THE ROMANTIC REACTION
My last lecture described the influence upon the eighteenth century of
the narrow and efficient scheme of scientific concepts which it had
inherited from its predecessor. That scheme was the product of a
mentality which found the Augustinian theology extremely congenial. The
Protestant Calvinism and the Catholic Jansenism exhibited man as
helpless to co-operate with Irresistible Grace: the contemporary scheme
of science exhibited man as helpless to co-operate with the irresistable
mechanism of nature. The mechanism of God and the mechanism of matter
were the monstrous issues of limited metaphysics and clear logical
intellect. Also the seventeenth century had genius, and cleared the
world of muddled thought. The eighteenth century continued the work of
clearance, with ruthless efficiency. The scientific scheme has lasted
longer than the theological scheme. Mankind soon lost interest in
Irresistible Grace; but it quickly appreciated the competent engineering
which was due to science. Also in the first quarter of the eighteenth
century, George Berkeley launched his philosophical criticism against
the whole basis of the system. He failed to disturb the dominant current
of thought. In my last lecture I developed a parallel line of argument,
which would lead to a system of thought basing nature upon the concept
of organism, and not upon the concept of matter. In the present lecture,
I propose in the first place to consider how the concrete educated
thought of men has viewed this opposition of mechanism and organism. It
is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its
expression. Accordingly it is to literature that we must look,
particularly in its more concrete forms, namely in poetry and in drama,
if we hope to discover the inward thoughts of a generation.
We quickly find that the Western peoples exhibit on a colossal scale a
peculiarity which is popularly supposed to be more especially
characteristic of the Chinese. Surprise is often expressed that a
Chinaman can be of two religions, a Confucian for some occasions and a
Buddhist for other occasions. Whether this is true of China I do not
know; nor do I know whether, if true, these two attitudes are really
inconsistent. But there can be no doubt that an analogous fact is true
of the West, and that the two attitudes involved are inconsistent. A
scientific realism, based on mechanism, is conjoined with an unwavering
belief in the world of men and of the higher animals as being composed
of self-determining organisms. This radical inconsistency at the basis
of modern thought accounts for much that is half-hearted and wavering in
our civilisation. It would be going too far to say that it distracts
thought. It enfeebles it, by reason of the inconsistency lurking in the
background. After all, the men of the Middle Ages were in pursuit of an
excellency of which we have nearly forgotten the existence. They set
before themselves the ideal of the attainment of a harmony of the
understanding. We are content with superficial orderings from diverse
arbitrary starting points. For instance, the enterprises produced by the
individualistic energy of the European peoples presupposes physical
actions directed to final causes. But the science which is employed in
their development is based on a philosophy which asserts that physical
causation is supreme, and which disjoins the physical cause from the
final end. It is not popular to dwell on the absolute contradiction here
involved. It is the fact, however you gloze it over with phrases. Of
course, we find in the eighteenth century Paley’s famous argument, that
mechanism presupposes a God who is the author of nature. But even before
Paley put the argument into its final form, Hume had written the retort,
that the God whom you will find will be the sort of God who makes that
mechanism. In other words, that mechanism can, at most, presuppose a
mechanic, and not merely _a_ mechanic but _its_ mechanic. The only way
of mitigating mechanism is by the discovery that it is not mechanism.
When we leave apologetic theology, and come to ordinary literature, we
find, as we might expect, that the scientific outlook is in general
simply ignored. So far as the mass of literature is concerned, science
might never have been heard of. Until recently nearly all writers have
been soaked in classical and renaissance literature. For the most part,
neither philosophy nor science interested them, and their minds were
trained to ignore it.
There are exceptions to this sweeping statement; and, even if we confine
ourselves to English literature, they concern some of the greatest
names; also the indirect influence of science has been considerable.
A side light on this distracting inconsistency in modern thought is
obtained by examining some of those great serious poems in English
literature, whose general scale gives them a didactic character. The
relevant poems are Milton’s _Paradise Lost_, Pope’s _Essay on Man_,
Wordsworth’s _Excursion_, Tennyson’s _In Memoriam_. Milton, though he is
writing after the Restoration, voices the theological aspect of the
earlier portion of his century, untouched by the influence of the
scientific materialism. Pope’s poem represents the effect on popular
thought of the intervening sixty years which includes the first period
of assured triumph for the scientific movement. Wordsworth in his whole
being expresses a conscious reaction against the mentality of the
eighteenth century. This mentality means nothing else than the
acceptance of the scientific ideas at their full face value. Wordsworth
was not bothered by any intellectual antagonism. What moved him was a
moral repulsion. He felt that something had been left out, and that what
had been left out comprised everything that was most important. Tennyson
is the mouthpiece of the attempts of the waning romantic movement in the
second quarter of the nineteenth century to come to terms with science.
