being. He believes thus in no other world than that of
self-consciousness; asserting that neither its perceptual nor its
conceptual content are significative of any reality beyond.
The editor, though an ardent defender of cosmic Monism, is by no
means a convert to such purely psychical monism. He maintains, on the
contrary, in the same issue of _The Monist_ (p. 85), that, “The mental
picture of a tree becomes a symbol for a special object outside of us,
and is projected to the place where experience has taught us to expect
that object.” Consequently, the mental picture refers as knowledge
to something outside of us, to something not forming part of our
consciousness.
The present writer believes likewise, that the perceptual tree is merely
a mental symbol signalising an extra-mental, sense-stimulating existent;
and that the value of this symbol as knowledge consists altogether in
its implication of the existence of an entity subsisting outside our own
being and its consciousness, and having power to affect our sensibility
in definite more or less recognised ways.
The editor and the present writer assert then, that the content of
perceptual consciousness forms merely a symbolical representation of a
corresponding reality subsisting outside consciousness; while Professor
Dewey acknowledges as really existent only self-consciousness, and
nothing outside of it, either peripherically stimulating the senses, or
centrally imparting universality to individual intelligence.
The former view frankly admits duality in nature, so far as conscious
and extra-conscious existence are concerned. And in order to overcome
this dualism of _ordo idearum_ and _ordo rerum_—essentially the same
dualism as bequeathed to us by Descartes—it has to show how the world
within consciousness with its “mental picture,” and the world “outside of
us” containing the existent symbolically represented; how these totally
disparate worlds come to constitute a unitary nature, whose divers modes
of existence are throughout interdependently connected.
It is clear that the reality symbolised by the “mental picture”—if any
such reality actually exists—can be known to us solely as thus mentally
symbolised, and not known to us in any way as it subsists extra-mentally
“outside of us,” as it subsists in itself when not thus symbolically
represented by our casual and intermittent perception of it.
The mental picture being a mere representative symbol must needs differ
_toto genere_ from the non-mental existent symbolised thereby. We know
only what as mental representation is forming part of our consciousness.
We cannot possibly know anything we are not conscious of. The entity
“outside of us,” the “thing in itself”—if it at all exists—is therefore
as such of necessity unknown to us. This confession of ontological
ignorance is unavoidably involved in the acceptance of a symbolised
reality “outside of us.”
The complex and prodigious difficulties in the way of a monistic
interpretation, when we start with the dualistic presupposition of a
conscious and an extra-conscious world, are all effectively circumvented,
as soon as with Professor Dewey we deny altogether the existence of a
world of “things-in-themselves” or sense-affecting existents, and roundly
assert that consciousness as such constitutes, comprises, and has direct
knowledge of ultimate reality; that it is in fact itself the absolute
all-sufficient and all-efficient entity.
To understand the philosophical strength and influence of a position so
strangely at variance with that of current common sense, which holds as
self-evident the existence of body as well as mind, we have somewhat to
probe its deep-laid foundations in the history of modern thought.
It was rendered plausible through Descartes’s, Locke’s, Berkeley’s, and
Hume’s philosophical argumentation, that what we are consciously aware
of, what is actually present to us as perception or “idea,” and therewith
as the world at large, is altogether made up of a more or less complex
combination of our own actual and remembered sensations.
The conscious content itself was thus necessarily held to constitute
the exclusive object of philosophical research. And by starting with
sensations as its primordial elements, and taking all “ideas,” or facts
of memory, to be but faint reproductions of such elements, it became the
task of investigators “of the human mind” to analyse the given content of
consciousness into these its assumed elements, and to discover the “laws”
or general ways of their combination.
Proud of its purely experiential method, concerned about nothing but what
is actually found present in consciousness, this mode of philosophising
disclaimed, in consequence, all knowledge of any “power” giving rise
from without to sensorial “impressions” and their order of conscious
emergence. And it ignored likewise the existence of any “power” combining
and systematising them from within; and, moreover, of any entity for whom
the sensorially constituted experience had intelligent significance.
