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Title: A Pluralistic Universe

Author: William James

Release date: April 1, 2004 [eBook #11984]
                Most recently updated: December 26, 2020

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Felicia Urbanski, David Starner, Nicolas Hayes and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


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Produced by Felicia Urbanski, David Starner, Nicolas Hayes and the
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A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE


Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in
Philosophy


BY WILLIAM JAMES




1909




CONTENTS


LECTURE I

THE TYPES OF PHILOSOPHIC THINKING 1

  Our age is growing philosophical again, 3. Change of tone since 1860, 4.
  Empiricism and Rationalism defined, 7. The process of Philosophizing:
  Philosophers choose some part of the world to interpret the whole by, 8.
  They seek to make it seem less strange, 11. Their temperamental
  differences, 12. Their systems must be reasoned out, 13. Their tendency
  to over-technicality, 15. Excess of this in Germany, 17. The type of
  vision is the important thing in a philosopher, 20. Primitive thought,
  21. Spiritualism and Materialism: Spiritualism shows two types, 23.
  Theism and Pantheism, 24. Theism makes a duality of Man and God, and
  leaves Man an outsider, 25. Pantheism identifies Man with God, 29. The
  contemporary tendency is towards Pantheism, 30. Legitimacy of our demand
  to be essential in the Universe, 33. Pluralism versus Monism: The 'each-
  form' and the 'all-form' of representing the world, 34. Professor Jacks
  quoted, 35. Absolute Idealism characterized, 36. Peculiarities of the
  finite consciousness which the Absolute cannot share, 38. The finite
  still remains outside of absolute reality, 40.


LECTURE II

MONISTIC IDEALISM 41

  Recapitulation, 43. Radical Pluralism is to be the thesis of these
  lectures, 44. Most philosophers contemn it, 45. Foreignness to us of
  Bradley's Absolute, 46. Spinoza and 'quatenus,'47. Difficulty of
  sympathizing with the Absolute, 48. Idealistic attempt to interpret it,
  50. Professor Jones quoted, 52. Absolutist refutations of Pluralism, 54.
  Criticism of Lotze's proof of Monism by the analysis of what interaction
  involves, 55. Vicious intellectualism defined, 60. Royce's alternative:
  either the complete disunion or the absolute union of things, 61.
  Bradley's dialectic difficulties with relations, 69. Inefficiency of the
  Absolute as a rationalizing remedy, 71. Tendency of Rationalists to fly
  to extremes, 74. The question of 'external' relations, 79. Transition to
  Hegel, 91.


LECTURE III

HEGEL AND HIS METHOD 83

  Hegel's influence. 85. The type of his vision is impressionistic, 87.
  The 'dialectic' element in reality, 88. Pluralism involves possible
  conflicts among things, 90. Hegel explains conflicts by the mutual
  contradictoriness of concepts, 91. Criticism of his attempt to transcend
  ordinary logic, 92. Examples of the 'dialectic' constitution of things,
  95. The rationalistic ideal: propositions self-securing by means of
  double negation, 101. Sublimity of the conception, 104. Criticism of
  Hegel's account: it involves vicious intellectualism, 105. Hegel is a
  seer rather than a reasoner, 107. 'The Absolute' and 'God' are two
  different notions, 110. Utility of the Absolute in conferring mental
  peace, 114. But this is counterbalanced by the peculiar paradoxes which
  it introduces into philosophy, 116. Leibnitz and Lotze on the 'fall'
  involved in the creation of the finite, 119. Joachim on the fall of
  truth into error, 121. The world of the absolutist cannot be perfect,
  123. Pluralistic conclusions, 125.


LECTURE IV

CONCERNING FECHNER 131

  Superhuman consciousness does not necessarily imply an absolute
  mind, 134. Thinness of contemporary absolutism, 135. The
  tone of Fechner's empiricist pantheism contrasted with that of the
  rationalistic sort, 144. Fechner's life, 145. His vision, the 'daylight
  view,' 150. His way of reasoning by analogy, 151. The whole universe
  animated, 152. His monistic formula is unessential, 153. The
  Earth-Soul, 156. Its differences from our souls, 160. The earth as
  an angel, 164. The Plant-Soul, 165. The logic used by Fechner,
  168. His theory of immortality, 170. The 'thickness' of his imagination,
  173. Inferiority of the ordinary transcendentalist pantheism,
  to his vision, 174.


LECTURE V

THE COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS 179
  The assumption that states of mind may compound themselves, 181. This
  assumption is held in common by naturalistic psychology, by
  transcendental idealism, and by Fechner, 184. Criticism of it by the
  present writer in a former book, 188. Physical combinations, so-called,
  cannot be invoked as analogous, 194. Nevertheless, combination must be
  postulated among the parts of the Universe, 197. The logical objections
  to admitting it, 198. Rationalistic treatment of the question brings us
  to an _impasse_, 208. A radical breach with intellectualism is required,
  212. Transition to Bergson's philosophy, 214. Abusive use of concepts,
  219.


LECTURE VI

BERGSON AND HIS CRITIQUE OF INTELLECTUALISM 223

  Professor Bergson's personality, 225. Achilles and the tortoise, 228.
  Not a sophism, 229. We make motion unintelligible when we treat it by
  static concepts, 233. Conceptual treatment is nevertheless of immense
  practical use, 235. The traditional rationalism gives an essentially
  static universe, 237. Intolerableness of the intellectualist view, 240.
  No rationalist account is possible of action, change, or immediate life,
  244. The function of concepts is practical rather than theoretical, 247.
  Bergson remands us to intuition or sensational experience for the
  understanding of how life makes itself go, 252. What Bergson means by
  this, 255. Manyness in oneness must be admitted, 256. What really exists
  is not things made, but things in the making, 263. Bergson's
  originality, 264. Impotence of intellectualist logic to define a
  universe where change is continuous, 267. Livingly, things _are_ their
  own others, so that there is a sense in which Hegel's logic is true,
  270.


LECTURE VII

THE CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE 275

  Green's critique of Sensationalism, 278. Relations are as immediately
  felt as terms are, 280. The union of things is given in the immediate
  flux, not in any conceptual reason that overcomes the flux's aboriginal
  incoherence, 282. The minima of experience as vehicles of continuity,
  284. Fallacy of the objections to self-compounding, 286. The concrete
  units of experience are 'their own others,' 287. Reality is confluent
  from next to next, 290. Intellectualism must be sincerely renounced,
  291. The Absolute is only an hypothesis, 292. Fechner's God is not the
  Absolute, 298. The Absolute solves no intellectualist difficulty, 296.
  Does superhuman consciousness probably exist? 298.


LECTURE VIII

CONCLUSIONS 301

  Specifically religious experiences occur, 303. Their nature, 304.
  They corroborate the notion of a larger life of which we are a part,
  308. This life must be finite if we are to escape the paradoxes of
  monism, 310. God as a finite being, 311. Empiricism is a better
  ally than rationalism, of religion, 313. Empirical proofs of larger
  mind may open the door to superstitions, 315. But this objection
  should not be deemed fatal, 316. Our beliefs form parts of reality,
  317. In pluralistic empiricism our relation to God remains least
  foreign, 318. The word 'rationality' had better be replaced by the
  word 'intimacy,' 319. Monism and pluralism distinguished and
  defined, 321. Pluralism involves indeterminism, 324. All men use
  the 'faith-ladder' in reaching their decision, 328. Conclusion, 330.


NOTES 333


APPENDICES

  A. THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS 847

  B. THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY 870

  C. ON THE NOTION OF REALITY AS CHANGING 895


INDEX 401




LECTURE I


THE TYPES OF PHILOSOPHIC THINKING

As these lectures are meant to be public, and so few, I have assumed
all very special problems to be excluded, and some topic of general
interest required. Fortunately, our age seems to be growing
philosophical again--still in the ashes live the wonted fires. Oxford,
long the seed-bed, for the english world, of the idealism inspired by
Kant and Hegel, has recently become the nursery of a very different
way of thinking. Even non-philosophers have begun to take an interest
in a controversy over what is known as pluralism or humanism. It
looks a little as if the ancient english empirism, so long put out of
fashion here by nobler sounding germanic formulas, might be repluming
itself and getting ready for a stronger flight than ever. It looks as
if foundations were being sounded and examined afresh.

Individuality outruns all classification, yet we insist on classifying
every one we meet under some general head. As these heads usually
suggest prejudicial associations to some hearer or other, the life
of philosophy largely consists of resentments at the classing, and
complaints of being misunderstood. But there are signs of clearing up,
and, on the whole, less acrimony in discussion, for which both Oxford
and Harvard are partly to be thanked. As I look back into the sixties,
Mill, Bain, and Hamilton were the only official philosophers in
Britain. Spencer, Martineau, and Hodgson were just beginning. In
France, the pupils of Cousin were delving into history only, and
Renouvier alone had an original system. In Germany, the hegelian
impetus had spent itself, and, apart from historical scholarship,
nothing but the materialistic controversy remained, with such men as
Büchner and Ulrici as its champions. Lotze and Fechner were the sole
original thinkers, and Fechner was not a professional philosopher at
all.

The general impression made was of crude issues and oppositions, of
small subtlety and of a widely spread ignorance. Amateurishness was
rampant. Samuel Bailey's 'letters on the philosophy of the human
mind,' published in 1855, are one of the ablest expressions of english
associationism, and a book of real power. Yet hear how he writes of
Kant: 'No one, after reading the extracts, etc., can be surprised to
hear of a declaration by men of eminent abilities, that, after years
of study, they had not succeeded in gathering one clear idea from the
speculations of Kant. I should have been almost surprised if they had.
In or about 1818, Lord Grenville, when visiting the Lakes of England,
observed to Professor Wilson that, after five years' study of Kant's
philosophy, he had not gathered from it one clear idea. Wilberforce,
about the same time, made the same confession to another friend of
my own. "I am endeavoring," exclaims Sir James Mackintosh, in the
irritation, evidently, of baffled efforts, "to understand this
accursed german philosophy."[1]

What Oxford thinker would dare to print such _naïf_ and
provincial-sounding citations of authority to-day?

The torch of learning passes from land to land as the spirit bloweth
the flame. The deepening of philosophic consciousness came to us
english folk from Germany, as it will probably pass back ere long.
Ferrier, J.H. Stirling, and, most of all, T.H. Green are to be
thanked. If asked to tell in broad strokes what the main doctrinal
change has been, I should call it a change from the crudity of the
older english thinking, its ultra-simplicity of mind, both when it was
religious and when it was anti-religious, toward a rationalism
derived in the first instance from Germany, but relieved from german
technicality and shrillness, and content to suggest, and to remain
vague, and to be, in, the english fashion, devout.

By the time T.H. Green began at Oxford, the generation seemed to
feel as if it had fed on the chopped straw of psychology and of
associationism long enough, and as if a little vastness, even though
it went with vagueness, as of some moist wind from far away, reminding
us of our pre-natal sublimity, would be welcome.

Green's great point of attack was the disconnectedness of the reigning
english sensationalism. _Relating_ was the great intellectual activity
for him, and the key to this relating was believed by him to
lodge itself at last in what most of you know as Kant's unity of
apperception, transformed into a living spirit of the world.

Hence a monism of a devout kind. In some way we must be fallen angels,
one with intelligence as such; and a great disdain for empiricism
of the sensationalist sort has always characterized this school of
thought, which, on the whole, has reigned supreme at Oxford and in the
Scottish universities until the present day.

But now there are signs of its giving way to a wave of revised
empiricism. I confess that I should be glad to see this latest wave
prevail; so--the sooner I am frank about it the better--I hope to
have my voice counted in its favor as one of the results of this
lecture-course.

What do the terms empiricism and rationalism mean? Reduced to their
most pregnant difference, _empiricism means the habit of explaining
wholes by parts, and rationalism means the habit of explaining parts
by wholes_. Rationalism thus preserves affinities with monism, since
wholeness goes with union, while empiricism inclines to pluralistic
views. No philosophy can ever be anything but a summary sketch, a
picture of the world in abridgment, a foreshortened bird's-eye view of
the perspective of events. And the first thing to notice is this, that
the only material we have at our disposal for making a picture of the
whole world is supplied by the various portions of that world of
which we have already had experience. We can invent no new forms of
conception, applicable to the whole exclusively, and not suggested
originally by the parts. All philosophers, accordingly, have conceived
of the whole world after the analogy of some particular feature of it
which has particularly captivated their attention. Thus, the theists
take their cue from manufacture, the pantheists from growth. For one
man, the world is like a thought or a grammatical sentence in which a
thought is expressed. For such a philosopher, the whole must logically
be prior to the parts; for letters would never have been invented
without syllables to spell, or syllables without words to utter.

Another man, struck by the disconnectedness and mutual accidentality
of so many of the world's details, takes the universe as a whole to
have been such a disconnectedness originally, and supposes order to
have been superinduced upon it in the second instance, possibly
by attrition and the gradual wearing away by internal friction of
portions that originally interfered.

Another will conceive the order as only a statistical appearance, and
the universe will be for him like a vast grab-bag with black and white
balls in it, of which we guess the quantities only probably, by the
frequency with which we experience their egress.

For another, again, there is no really inherent order, but it is we
who project order into the world by selecting objects and tracing
relations so as to gratify our intellectual interests. We _carve out_
order by leaving the disorderly parts out; and the world is conceived
thus after the analogy of a forest or a block of marble from which
parks or statues may be produced by eliminating irrelevant trees or
chips of stone.

Some thinkers follow suggestions from human life, and treat the
universe as if it were essentially a place in which ideals are
realized. Others are more struck by its lower features, and for them,
brute necessities express its character better.

All follow one analogy or another; and all the analogies are with some
one or other of the universe's subdivisions. Every one is nevertheless
prone to claim that his conclusions are the only logical ones, that
they are necessities of universal reason, they being all the while, at
bottom, accidents more or less of personal vision which had far better
be avowed as such; for one man's vision may be much more valuable than
another's, and our visions are usually not only our most interesting
but our most respectable contributions to the world in which we play
our part. What was reason given to men for, said some eighteenth
century writer, except to enable them to find reasons for what they
want to think and do?--and I think the history of philosophy largely
bears him out, 'The aim of knowledge,' says Hegel,[2] 'is to divest
the objective world of its strangeness, and to make us more at home
in it.' Different men find their minds more at home in very different
fragments of the world.

Let me make a few comments, here, on the curious antipathies which
these partialities arouse. They are sovereignly unjust, for all the
parties are human beings with the same essential interests, and no one
of them is the wholly perverse demon which another often imagines him
to be. Both are loyal to the world that bears them; neither wishes to
spoil it; neither wishes to regard it as an insane incoherence; both
want to keep it as a universe of some kind; and their differences are
all secondary to this deep agreement. They may be only propensities to
emphasize differently. Or one man may care for finality and security
more than the other. Or their tastes in language may be different.
One may like a universe that lends itself to lofty and exalted
characterization. To another this may seem sentimental or rhetorical.
One may wish for the right to use a clerical vocabulary, another a
technical or professorial one. A certain old farmer of my acquaintance
in America was called a rascal by one of his neighbors. He immediately
smote the man, saying,'I won't stand none of your diminutive
epithets.' Empiricist minds, putting the parts before the whole,
appear to rationalists, who start from the whole, and consequently
enjoy magniloquent privileges, to use epithets offensively diminutive.
But all such differences are minor matters which ought to be
subordinated in view of the fact that, whether we be empiricists or
rationalists, we are, ourselves, parts of the universe and share the
same one deep concern in its destinies. We crave alike to feel more
truly at home with it, and to contribute our mite to its amelioration.
It would be pitiful if small aesthetic discords were to keep honest
men asunder.

I shall myself have use for the diminutive epithets of empiricism. But
if you look behind the words at the spirit, I am sure you will not
find it matricidal. I am as good a son as any rationalist among you to
our common mother. What troubles me more than this misapprehension is
the genuine abstruseness of many of the matters I shall be obliged
to talk about, and the difficulty of making them intelligible at one
hearing. But there two pieces, 'zwei stücke,' as Kant would have said,
in every philosophy--the final outlook, belief, or attitude to which
it brings us, and the reasonings by which that attitude is reached and
mediated. A philosophy, as James Ferrier used to tell us, must indeed
be true, but that is the least of its requirements. One may be true
without being a philosopher, true by guesswork or by revelation.
What distinguishes a philosopher's truth is that it is _reasoned_.
Argument, not supposition, must have put it in his possession. Common
men find themselves inheriting their beliefs, they know not how. They
jump into them with both feet, and stand there. Philosophers must
do more; they must first get reason's license for them; and to the
professional philosophic mind the operation of procuring the license
is usually a thing of much more pith and moment than any particular
beliefs to which the license may give the rights of access. Suppose,
for example, that a philosopher believes in what is called free-will.
That a common man alongside of him should also share that belief,
possessing it by a sort of inborn intuition, does not endear the man
to the philosopher at all--he may even be ashamed to be associated
with such a man. What interests the philosopher is the particular
premises on which the free-will he believes in is established, the
sense in which it is taken, the objections it eludes, the difficulties
it takes account of, in short the whole form and temper and manner
and technical apparatus that goes with the belief in question.
A philosopher across the way who should use the same technical
apparatus, making the same distinctions, etc., but drawing opposite
conclusions and denying free-will entirely, would fascinate the first
philosopher far more than would the _naïf_ co-believer. Their common
technical interests would unite them more than their opposite
conclusions separate them. Each would feel an essential consanguinity
in the other, would think of him, write _at_ him, care for his good
opinion. The simple-minded believer in free-will would be disregarded
by either. Neither as ally nor as opponent would his vote be counted.

