to be the same knower that knows everything else. For assume any third
being, the queen, say, and as the cat knew the king, so let the king
know his queen, and let this second knowledge, by the same reasoning,
require a higher knower as its presupposition. That knower of the
king's knowing must, it is now contended, be the same higher knower
that was required for the cat's knowing; for if you suppose otherwise,
you have no longer the _same king_. This may not seem immediately
obvious, but if you follow the intellectualistic logic employed in all
these reasonings, I don't see how you can escape the admission. If it
be true that the independent or indifferent cannot be related, for
the abstract words 'independent' or 'indifferent' as such imply no
relation, then it is just as true that the king known by the cat
cannot be the king that knows the queen, for taken merely 'as such,'
the abstract term 'what the cat knows' and the abstract term 'what
knows the queen' are logically distinct. The king thus logically
breaks into two kings, with nothing to connect them, until a higher
knower is introduced to recognize them as the self-same king concerned
in any previous acts of knowledge which he may have brought about.
This he can do because he possesses all the terms as his own objects
and can treat them as he will. Add any fourth or fifth term, and you
get a like result, and so on, until at last an all-owning knower,
otherwise called the absolute, is reached. The co-implicated
'through-and-through' world of monism thus stands proved by
irrefutable logic, and all pluralism appears as absurd.
The reasoning is pleasing from its ingenuity, and it is almost a pity
that so straight a bridge from abstract logic to concrete fact should
not bear our weight. To have the alternative forced upon us of
admitting either finite things each cut off from all relation with
its environment, or else of accepting the integral absolute with no
environment and all relations packed within itself, would be too
delicious a simplification. But the purely verbal character of the
operation is undisguised. Because the _names_ of finite things and
their relations are disjoined, it doesn't follow that the realities
named need a _deus ex machina_ from on high to conjoin them. The same
things disjoined in one respect _appear_ as conjoined in another.
Naming the disjunction doesn't debar us from also naming the
conjunction in a later modifying statement, for the two are absolutely
co-ordinate elements in the finite tissue of experience. When at
Athens it was found self-contradictory that a boy could be both tall
and short (tall namely in respect of a child, short in respect of a
man), the absolute had not yet been thought of, but it might just as
well have been invoked by Socrates as by Lotze or Royce, as a relief
from his peculiar intellectualistic difficulty.
Everywhere we find rationalists using the same kind of reasoning. The
primal whole which is their vision must be there not only as a
fact but as a logical necessity. It must be the minimum that can
exist--either that absolute whole is there, or there is absolutely
nothing. The logical proof alleged of the irrationality of supposing
otherwise, is that you can deny the whole only in words that
implicitly assert it. If you say 'parts,' of _what_ are they parts? If
you call them a 'many,' that very word unifies them. If you suppose
them unrelated in any particular respect, that 'respect' connects
them; and so on. In short you fall into hopeless contradiction. You
must stay either at one extreme or the other.[8] 'Partly this and
partly that,' partly rational, for instance, and partly irrational,
is no admissible description of the world. If rationality be in it at
all, it must be in it throughout; if irrationality be in it anywhere,
that also must pervade it throughout. It must be wholly rational or
wholly irrational, pure universe or pure multiverse or nulliverse; and
reduced to this violent alternative, no one's choice ought long to
remain doubtful. The individual absolute, with its parts co-implicated
through and through, so that there is nothing in any part by which
any other part can remain inwardly unaffected, is the only rational
supposition. Connexions of an external sort, by which the many became
merely continuous instead of being consubstantial, would be an
irrational supposition.
Mr. Bradley is the pattern champion of this philosophy _in extremis_,
as one might call it, for he shows an intolerance to pluralism so
extreme that I fancy few of his readers have been able fully to share
it. His reasoning exemplifies everywhere what I call the vice of
intellectualism, for abstract terms are used by him as positively
excluding all that their definition fails to include. Some Greek
sophists could deny that we may say that man is good, for man, they
said, means only man, and good means only good, and the word _is_
can't be construed to identify such disparate meanings. Mr. Bradley
revels in the same type of argument. No adjective can rationally
qualify a substantive, he thinks, for if distinct from the
substantive, it can't be united with it; and if not distinct, there is
only one thing there, and nothing left to unite. Our whole pluralistic
procedure in using subjects and predicates as we do is fundamentally
irrational, an example of the desperation of our finite intellectual
estate, infected and undermined as that is by the separatist
discursive forms which are our only categories, but which absolute
reality must somehow absorb into its unity and overcome.
