and O into water, but looked at more closely, the analogy halts badly.
When a chemist tells us that two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen
combine themselves of their own accord into the new compound substance
'water,' he knows (if he believes in the mechanical view of nature)
that this is only an elliptical statement for a more complex fact.
That fact is that when H_2 and O, instead of keeping far apart, get
into closer quarters, say into the position H-O-H, they _affect
surrounding bodies differently_: they now wet our skin, dissolve
sugar, put out fire, etc., which they didn't in their former
positions. 'Water' is but _our name_ for what acts thus peculiarly.
But if the skin, sugar, and fire were absent, no witness would speak
of water at all. He would still talk of the H and O distributively,
merely noting that they acted now in the new position H-O-H.
In the older psychologies the soul or self took the place of the
sugar, fire, or skin. The lower feelings produced _effects on it_,
and their apparent compounds were only its reactions. As you tickle
a man's face with a feather, and he laughs, so when you tickle his
intellectual principle with a retinal feeling, say, and a muscular
feeling at once, it laughs responsively by its category of 'space,'
but it would be false to treat the space as simply made of those
simpler feelings. It is rather a new and unique psychic creation which
their combined action on the mind is able to evoke.
I found myself obliged, in discussing the mind-dust theory, to urge
this last alternative view. The so-called mental compounds are simple
psychic reactions of a higher type. The form itself of them, I said,
is something new. We can't say that awareness of the alphabet as
such is nothing more than twenty-six awarenesses, each of a separate
letter; for those are twenty-six distinct awarenesses, of single
letters _without_ others, while their so-called sum is one awareness,
of every letter _with_ its comrades. There is thus something new in
the collective consciousness. It knows the same letters, indeed, but
it knows them in this novel way. It is safer, I said (for I fought shy
of admitting a self or soul or other agent of combination), to treat
the consciousness of the alphabet as a twenty-seventh fact, the
substitute and not the sum of the twenty-six simpler consciousnesses,
and to say that while under certain physiological conditions they
alone are produced, other more complex physiological conditions result
in its production instead. Do not talk, therefore, I said, of the
higher states _consisting_ of the simpler, or _being_ the same with
them; talk rather of their _knowing the same things_. They are
different mental facts, but they apprehend, each in its own peculiar
way, the same objective A, B, C, and D.
The theory of combination, I was forced to conclude, is thus
untenable, being both logically nonsensical and practically
unnecessary. Say what you will, twelve thoughts, each of a single
word, are not the self-same mental thing as one thought of the whole
sentence. The higher thoughts, I insisted, are psychic units, not
compounds; but for all that, they may know together as a collective
multitude the very same objects which under other conditions are known
separately by as many simple thoughts.
For many years I held rigorously to this view,[3] and the reasons for
doing so seemed to me during all those years to apply also to the
opinion that the absolute mind stands to our minds in the relation of
a whole to its parts. If untenable in finite psychology, that opinion
ought to be untenable in metaphysics also. The great transcendentalist
metaphor has always been, as I lately reminded you, a grammatical
sentence. Physically such a sentence is of course composed of clauses,
these of words, the words of syllables, and the syllables of letters.
We may take each word in, yet not understand the sentence; but if
suddenly the meaning of the whole sentence flashes, the sense of each
word is taken up into that whole meaning. Just so, according to
our transcendentalist teachers, the absolute mind thinks the whole
sentence, while we, according to our rank as thinkers, think a clause,
a word, a syllable, or a letter. Most of us are, as I said, mere
syllables in the mouth of Allah. And as Allah comes first in the order
of being, so comes first the entire sentence, the _logos_ that forms
the eternal absolute thought. Students of language tell us that speech
began with men's efforts to make _statements_. The rude synthetic
vocal utterances first used for this effect slowly got stereotyped,
and then much later got decomposed into grammatical parts. It is not
as if men had first invented letters and made syllables of them, then
made words of the syllables and sentences of the words;--they actually
followed the reverse order. So, the transcendentalists affirm, the
complete absolute thought is the pre-condition of our thoughts, and
we finite creatures _are_ only in so far as it owns us as its verbal
fragments.