In a measure this is doubtless as it should be, but like all
professionalism it can go to abusive extremes. The end is after all
more than the way, in most things human, and forms and methods may
easily frustrate their own purpose. The abuse of technicality is
seen in the infrequency with which, in philosophical literature,
metaphysical questions are discussed directly and on their own merits.
Almost always they are handled as if through a heavy woolen curtain,
the veil of previous philosophers' opinions. Alternatives are wrapped
in proper names, as if it were indecent for a truth to go naked. The
late Professor John Grote of Cambridge has some good remarks about
this. 'Thought,' he says,'is not a professional matter, not something
for so-called philosophers only or for professed thinkers. The best
philosopher is the man who can think most _simply_. ... I wish that
people would consider that thought--and philosophy is no more than
good and methodical thought--is a matter _intimate_ to them, a portion
of their real selves ... that they would _value_ what they think, and
be interested in it.... In my own opinion,' he goes on, 'there is
something depressing in this weight of learning, with nothing that can
come into one's mind but one is told, Oh, that is the opinion of such
and such a person long ago. ... I can conceive of nothing more noxious
for students than to get into the habit of saying to themselves about
their ordinary philosophic thought, Oh, somebody must have thought it
all before.'[3] Yet this is the habit most encouraged at our seats of
learning. You must tie your opinion to Aristotle's or Spinoza's; you
must define it by its distance from Kant's; you must refute your
rival's view by identifying it with Protagoras's. Thus does all
spontaneity of thought, all freshness of conception, get destroyed.
Everything you touch is shopworn. The over-technicality and consequent
dreariness of the younger disciples at our american universities is
appalling. It comes from too much following of german models and
manners. Let me fervently express the hope that in this country you
will hark back to the more humane english tradition. American students
have to regain direct relations with our subject by painful individual
effort in later life. Some of us have done so. Some of the younger
ones, I fear, never will, so strong are the professional shop-habits
already.

In a subject like philosophy it is really fatal to lose connexion with
the open air of human nature, and to think in terms of shop-tradition
only. In Germany the forms are so professionalized that anybody who
has gained a teaching chair and written a book, however distorted and
eccentric, has the legal right to figure forever in the history of the
subject like a fly in amber. All later comers have the duty of quoting
him and measuring their opinions with his opinion. Such are the rules
of the professorial game--they think and write from each other and for
each other and at each other exclusively. With this exclusion of the
open air all true perspective gets lost, extremes and oddities count
as much as sanities, and command the same attention; and if by chance
any one writes popularly and about results only, with his mind
directly focussed on the subject, it is reckoned _oberflächliches
zeug_ and _ganz unwissenschaftlich_. Professor Paulsen has recently
written some feeling lines about this over-professionalism, from
the reign of which in Germany his own writings, which sin by being
'literary,' have suffered loss of credit. Philosophy, he says, has
long assumed in Germany the character of being an esoteric and
occult science. There is a genuine fear of popularity. Simplicity of
statement is deemed synonymous with hollowness and shallowness. He
recalls an old professor saying to him once: 'Yes, we philosophers,
whenever we wish, can go so far that in a couple of sentences we can
put ourselves where nobody can follow us.' The professor said this
with conscious pride, but he ought to have been ashamed of it. Great
as technique is, results are greater. To teach philosophy so that the
pupils' interest in technique exceeds that in results is surely a
vicious aberration. It is bad form, not good form, in a discipline
of such universal human interest. Moreover, technique for technique,
doesn't David Hume's technique set, after all, the kind of pattern
most difficult to follow? Isn't it the most admirable? The english
mind, thank heaven, and the french mind, are still kept, by their
aversion to crude technique and barbarism, closer to truth's natural
probabilities. Their literatures show fewer obvious falsities and
monstrosities than that of Germany. Think of the german literature of
aesthetics, with the preposterousness of such an unaesthetic personage
as Immanuel Kant enthroned in its centre! Think of german books on
_religions-philosophie_, with the heart's battles translated into
conceptual jargon and made dialectic. The most persistent setter of
questions, feeler of objections, insister on satisfactions, is the
religious life. Yet all its troubles can be treated with absurdly
little technicality. The wonder is that, with their way of working
philosophy, individual Germans should preserve any spontaneity of
mind at all. That they still manifest freshness and originality in so
eminent a degree, proves the indestructible richness of the german
cerebral endowment.

Let me repeat once more that a man's vision is the great fact about
him. Who cares for Carlyle's reasons, or Schopenhauer's, or Spencer's?
A philosophy is the expression of a man's intimate character, and all
definitions of the universe are but the deliberately adopted reactions
of human characters upon it. In the recent book from which I quoted
the words of Professor Paulsen, a book of successive chapters by
various living german philosophers,[4] we pass from one idiosyncratic
personal atmosphere into another almost as if we were turning over a
photograph album.

If we take the whole history of philosophy, the systems reduce
themselves to a few main types which, under all the technical verbiage
in which the ingenious intellect of man envelops them, are just so
many visions, modes of feeling the whole push, and seeing the whole
drift of life, forced on one by one's total character and experience,
and on the whole _preferred_--there is no other truthful word--as
one's best working attitude. Cynical characters take one general
attitude, sympathetic characters another. But no general attitude
is possible towards the world as a whole, until the intellect has
developed considerable generalizing power and learned to take pleasure
in synthetic formulas. The thought of very primitive men has hardly
any tincture of philosophy. Nature can have little unity for savages.
It is a Walpurgis-nacht procession, a checkered play of light and
shadow, a medley of impish and elfish friendly and inimical
powers. 'Close to nature' though they live, they are anything but
Wordsworthians. If a bit of cosmic emotion ever thrills them, it is
likely to be at midnight, when the camp smoke rises straight to the
wicked full moon in the zenith, and the forest is all whispering with
witchery and danger. The eeriness of the world, the mischief and the
manyness, the littleness of the forces, the magical surprises, the
unaccountability of every agent, these surely are the characters most
impressive at that stage of culture, these communicate the thrills
of curiosity and the earliest intellectual stirrings. Tempests and
conflagrations, pestilences and earthquakes, reveal supramundane
powers, and instigate religious terror rather than philosophy. Nature,
more demonic than divine, is above all things _multifarious_. So many
creatures that feed or threaten, that help or crush, so many beings
to hate or love, to understand or start at--which is on top and which
subordinate? Who can tell? They are co-ordinate, rather, and to adapt
ourselves to them singly, to 'square' the dangerous powers and keep
the others friendly, regardless of consistency or unity, is the chief
problem. The symbol of nature at this stage, as Paulsen well says,
is the sphinx, under whose nourishing breasts the tearing claws are
visible.

But in due course of time the intellect awoke, with its passion for
generalizing, simplifying, and subordinating, and then began those
divergences of conception which all later experience seems rather
to have deepened than to have effaced, because objective nature has
contributed to both sides impartially, and has let the thinkers
emphasize different parts of her, and pile up opposite imaginary
supplements.

Perhaps the most interesting opposition is that which results from the
clash between what I lately called the sympathetic and the cynical
temper. Materialistic and spiritualistic philosophies are the rival
types that result: the former defining the world so as to leave man's
soul upon it as a soil of outside passenger or alien, while the latter
insists that the intimate and human must surround and underlie the
brutal. This latter is the spiritual way of thinking.

Now there are two very distinct types or stages in spiritualistic
philosophy, and my next purpose in this lecture is to make their
contrast evident. Both types attain the sought-for intimacy of view,
but the one attains it somewhat less successfully than the other.

The generic term spiritualism, which I began by using merely as the
opposite of materialism, thus subdivides into two species, the more
intimate one of which is monistic and the less intimate dualistic. The
dualistic species is the _theism_ that reached its elaboration in the
scholastic philosophy, while the monistic species is the _pantheism_
spoken of sometimes simply as idealism, and sometimes as
'post-kantian' or 'absolute' idealism. Dualistic theism is professed
as firmly as ever at all catholic seats of learning, whereas it has
of late years tended to disappear at our british and american
universities, and to be replaced by a monistic pantheism more or less
open or disguised. I have an impression that ever since T.H. Green's
time absolute idealism has been decidedly in the ascendent at Oxford.
It is in the ascendent at my own university of Harvard.

Absolute idealism attains, I said, to the more intimate point of view;
but the statement needs some explanation. So far as theism represents
the world as God's world, and God as what Matthew Arnold called a
magnified non-natural man, it would seem as if the inner quality of
the world remained human, and as if our relations with it might be
intimate enough--for what is best in ourselves appears then also
outside of ourselves, and we and the universe are of the same
spiritual species. So far, so good, then; and one might consequently
ask, What more of intimacy do you require? To which the answer is
that to be like a thing is not as intimate a relation as to be
substantially fused into it, to form one continuous soul and body with
it; and that pantheistic idealism, making us entitatively one with
God, attains this higher reach of intimacy.

The theistic conception, picturing God and his creation as entities
distinct from each other, still leaves the human subject outside of
the deepest reality in the universe. God is from eternity complete, it
says, and sufficient unto himself; he throws off the world by a free
act and as an extraneous substance, and he throws off man as a third
substance, extraneous to both the world and himself. Between them, God
says 'one,' the world says 'two,' and man says 'three,'--that is the
orthodox theistic view. And orthodox theism has been so jealous of
God's glory that it has taken pains to exaggerate everything in the
notion of him that could make for isolation and separateness. Page
upon page in scholastic books go to prove that God is in no sense
implicated by his creative act, or involved in his creation. That his
relation to the creatures he has made should make any difference to
him, carry any consequence, or qualify his being, is repudiated as a
pantheistic slur upon his self-sufficingness. I said a moment ago that
theism treats us and God as of the same species, but from the orthodox
point of view that was a slip of language. God and his creatures
are _toto genere_ distinct in the scholastic theology, they have
absolutely _nothing_ in common; nay, it degrades God to attribute to
him any generic nature whatever; he can be classed with nothing. There
is a sense, then, in which philosophic theism makes us outsiders and
keeps us foreigners in relation to God, in which, at any rate, his
connexion with us appears as unilateral and not reciprocal. His action
can affect us, but he can never be affected by our reaction. Our
relation, in short, is not a strictly social relation. Of course in
common men's religion the relation is believed to be social, but that
is only one of the many differences between religion and theology.

This essential dualism of the theistic view has all sorts of
collateral consequences. Man being an outsider and a mere subject to
God, not his intimate partner, a character of externality invades the
field. God is not heart of our heart and reason of our reason, but our
magistrate, rather; and mechanically to obey his commands, however
strange they may be, remains our only moral duty. Conceptions of
criminal law have in fact played a great part in defining our
relations with him. Our relations with speculative truth show the
same externality. One of our duties is to know truth, and rationalist
thinkers have always assumed it to be our sovereign duty. But in
scholastic theism we find truth already instituted and established
without our help, complete apart from our knowing; and the most we
can do is to acknowledge it passively and adhere to it, altho such
adhesion as ours can make no jot of difference to what is adhered to.
The situation here again is radically dualistic. It is not as if the
world came to know itself, or God came to know himself, partly through
us, as pantheistic idealists have maintained, but truth exists _per
se_ and absolutely, by God's grace and decree, no matter who of us
knows it or is ignorant, and it would continue to exist unaltered,
even though we finite knowers were all annihilated.

It has to be confessed that this dualism and lack of intimacy has
always operated as a drag and handicap on Christian thought. Orthodox
theology has had to wage a steady fight within the schools against the
various forms of pantheistic heresy which the mystical experiences
of religious persons, on the one hand, and the formal or aesthetic
superiorities of monism to dualism, on the other, kept producing. God
as intimate soul and reason of the universe has always seemed to some
people a more worthy conception than God as external creator. So
conceived, he appeared to unify the world more perfectly, he made
it less finite and mechanical, and in comparison with such a God an
external creator seemed more like the product of a childish fancy. I
have been told by Hindoos that the great obstacle to the spread
of Christianity in their country is the puerility of our dogma
of creation. It has not sweep and infinity enough to meet the
requirements of even the illiterate natives of India.

Assuredly most members of this audience are ready to side with
Hinduism in this matter. Those of us who are sexagenarians have
witnessed in our own persons one of those gradual mutations of
intellectual climate, due to innumerable influences, that make the
thought of a past generation seem as foreign to its successor as if
it were the expression of a different race of men. The theological
machinery that spoke so livingly to our ancestors, with its finite age
of the world, its creation out of nothing, its juridical morality and
eschatology, its relish for rewards and punishments, its treatment of
God as an external contriver, an 'intelligent and moral governor,'
sounds as odd to most of us as if it were some outlandish savage
religion. The vaster vistas which scientific evolutionism has opened,
and the rising tide of social democratic ideals, have changed the type
of our imagination, and the older monarchical theism is obsolete or
obsolescent. The place of the divine in the world must be more organic
and intimate. An external creator and his institutions may still be
verbally confessed at Church in formulas that linger by their mere
inertia, but the life is out of them, we avoid dwelling on them, the
sincere heart of us is elsewhere. I shall leave cynical materialism
entirely out of our discussion as not calling for treatment before
this present audience, and I shall ignore old-fashioned dualistic
theism for the same reason. Our contemporary mind having once for all
grasped the possibility of a more intimate _Weltanschauung_, the only
opinions quite worthy of arresting our attention will fall within the
general scope of what may roughly be called the pantheistic field of
vision, the vision of God as the indwelling divine rather than the
external creator, and of human life as part and parcel of that deep
reality.

As we have found that spiritualism in general breaks into a more
intimate and a less intimate species, so the more intimate species
itself breaks into two subspecies, of which the one is more monistic,
the other more pluralistic in form. I say in form, for our vocabulary
gets unmanageable if we don't distinguish between form and substance
here. The inner life of things must be substantially akin anyhow to
the tenderer parts of man's nature in any spiritualistic philosophy.
The word 'intimacy' probably covers the essential difference.
Materialism holds the foreign in things to be more primary and
lasting, it sends us to a lonely corner with our intimacy. The brutal
aspects overlap and outwear; refinement has the feebler and more
ephemeral hold on reality.

From a pragmatic point of view the difference between living against
a background of foreignness and one of intimacy means the difference
between a general habit of wariness and one of trust. One might call
it a social difference, for after all, the common _socius_ of us all
is the great universe whose children we are. If materialistic, we
must be suspicious of this socius, cautious, tense, on guard. If
spiritualistic, we may give way, embrace, and keep no ultimate fear.

The contrast is rough enough, and can be cut across by all sorts
of other divisions, drawn from other points of view than that of
foreignness and intimacy. We have so many different businesses with
nature that no one of them yields us an all-embracing clasp. The
philosophic attempt to define nature so that no one's business is left
out, so that no one lies outside the door saying 'Where do _I_ come
in?' is sure in advance to fail. The most a philosophy can hope for is
not to lock out any interest forever. No matter what doors it closes,
it must leave other doors open for the interests which it neglects.
I have begun by shutting ourselves up to intimacy and foreignness
because that makes so generally interesting a contrast, and because it
will conveniently introduce a farther contrast to which I wish this
hour to lead.

The majority of men are sympathetic. Comparatively few are cynics
because they like cynicism, and most of our existing materialists are
such because they think the evidence of facts impels them, or because
they find the idealists they are in contact with too private and
tender-minded; so, rather than join their company, they fly to the
opposite extreme. I therefore propose to you to disregard materialists
altogether for the present, and to consider the sympathetic party
alone.

It is normal, I say, to be sympathetic in the sense in which I use the
term. Not to demand intimate relations with the universe, and not to
wish them satisfactory, should be accounted signs of something wrong.
Accordingly when minds of this type reach the philosophic level, and
seek some unification of their vision, they find themselves compelled
to correct that aboriginal appearance of things by which savages are
not troubled. That sphinx-like presence, with its breasts and claws,
that first bald multifariousness, is too discrepant an object for
philosophic contemplation. The intimacy and the foreignness cannot be
written down as simply coexisting. An order must be made; and in that
order the higher side of things must dominate. The philosophy of the
absolute agrees with the pluralistic philosophy which I am going
to contrast with it in these lectures, in that both identify human
substance with the divine substance. But whereas absolutism thinks
that the said substance becomes fully divine only in the form of
totality, and is not its real self in any form but the _all_-form, the
pluralistic view which I prefer to adopt is willing to believe that
there may ultimately never be an all-form at all, that the substance
of reality may never get totally collected, that some of it may
remain outside of the largest combination of it ever made, and that
a distributive form of reality, the _each_-form, is logically as
acceptable and empirically as probable as the all-form commonly
acquiesced in as so obviously the self-evident thing. The contrast
between these two forms of a reality which we will agree to suppose
substantially spiritual is practically the topic of this course of
lectures. You see now what I mean by pantheism's two subspecies. If
we give to the monistic subspecies the name of philosophy of the
absolute, we may give that of radical empiricism to its pluralistic
rival, and it may be well to distinguish them occasionally later by
these names.

As a convenient way of entering into the study of their differences,
I may refer to a recent article by Professor Jacks of Manchester
College. Professor Jacks, in some brilliant pages in the 'Hibbert
Journal' for last October, studies the relation between the universe
and the philosopher who describes and defines it for us. You may
assume two cases, he says. Either what the philosopher tells us is
extraneous to the universe he is accounting for, an indifferent
parasitic outgrowth, so to speak; or the fact of his philosophizing
is itself one of the things taken account of in the philosophy, and
self-included in the description. In the former case the philosopher
means by the universe everything _except_ what his own presence
brings; in the latter case his philosophy is itself an intimate
part of the universe, and may be a part momentous enough to give a
different turn to what the other parts signify. It may be a
supreme reaction of the universe upon itself by which it rises to
self-comprehension. It may handle itself differently in consequence of
this event.

Now both empiricism and absolutism bring the philosopher inside
and make man intimate, but the one being pluralistic and the other
monistic, they do so in differing ways that need much explanation. Let
me then contrast the one with the other way of representing the status
of the human thinker.

For monism the world is no collection, but one great all-inclusive
fact outside of which is nothing--nothing is its only alternative.
When the monism is idealistic, this all-enveloping fact is represented
as an absolute mind that makes the partial facts by thinking them,
just as we make objects in a dream by dreaming them, or personages in
a story by imagining them. To _be_, on this scheme, is, on the part of
a finite thing, to be an object for the absolute; and on the part of
the absolute it is to be the thinker of that assemblage of objects. If
we use the word 'content' here, we see that the absolute and the world
have an identical content. The absolute is nothing but the knowledge
of those objects; the objects are nothing but what the absolute knows.
The world and the all-thinker thus compenetrate and soak each other
up without residuum. They are but two names for the same identical
material, considered now from the subjective, and now from the
objective point of view--gedanke and gedachtes, as we would say if we
were Germans. We philosophers naturally form part of the material, on
the monistic scheme. The absolute makes us by thinking us, and if we
ourselves are enlightened enough to be believers in the absolute, one
may then say that our philosophizing is one of the ways in which the
absolute is conscious of itself. This is the full pantheistic scheme,
the _identitätsphilosophie_, the immanence of God in his creation, a
conception sublime from its tremendous unity. And yet that unity is
incomplete, as closer examination will show.