Such nominalistic, sensorial idealism has until lately reigned supreme
in English philosophy. Previous to the new departure introduced by it
philosophical interpretation had always followed the method of conceptual
evolution, carried on according to the rules of formal or deductive
logic. It took some widely inclusive, ready-made concepts as its starting
points or major premises, and extracted therefrom all knowledge that
seemed to be implicitly contained in them.
Even Kant in his younger days had no idea that valid knowledge or
truth could possibly be attained in any other way than by logically
deducing it from ready-made premises. At a later period he learned from
Hume to distinguish between what he termed analytical and synthetical
propositions, and what had been called by the former thinker connection
between vivid impressions or matter of fact on the one side, and
connection between their faint copies or the so-called ideas on the other
side.
The discovery on the part of Kant, that our knowledge of the actual
connection of matters of facts has in every instance to be learned from
direct experience and cannot be ratiocinatively deduced from ready-made
general notions, was a complete revelation to him. It changed his entire
way of thinking, and became the starting-point of his system of critical
or transcendental philosophy. He saw clearly, that, if all instructive
cognition is gained, and has always been gained, solely by means of
actual experience, if it has been synthetically built up bit by bit as
directly given to us, without our being able to construct a valid system
of knowledge transcending in any way actual experience; that reason then
as a knowledge-constituting faculty is impotent, and that metaphysics,
as the science of a realm of intelligible existence, must be ever more
rejected as a pure illusion.
Kant’s thought, like that of most of our own rationalistic thinkers, was
however predominantly swayed by the belief in an intelligible world,
the veritable home of man’s spiritual being, where it eternally abideth
in close communion with a supreme creative intelligence. After a brief
attack of Humian scepticism, the theologically trained, though rationally
wide-awake and profound thinker, set out to examine the faculties of
reason with a view to discover a philosophically legitimate ingress
into that cherished realm of intelligible subsistence. Hitherto reason
had been effectively used in philosophy only as an analytic instrument.
Real knowledge being, however, as proved by Hume, a matter of synthesis,
it would evidently be making proper way toward a rationally conceived
intelligible world, if it could be proved that reason is itself in
possession of synthetical powers.
After many years of profound meditation in this direction, Kant gave
its results to the philosophical world. He had become convinced that
mathematical truth, instead of being analytically derived as hitherto
believed, is on the contrary built up synthetically by intelligence
itself, and this without the aid of externally imparted experience; that
intelligence is therefore efficient to form synthetical propositions _a
priori_. It followed, as a matter of course, that time and space in which
mathematical figurations take shape, are not conditions of existence
outside of us, but original forms of our own perceptive faculty, and that
intelligence by dint of its synthetical powers constructs mathematical
figurations within these perceptual forms. And finally the conclusion
was reached that time and space, the empty forms of perception,
being themselves wholly deficient of any kind of activity, it must
be intelligence alone which possesses synthetical efficiency, which
exercises in fact whatever activity is operative in the conscious world.
But though Kant enthroned intelligence as the creator of pure
mathematics, and endowed it with the exclusive gift of synthetical
efficiency, he did not see his way to constitute it also the creator of
the sense-given material that comes experientially to fill the empty and
passive forms of perception. Against all denunciations of his system as
purely idealistic, he insisted that there exists outside our being and
its consciousness a world of things-in-themselves, having power to affect
our sensibility, so that time and space, its receptive forms, become
filled with experiential, though wholly unsynthetised material.
Reluctantly, though in faithful adherence to the unbiassed results of
his investigation, he was at last led to declare that intelligence or
reason as an instrument of knowledge—called by him theoretical reason in
contradistinction to practical reason, conceived as the leading principle
of moral conduct;—that such theoretical reason has power only over
sensorially given material, and is incapable of attaining knowledge of
the intelligible sphere.
Still Kant regarded his so-called categories or synthetical functions
of reason as modes of activity, belonging not only to individual
reason, but to reason in general. And on the strength of this realistic
generalisation he attributed to them the power of imparting necessity to
synthetical propositions, such propositions—otherwise merely subjective
or empirical—being rendered thereby objective or universally valid.
He showed, moreover, that the relation of every kind of knowledge
to a common centre of all-inclusive awareness,—that this “synthetic
unity of apperception” as he called it,—presupposes an intelligible
ego, whose veritable nature becomes however nowise manifest within
our time-and-space-conditioned experience. And he taught that an
all-comprehending intelligible being had to be hypostatised in order to
complete the totality of rational knowledge.