The metaphor is so beautiful, and applies, moreover, so literally to
such a multitude of the minor wholes of experience, that by merely
hearing it most of us are convinced that it must apply universally.
We see that no smallest raindrop can come into being without a whole
shower, no single feather without a whole bird, neck and crop, beak
and tail, coming into being simultaneously: so we unhesitatingly lay
down the law that no part of anything can be except so far as the
whole also is. And then, since everything whatever is part of the
whole universe, and since (if we are idealists) nothing, whether part
or whole, exists except for a witness, we proceed to the conclusion
that the unmitigated absolute as witness of the whole is the one sole
ground of being of every partial fact, the fact of our own existence
included. We think of ourselves as being only a few of the feathers,
so to speak, which help to constitute that absolute bird. Extending
the analogy of certain wholes, of which we have familiar experience,
to the whole of wholes, we easily become absolute idealists.
But if, instead of yielding to the seductions of our metaphor, be
it sentence, shower, or bird, we analyze more carefully the notion
suggested by it that we are constituent parts of the absolute's
eternal field of consciousness, we find grave difficulties arising.
First, the difficulty I found with the mind-dust theory. If the
absolute makes us by knowing us, how can we exist otherwise than _as_
it knows us? But it knows each of us indivisibly from everything else.
Yet if to exist means nothing but to be experienced, as idealism
affirms, we surely exist otherwise, for we experience _ourselves_
ignorantly and in division. We indeed differ from the absolute not
only by defect, but by excess. Our ignorances, for example, bring
curiosities and doubts by which it cannot be troubled, for it owns
eternally the solution of every problem. Our impotence entails pains,
our imperfection sins, which its perfection keeps at a distance. What
I said of the alphabet-form and the letters holds good of the absolute
experience and our experiences. Their relation, whatever it may be,
seems not to be that of identity.
It is impossible to reconcile the peculiarities of our experience with
our being only the absolute's mental objects. A God, as distinguished
from the absolute, creates things by projecting them beyond himself as
so many substances, each endowed with _perseity_, as the scholastics
call it. But objects of thought are not things _per se_. They are
there only _for_ their thinker, and only _as_ he thinks them. How,
then, can they become severally alive on their own accounts and think
themselves quite otherwise than as he thinks them? It is as if the
characters in a novel were to get up from the pages, and walk away and
transact business of their own outside of the author's story.
A third difficulty is this: The bird-metaphor is physical, but we
see on reflection that in the _physical_ world there is no real
compounding. 'Wholes' are not realities there, parts only are
realities. 'Bird' is only our _name_ for the physical fact of a
certain grouping of organs, just as 'Charles's Wain' is our name for a
certain grouping of stars. The 'whole,' be it bird or constellation,
is nothing but our vision, nothing but an effect on our sensorium when
a lot of things act on it together. It is not realized by any organ
or any star, or experienced apart from the consciousness of an
onlooker.[4] In the physical world taken by itself there _is_ thus no
'all,' there are only the 'eaches'--at least that is the 'scientific'
view.
In the mental world, on the contrary, wholes do in point of fact
realize themselves _per se_. The meaning of the whole sentence is
just as much a real experience as the feeling of each word is; the
absolute's experience _is_ for itself, as much as yours is for
yourself or mine for myself. So the feather-and-bird analogy won't
work unless you make the absolute into a distinct sort of mental agent
with a vision produced in it _by_ our several minds analogous to the
'bird'-vision which the feathers, beak, etc., produce _in_ those same
minds. The 'whole,' which is _its_ experience, would then be its
unifying reaction on our experiences, and not those very experiences
self-combined. Such a view as this would go with theism, for the
theistic God is a separate being; but it would not go with pantheistic
idealism, the very essence of which is to insist that we are literally
_parts_ of God, and he only ourselves in our totality--the word
'ourselves' here standing of course for all the universe's finite
facts.