The absolute and the world are one fact, I said, when materially
considered. Our philosophy, for example, is not numerically distinct
from the absolute's own knowledge of itself, not a duplicate and copy
of it, it is part of that very knowledge, is numerically identical
with as much of it as our thought covers. The absolute just _is_ our
philosophy, along with everything else that is known, in an act of
knowing which (to use the words of my gifted absolutist colleague
Royce) forms in its wholeness one luminously transparent conscious
moment.

But one as we are in this material sense with the absolute substance,
that being only the whole of us, and we only the parts of it, yet in a
formal sense something like a pluralism breaks out. When we speak of
the absolute we _take_ the one universal known material collectively
or integrally; when we speak of its objects, of our finite selves,
etc., we _take_ that same identical material distributively and
separately. But what is the use of a thing's _being_ only once if it
can be _taken_ twice over, and if being taken in different ways makes
different things true of it? As the absolute takes me, for example, I
appear _with_ everything else in its field of perfect knowledge. As
I take myself, I appear _without_ most other things in my field
of relative ignorance. And practical differences result from its
knowledge and my ignorance. Ignorance breeds mistake, curiosity,
misfortune, pain, for me; I suffer those consequences. The absolute
knows of those things, of course, for it knows me and my suffering,
but it doesn't itself suffer. It can't be ignorant, for simultaneous
with its knowledge of each question goes its knowledge of each answer.
It can't be patient, for it has to wait for nothing, having everything
at once in its possession. It can't be surprised; it can't be guilty.
No attribute connected with succession can be applied to it, for it
is all at once and wholly what it is, 'with the unity of a single
instant,' and succession is not of it but in it, for we are
continually told that it is 'timeless.'

Things true of the world in its finite aspects, then, are not true of
it in its infinite capacity. _Quâ_ finite and plural its accounts of
itself to itself are different from what its account to itself _quâ_
infinite and one must be.

With this radical discrepancy between the absolute and the relative
points of view, it seems to me that almost as great a bar to intimacy
between the divine and the human breaks out in pantheism as that which
we found in monarchical theism, and hoped that pantheism might not
show. We humans are incurably rooted in the temporal point of view.
The eternal's ways are utterly unlike our ways. 'Let us imitate the
All,' said the original prospectus of that admirable Chicago quarterly
called the 'Monist.' As if we could, either in thought or conduct!
We are invincibly parts, let us talk as we will, and must always
apprehend the absolute as if it were a foreign being. If what I mean
by this is not wholly clear to you at this point, it ought to grow
clearer as my lectures proceed.




LECTURE II


MONISTIC IDEALISM

Let me recall to you the programme which I indicated to you at our
last meeting. After agreeing not to consider materialism in any
shape, but to place ourselves straightway upon a more spiritualistic
platform, I pointed out three kinds of spiritual philosophy between
which we are asked to choose. The first way was that of the older
dualistic theism, with ourselves represented as a secondary order of
substances created by God. We found that this allowed of a degree of
intimacy with the creative principle inferior to that implied in the
pantheistic belief that we are substantially one with it, and that the
divine is therefore the most intimate of all our possessions, heart of
our heart, in fact. But we saw that this pantheistic belief could be
held in two forms, a monistic form which I called philosophy of the
absolute, and a pluralistic form which I called radical empiricism,
the former conceiving that the divine exists authentically only when
the world is experienced all at once in its absolute totality, whereas
radical empiricism allows that the absolute sum-total of things may
never be actually experienced or realized in that shape at all, and
that a disseminated, distributed, or incompletely unified appearance
is the only form that reality may yet have achieved.

I may contrast the monistic and pluralistic forms in question as
the 'all-form' and the 'each-form.' At the end of the last hour I
animadverted on the fact that the all-form is so radically different
from the each-form, which is our human form of experiencing the
world, that the philosophy of the absolute, so far as insight and
understanding go, leaves us almost as much outside of the divine being
as dualistic theism does. I believe that radical empiricism, on the
contrary, holding to the each-form, and making of God only one of the
eaches, affords the higher degree of intimacy. The general thesis of
these lectures I said would be a defence of the pluralistic against
the monistic view. Think of the universe as existing solely in the
each-form, and you will have on the whole a more reasonable and
satisfactory idea of it than if you insist on the all-form being
necessary. The rest of my lectures will do little more than make this
thesis more concrete, and I hope more persuasive.

It is curious how little countenance radical pluralism has ever had
from philosophers. Whether materialistically or spiritualistically
minded, philosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter with
which the world apparently is filled. They have substituted economical
and orderly conceptions for the first sensible tangle; and whether
these were morally elevated or only intellectually neat they were
at any rate always aesthetically pure and definite, and aimed at
ascribing to the world something clean and intellectual in the way of
inner structure. As compared with all these rationalizing pictures,
the pluralistic empiricism which I profess offers but a sorry
appearance. It is a turbid, muddled, gothic sort of an affair, without
a sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility. Those of you
who are accustomed to the classical constructions of reality may be
excused if your first reaction upon it be absolute contempt--a
shrug of the shoulders as if such ideas were unworthy of explicit
refutation. But one must have lived some time with a system to
appreciate its merits. Perhaps a little more familiarity may mitigate
your first surprise at such a programme as I offer.

First, one word more than what I said last time about the relative
foreignness of the divine principle in the philosophy of the absolute.
Those of you who have read the last two chapters of Mr. Bradley's
wonderful book, 'Appearance and reality,' will remember what an
elaborately foreign aspect _his_ absolute is finally made to assume.
It is neither intelligence nor will, neither a self nor a collection
of selves, neither truthful, good, nor beautiful, as we understand
these terms. It is, in short, a metaphysical monster, all that we are
permitted to say of it being that whatever it is, it is at any rate
_worth_ more (worth more to itself, that is) than if any eulogistic
adjectives of ours applied to it. It is us, and all other appearances,
but none of us _as such_, for in it we are all 'transmuted,' and its
own as-suchness is of another denomination altogether.

Spinoza was the first great absolutist, and the impossibility of being
intimate with _his_ God is universally recognized. _Quatenus infinitus
est_ he is other than what he is _quatenus humanam mentem constituit_.
Spinoza's philosophy has been rightly said to be worked by the word
_quatenus_. Conjunctions, prepositions, and adverbs play indeed the
vital part in all philosophies; and in contemporary idealism the words
'as' and 'quâ' bear the burden of reconciling metaphysical unity with
phenomenal diversity. Quâ absolute the world is one and perfect, quâ
relative it is many and faulty, yet it is identically the self-same
world--instead of talking of it as many facts, we call it one fact in
many aspects.

_As_ absolute, then, or _sub specie eternitatis_, or _quatenus
infinitus est_, the world repels our sympathy because it has no
history. _As such_, the absolute neither acts nor suffers, nor loves
nor hates; it has no needs, desires, or aspirations, no failures or
successes, friends or enemies, victories or defeats. All such things
pertain to the world quâ relative, in which our finite experiences
lie, and whose vicissitudes alone have power to arouse our interest.
What boots it to tell me that the absolute way is the true way, and
to exhort me, as Emerson says, to lift mine eye up to its style, and
manners of the sky, if the feat is impossible by definition? I am
finite once for all, and all the categories of my sympathy are knit up
with the finite world _as such_, and with things that have a history.
'Aus dieser erde quellen meine freuden, und ihre sonne scheinet meinen
leiden.' I have neither eyes nor ears nor heart nor mind for anything
of an opposite description, and the stagnant felicity of the
absolute's own perfection moves me as little as I move it. If we were
_readers_ only of the cosmic novel, things would be different: we
should then share the author's point of view and recognize villains to
be as essential as heroes in the plot. But we are not the readers but
the very personages of the world-drama. In your own eyes each of you
here is its hero, and the villains are your respective friends or
enemies. The tale which the absolute reader finds so perfect, we spoil
for one another through our several vital identifications with the
destinies of the particular personages involved.

The doctrine on which the absolutists lay most stress is the
absolute's 'timeless' character. For pluralists, on the other hand,
time remains as real as anything, and nothing in the universe is great
or static or eternal enough not to have some history. But the world
that each of us feels most intimately at home with is that of beings
with histories that play into our history, whom we can help in their
vicissitudes even as they help us in ours. This satisfaction the
absolute denies us; we can neither help nor hinder it, for it stands
outside of history. It surely is a merit in a philosophy to make the
very life we lead seem real and earnest. Pluralism, in exorcising the
absolute, exorcises the great de-realizer of the only life we are
at home in, and thus redeems the nature of reality from essential
foreignness. Every end, reason, motive, object of desire or aversion,
ground of sorrow or joy that we feel is in the world of finite
multifariousness, for only in that world does anything really happen,
only there do events come to pass.

In one sense this is a far-fetched and rather childish objection, for
so much of the history of the finite is as formidably foreign to us as
the static absolute can possibly be--in fact that entity derives its
own foreignness largely from the bad character of the finite which it
simultaneously is--that this sentimental reason for preferring the
pluralistic view seems small.[1] I shall return to the subject in my
final lecture, and meanwhile, with your permission, I will say no more
about this objection. The more so as the necessary foreignness of the
absolute is cancelled emotionally by its attribute of _totality_,
which is universally considered to carry the further attribute of
_perfection_ in its train. 'Philosophy,' says a recent american
philosopher, 'is humanity's hold on totality,' and there is no doubt
that most of us find that the bare notion of an absolute all-one is
inspiring. 'I yielded myself to the perfect whole,' writes Emerson;
and where can you find a more mind-dilating object? A certain loyalty
is called forth by the idea; even if not proved actual, it must be
believed in somehow. Only an enemy of philosophy can speak lightly
of it. Rationalism starts from the idea of such a whole and builds
downward. Movement and change are absorbed into its immutability as
forms of mere appearance. When you accept this beatific vision of
what _is_, in contrast with what _goes on_, you feel as if you had
fulfilled an intellectual duty. 'Reality is not in its truest nature
a process,' Mr. McTaggart tells us, 'but a stable and timeless
state.'[2] 'The true knowledge of God begins,' Hegel writes, 'when
we know that things as they immediately are have no truth.'[3] 'The
consummation of the infinite aim,' he says elsewhere, 'consists merely
in removing the illusion which makes it seem yet unaccomplished. Good
and absolute goodness is eternally accomplishing itself in the world:
and the result is that it needs not wait upon _us_, but is already ...
accomplished. It is an illusion under which we live. ... In the course
of its process the Idea makes itself that illusion, by setting an
antithesis to confront it, and its action consists in getting rid of
the illusion which it has created.'[4]

But abstract emotional appeals of any kind sound amateurish in the
business that concerns us. Impressionistic philosophizing, like
impressionistic watchmaking or land-surveying, is intolerable to
experts. Serious discussion of the alternative before us forces
me, therefore, to become more technical. The great _claim_ of the
philosophy of the absolute is that the absolute is no hypothesis, but
a presupposition implicated in all thinking, and needing only a little
effort of analysis to be seen as a logical necessity. I will therefore
take it in this more rigorous character and see whether its claim is
in effect so coercive.

It has seemed coercive to an enormous number of contemporaneous
thinkers. Professor Henry Jones thus describes the range and influence
of it upon the social and political life of the present time:[5] 'For
many years adherents of this way of thought have deeply interested the
british public by their writings. Almost more important than their
writings is the fact that they have occupied philosophical chairs in
almost every university in the kingdom. Even the professional critics
of idealism are for the most part idealists--after a fashion. And when
they are not, they are as a rule more occupied with the refutation of
idealism than with the construction of a better theory. It follows
from their position of academic authority, were it from nothing else,
that idealism exercises an influence not easily measured upon the
youth of the nation--upon those, that is, who from the educational
opportunities they enjoy may naturally be expected to become the
leaders of the nation's thought and practice.... Difficult as it is
to measure the forces ... it is hardly to be denied that the power
exercised by Bentham and the utilitarian school has, for better or
for worse, passed into the hands of the idealists.... "The Rhine has
flowed into the Thames" is the warning note rung out by Mr. Hobhouse.
Carlyle introduced it, bringing it as far as Chelsea. Then Jowett
and Thomas Hill Green, and William Wallace and Lewis Nettleship, and
Arnold Toynbee and David Eitchie--to mention only those teachers whose
voices now are silent--guided the waters into those upper reaches
known locally as the Isis. John and Edward Caird brought them up the
Clyde, Hutchison Stirling up the Firth of Forth. They have passed up
the Mersey and up the Severn and Dee and Don. They pollute the bay of
St. Andrews and swell the waters of the Cam, and have somehow crept
overland into Birmingham. The stream of german idealism has been
diffused over the academical world of Great Britain. The disaster is
universal.'

Evidently if weight of authority were all, the truth of absolutism
would be thus decided. But let us first pass in review the general
style of argumentation of that philosophy.

As I read it, its favorite way of meeting pluralism and empiricism is
by a _reductio ad absurdum_ framed somewhat as follows: You contend,
it says to the pluralist, that things, though in some respects
connected, are in other respects independent, so that they are not
members of one all-inclusive individual fact. Well, your position is
absurd on either point. For admit in fact the slightest modicum of
independence, and you find (if you will only think accurately) that
you have to admit more and more of it, until at last nothing but an
absolute chaos, or the proved impossibility of any connexion whatever
between the parts of the universe, remains upon your hands. Admit, on
the other hand, the most incipient minimum of relation between any two
things, and again you can't stop until you see that the absolute unity
of all things is implied.

If we take the latter _reductio ad absurdum_ first, we find a good
example of it in Lotze's well-known proof of monism from the fact of
interaction between finite things. Suppose, Lotze says in effect, and
for simplicity's sake I have to paraphrase him, for his own words are
too long to quote--many distinct beings _a, b, c_, etc., to exist
independently of each other: _can a in that case ever act on b_?

What is it to act? Is it not to exert an influence? Does the influence
detach itself from _a_ and find _b_? If so, it is a third fact, and
the problem is not how _a_ acts, but how its 'influence' acts on _b_.
By another influence perhaps? And how in the end does the chain of
influences find _b_ rather than _c_ unless _b_ is somehow prefigured
in them already? And when they have found _b_, how do they make _b_
respond, if _b_ has nothing in common with them? Why don't they go
right through _b_? The change in _b_ is a _response_, due to _b_'s
capacity for taking account of _a_'s influence, and that again seems
to prove that _b_'s nature is somehow fitted to _a_'s nature in
advance. _A_ and _b_, in short, are not really as distinct as we at
first supposed them, not separated by a void. Were this so they would
be mutually impenetrable, or at least mutually irrelevant. They would
form two universes each living by itself, making no difference to each
other, taking no account of each other, much as the universe of your
day dreams takes no account of mine. They must therefore belong
together beforehand, be co-implicated already, their natures must have
an inborn mutual reference each to each.

Lotze's own solution runs as follows: The multiple independent things
supposed cannot be real in that shape, but all of them, if reciprocal
action is to be possible between them, must be regarded as parts of a
single real being, M. The pluralism with which our view began has
to give place to a monism; and the 'transeunt' interaction,
being unintelligible as such, is to be understood as an immanent
operation.[6]

The words 'immanent operation' seem here to mean that the single real
being M, of which _a_ and _b_ are members, is the only thing that
changes, and that when it changes, it changes inwardly and all over at
once. When part _a_ in it changes, consequently, part _b_ must also
change, but without the whole M changing this would not occur.

A pretty argument, but a purely verbal one, as I apprehend it. _Call_
your _a_ and _b_ distinct, they can't interact; _call_ them one,
they can. For taken abstractly and without qualification the words
'distinct' and 'independent' suggest only disconnection. If this be
the only property of your _a_ and _b_ (and it is the only property
your words imply), then of course, since you can't deduce their mutual
influence from _it_, you can find no ground of its occurring between
them. Your bare word 'separate,' contradicting your bare word
'joined,' seems to exclude connexion.

Lotze's remedy for the impossibility thus verbally found is to change
the first word. If, instead of calling _a_ and _b_ independent, we now
call them 'interdependent,' 'united,' or 'one,' he says, _these_ words
do not contradict any sort of mutual influence that may be proposed.
If _a_ and _b_ are 'one,' and the one changes, _a_ and _b_ of course
must co-ordinately change. What under the old name they couldn't do,
they now have license to do under the new name.

But I ask you whether giving the name of 'one' to the former 'many'
makes us really understand the modus operandi of interaction any
better. We have now given verbal permission to the many to change all
together, if they can; we have removed a verbal impossibility
and substituted a verbal possibility, but the new name, with the
possibility it suggests, tells us nothing of the actual process by
which real things that are one can and do change at all. In point
of fact abstract oneness as such _doesn't_ change, neither has it
parts--any more than abstract independence as such interacts. But then
neither abstract oneness nor abstract independence _exists_; only
concrete real things exist, which add to these properties the other
properties which they possess, to make up what we call their total
nature. To construe any one of their abstract names as _making their
total nature impossible_ is a misuse of the function of naming. The
real way of rescue from the abstract consequences of one name is not
to fly to an opposite name, equally abstract, but rather to correct
the first name by qualifying adjectives that restore some concreteness
to the case. Don't take your 'independence' _simpliciter_, as Lotze
does, take it _secundum quid_. Only when we know what the process of
interaction literally and concretely _consists_ in can we tell whether
beings independent _in definite respects_, distinct, for example, in
origin, separate in place, different in kind, etc., can or cannot
interact.

_The treating of a name as excluding from the fact named what the
name's definition fails positively to include, is what I call
'vicious intellectualism_.' Later I shall have more to say about this
intellectualism, but that Lotze's argument is tainted by it I hardly
think we can deny. As well might you contend (to use an instance from
Sigwart) that a person whom you have once called an 'equestrian' is
thereby forever made unable to walk on his own feet.