By this time the two elements in modern thought had disclosed their
fundamental divergence by their jarring interpretations of the course of
nature and the life of man. Tennyson stands in this poem as the perfect
example of the distraction which I have already mentioned. There are
opposing visions of the world, and both of them command his assent by
appeals to ultimate intuitions from which there seems no escape.
Tennyson goes to the heart of the difficulty. It is the problem of
mechanism which appalls him,
“‘The stars,’ she whispers, ‘blindly run.’”
This line states starkly the whole philosophic problem implicit in the
poem. Each molecule blindly runs. The human body is a collection of
molecules. Therefore, the human body blindly runs, and therefore there
can be no individual responsibility for the actions of the body. If you
once accept that the molecule is definitely determined to be what it is,
independently of any determination by reason of the total organism of
the body, and if you further admit that the blind run is settled by the
general mechanical laws, there can be no escape from this conclusion.
But mental experiences are derivative from the actions of the body,
including of course its internal behaviour. Accordingly, the sole
function of the mind is to have at least some of its experiences settled
for it, and to add such others as may be open to it independently of the
body’s motions, internal and external.
There are then two possible theories as to the mind. You can either deny
that it can supply for itself any experiences other than those provided
for it by the body, or you can admit them.
If you refuse to admit the additional experiences, then all individual
moral responsibility is swept away. If you do admit them, then a human
being may be responsible for the state of his mind though he has no
responsibility for the actions of his body. The enfeeblement of thought
in the modern world is illustrated by the way in which this plain issue
is avoided in Tennyson’s poem. There is something kept in the
background, a skeleton in the cupboard. He touches on almost every
religious and scientific problem, but carefully avoids more than a
passing allusion to this one.
This very problem was in full debate at the date of the poem. John
Stuart Mill was maintaining his doctrine of determinism. In this
doctrine volitions are determined by motives, and motives are
expressible in terms of antecedent conditions including states of mind
as well as states of the body.
It is obvious that this doctrine affords no escape from the dilemma
presented by a thoroughgoing mechanism. For if the volition affects the
state of the body, then the molecules in the body do not blindly run. If
the volition does not affect the state of the body, the mind is still
left in its uncomfortable position.
Mill’s doctrine is generally accepted, especially among scientists, as
though in some way it allowed you to accept the extreme doctrine of
materialistic mechanism, and yet mitigated its unbelievable
consequences. It does nothing of the sort. Either the bodily molecules
blindly run, or they do not. If they do blindly run, the mental states
are irrelevant in discussing the bodily actions.
I have stated the arguments concisely, because in truth the issue is a
very simple one. Prolonged discussion is merely a source of confusion.
The question as to the metaphysical status of molecules does not come
in. The statement that they are mere formulae has no bearing on the
argument. For presumably the formulae mean something. If they mean
nothing, the whole mechanical doctrine is likewise without meaning, and
the question drops. But if the formulae mean anything, the argument
applies to exactly what they do mean. The traditional way of evading the
difficulty—other than the simple way of ignoring it—is to have recourse
to some form of what is now termed ‘vitalism.’ This doctrine is really a
compromise. It allows a free run to mechanism throughout the whole of
inanimate nature, and holds that the mechanism is partially mitigated
within living bodies. I feel that this theory is an unsatisfactory
compromise. The gap between living and dead matter is too vague and
problematical to bear the weight of such an arbitrary assumption, which
involves an essential dualism somewhere.
The doctrine which I am maintaining is that the whole concept of
materialism only applies to very abstract entities, the products of
logical discernment. The concrete enduring entities are organisms, so
that the plan of the _whole_ influences the very characters of the
various subordinate organisms which enter into it. In the case of an
animal, the mental states enter into the plan of the total organism and
thus modify the plans of the successive subordinate organisms until the
ultimate smallest organisms, such as electrons, are reached. Thus an
electron within a living body is different from an electron outside it,
by reason of the plan of the body. The electron blindly runs either
within or without the body; but it runs within the body in accordance
with its character within the body; that is to say, in accordance with
the general plan of the body, and this plan includes the mental state.
