Philosophy are alike created by the simple determination to be
_thorough_ in our thinking about the problems which all things and
events present to us, to use no terms whose meaning is ambiguous, to
assert no propositions as true until we are satisfied that they are
either directly apprehended as true, or strictly deducible from other
propositions which are thus apprehended. But now that the area of facts
open to our exploration has become far too vast for a modern Francis
Bacon to 'take all knowledge for his province', and convenience has led
to the distinction between the philosopher and the man of science, a
_practical_ distinction between the two makes its appearance. It is
_convenient_ that our knowledge of detail should be steadily extended by
considering the consequences which follow from a given set of postulates
without waiting for the solution of the more strictly philosophical
questions whether our postulates have been reduced to the simplest and
most unambiguous expression, whether the list might not be curtailed by
showing that some of its members which have been accepted on their own
merits can be deduced from the rest, or again enlarged by the express
addition of principles which we have all along been using without any
actual formulation of them. The point may be illustrated by considering
the set of 'postulates' explicitly made in the geometry of Euclid. We
cannot be said to have made geometry thoroughly scientific until we know
whether the traditional list of postulates is complete, whether some of
the traditional postulates might not be capable of demonstration, and
whether geometry as a science would be destroyed by the denial of one or
more of the postulates. But it would be very undesirable to suspend
examination of the consequences which follow from the Euclidean
postulates until we have answered all these questions. Even in pure
mathematics one has, in the first instance, to proceed tentatively, to
venture on the work of drawing inferences from what seem to be plausible
postulates before one can pass a verdict on the merits of the postulates
themselves. The consequence of this tentative character of our
inquiries is that, so far as there is a difference between Philosophy
and Science at all, it is a difference in _thoroughness_. The more
philosophic a man's mind is, the less ready will he be to let an
assertion pass without examination as obviously true. Thus Euclid makes
a famous assumption--the 'parallel-postulate'--which amounts to the
assertion that if three of the angles of a rectilinear quadrilateral are
right angles, the fourth will be a right angle. The mathematicians of
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, again, generally assumed
that if a function is continuous it can always be differentiated. A
comparatively unphilosophical mind may let such plausible assertions
pass unexamined, but a more philosophical mind will say to itself, when
it comes across them, 'You great duffer, aren't you going to ask _Why_?'
Suppose that, by way of experiment, I assume that the fourth angle of my
quadrilateral will be acute, or again obtuse, will the body of
conclusions I can now deduce from my set of postulates be free from
contradictions or not? If I really give my mind to the task, cannot I
define a continuous function which is _not_ differentiable? The raising
of the first question led in fact to the discovery of what is called
'non-Euclidean' geometry, the raising of the second has banished from
the text-books of the Calculus the masses of bad reasoning which long
made that branch of mathematics a scandal to logic and led distinguished
philosophers--Kant among them--to suspect that there are hopeless
contradictions in the very foundations of mathematical science.
Now, the effect of such careful scrutiny of first principles is not, of
course, to upset any conclusions which have been correctly drawn from a
set of premisses. All that happens is that the conclusion is no longer
asserted by itself as a truth; what is asserted is that the conclusion
is true _if_ the premisses are true. Thus we no longer assert the
'theorem of Pythagoras' as a categorical proposition; what we assert is
that the theorem follows as a consequence from the assertion of some
half-dozen ultimate postulates which will be found on analysis to be the
premisses of Euclid's proof of his forty-seventh proposition.
To come back to the point I wish to illustrate. The peculiarity of the
philosopher is simply that he still goes on to 'wonder' and ask _Why_
when other persons are ready to leave off. He is less contented than
other men to take things for granted. Of course, he knows that, in the
end, you cannot get away from the necessity of taking something for
granted, but he is anxious to take for granted as few things as
possible, and when he has to take something for granted, he is
exceptionally anxious to know exactly what that something is. De Morgan
tells a story of a very pertinacious controversialist who, being asked
whether he would not at least admit that 'the whole is greater than the
part', retorted, 'Not I, until I see what use you mean to make of the
admission.' I am not sure whether De Morgan quotes this as an ensample
for our following or as a warning for our avoidance, but to my own mind
it is an excellent specimen of the philosophic temper. Until you know
what use is going to be made of your admission, you do not really know
what it is you have admitted. It is this superior thoroughness of
Philosophy which Plato has in mind when he says of his supreme science
'Dialectic' that its business is to examine and even to 'destroy'
([Greek: anairein]) the assumptions of all the other sciences. It does
not let propositions which they have been content to take for granted
pass without challenge, and it may actually 'destroy' them by showing
that there is no justification for asserting them. Thus Euclid's
assumption about parallels ceased to be included among the indispensable
premisses of geometry, and was 'destroyed' in Plato's sense when
Lobatchevsky, Bolyai, and Riemann showed that complete bodies of
self-consistent geometrical theory can be deduced from sets of
postulates in which Euclid's assumption is explicitly denied. There are
two further points I should like to put before you in this connexion.