I am dragging you into depths unsuitable, I fear, for a rapid lecture.
Such difficulties as these have to be teased out with a needle, so to
speak, and lecturers should take only bird's-eye views. The practical
upshot of the matter, however, so far as I am concerned, is this, that
if I had been lecturing on the absolute a very few years ago, I should
unhesitatingly have urged these difficulties, and developed them at
still greater length, to show that the hypothesis of the absolute
was not only non-coercive from the logical point of view, but
self-contradictory as well, its notion that parts and whole are only
two names for the same thing not bearing critical scrutiny. If you
stick to purely physical terms like stars, there is no whole. If you
call the whole mental, then the so-called whole, instead of being one
fact with the parts, appears rather as the integral reaction on those
parts of an independent higher witness, such as the theistic God is
supposed to be.
So long as this was the state of my own mind, I could accept the
notion of self-compounding in the supernal spheres of experience no
more easily than in that chapter on mind-dust I had accepted it in
the lower spheres. I found myself compelled, therefore, to call
the absolute impossible; and the untrammelled freedom with which
pantheistic or monistic idealists stepped over the logical barriers
which Lotze and others had set down long before I had--I had done
little more than quote these previous critics in my chapter--surprised
me not a little, and made me, I have to confess, both resentful and
envious. Envious because in the bottom of my heart I wanted the same
freedom myself, for motives which I shall develop later; and resentful
because my absolutist friends seemed to me to be stealing the
privilege of blowing both hot and cold. To establish their absolute
they used an intellectualist type of logic which they disregarded when
employed against it. It seemed to me that they ought at least to have
mentioned the objections that had stopped me so completely. I had
yielded to them against my 'will to believe,' out of pure logical
scrupulosity. They, professing to loathe the will to believe and to
follow purest rationality, had simply ignored them. The method was
easy, but hardly to be called candid. Fechner indeed was candid
enough, for he had never thought of the objections, but later writers,
like Royce, who should presumably have heard them, had passed them by
in silence. I felt as if these philosophers were granting their will
to believe in monism too easy a license. My own conscience would
permit me no such license.
So much for the personal confession by which you have allowed me to
introduce the subject. Let us now consider it more objectively.
The fundamental difficulty I have found is the number of
contradictions which idealistic monists seem to disregard. In the
first place they attribute to all existence a mental or experiential
character, but I find their simultaneous belief that the higher and
the lower in the universe are entitatively identical, incompatible
with this character. Incompatible in consequence of the generally
accepted doctrine that, whether Berkeley were right or not in saying
of material existence that its _esse_ is _sentiri_, it is undoubtedly
right to say of _mental_ existence that its _esse_ is _sentiri_ or
_experiri_. If I feel pain, it is just pain that I feel, however I
may have come by the feeling. No one pretends that pain as such only
appears like pain, but in itself is different, for to be as a mental
experience _is_ only to appear to some one.
The idealists in question ought then to do one of two things, but they
do neither. They ought either to refute the notion that as mental
states appear, so they are; or, still keeping that notion, they
ought to admit a distinct agent of unification to do the work of
the all-knower, just as our respective souls or selves in popular
philosophy do the work of partial knowers. Otherwise it is like a
joint-stock company all shareholders and no treasurer or director. If
our finite minds formed a billion facts, then its mind, knowing our
billion, would make a universe composed of a billion and one facts.
But transcendental idealism is quite as unfriendly to active
principles called souls as physiological psychology is, Kant having,
as it thinks, definitively demolished them. And altho some disciples
speak of the transcendental ego of apperception (which they celebrate
as Kant's most precious legacy to posterity) as if it were a combining
agent, the drift of monistic authority is certainly in the direction
of treating it as only an all-witness, whose field of vision we finite
witnesses do not cause, but constitute rather. We are the letters, it
is the alphabet; we are the features, it is the face; not indeed as if
either alphabet or face were something additional to the letters or
the features, but rather as if it were only another name for the very
letters or features themselves. The all-form assuredly differs from
the each-form, but the _matter_ is the same in both, and the each-form
only an unaccountable appearance.