But this principle of modification is perfectly general throughout
nature, and represents no property peculiar to living bodies. In
subsequent lectures it will be explained that this doctrine involves the
abandonment of the traditional scientific materialism, and the
substitution of an alternative doctrine of organism.
I shall not discuss Mill’s determinism, as it lies outside the scheme of
these lectures. The foregoing discussion has been directed to secure
that either determinism or free will shall have some relevance,
unhampered by the difficulties introduced by materialistic mechanism, or
by the compromise of vitalism. I would term the doctrine of these
lectures, the theory of _organic mechanism_. In this theory, the
molecules may blindly run in accordance with the general laws, but the
molecules differ in their intrinsic characters according to the general
organic plans of the situations in which they find themselves.
The discrepancy between the materialistic mechanism of science and the
moral intuitions, which are presupposed in the concrete affairs of life,
only gradually assumed its true importance as the centuries advanced.
The different tones of the successive epochs to which the poems, already
mentioned, belong are curiously reflected in their opening passages.
Milton ends his introduction with the prayer,
“That to the height of this great argument
I may assert eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.”
To judge from many modern writers on Milton, we might imagine that the
_Paradise Lost_ and the _Paradise Regained_ were written as a series of
experiments in blank verse. This was certainly not Milton’s view of his
work. To ‘justify the ways of God to men’ was very much his main object.
He recurs to the same idea in the _Samson Agonistes_,
“Just are the ways of God
And justifiable to men;”
We note the assured volume of confidence, untroubled by the coming
scientific avalanche. The actual date of the publication of the
_Paradise Lost_ lies just beyond the epoch to which it belongs. It is
the swansong of a passing world of untroubled certitude.
A comparison between Pope’s _Essay on Man_ and the _Paradise Lost_
exhibits the change of tone in English thought in the fifty or sixty
years which separate the age of Milton from the age of Pope. Milton
addresses his poem to God, Pope’s poem is addressed to Lord Bolingbroke,
“Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things
To low ambition and the pride of kings.
Let us (since life can little more supply
Than just to look about us and to die)
Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man;
A mighty maze! but not without a plan;”
Compare the jaunty assurance of Pope,
“A mighty maze! but not without a plan.”
with Milton’s
“Just are the ways of God
And justifiable to men;”
But the real point to notice is that Pope as well as Milton was
untroubled by the great perplexity which haunts the modern world. The
clue which Milton followed was to dwell on the ways of God in dealings
with man. Two generations later we find Pope equally confident that the
enlightened methods of modern science provided a plan adequate as a map
of the ‘mighty maze.’
Wordsworth’s _Excursion_ is the next English poem on the same subject. A
prose preface tells us that it is a fragment of a larger projected work,
described as ‘A philosophical poem containing views of Man, Nature, and
Society.’
Very characteristically the poem begins with the line,
“’Twas summer, and the sun had mounted high:”
Thus the romantic reaction started neither with God nor with Lord
Bolingbroke, but with nature. We are here witnessing a conscious
reaction against the whole tone of the eighteenth century. That century
approached nature with the abstract analysis of science, whereas
Wordsworth opposes to the scientific abstractions his full concrete
experience.
A generation of religious revival and of scientific advance lies between
the _Excursion_ and Tennyson’s _In Memoriam_. The earlier poets had
solved the perplexity by ignoring it. That course was not open to
Tennyson. Accordingly his poem begins thus:
“Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen Thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;”
The note of perplexity is struck at once. The nineteenth century has
been a perplexed century, in a sense which is not true of any of its
predecessors of the modern period. In the earlier times there were
opposing camps, bitterly at variance on questions which they deemed
fundamental. But, except for a few stragglers, either camp was
whole-hearted. The importance of Tennyson’s poem lies in the fact that
it exactly expressed the character of its period. Each individual was
divided against himself. In the earlier times, the deep thinkers were
the clear thinkers,—Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz. They knew
exactly what they meant and said it. In the nineteenth century, some of
the deeper thinkers among theologians and philosophers were muddled
thinkers. Their assent was claimed by incompatible doctrines; and their
efforts at reconciliation produced inevitable confusion.
Matthew Arnold, even more than Tennyson, was the poet who expressed this
mood of individual distraction which was so characteristic of this
century. Compare with _In Memoriam_ the closing lines of Arnold’s _Dover
Beach_:
“And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
Cardinal Newman in his _Apologia pro Vitâ Suâ_ mentions it as a
peculiarity of Pusey, the great Anglican ecclesiastic, “He was haunted
by no intellectual perplexities.” In this respect Pusey recalls Milton,
Pope, Wordsworth, as in contrast with Tennyson, Clough, Matthew Arnold,
and Newman himself.