I almost feel as if I should apologize for criticising such subtle
arguments in rapid lectures of this kind. The criticisms have to be as
abstract as the arguments, and in exposing their unreality, take
on such an unreal sound themselves that a hearer not nursed in the
intellectualist atmosphere knows not which of them to accuse. But
_le vin est versé, il faut le boire_, and I must cite a couple more
instances before I stop.

If we are empiricists and go from parts to wholes, we believe that
beings may first exist and feed so to speak on their own existence,
and then secondarily become known to one another. But philosophers of
the absolute tell us that such independence of being from being known
would, if once admitted, disintegrate the universe beyond all hope of
mending. The argument is one of Professor Royce's proofs that the only
alternative we have is to choose the complete disunion of all things
or their complete union in the absolute One.

Take, for instance, the proverb 'a cat may look at a king' and adopt
the realistic view that the king's being is independent of the cat's
witnessing. This assumption, which amounts to saying that it need make
no essential difference to the royal object whether the feline subject
cognizes him or not, that the cat may look away from him or may even
be annihilated, and the king remain unchanged,--this assumption, I
say, is considered by my ingenious colleague to lead to the absurd
practical consequence that the two beings _can_ never later acquire
any possible linkages or connexions, but must remain eternally as if
in different worlds. For suppose any connexion whatever to ensue, this
connexion would simply be a third being additional to the cat and the
king, which would itself have to be linked to both by additional links
before it could connect them, and so on _ad infinitum_, the argument,
you see, being the same as Lotze's about how _a_'s influence does its
influencing when it influences _b_.

In Royce's own words, if the king can be without the cat knowing him,
then king and cat 'can have no common features, no ties, no true
relations; they are separated, each from the other, by absolutely
impassable chasms. They can never come to get either ties or community
of nature; they are not in the same space, nor in the same time, nor
in the same natural or spiritual order.'[7] They form in short two
unrelated universes,--which is the _reductio ad absurdum_ required.

To escape this preposterous state of things we must accordingly revoke
the original hypothesis. The king and the cat are not indifferent to
each other in the way supposed. But if not in that way, then in no
way, for connexion in that way carries connexion in other ways; so
that, pursuing the reverse line of reasoning, we end with the
absolute itself as the smallest fact that can exist. Cat and king are
co-involved, they are a single fact in two names, they can never have
been absent from each other, and they are both equally co-implicated
with all the other facts of which the universe consists.

Professor Royce's proof that whoso admits the cat's witnessing the
king at all must thereupon admit the integral absolute, may be briefly
put as follows:--

First, to know the king, the cat must intend _that_ king, must somehow
pass over and lay hold of him individually and specifically. The cat's
idea, in short, must transcend the cat's own separate mind and somehow
include the king, for were the king utterly outside and independent of
the cat, the cat's pure other, the beast's mind could touch the king
in no wise. This makes the cat much less distinct from the king than
we had at first naïvely supposed. There must be some prior continuity
between them, which continuity Royce interprets idealistically as
meaning a higher mind that owns them both as objects, and owning them
can also own any relation, such as the supposed witnessing, that may
obtain between them. Taken purely pluralistically, neither of them can
own any part of a _between_, because, so taken, each is supposed shut
up to itself: the fact of a _between_ thus commits us to a higher
knower.

But the higher knower that knows the two beings we start with proves
to be the same knower that knows everything else. For assume any third
being, the queen, say, and as the cat knew the king, so let the king
know his queen, and let this second knowledge, by the same reasoning,
require a higher knower as its presupposition. That knower of the
king's knowing must, it is now contended, be the same higher knower
that was required for the cat's knowing; for if you suppose otherwise,
you have no longer the _same king_. This may not seem immediately
obvious, but if you follow the intellectualistic logic employed in all
these reasonings, I don't see how you can escape the admission. If it
be true that the independent or indifferent cannot be related, for
the abstract words 'independent' or 'indifferent' as such imply no
relation, then it is just as true that the king known by the cat
cannot be the king that knows the queen, for taken merely 'as such,'
the abstract term 'what the cat knows' and the abstract term 'what
knows the queen' are logically distinct. The king thus logically
breaks into two kings, with nothing to connect them, until a higher
knower is introduced to recognize them as the self-same king concerned
in any previous acts of knowledge which he may have brought about.
This he can do because he possesses all the terms as his own objects
and can treat them as he will. Add any fourth or fifth term, and you
get a like result, and so on, until at last an all-owning knower,
otherwise called the absolute, is reached. The co-implicated
'through-and-through' world of monism thus stands proved by
irrefutable logic, and all pluralism appears as absurd.

The reasoning is pleasing from its ingenuity, and it is almost a pity
that so straight a bridge from abstract logic to concrete fact should
not bear our weight. To have the alternative forced upon us of
admitting either finite things each cut off from all relation with
its environment, or else of accepting the integral absolute with no
environment and all relations packed within itself, would be too
delicious a simplification. But the purely verbal character of the
operation is undisguised. Because the _names_ of finite things and
their relations are disjoined, it doesn't follow that the realities
named need a _deus ex machina_ from on high to conjoin them. The same
things disjoined in one respect _appear_ as conjoined in another.
Naming the disjunction doesn't debar us from also naming the
conjunction in a later modifying statement, for the two are absolutely
co-ordinate elements in the finite tissue of experience. When at
Athens it was found self-contradictory that a boy could be both tall
and short (tall namely in respect of a child, short in respect of a
man), the absolute had not yet been thought of, but it might just as
well have been invoked by Socrates as by Lotze or Royce, as a relief
from his peculiar intellectualistic difficulty.

Everywhere we find rationalists using the same kind of reasoning. The
primal whole which is their vision must be there not only as a
fact but as a logical necessity. It must be the minimum that can
exist--either that absolute whole is there, or there is absolutely
nothing. The logical proof alleged of the irrationality of supposing
otherwise, is that you can deny the whole only in words that
implicitly assert it. If you say 'parts,' of _what_ are they parts? If
you call them a 'many,' that very word unifies them. If you suppose
them unrelated in any particular respect, that 'respect' connects
them; and so on. In short you fall into hopeless contradiction. You
must stay either at one extreme or the other.[8] 'Partly this and
partly that,' partly rational, for instance, and partly irrational,
is no admissible description of the world. If rationality be in it at
all, it must be in it throughout; if irrationality be in it anywhere,
that also must pervade it throughout. It must be wholly rational or
wholly irrational, pure universe or pure multiverse or nulliverse; and
reduced to this violent alternative, no one's choice ought long to
remain doubtful. The individual absolute, with its parts co-implicated
through and through, so that there is nothing in any part by which
any other part can remain inwardly unaffected, is the only rational
supposition. Connexions of an external sort, by which the many became
merely continuous instead of being consubstantial, would be an
irrational supposition.

Mr. Bradley is the pattern champion of this philosophy _in extremis_,
as one might call it, for he shows an intolerance to pluralism so
extreme that I fancy few of his readers have been able fully to share
it. His reasoning exemplifies everywhere what I call the vice of
intellectualism, for abstract terms are used by him as positively
excluding all that their definition fails to include. Some Greek
sophists could deny that we may say that man is good, for man, they
said, means only man, and good means only good, and the word _is_
can't be construed to identify such disparate meanings. Mr. Bradley
revels in the same type of argument. No adjective can rationally
qualify a substantive, he thinks, for if distinct from the
substantive, it can't be united with it; and if not distinct, there is
only one thing there, and nothing left to unite. Our whole pluralistic
procedure in using subjects and predicates as we do is fundamentally
irrational, an example of the desperation of our finite intellectual
estate, infected and undermined as that is by the separatist
discursive forms which are our only categories, but which absolute
reality must somehow absorb into its unity and overcome.

Readers of 'Appearance and reality' will remember how Mr. Bradley
suffers from a difficulty identical with that to which Lotze and Royce
fall a prey--how shall an influence influence? how shall a relation
relate? Any conjunctive relation between two phenomenal experiences
_a_ and _b_ must, in the intellectualist philosophy of these authors,
be itself a third entity; and as such, instead of bridging the one
original chasm, it can only create two smaller chasms, each to be
freshly bridged. Instead of hooking _a_ to _b_, it needs itself to be
hooked by a fresh relation _r’_ to _a_ and by another _r”_ to _b_.
These new relations are but two more entities which themselves require
to be hitched in turn by four still newer relations--so behold the
vertiginous _regressus ad infinitum_ in full career.

Since a _regressus ad infinitum_ is deemed absurd, the notion that
relations come 'between' their terms must be given up. No mere
external go-between can logically connect. What occurs must be more
intimate. The hooking must be a penetration, a possession. The
relation must _involve_ the terms, each term must involve _it_, and
merging thus their being in it, they must somehow merge their being in
each other, tho, as they seem still phenomenally so separate, we can
never conceive exactly how it is that they are inwardly one. The
absolute, however, must be supposed able to perform the unifying feat
in his own inscrutable fashion.

In old times, whenever a philosopher was assailed for some
particularly tough absurdity in his system, he was wont to parry the
attack by the argument from the divine omnipotence. 'Do you mean to
limit God's power?' he would reply: 'do you mean to say that God could
not, if he would, do this or that?' This retort was supposed to close
the mouths of all objectors of properly decorous mind. The functions
of the bradleian absolute are in this particular identical with those
of the theistic God. Suppositions treated as too absurd to pass muster
in the finite world which we inhabit, the absolute must be able to
make good 'somehow' in his ineffable way. First we hear Mr. Bradley
convicting things of absurdity; next, calling on the absolute to vouch
for them _quand même_. Invoked for no other duty, that duty it must
and shall perform.

The strangest discontinuity of our world of appearance with the
supposed world of absolute reality is asserted both by Bradley and
by Royce; and both writers, the latter with great ingenuity, seek to
soften the violence of the jolt. But it remains violent all the same,
and is felt to be so by most readers. Whoever feels the violence
strongly sees as on a diagram in just what the peculiarity of all this
philosophy of the absolute consists. First, there is a healthy faith
that the world must be rational and self-consistent. 'All science, all
real knowledge, all experience presuppose,' as Mr. Ritchie writes, 'a
coherent universe.' Next, we find a loyal clinging to the rationalist
belief that sense-data and their associations are incoherent, and that
only in substituting a conceptual order for their order can truth
be found. Third, the substituted conceptions are treated
intellectualistically, that is as mutually exclusive and
discontinuous, so that the first innocent continuity of the flow of
sense-experience is shattered for us without any higher conceptual
continuity taking its place. Finally, since this broken state of
things is intolerable, the absolute _deus ex machina_ is called on to
mend it in his own way, since we cannot mend it in ours.

Any other picture than this of post-kantian absolutism I am unable
to frame. I see the intellectualistic criticism destroying the
immediately given coherence of the phenomenal world, but unable to
make its own conceptual substitutes cohere, and I see the resort to
the absolute for a coherence of a higher type. The situation has
dramatic liveliness, but it is inwardly incoherent throughout, and the
question inevitably comes up whether a mistake may not somewhere have
crept in in the process that has brought it about. May not the remedy
lie rather in revising the intellectualist criticism than in first
adopting it and then trying to undo its consequences by an arbitrary
act of faith in an unintelligible agent. May not the flux of sensible
experience itself contain a rationality that has been overlooked,
so that the real remedy would consist in harking back to it more
intelligently, and not in advancing in the opposite direction away
from it and even away beyond the intellectualist criticism that
disintegrates it, to the pseudo-rationality of the supposed absolute
point of view. I myself believe that this is the real way to keep
rationality in the world, and that the traditional rationalism has
always been facing in the wrong direction. I hope in the end to make
you share, or at any rate respect, this belief, but there is much to
talk of before we get to that point.

I employed the word 'violent' just now in describing the dramatic
situation in which it pleases the philosophy of the absolute to make
its camp. I don't see how any one can help being struck in absolutist
writings by that curious tendency to fly to violent extremes of which
I have already said a word. The universe must be rational; well
and good; but _how_ rational? in what sense of that eulogistic but
ambiguous word?--this would seem to be the next point to bring up.
There are surely degrees in rationality that might be discriminated
and described. Things can be consistent or coherent in very diverse
ways. But no more in its conception of rationality than in its
conception of relations can the monistic mind suffer the notion of
more or less. Rationality is one and indivisible: if not rational
thus indivisibly, the universe must be completely irrational, and no
shadings or mixtures or compromises can obtain. Mr. McTaggart writes,
in discussing the notion of a mixture: 'The two principles, of
rationality and irrationality, to which the universe is then referred,
will have to be absolutely separate and independent. For if there were
any common unity to which they should be referred, it would be that
unity and not its two manifestations which would be the ultimate
explanation ... and the theory, having thus become monistic,'[9] would
resolve itself into the same alternative once more: is the single
principle rational through and through or not?

'Can a plurality of reals be possible?' asks Mr. Bradley, and answers,
'No, impossible.' For it would mean a number of beings not dependent
on each other, and this independence their plurality would contradict.
For to be 'many' is to be related, the word having no meaning unless
the units are somehow taken together, and it is impossible to take
them in a sort of unreal void, so they must belong to a larger
reality, and so carry the essence of the units beyond their proper
selves, into a whole which possesses unity and is a larger system.[10]
Either absolute independence or absolute mutual dependence--this,
then, is the only alternative allowed by these thinkers. Of course
'independence,' if absolute, would be preposterous, so the only
conclusion allowable is that, in Ritchie's words, 'every single event
is ultimately related to every other, and determined by the whole
to which it belongs.' The whole complete block-universe
through-and-through, therefore, or no universe at all!

Professor Taylor is so _naïf_ in this habit of thinking only in
extremes that he charges the pluralists with cutting the ground from
under their own feet in not consistently following it themselves. What
pluralists say is that a universe really connected loosely, after the
pattern of our daily experience, is possible, and that for certain
reasons it is the hypothesis to be preferred. What Professor Taylor
thinks they naturally must or should say is that any other sort of
universe is logically impossible, and that a totality of things
interrelated like the world of the monists is not an hypothesis that
can be seriously thought out at all.[11]

Meanwhile no sensible pluralist ever flies or wants to fly to this
dogmatic extreme.

If chance is spoken of as an ingredient of the universe, absolutists
interpret it to mean that double sevens are as likely to be thrown out
of a dice box as double sixes are. If free-will is spoken of, that
must mean that an english general is as likely to eat his prisoners
to-day as a Maori chief was a hundred years ago. It is as likely--I am
using Mr. McTaggart's examples--that a majority of Londoners will
burn themselves alive to-morrow as that they will partake of food, as
likely that I shall be hanged for brushing my hair as for committing
a murder,[12] and so forth, through various suppositions that no
indeterminist ever sees real reason to make.

This habit of thinking only in the most violent extremes reminds me
of what Mr. Wells says of the current objections to socialism, in his
wonderful little book, 'New worlds for old.' The commonest vice of the
human mind is its disposition to see everything as yes or no, as black
or white, its incapacity for discrimination of intermediate shades.
So the critics agree to some hard and fast impossible definition of
socialism, and extract absurdities from it as a conjurer gets rabbits
from a hat. Socialism abolishes property, abolishes the family, and
the rest. The method, Mr. Wells continues, is always the same: It
is to assume that whatever the socialist postulates as desirable is
wanted without limit of qualification,--for socialist read pluralist
and the parallel holds good,--it is to imagine that whatever proposal
is made by him is to be carried out by uncontrolled monomaniacs, and
so to make a picture of the socialist dream which can be presented to
the simple-minded person in doubt--'This is socialism'--or pluralism,
as the case may be. 'Surely!--SURELY! you don't want _this!_'

How often have I been replied to, when expressing doubts of the
logical necessity of the absolute, of flying to the opposite extreme:
'But surely, SURELY there must be _some_ connexion among things!' As
if I must necessarily be an uncontrolled monomanic insanely denying
any connexion whatever. The whole question revolves in very truth
about the word 'some.' Radical empiricism and pluralism stand out for
the legitimacy of the notion of _some_: each part of the world is in
some ways connected, in some other ways not connected with its other
parts, and the ways can be discriminated, for many of them are
obvious, and their differences are obvious to view. Absolutism, on its
side, seems to hold that 'some' is a category ruinously infected
with self-contradictoriness, and that the only categories inwardly
consistent and therefore pertinent to reality are 'all' and 'none.'

The question runs into the still more general one with which Mr.
Bradley and later writers of the monistic school have made us
abundantly familiar--the question, namely, whether all the relations
with other things, possible to a being, are pre-included in its
intrinsic nature and enter into its essence, or whether, in respect to
some of these relations, it can _be_ without reference to them, and,
if it ever does enter into them, do so adventitiously and as it
were by an after-thought. This is the great question as to whether
'external' relations can exist. They seem to, undoubtedly. My
manuscript, for example, is 'on' the desk. The relation of being 'on'
doesn't seem to implicate or involve in any way the inner meaning
of the manuscript or the inner structure of the desk--these objects
engage in it only by their outsides, it seems only a temporary
accident in their respective histories. Moreover, the 'on' fails to
appear to our senses as one of those unintelligible 'betweens' that
have to be separately hooked on the terms they pretend to connect.
All this innocent sense-appearance, however, we are told, cannot pass
muster in the eyes of reason. It is a tissue of self-contradiction
which only the complete absorption of the desk and the manuscript into
the higher unity of a more absolute reality can overcome.

The reasoning by which this conclusion is supported is too subtle and
complicated to be properly dealt with in a public lecture, and you
will thank me for not inviting you to consider it at all.[13] I feel
the more free to pass it by now as I think that the cursory account of
the absolutistic attitude which I have already given is sufficient for
our present purpose, and that my own verdict on the philosophy of
the absolute as 'not proven'--please observe that I go no farther
now--need not be backed by argument at every special point. Flanking
operations are less costly and in some ways more effective than
frontal attacks. Possibly you will yourselves think after hearing my
remaining lectures that the alternative of an universe absolutely
rational or absolutely irrational is forced and strained, and that
a _via media_ exists which some of you may agree with me is to
be preferred. _Some_ rationality certainly does characterize our
universe; and, weighing one kind with another, we may deem that the
incomplete kinds that appear are on the whole as acceptable as
the through-and-through sort of rationality on which the monistic
systematizers insist.

