they doubtless seem rambling and inconclusive enough. My only hope is
that they may possibly have proved suggestive; and if indeed they have
been suggestive of one point of method, I am almost willing to let
all other suggestions go. That point is that _it is high time for the
basis of discussion in these questions to be broadened and thickened
up_. It is for that that I have brought in Fechner and Bergson, and
descriptive psychology and religious experiences, and have ventured
even to hint at psychical research and other wild beasts of the
philosophic desert. Owing possibly to the fact that Plato and
Aristotle, with their intellectualism, are the basis of philosophic
study here, the Oxford brand of transcendentalism seems to me to have
confined itself too exclusively to thin logical considerations, that
would hold good in all conceivable worlds, worlds of an empirical
constitution entirely different from ours. It is as if the actual
peculiarities of the world that is were entirely irrelevant to the
content of truth. But they cannot be irrelevant; and the philosophy
of the future must imitate the sciences in taking them more and more
elaborately into account. I urge some of the younger members of
this learned audience to lay this hint to heart. If you can do so
effectively, making still more concrete advances upon the path which
Fechner and Bergson have so enticingly opened up, if you can gather
philosophic conclusions of any kind, monistic or pluralistic, from
the _particulars of life_, I will say, as I now do say, with the
cheerfullest of hearts, 'Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, but
ring the fuller minstrel in.'
NOTES
LECTURE I
Note 1, page 5.--Bailey: _op. cit._, First Series, p. 52.
Note 2, page 11.--_Smaller Logic_, § 194.
Note 3, page 16.--_Exploratio philosophica_, Part I, 1865, pp.
xxxviii, 130.
Note 4, page 20.--Hinneberg: _Die Kultur der Gegenwart: Systematische
Philosophie_. Leipzig: Teubner, 1907.
LECTURE II
Note 1, page 50.--The difference is that the bad parts of this finite
are eternal and essential for absolutists, whereas pluralists may hope
that they will eventually get sloughed off and become as if they had
not been.
Note 2, page 51.--Quoted by W. Wallace: _Lectures and Essays_, Oxford,
1898, p. 560.
Note 3, page 51.--_Logic_, tr. Wallace, 1874, p. 181.
Note 4, page 52.--_Ibid._, p. 304.
Note 5, page 53.--_Contemporary Review_, December, 1907, vol. 92, p.
618.
Note 6, page 57.--_Metaphysic_, sec. 69 ff.
Note 7, page 62.--_The World and the Individual_, vol. i, pp. 131-132.
Note 8, page 67.--A good illustration of this is to be found in a
controversy between Mr. Bradley and the present writer, in _Mind_
for 1893, Mr. Bradley contending (if I understood him rightly) that
'resemblance' is an illegitimate category, because it admits of
degrees, and that the only real relations in comparison are absolute
identity and absolute non-comparability.
Note 9, page 75.--_Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic_, p. 184.
Note 10, page 75.--_Appearance and Reality_, 1893, pp. 141-142.
Note 11, page 76.--Cf. _Elements of Metaphysics_, p. 88.
Note 12, page 77.--_Some Dogmas of Religion_, p. 184.
Note 13, page 80.--For a more detailed criticism of Mr. Bradley's
intellectualism, see Appendix A.
LECTURE III
Note 1, page 94.--Hegel, _Smaller Logic_, pp. 184-185.
Note 2, page 95.--Cf. Hegel's fine vindication of this function of
contradiction in his _Wissenschaft der Logik_, Bk. ii, sec. 1, chap,
ii, C, Anmerkung 3.
Note 3, page 95--_Hegel_, in _Blackwood's Philosophical Classics_, p.
162.
Note 4, page 95--_Wissenschaft der Logik_, Bk. i, sec. 1, chap, ii, B,
a.
Note 5, page 96--Wallace's translation of the _Smaller Logic_, p. 128.
Note 6, page 101--Joachim, _The Nature of Truth_, Oxford, 1906, pp.
22, 178. The argument in case the belief should be doubted would be
the higher synthetic idea: if two truths were possible, the duality of
that possibility would itself be the one truth that would unite them.
Note 7, page 115.--_The World and the Individual_, vol. ii, pp. 385,
386, 409.