One of them has been forcibly argued by Mr. Bertrand Russell in his
admirable little work _The Problems of Philosophy_; the other has not.
Indeed, it is just in his unwillingness to allow the second of these
points to be raised at all that Mr. Russell seems to me to fall
conspicuously and unaccountably short of being what, by his own showing,
a great philosopher ought to be.
To take first the point with which Mr. Russell has dealt. There is one
very important branch of inquiry, if we ought not rather to say that
there are two, which appear to belong wholly to general Philosophy and
not to any of the 'sciences'. We cannot so much as ask the simplest
question without making the implication that there is an ultimate
distinction between true assertions and false ones, and certain definite
principles by which we can infer true conclusions from true premisses.
It is thus a very important part of the true 'story of everything' to
state the principles upon which valid reasoning depends, and to
enunciate the ultimate postulates which have to be taken for granted
whenever we try to reason validly about anything. This is the inquiry
known by the name of logic. We cannot expect men whose time is fully
taken up with the task of reaching true conclusions about some special
class of facts, those which concern the history of living organisms, or
the production and distribution of 'wealth', or the stability of various
forms of government, to burden themselves with this inquiry in addition
to their other tasks. They may fairly be allowed to leave the
construction of logic to others. But the man who makes it the business
of his life to get back to ultimate first principles must plainly be a
logician, though he need not be a specialist in biology or economics or
'sociology'. One great advantage which our children should have over
their parents as students of Philosophy is that the last half-century
has been one of unprecedented advance in the study of logic. In the
'logic of relations', founded by De Morgan, carried out further in the
third volume of Ernst Schröder's _Algebra der Logik_, and made still
more precise in the earliest sections of the _Principia Mathematica_ of
Whitehead and Russell, we now possess the most potent weapon of
intellectual analysis ever yet devised by man.
We must further remark that the serious pursuit of any kind of science
implies not only that there _are_ truths, but that some of them, at
least, can be _known_ by man. Hence there arises a problem which is not
quite the same as that of logic. What _is_ the relation we mean to speak
of when we talk of 'knowing' something, and what conditions must be
fulfilled in order that a proposition may not only be true but be known
by us to be true? The very generality of this problem marks it out as
one which belongs to what I have been all along calling Philosophy. (We
must be careful to note that the problem does not belong to the 'special
science' of psychology. Psychology aims at telling us how particular
thoughts and trains of thought arise in an individual mind, but it has
nothing to say on the question which of our thoughts give us 'knowledge'
and which do not. The 'possibility of knowledge' has to be presupposed
by the psychologist as a pre-condition of his particular investigations
exactly as it is presupposed by the physicist, the botanist, or the
economist.) The study of the problem 'what are the conditions which must
be satisfied whenever anything at all is known' is precisely what Kant
meant by _Criticism_, though the raising of the problem in this
definite form is not due to Kant but goes back to Plato, who made it the
subject of one of his greatest dialogues, the _Theaetetus_. The simplest
way to make the nature and importance of the problem clear is perhaps
the way Mr. Russell adopts in the _Problems of Philosophy_--to give a
very rough statement of Kant's famous solution.
