last meeting. After agreeing not to consider materialism in any
shape, but to place ourselves straightway upon a more spiritualistic
platform, I pointed out three kinds of spiritual philosophy between
which we are asked to choose. The first way was that of the older
dualistic theism, with ourselves represented as a secondary order of
substances created by God. We found that this allowed of a degree of
intimacy with the creative principle inferior to that implied in the
pantheistic belief that we are substantially one with it, and that the
divine is therefore the most intimate of all our possessions, heart of
our heart, in fact. But we saw that this pantheistic belief could be
held in two forms, a monistic form which I called philosophy of the
absolute, and a pluralistic form which I called radical empiricism,
the former conceiving that the divine exists authentically only when
the world is experienced all at once in its absolute totality, whereas
radical empiricism allows that the absolute sum-total of things may
never be actually experienced or realized in that shape at all, and
that a disseminated, distributed, or incompletely unified appearance
is the only form that reality may yet have achieved.
I may contrast the monistic and pluralistic forms in question as
the 'all-form' and the 'each-form.' At the end of the last hour I
animadverted on the fact that the all-form is so radically different
from the each-form, which is our human form of experiencing the
world, that the philosophy of the absolute, so far as insight and
understanding go, leaves us almost as much outside of the divine being
as dualistic theism does. I believe that radical empiricism, on the
contrary, holding to the each-form, and making of God only one of the
eaches, affords the higher degree of intimacy. The general thesis of
these lectures I said would be a defence of the pluralistic against
the monistic view. Think of the universe as existing solely in the
each-form, and you will have on the whole a more reasonable and
satisfactory idea of it than if you insist on the all-form being
necessary. The rest of my lectures will do little more than make this
thesis more concrete, and I hope more persuasive.
It is curious how little countenance radical pluralism has ever had
from philosophers. Whether materialistically or spiritualistically
minded, philosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter with
which the world apparently is filled. They have substituted economical
and orderly conceptions for the first sensible tangle; and whether
these were morally elevated or only intellectually neat they were
at any rate always aesthetically pure and definite, and aimed at
ascribing to the world something clean and intellectual in the way of
inner structure. As compared with all these rationalizing pictures,
the pluralistic empiricism which I profess offers but a sorry
appearance. It is a turbid, muddled, gothic sort of an affair, without
a sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility. Those of you
who are accustomed to the classical constructions of reality may be
excused if your first reaction upon it be absolute contempt--a
shrug of the shoulders as if such ideas were unworthy of explicit
refutation. But one must have lived some time with a system to
appreciate its merits. Perhaps a little more familiarity may mitigate
your first surprise at such a programme as I offer.
First, one word more than what I said last time about the relative
foreignness of the divine principle in the philosophy of the absolute.
Those of you who have read the last two chapters of Mr. Bradley's
wonderful book, 'Appearance and reality,' will remember what an
elaborately foreign aspect _his_ absolute is finally made to assume.
It is neither intelligence nor will, neither a self nor a collection
of selves, neither truthful, good, nor beautiful, as we understand
these terms. It is, in short, a metaphysical monster, all that we are
permitted to say of it being that whatever it is, it is at any rate
_worth_ more (worth more to itself, that is) than if any eulogistic
adjectives of ours applied to it. It is us, and all other appearances,
but none of us _as such_, for in it we are all 'transmuted,' and its
own as-suchness is of another denomination altogether.
Spinoza was the first great absolutist, and the impossibility of being
intimate with _his_ God is universally recognized. _Quatenus infinitus
est_ he is other than what he is _quatenus humanam mentem constituit_.
Spinoza's philosophy has been rightly said to be worked by the word
_quatenus_. Conjunctions, prepositions, and adverbs play indeed the
vital part in all philosophies; and in contemporary idealism the words
'as' and 'quâ' bear the burden of reconciling metaphysical unity with
phenomenal diversity. Quâ absolute the world is one and perfect, quâ
relative it is many and faulty, yet it is identically the self-same
world--instead of talking of it as many facts, we call it one fact in
many aspects.
_As_ absolute, then, or _sub specie eternitatis_, or _quatenus
infinitus est_, the world repels our sympathy because it has no
history. _As such_, the absolute neither acts nor suffers, nor loves
nor hates; it has no needs, desires, or aspirations, no failures or
successes, friends or enemies, victories or defeats. All such things
pertain to the world quâ relative, in which our finite experiences
lie, and whose vicissitudes alone have power to arouse our interest.
What boots it to tell me that the absolute way is the true way, and
to exhort me, as Emerson says, to lift mine eye up to its style, and
manners of the sky, if the feat is impossible by definition? I am
finite once for all, and all the categories of my sympathy are knit up
with the finite world _as such_, and with things that have a history.