Readers of 'Appearance and reality' will remember how Mr. Bradley
suffers from a difficulty identical with that to which Lotze and Royce
fall a prey--how shall an influence influence? how shall a relation
relate? Any conjunctive relation between two phenomenal experiences
_a_ and _b_ must, in the intellectualist philosophy of these authors,
be itself a third entity; and as such, instead of bridging the one
original chasm, it can only create two smaller chasms, each to be
freshly bridged. Instead of hooking _a_ to _b_, it needs itself to be
hooked by a fresh relation _r_ to _a_ and by another _r_ to _b_.
These new relations are but two more entities which themselves require
to be hitched in turn by four still newer relations--so behold the
vertiginous _regressus ad infinitum_ in full career.
Since a _regressus ad infinitum_ is deemed absurd, the notion that
relations come 'between' their terms must be given up. No mere
external go-between can logically connect. What occurs must be more
intimate. The hooking must be a penetration, a possession. The
relation must _involve_ the terms, each term must involve _it_, and
merging thus their being in it, they must somehow merge their being in
each other, tho, as they seem still phenomenally so separate, we can
never conceive exactly how it is that they are inwardly one. The
absolute, however, must be supposed able to perform the unifying feat
in his own inscrutable fashion.
In old times, whenever a philosopher was assailed for some
particularly tough absurdity in his system, he was wont to parry the
attack by the argument from the divine omnipotence. 'Do you mean to
limit God's power?' he would reply: 'do you mean to say that God could
not, if he would, do this or that?' This retort was supposed to close
the mouths of all objectors of properly decorous mind. The functions
of the bradleian absolute are in this particular identical with those
of the theistic God. Suppositions treated as too absurd to pass muster
in the finite world which we inhabit, the absolute must be able to
make good 'somehow' in his ineffable way. First we hear Mr. Bradley
convicting things of absurdity; next, calling on the absolute to vouch
for them _quand même_. Invoked for no other duty, that duty it must
and shall perform.
The strangest discontinuity of our world of appearance with the
supposed world of absolute reality is asserted both by Bradley and
by Royce; and both writers, the latter with great ingenuity, seek to
soften the violence of the jolt. But it remains violent all the same,
and is felt to be so by most readers. Whoever feels the violence
strongly sees as on a diagram in just what the peculiarity of all this
philosophy of the absolute consists. First, there is a healthy faith
that the world must be rational and self-consistent. 'All science, all
real knowledge, all experience presuppose,' as Mr. Ritchie writes, 'a
coherent universe.' Next, we find a loyal clinging to the rationalist
belief that sense-data and their associations are incoherent, and that
only in substituting a conceptual order for their order can truth
be found. Third, the substituted conceptions are treated
intellectualistically, that is as mutually exclusive and
discontinuous, so that the first innocent continuity of the flow of
sense-experience is shattered for us without any higher conceptual
continuity taking its place. Finally, since this broken state of
things is intolerable, the absolute _deus ex machina_ is called on to
mend it in his own way, since we cannot mend it in ours.
Any other picture than this of post-kantian absolutism I am unable
to frame. I see the intellectualistic criticism destroying the
immediately given coherence of the phenomenal world, but unable to
make its own conceptual substitutes cohere, and I see the resort to
the absolute for a coherence of a higher type. The situation has
dramatic liveliness, but it is inwardly incoherent throughout, and the
question inevitably comes up whether a mistake may not somewhere have
crept in in the process that has brought it about. May not the remedy
lie rather in revising the intellectualist criticism than in first
adopting it and then trying to undo its consequences by an arbitrary
act of faith in an unintelligible agent. May not the flux of sensible
experience itself contain a rationality that has been overlooked,
so that the real remedy would consist in harking back to it more
intelligently, and not in advancing in the opposite direction away
from it and even away beyond the intellectualist criticism that
disintegrates it, to the pseudo-rationality of the supposed absolute
point of view. I myself believe that this is the real way to keep
rationality in the world, and that the traditional rationalism has
always been facing in the wrong direction. I hope in the end to make
you share, or at any rate respect, this belief, but there is much to
talk of before we get to that point.