Note 8, page 116.--The best _un_inspired argument (again not
ironical!) which I know is that in Miss M.W. Calkins's excellent book,
_The Persistent Problems of Philosophy_, Macmillan, 1902.
Note 9, page 117.--Cf. Dr. Fuller's excellent article,' Ethical monism
and the problem of evil,' in the _Harvard Journal of Theology_, vol.
i, No. 2, April, 1908.
Note 10, page 120.--_Metaphysic_, sec. 79.
Note 11, page 121.--_Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic_, secs. 150,
153.
Note 12, page 121.--_The Nature of Truth_, 1906, pp. 170-171.
Note 13, page 121.--_Ibid._, p. 179.
Note 14, page 123.--The psychological analogy that certain finite
tracts of consciousness are composed of isolable parts added together,
cannot be used by absolutists as proof that such parts are essential
elements of all consciousness. Other finite fields of consciousness
seem in point of fact not to be similarly resolvable into isolable
parts.
Note 15, page 128.--Judging by the analogy of the relation which our
central consciousness seems to bear to that of our spinal cord, lower
ganglia, etc., it would seem natural to suppose that in whatever
superhuman mental synthesis there may be, the neglect and elimination
of certain contents of which we are conscious on the human level might
be as characteristic a feature as is the combination and interweaving
of other human contents.
LECTURE IV
Note 1, page 143.--_The Spirit of Modern Philosophy_, p. 227.
Note 2, page 165.--Fechner: _Über die Seelenfrage_, 1861, p. 170.
Note 3, page 168.--Fechner's latest summarizing of his views, _Die
Tagesansicht gegenüber der Nachtansicht_, Leipzig, 1879, is now, I
understand, in process of translation. His _Little Book of Life after
Death_ exists already in two American versions, one published by
Little, Brown & Co., Boston, the other by the Open Court Co., Chicago.
Note 4, page 176.--Mr. Bradley ought to be to some degree exempted
from my attack in these last pages. Compare especially what he says of
non-human consciousness in his _Appearance and Reality_, pp. 269-272.
LECTURE V
Note 1, page 182.--Royce: _The Spirit of Modern Philosophy_, p. 379.
Note 2, page 184.--_The World and the Individual_, vol. ii, pp. 58-62.
Note 3, page 190.--I hold to it still as the best description of
an enormous number of our higher fields of consciousness. They
demonstrably do not _contain_ the lower states that know the same
objects. Of other fields, however this is not so true; so, in the
_Psychological Review_ for 1895, vol. ii, p. 105 (see especially pp.
119-120), I frankly withdrew, in principle, my former objection to
talking of fields of consciousness being made of simpler 'parts,'
leaving the facts to decide the question in each special case.
Note 4, page 194.--I abstract from the consciousness attached to the
whole itself, if such consciousness be there.
LECTURE VI
Note 1, page 250.--For a more explicit vindication of the notion of
activity, see Appendix B, where I try to defend its recognition as
a definite form of immediate experience against its rationalistic
critics.
I subjoin here a few remarks destined to disarm some possible critics
of Professor Bergson, who, to defend himself against misunderstandings
of his meaning, ought to amplify and more fully explain his statement
that concepts have a practical but not a theoretical use. Understood
in one way, the thesis sounds indefensible, for by concepts we
certainly increase our knowledge about things, and that seems a
theoretical achievement, whatever practical achievements may follow in
its train. Indeed, M. Bergson might seem to be easily refutable out of
his own mouth. His philosophy pretends, if anything, to give a better
insight into truth than rationalistic philosophies give: yet what is
it in itself if not a conceptual system? Does its author not reason by
concepts exclusively in his very attempt to show that they can give no
insight?
To this particular objection, at any rate, it is easy to reply.
In using concepts of his own to discredit the theoretic claims of
concepts generally, Bergson does not contradict, but on the contrary
emphatically illustrates his own view of their practical role, for
they serve in his hands only to 'orient' us, to show us to what
quarter we must _practically turn_ if we wish to gain that completer
insight into reality which he denies that they can give. He directs
our hopes away from them and towards the despised sensible flux. _What
he reaches by their means is thus only a new practical attitude_. He
but restores, against the vetoes of intellectualist philosophy, our
naturally cordial relations with sensible experience and common sense.