So far as concerns English literature we find, as might be anticipated,
the most interesting criticism of the thoughts of science among the
leaders of the romantic reaction which accompanied and succeeded the
epoch of the French Revolution. In English literature, the deepest
thinkers of this school were Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley. Keats
is an example of literature untouched by science. We may neglect
Coleridge’s attempt at an explicit philosophical formulation. It was
influential in his own generation; but in these lectures it is my object
only to mention those elements of the thought of the past which stand
for all time. Even with this limitation, only a selection is possible.
For our purposes Coleridge is only important by his influence on
Wordsworth. Thus Wordsworth and Shelley remain.
Wordsworth was passionately absorbed in nature. It has been said of
Spinoza, that he was drunk with God. It is equally true that Wordsworth
was drunk with nature. But he was a thoughtful, well-read man, with
philosophical interests, and sane even to the point of prosiness. In
addition, he was a genius. He weakens his evidence by his dislike of
science. We all remember his scorn of the poor man whom he somewhat
hastily accuses of peeping and botanising on his mother’s grave. Passage
after passage could be quoted from him, expressing this repulsion. In
this respect, his characteristic thought can be summed up in his phrase,
‘We murder to dissect.’
In this latter passage, he discloses the intellectual basis of his
criticism of science. He alleges against science its absorption in
abstractions. His consistent theme is that the important facts of nature
elude the scientific method. It is important therefore to ask, what
Wordsworth found in nature that failed to receive expression in science.
I ask this question in the interest of science itself; for one main
position in these lectures is a protest against the idea that the
abstractions of science are irreformable and unalterable. Now it is
emphatically not the case that Wordsworth hands over inorganic matter to
the mercy of science, and concentrates on the faith that in the living
organism there is some element that science cannot analyse. Of course he
recognises, what no one doubts, that in some sense living things are
different from lifeless things. But that is not his main point. It is
the brooding presence of the hills which haunts him. His theme is nature
_in solido_, that is to say, he dwells on that mysterious presence of
surrounding things, which imposes itself on any separate element that we
set up as an individual for its own sake. He always grasps the whole of
nature as involved in the tonality of the particular instance. That is
why he laughs with the daffodils, and finds in the primrose “thoughts
too deep for terms.”
Wordsworth’s greatest poem is, by far, the first book of _The Prelude_.
It is pervaded by this sense of the haunting presences of nature. A
series of magnificent passages, too long for quotation, express this
idea. Of course, Wordsworth is a poet writing a poem, and is not
concerned with dry philosophical statements. But it would hardly be
possible to express more clearly a feeling for nature, as exhibiting
entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal presences of
others:
“Ye Presences of Nature in the sky
And on the earth! Ye Visions of the hills!
And Souls of lonely places! can I think
A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed
Such ministry, when ye through many a year
Haunting me thus among my boyish sports,
On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills,
Impressed upon all forms the characters
Of danger or desire; and thus did make
The surface of the universal earth
With triumph and delight, with hope and fear,
Work like a sea?...”
In thus citing Wordsworth, the point which I wish to make is that we
forget how strained and paradoxical is the view of nature which modern
science imposes on our thoughts. Wordsworth, to the height of genius,
expresses the concrete facts of our apprehension, facts which are
distorted in the scientific analysis. Is it not possible that the
standardised concepts of science are only valid within narrow
limitations, perhaps too narrow for science itself?
Shelley’s attitude to science was at the opposite pole to that of
Wordsworth. He loved it, and is never tired of expressing in poetry the
thoughts which it suggests. It symbolises to him joy, and peace, and
illumination. What the hills were to the youth of Wordsworth, a chemical
laboratory was to Shelley. It is unfortunate that Shelley’s literary
critics have, in this respect, so little of Shelley in their own
mentality. They tend to treat as a casual oddity of Shelley’s nature
what was, in fact, part of the main structure of his mind, permeating
his poetry through and through. If Shelley had been born a hundred years
later, the twentieth century would have seen a Newton among chemists.