'Aus dieser erde quellen meine freuden, und ihre sonne scheinet meinen
leiden.' I have neither eyes nor ears nor heart nor mind for anything
of an opposite description, and the stagnant felicity of the
absolute's own perfection moves me as little as I move it. If we were
_readers_ only of the cosmic novel, things would be different: we
should then share the author's point of view and recognize villains to
be as essential as heroes in the plot. But we are not the readers but
the very personages of the world-drama. In your own eyes each of you
here is its hero, and the villains are your respective friends or
enemies. The tale which the absolute reader finds so perfect, we spoil
for one another through our several vital identifications with the
destinies of the particular personages involved.
The doctrine on which the absolutists lay most stress is the
absolute's 'timeless' character. For pluralists, on the other hand,
time remains as real as anything, and nothing in the universe is great
or static or eternal enough not to have some history. But the world
that each of us feels most intimately at home with is that of beings
with histories that play into our history, whom we can help in their
vicissitudes even as they help us in ours. This satisfaction the
absolute denies us; we can neither help nor hinder it, for it stands
outside of history. It surely is a merit in a philosophy to make the
very life we lead seem real and earnest. Pluralism, in exorcising the
absolute, exorcises the great de-realizer of the only life we are
at home in, and thus redeems the nature of reality from essential
foreignness. Every end, reason, motive, object of desire or aversion,
ground of sorrow or joy that we feel is in the world of finite
multifariousness, for only in that world does anything really happen,
only there do events come to pass.
In one sense this is a far-fetched and rather childish objection, for
so much of the history of the finite is as formidably foreign to us as
the static absolute can possibly be--in fact that entity derives its
own foreignness largely from the bad character of the finite which it
simultaneously is--that this sentimental reason for preferring the
pluralistic view seems small.[1] I shall return to the subject in my
final lecture, and meanwhile, with your permission, I will say no more
about this objection. The more so as the necessary foreignness of the
absolute is cancelled emotionally by its attribute of _totality_,
which is universally considered to carry the further attribute of
_perfection_ in its train. 'Philosophy,' says a recent american
philosopher, 'is humanity's hold on totality,' and there is no doubt
that most of us find that the bare notion of an absolute all-one is
inspiring. 'I yielded myself to the perfect whole,' writes Emerson;
and where can you find a more mind-dilating object? A certain loyalty
is called forth by the idea; even if not proved actual, it must be
believed in somehow. Only an enemy of philosophy can speak lightly
of it. Rationalism starts from the idea of such a whole and builds
downward. Movement and change are absorbed into its immutability as
forms of mere appearance. When you accept this beatific vision of
what _is_, in contrast with what _goes on_, you feel as if you had
fulfilled an intellectual duty. 'Reality is not in its truest nature
a process,' Mr. McTaggart tells us, 'but a stable and timeless
state.'[2] 'The true knowledge of God begins,' Hegel writes, 'when
we know that things as they immediately are have no truth.'[3] 'The
consummation of the infinite aim,' he says elsewhere, 'consists merely
in removing the illusion which makes it seem yet unaccomplished. Good
and absolute goodness is eternally accomplishing itself in the world:
and the result is that it needs not wait upon _us_, but is already ...
accomplished. It is an illusion under which we live. ... In the course
of its process the Idea makes itself that illusion, by setting an
antithesis to confront it, and its action consists in getting rid of
the illusion which it has created.'[4]
But abstract emotional appeals of any kind sound amateurish in the
business that concerns us. Impressionistic philosophizing, like
impressionistic watchmaking or land-surveying, is intolerable to
experts. Serious discussion of the alternative before us forces
me, therefore, to become more technical. The great _claim_ of the
philosophy of the absolute is that the absolute is no hypothesis, but
a presupposition implicated in all thinking, and needing only a little
effort of analysis to be seen as a logical necessity. I will therefore
take it in this more rigorous character and see whether its claim is
in effect so coercive.
It has seemed coercive to an enormous number of contemporaneous
thinkers. Professor Henry Jones thus describes the range and influence
of it upon the social and political life of the present time:[5] 'For
many years adherents of this way of thought have deeply interested the
british public by their writings. Almost more important than their
writings is the fact that they have occupied philosophical chairs in
almost every university in the kingdom. Even the professional critics
of idealism are for the most part idealists--after a fashion. And when
they are not, they are as a rule more occupied with the refutation of
idealism than with the construction of a better theory. It follows
from their position of academic authority, were it from nothing else,
that idealism exercises an influence not easily measured upon the
youth of the nation--upon those, that is, who from the educational
opportunities they enjoy may naturally be expected to become the
leaders of the nation's thought and practice.... Difficult as it is
to measure the forces ... it is hardly to be denied that the power
exercised by Bentham and the utilitarian school has, for better or
for worse, passed into the hands of the idealists.... "The Rhine has
flowed into the Thames" is the warning note rung out by Mr. Hobhouse.
