grows thicker when we gather, after enormous amounts of reading, that
the great enveloping self in question is absolute reason as such, and
that as such it is characterized by the habit of using certain jejune
'categories' with which to perform its eminent relating work. The
whole active material of natural fact is tried out, and only the
barest intellectualistic formalism remains.
Hegel tried, as we saw, to make the system concreter by making the
relations between things 'dialectic,' but if we turn to those who use
his name most worshipfully, we find them giving up all the particulars
of his attempt, and simply praising his intention--much as in our
manner we have praised it ourselves. Mr. Haldane, for example, in his
wonderfully clever Gifford lectures, praises Hegel to the skies, but
what he tells of him amounts to little more than this, that 'the
categories in which the mind arranges its experiences, and gives
meaning to them, the universals in which the particulars are grasped
in the individual, are a logical chain, in which the first presupposes
the last, and the last is its presupposition and its truth.' He hardly
tries at all to thicken this thin logical scheme. He says indeed
that absolute mind in itself, and absolute mind in its hetereity or
otherness, under the distinction which it sets up of itself from
itself, have as their real _prius_ absolute mind in synthesis; and,
this being absolute mind's true nature, its dialectic character must
show itself in such concrete forms as Goethe's and Wordsworth's
poetry, as well as in religious forms. 'The nature of God, the nature
of absolute mind, is to exhibit the triple movement of dialectic, and
so the nature of God as presented in religion must be a triplicity,
a trinity.' But beyond thus naming Goethe and Wordsworth and
establishing the trinity, Mr. Haldane's Hegelianism carries us hardly
an inch into the concrete detail of the world we actually inhabit.
Equally thin is Mr. Taylor, both in his principles and in their
results. Following Mr. Bradley, he starts by assuring us that reality
cannot be self-contradictory, but to be related to anything really
outside of one's self is to be self-contradictory, so the ultimate
reality must be a single all-inclusive systematic whole. Yet all he
can say of this whole at the end of his excellently written book is
that the notion of it 'can make no addition to our information and can
of itself supply no motives for practical endeavor.'
Mr. McTaggart treats us to almost as thin a fare. 'The main practical
interest of Hegel's philosophy,' he says, 'is to be found in the
abstract certainty which the logic gives us that all reality is
rational and righteous, even when we cannot see in the least how it is
so.... Not that it shows us how the facts around us are good, not that
it shows us how we can make them better, but that it proves that they,
like other reality, are _sub specie eternitatis_, perfectly good, and
_sub specie temporis_, destined to become perfectly good.'
Here again, no detail whatever, only the abstract certainty that
whatever the detail may prove to be, it will be good. Common
non-dialectical men have already this certainty as a result of the
generous vital enthusiasm about the universe with which they are born.
The peculiarity of transcendental philosophy is its sovereign contempt
for merely vital functions like enthusiasm, and its pretension to turn
our simple and immediate trusts and faiths into the form of logically
mediated certainties, to question which would be absurd. But the whole
basis on which Mr. McTaggart's own certainty so solidly rests, settles
down into the one nutshell of an assertion into which he puts Hegel's
gospel, namely, that in every bit of experience and thought, however
finite, the whole of reality (the absolute idea, as Hegel calls it) is
'implicitly present.'
This indeed is Hegel's _vision_, and Hegel thought that the details of
his dialectic proved its truth. But disciples who treat the details of
the proof as unsatisfactory and yet cling to the vision, are surely,
in spite of their pretension to a more rational consciousness, no
better than common men with their enthusiasms or deliberately adopted
faiths. We have ourselves seen some of the weakness of the monistic
proofs. Mr. McTaggart picks plenty of holes of his own in Hegel's
logic, and finally concludes that 'all true philosophy must be
mystical, not indeed in its methods but in its final conclusions,'
which is as much as to say that the rationalistic methods leave us
in the lurch, in spite of all their superiority, and that in the end
vision and faith must eke them out. But how abstract and thin is
here the vision, to say nothing of the faith! The whole of reality,
explicitly absent from our finite experiences, must nevertheless
be present in them all implicitly, altho no one of us can ever see
how--the bare word 'implicit' here bearing the whole pyramid of the
monistic system on its slender point. Mr. Joachim's monistic system of
truth rests on an even slenderer point.--_I have never doubted_,'
he says, 'that universal and timeless truth is a single content or
significance, one and whole and complete,' and he candidly confesses
the failure of rationalistic attempts 'to raise this immediate
certainty' to the level of reflective knowledge. There is, in short,
no mediation for him between the Truth in capital letters and all
the little 'lower-case' truths--and errors--which life presents. The
psychological fact that he never has 'doubted' is enough.