All the said systematizers who have written since Hegel have owed
their inspiration largely to him. Even when they have found no use
for his particular triadic dialectic, they have drawn confidence
and courage from his authoritative and conquering tone. I have said
nothing about Hegel in this lecture, so I must repair the omission in
the next.




LECTURE III


HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

Directly or indirectly, that strange and powerful genius Hegel has
done more to strengthen idealistic pantheism in thoughtful circles
than all other influences put together. I must talk a little about him
before drawing my final conclusions about the cogency of the arguments
for the absolute. In no philosophy is the fact that a philosopher's
vision and the technique he uses in proof of it are two different
things more palpably evident than in Hegel. The vision in his case
was that of a world in which reason holds all things in solution and
accounts for all the irrationality that superficially appears by
taking it up as a 'moment' into itself. This vision was so intense in
Hegel, and the tone of authority with which he spoke from out of the
midst of it was so weighty, that the impression he made has never been
effaced. Once dilated to the scale of the master's eye, the disciples'
sight could not contract to any lesser prospect. The technique which
Hegel used to prove his vision was the so-called dialectic method, but
here his fortune has been quite contrary. Hardly a recent disciple has
felt his particular applications of the method to be satisfactory.
Many have let them drop entirely, treating them rather as a sort of
provisional stop-gap, symbolic of what might some day prove possible
of execution, but having no literal cogency or value now. Yet these
very same disciples hold to the vision itself as a revelation that can
never pass away. The case is curious and worthy of our study.

It is still more curious in that these same disciples, altho they are
usually willing to abandon any particular instance of the dialectic
method to its critics, are unshakably sure that in some shape the
dialectic method is the key to truth. What, then, is the dialectic
method? It is itself a part of the hegelian vision or intuition, and
a part that finds the strongest echo in empiricism and common sense.
Great injustice is done to Hegel by treating him as primarily a
reasoner. He is in reality a naïvely observant man, only beset with a
perverse preference for the use of technical and logical jargon. He
plants himself in the empirical flux of things and gets the impression
of what happens. His mind is in very truth _impressionistic_; and his
thought, when once you put yourself at the animating centre of it, is
the easiest thing in the world to catch the pulse of and to follow.

Any author is easy if you can catch the centre of his vision. From
the centre in Hegel come those towering sentences of his that are
comparable only to Luther's, as where, speaking of the ontological
proof of God's existence from the concept of him as the _ens
perfectissimum_ to which no attribute can be lacking, he says: 'It
would be strange if the Notion, the very heart of the mind, or, in
a word, the concrete totality we call God, were not rich enough
to embrace so poor a category as Being, the very poorest and most
abstract of all--for nothing can be more insignificant than Being.'
But if Hegel's central thought is easy to catch, his abominable habits
of speech make his application of it to details exceedingly difficult
to follow. His passion for the slipshod in the way of sentences,
his unprincipled playing fast and loose with terms; his dreadful
vocabulary, calling what completes a thing its 'negation,' for
example; his systematic refusal to let you know whether he is talking
logic or physics or psychology, his whole deliberately adopted policy
of ambiguity and vagueness, in short: all these things make his
present-day readers wish to tear their hair--or his--out in
desperation. Like Byron's corsair, he has left a name 'to other times,
linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes.'

The virtue was the vision, which was really in two parts. The first
part was that reason is all-inclusive, the second was that things
are 'dialectic.' Let me say a word about this second part of Hegel's
vision.

The impression that any _naïf_ person gets who plants himself
innocently in the flux of things is that things are off their balance.
Whatever equilibriums our finite experiences attain to are but
provisional. Martinique volcanoes shatter our wordsworthian
equilibrium with nature. Accidents, either moral, mental, or physical,
break up the slowly built-up equilibriums men reach in family life
and in their civic and professional relations. Intellectual enigmas
frustrate our scientific systems, and the ultimate cruelty of the
universe upsets our religious attitudes and outlooks. Of no special
system of good attained does the universe recognize the value as
sacred. Down it tumbles, over it goes, to feed the ravenous appetite
for destruction, of the larger system of history in which it stood
for a moment as a landing-place and stepping-stone. This dogging of
everything by its negative, its fate, its undoing, this perpetual
moving on to something future which shall supersede the present,
this is the hegelian intuition of the essential provisionality, and
consequent unreality, of everything empirical and finite. Take any
concrete finite thing and try to hold it fast. You cannot, for so
held, it proves not to be concrete at all, but an arbitrary extract or
abstract which you have made from the remainder of empirical reality.
The rest of things invades and overflows both it and you together,
and defeats your rash attempt. Any partial view whatever of the world
tears the part out of its relations, leaves out some truth concerning
it, is untrue of it, falsifies it. The full truth about anything
involves more than that thing. In the end nothing less than the whole
of everything can be the truth of anything at all.

Taken so far, and taken in the rough, Hegel is not only harmless, but
accurate. There is a dialectic movement in things, if such it please
you to call it, one that the whole constitution of concrete life
establishes; but it is one that can be described and accounted for in
terms of the pluralistic vision of things far more naturally than in
the monistic terms to which Hegel finally reduced it. Pluralistic
empiricism knows that everything is in an environment, a surrounding
world of other things, and that if you leave it to work there it will
inevitably meet with friction and opposition from its neighbors. Its
rivals and enemies will destroy it unless it can buy them off by
compromising some part of its original pretensions.

But Hegel saw this undeniable characteristic of the world we live in
in a non-empirical light. Let the _mental idea_ of the thing work in
your thought all alone, he fancied, and just the same consequences
will follow. It will be negated by the opposite ideas that dog it,
and can survive only by entering, along with them, into some kind
of treaty. This treaty will be an instance of the so-called 'higher
synthesis' of everything with its negative; and Hegel's originality
lay in transporting the process from the sphere of percepts to that of
concepts and treating it as the universal method by which every kind
of life, logical, physical, or psychological, is mediated. Not to the
sensible facts as such, then, did Hegel point for the secret of what
keeps existence going, but rather to the conceptual way of treating
them. Concepts were not in his eyes the static self-contained things
that previous logicians had supposed, but were germinative, and passed
beyond themselves into each other by what he called their immanent
dialectic. In ignoring each other as they do, they virtually exclude
and deny each other, he thought, and thus in a manner introduce each
other. So the dialectic logic, according to him, had to supersede the
'logic of identity' in which, since Aristotle, all Europe had been
brought up.

This view of concepts is Hegel's revolutionary performance; but so
studiously vague and ambiguous are all his expressions of it that one
can hardly tell whether it is the concepts as such, or the sensible
experiences and elements conceived, that Hegel really means to work
with. The only thing that is certain is that whatever you may say of
his procedure, some one will accuse you of misunderstanding it. I make
no claim to understanding it, I treat it merely impressionistically.

So treating it, I regret that he should have called it by the name of
logic. Clinging as he did to the vision of a really living world, and
refusing to be content with a chopped-up intellectualist picture
of it, it is a pity that he should have adopted the very word that
intellectualism had already pre-empted. But he clung fast to the old
rationalist contempt for the immediately given world of sense and all
its squalid particulars, and never tolerated the notion that the form
of philosophy might be empirical only. His own system had to be a
product of eternal reason, so the word 'logic,' with its suggestions
of coercive necessity, was the only word he could find natural. He
pretended therefore to be using the _a priori_ method, and to be
working by a scanty equipment of ancient logical terms--position,
negation, reflection, universal, particular, individual, and the like.
But what he really worked by was his own empirical perceptions, which
exceeded and overflowed his miserably insufficient logical categories
in every instance of their use.

What he did with the category of negation was his most original
stroke. The orthodox opinion is that you can advance logically through
the field of concepts only by going from the same to the same. Hegel
felt deeply the sterility of this law of conceptual thought; he
saw that in a fashion negation also relates things; and he had the
brilliant idea of transcending the ordinary logic by treating advance
from the different to the different as if it were also a necessity of
thought. 'The so-called maxim of identity,' he wrote, 'is supposed to
be accepted by the consciousness of every one. But the language which
such a law demands, "a planet is a planet, magnetism is magnetism,
mind is mind," deserves to be called silliness. No mind either speaks
or thinks or forms conceptions in accordance with this law, and no
existence of any kind whatever conforms to it. We must never view
identity as abstract identity, to the exclusion of all difference.
That is the touchstone for distinguishing all bad philosophy from what
alone deserves the name of philosophy. If thinking were no more than
registering abstract identities, it would be a most superfluous
performance. Things and concepts are identical with themselves only in
so far as at the same time they involve distinction.'[1]

The distinction that Hegel has in mind here is naturally in the first
instance distinction from all other things or concepts. But in his
hands this quickly develops into contradiction of them, and finally,
reflected back upon itself, into self-contradiction; and the immanent
self-contradictoriness of all finite concepts thenceforth becomes the
propulsive logical force that moves the world.[2] 'Isolate a thing
from all its relations,' says Dr. Edward Caird,[3] expounding Hegel,
'and try to assert it by itself; you find that it has negated itself
as well as its relations. The thing in itself is nothing.' Or, to
quote Hegel's own words: 'When we suppose an existent A, and another,
B, B is at first defined as the other. But A is just as much the other
of B. Both are others in the same fashion.... "Other" is the other by
itself, therefore the other of every other, consequently the other of
itself, the simply unlike itself, the self-negator, the self-alterer,'
etc.[4] Hegel writes elsewhere: 'The finite, as implicitly other than
what it is, is forced to surrender its own immediate or natural being,
and to turn suddenly into its opposite.... Dialectic is the universal
and irresistible power before which nothing can stay.... _Summum jus,
summa injuria_--to drive an abstract right to excess is to commit
injustice.... Extreme anarchy and extreme despotism lead to one
another. Pride comes before a fall. Too much wit outwits itself. Joy
brings tears, melancholy a sardonic smile.'[5] To which one well
might add that most human institutions, by the purely technical and
professional manner in which they come to be administered, end by
becoming obstacles to the very purposes which their founders had in
view.

Once catch well the knack of this scheme of thought and you are lucky
if you ever get away from it. It is all you can see. Let any one
pronounce anything, and your feeling of a contradiction being implied
becomes a habit, almost a motor habit in some persons who symbolize by
a stereotyped gesture the position, sublation, and final reinstatement
involved. If you say 'two' or 'many,' your speech betrayeth you, for
the very name collects them into one. If you express doubt, your
expression contradicts its content, for the doubt itself is not
doubted but affirmed. If you say 'disorder,' what is that but a
certain bad kind of order? if you say 'indetermination,' you are
determining just _that_. If you say 'nothing but the unexpected
happens,' the unexpected becomes what you expect. If you say 'all
things are relative,' to what is the all of them itself relative? If
you say 'no more,' you have said more already, by implying a region
in which no more is found; to know a limit as such is consequently
already to have got beyond it; And so forth, throughout as many
examples as one cares to cite.

Whatever you posit appears thus as one-sided, and negates its other,
which, being equally one-sided, negates _it_; and, since this
situation remains unstable, the two contradictory terms have together,
according to Hegel, to engender a higher truth of which they both
appear as indispensable members, mutually mediating aspects of that
higher concept of situation in thought.

Every higher total, however provisional and relative, thus reconciles
the contradictions which its parts, abstracted from it, prove
implicitly to contain. Rationalism, you remember, is what I called the
way of thinking that methodically subordinates parts to wholes, so
Hegel here is rationalistic through and through. The only whole by
which _all_ contradictions are reconciled is for him the absolute
whole of wholes, the all-inclusive reason to which Hegel himself gave
the name of the absolute Idea, but which I shall continue to call 'the
absolute' purely and simply, as I have done hitherto.

Empirical instances of the way in which higher unities reconcile
contradictions are innumerable, so here again Hegel's vision, taken
merely impressionistically, agrees with countless facts. Somehow life
does, out of its total resources, find ways of satisfying opposites
at once. This is precisely the paradoxical aspect which much of our
civilization presents. Peace we secure by armaments, liberty by laws
and constitutions; simplicity and naturalness are the consummate
result of artificial breeding and training; health, strength, and
wealth are increased only by lavish use, expense, and wear. Our
mistrust of mistrust engenders our commercial system of credit; our
tolerance of anarchistic and revolutionary utterances is the only way
of lessening their danger; our charity has to say no to beggars in
order not to defeat its own desires; the true epicurean has to observe
great sobriety; the way to certainty lies through radical doubt;
virtue signifies not innocence but the knowledge of sin and its
overcoming; by obeying nature, we command her, etc. The ethical and
the religious life are full of such contradictions held in solution.
You hate your enemy?--well, forgive him, and thereby heap coals of
fire on his head; to realize yourself, renounce yourself; to save your
soul, first lose it; in short, die to live.

From such massive examples one easily generalizes Hegel's vision.
Roughly, his 'dialectic' picture is a fair account of a good deal of
the world. It sounds paradoxical, but whenever you once place yourself
at the point of view; of any higher synthesis, you see exactly how
it does in a fashion take up opposites into itself. As an example,
consider the conflict between our carnivorous appetites and hunting
instincts and the sympathy with animals which our refinement is
bringing in its train. We have found how to reconcile these opposites
most effectively by establishing game-laws and close seasons and by
keeping domestic herds. The creatures preserved thus are preserved for
the sake of slaughter, truly, but if not preserved for that reason,
not one of them would be alive at all. Their will to live and our
will to kill them thus harmoniously combine in this peculiar higher
synthesis of domestication.

Merely as a reporter of certain empirical aspects of the actual,
Hegel, then, is great and true. But he aimed at being something far
greater than an empirical reporter, so I must say something about that
essential aspect of his thought. Hegel was dominated by the notion of
a truth that should prove incontrovertible, binding on every one,
and certain, which should be _the_ truth, one, indivisible, eternal,
objective, and necessary, to which all our particular thinking
must lead as to its consummation. This is the dogmatic ideal,
the postulate, uncriticised, undoubted, and unchallenged, of all
rationalizers in philosophy. '_I have never doubted_,' a recent Oxford
writer says, that truth is universal and single and timeless, a single
content or significance, one and whole and complete.[6] Advance in
thinking, in the hegelian universe, has, in short, to proceed by the
apodictic words _must be_ rather than by those inferior hypothetic
words _may be_, which are all that empiricists can use.

Now Hegel found that his idea of an immanent movement through
the field of concepts by way of 'dialectic' negation played most
beautifully into the hands of this rationalistic demand for something
absolute and _inconcussum_ in the way of truth. It is easy to see how.
If you affirm anything, for example that A is, and simply leave the
matter thus, you leave it at the mercy of any one who may supervene
and say 'not A, but B is.' If he does say so, your statement doesn't
refute him, it simply contradicts him, just as his contradicts you.
The only way of making your affirmation about A _self-securing_ is by
getting it into a form which will by implication negate all possible
negations in advance. The mere absence of negation is not enough; it
must be present, but present with its fangs drawn. What you posit as A
must already have cancelled the alternative or made it innocuous, by
having negated it in advance. Double negation is the only form of
affirmation that fully plays into the hands of the dogmatic ideal.
Simply and innocently affirmative statements are good enough for
empiricists, but unfit for rationalist use, lying open as they do to
every accidental contradictor, and exposed to every puff of doubt.
The _final_ truth must be something to which there is no imaginable
alternative, because it contains all its possible alternatives inside
of itself as moments already taken account of and overcome. Whatever
involves its own alternatives as elements of itself is, in a phrase
often repeated, its 'own other,' made so by the _methode der absoluten
negativität_.

Formally, this scheme of an organism of truth that has already fed as
it were on its own liability to death, so that, death once dead
for it, there's no more dying then, is the very fulfilment of the
rationalistic aspiration. That one and only whole, with all its
parts involved in it, negating and making one another impossible if
abstracted and taken singly, but necessitating and holding one another
in place if the whole of them be taken integrally, is the literal
ideal sought after; it is the very diagram and picture of that notion
of _the_ truth with no outlying alternative, to which nothing can be
added, nor from it anything withdrawn, and all variations from which
are absurd, which so dominates the human imagination. Once we have
taken in the features of this diagram that so successfully solves
the world-old problem, the older ways of proving the necessity of
judgments cease to give us satisfaction. Hegel's way we think must
be the right way. The true must be essentially the self-reflecting
self-contained recurrent, that which secures itself by including its
own other and negating it; that makes a spherical system with no loose
ends hanging out for foreignness to get a hold upon; that is forever
rounded in and closed, not strung along rectilinearly and open at its
ends like that universe of simply collective or additive form which
Hegel calls the world of the bad infinite, and which is all that
empiricism, starting with simply posited single parts and elements, is
ever able to attain to.

No one can possibly deny the sublimity of this hegelian conception.
It is surely in the grand style, if there be such a thing as a grand
style in philosophy. For us, however, it remains, so far, a merely
formal and diagrammatic conception; for with the actual content
of absolute truth, as Hegel materially tries to set it forth, few
disciples have been satisfied, and I do not propose to refer at all to
the concreter parts of his philosophy. The main thing now is to grasp
the generalized vision, and feel the authority of the abstract scheme
of a statement self-secured by involving double negation. Absolutists
who make no use of Hegel's own technique are really working by his
method. You remember the proofs of the absolute which I instanced in
my last lecture, Lotze's and Royce's proofs by _reductio ad absurdum_,
to the effect that any smallest connexion rashly supposed in things
will logically work out into absolute union, and any minimal
disconnexion into absolute disunion,--these are really arguments
framed on the hegelian pattern. The truth is that which you implicitly
affirm in the very attempt to deny it; it is that from which every
variation refutes itself by proving self-contradictory. This is the
supreme insight of rationalism, and to-day the best _must-be's_ of
rationalist argumentation are but so many attempts to communicate it
to the hearer.

Thus, you see, my last lecture and this lecture make connexion again
and we can consider Hegel and the other absolutists to be supporting
the same system. The next point I wish to dwell on is the part played
by what I have called vicious intellectualism in this wonderful
system's structure.