Thus, instead of giving us a monistic philosophy, Kant’s theoretical
speculations disclosed, on the contrary, a tripartite world. At the
centre the non-manifest intelligible ego in communion with a supernatural
sphere, and conceived as the veritable bearer of the synthetical reason.
In the median and only known region the synthetical reason itself,
constructing and cognising nature, by synthetically elaborating the
chaotic manifold in time and space. And at the periphery, beyond our own
being and its perception, an unknowable realm of things-in-themselves
affecting our sensibility.
So complex an appearance did existence assume under Kant’s critical
inspection. Contemplative man, however, never ceases to hanker after a
monistic world-conception. Though individualised, he feels himself one
with universal being, and strenuously strives to understand how those
bonds of union are established, and what part he in verity is playing in
this stupendous drama of being and becoming.
To most philosophers, before Kant, knowledge seemed to be given to us
ready-made, first conceptually as innate ideas or universal notions; and
then perceptually as the finished image of an outside world.
Kant has exerted, and still exerts, a controlling influence over
thinkers by having systematically demonstrated, that not only knowledge,
but nature itself as we know it, is constructed by powers inherent in
our own being. He taught that we ourselves, by force of our combining
and ordering intellectual organisation, fashion out of meaningless
sense-material the wondrous world we know. And, moreover, that by force
of our intelligible being we have power to bend the otherwise rigorously
mechanical course of nature in compliance with moral injunctions.
No wonder that so inspiriting a philosophy electrified to new vigor and
valiant self-reliance the dogmatically slumbering life of German thought.
And it was Fichte, above all other followers of Kant, who by his fervent
exposition kindled in crowds of hearers the vivifying spark of this “new
philosophy” of all-efficient intelligence.
Fichte is the real father of such psychical monism as has recently found
so proficient an expounder in Professor Dewey. Fichte understood, what
Kant failed to see, that the “dynamical idealism” of nature-constituting
reason involves, not merely the _elaboration_ of sense-given material,
but the _out and out production_ within consciousness of the entire
world of perception. For perception undeniably takes place within our
own being, and must therefore be, as regards matter as well as form, the
outcome of powers inherent in ourselves. Between a consistent dream and
the apperception of reality the difference lies merely in our feeling, in
the latter instance, compelled in a peculiar manner to perceive what we
perceive. But this feeling of compulsion is likewise a constituent of our
own consciousness, and, moreover, under the influence of hallucinations
even this test of reality fails us.
According to Fichte’s matured thought, our being consists altogether
in intellectual activity, an activity rendering explicit by means of
self-consciousness what it already implicitly contains. And it is
universal being that becomes thus self-conscious in us. Infinite reason,
constituting a system of ideas, a spiritual organisation, is the fount
and origin of all existence, its own self-revelation becoming manifest in
finite beings.
Thus, by force of logical consistency, was eliminated from Kantian
transcendentalism the world of things-in-themselves as superfluous
to all-constituting intelligence. And the unification of individual
self-consciousness with universal intelligence was established
by considering individual self-consciousness as partaking in the
self-revealing activity of universal intelligence.
Hegel elaborated systematically the psychical or idealistic monism thus
foreshadowed in Fichte’s later writings. Philosophical interpretation
turns principally upon the source and import of consciousness. And from
the recognition of the fact, that all constituents of perception form
part of this consciousness of ours, it obviously follows that objects,
and indeed the entire objective world realised in perception and solely
as perception; that the realisation of this entire world of perceptual
objects is in verity realisation of a world contained in our own being or
subject. Subject and object are therefore, from this point of view, at
bottom identical; the objective world—our human bodies included—being a
self-revelation of our all-comprehending subject. Mind as well as matter,
that which we call mental and that which we call material, are thus mere
abstract terms denoting the subjective and objective sides of one and the
same reality.
This reality transcendental idealism declares to be “intellectual
activity.” It is intellectual activity which—from its point of view—is
revealing itself in the conscious content, becoming thus self-conscious.