I employed the word 'violent' just now in describing the dramatic
situation in which it pleases the philosophy of the absolute to make
its camp. I don't see how any one can help being struck in absolutist
writings by that curious tendency to fly to violent extremes of which
I have already said a word. The universe must be rational; well
and good; but _how_ rational? in what sense of that eulogistic but
ambiguous word?--this would seem to be the next point to bring up.
There are surely degrees in rationality that might be discriminated
and described. Things can be consistent or coherent in very diverse
ways. But no more in its conception of rationality than in its
conception of relations can the monistic mind suffer the notion of
more or less. Rationality is one and indivisible: if not rational
thus indivisibly, the universe must be completely irrational, and no
shadings or mixtures or compromises can obtain. Mr. McTaggart writes,
in discussing the notion of a mixture: 'The two principles, of
rationality and irrationality, to which the universe is then referred,
will have to be absolutely separate and independent. For if there were
any common unity to which they should be referred, it would be that
unity and not its two manifestations which would be the ultimate
explanation ... and the theory, having thus become monistic,'[9] would
resolve itself into the same alternative once more: is the single
principle rational through and through or not?
'Can a plurality of reals be possible?' asks Mr. Bradley, and answers,
'No, impossible.' For it would mean a number of beings not dependent
on each other, and this independence their plurality would contradict.
For to be 'many' is to be related, the word having no meaning unless
the units are somehow taken together, and it is impossible to take
them in a sort of unreal void, so they must belong to a larger
reality, and so carry the essence of the units beyond their proper
selves, into a whole which possesses unity and is a larger system.[10]
Either absolute independence or absolute mutual dependence--this,
then, is the only alternative allowed by these thinkers. Of course
'independence,' if absolute, would be preposterous, so the only
conclusion allowable is that, in Ritchie's words, 'every single event
is ultimately related to every other, and determined by the whole
to which it belongs.' The whole complete block-universe
through-and-through, therefore, or no universe at all!
Professor Taylor is so _naïf_ in this habit of thinking only in
extremes that he charges the pluralists with cutting the ground from
under their own feet in not consistently following it themselves. What
pluralists say is that a universe really connected loosely, after the
pattern of our daily experience, is possible, and that for certain
reasons it is the hypothesis to be preferred. What Professor Taylor
thinks they naturally must or should say is that any other sort of
universe is logically impossible, and that a totality of things
interrelated like the world of the monists is not an hypothesis that
can be seriously thought out at all.[11]
Meanwhile no sensible pluralist ever flies or wants to fly to this
dogmatic extreme.
If chance is spoken of as an ingredient of the universe, absolutists
interpret it to mean that double sevens are as likely to be thrown out
of a dice box as double sixes are. If free-will is spoken of, that
must mean that an english general is as likely to eat his prisoners
to-day as a Maori chief was a hundred years ago. It is as likely--I am
using Mr. McTaggart's examples--that a majority of Londoners will
burn themselves alive to-morrow as that they will partake of food, as
likely that I shall be hanged for brushing my hair as for committing
a murder,[12] and so forth, through various suppositions that no
indeterminist ever sees real reason to make.
This habit of thinking only in the most violent extremes reminds me
of what Mr. Wells says of the current objections to socialism, in his
wonderful little book, 'New worlds for old.' The commonest vice of the
human mind is its disposition to see everything as yes or no, as black
or white, its incapacity for discrimination of intermediate shades.