For the sake of estimating the value of Shelley’s evidence it is
important to realise this absorption of his mind in scientific ideas. It
can be illustrated by lyric after lyric. I will choose one poem only,
the fourth act of his _Prometheus Unbound_. The Earth and the Moon
converse together in the language of accurate science. Physical
experiments guide his imagery. For example, the Earth’s exclamation,
“The vaporous exultation not to be confined!”
is the poetic transcript of ‘the expansive force of gases,’ as it is
termed in books on science. Again, take the Earth’s stanza,
“I spin beneath my pyramid of night,
Which points into the heavens,—dreaming delight,
Murmuring victorious joy in my enchanted sleep;
As a youth lulled in love-dreams faintly sighing,
Under the shadow of his beauty lying,
Which round his rest a watch of light and warmth doth keep.”
This stanza could only have been written by someone with a definite
geometrical diagram before his inward eye—a diagram which it has often
been my business to demonstrate to mathematical classes. As evidence,
note especially the last line which gives poetical imagery to the light
surrounding night’s pyramid. This idea could not occur to anyone without
the diagram. But the whole poem and other poems are permeated with
touches of this kind.
Now the poet, so sympathetic with science, so absorbed in its ideas, can
simply make nothing of the doctrine of secondary qualities which is
fundamental to its concepts. For Shelley nature retains its beauty and
its colour. Shelley’s nature is in its essence a nature of organisms,
functioning with the full content of our perceptual experience. We are
so used to ignoring the implications of orthodox scientific doctrine,
that it is difficult to make evident the criticism upon it which is
thereby implied. If anybody could have treated it seriously, Shelley
would have done so.
Furthermore Shelley is entirely at one with Wordsworth as to the
interfusing of the Presence in nature. Here is the opening stanza of his
poem entitled _Mont Blanc_:
“The everlasting universe of Things
Flows through the Mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters,—with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild woods, among the Mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.”
Shelley has written these lines with explicit reference to some form of
idealism, Kantian or Berkeleyan or Platonic. But however you construe
him, he is here an emphatic witness to a prehensive unification as
constituting the very being of nature.
Berkeley, Wordsworth, Shelley are representative of the intuitive
refusal seriously to accept the abstract materialism of science.
There is an interesting difference in the treatment of nature by
Wordsworth and by Shelley, which brings forward the exact questions we
have got to think about. Shelley thinks of nature as changing,
dissolving, transforming as it were at a fairy’s touch. The leaves fly
before the West Wind
“Like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.”
In his poem _The Cloud_ it is the transformations of water which excite
his imagination. The subject of the poem is the endless, eternal,
elusive change of things:
“I change but I cannot die.”
This is one aspect of nature, its elusive change: a change not merely to
be expressed by locomotion, but a change of inward character. This is
where Shelley places his emphasis, on the change of what cannot die.
Wordsworth was born among hills; hills mostly barren of trees, and thus
showing the minimum of change with the seasons. He was haunted by the
enormous permanences of nature. For him change is an incident which
shoots across a background of endurance,
“Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.”
Every scheme for the analysis of nature has to face these two facts,
_change_ and _endurance_. There is yet a third fact to be placed by it,
_eternality_, I will call it. The mountain endures. But when after ages
it has been worn away, it has gone. If a replica arises, it is yet a new
mountain. A colour is eternal. It haunts time like a spirit. It comes
and it goes. But where it comes, it is the same colour. It neither
survives nor does it live. It appears when it is wanted. The mountain
has to time and space a different relation from that which colour has.
In the previous lecture, I was chiefly considering the relation to
space-time of things which, in my sense of the term, are eternal. It was
necessary to do so before we can pass to the consideration of the things
which endure.
Also we must recollect the basis of our procedure. I hold that
philosophy is the critic of abstractions. Its function is the double
one, first of harmonising them by assigning to them their right relative
status as abstractions, and secondly of completing them by direct
comparison with more concrete intuitions of the universe, and thereby
promoting the formation of more complete schemes of thought. It is in
respect to this comparison that the testimony of great poets is of such
importance. Their survival is evidence that they express deep intuitions
of mankind penetrating into what is universal in concrete fact.
Philosophy is not one among the sciences with its own little scheme of
abstractions which it works away at perfecting and improving. It is the
survey of sciences, with the special objects of their harmony, and of
their completion. It brings to this task, not only the evidence of the
separate sciences, but also its own appeal to concrete experience. It
confronts the sciences with concrete fact.
The literature of the nineteenth century, especially its English poetic
literature, is a witness to the discord between the aesthetic intuitions
of mankind and the mechanism of science. Shelley brings vividly before
us the elusiveness of the eternal objects of sense as they haunt the
change which infects underlying organisms. Wordsworth is the poet of
nature as being the field of enduring permanences carrying within
themselves a message of tremendous significance. The eternal objects are
also there for him,
“The light that never was, on sea or land.”