This process of recognition of one’s self as subject-object, as the
unitary essence and completion of both, is what Hegel calls the “Idea.”
And with him theoretical or logical self-recognition and practical
or ethical self-realization coincide as “Absolute Idea.” For to think
absolute truth and to will its realisation are but two sides of one and
the same activity. Thought, intelligence, reason, knowing itself as in
every sense veritable being is thus the absolute One and All.
Such out and out psychical monism is the legitimate outcome of a
conception which takes the content of consciousness to be ultimate
reality, signifying nothing beyond itself; and which then constitutes a
spiritually conceived entity, called thought, intelligence, or reason, as
the originator and bearer of such consciousness.
After a period of glorious triumph the Hegelian philosophy of
self-evolving intelligence became a general laughing-stock at home and
abroad. This ignominious fate overtook it, first in consequence of its
fawning prostitution by the master himself to the reactionary service
of Church and State; and then also in consequence of the ridiculous
“pyrotechnical” abuse of its dialectical method by the “Young-Hegelians.”
However, by “going back to Kant,” the teachings of transcendental
idealism have in our time once more gained the ascendency, and have
succeeded not only in conquering materialism, but also in invading and
almost supplanting English experientialism.
In Germany, after a season of complete estrangement between science and
philosophy, a re-approachment was effected by the Neo-Kantian movement.
It originated principally in the recognition on the part of science, that
sense-perception is above all a psychical and not a purely physiological
process, a mental not a material fact; that therefore the effort to
arrive at a correct “theory of knowledge” is by no means a vain endeavor,
and that psychics as well as physics deserves a place in the hierarchy of
sciences.
In England and America the Neo-Kantian movement owed, on the other hand,
its success, above all, to such theistic rationalism as found popular
expression in “Robert Elsmere.” In Professor Caird’s words it is said
to afford a means for the “vindication of the religious consciousness.”
And this it accomplishes “by an objective or absolute synthesis,”
which establishes “the indivisible unity of the intelligence and the
intelligible world,” “the unity of man as spiritual with an absolute
spirit.”
Dr. Hutchison Sterling’s “Secret of Hegel” gave the first effective
impulse to this transcendental mode of thinking among university men
of a speculative turn. The late Thomas Hill Green of Oxford and Prof.
Edward Caird of Glasgow became its foremost exponents, and made numerous
converts. The former by elaborately disclosing, by force of Kant’s
principle of synthetical reason, the insufficiency of the sensorial
experientialism generally accepted in England since Locke’s “Essay
Concerning Human Understanding.” The latter by consistently developing
the idealistic and transcendental implications of this same principle of
synthetical reason.
As repeatedly noticed, and never to be lost sight of, transcendental
idealism derives its convincing force from the undeniable truth, that
whatever we are directly aware of forms part of our own consciousness.
This involves the indivisible unity of such fact as we are directly
conscious of and the faculty through which we are conscious of it. This
unity of the realising self and the realised world, of object and subject
as content of consciousness; or rather the unity of the objective and
subjective factors of it, this subject-object oneness of conscious states
and occurrences is an irrefutable truth, from which one has to start,
whatever direction one may take. You assert, then, that that which exists
thus interblended as consciousness is itself ultimate reality, and you
will encounter but little difficulty in deducing therefrom a pretty
plausible psychical monism. For the power through which and as which
this ultimate reality exists is then immanent in us individually. And
when this power is conceived as intelligence or spirit, and the world
at large as existing solely as content of this spirit’s consciousness,
or indeed as such consciousness itself, it is clear that our own
self-and-world-awareness must be—according to this view—identical in
essence with the spiritual power which is ultimate and universal Reality.
In self-consciousness, when regarded as a totality of all actual and
potential awareness, our feelings as well as the perceptual objects
composed of them constitute an organically completed order. They all
stand in definite and interdependent relations to our unitary being.
This all-comprising being has time and space as modes of gradual
self-realisation, but is not—according to transcendentalism—itself in
time and space. And this is undeniably true, so far at least as the being
that combines all transient events of experience into a unitary system
of permanent knowledge cannot possibly itself form part of the ephemeral
flux of conscious states experienced by it.