The whole monistic pyramid, resting on points as thin as these, seems
to me to be a _machtspruch_, a product of will far more than one of
reason. Unity is good, therefore things _shall_ cohere; they _shall_
be one; there _shall_ be categories to make them one, no matter what
empirical disjunctions may appear. In Hegel's own writings, the
_shall-be_ temper is ubiquitous and towering; it overrides verbal and
logical resistances alike. Hegel's error, as Professor Royce so well
says, 'lay not in introducing logic into passion,' as some people
charge, 'but in conceiving the logic of passion as the only logic....
He is [thus] suggestive,' Royce says, 'but never final. His system as
a system has crumbled, but his vital comprehension of our life remains
forever.'[1]
That vital comprehension we have already seen. It is that there is a
sense in which real things are not merely their own bare selves, but
may vaguely be treated as also their own others, and that ordinary
logic, since it denies this, must be overcome. Ordinary logic denies
this because it substitutes concepts for real things, and concepts
_are_ their own bare selves and nothing else. What Royce calls Hegel's
'system' was Hegel's attempt to make us believe that he was working
by concepts and grinding out a higher style of logic, when in reality
sensible experiences, hypotheses, and passion furnished him with all
his results.
What I myself may mean by things being their own others, we shall see
in a later lecture. It is now time to take our look at Fechner, whose
thickness is a refreshing contrast to the thin, abstract, indigent,
and threadbare appearance, the starving, school-room aspect, which the
speculations of most of our absolutist philosophers present.
There is something really weird and uncanny in the contrast between
the abstract pretensions of rationalism and what rationalistic methods
concretely can do. If the 'logical prius' of our mind were really the
'implicit presence' of the whole 'concrete universal,' the whole of
reason, or reality, or spirit, or the absolute idea, or whatever it
may be called, in all our finite thinking, and if this reason worked
(for example) by the dialectical method, doesn't it seem odd that
in the greatest instance of rationalization mankind has known, in
'science,' namely, the dialectical method should never once have been
tried? Not a solitary instance of the use of it in science occurs
to my mind. Hypotheses, and deductions from these, controlled by
sense-observations and analogies with what we know elsewhere, are to
be thanked for all of science's results.
Fechner used no methods but these latter ones in arguing for his
metaphysical conclusions about reality--but let me first rehearse a
few of the facts about his life.
Born in 1801, the son of a poor country pastor in Saxony, he lived
from 1817 to 1887, when he died, seventy years therefore, at Leipzig,
a typical _gelehrter_ of the old-fashioned german stripe. His means
were always scanty, so his only extravagances could be in the way
of thought, but these were gorgeous ones. He passed his medical
examinations at Leipzig University at the age of twenty-one, but
decided, instead of becoming a doctor, to devote himself to physical
science. It was ten years before he was made professor of physics,
although he soon was authorized to lecture. Meanwhile, he had to make
both ends meet, and this he did by voluminous literary labors. He
translated, for example, the four volumes of Biot's treatise on
physics, and the six of Thénard's work on chemistry, and took care of
their enlarged editions later. He edited repertories of chemistry
and physics, a pharmaceutical journal, and an encyclopaedia in eight
volumes, of which he wrote about one third. He published physical
treatises and experimental investigations of his own, especially in
electricity. Electrical measurements, as you know, are the basis of
electrical science, and Fechner's measurements in galvanism, performed
with the simplest self-made apparatus, are classic to this day.
During this time he also published a number of half-philosophical,
half-humorous writings, which have gone through several editions,
under the name of Dr. Mises, besides poems, literary and artistic
essays, and other occasional articles.
But overwork, poverty, and an eye-trouble produced by his observations
on after-images in the retina (also a classic piece of investigation)
produced in Fechner, then about thirty-eight years old, a terrific
attack of nervous prostration with painful hyperaesthesia of all the
functions, from which he suffered three years, cut off entirely from
active life. Present-day medicine would have classed poor Fechner's
malady quickly enough, as partly a habit-neurosis, but its
severity was such that in his day it was treated as a visitation
incomprehensible in its malignity; and when he suddenly began to get
well, both Fechner and others treated the recovery as a sort of divine
miracle. This illness, bringing Fechner face to face with inner
desperation, made a great crisis in his life. 'Had I not then clung to
the faith,' he writes, 'that clinging to faith would somehow or other
work its reward, _so hätte ich jene zeit nicht ausgehalten_.' His
religious and cosmological faiths saved him--thenceforward one great
aim with him was to work out and communicate these faiths to the
world. He did so on the largest scale; but he did many other things
too ere he died.
A book on the atomic theory, classic also; four elaborate mathematical
and experimental volumes on what he called psychophysics--many persons
consider Fechner to have practically founded scientific psychology in
the first of these books; a volume on organic evolution, and two works
on experimental aesthetics, in which again Fechner is considered by
some judges to have laid the foundations of a new science, must be
included among these other performances. Of the more religious and
philosophical works, I shall immediately give a further account.