Both Shelley and Wordsworth emphatically bear witness that nature cannot
be divorced from its aesthetic values; and that these values arise from
the cumulation, in some sense, of the brooding presence of the whole
onto its various parts. Thus we gain from the poets the doctrine that a
philosophy of nature must concern itself at least with these five
notions: change, value, eternal objects, endurance, organism,
interfusion.
We see that the literary romantic movement at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, just as much as Berkeley’s philosophical idealistic
movement a hundred years earlier, refused to be confined within the
materialistic concepts of the orthodox scientific theory. We know also
that when in these lectures we come to the twentieth century, we shall
find a movement in science itself to reorganise its concepts, driven
thereto by its own intrinsic development.
It is, however, impossible to proceed until we have settled whether
this refashioning of ideas is to be carried out on an objectivist
basis or on a subjectivist basis. By a subjectivist basis I mean the
belief that the nature of our immediate experience is the outcome of
the perceptive peculiarities of the subject enjoying the experience.
In other words, I mean that for this theory what is perceived is not a
partial vision of a complex of things generally independent of that
act of cognition; but that it merely is the expression of the
individual peculiarities of the cognitive act. Accordingly what is
common to the multiplicity of cognitive acts is the ratiocination
connected with them. Thus, though there is a common world of thought
associated with our sense-perceptions, there is no common world to
think about. What we do think about is a common conceptual world
applying indifferently to our individual experiences which are
strictly personal to ourselves. Such a conceptual world will
ultimately find its complete expression in the equations of applied
mathematics. This is the extreme subjectivist position. There is of
course the half-way house of those who believe that our perceptual
experience does tell us of a common objective world; but that the
things perceived are merely the outcome for us of this world, and are
not _in themselves_ elements in the common world itself.
Also there is the objectivist position. This creed is that the actual
elements perceived by our senses are _in themselves_ the elements of a
common world; and that this world is a complex of things, including
indeed our acts of cognition, but transcending them. According to this
point of view the things experienced are to be distinguished from our
knowledge of them. So far as there is dependence, the _things_ pave the
way for the _cognition_, rather than _vice versa_. But the point is that
the actual things experienced enter into a common world which transcends
knowledge, though it includes knowledge. The intermediate subjectivists
would hold that the things experienced only indirectly enter into the
common world by reason of their dependence on the subject who is
cognising. The objectivist holds that the things experienced and the
cognisant subject enter into the common world on equal terms. In these
lectures I am giving the outline of what I consider to be the essentials
of an objectivist philosophy adapted to the requirement of science and
to the concrete experience of mankind. Apart from the detailed criticism
of the difficulties raised by subjectivism in any form, my broad reasons
for distrusting it are three in number. One reason arises from the
direct interrogation of our perceptive experience. It appears from this
interrogation that we are _within_ a world of colours, sounds, and other
sense-objects, related in space and time to enduring objects such as
stones, trees, and human bodies. We seem to be ourselves elements of
this world in the same sense as are the other things which we perceive.
But the subjectivist, even the moderate intermediate subjectivist, makes
this world, as thus described, depend on us, in a way which directly
traverses our naïve experience. I hold that the ultimate appeal is to
naïve experience and that is why I lay such stress on the evidence of
poetry. My point is, that in our sense-experience we know away from and
beyond our own personality; whereas the subjectivist holds that in such
experience we merely know about our own personality. Even the
intermediate subjectivist places our personality between the world we
know of and the common world which he admits. The world we know of is
for him the internal strain of our personality under the stress of the
common world which lies behind.
My second reason for distrusting subjectivism is based on the particular
content of experience. Our historical knowledge tells us of ages in the
past when, so far as we can see, no living being existed on earth. Again
it also tells us of countless star-systems, whose detailed history
remains beyond our ken. Consider even the moon and the earth. What is
going on within the interior of the earth, and on the far side of the
moon! Our perceptions lead us to infer that there is something happening
in the stars, something happening within the earth, and something
happening on the far side of the moon. Also they tell us that in remote
ages there were things happening. But all these things which it appears
certainly happened, are either unknown in detail, or else are
reconstructed by inferential evidence. In the face of this content of
our personal experience, it is difficult to believe that the experienced
world is an attribute of our own personality. My third reason is based
upon the instinct for action. Just as sense-perception seems to give
knowledge of what lies beyond individuality, so action seems to issue in
an instinct for self-transcendence. The activity passes beyond self into
the known transcendent world. It is here that final ends are of
importance. For it is not activity urged from behind, which passes out
into the veiled world of the intermediate subjectivist. It is activity
directed to determinate ends in the known world; and yet it is activity
transcending self and it is activity within the known world. It follows
therefore that the world, as known, transcends the subject which is
cognisant of it.