This service is surely only practical; but it is a service for which
we may be almost immeasurably grateful. To trust our senses again with
a good philosophic conscience!--who ever conferred on us so valuable a
freedom before?
By making certain distinctions and additions it seems easy to meet the
other counts of the indictment. Concepts are realities of a new order,
with particular relations between them. These relations are just as
much directly perceived, when we compare our various concepts, as the
distance between two sense-objects is perceived when we look at it.
Conception is an operation which gives us material for new acts of
perception, then; and when the results of these are written down,
we get those bodies of 'mental truth' (as Locke called it) known as
mathematics, logic, and _a priori_ metaphysics. To know all this truth
is a theoretic achievement, indeed, but it is a narrow one; for the
relations between conceptual objects as such are only the static
ones of bare comparison, as difference or sameness, congruity or
contradiction, inclusion or exclusion. Nothing _happens_ in the realm
of concepts; relations there are 'eternal' only. The theoretic gain
fails so far, therefore, to touch even the outer hem of the real
world, the world of causal and dynamic relations, of activity and
history. To gain insight into all that moving life, Bergson is right
in turning us away from conception and towards perception.
By combining concepts with percepts, _we can draw maps of the
distribution_ of other percepts in distant space and time. To know
this distribution is of course a theoretic achievement, but the
achievement is extremely limited, it cannot be effected without
percepts, and even then what it yields is only static relations. From
maps we learn positions only, and the position of a thing is but the
slightest kind of truth about it; but, being indispensable for forming
our plans of action, the conceptual map-making has the enormous
practical importance on which Bergson so rightly insists.
But concepts, it will be said, do not only give us eternal truths
of comparison and maps of the positions of things, they bring new
_values_ into life. In their mapping function they stand to perception
in general in the same relation in which sight and hearing stand to
touch--Spencer calls these higher senses only organs of anticipatory
touch. But our eyes and ears also open to us worlds of independent
glory: music and decorative art result, and an incredible enhancement
of life's value follows. Even so does the conceptual world bring new
ranges of value and of motivation to our life. Its maps not only serve
us practically, but the mere mental possession of such vast pictures
is of itself an inspiring good. New interests and incitements, and
feelings of power, sublimity, and admiration are aroused.
Abstractness _per se_ seems to have a touch of ideality. ROYCE'S
'loyalty to loyalty' is an excellent example. 'Causes,' as
anti-slavery, democracy, liberty, etc., dwindle when realized in their
sordid particulars. The veritable 'cash-value' of the idea seems to
cleave to it only in the abstract status. Truth at large, as ROYCE
contends, in his _Philosophy of Loyalty_, appears another thing
altogether from the true particulars in which it is best to believe.
It transcends in value all those 'expediencies,' and is something to
live for, whether expedient or inexpedient. Truth with a big T is a
'momentous issue'; truths in detail are 'poor scraps,' mere 'crumbling
successes.' (_Op. cit._, Lecture VII, especially § v.)
Is, now, such bringing into existence of a new _value_ to be regarded
as a theoretic achievement? The question is a nice one, for altho a
value is in one sense an objective quality perceived, the essence of
that quality is its relation to the will, and consists in its being
a dynamogenic spur that makes our action different. So far as their
value-creating function goes, it would thus appear that concepts
connect themselves more with our active than with our theoretic life,
so here again Bergson's formulation seems unobjectionable. Persons who
have certain concepts are animated otherwise, pursue their own
vital careers differently. It doesn't necessarily follow that they
understand other vital careers more intimately.
Again it may be said that we combine old concepts into new ones,
conceiving thus such realities as the ether, God, souls, or what not,
of which our sensible life alone would leave us altogether ignorant.
This surely is an increase of our knowledge, and may well be called
a theoretical achievement. Yet here again Bergson's criticisms hold
good. Much as conception may tell us _about_ such invisible objects,
it sheds no ray of light into their interior. The completer, indeed,
our definitions of ether-waves, atoms, Gods, or souls become, the less
instead of the more intelligible do they appear to us. The learned
in such things are consequently beginning more and more to ascribe a
solely instrumental value to our concepts of them. Ether and molecules
may be like co-ordinates and averages, only so many crutches by the
help of which we practically perform the operation of getting about
among our sensible experiences.