All Leipzig mourned him when he died, for he was the pattern of the
ideal german scholar, as daringly original in his thought as he was
homely in his life, a modest, genial, laborious slave to truth and
learning, and withal the owner of an admirable literary style of the
vernacular sort. The materialistic generation, that in the fifties and
sixties called his speculations fantastic, had been replaced by one
with greater liberty of imagination, and a Preyer, a Wundt, a Paulsen,
and a Lasswitz could now speak of Fechner as their master.
His mind was indeed one of those multitudinously organized cross-roads
of truth which are occupied only at rare intervals by children of men,
and from which nothing is either too far or too near to be seen in due
perspective. Patientest observation, exactest mathematics, shrewdest
discrimination, humanest feeling, flourished in him on the largest
scale, with no apparent detriment to one another. He was in fact a
philosopher in the 'great' sense, altho he cared so much less than
most philosophers care for abstractions of the 'thin' order. For him
the abstract lived in the concrete, and the hidden motive of all he
did was to bring what he called the daylight view of the world into
ever greater evidence, that daylight view being this, that the whole
universe in its different spans and wave-lengths, exclusions and
envelopments, is everywhere alive and conscious. It has taken fifty
years for his chief book, 'Zend-avesta,' to pass into a second edition
(1901). 'One swallow,' he cheerfully writes, 'does not make a summer.
But the first swallow would not come unless the summer were coming;
and for me that summer means my daylight view some time prevailing.'
The original sin, according to Fechner, of both our popular and
our scientific thinking, is our inveterate habit of regarding the
spiritual not as the rule but as an exception in the midst of nature.
Instead of believing our life to be fed at the breasts of the greater
life, our individuality to be sustained by the greater individuality,
which must necessarily have more consciousness and more independence
than all that it brings forth, we habitually treat whatever lies
outside of our life as so much slag and ashes of life only; or if we
believe in a Divine Spirit, we fancy him on the one side as bodiless,
and nature as soulless on the other. What comfort, or peace, Fechner
asks, can come from such a doctrine? The flowers wither at its breath,
the stars turn into stone; our own body grows unworthy of our spirit
and sinks to a tenement for carnal senses only. The book of nature
turns into a volume on mechanics, in which whatever has life is
treated as a sort of anomaly; a great chasm of separation yawns
between us and all that is higher than ourselves; and God becomes a
thin nest of abstractions.
Fechner's great instrument for vivifying the daylight view is
analogy; not a rationalistic argument is to be found in all his
many pages--only reasonings like those which men continually use in
practical life. For example: My house is built by some one, the world
too is built by some one. The world is greater than my house, it
must be a greater some one who built the world. My body moves by the
influence of my feeling and will; the sun, moon, sea, and wind, being
themselves more powerful, move by the influence of some more powerful
feeling and will. I live now, and change from one day to another; I
shall live hereafter, and change still more, etc.
Bain defines genius as the power of seeing analogies. The number
that Fechner could perceive was prodigious; but he insisted on the
differences as well. Neglect to make allowance for these, he said, is
the common fallacy in analogical reasoning. Most of us, for example,
reasoning justly that, since all the minds we know are connected with
bodies, therefore God's mind should be connected with a body, proceed
to suppose that that body must be just an animal body over again, and
paint an altogether human picture of God. But all that the analogy
comports is _a_ body--the particular features of _our_ body are
adaptations to a habitat so different from God's that if God have
a physical body at all, it must be utterly different from ours in
structure. Throughout his writings Fechner makes difference and
analogy walk abreast, and by his extraordinary power of noticing
both, he converts what would ordinarily pass for objections to his
conclusions into factors of their support.
The vaster orders of mind go with the vaster orders of body. The
entire earth on which we live must have, according to Fechner, its own
collective consciousness. So must each sun, moon, and planet; so must
the whole solar system have its own wider consciousness, in which the
consciousness of our earth plays one part. So has the entire starry
system as such its consciousness; and if that starry system be not the
sum of all that _is_, materially considered, then that whole system,
along with whatever else may be, is the body of that absolutely
totalized consciousness of the universe to which men give the name of
God.
Speculatively Fechner is thus a monist in his theology; but there is
room in his universe for every grade of spiritual being between man
and the final all-inclusive God; and in suggesting what the positive
content of all this super-humanity may be, he hardly lets his
imagination fly beyond simple spirits of the planetary order. The
earth-soul he passionately believes in; he treats the earth as our
special human guardian angel; we can pray to the earth as men pray to
their saints; but I think that in his system, as in so many of the
actual historic theologies, the supreme God marks only a sort of limit
of enclosure of the worlds above man. He is left thin and abstract in
his majesty, men preferring to carry on their personal transactions
with the many less remote and abstract messengers and mediators whom
the divine order provides.