Rationalism in general thinks it gets the fulness of truth by turning
away from sensation to conception, conception obviously giving the
more universal and immutable picture. Intellectualism in the vicious
sense I have already defined as the habit of assuming that a concept
_ex_cludes from any reality conceived by its means everything not
included in the concept's definition. I called such intellectualism
illegitimate as I found it used in Lotze's, Royce's, and Bradley's
proofs of the absolute (which absolute I consequently held to be
non-proven by their arguments), and I left off by asserting my own
belief that a pluralistic and incompletely integrated universe,
describable only by the free use of the word 'some,' is a legitimate
hypothesis.

Now Hegel himself, in building up his method of double negation,
offers the vividest possible example of this vice of intellectualism.
Every idea of a finite thing is of course a concept of _that_ thing
and not a concept of anything else. But Hegel treats this not being a
concept of anything else as if it were _equivalent to the concept of
anything else not being_, or in other words as if it were a denial
or negation of everything else. Then, as the other things, thus
implicitly contradicted by the thing first conceived, also by the same
law contradict _it_, the pulse of dialectic commences to beat and the
famous triads begin to grind out the cosmos. If any one finds
the process here to be a luminous one, he must be left to the
illumination, he must remain an undisturbed hegelian. What others feel
as the intolerable ambiguity, verbosity, and unscrupulousness of the
master's way of deducing things, he will probably ascribe--since
divine oracles are notoriously hard to interpret--to the 'difficulty'
that habitually accompanies profundity. For my own part, there seems
something grotesque and _saugrenu_ in the pretension of a style so
disobedient to the first rules of sound communication between minds,
to be the authentic mother-tongue of reason, and to keep step more
accurately than any other style does with the absolute's own ways
of thinking. I do not therefore take Hegel's technical apparatus
seriously at all. I regard him rather as one of those numerous
original seers who can never learn how to articulate. His would-be
coercive logic counts for nothing in my eyes; but that does not in
the least impugn the philosophic importance of his conception of the
absolute, if we take it merely hypothetically as one of the great
types of cosmic vision.

Taken thus hypothetically, I wish to discuss it briefly. But before
doing so I must call your attention to an odd peculiarity in the
hegelian procedure. The peculiarity is one which will come before us
again for a final judgment in my seventh lecture, so at present I only
note it in passing. Hegel, you remember, considers that the immediate
finite data of experience are 'untrue' because they are not their own
others. They are negated by what is external to them. The absolute
is true because it and it only has no external environment, and has
attained to being its own other. (These words sound queer enough, but
those of you who know something of Hegel's text will follow them.)
Granting his premise that to be true a thing must in some sort be its
own other, everything hinges on whether he is right in holding that
the several pieces of finite experience themselves cannot be said
to be in any wise _their_ own others. When conceptually or
intellectualistically treated, they of course cannot be their own
others. Every abstract concept as such excludes what it doesn't
include, and if such concepts are adequate substitutes for
reality's concrete pulses, the latter must square themselves with
intellectualistic logic, and no one of them in any sense can claim to
be its own other. If, however, the conceptual treatment of the flow of
reality should prove for any good reason to be inadequate and to have
a practical rather than a theoretical or speculative value, then an
independent empirical look into the constitution of reality's pulses
might possibly show that some of them _are_ their own others, and
indeed are so in the self-same sense in which the absolute is
maintained to be so by Hegel. When we come to my sixth lecture,
on Professor Bergson, I shall in effect defend this very view,
strengthening my thesis by his authority. I am unwilling to say
anything more about the point at this time, and what I have just said
of it is only a sort of surveyor's note of where our present position
lies in the general framework of these lectures.

Let us turn now at last to the great question of fact, _Does the
absolute exist or not_? to which all our previous discussion has been
preliminary. I may sum up that discussion by saying that whether
there really be an absolute or not, no one makes himself absurd
or self-contradictory by doubting or denying it. The charges of
self-contradiction, where they do not rest on purely verbal reasoning,
rest on a vicious intellectualism. I will not recapitulate my
criticisms. I will simply ask you to change the _venue_, and to
discuss the absolute now as if it were only an open hypothesis. As
such, is it more probable or more improbable?

But first of all I must parenthetically ask you to distinguish the
notion of the absolute carefully from that of another object with
which it is liable to become heedlessly entangled. That other object
is the 'God' of common people in their religion, and the creator-God
of orthodox christian theology. Only thoroughgoing monists or
pantheists believe in the absolute. The God of our popular
Christianity is but one member of a pluralistic system. He and we
stand outside of each other, just as the devil, the saints, and the
angels stand outside of both of us. I can hardly conceive of anything
more different from the absolute than the God, say, of David or of
Isaiah. _That_ God is an essentially finite being _in_ the cosmos,
not with the cosmos in him, and indeed he has a very local habitation
there, and very one-sided local and personal attachments. If it should
prove probable that the absolute does not exist, it will not follow in
the slightest degree that a God like that of David, Isaiah, or Jesus
may not exist, or may not be the most important existence in the
universe for us to acknowledge. I pray you, then, not to confound the
two ideas as you listen to the criticisms I shall have to proffer.
I hold to the finite God, for reasons which I shall touch on in the
seventh of these lectures; but I hold that his rival and competitor--I
feel almost tempted to say his enemy--the absolute, is not only not
forced on us by logic, but that it is an improbable hypothesis.

The great claim made for the absolute is that by supposing it we make
the world appear more rational. Any hypothesis that does that will
always be accepted as more probably true than an hypothesis that makes
the world appear irrational. Men are once for all so made that they
prefer a rational world to believe in and to live in. But rationality
has at least four dimensions, intellectual, aesthetical, moral, and
practical; and to find a world rational to the maximal degree _in all
these respects simultaneously_ is no easy matter. Intellectually, the
world of mechanical materialism is the most rational, for we subject
its events to mathematical calculation. But the mechanical world
is ugly, as arithmetic is ugly, and it is non-moral. Morally,
the theistic world is rational enough, but full of intellectual
frustrations. The practical world of affairs, in its turn, so
supremely rational to the politician, the military man, or the man of
conquering business-faculty that he never would vote to change the
type of it, is irrational to moral and artistic temperaments; so that
whatever demand for rationality we find satisfied by a philosophic
hypothesis, we are liable to find some other demand for rationality
unsatisfied by the same hypothesis. The rationality we gain in one
coin we thus pay for in another; and the problem accordingly seems at
first sight to resolve itself into that of getting a conception which
will yield the largest _balance_ of rationality rather than one which
will yield perfect rationality of every description. In general, it
may be said that if a man's conception of the world lets loose any
action in him that is easy, or any faculty which he is fond of
exercising, he will deem it rational in so far forth, be the faculty
that of computing, fighting, lecturing, classifying, framing schematic
tabulations, getting the better end of a bargain, patiently waiting
and enduring, preaching, joke-making, or what you like. Albeit the
absolute is defined as being necessarily an embodiment of objectively
perfect rationality, it is fair to its english advocates to say that
those who have espoused the hypothesis most concretely and seriously
have usually avowed the irrationality to their own minds of certain
elements in it.

Probably the weightiest contribution to our feeling of the rationality
of the universe which the notion of the absolute brings is the
assurance that however disturbed the surface may be, at bottom all is
well with the cosmos--central peace abiding at the heart of endless
agitation. This conception is rational in many ways, beautiful
aesthetically, beautiful intellectually (could we only follow it into
detail), and beautiful morally, if the enjoyment of security can be
accounted moral. Practically it is less beautiful; for, as we saw in
our last lecture, in representing the deepest reality of the world as
static and without a history, it loosens the world's hold upon our
sympathies and leaves the soul of it foreign. Nevertheless it does
give _peace_, and that kind of rationality is so paramountly demanded
by men that to the end of time there will be absolutists, men who
choose belief in a static eternal, rather than admit that the finite
world of change and striving, even with a God as one of the strivers,
is itself eternal. For such minds Professor Royce's words will always
be the truest: 'The very presence of ill in the temporal order is the
condition of the perfection of the eternal order.... We long for the
absolute only in so far as in us the absolute also longs, and seeks
through our very temporal striving, the peace that is nowhere in time,
but only, and yet absolutely, in eternity. Were there no longing in
time there would be no peace in eternity.... God [_i.e._ the absolute]
who here in me aims at what I now temporally miss, not only possesses
in the eternal world the goal after which I strive, but comes to
possess it even through and because of my sorrow. Through this my
tribulation the absolute triumph then is won.... In the absolute I am
fulfilled. Yet my very fulfilment demands and therefore can transcend
this sorrow.'[7] Royce is particularly felicitous in his ability to
cite parts of finite experience to which he finds his picture of this
absolute experience analogous. But it is hard to portray the absolute
at all without rising into what might be called the 'inspired' style
of language--I use the word not ironically, but prosaically and
descriptively, to designate the only literary form that goes with the
kind of emotion that the absolute arouses. One can follow the pathway
of reasoning soberly enough,[8] but the picture itself has to be
effulgent. This admirable faculty of transcending, whilst inwardly
preserving, every contrariety, is the absolute's characteristic form
of rationality. We are but syllables in the mouth of the Lord; if the
whole sentence is divine, each syllable is absolutely what it should
be, in spite of all appearances. In making up the balance for or
against absolutism, this emotional value weights heavily the credit
side of the account.

The trouble is that we are able to see so little into the positive
detail of it, and that if once admitted not to be coercively proven
by the intellectualist arguments, it remains only a hypothetic
possibility.

On the debit side of the account the absolute, taken seriously, and
not as a mere name for our right occasionally to drop the strenuous
mood and take a moral holiday, introduces all those tremendous
irrationalities into the universe which a frankly pluralistic theism
escapes, but which have been flung as a reproach at every form of
monistic theism or pantheism. It introduces a speculative 'problem
of evil' namely, and leaves us wondering why the perfection of the
absolute should require just such particular hideous forms of life as
darken the day for our human imaginations. If they were forced on it
by something alien, and to 'overcome' them the absolute had still to
keep hold of them, we could understand its feeling of triumph, though
we, so far as we were ourselves among the elements overcome, could
acquiesce but sullenly in the resultant situation, and would never
just have chosen it as the most rational one conceivable. But the
absolute is represented as a being without environment, upon which
nothing alien can be forced, and which has spontaneously chosen from
within to give itself the spectacle of all that evil rather than a
spectacle with less evil in it.[9] Its perfection is represented as
the source of things, and yet the first effect of that perfection is
the tremendous imperfection of all finite experience. In whatever
sense the word 'rationality' may be taken, it is vain to contend that
the impression made on our finite minds by such a way of representing
things is altogether rational. Theologians have felt its irrationality
acutely, and the 'fall,' the predestination, and the election which
the situation involves have given them more trouble than anything else
in their attempt to pantheize Christianity. The whole business remains
a puzzle, both intellectually and morally.

Grant that the spectacle or world-romance offered to itself by the
absolute is in the absolute's eyes perfect. Why would not the world be
more perfect by having the affair remain in just those terms, and
by not having any finite spectators to come in and add to what was
perfect already their innumerable imperfect manners of seeing the same
spectacle? Suppose the entire universe to consist of one superb copy
of a book, fit for the ideal reader. Is that universe improved or
deteriorated by having myriads of garbled and misprinted separate
leaves and chapters also created, giving false impressions of the book
to whoever looks at them? To say the least, the balance of rationality
is not obviously in favor of such added mutilations. So this question
becomes urgent: Why, the absolute's own total vision of things
being so rational, was it necessary to comminute it into all these
coexisting inferior fragmentary visions?

Leibnitz in his theodicy represents God as limited by an antecedent
reason in things which makes certain combinations logically
incompatible, certain goods impossible. He surveys in advance all the
universes he might create, and by an act of what Leibnitz calls his
antecedent will he chooses our actual world as the one in which the
evil, unhappily necessary anyhow, is at its minimum. It is the best of
all the worlds that are possible, therefore, but by no means the most
abstractly desirable world. Having made this mental choice, God next
proceeds to what Leibnitz calls his act of consequent or decretory
will: he says '_Fiat_' and the world selected springs into objective
being, with all the finite creatures in it to suffer from its
imperfections without sharing in its creator's atoning vision.

Lotze has made some penetrating remarks on this conception of
Leibnitz's, and they exactly fall in with what I say of the absolutist
conception. The world projected out of the creative mind by the
_fiat_, and existing in detachment from its author, is a sphere of
being where the parts realize themselves only singly. If the divine
value of them is evident only when they are collectively looked at,
then, Lotze rightly says, the world surely becomes poorer and not
richer for God's utterance of the _fiat_. He might much better have
remained contented with his merely antecedent choice of the scheme,
without following it up by a creative decree. The scheme _as such_ was
admirable; it could only lose by being translated into reality.[10]
Why, I similarly ask, should the absolute ever have lapsed from the
perfection of its own integral experience of things, and refracted
itself into all our finite experiences?

It is but fair to recent english absolutists to say that many of them
have confessed the imperfect rationality of the absolute from this
point of view. Mr. McTaggart, for example, writes: 'Does not our very
failure to perceive the perfection of the universe destroy it? ... In
so far as we do not see the perfection of the universe, we are not
perfect ourselves. And as we are parts of the universe, that cannot be
perfect.'[11]

And Mr. Joachim finds just the same difficulty. Calling the hypothesis
of the absolute by the name of the 'coherence theory of truth,' he
calls the problem of understanding how the complete coherence of all
things in the absolute should involve as a necessary moment in
its self-maintenance the self-assertion of the finite minds, a
self-assertion which in its extreme form is error,--he calls this
problem, I say, an insoluble puzzle. If truth be the universal _fons
et origo_, how does error slip in? 'The coherence theory of truth,' he
concludes, 'may thus be said to suffer shipwreck at the very
entrance of the harbor.'[12] Yet in spite of this rather bad form
of irrationality, Mr. Joachim stoutly asserts his 'immediate
certainty'[13] of the theory shipwrecked, the correctness of which
he says he has 'never doubted.' This candid confession of a fixed
attitude of faith in the absolute, which even one's own criticisms and
perplexities fail to disturb, seems to me very significant. Not only
empiricists, but absolutists also, would all, if they were as candid
as this author, confess that the prime thing in their philosophy
is their vision of a truth possible, which they then employ their
reasoning to convert, as best it can, into a certainty or probability.

I can imagine a believer in the absolute retorting at this point that
_he_ at any rate is not dealing with mere probabilities, but that
the nature of things logically requires the multitudinous erroneous
copies, and that therefore the universe cannot be the absolute's book
alone. For, he will ask, is not the absolute defined as the total
consciousness of everything that is? Must not its field of view
consist of parts? And what can the parts of a total consciousness be
unless they be fractional consciousnesses? Our finite minds _must_
therefore coexist with the absolute mind. We are its constituents, and
it cannot live without us.--But if any one of you feels tempted to
retort in this wise, let me remind you that you are frankly employing
pluralistic weapons, and thereby giving up the absolutist cause. The
notion that the absolute is made of constituents on which its being
depends is the rankest empiricism. The absolute as such has _objects_,
not constituents, and if the objects develop selfhoods upon their own
several accounts, those selfhoods must be set down as facts additional
to the absolute consciousness, and not as elements implicated in its
definition. The absolute is a rationalist conception. Rationalism
goes from wholes to parts, and always assumes wholes to be
self-sufficing.[14]

My conclusion, so far, then, is this, that altho the hypothesis of the
absolute, in yielding a certain kind of religious peace, performs
a most important rationalizing function, it nevertheless, from
the intellectual point of view, remains decidedly irrational. The
_ideally_ perfect whole is certainly that whole of which the _parts
also are perfect_--if we can depend on logic for anything, we can
depend on it for that definition. The absolute is defined as the
ideally perfect whole, yet most of its parts, if not all, are
admittedly imperfect. Evidently the conception lacks internal
consistency, and yields us a problem rather than a solution. It
creates a speculative puzzle, the so-called mystery of evil and of
error, from which a pluralistic metaphysic is entirely free.

In any pluralistic metaphysic, the problems that evil presents are
practical, not speculative. Not why evil should exist at all, but how
we can lessen the actual amount of it, is the sole question we need
there consider. 'God,' in the religious life of ordinary men, is the
name not of the whole of things, heaven forbid, but only of the ideal
tendency in things, believed in as a superhuman person who calls us to
co-operate in his purposes, and who furthers ours if they are worthy.
He works in an external environment, has limits, and has enemies. When
John Mill said that the notion of God's omnipotence must be given up,
if God is to be kept as a religious object, he was surely accurately
right; yet so prevalent is the lazy monism that idly haunts the region
of God's name, that so simple and truthful a saying was generally
treated as a paradox: God, it was said, _could_ not be finite. I
believe that the only God worthy of the name _must_ be finite, and I
shall return to this point in a later lecture. If the absolute exist
in addition--and the hypothesis must, in spite of its irrational
features, still be left open--then the absolute is only the wider
cosmic whole of which our God is but the most ideal portion, and which
in the more usual human sense is hardly to be termed a religious
hypothesis at all. 'Cosmic emotion' is the better name for the
reaction it may awaken.

Observe that all the irrationalities and puzzles which the absolute
gives rise to, and from which the finite God remains free, are due to
the fact that the absolute has nothing, absolutely nothing, outside of
itself. The finite God whom I contrast with it may conceivably have
_almost_ nothing outside of himself; he may already have triumphed
over and absorbed all but the minutest fraction of the universe; but
that fraction, however small, reduces him to the status of a
relative being, and in principle the universe is saved from all the
irrationalities incidental to absolutism. The only irrationality left
would be the irrationality of which pluralism as such is accused, and
of this I hope to say a word more later.

I have tired you with so many subtleties in this lecture that I will
add only two other counts to my indictment.

First, then, let me remind you that _the absolute is useless for
deductive purposes_. It gives us absolute safety if you will, but
it is compatible with every relative danger. You cannot enter the
phenomenal world with the notion of it in your grasp, and name
beforehand any detail which you are likely to meet there. Whatever the
details of experience may prove to be, _after the fact of them_
the absolute will adopt them. It is an hypothesis that functions
retrospectively only, not prospectively. _That_, whatever it may be,
will have been in point of fact the sort of world which the absolute
was pleased to offer to itself as a spectacle.

