At the end of the preceding chapter we saw that such entities as
relations appear to have a being which is in some way different from
that of physical objects, and also different from that of minds and from
that of sense-data. In the present chapter we have to consider what is
the nature of this kind of being, and also what objects there are that
have this kind of being. We will begin with the latter question.
The problem with which we are now concerned is a very old one, since it
was brought into philosophy by Plato. Plato's 'theory of ideas' is an
attempt to solve this very problem, and in my opinion it is one of the
most successful attempts hitherto made. The theory to be advocated in
what follows is largely Plato's, with merely such modifications as time
has shown to be necessary.
The way the problem arose for Plato was more or less as follows. Let
us consider, say, such a notion as _justice_. If we ask ourselves what
justice is, it is natural to proceed by considering this, that, and the
other just act, with a view to discovering what they have in common.
They must all, in some sense, partake of a common nature, which will be
found in whatever is just and in nothing else. This common nature, in
virtue of which they are all just, will be justice itself, the pure
essence the admixture of which with facts of ordinary life produces the
multiplicity of just acts. Similarly with any other word which may be
applicable to common facts, such as 'whiteness' for example. The word
will be applicable to a number of particular things because they all
participate in a common nature or essence. This pure essence is what
Plato calls an 'idea' or 'form'. (It must not be supposed that 'ideas',
in his sense, exist in minds, though they may be apprehended by minds.)
The 'idea' _justice_ is not identical with anything that is just: it is
something other than particular things, which particular things partake
of. Not being particular, it cannot itself exist in the world of sense.
Moreover it is not fleeting or changeable like the things of sense: it
is eternally itself, immutable and indestructible.
Thus Plato is led to a supra-sensible world, more real than the common
world of sense, the unchangeable world of ideas, which alone gives to
the world of sense whatever pale reflection of reality may belong to it.
The truly real world, for Plato, is the world of ideas; for whatever
we may attempt to say about things in the world of sense, we can only
succeed in saying that they participate in such and such ideas, which,
therefore, constitute all their character. Hence it is easy to pass
on into a mysticism. We may hope, in a mystic illumination, to see the
ideas as we see objects of sense; and we may imagine that the ideas
exist in heaven. These mystical developments are very natural, but the
basis of the theory is in logic, and it is as based in logic that we
have to consider it.
The word 'idea' has acquired, in the course of time, many associations
which are quite misleading when applied to Plato's 'ideas'. We shall
therefore use the word 'universal' instead of the word 'idea', to
describe what Plato meant. The essence of the sort of entity that Plato
meant is that it is opposed to the particular things that are given in
sensation. We speak of whatever is given in sensation, or is of the same
nature as things given in sensation, as a _particular_; by opposition
to this, a _universal_ will be anything which may be shared by many
particulars, and has those characteristics which, as we saw, distinguish
justice and whiteness from just acts and white things.
When we examine common words, we find that, broadly speaking, proper
names stand for particulars, while other substantives, adjectives,
prepositions, and verbs stand for universals. Pronouns stand for
particulars, but are ambiguous: it is only by the context or the
circumstances that we know what particulars they stand for. The word
'now' stands for a particular, namely the present moment; but like
pronouns, it stands for an ambiguous particular, because the present is
always changing.
It will be seen that no sentence can be made up without at least one
word which denotes a universal. The nearest approach would be some such
statement as 'I like this'. But even here the word 'like' denotes
a universal, for I may like other things, and other people may like
things. Thus all truths involve universals, and all knowledge of truths
involves acquaintance with universals.
Seeing that nearly all the words to be found in the dictionary stand
for universals, it is strange that hardly anybody except students of
philosophy ever realizes that there are such entities as universals. We
do not naturally dwell upon those words in a sentence which do not stand
for particulars; and if we are forced to dwell upon a word which stands
for a universal, we naturally think of it as standing for some one of
the particulars that come under the universal. When, for example, we
hear the sentence, 'Charles I's head was cut off', we may naturally
enough think of Charles I, of Charles I's head, and of the operation
of cutting off _his_ head, which are all particulars; but we do not
naturally dwell upon what is meant by the word 'head' or the word
'cut', which is a universal: We feel such words to be incomplete and
insubstantial; they seem to demand a context before anything can be
done with them. Hence we succeed in avoiding all notice of universals as
such, until the study of philosophy forces them upon our attention.