Kant held that careful analysis shows us that any piece of knowledge has
two constituents of very diverse origin. It has a _matter_ or material
constituent consisting, as Kant held, of certain crude data supplied by
sensation, colours, tones of varying pitch and loudness, odours,
savours, and the like. It has also a _form_ or formal constituent. Our
data, when we know anything at all, are arranged on some definite
principle of order. When we recognize an object by the eye or a tune by
the ear, we do not apprehend simply so much colour or sound, but colours
spread out and forming a pattern or notes following one another in a
fixed order. (If you reverse the movement of a gramophone, you get the
same notes as before, but you do not get the same tune.) Further, Kant
thought it could be shown that the data of our knowledge are a
disorderly medley and come to us from without, being supplied by things
which exist and are what they are equally whether any one perceives them
or not, but the element of form, pattern, or order is put into them by
our own minds in the act of knowing them. Our minds are so constructed
that we _can_ only perceive things or think of them as connected by
certain definite principles of orderly arrangement. This, he thought,
explains the indubitable fact that we can sometimes know universal
propositions to be true without needing to examine all the individual
instances. I can know for certain that in every triangle the greater
angle is subtended by the greater side, or that every event has a
definite cause among earlier events, though I cannot examine all
triangles or all events one by one. This is because the postulates of
geometry and the law of causality are types of order which my mind
_puts_ into the data of its knowledge in the very act of attending to
them, and it is therefore certain that I shall never perceive or think
anything which does not conform to these types.
I give Kant's answer to the problem of Criticism not because I believe
it to be the correct one, but to show what important consequences follow
from our acceptance of a solution of this problem. If it is true that
one of the constituent elements of every piece of knowledge is a lump of
crude sensation, it follows that we can have no knowledge about our own
minds or souls, and still less about God, since, if there are such
beings as my soul and God, at any rate neither furnishes me with
sense-data. Hence a great part of Kant's famous _Critique of Pure
Reason_ is taken up by an elaborate attempt to show that psychology and
theology contain no real knowledge. We cannot even know whether there is
any probability for or against the existence of the soul or of God,
though Kant was very anxious to show that it is our duty on moral
grounds to _believe_ very firmly in both. Now if Kant is right about
this, his result is tremendously important. If psychology and theology
are wholly devoid of scientific value, it is most desirable that we
should know this, not only that we may not waste time in studying them,
but because it may reasonably make a very great difference to the
practical ordering of our lives. If Kant can be proved wrong, it is
equally important to be convinced that he is wrong. We may have been led
by belief in his teaching to neglect the acquisition of a great deal of
knowledge of high intrinsic interest, and may even have been betrayed
into basing the conduct of life on wrong principles. If, for example, we
can really know something about the soul, it _may_ be possible to know
whether it is immortal or not, and it is not unreasonable to hold that
certain knowledge, or even probable belief, on such a point ought to
make a great difference to our choice between rival aims in life. There
is clearly much less to be said for the recommendation to 'eat and drink
for to-morrow we die' if we have reason to believe our souls immortal
than if we have not, and some of us do not share Mr. Russell's view that
Philosophy is called upon to abdicate what the Greeks thought her
sovereign function, the regulation of life. It is true that Kant
convinced himself that it is a moral duty to act as if we knew the truth
of doctrines for or against which we cannot detect the slightest balance
of probability. But the logically sound inference from Kant's premisses
would be that, to use Pascal's famous metaphor, a prudent man will do
well to bet neither for nor against immortality. Unfortunately, as
Pascal said, you can't _help_ betting; _il faut parier_. If it makes any
difference to the relative values of different goods whether the soul
dies with the body or not, one _must_ take sides in the matter. In
making one's choices one must prefer either the things it is reasonable
to regard as good for a creature whose days are threescore years and ten
or those which it is reasonable to regard as best for a being who is to
live for ever. The only way to escape having to bet is not to be born.
I come to the second problem, the one which, as I think, Mr. Russell
arbitrarily ignores. A human being is not a mere knowledge-machine. The
relation of knower to known is not the only relation in which he stands
to himself and to other things. The 'world' is not merely something at
which he can look on, it is also an instrument for achieving what he
regards as good and for creating what he judges to be beautiful. To do
good and to make beautiful things are just as much man's business as to
discover truth. A knowledge of the world would be very incomplete if it
did not include knowledge of what ought to be, whether because it is
morally best or because it is beautiful, as well as knowledge of what is
actually there. And it is not immediately evident how the two, knowledge
of what ought to be and knowledge of what merely is, are connected.