Again, the absolute is always represented idealistically, as the
all-knower. Thinking this view consistently out leads one to frame
an almost ridiculous conception of the absolute mind, owing to the
enormous mass of unprofitable information which it would then seem
obliged to carry. One of the many _reductiones ad absurdum_ of
pluralism by which idealism thinks it proves the absolute One is as
follows: Let there be many facts; but since on idealist principles
facts exist only by being known, the many facts will therefore mean
many knowers. But that there are so many knowers is itself a fact,
which in turn requires _its_ knower, so the one absolute knower has
eventually to be brought in. _All_ facts lead to him. If it be a fact
that this table is not a chair, not a rhinoceros, not a logarithm, not
a mile away from the door, not worth five hundred pounds sterling, not
a thousand centuries old, the absolute must even now be articulately
aware of all these negations. Along with what everything is it must
also be conscious of everything which it is not. This infinite
atmosphere of explicit negativity--observe that it has to be
explicit--around everything seems to us so useless an encumbrance as
to make the absolute still more foreign to our sympathy. Furthermore,
if it be a fact that certain ideas are silly, the absolute has to have
already thought the silly ideas to establish them in silliness. The
rubbish in its mind would thus appear easily to outweigh in amount the
more desirable material. One would expect it fairly to burst with such
an obesity, plethora, and superfoetation of useless information.[15]

I will spare you further objections. The sum of it all is that the
absolute is not forced on our belief by logic, that it involves
features of irrationality peculiar to itself, and that a thinker
to whom it does not come as an 'immediate certainty' (to use Mr.
Joachim's words), is in no way bound to treat it as anything but an
emotionally rather sublime hypothesis. As such, it might, with all its
defects, be, on account of its peace-conferring power and its formal
grandeur, more rational than anything else in the field. But meanwhile
the strung-along unfinished world in time is its rival: _reality MAY
exist in distributive form, in the shape not of an all but of a set of
eaches, just as it seems to_--this is the anti-absolutist hypothesis.
_Prima facie_ there is this in favor of the eaches, that they are at
any rate real enough to have made themselves at least _appear_ to
every one, whereas the absolute has as yet appeared immediately to
only a few mystics, and indeed to them very ambiguously. The advocates
of the absolute assure us that any distributive form of being is
infected and undermined by self-contradiction. If we are unable to
assimilate their arguments, and we have been unable, the only course
we can take, it seems to me, is to let the absolute bury the absolute,
and to seek reality in more promising directions, even among the
details of the finite and the immediately given.

If these words of mine sound in bad taste to some of you, or even
sacrilegious, I am sorry. Perhaps the impression may be mitigated by
what I have to say in later lectures.




LECTURE IV


CONCERNING FECHNER

The prestige of the absolute has rather crumbled in our hands.
The logical proofs of it miss fire; the portraits which its best
court-painters show of it are featureless and foggy in the extreme;
and, apart from the cold comfort of assuring us that with _it_ all is
well, and that to see that all is well with us also we need only rise
to its eternal point of view, it yields us no relief whatever. It
introduces, on the contrary, into philosophy and theology certain
poisonous difficulties of which but for its intrusion we never should
have heard.

But if we drop the absolute out of the world, must we then conclude
that the world contains nothing better in the way of consciousness
than our consciousness? Is our whole instinctive belief in higher
presences, our persistent inner turning towards divine companionship,
to count for nothing? Is it but the pathetic illusion of beings with
incorrigibly social and imaginative minds?

Such a negative conclusion would, I believe, be desperately hasty,
a sort of pouring out of the child with the bath. Logically it is
possible to believe in superhuman beings without identifying them with
the absolute at all. The treaty of offensive and defensive alliance
which certain groups of the Christian clergy have recently made with
our transcendentalist philosophers seems to me to be based on a
well-meaning but baleful mistake. Neither the Jehovah of the old
testament nor the heavenly father of the new has anything in common
with the absolute except that they are all three greater than man;
and if you say that the notion of the absolute is what the gods of
Abraham, of David, and of Jesus, after first developing into each
other, were inevitably destined to develop into in more reflective
and modern minds, I reply that although in certain specifically
philosophical minds this may have been the case, in minds more
properly to be termed religious the development has followed quite
another path. The whole history of evangelical Christianity is there
to prove it. I propose in these lectures to plead for that other line
of development. To set the doctrine of the absolute in its proper
framework, so that it shall not fill the whole welkin and exclude all
alternative possibilities of higher thought--as it seems to do for
many students who approach it with a limited previous acquaintance
with philosophy--I will contrast it with a system which, abstractly
considered, seems at first to have much in common with absolutism, but
which, when taken concretely and temperamentally, really stands at the
opposite pole. I refer to the philosophy of Gustav Theodor Fechner, a
writer but little known as yet to English readers, but destined, I am
persuaded, to wield more and more influence as time goes on.

It is the intense concreteness of Fechner, his fertility of detail,
which fills me with an admiration which I should like to make this
audience share. Among the philosophic cranks of my acquaintance in the
past was a lady all the tenets of whose system I have forgotten except
one. Had she been born in the Ionian Archipelago some three thousand
years ago, that one doctrine would probably have made her name sure
of a place in every university curriculum and examination paper. The
world, she said, is composed of only two elements, the Thick, namely,
and the Thin. No one can deny the truth of this analysis, as far as it
goes (though in the light of our contemporary knowledge of nature it
has itself a rather 'thin' sound), and it is nowhere truer than in
that part of the world called philosophy. I am sure, for example, that
many of you, listening to what poor account I have been able to
give of transcendental idealism, have received an impression of its
arguments being strangely thin, and of the terms it leaves us with
being shiveringly thin wrappings for so thick and burly a world as
this. Some of you of course will charge the thinness to my exposition;
but thin as that has been, I believe the doctrines reported on to have
been thinner. From Green to Haldane the absolute proposed to us to
straighten out the confusions of the thicket of experience in which
our life is passed remains a pure abstraction which hardly any one
tries to make a whit concreter. If we open Green, we get nothing but
the transcendental ego of apperception (Kant's name for the fact that
to be counted in experience a thing has to be witnessed), blown up
into a sort of timeless soap-bubble large enough to mirror the whole
universe. Nature, Green keeps insisting, consists only in
relations, and these imply the action of a mind that is eternal;
a self-distinguishing consciousness which itself escapes from the
relations by which it determines other things. Present to whatever is
in succession, it is not in succession itself. If we take the Cairds,
they tell us little more of the principle of the universe--it is
always a return into the identity of the self from the difference of
its objects. It separates itself from them and so becomes conscious of
them in their separation from one another, while at the same time it
binds them together as elements in one higher self-consciousness.

This seems the very quintessence of thinness; and the matter hardly
grows thicker when we gather, after enormous amounts of reading, that
the great enveloping self in question is absolute reason as such, and
that as such it is characterized by the habit of using certain jejune
'categories' with which to perform its eminent relating work. The
whole active material of natural fact is tried out, and only the
barest intellectualistic formalism remains.

Hegel tried, as we saw, to make the system concreter by making the
relations between things 'dialectic,' but if we turn to those who use
his name most worshipfully, we find them giving up all the particulars
of his attempt, and simply praising his intention--much as in our
manner we have praised it ourselves. Mr. Haldane, for example, in his
wonderfully clever Gifford lectures, praises Hegel to the skies, but
what he tells of him amounts to little more than this, that 'the
categories in which the mind arranges its experiences, and gives
meaning to them, the universals in which the particulars are grasped
in the individual, are a logical chain, in which the first presupposes
the last, and the last is its presupposition and its truth.' He hardly
tries at all to thicken this thin logical scheme. He says indeed
that absolute mind in itself, and absolute mind in its hetereity or
otherness, under the distinction which it sets up of itself from
itself, have as their real _prius_ absolute mind in synthesis; and,
this being absolute mind's true nature, its dialectic character must
show itself in such concrete forms as Goethe's and Wordsworth's
poetry, as well as in religious forms. 'The nature of God, the nature
of absolute mind, is to exhibit the triple movement of dialectic, and
so the nature of God as presented in religion must be a triplicity,
a trinity.' But beyond thus naming Goethe and Wordsworth and
establishing the trinity, Mr. Haldane's Hegelianism carries us hardly
an inch into the concrete detail of the world we actually inhabit.

Equally thin is Mr. Taylor, both in his principles and in their
results. Following Mr. Bradley, he starts by assuring us that reality
cannot be self-contradictory, but to be related to anything really
outside of one's self is to be self-contradictory, so the ultimate
reality must be a single all-inclusive systematic whole. Yet all he
can say of this whole at the end of his excellently written book is
that the notion of it 'can make no addition to our information and can
of itself supply no motives for practical endeavor.'

Mr. McTaggart treats us to almost as thin a fare. 'The main practical
interest of Hegel's philosophy,' he says, 'is to be found in the
abstract certainty which the logic gives us that all reality is
rational and righteous, even when we cannot see in the least how it is
so.... Not that it shows us how the facts around us are good, not that
it shows us how we can make them better, but that it proves that they,
like other reality, are _sub specie eternitatis_, perfectly good, and
_sub specie temporis_, destined to become perfectly good.'

Here again, no detail whatever, only the abstract certainty that
whatever the detail may prove to be, it will be good. Common
non-dialectical men have already this certainty as a result of the
generous vital enthusiasm about the universe with which they are born.
The peculiarity of transcendental philosophy is its sovereign contempt
for merely vital functions like enthusiasm, and its pretension to turn
our simple and immediate trusts and faiths into the form of logically
mediated certainties, to question which would be absurd. But the whole
basis on which Mr. McTaggart's own certainty so solidly rests, settles
down into the one nutshell of an assertion into which he puts Hegel's
gospel, namely, that in every bit of experience and thought, however
finite, the whole of reality (the absolute idea, as Hegel calls it) is
'implicitly present.'

This indeed is Hegel's _vision_, and Hegel thought that the details of
his dialectic proved its truth. But disciples who treat the details of
the proof as unsatisfactory and yet cling to the vision, are surely,
in spite of their pretension to a more rational consciousness, no
better than common men with their enthusiasms or deliberately adopted
faiths. We have ourselves seen some of the weakness of the monistic
proofs. Mr. McTaggart picks plenty of holes of his own in Hegel's
logic, and finally concludes that 'all true philosophy must be
mystical, not indeed in its methods but in its final conclusions,'
which is as much as to say that the rationalistic methods leave us
in the lurch, in spite of all their superiority, and that in the end
vision and faith must eke them out. But how abstract and thin is
here the vision, to say nothing of the faith! The whole of reality,
explicitly absent from our finite experiences, must nevertheless
be present in them all implicitly, altho no one of us can ever see
how--the bare word 'implicit' here bearing the whole pyramid of the
monistic system on its slender point. Mr. Joachim's monistic system of
truth rests on an even slenderer point.--_I have never doubted_,'
he says, 'that universal and timeless truth is a single content or
significance, one and whole and complete,' and he candidly confesses
the failure of rationalistic attempts 'to raise this immediate
certainty' to the level of reflective knowledge. There is, in short,
no mediation for him between the Truth in capital letters and all
the little 'lower-case' truths--and errors--which life presents. The
psychological fact that he never has 'doubted' is enough.

The whole monistic pyramid, resting on points as thin as these, seems
to me to be a _machtspruch_, a product of will far more than one of
reason. Unity is good, therefore things _shall_ cohere; they _shall_
be one; there _shall_ be categories to make them one, no matter what
empirical disjunctions may appear. In Hegel's own writings, the
_shall-be_ temper is ubiquitous and towering; it overrides verbal and
logical resistances alike. Hegel's error, as Professor Royce so well
says, 'lay not in introducing logic into passion,' as some people
charge, 'but in conceiving the logic of passion as the only logic....
He is [thus] suggestive,' Royce says, 'but never final. His system as
a system has crumbled, but his vital comprehension of our life remains
forever.'[1]

That vital comprehension we have already seen. It is that there is a
sense in which real things are not merely their own bare selves, but
may vaguely be treated as also their own others, and that ordinary
logic, since it denies this, must be overcome. Ordinary logic denies
this because it substitutes concepts for real things, and concepts
_are_ their own bare selves and nothing else. What Royce calls Hegel's
'system' was Hegel's attempt to make us believe that he was working
by concepts and grinding out a higher style of logic, when in reality
sensible experiences, hypotheses, and passion furnished him with all
his results.

What I myself may mean by things being their own others, we shall see
in a later lecture. It is now time to take our look at Fechner, whose
thickness is a refreshing contrast to the thin, abstract, indigent,
and threadbare appearance, the starving, school-room aspect, which the
speculations of most of our absolutist philosophers present.

There is something really weird and uncanny in the contrast between
the abstract pretensions of rationalism and what rationalistic methods
concretely can do. If the 'logical prius' of our mind were really the
'implicit presence' of the whole 'concrete universal,' the whole of
reason, or reality, or spirit, or the absolute idea, or whatever it
may be called, in all our finite thinking, and if this reason worked
(for example) by the dialectical method, doesn't it seem odd that
in the greatest instance of rationalization mankind has known, in
'science,' namely, the dialectical method should never once have been
tried? Not a solitary instance of the use of it in science occurs
to my mind. Hypotheses, and deductions from these, controlled by
sense-observations and analogies with what we know elsewhere, are to
be thanked for all of science's results.

Fechner used no methods but these latter ones in arguing for his
metaphysical conclusions about reality--but let me first rehearse a
few of the facts about his life.

Born in 1801, the son of a poor country pastor in Saxony, he lived
from 1817 to 1887, when he died, seventy years therefore, at Leipzig,
a typical _gelehrter_ of the old-fashioned german stripe. His means
were always scanty, so his only extravagances could be in the way
of thought, but these were gorgeous ones. He passed his medical
examinations at Leipzig University at the age of twenty-one, but
decided, instead of becoming a doctor, to devote himself to physical
science. It was ten years before he was made professor of physics,
although he soon was authorized to lecture. Meanwhile, he had to make
both ends meet, and this he did by voluminous literary labors. He
translated, for example, the four volumes of Biot's treatise on
physics, and the six of Thénard's work on chemistry, and took care of
their enlarged editions later. He edited repertories of chemistry
and physics, a pharmaceutical journal, and an encyclopaedia in eight
volumes, of which he wrote about one third. He published physical
treatises and experimental investigations of his own, especially in
electricity. Electrical measurements, as you know, are the basis of
electrical science, and Fechner's measurements in galvanism, performed
with the simplest self-made apparatus, are classic to this day.
During this time he also published a number of half-philosophical,
half-humorous writings, which have gone through several editions,
under the name of Dr. Mises, besides poems, literary and artistic
essays, and other occasional articles.

But overwork, poverty, and an eye-trouble produced by his observations
on after-images in the retina (also a classic piece of investigation)
produced in Fechner, then about thirty-eight years old, a terrific
attack of nervous prostration with painful hyperaesthesia of all the
functions, from which he suffered three years, cut off entirely from
active life. Present-day medicine would have classed poor Fechner's
malady quickly enough, as partly a habit-neurosis, but its
severity was such that in his day it was treated as a visitation
incomprehensible in its malignity; and when he suddenly began to get
well, both Fechner and others treated the recovery as a sort of divine
miracle. This illness, bringing Fechner face to face with inner
desperation, made a great crisis in his life. 'Had I not then clung to
the faith,' he writes, 'that clinging to faith would somehow or other
work its reward, _so hätte ich jene zeit nicht ausgehalten_.' His
religious and cosmological faiths saved him--thenceforward one great
aim with him was to work out and communicate these faiths to the
world. He did so on the largest scale; but he did many other things
too ere he died.

A book on the atomic theory, classic also; four elaborate mathematical
and experimental volumes on what he called psychophysics--many persons
consider Fechner to have practically founded scientific psychology in
the first of these books; a volume on organic evolution, and two works
on experimental aesthetics, in which again Fechner is considered by
some judges to have laid the foundations of a new science, must be
included among these other performances. Of the more religious and
philosophical works, I shall immediately give a further account.

All Leipzig mourned him when he died, for he was the pattern of the
ideal german scholar, as daringly original in his thought as he was
homely in his life, a modest, genial, laborious slave to truth and
learning, and withal the owner of an admirable literary style of the
vernacular sort. The materialistic generation, that in the fifties and
sixties called his speculations fantastic, had been replaced by one
with greater liberty of imagination, and a Preyer, a Wundt, a Paulsen,
and a Lasswitz could now speak of Fechner as their master.

His mind was indeed one of those multitudinously organized cross-roads
of truth which are occupied only at rare intervals by children of men,
and from which nothing is either too far or too near to be seen in due
perspective. Patientest observation, exactest mathematics, shrewdest
discrimination, humanest feeling, flourished in him on the largest
scale, with no apparent detriment to one another. He was in fact a
philosopher in the 'great' sense, altho he cared so much less than
most philosophers care for abstractions of the 'thin' order. For him
the abstract lived in the concrete, and the hidden motive of all he
did was to bring what he called the daylight view of the world into
ever greater evidence, that daylight view being this, that the whole
universe in its different spans and wave-lengths, exclusions and
envelopments, is everywhere alive and conscious. It has taken fifty
years for his chief book, 'Zend-avesta,' to pass into a second edition
(1901). 'One swallow,' he cheerfully writes, 'does not make a summer.
But the first swallow would not come unless the summer were coming;
and for me that summer means my daylight view some time prevailing.'

The original sin, according to Fechner, of both our popular and
our scientific thinking, is our inveterate habit of regarding the
spiritual not as the rule but as an exception in the midst of nature.
Instead of believing our life to be fed at the breasts of the greater
life, our individuality to be sustained by the greater individuality,
which must necessarily have more consciousness and more independence
than all that it brings forth, we habitually treat whatever lies
outside of our life as so much slag and ashes of life only; or if we
believe in a Divine Spirit, we fancy him on the one side as bodiless,
and nature as soulless on the other. What comfort, or peace, Fechner
asks, can come from such a doctrine? The flowers wither at its breath,
the stars turn into stone; our own body grows unworthy of our spirit
and sinks to a tenement for carnal senses only. The book of nature
turns into a volume on mechanics, in which whatever has life is
treated as a sort of anomaly; a great chasm of separation yawns
between us and all that is higher than ourselves; and God becomes a
thin nest of abstractions.