I shall ask later whether the abstractly monistic turn which Fechner's
speculations took was necessitated by logic. I believe it not to have
been required. Meanwhile let me lead you a little more into the
detail of his thought. Inevitably one does him miserable injustice
by summarizing and abridging him. For altho the type of reasoning he
employs is almost childlike for simplicity, and his bare conclusions
can be written on a single page, the _power_ of the man is due
altogether to the profuseness of his concrete imagination, to the
multitude of the points which he considers successively, to the
cumulative effect of his learning, of his thoroughness, and of the
ingenuity of his detail, to his admirably homely style, to the
sincerity with which his pages glow, and finally to the impression he
gives of a man who doesn't live at second-hand, but who _sees_, who in
fact speaks as one having authority, and not as if he were one of the
common herd of professorial philosophic scribes.
Abstractly set down, his most important conclusion for my purpose in
these lectures is that the constitution of the world is identical
throughout. In ourselves, visual consciousness goes with our eyes,
tactile consciousness with our skin. But altho neither skin nor eye
knows aught of the sensations of the other, they come together and
figure in some sort of relation and combination in the more inclusive
consciousness which each of us names his _self_. Quite similarly,
then, says Fechner, we must suppose that my consciousness of myself
and yours of yourself, altho in their immediacy they keep separate
and know nothing of each other, are yet known and used together in a
higher consciousness, that of the human race, say, into which they
enter as constituent parts. Similarly, the whole human and animal
kingdoms come together as conditions of a consciousness of still wider
scope. This combines in the soul of the earth with the consciousness
of the vegetable kingdom, which in turn contributes its share of
experience to that of the whole solar system, and so on from synthesis
to synthesis and height to height, till an absolutely universal
consciousness is reached.
A vast analogical series, in which the basis of the analogy consists
of facts directly observable in ourselves.
The supposition of an earth-consciousness meets a strong instinctive
prejudice which Fechner ingeniously tries to overcome. Man's mind is
the highest consciousness upon the earth, we think--the earth itself
being in all ways man's inferior. How should its consciousness, if it
have one, be superior to his?
What are the marks of superiority which we are tempted to use here? If
we look more carefully into them, Fechner points out that the earth
possesses each and all of them more perfectly than we. He considers in
detail the points of difference between us, and shows them all to
make for the earth's higher rank. I will touch on only a few of these
points.
One of them of course is independence of other external beings.
External to the earth are only the other heavenly bodies. All the
things on which we externally depend for life--air, water, plant and
animal food, fellow men, etc.--are included in her as her constituent
parts. She is self-sufficing in a million respects in which we are not
so. We depend on her for almost everything, she on us for but a small
portion of her history. She swings us in her orbit from winter to
summer and revolves us from day into night and from night into day.
Complexity in unity is another sign of superiority. The total earth's
complexity far exceeds that of any organism, for she includes all our
organisms in herself, along with an infinite number of things that our
organisms fail to include. Yet how simple and massive are the phases
of her own proper life! As the total bearing of any animal is sedate
and tranquil compared with the agitation of its blood corpuscles, so
is the earth a sedate and tranquil being compared with the animals
whom she supports.
To develop from within, instead of being fashioned from without, is
also counted as something superior in men's eyes. An egg is a higher
style of being than a piece of clay which an external modeler makes
into the image of a bird. Well, the earth's history develops from
within. It is like that of a wonderful egg which the sun's heat, like
that of a mother-hen, has stimulated to its cycles of evolutionary
change.
Individuality of type, and difference from other beings of its type,
is another mark of rank. The earth differs from every other planet,
and as a class planetary beings are extraordinarily distinct from
other beings.
Long ago the earth was called an animal; but a planet is a higher
class of being than either man or animal; not only quantitatively
greater, like a vaster and more awkward whale or elephant, but a being
whose enormous size requires an altogether different plan of life. Our
animal organization comes from our inferiority. Our need of moving to
and fro, of stretching our limbs and bending our bodies, shows only
our defect. What are our legs but crutches, by means of which, with
restless efforts, we go hunting after the things we have not inside
of ourselves. But the earth is no such cripple; why should she who
already possesses within herself the things we so painfully pursue,
have limbs analogous to ours? Shall she mimic a small part of herself?
What need has she of arms, with nothing to reach for? of a neck, with
no head to carry? of eyes or nose when she finds her way through space
without either, and has the millions of eyes of all her animals to
guide their movements on her surface, and all their noses to smell the
flowers that grow? For, as we are ourselves a part of the earth, so
our organs are her organs. She is, as it were, eye and ear over her
whole extent--all that we see and hear in separation she sees and
hears at once. She brings forth living beings of countless kinds upon
her surface, and their multitudinous conscious relations with each
other she takes up into her higher and more general conscious life.