The subjectivist position has been popular among those who have been
engaged in giving a philosophical interpretation to the recent theories
of relativity in physical science. The dependence of the world of sense
on the individual percipient seems an easy mode of expressing the
meanings involved. Of course, with the exception of those who are
content with themselves as forming the entire universe, solitary amid
nothing, everyone wants to struggle back to some sort of objectivist
position. I do not understand how a common world of thought can be
established in the absence of a common world of sense. I will not argue
this point in detail; but in the absence of a transcendence of thought,
or a transcendence of the world of sense, it is difficult to see how the
subjectivist is to divest himself of his solitariness. Nor does the
intermediate subjectivist appear to get any help from his unknown world
in the background.
The distinction between realism and idealism does not coincide with that
between objectivism and subjectivism. Both realists and idealists can
start from an objective standpoint. They may both agree that the world
disclosed in sense-perception is a common world, transcending the
individual percipient. But the objective idealist, when he comes to
analyse what the reality of this world involves, finds that cognitive
mentality is in some way inextricably concerned in every detail. This
position the realist denies. Accordingly these two classes of
objectivists do not part company till they have arrived at the ultimate
problem of metaphysics. There is a great deal which they share in
common. This is why, in my last lecture, I said that I adopted a
position of provisional realism.
In the past, the objectivist position has been distorted by the supposed
necessity of accepting the classical scientific materialism, with its
doctrine of simple location. This has necessitated the doctrine of
secondary and primary qualities. Thus the secondary qualities, such as
the sense-objects, are dealt with on subjectivist principles. This is a
half-hearted position which falls an easy prey to subjectivist
criticism.
If we are to include the secondary qualities in the common world, a very
drastic reorganisation of our fundamental concepts is necessary. It is
an evident fact of experience that our apprehensions of the external
world depend absolutely on the occurrences within the human body. By
playing appropriate tricks on the body a man can be got to perceive, or
not to perceive, almost anything. Some people express themselves as
though bodies, brains, and nerves were the only real things in an
entirely imaginary world. In other words, they treat bodies on
objectivist principles, and the rest of the world on subjectivist
principles. This will not do; especially, when we remember that it is
the experimenter’s perception of another person’s body which is in
question as evidence.
But we have to admit that the body is the organism whose states regulate
our cognisance of the world. The unity of the perceptual field therefore
must be a unity of bodily experience. In being aware of the bodily
experience, we must thereby be aware of aspects of the whole
spatio-temporal world as mirrored within the bodily life. This is the
solution of the problem which I gave in my last lecture. I will not
repeat myself now, except to remind you that my theory involves the
entire abandonment of the notion that simple location is the primary way
in which things are involved in space-time. In a certain sense,
everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an
aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal
standpoint mirrors the world.
If you try to imagine this doctrine in terms of our conventional views
of space and time, which presuppose simple location, it is a great
paradox. But if you think of it in terms of our naïve experience, it is
a mere transcript of the obvious facts. You are in a certain place
perceiving things. Your perception takes place where you are, and is
entirely dependent on how your body is functioning. But this functioning
of the body in one place, exhibits for your cognisance an aspect of the
distant environment, fading away into the general knowledge that there
are things beyond. If this cognisance conveys knowledge of a
transcendent world, it must be because the event which is the bodily
life unifies in itself aspects of the universe.
This is a doctrine extremely consonant with the vivid expression of
personal experience which we find in the nature-poetry of imaginative
writers such as Wordsworth or Shelley. The brooding, immediate presences
of things are an obsession to Wordsworth. What the theory does do is to
edge cognitive mentality away from being the necessary substratum of the
unity of experience. That unity is now placed in the unity of an event.
Accompanying this unity, there may or there may not be cognition.