Carlyle introduced it, bringing it as far as Chelsea. Then Jowett
and Thomas Hill Green, and William Wallace and Lewis Nettleship, and
Arnold Toynbee and David Eitchie--to mention only those teachers whose
voices now are silent--guided the waters into those upper reaches
known locally as the Isis. John and Edward Caird brought them up the
Clyde, Hutchison Stirling up the Firth of Forth. They have passed up
the Mersey and up the Severn and Dee and Don. They pollute the bay of
St. Andrews and swell the waters of the Cam, and have somehow crept
overland into Birmingham. The stream of german idealism has been
diffused over the academical world of Great Britain. The disaster is
universal.'
Evidently if weight of authority were all, the truth of absolutism
would be thus decided. But let us first pass in review the general
style of argumentation of that philosophy.
As I read it, its favorite way of meeting pluralism and empiricism is
by a _reductio ad absurdum_ framed somewhat as follows: You contend,
it says to the pluralist, that things, though in some respects
connected, are in other respects independent, so that they are not
members of one all-inclusive individual fact. Well, your position is
absurd on either point. For admit in fact the slightest modicum of
independence, and you find (if you will only think accurately) that
you have to admit more and more of it, until at last nothing but an
absolute chaos, or the proved impossibility of any connexion whatever
between the parts of the universe, remains upon your hands. Admit, on
the other hand, the most incipient minimum of relation between any two
things, and again you can't stop until you see that the absolute unity
of all things is implied.
If we take the latter _reductio ad absurdum_ first, we find a good
example of it in Lotze's well-known proof of monism from the fact of
interaction between finite things. Suppose, Lotze says in effect, and
for simplicity's sake I have to paraphrase him, for his own words are
too long to quote--many distinct beings _a, b, c_, etc., to exist
independently of each other: _can a in that case ever act on b_?
What is it to act? Is it not to exert an influence? Does the influence
detach itself from _a_ and find _b_? If so, it is a third fact, and
the problem is not how _a_ acts, but how its 'influence' acts on _b_.
By another influence perhaps? And how in the end does the chain of
influences find _b_ rather than _c_ unless _b_ is somehow prefigured
in them already? And when they have found _b_, how do they make _b_
respond, if _b_ has nothing in common with them? Why don't they go
right through _b_? The change in _b_ is a _response_, due to _b_'s
capacity for taking account of _a_'s influence, and that again seems
to prove that _b_'s nature is somehow fitted to _a_'s nature in
advance. _A_ and _b_, in short, are not really as distinct as we at
first supposed them, not separated by a void. Were this so they would
be mutually impenetrable, or at least mutually irrelevant. They would
form two universes each living by itself, making no difference to each
other, taking no account of each other, much as the universe of your
day dreams takes no account of mine. They must therefore belong
together beforehand, be co-implicated already, their natures must have
an inborn mutual reference each to each.
Lotze's own solution runs as follows: The multiple independent things
supposed cannot be real in that shape, but all of them, if reciprocal
action is to be possible between them, must be regarded as parts of a
single real being, M. The pluralism with which our view began has
to give place to a monism; and the 'transeunt' interaction,
being unintelligible as such, is to be understood as an immanent
operation.[6]
The words 'immanent operation' seem here to mean that the single real
being M, of which _a_ and _b_ are members, is the only thing that
changes, and that when it changes, it changes inwardly and all over at
once. When part _a_ in it changes, consequently, part _b_ must also
change, but without the whole M changing this would not occur.
A pretty argument, but a purely verbal one, as I apprehend it. _Call_
your _a_ and _b_ distinct, they can't interact; _call_ them one,
they can. For taken abstractly and without qualification the words
'distinct' and 'independent' suggest only disconnection. If this be
the only property of your _a_ and _b_ (and it is the only property
your words imply), then of course, since you can't deduce their mutual
influence from _it_, you can find no ground of its occurring between
them. Your bare word 'separate,' contradicting your bare word
'joined,' seems to exclude connexion.
Lotze's remedy for the impossibility thus verbally found is to change
the first word. If, instead of calling _a_ and _b_ independent, we now
call them 'interdependent,' 'united,' or 'one,' he says, _these_ words
do not contradict any sort of mutual influence that may be proposed.
If _a_ and _b_ are 'one,' and the one changes, _a_ and _b_ of course
must co-ordinately change. What under the old name they couldn't do,
they now have license to do under the new name.