There is, to be sure, one way in which it is pretty plain that they are
_not_ related. You cannot learn what ought to be--what is beautiful or
morally good--merely by first finding out what has been or what is
likely to be. This simple consideration of itself deprives many of the
big volumes which have been written about the 'evolution' of art and
morals of most of their value. They may have interest if they are
treated only as contributions to the history of opinion about art and
morals. But unhappily their authors often assume that we can find out
what really _is_ right or beautiful by merely discovering what men have
thought right and beautiful in the remote past or guessing what they
will think right or beautiful in the distant future. The fallacy
underlying this procedure has been happily exposed by Mr. Russell
himself in an occasional essay where he remarks that it is antecedently
just as likely that evolution is going from bad to worse as that it is
going from good to better. _Unless_ it is going from bad to worse it is
obviously absurd to suppose that you can find out what _is_ good by
discovering what our distant ancestors _thought_ good. And _if_ (as may
be the case) it is going from bad to worse, no amount of knowledge about
what our posterity will think good can throw any light on the question
what is good. There is, in fact, no ground whatever for believing that
'evolution' need be the same thing as progress, and this is enough to
knock the bottom out of 'evolutionary ethics'.
On the other hand, it is quite certain that when we call an act right
or a picture beautiful we do not mean to be expressing a mere personal
liking of our own, any more than when we make a statement about the
composition of sulphuric acid or the product of 9 and 7. As Dr. Rashdall
has put it, when we say that a given act is right, we do not pretend to
be infallible. We know that we may fall into mistakes about right and
wrong just as we may make mistakes in working a multiplication sum. But
we do mean to say that _if_ our own verdict 'that act is right' is a
true one, then the verdict of any one who retorts 'that act is wrong' is
false, just as when we state the result of our multiplication we mean to
assert that _if_ we have done the sum correctly any one else who brings
out a different answer has worked it wrongly. Indeed, we might convince
ourselves that these verdicts are not meant to be expressions of private
and personal liking in a still simpler way. All of us must be aware that
the line of action we pronounce 'right' is not always what we like nor
the conduct we call 'wrong' what we dislike. We often like doing what we
fully believe to be wrong and dislike doing what we believe right,
without being in the least confused in our moral verdicts by this
collision of liking and conviction. So again it is a common thing to
like one poem or picture better than another, and yet to be fully
persuaded that the work we like the less is the better work of art.
Indeed, the whole process of moral and aesthetic education may be said
to exist just in learning to like most what is really best.
All this, put into so many words, may seem too simple to call for
statement, but it makes nonsense of a great deal that has been written
about ethics of late years. It disposes once for all of the theory that
moral and aesthetic verdicts are 'subjective', that is, that they mean
no more than that the persons who make them have certain personal likes
and dislikes of which these verdicts are a record. Of course, it might
be urged that all of us do indeed mean to express truths which are
independent of our personal likings when we make moral and aesthetic
judgements, but that we never succeed in doing so. A man might
conceivably hold that there is no real distinction between right and
wrong or between beautiful and ugly, but that it is a universal illusion
of mankind to suppose that there are such distinctions. Or he might hold
that the distinctions are real, but that we do not know where to draw
them. He might suggest that some ways of acting are really right and
others really wrong, but that we do not know which are the right acts
and so regularly confuse what we like doing with what is 'really' right.
Mr. Russell, in some of his later writings, seems to incline to views of
this sort. But the suggestion is really unmotived. It would be just as
reasonable to suggest that all geometrical or astronomical propositions
are only expressions of the personal and private feelings of geometers
and astronomers, and that either there is no distinction between truths
and falsehoods in geometry and astronomy, or that, at any rate, we do
not know which the true propositions are. That there is a real
distinction between true and false propositions and that, with pains and
care, we can discover some truths are assumptions we must make if we are
to recognize the possibility of pursuing knowledge at all, and there is
no reason to suppose that these assumptions do not hold as good in
matters of art and morals as elsewhere. No doubt, in practice men are
prone to mistake what they like for what is right or beautiful, but this
danger, such as it is, is not confined to art and morals. Men do often
call acts right merely because they like doing them or pictures
beautiful merely because they get pleasure from them. But it is also
notorious that many men are prone to believe that a thing is likely to
happen merely because they wish it to happen, or that it is unlikely to
happen merely because they wish it not to happen. Yet no one seriously
makes the reality of these tendencies a ground for denying the
possibility of 'inferring the future from the past'. We must then, I
hold, regard it as an integral part of the whole story of everything to
find an answer to the questions What is good? and What is beautiful? as
well as to the question What is fact? By the side of the so-called
'positive sciences', which deal with the third question, we must
recognize as having an equal right to exist the so-called 'sciences of
value', which deal with the first and the second.