So the critics agree to some hard and fast impossible definition of
socialism, and extract absurdities from it as a conjurer gets rabbits
from a hat. Socialism abolishes property, abolishes the family, and
the rest. The method, Mr. Wells continues, is always the same: It
is to assume that whatever the socialist postulates as desirable is
wanted without limit of qualification,--for socialist read pluralist
and the parallel holds good,--it is to imagine that whatever proposal
is made by him is to be carried out by uncontrolled monomaniacs, and
so to make a picture of the socialist dream which can be presented to
the simple-minded person in doubt--'This is socialism'--or pluralism,
as the case may be. 'Surely!--SURELY! you don't want _this!_'
How often have I been replied to, when expressing doubts of the
logical necessity of the absolute, of flying to the opposite extreme:
'But surely, SURELY there must be _some_ connexion among things!' As
if I must necessarily be an uncontrolled monomanic insanely denying
any connexion whatever. The whole question revolves in very truth
about the word 'some.' Radical empiricism and pluralism stand out for
the legitimacy of the notion of _some_: each part of the world is in
some ways connected, in some other ways not connected with its other
parts, and the ways can be discriminated, for many of them are
obvious, and their differences are obvious to view. Absolutism, on its
side, seems to hold that 'some' is a category ruinously infected
with self-contradictoriness, and that the only categories inwardly
consistent and therefore pertinent to reality are 'all' and 'none.'
The question runs into the still more general one with which Mr.
Bradley and later writers of the monistic school have made us
abundantly familiar--the question, namely, whether all the relations
with other things, possible to a being, are pre-included in its
intrinsic nature and enter into its essence, or whether, in respect to
some of these relations, it can _be_ without reference to them, and,
if it ever does enter into them, do so adventitiously and as it
were by an after-thought. This is the great question as to whether
'external' relations can exist. They seem to, undoubtedly. My
manuscript, for example, is 'on' the desk. The relation of being 'on'
doesn't seem to implicate or involve in any way the inner meaning
of the manuscript or the inner structure of the desk--these objects
engage in it only by their outsides, it seems only a temporary
accident in their respective histories. Moreover, the 'on' fails to
appear to our senses as one of those unintelligible 'betweens' that
have to be separately hooked on the terms they pretend to connect.
All this innocent sense-appearance, however, we are told, cannot pass
muster in the eyes of reason. It is a tissue of self-contradiction
which only the complete absorption of the desk and the manuscript into
the higher unity of a more absolute reality can overcome.
The reasoning by which this conclusion is supported is too subtle and
complicated to be properly dealt with in a public lecture, and you
will thank me for not inviting you to consider it at all.[13] I feel
the more free to pass it by now as I think that the cursory account of
the absolutistic attitude which I have already given is sufficient for
our present purpose, and that my own verdict on the philosophy of
the absolute as 'not proven'--please observe that I go no farther
now--need not be backed by argument at every special point. Flanking
operations are less costly and in some ways more effective than
frontal attacks. Possibly you will yourselves think after hearing my
remaining lectures that the alternative of an universe absolutely
rational or absolutely irrational is forced and strained, and that
a _via media_ exists which some of you may agree with me is to
be preferred. _Some_ rationality certainly does characterize our
universe; and, weighing one kind with another, we may deem that the
incomplete kinds that appear are on the whole as acceptable as
the through-and-through sort of rationality on which the monistic
systematizers insist.
All the said systematizers who have written since Hegel have owed
their inspiration largely to him. Even when they have found no use
for his particular triadic dialectic, they have drawn confidence
and courage from his authoritative and conquering tone. I have said
nothing about Hegel in this lecture, so I must repair the omission in
the next.
LECTURE III
HEGEL AND HIS METHOD
Directly or indirectly, that strange and powerful genius Hegel has
done more to strengthen idealistic pantheism in thoughtful circles
than all other influences put together. I must talk a little about him
before drawing my final conclusions about the cogency of the arguments
for the absolute. In no philosophy is the fact that a philosopher's
vision and the technique he uses in proof of it are two different
things more palpably evident than in Hegel. The vision in his case
was that of a world in which reason holds all things in solution and
accounts for all the irrationality that superficially appears by
taking it up as a 'moment' into itself. This vision was so intense in
Hegel, and the tone of authority with which he spoke from out of the
midst of it was so weighty, that the impression he made has never been
effaced. Once dilated to the scale of the master's eye, the disciples'
sight could not contract to any lesser prospect. The technique which
Hegel used to prove his vision was the so-called dialectic method, but
here his fortune has been quite contrary. Hardly a recent disciple has
felt his particular applications of the method to be satisfactory.