Still the multifold individuations of the ultimate reality into
separate personal self-consciousnesses and deciduous bodily organisms
forms the great, if not insuperable, obstacle in the way of psychical
monism. If, on the one hand, we take with Green and Professor Caird
individual self-consciousness as a “reproduction,” and not as a mere
phase of universal consciousness; and on the other hand admit a natural
and gradual development “of man as an animal organism,” instead of
proving such natural development to be a misconception of our time
and space bound recognition, we are far from having as yet succeeded
in establishing a consistent psychical monism on Kantian lines. His
tripartite world remains ununified.
To achieve its unification is, however, after a profound study and
appreciation of the difficulties to be encountered, the arduous task
Professor Dewey has courageously undertaken. To accomplish his purpose
he has to show how individual consciousness proves itself to be ultimate
reality, and as such identical with universal consciousness; how man,
appearing among other perceptible objects in multifold individuated
specimens as a gradually developed organism, is nevertheless in reality a
complete, all-comprising entity, not essentially subject to time, space,
or numerical limitations. And he has to make clear how all conscious
content, including the external world as well as the feeling and thinking
subject, has no other existence and significance than in and for
consciousness.
Professor Dewey maintains that individual consciousness is in reality
one with universal consciousness, because it comprehends within itself
subject-and-object-consciousness; the abiding consciousness of oneself
as an ever-changing individual, and that of the world at large, though
figured in transient groups of sensations. This being so, that which
is thus the bearer and realiser of all being and becoming in nature,
cannot itself form part of this becoming, but must—according to
Professor Dewey’s view—be eternal and absolute. The all-comprehending
consciousness—and there is no existence outside of it—is thus identical
with universal intelligence, identical with that eternally active
intelligence which is everlastingly creating the organic synthesis of all
being and becoming.
“Consciousness the ultimate fact reveals itself as reason.” Sensations
have no self-existence, no meaning in themselves. They exist only as
intellectually apprehended and for intelligence alone. It is from
intellectual interpretation that they receive their entire significance.
On solicitation of sensations the ideal content of universal intelligence
becomes partially and interruptedly revealed to individual consciousness.
The sole office of sensations is to give in us occasion to this
self-realisation of the eternal content of intelligence.
Professor Dewey establishes his psychical monism by discovering
self-consciousness as the Absolute, the One and All. Individual idealism
or so-called solipsism, such as expounded by Fichte in his earlier
writings from the side of intellect, and in the writings of English
experientialists from the side of sensation, this individual idealism
presents itself likewise as a psychical monism, but as an absurdly narrow
one. Professor Dewey points out how it fails to understand that by
constituting mind, as such, the ego or subject for which all experience
exists, it artificially divides our unitary consciousness into two
separate constituents, and takes the subjective constituent to be the
bearer and realiser of the objective constituent; while in reality both
constituents are but elements of consciousness in general; are in fact
completely unified in eternal and absolute consciousness.
Now it is perfectly true, that during conscious awareness object and
subject-consciousness are inextricably interblended so as to constitute
a unified experience. It is true also, that the veritable subject that
thus consciously experiences, and that furthermore imparts intelligent
meaning to such experience, cannot itself form part of these its own
fragmentary and transient moments of awareness. Comprehending them all,
it must evidently be an enduring, at least a relatively persistent being.
It is undoubtedly to such a persistent being or subject that experience
gradually accrues, and in whom it is all retained and organised into more
or less systematic order.
But is there the least warrant for assuming that this persistent subject,
weaving thus intelligent experience out of its transient conscious
states, is itself “consciousness” or “intelligence”?
Intelligent consciousness is very obviously only one of the functions
of the persistent subject, and by no means its being or essence. And
the experience accruing to it, that at least of the external world,
bears nowise the characteristics of Platonic reminiscence, does nowise
consist in self-revelation, in the becoming explicitly aware of what
already implicitly existed within itself. We may indeed say, that our
emotions, when aroused, constitute such self-revelation. But, for
instance, yonder visual figuration, consisting of nothing but colored
forms, though intelligently interpreted as a landscape with plains,
woods, and creeks; interpreted thus by the aid of no end of former
experience; this landscape now perceived by me for the first time was
certainly not implicitly immanent in my consciousness previous to all
my individual experience. Its conscious realisation does assuredly not
render explicit as objective experience what for ever has been an organic
member of my self-consciousness. What is immanent in my being—not in my
consciousness—is the sensorial faculty of symbolically picturing whatever
sense-affecting agent is placed before me. The conscious picture itself
is an evanescent phenomenon, having no steadfast existence or reality.