At this point we come back to the great question which was posed before
us by our examination of the evidence afforded by the poetic insight of
Wordsworth and Shelley. This single question has expanded into a group
of questions. What are enduring things, as distinguished from the
eternal objects, such as colour and shape? How are they possible? What
is their status and meaning in the universe? It comes to this: What is
the status of the enduring stability of the order of nature? There is
the summary answer, which refers nature to some greater reality standing
behind it. This reality occurs in the history of thought under many
names, The Absolute, Brahma, The Order of Heaven, God. The delineation
of final metaphysical truth is no part of this lecture. My point is that
any summary conclusion jumping from our conviction of the existence of
such an order of nature to the easy assumption that there is an ultimate
reality which, in some unexplained way, is to be appealed to for the
removal of perplexity, constitutes the great refusal of rationality to
assert its rights. We have to search whether nature does not in its very
being show itself as self-explanatory. By this I mean, that the sheer
statement, of what things are, may contain elements explanatory of why
things are. Such elements may be expected to refer to depths beyond
anything which we can grasp with a clear apprehension. In a sense, all
explanation must end in an ultimate arbitrariness. My demand is, that
the ultimate arbitrariness of matter of fact from which our formulation
starts should disclose the same general principles of reality, which we
dimly discern as stretching away into regions beyond our explicit powers
of discernment. Nature exhibits itself as exemplifying a philosophy of
the evolution of organisms subject to determinate conditions. Examples
of such conditions are the dimensions of space, the laws of nature, the
determinate enduring entities, such as atoms and electrons, which
exemplify these laws. But the very nature of these entities, the very
nature of their spatiality and temporality, should exhibit the
arbitrariness of these conditions as the outcome of a wider evolution
beyond nature itself, and within which nature is but a limited mode.
One all-pervasive fact, inherent in the very character of what is real
is the transition of things, the passage one to another. This passage is
not a mere linear procession of discrete entities. However we fix a
determinate entity, there is always a narrower determination of
something which is presupposed in our first choice. Also there is always
a wider determination into which our first choice fades by transition
beyond itself. The general aspect of nature is that of evolutionary
expansiveness. These unities, which I call events, are the emergence
into actuality of something. How are we to characterise the something
which thus emerges? The name ‘_event_’ given to such a unity, draws
attention to the inherent transitoriness, combined with the actual
unity. But this abstract word cannot be sufficient to characterise what
the fact of the reality of an event is in itself. A moment’s thought
shows us that no one idea can in itself be sufficient. For every idea
which finds its significance in each event must represent something
which contributes to what realisation is in itself. Thus no one word can
be adequate. But conversely, nothing must be left out. Remembering the
poetic rendering of our concrete experience, we see at once that the
element of value, of being valuable, of having value, of being an end in
itself, of being something which is for its own sake, must not be
omitted in any account of an event as the most concrete actual
something. ‘Value’ is the word I use for the intrinsic reality of an
event. Value is an element which permeates through and through the
poetic view of nature. We have only to transfer to the very texture of
realisation in itself that value which we recognise so readily in terms
of human life. This is the secret of Wordsworth’s worship of nature.
Realization therefore is in itself the attainment of value. But there is
no such thing as mere value. Value is the outcome of limitation. The
definite finite entity is the selected mode which is the shaping of
attainment; apart from such shaping into individual matter of fact there
is no attainment. The mere fusion of all that there is would be the
nonentity of indefiniteness. The salvation of reality is its obstinate,
irreducible, matter-of-fact entities, which are limited to be no other
than themselves. Neither science, nor art, nor creative action can tear
itself away from obstinate, irreducible, limited facts. The endurance of
things has its significance in the self-retention of that which imposes
itself as a definite attainment for its own sake. That which endures is
limited, obstructive, intolerant, infecting its environment with its own
aspects. But it is not self-sufficient. The aspects of all things enter
into its very nature. It is only itself as drawing together into its own
limitation the larger whole in which it finds itself. Conversely it is
only itself by lending its aspects to this same environment in which it
finds itself. The problem of evolution is the development of enduring
harmonies of enduring shapes of value, which merge into higher
attainments of things beyond themselves. Aesthetic attainment is
interwoven in the texture of realisation. The endurance of an entity
represents the attainment of a limited aesthetic success, though if we
look beyond it to its external effects, it may represent an aesthetic
failure. Even within itself, it may represent the conflict between a
lower success and a higher failure. The conflict is the presage of
disruption.
The further discussion of the nature of enduring objects and of the
conditions they require will be relevant to the consideration of the
doctrine of evolution which dominated the latter half of the nineteenth
century. The point which in this lecture I have endeavoured to make
clear is that the nature-poetry of the romantic revival was a protest on
behalf of the organic view of nature, and also a protest against the
exclusion of value from the essence of matter of fact. In this aspect of
it, the romantic movement may be conceived as a revival of Berkeley’s
protest which had been launched a hundred years earlier. The romantic
reaction was a protest on behalf of value.