But I ask you whether giving the name of 'one' to the former 'many'
makes us really understand the modus operandi of interaction any
better. We have now given verbal permission to the many to change all
together, if they can; we have removed a verbal impossibility
and substituted a verbal possibility, but the new name, with the
possibility it suggests, tells us nothing of the actual process by
which real things that are one can and do change at all. In point
of fact abstract oneness as such _doesn't_ change, neither has it
parts--any more than abstract independence as such interacts. But then
neither abstract oneness nor abstract independence _exists_; only
concrete real things exist, which add to these properties the other
properties which they possess, to make up what we call their total
nature. To construe any one of their abstract names as _making their
total nature impossible_ is a misuse of the function of naming. The
real way of rescue from the abstract consequences of one name is not
to fly to an opposite name, equally abstract, but rather to correct
the first name by qualifying adjectives that restore some concreteness
to the case. Don't take your 'independence' _simpliciter_, as Lotze
does, take it _secundum quid_. Only when we know what the process of
interaction literally and concretely _consists_ in can we tell whether
beings independent _in definite respects_, distinct, for example, in
origin, separate in place, different in kind, etc., can or cannot
interact.
_The treating of a name as excluding from the fact named what the
name's definition fails positively to include, is what I call
'vicious intellectualism_.' Later I shall have more to say about this
intellectualism, but that Lotze's argument is tainted by it I hardly
think we can deny. As well might you contend (to use an instance from
Sigwart) that a person whom you have once called an 'equestrian' is
thereby forever made unable to walk on his own feet.
I almost feel as if I should apologize for criticising such subtle
arguments in rapid lectures of this kind. The criticisms have to be as
abstract as the arguments, and in exposing their unreality, take
on such an unreal sound themselves that a hearer not nursed in the
intellectualist atmosphere knows not which of them to accuse. But
_le vin est versé, il faut le boire_, and I must cite a couple more
instances before I stop.
If we are empiricists and go from parts to wholes, we believe that
beings may first exist and feed so to speak on their own existence,
and then secondarily become known to one another. But philosophers of
the absolute tell us that such independence of being from being known
would, if once admitted, disintegrate the universe beyond all hope of
mending. The argument is one of Professor Royce's proofs that the only
alternative we have is to choose the complete disunion of all things
or their complete union in the absolute One.
Take, for instance, the proverb 'a cat may look at a king' and adopt
the realistic view that the king's being is independent of the cat's
witnessing. This assumption, which amounts to saying that it need make
no essential difference to the royal object whether the feline subject
cognizes him or not, that the cat may look away from him or may even
be annihilated, and the king remain unchanged,--this assumption, I
say, is considered by my ingenious colleague to lead to the absurd
practical consequence that the two beings _can_ never later acquire
any possible linkages or connexions, but must remain eternally as if
in different worlds. For suppose any connexion whatever to ensue, this
connexion would simply be a third being additional to the cat and the
king, which would itself have to be linked to both by additional links
before it could connect them, and so on _ad infinitum_, the argument,
you see, being the same as Lotze's about how _a_'s influence does its
influencing when it influences _b_.
In Royce's own words, if the king can be without the cat knowing him,
then king and cat 'can have no common features, no ties, no true
relations; they are separated, each from the other, by absolutely
impassable chasms. They can never come to get either ties or community
of nature; they are not in the same space, nor in the same time, nor
in the same natural or spiritual order.'[7] They form in short two
unrelated universes,--which is the _reductio ad absurdum_ required.
To escape this preposterous state of things we must accordingly revoke
the original hypothesis. The king and the cat are not indifferent to
each other in the way supposed. But if not in that way, then in no
way, for connexion in that way carries connexion in other ways; so
that, pursuing the reverse line of reasoning, we end with the
absolute itself as the smallest fact that can exist. Cat and king are
co-involved, they are a single fact in two names, they can never have
been absent from each other, and they are both equally co-implicated
with all the other facts of which the universe consists.
Professor Royce's proof that whoso admits the cat's witnessing the
king at all must thereupon admit the integral absolute, may be briefly
put as follows:--
First, to know the king, the cat must intend _that_ king, must somehow
pass over and lay hold of him individually and specifically. The cat's
idea, in short, must transcend the cat's own separate mind and somehow
include the king, for were the king utterly outside and independent of
the cat, the cat's pure other, the beast's mind could touch the king
in no wise. This makes the cat much less distinct from the king than
we had at first naïvely supposed. There must be some prior continuity
between them, which continuity Royce interprets idealistically as
meaning a higher mind that owns them both as objects, and owning them
can also own any relation, such as the supposed witnessing, that may
obtain between them. Taken purely pluralistically, neither of them can
own any part of a _between_, because, so taken, each is supposed shut
up to itself: the fact of a _between_ thus commits us to a higher
knower.