To assert—as is usually done by transcendentalists and by Professor Dewey
among them—that our individual experience, when—as mostly occurs—not
actually conscious to ourselves, exists then nevertheless as conscious
content of a universal being; to venture such an utterly gratuitous
assertion, even when merely hypothetically advanced, transcends all
legitimate inference from given facts. When declared to be positively
justified by given facts, it all too obviously betrays the theological
bias by which it is inspired, the set purpose of vindicating the
religious consciousness which has faith in “the unity of man as spiritual
with an absolute spirit.”
Through consciousness we indeed become aware of the divers faculties
of our being, together with their functionally accruing experience.
All this, however, rises into conscious awareness only at times, when
casually awakened. To give to the vast system of consciously latent being
and experience the name of “consciousness,” to call that “consciousness”
whose principal distinction is to constitute a persistent subject
with an organised system of experience abiding for the most part in
extra-conscious latency; to do this only because all this extra-conscious
existence may and does at times become more or less conscious; this is
surely committing the fatal error of denoting a state of things by its
outright opposite.
There is no denying that most of the content of our being is usually
not present in consciousness. Consequently, abiding thus outside
consciousness, it cannot possibly form part of consciousness either
individual or universal.
Nothing could be more to the point than Professor Dewey’s statement,
that “only a living actual fact (let us say existent instead of fact)
can preserve within its unity that organic system of differences in
virtue of which it lives and moves and has its being.” There is not the
least doubt that the subject, who at times is conscious of more or less
of his experience, is exactly such an existent as here described. But
consciousness, though the medium in which and through which everything
is realised, is itself but an intermittent function of that living
actual subject which preserves within its unity the organic system of
differences in virtue of which it lives and moves and has its being. The
consciousness of the subject conveys information to it only interruptedly
and in broken bits. These become organically unified into a more or less
consistent totality of experience. But this process of unification takes
place, not in the dream like stuff which makes up consciousness, but in
the persistent, extra-conscious matrix whence our ever lapsing, ever
renewed moment of conscious awareness emerges ready-made.
The subject capable of thought and feeling becomes thinkingly and
feelingly manifest to _itself_, when its functions through which
consciousness arises are in operation; becomes manifest as bodily active
to _other sentient beings also_, when its functions through which such
activity arises are in operation.
But if the real nature of the experiencing subject is not
self-consciousness or intelligence, what then can it be?
Idealists, and with them Professor Dewey, become such by believing that
the perceptually realised objects are themselves veritable reality,
and not mere symbols of extra-conscious reality. Now can they in all
sincerity bring themselves to believe that a baby—to use one of Professor
Dewey’s illustrations—which experiences a sensation, say a pain caused
by the prick of a pin, that this pain-experiencing baby is no other
than that colored form within the perceptual consciousness of may be
half a dozen spectators; and that it is the perceptual pin within the
consciousness of each of them that has pricked the baby and caused the
pain?
Does the pain-experiencing baby derive its existence from the fact that
the intellect of the spectator interprets the perceptual form within his
consciousness to signify a baby, which has forever implicitly formed part
of the organic content of his own self-consciousness?
Surely the pain experienced by the baby is not experienced by the
perceptually realised baby, not by the baby existing as interpreted
perception in the consciousness of him who perceives it. The pain
experienced by the baby does nowise form part of the consciousness
of the perceiver. Consequently and incontestably, the subject that
experiences the sensation, that experiences in fact any kind of feeling
or thought, is itself an extra-conscious being, a being only casually and
symbolically realised in consciousness.
And if the perceptual baby is merely a conscious symbol signalising
an extra-conscious existent, then all perceptual existence, all that
constitutes what we perceptually realise as nature, symbolises likewise
an extra-conscious reality, a reality that has power so to affect our
sensibility as to arouse in us perceptual representations of itself and
its characteristics.