I want now to take a further step in which disciples of Mr. Russell
would perhaps decline to follow me. We have already seen what is meant
by the co-ordination of the sciences into a single body of deductions
from definite ultimate postulates, though in what we have said about the
task we were content to speak provisionally as if the sciences of 'what
is' were all the sciences to be co-ordinated. We talked, in fact, as if
the work of Philosophy were merely to work into a coherent story all
that can be known of 'objects that present themselves to the
contemplation' of a knower. But, of course, if Philosophy is ever to
attack its final problem, we must take into account two things which we
have so far ignored. The 'whole story of everything' includes the
knowing intelligence itself as well as the 'objects' which present
themselves to its gaze. Indeed, it is not even accurate to speak as if
'objects' 'presented themselves' to a merely passive intelligence; to be
apprehended, they have to be actively attended to. If we would see them,
we have to be on the look-out for them. And the knowing intelligence is
not aware merely of these objects. It is also aware of itself, though
it is certainly never a 'presented object'. Also, it is not only a
knower but a doer and a maker. Intelligence is shown as much in the
ordering of life by a rule based on a right valuation of goods and in
the making of things of beauty as in the discovery of propositions about
what is. Hence, we can hardly be content to leave the 'positive'
sciences and the 'sciences of values' simply standing over against one
another. There is that which 'is', and there is that which 'ought to
be', and, at first sight at any rate, the two seem very different. Much
that is--ignorance, sin, misery, ugliness--ought not to be, and much
that ought to be is very far from being fact. We are accustomed to
regard this as a matter of course, but, closely considered, it is
perhaps the supreme wonder of all the wonders. We creatures of
circumstance, as we call ourselves, can take stock of the sum of things
to which we belong, and judge it. It is not simply that we can, and
often do, _wish_ that it were different in various ways; we can judge
that it _ought_ to be different, and you may find a man of science like
Huxley, after a life spent in trying to understand the laws which
prevail in the world, deliberately making it his last word to his
fellows that their duty is to set themselves to reverse the 'cosmic
process', to select for preservation just the human types which, if the
much-abused metaphor may be tolerated, Nature, left to herself, selects
for destruction.
We might, of course, regard this apparently unreconcilable conflict
between the arrangements which do prevail; as is commonly supposed, in
the world, and those which ought to prevail, as a mystery which we must
despair of ever understanding. But, to say the least of it, it is hardly
consistent with the philosophic temper to treat any question as an
insoluble riddle until one has tried all ways of solution and found them
_culs-de-sac_. If we are to be thoroughly loyal to the spirit which
prompts all intelligent inquiry, we are bound at least to ask whether
it is, after all, beyond the power of human intelligence to think of the
world as a system in which somehow, in the end, what ought to be
prescribes what is. It is true that, for reasons already mentioned, we
cannot, like Spinoza or the Sufis, reconcile facts and values by the
simple assumption that what is is shown, by the fact that it is, to be
what ought to be, and that our common conviction that sin and ugliness
are painfully real is only an illusion due to spiritual short sight. We
have just as much reason to believe that some pleasures are good, that
pain which is not a means to good is evil, that justice and purity are
good, lewdness and cruelty bad, that some colours are lovely and others
odious, as we have to believe that between any two points there is
always a third, or that, if _B_ and _C_ are two points there is always a
point _D_ on the straight line _BC_ such that _C_ is between _B_ and
_D_, and a point _A_ on _CB_ such that _B_ is between _C_ and _A_.
Indeed, the most fanatical champion of what Mr. Russell in his
anti-ethical mood calls 'ethical neutrality' cannot well avoid
recognizing the truth of at least one proposition in ethics, the
proposition that knowledge of scientific truth is _better_ than
ignorance of it. The admission of this single truth of value is enough
to raise all the time-honoured problems of ethics and theodicy. If
knowledge of truth is better than ignorance of it, the actual present
state of the world, in which so much truth is yet to seek, is by no
means wholly good, and there really is at least one way in which it is
our duty to make it more like what it ought to be.