But this, as you see, contradicts the other idealist principle, of
a mental fact being just what it appears to be. If their forms
of appearance are so different, the all and the eaches cannot be
identical.
The way out (unless, indeed, we are willing to discard the logic of
identity altogether) would seem to be frankly to write down the all
and the eaches as two distinct orders of witness, each minor witness
being aware of its own 'content' solely, while the greater witness
knows the minor witnesses, knows their whole content pooled together,
knows their relations to one another, and knows of just how much each
one of them is ignorant.
The two types of witnessing are here palpably non-identical. We get a
pluralism, not a monism, out of them. In my psychology-chapter I
had resorted openly to such pluralism, treating each total field of
consciousness as a distinct entity, and maintaining that the higher
fields merely supersede the lower functionally by knowing more about
the same objects.
The monists themselves writhe like worms on the hook to escape
pluralistic or at least dualistic language, but they cannot escape it.
They speak of the eternal and the temporal 'points of view'; of the
universe in its infinite 'aspect' or in its finite 'capacity'; they
say that '_quâ_ absolute' it is one thing, '_quâ_ relative' another;
they contrast its 'truth' with its appearances; they distinguish the
total from the partial way of 'taking' it, etc.; but they forget that,
on idealistic principles, to make such distinctions is tantamount to
making different beings, or at any rate that varying points of view,
aspects, appearances, ways of taking, and the like, are meaningless
phrases unless we suppose outside of the unchanging content of reality
a diversity of witnesses who experience or take it variously, the
absolute mind being just the witness that takes it most completely.
For consider the matter one moment longer, if you can. Ask what this
notion implies, of appearing differently from different points of
view. If there be no outside witness, a thing can appear only to
itself, the eaches or parts to their several selves temporally, the
all or whole to itself eternally. Different 'selves' thus break out
inside of what the absolutist insists to be intrinsically one fact.
But how can what is _actually_ one be _effectively_ so many? Put your
witnesses anywhere, whether outside or inside of what is witnessed,
in the last resort your witnesses must on idealistic principles be
distinct, for what is witnessed is different.
I fear that I am expressing myself with terrible obscurity--some of
you, I know, are groaning over the logic-chopping. Be a pluralist or
be a monist, you say, for heaven's sake, no matter which, so long as
you stop arguing. It reminds one of Chesterton's epigram that the only
thing that ever drives human beings insane is logic. But whether I be
sane or insane, you cannot fail, even tho you be transcendentalists
yourselves, to recognize to some degree by my trouble the difficulties
that beset monistic idealism. What boots it to call the parts and the
whole the same body of experience, when in the same breath you have to
say that the all 'as such' means one sort of experience and each part
'as such' means another?
Difficulties, then, so far, but no stable solution as yet, for I have
been talking only critically. You will probably be relieved to hear,
then, that having rounded this corner, I shall begin to consider what
may be the possibilities of getting farther.
To clear the path, I beg you first to note one point. What has so
troubled my logical conscience is not so much the absolute by itself
as the whole class of suppositions of which it is the supreme
example, collective experiences namely, claiming identity with their
constituent parts, yet experiencing things quite differently from
these latter. If _any_ such collective experience can be, then of
course, so far as the mere logic of the case goes, the absolute may
be. In a previous lecture I have talked against the absolute from
other points of view. In this lecture I have meant merely to take it
as the example most prominent at Oxford of the thing which has given
me such logical perplexity. I don't logically see how a collective
experience of any grade whatever can be treated as logically identical
with a lot of distributive experiences. They form two different
concepts. The absolute happens to be the only collective experience
concerning which Oxford idealists have urged the identity, so I took
it as my prerogative instance. But Fechner's earth-soul, or any stage
of being below or above that, would have served my purpose just
as well: the same logical objection applies to these collective
experiences as to the absolute.