Even among philosophers, we may say, broadly, that only those universals
which are named by adjectives or substantives have been much or often
recognized, while those named by verbs and prepositions have been
usually overlooked. This omission has had a very great effect upon
philosophy; it is hardly too much to say that most metaphysics, since
Spinoza, has been largely determined by it. The way this has occurred
is, in outline, as follows: Speaking generally, adjectives and common
nouns express qualities or properties of single things, whereas
prepositions and verbs tend to express relations between two or more
things. Thus the neglect of prepositions and verbs led to the belief
that every proposition can be regarded as attributing a property to a
single thing, rather than as expressing a relation between two or more
things. Hence it was supposed that, ultimately, there can be no such
entities as relations between things. Hence either there can be only
one thing in the universe, or, if there are many things, they cannot
possibly interact in any way, since any interaction would be a relation,
and relations are impossible.
The first of these views, advocated by Spinoza and held in our own day
by Bradley and many other philosophers, is called _monism_; the second,
advocated by Leibniz but not very common nowadays, is called _monadism_,
because each of the isolated things is called a _monad_. Both these
opposing philosophies, interesting as they are, result, in my opinion,
from an undue attention to one sort of universals, namely the sort
represented by adjectives and substantives rather than by verbs and
prepositions.
As a matter of fact, if any one were anxious to deny altogether that
there are such things as universals, we should find that we cannot
strictly prove that there are such entities as _qualities_, i.e. the
universals represented by adjectives and substantives, whereas we
can prove that there must be _relations_, i.e. the sort of universals
generally represented by verbs and prepositions. Let us take in
illustration the universal _whiteness_. If we believe that there is such
a universal, we shall say that things are white because they have the
quality of whiteness. This view, however, was strenuously denied by
Berkeley and Hume, who have been followed in this by later empiricists.
The form which their denial took was to deny that there are such things
as 'abstract ideas '. When we want to think of whiteness, they said, we
form an image of some particular white thing, and reason concerning this
particular, taking care not to deduce anything concerning it which we
cannot see to be equally true of any other white thing. As an account of
our actual mental processes, this is no doubt largely true. In geometry,
for example, when we wish to prove something about all triangles, we
draw a particular triangle and reason about it, taking care not to use
any characteristic which it does not share with other triangles. The
beginner, in order to avoid error, often finds it useful to draw several
triangles, as unlike each other as possible, in order to make sure that
his reasoning is equally applicable to all of them. But a difficulty
emerges as soon as we ask ourselves how we know that a thing is white
or a triangle. If we wish to avoid the universals _whiteness_ and
_triangularity_, we shall choose some particular patch of white or some
particular triangle, and say that anything is white or a triangle if it
has the right sort of resemblance to our chosen particular. But then the
resemblance required will have to be a universal. Since there are many
white things, the resemblance must hold between many pairs of particular
white things; and this is the characteristic of a universal. It will be
useless to say that there is a different resemblance for each pair, for
then we shall have to say that these resemblances resemble each other,
and thus at last we shall be forced to admit resemblance as a universal.
The relation of resemblance, therefore, must be a true universal. And
having been forced to admit this universal, we find that it is no longer
worth while to invent difficult and unplausible theories to avoid the
admission of such universals as whiteness and triangularity.
Berkeley and Hume failed to perceive this refutation of their rejection
of 'abstract ideas', because, like their adversaries, they only thought
of _qualities_, and altogether ignored _relations_ as universals. We
have therefore here another respect in which the rationalists appear to
have been in the right as against the empiricists, although, owing to
the neglect or denial of relations, the deductions made by rationalists
were, if anything, more apt to be mistaken than those made by
empiricists.
Having now seen that there must be such entities as universals, the next
point to be proved is that their being is not merely mental. By this is
meant that whatever being belongs to them is independent of their being
thought of or in any way apprehended by minds. We have already touched
on this subject at the end of the preceding chapter, but we must now
consider more fully what sort of being it is that belongs to universals.