The matter stands then exactly as denied by Professor Dewey. It is
indeed the “baby thing-in-itself which is affected,” and it is “a
world thing-in-itself which calls forth the sensation.” It is not, as
maintained by Professor Dewey the baby known to him as his own perception
which experiences the sensation by having been pricked within the
beholder’s consciousness by a perceptually constituted pin.
But if the entity, which affects the beholder’s sensibility and awakens
in him the percept of a baby, exists in verity outside his, the
beholder’s, consciousness, and is known to him only as thus symbolically
pictured by his own percept; such sense-affecting entity is, on the other
hand, nowise to be construed as the unknowable “First Cause,” nowise as
that protean Persistent Force, which Mr. Spencer imagines capable of
assuming every kind of mental or material appearance.
The so-called material or physical modes which constitute in the beholder
the perceptually realised baby, and the so-called immaterial or mental
modes which are experienced by the baby as his sensations and emotions;
these material and mental modes are in no sense the manifestation of an
“Absolute Force” or “inscrutable Power,” as our Spencerians would lead us
religiously, and almost theologically to believe.[54]
The material modes that constitute the perceptually realised baby are
awakened in the beholder by a definite sense-affecting existent, which is
thus revealing not only its bare presence, but most vividly and minutely
also its perceptible and distinguishing characteristics. And in the same
manner it makes also known that it is interdependently connected with
the vast system of sense-affecting entities, that constitutes nature in
general.
All reality is interdependently conditioned. The “Unconditioned Reality”
of the Hamiltons, Mansels, and Spencers, has nowhere any existence,
either in consciousness or outside of it. It is altogether a fictitious,
superfluous, and most misleading conception.
As regards the mental modes experienced by the baby, they are evidently
exclusively his own affections as a highly and most specifically
organised being, and not by any means are they modes of appearance of
that most empty abstraction “The Unknowable,” that has with so many
believers usurped the throne of their former anthropomorphic Deity.
This coiled up thing over there, is it a rope or a snake? I see it move,
and my intellect interprets it to be a snake. Surely the significance
of the interpretation does not consist in my realising what was already
implicitly contained in my consciousness, but in knowing that in contact
with the being out there, which forms no part whatever of myself
though perceptually realised by me, I shall become affected in certain
additional ways taught by former experience.
Will any unbiassed and competent judge assert that the far-fetched
idealistic interpretation is more in accordance with what we really
experience, than the very simple one here given?
No doubt the immediate object of physical observation is not the
thing-in-itself, but its perceptual realisation. It is such, however,
only as symbolical representation of something subsisting outside
consciousness, only as a conscious affection awakened with compulsory
force in the observer from without. The observer offers his diversely
differentiated and delicately attuned sensibilities to the outside world
and carefully notices its specific modes of reaction upon definite modes
of stimulation. This in truth is the method of scientific observation,
from which all conclusions regarding the characteristics of nature are
drawn.
The conscious subject phylogenetically evolved in constant interaction
with the medium in which he lives and moves and has his being, possesses
realising faculties so adjusted as to correctly subserve his needs in
relation to such a medium. He then furthermore uses these faculties
in order to gain a fuller and more accurate knowledge of further
perceptible characteristics of this same medium.
A monistic interpretation of nature cannot possibly be reached by
assuming consciousness or intelligence to be ultimate reality, and
as such the One and All. It can be reached only by recognising that
consciousness is a function of subjects that stand in definite relations
to the rest of nature, and have power along with the other constituents
of nature so to affect the sensibility of other sentient beings as to
cause to arise therein the symbolical representation of themselves.
Systematised experience consists in the organised totality of such
symbolical representations. And this organised totality of experience
exists as potential possession of the subject in extra-conscious
latency, in what we figuratively call memory. Emerging on occasion
into consciousness it reproduces more or less faithfully the order and
connection of the manifold that constitutes the sense-affecting universe.
In highly developed sentient subjects self-realisation or the “inner
life,” which arises from the activity of their emotional and above all
their social nature, gains predominant influence over their sensual and
perceptual experience, urging them so to transform the given aspect of
the outer world as to render it subservient to the aspirations of that
inner life.