We see from these considerations how easily the question of whether
the function of concepts is theoretical or practical may grow into
a logomachy. It may be better from this point of view to refuse to
recognize the alternative as a sharp one. The sole thing that is
certain in the midst of it all is that Bergson is absolutely right
in contending that the whole life of activity and change is inwardly
impenetrable to conceptual treatment, and that it opens itself only to
sympathetic apprehension at the hands of immediate feeling. All the
_whats_ as well as the _thats_ of reality, relational as well as
terminal, are in the end contents of immediate concrete perception.
Yet the remoter unperceived _arrangements_, temporal, spatial, and
logical, of these contents, are also something that we need to know as
well for the pleasure of the knowing as for the practical help. We may
call this need of arrangement a theoretic need or a practical need,
according as we choose to lay the emphasis; but Bergson is accurately
right when he limits conceptual knowledge to arrangement, and when he
insists that arrangement is the mere skirt and skin of the whole of
what we ought to know.
Note 2, page 266.--Gaston Rageot, _Revue Philosophique_, vol. lxiv, p.
85 (July, 1907).
Note 3, page 268.--I have myself talked in other ways as plausibly
as I could, in my _Psychology_, and talked truly (as I believe) in
certain selected cases; but for other cases the natural way invincibly
comes back.
LECTURE VII
Note 1, page 278.--_Introduction to Hume_, 1874, p. 151.
Note 2, page 279.--_Ibid._, pp. 16, 21, 36, _et passim_.
Note 3, page 279.--See, _inter alia_, the chapter on the 'Stream of
Thought' in my own Psychologies; H. Cornelius, _Psychologie_, 1897,
chaps, i and iii; G.H. Luquet, _Idées Générales de Psychologie_, 1906,
_passim_.
Note 4, page 280.--Compare, as to all this, an article by the present
writer, entitled 'A world of pure experience,' in the _Journal of
Philosophy_, New York, vol. i, pp. 533, 561 (1905).
Note 5, page 280.--Green's attempt to discredit sensations by
reminding us of their 'dumbness,' in that they do not come already
_named_, as concepts may be said to do, only shows how intellectualism
is dominated by verbality. The unnamed appears in Green as synonymous
with the unreal.
Note 6, page 283.--_Philosophy of Reflection_, i, 248 ff.
Note 7, page 284.--Most of this paragraph is extracted from an address
of mine before the American Psychological Association, printed in the
_Psychological Review_, vol. ii, p. 105. I take pleasure in the
fact that already in 1895 I was so far advanced towards my present
bergsonian position.
Note 8, page 289.--The conscious self of the moment, the central self,
is probably determined to this privileged position by its functional
connexion with the body's imminent or present acts. It is the present
_acting_ self. Tho the more that surrounds it may be 'subconscious'
to us, yet if in its 'collective capacity' it also exerts an active
function, it may be conscious in a wider way, conscious, as it were,
over our heads.
On the relations of consciousness to action see Bergson's _Matière
et Mémoire, passim_, especially chap. i. Compare also the hints in
Münsterberg's _Grundzüge der Psychologie_, chap, xv; those in my own
_Principles of Psychology_, vol. ii, pp. 581-592; and those in W.
McDougall's _Physiological Psychology_, chap. vii.
Note 9, page 295.--Compare _Zend-Avesta_, 2d edition, vol. i, pp. 165
ff., 181, 206, 244 ff., etc.; _Die Tagesansicht_, etc., chap, v, § 6;
and chap. xv.
LECTURE VIII
Note 1, page 330.--Blondel: _Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne_, June,
1906, p. 241.
APPENDICES
APPENDIX A
THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS[1]
Experience in its immediacy seems perfectly fluent. The active
sense of living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our
instinctive world for us, is self-luminous and suggests no paradoxes.
Its difficulties are disappointments and uncertainties. They are not
intellectual contradictions.