Consider such a proposition as 'Edinburgh is north of London'. Here we
have a relation between two places, and it seems plain that the relation
subsists independently of our knowledge of it. When we come to know that
Edinburgh is north of London, we come to know something which has to
do only with Edinburgh and London: we do not cause the truth of the
proposition by coming to know it, on the contrary we merely apprehend a
fact which was there before we knew it. The part of the earth's surface
where Edinburgh stands would be north of the part where London stands,
even if there were no human being to know about north and south, and
even if there were no minds at all in the universe. This is, of course,
denied by many philosophers, either for Berkeley's reasons or for
Kant's. But we have already considered these reasons, and decided that
they are inadequate. We may therefore now assume it to be true that
nothing mental is presupposed in the fact that Edinburgh is north of
London. But this fact involves the relation 'north of', which is a
universal; and it would be impossible for the whole fact to involve
nothing mental if the relation 'north of', which is a constituent part
of the fact, did involve anything mental. Hence we must admit that the
relation, like the terms it relates, is not dependent upon thought, but
belongs to the independent world which thought apprehends but does not
create.
This conclusion, however, is met by the difficulty that the relation
'north of' does not seem to _exist_ in the same sense in which Edinburgh
and London exist. If we ask 'Where and when does this relation exist?'
the answer must be 'Nowhere and nowhen'. There is no place or time where
we can find the relation 'north of'. It does not exist in Edinburgh any
more than in London, for it relates the two and is neutral as between
them. Nor can we say that it exists at any particular time. Now
everything that can be apprehended by the senses or by introspection
exists at some particular time. Hence the relation 'north of' is
radically different from such things. It is neither in space nor in
time, neither material nor mental; yet it is something.
It is largely the very peculiar kind of being that belongs to universals
which has led many people to suppose that they are really mental. We
can think _of_ a universal, and our thinking then exists in a perfectly
ordinary sense, like any other mental act. Suppose, for example, that
we are thinking of whiteness. Then _in one sense_ it may be said that
whiteness is 'in our mind'. We have here the same ambiguity as we noted
in discussing Berkeley in Chapter IV. In the strict sense, it is not
whiteness that is in our mind, but the act of thinking of whiteness. The
connected ambiguity in the word 'idea', which we noted at the same time,
also causes confusion here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense
in which it denotes the _object_ of an act of thought, whiteness is an
'idea'. Hence, if the ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come to
think that whiteness is an 'idea' in the other sense, i.e. an act of
thought; and thus we come to think that whiteness is mental. But in so
thinking, we rob it of its essential quality of universality. One man's
act of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man's; one
man's act of thought at one time is necessarily a different thing from
the same man's act of thought at another time. Hence, if whiteness were
the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think
of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different
thoughts of whiteness have in common is their _object_, and this object
is different from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though
when known they are the objects of thoughts.
We shall find it convenient only to speak of things _existing_ when they
are in time, that is to say, when we can point to some time at which
they exist (not excluding the possibility of their existing at all
times). Thus thoughts and feelings, minds and physical objects exist.
But universals do not exist in this sense; we shall say that they
_subsist_ or _have being_, where 'being' is opposed to 'existence'
as being timeless. The world of universals, therefore, may also be
described as the world of being. The world of being is unchangeable,
rigid, exact, delightful to the mathematician, the logician, the builder
of metaphysical systems, and all who love perfection more than life. The
world of existence is fleeting, vague, without sharp boundaries,
without any clear plan or arrangement, but it contains all thoughts and
feelings, all the data of sense, and all physical objects, everything
that can do either good or harm, everything that makes any difference to
the value of life and the world. According to our temperaments, we shall
prefer the contemplation of the one or of the other. The one we do not
prefer will probably seem to us a pale shadow of the one we prefer, and
hardly worthy to be regarded as in any sense real. But the truth is that
both have the same claim on our impartial attention, both are real,
and both are important to the metaphysician. Indeed no sooner have we
distinguished the two worlds than it becomes necessary to consider their
relations.
But first of all we must examine our knowledge of universals. This
consideration will occupy us in the following chapter, where we shall
find that it solves the problem of _a priori_ knowledge, from which we
were first led to consider universals.