Many have let them drop entirely, treating them rather as a sort of
provisional stop-gap, symbolic of what might some day prove possible
of execution, but having no literal cogency or value now. Yet these
very same disciples hold to the vision itself as a revelation that can
never pass away. The case is curious and worthy of our study.
It is still more curious in that these same disciples, altho they are
usually willing to abandon any particular instance of the dialectic
method to its critics, are unshakably sure that in some shape the
dialectic method is the key to truth. What, then, is the dialectic
method? It is itself a part of the hegelian vision or intuition, and
a part that finds the strongest echo in empiricism and common sense.
Great injustice is done to Hegel by treating him as primarily a
reasoner. He is in reality a naïvely observant man, only beset with a
perverse preference for the use of technical and logical jargon. He
plants himself in the empirical flux of things and gets the impression
of what happens. His mind is in very truth _impressionistic_; and his
thought, when once you put yourself at the animating centre of it, is
the easiest thing in the world to catch the pulse of and to follow.
Any author is easy if you can catch the centre of his vision. From
the centre in Hegel come those towering sentences of his that are
comparable only to Luther's, as where, speaking of the ontological
proof of God's existence from the concept of him as the _ens
perfectissimum_ to which no attribute can be lacking, he says: 'It
would be strange if the Notion, the very heart of the mind, or, in
a word, the concrete totality we call God, were not rich enough
to embrace so poor a category as Being, the very poorest and most
abstract of all--for nothing can be more insignificant than Being.'
But if Hegel's central thought is easy to catch, his abominable habits
of speech make his application of it to details exceedingly difficult
to follow. His passion for the slipshod in the way of sentences,
his unprincipled playing fast and loose with terms; his dreadful
vocabulary, calling what completes a thing its 'negation,' for
example; his systematic refusal to let you know whether he is talking
logic or physics or psychology, his whole deliberately adopted policy
of ambiguity and vagueness, in short: all these things make his
present-day readers wish to tear their hair--or his--out in
desperation. Like Byron's corsair, he has left a name 'to other times,
linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes.'
The virtue was the vision, which was really in two parts. The first
part was that reason is all-inclusive, the second was that things
are 'dialectic.' Let me say a word about this second part of Hegel's
vision.
The impression that any _naïf_ person gets who plants himself
innocently in the flux of things is that things are off their balance.
Whatever equilibriums our finite experiences attain to are but
provisional. Martinique volcanoes shatter our wordsworthian
equilibrium with nature. Accidents, either moral, mental, or physical,
break up the slowly built-up equilibriums men reach in family life
and in their civic and professional relations. Intellectual enigmas
frustrate our scientific systems, and the ultimate cruelty of the
universe upsets our religious attitudes and outlooks. Of no special
system of good attained does the universe recognize the value as
sacred. Down it tumbles, over it goes, to feed the ravenous appetite
for destruction, of the larger system of history in which it stood
for a moment as a landing-place and stepping-stone. This dogging of
everything by its negative, its fate, its undoing, this perpetual
moving on to something future which shall supersede the present,
this is the hegelian intuition of the essential provisionality, and
consequent unreality, of everything empirical and finite. Take any
concrete finite thing and try to hold it fast. You cannot, for so
held, it proves not to be concrete at all, but an arbitrary extract or
abstract which you have made from the remainder of empirical reality.
The rest of things invades and overflows both it and you together,
and defeats your rash attempt. Any partial view whatever of the world
tears the part out of its relations, leaves out some truth concerning
it, is untrue of it, falsifies it. The full truth about anything
involves more than that thing. In the end nothing less than the whole
of everything can be the truth of anything at all.