So much, then, in order that you may not be confused about my
strategical objective. The real point to defend against the logic that
I have used is the identity of the collective and distributive anyhow,
not the particular example of such identity known as the absolute.
So now for the directer question. Shall we say that every complex
mental fact is a separate psychic entity succeeding upon a lot of
other psychic entities which are erroneously called its parts, and
superseding them in function, but not literally being composed of
them? This was the course I took in my psychology; and if followed in
theology, we should have to deny the absolute as usually conceived,
and replace it by the 'God' of theism. We should also have to deny
Fechner's 'earth-soul' and all other superhuman collections of
experience of every grade, so far at least as these are held to be
compounded of our simpler souls in the way which Fechner believed
in; and we should have to make all these denials in the name of the
incorruptible logic of self-identity, teaching us that to call a thing
and its other the same is to commit the crime of self-contradiction.
But if we realize the whole philosophic situation thus produced,
we see that it is almost intolerable. Loyal to the logical kind of
rationality, it is disloyal to every other kind. It makes the universe
discontinuous. These fields of experience that replace each other
so punctually, each knowing the same matter, but in ever-widening
contexts, from simplest feeling up to absolute knowledge, _can_
they have no _being_ in common when their cognitive function is so
manifestly common? The regular succession of them is on such terms an
unintelligible miracle. If you reply that their common _object_ is
of itself enough to make the many witnesses continuous, the same
implacable logic follows you--how _can_ one and the same object appear
so variously? Its diverse appearances break it into a plurality; and
our world of objects then falls into discontinuous pieces quite as
much as did our world of subjects. The resultant irrationality is
really intolerable.
I said awhile ago that I was envious of Fechner and the other
pantheists because I myself wanted the same freedom that I saw them
unscrupulously enjoying, of letting mental fields compound themselves
and so make the universe more continuous, but that my conscience held
me prisoner. In my heart of hearts, however, I knew that my situation
was absurd and could be only provisional. That secret of a continuous
life which the universe knows by heart and acts on every instant
cannot be a contradiction incarnate. If logic says it is one, so
much the worse for logic. Logic being the lesser thing, the static
incomplete abstraction, must succumb to reality, not reality to logic.
Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in its
chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the
universe that engendered it. Fechner, Royce, and Hegel seem on the
truer path. Fechner has never heard of logic's veto, Royce hears the
voice but cannily ignores the utterances, Hegel hears them but to
spurn them--and all go on their way rejoicing. Shall we alone obey the
veto?
Sincerely, and patiently as I could, I struggled with the problem for
years, covering hundreds of sheets of paper with notes and memoranda
and discussions with myself over the difficulty. How can many
consciousnesses be at the same time one consciousness? How can one and
the same identical fact experience itself so diversely? The struggle
was vain; I found myself in an _impasse_. I saw that I must either
forswear that 'psychology without a soul' to which my whole
psychological and kantian education had committed me,--I must, in
short, bring back distinct spiritual agents to know the mental states,
now singly and now in combination, in a word bring back scholasticism
and common sense--or else I must squarely confess the solution of
the problem impossible, and then either give up my intellectualistic
logic, the logic of identity, and adopt some higher (or lower) form
of rationality, or, finally, face the fact that life is logically
irrational.
Sincerely, this is the actual trilemma that confronts every one of us.
Those of you who are scholastic-minded, or simply common-sense minded,
will smile at the elaborate groans of my parturient mountain resulting
in nothing but this mouse. Accept the spiritual agents, for heaven's
sake, you will say, and leave off your ridiculous pedantry. Let but
our 'souls' combine our sensations by their intellectual faculties,
and let but 'God' replace the pantheistic world-soul, and your wheels
will go round again--you will enjoy both life and logic together.