When the reflective intellect gets at work, however, it discovers
incomprehensibilities in the flowing process. Distinguishing its
elements and parts, it gives them separate names, and what it thus
disjoins it cannot easily put together. Pyrrhonism accepts the
irrationality and revels in its dialectic elaboration. Other
philosophies try, some by ignoring, some by resisting, and some by
turning the dialectic procedure against itself, negating its first
negations, to restore the fluent sense of life again, and let
redemption take the place of innocence. The perfection with which any
philosophy may do this is the measure of its human success and of its
importance in philosophic history. In an article entitled 'A world of
pure experience,[2] I tried my own hand sketchily at
[Footnote 1: Reprinted from the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology,
and Scientific Methods_, vol. ii, New York, 1905, with slight verbal
revision.]
[Footnote 2: _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific
Methods_, vol. i, No. 20, p. 566.]
the problem, resisting certain first steps of dialectics by insisting
in a general way that the immediately experienced conjunctive
relations are as real as anything else. If my sketch is not to appear
too _näif_, I must come closer to details, and in the present essay I
propose to do so.
I
'Pure experience' is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of
life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its
conceptual categories. Only new-born babes, or men in semi-coma
from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an
experience pure in the literal sense of a _that_ which is not yet any
definite _what_, tho ready to be all sorts of whats; full both of
oneness and of manyness, but in respects that don't appear; changing
throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no
points, either of distinction or of identity, can be caught. Pure
experience in this state is but another name for feeling or sensation.
But the flux of it no sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with
emphases, and these salient parts become identified and fixed and
abstracted; so that experience now flows as if shot through with
adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity is
only a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized
sensation which it still embodies.
Far back as we go, the flux, both as a whole and in its parts, is that
of things conjunct and separated. The great continua of time, space,
and the self envelop everything, betwixt them, and flow together
without interfering. The things that they envelop come as separate in
some ways and as continuous in others. Some sensations coalesce with
some ideas, and others are irreconcilable. Qualities compenetrate one
space, or exclude each other from it. They cling together persistently
in groups that move as units, or else they separate. Their changes are
abrupt or discontinuous; and their kinds resemble or differ; and, as
they do so, they fall into either even or irregular series.
In all this the continuities and the discontinuities are absolutely
co-ordinate matters of immediate feeling. The conjunctions are
as primordial elements of 'fact' as are the distinctions and
disjunctions. In the same act by which I feel that this passing minute
is a new pulse of my life, I feel that the old life continues into it,
and the feeling of continuance in no wise jars upon the simultaneous
feeling of a novelty. They, too, compenetrate harmoniously.
Prepositions, copulas, and conjunctions, 'is,' 'isn't,' 'then,'
'before,' 'in,' 'on,' 'beside,' 'between,' 'next,' 'like,' 'unlike,'
'as,' 'but,' flower out of the stream of pure experience, the stream
of concretes or the sensational stream, as naturally as nouns and
adjectives do, and they melt into it again as fluidly when we apply
them to a new portion of the stream.
II
If now we ask why we must translate experience from a more concrete
or pure into a more intellectualized form, filling it with ever more
abounding conceptual distinctions, rationalism and naturalism give
different replies.
The rationalistic answer is that the theoretic life is absolute and
its interests imperative; that to understand is simply the duty of
man; and that who questions this need not be argued with, for by the
fact of arguing he gives away his case.
The naturalist answer is that the environment kills as well as
sustains us, and that the tendency of raw experience to extinguish the
experient himself is lessened just in the degree in which the elements
in it that have a practical bearing upon life are analyzed out of the
continuum and verbally fixed and coupled together, so that we may know
what is in the wind for us and get ready to react in time. Had pure
experience, the naturalist says, been always perfectly healthy, there
would never have arisen the necessity of isolating or verbalizing
any of its terms. We should just have experienced inarticulately and
unintellectually enjoyed. This leaning on 'reaction' in the naturalist
account implies that, whenever we intellectualize a relatively pure
experience, we ought to do so for the sake of redescending to the
purer or more concrete level again; and that if an intellect stays
aloft among its abstract terms and generalized relations, and does not
reinsert itself with its conclusions into some particular point of
the immediate stream of life, it fails to finish out its function and
leaves its normal race unrun.