Fechner's great instrument for vivifying the daylight view is
analogy; not a rationalistic argument is to be found in all his
many pages--only reasonings like those which men continually use in
practical life. For example: My house is built by some one, the world
too is built by some one. The world is greater than my house, it
must be a greater some one who built the world. My body moves by the
influence of my feeling and will; the sun, moon, sea, and wind, being
themselves more powerful, move by the influence of some more powerful
feeling and will. I live now, and change from one day to another; I
shall live hereafter, and change still more, etc.

Bain defines genius as the power of seeing analogies. The number
that Fechner could perceive was prodigious; but he insisted on the
differences as well. Neglect to make allowance for these, he said, is
the common fallacy in analogical reasoning. Most of us, for example,
reasoning justly that, since all the minds we know are connected with
bodies, therefore God's mind should be connected with a body, proceed
to suppose that that body must be just an animal body over again, and
paint an altogether human picture of God. But all that the analogy
comports is _a_ body--the particular features of _our_ body are
adaptations to a habitat so different from God's that if God have
a physical body at all, it must be utterly different from ours in
structure. Throughout his writings Fechner makes difference and
analogy walk abreast, and by his extraordinary power of noticing
both, he converts what would ordinarily pass for objections to his
conclusions into factors of their support.

The vaster orders of mind go with the vaster orders of body. The
entire earth on which we live must have, according to Fechner, its own
collective consciousness. So must each sun, moon, and planet; so must
the whole solar system have its own wider consciousness, in which the
consciousness of our earth plays one part. So has the entire starry
system as such its consciousness; and if that starry system be not the
sum of all that _is_, materially considered, then that whole system,
along with whatever else may be, is the body of that absolutely
totalized consciousness of the universe to which men give the name of
God.

Speculatively Fechner is thus a monist in his theology; but there is
room in his universe for every grade of spiritual being between man
and the final all-inclusive God; and in suggesting what the positive
content of all this super-humanity may be, he hardly lets his
imagination fly beyond simple spirits of the planetary order. The
earth-soul he passionately believes in; he treats the earth as our
special human guardian angel; we can pray to the earth as men pray to
their saints; but I think that in his system, as in so many of the
actual historic theologies, the supreme God marks only a sort of limit
of enclosure of the worlds above man. He is left thin and abstract in
his majesty, men preferring to carry on their personal transactions
with the many less remote and abstract messengers and mediators whom
the divine order provides.

I shall ask later whether the abstractly monistic turn which Fechner's
speculations took was necessitated by logic. I believe it not to have
been required. Meanwhile let me lead you a little more into the
detail of his thought. Inevitably one does him miserable injustice
by summarizing and abridging him. For altho the type of reasoning he
employs is almost childlike for simplicity, and his bare conclusions
can be written on a single page, the _power_ of the man is due
altogether to the profuseness of his concrete imagination, to the
multitude of the points which he considers successively, to the
cumulative effect of his learning, of his thoroughness, and of the
ingenuity of his detail, to his admirably homely style, to the
sincerity with which his pages glow, and finally to the impression he
gives of a man who doesn't live at second-hand, but who _sees_, who in
fact speaks as one having authority, and not as if he were one of the
common herd of professorial philosophic scribes.

Abstractly set down, his most important conclusion for my purpose in
these lectures is that the constitution of the world is identical
throughout. In ourselves, visual consciousness goes with our eyes,
tactile consciousness with our skin. But altho neither skin nor eye
knows aught of the sensations of the other, they come together and
figure in some sort of relation and combination in the more inclusive
consciousness which each of us names his _self_. Quite similarly,
then, says Fechner, we must suppose that my consciousness of myself
and yours of yourself, altho in their immediacy they keep separate
and know nothing of each other, are yet known and used together in a
higher consciousness, that of the human race, say, into which they
enter as constituent parts. Similarly, the whole human and animal
kingdoms come together as conditions of a consciousness of still wider
scope. This combines in the soul of the earth with the consciousness
of the vegetable kingdom, which in turn contributes its share of
experience to that of the whole solar system, and so on from synthesis
to synthesis and height to height, till an absolutely universal
consciousness is reached.

A vast analogical series, in which the basis of the analogy consists
of facts directly observable in ourselves.

The supposition of an earth-consciousness meets a strong instinctive
prejudice which Fechner ingeniously tries to overcome. Man's mind is
the highest consciousness upon the earth, we think--the earth itself
being in all ways man's inferior. How should its consciousness, if it
have one, be superior to his?

What are the marks of superiority which we are tempted to use here? If
we look more carefully into them, Fechner points out that the earth
possesses each and all of them more perfectly than we. He considers in
detail the points of difference between us, and shows them all to
make for the earth's higher rank. I will touch on only a few of these
points.

One of them of course is independence of other external beings.
External to the earth are only the other heavenly bodies. All the
things on which we externally depend for life--air, water, plant and
animal food, fellow men, etc.--are included in her as her constituent
parts. She is self-sufficing in a million respects in which we are not
so. We depend on her for almost everything, she on us for but a small
portion of her history. She swings us in her orbit from winter to
summer and revolves us from day into night and from night into day.

Complexity in unity is another sign of superiority. The total earth's
complexity far exceeds that of any organism, for she includes all our
organisms in herself, along with an infinite number of things that our
organisms fail to include. Yet how simple and massive are the phases
of her own proper life! As the total bearing of any animal is sedate
and tranquil compared with the agitation of its blood corpuscles, so
is the earth a sedate and tranquil being compared with the animals
whom she supports.

To develop from within, instead of being fashioned from without, is
also counted as something superior in men's eyes. An egg is a higher
style of being than a piece of clay which an external modeler makes
into the image of a bird. Well, the earth's history develops from
within. It is like that of a wonderful egg which the sun's heat, like
that of a mother-hen, has stimulated to its cycles of evolutionary
change.

Individuality of type, and difference from other beings of its type,
is another mark of rank. The earth differs from every other planet,
and as a class planetary beings are extraordinarily distinct from
other beings.

Long ago the earth was called an animal; but a planet is a higher
class of being than either man or animal; not only quantitatively
greater, like a vaster and more awkward whale or elephant, but a being
whose enormous size requires an altogether different plan of life. Our
animal organization comes from our inferiority. Our need of moving to
and fro, of stretching our limbs and bending our bodies, shows only
our defect. What are our legs but crutches, by means of which, with
restless efforts, we go hunting after the things we have not inside
of ourselves. But the earth is no such cripple; why should she who
already possesses within herself the things we so painfully pursue,
have limbs analogous to ours? Shall she mimic a small part of herself?
What need has she of arms, with nothing to reach for? of a neck, with
no head to carry? of eyes or nose when she finds her way through space
without either, and has the millions of eyes of all her animals to
guide their movements on her surface, and all their noses to smell the
flowers that grow? For, as we are ourselves a part of the earth, so
our organs are her organs. She is, as it were, eye and ear over her
whole extent--all that we see and hear in separation she sees and
hears at once. She brings forth living beings of countless kinds upon
her surface, and their multitudinous conscious relations with each
other she takes up into her higher and more general conscious life.

Most of us, considering the theory that the whole terrestrial mass is
animated as our bodies are, make the mistake of working the analogy
too literally, and allowing for no differences. If the earth be a
sentient organism, we say, where are her brain and nerves? What
corresponds to her heart and lungs? In other words, we expect
functions which she already performs through us, to be performed
outside of us again, and in just the same way. But we see perfectly
well how the earth performs some of these functions in a way unlike
our way. If you speak of circulation, what need has she of a heart
when the sun keeps all the showers of rain that fall upon her and all
the springs and brooks and rivers that irrigate her, going? What need
has she of internal lungs, when her whole sensitive surface is in
living commerce with the atmosphere that clings to it?

The organ that gives us most trouble is the brain. All the
consciousness we directly know seems tied to brains.--Can there be
consciousness, we ask, where there is no brain? But our brain, which
primarily serves to correlate our muscular reactions with the external
objects on which we depend, performs a function which the earth
performs in an entirely different way. She has no proper muscles or
limbs of her own, and the only objects external to her are the other
stars. To these her whole mass reacts by most exquisite alterations in
its total gait, and by still more exquisite vibratory responses in
its substance. Her ocean reflects the lights of heaven as in a mighty
mirror, her atmosphere refracts them like a monstrous lens, the
clouds and snow-fields combine them into white, the woods and flowers
disperse them into colors. Polarization, interference, absorption,
awaken sensibilities in matter of which our senses are too coarse to
take any note.

For these cosmic relations of hers, then, she no more needs a special
brain than she needs eyes or ears. _Our_ brains do indeed unify and
correlate innumerable functions. Our eyes know nothing of sound, our
ears nothing of light, but, having brains, we can feel sound and light
together, and compare them. We account for this by the fibres which in
the brain connect the optical with the acoustic centre, but just how
these fibres bring together not only the sensations, but the centres,
we fail to see. But if fibres are indeed all that is needed to do that
trick, has not the earth pathways, by which you and I are physically
continuous, more than enough to do for our two minds what the
brain-fibres do for the sounds and sights in a single mind? Must every
higher means of unification between things be a literal _brain_-fibre,
and go by that name? Cannot the earth-mind know otherwise the contents
of our minds together?

Fechner's imagination, insisting on the differences as well as on the
resemblances, thus tries to make our picture of the whole earth's life
more concrete. He revels in the thought of its perfections. To carry
her precious freight through the hours and seasons what form could be
more excellent than hers--being as it is horse, wheels, and wagon all
in one. Think of her beauty--a shining ball, sky-blue and sun-lit over
one half, the other bathed in starry night, reflecting the heavens
from all her waters, myriads of lights and shadows in the folds of her
mountains and windings of her valleys, she would be a spectacle of
rainbow glory, could one only see her from afar as we see parts of her
from her own mountain-tops. Every quality of landscape that has a
name would then be visible in her at once--all that is delicate or
graceful, all that is quiet, or wild, or romantic, or desolate, or
cheerful, or luxuriant, or fresh. That landscape is her face--a
peopled landscape, too, for men's eyes would appear in it like
diamonds among the dew-drops. Green would be the dominant color, but
the blue atmosphere and the clouds would enfold her as a bride is
shrouded in her veil--a veil the vapory transparent folds of which
the earth, through her ministers the winds, never tires of laying and
folding about herself anew.

Every element has its own living denizens. Can the celestial ocean of
ether, whose waves are light, in which the earth herself floats, not
have hers, higher by as much as their element is higher, swimming
without fins, flying without wings, moving, immense and tranquil, as
by a half-spiritual force through the half-spiritual sea which they
inhabit, rejoicing in the exchange of luminous influence with one
another, following the slightest pull of one another's attraction, and
harboring, each of them, an inexhaustible inward wealth?

Men have always made fables about angels, dwelling in the light,
needing no earthly food or drink, messengers between ourselves and
God. Here are actually existent beings, dwelling in the light and
moving through the sky, needing neither food nor drink, intermediaries
between God and us, obeying his commands. So, if the heavens really
are the home of angels, the heavenly bodies must be those very angels,
for other creatures _there_ are none. Yes! the earth is our great
common guardian angel, who watches over all our interests combined.

In a striking page Fechner relates one of his moments of direct vision
of this truth.

'On a certain spring morning I went out to walk. The fields were
green, the birds sang, the dew glistened, the smoke was rising, here
and there a man appeared; a light as of transfiguration lay on all
things. It was only a little bit of the earth; it was only one moment
of her existence; and yet as my look embraced her more and more it
seemed to me not only so beautiful an idea, but so true and clear
a fact, that she is an angel, an angel so rich and fresh and
flower-like, and yet going her round in the skies so firmly and so
at one with herself, turning her whole living face to Heaven, and
carrying me along with her into that Heaven, that I asked myself how
the opinions of men could ever have so spun themselves away from life
so far as to deem the earth only a dry clod, and to seek for angels
above it or about it in the emptiness of the sky,--only to find them
nowhere.... But such an experience as this passes for fantastic. The
earth is a globular body, and what more she may be, one can find in
mineralogical cabinets.'[2]

Where there is no vision the people perish. Few professorial
philosophers have any vision. Fechner had vision, and that is why one
can read him over and over again, and each time bring away a fresh
sense of reality.

His earliest book was a vision of what the inner life of plants may be
like. He called it 'Nanna.' In the development of animals the nervous
system is the central fact. Plants develop centrifugally, spread their
organs abroad. For that reason people suppose that they can have no
consciousness, for they lack the unity which the central nervous
system provides. But the plant's consciousness may be of another type,
being connected with other structures. Violins and pianos give out
sounds because they have strings. Does it follow that nothing but
strings can give out sound? How then about flutes and organ-pipes?
Of course their sounds are of a different quality, and so may the
consciousness of plants be of a quality correlated exclusively with
the kind of organization that | they possess. Nutrition, respiration,
propagation take place in them without nerves. In us these functions
are conscious only in unusual states, normally their consciousness is
eclipsed by that which goes with the brain. No such eclipse occurs in
plants, and their lower consciousness may therefore be all the more
lively. With nothing to do but to drink the light and air with their
leaves, to let their cells proliferate, to feel their rootlets draw
the sap, is it conceivable that they should not consciously suffer
if water, light, and air are suddenly withdrawn? or that when the
flowering and fertilization which are the culmination of their life
take place, they should not feel their own existence more intensely
and enjoy something like what we call pleasure in ourselves? Does
the water-lily, rocking in her triple bath of water, air, and light,
relish in no wise her own beauty? When the plant in our room turns to
the light, closes her blossoms in the dark, responds to our watering
or pruning by increase of size or change of shape and bloom, who has
the right to say she does not feel, or that she plays a purely passive
part? Truly plants can foresee nothing, neither the scythe of the
mower, nor the hand extended to pluck their flowers. They can neither
run away nor cry out. But this only proves how different their modes
of feeling life must be from those of animals that live by eyes and
ears and locomotive organs, it does not prove that they have no mode
of feeling life at all.

How scanty and scattered would sensation be on our globe, if the
feeling-life of plants were blotted from existence. Solitary would
consciousness move through the woods in the shape of some deer or
other quadruped, or fly about the flowers in that of some insect, but
can we really suppose that the Nature through which God's breath blows
is such a barren wilderness as this?

I have probably by this time said enough to acquaint those of you who
have never seen these metaphysical writings of Fechner with their more
general characteristics, and I hope that some of you may now feel like
reading them yourselves.[3] The special thought of Fechner's with
which in these lectures I have most practical concern, is his
belief that the more inclusive forms of consciousness are in part
_constituted_ by the more limited forms. Not that they are the mere
sum of the more limited forms. As our mind is not the bare sum of
our sights plus our sounds plus our pains, but in adding these terms
together also finds relations among them and weaves them into schemes
and forms and objects of which no one sense in its separate estate
knows anything, so the earth-soul traces relations between the
contents of my mind and the contents of yours of which neither of
our separate minds is conscious. It has schemes, forms, and objects
proportionate to its wider field, which our mental fields are far too
narrow to cognize. By ourselves we are simply out of relation with
each other, for it we are both of us there, and _different_ from each
other, which is a positive relation. What we are without knowing, it
knows that we are. We are closed against its world, but that world is
not closed against us. It is as if the total universe of inner life
had a sort of grain or direction, a sort of valvular structure,
permitting knowledge to flow in one way only, so that the wider might
always have the narrower under observation, but never the narrower the
wider.

Fechner's great analogy here is the relation of the senses to our
individual minds. When our eyes are open their sensations enter into
our general mental life, which grows incessantly by the addition of
what they see. Close the eyes, however, and the visual additions stop,
nothing but thoughts and memories of the past visual experiences
remain--in combination of course with the enormous stock of other
thoughts and memories, and with the data coming in from the senses
not yet closed. Our eye-sensations of themselves know nothing of this
enormous life into which they fall. Fechner thinks, as any common man
would think, that they are taken into it directly when they occur,
and form part of it just as they are. They don't stay outside and
get represented inside by their copies. It is only the memories and
concepts of them that are copies; the sensible perceptions themselves
are taken in or walled out in their own proper persons according as
the eyes are open or shut.

Fechner likens our individual persons on the earth unto so many
sense-organs of the earth's soul. We add to its perceptive life so
long as our own life lasts. It absorbs our perceptions, just as they
occur, into its larger sphere of knowledge, and combines them with the
other data there. When one of us dies, it is as if an eye of the world
were closed, for all _perceptive_ contributions from that particular
quarter cease. But the memories and conceptual relations that have
spun themselves round the perceptions of that person remain in the
larger earth-life as distinct as ever, and form new relations and grow
and develop throughout all the future, in the same way in which our
own distinct objects of thought, once stored in memory, form new
relations and develop throughout our whole finite life. This is
Fechner's theory of immortality, first published in the little
'Büchlein des lebens nach dem tode,' in 1836, and re-edited in greatly
improved shape in the last volume of his 'Zend-avesta.'

We rise upon the earth as wavelets rise upon the ocean. We grow out of
her soil as leaves grow from a tree. The wavelets catch the sunbeams
separately, the leaves stir when the branches do not move. They
realize their own events apart, just as in our own consciousness, when
anything becomes emphatic, the background fades from observation. Yet
the event works back upon the background, as the wavelet works upon
the waves, or as the leaf's movements work upon the sap inside the
branch. The whole sea and the whole tree are registers of what has
happened, and are different for the wave's and the leaf's action
having occurred. A grafted twig may modify its stock to the roots:--so
our outlived private experiences, impressed on the whole earth-mind as
memories, lead the immortal life of ideas there, and become parts of
the great system, fully distinguished from one another, just as we
ourselves when alive were distinct, realizing themselves no longer
isolatedly, but along with one another as so many partial systems,
entering thus into new combinations, being affected by the perceptive
experiences of those living then, and affecting the living in their
turn--altho they are so seldom recognized by living men to do so.

If you imagine that this entrance after the death of the body into a
common life of higher type means a merging and loss of our distinct
personality, Fechner asks you whether a visual sensation of our own
exists in any sense _less for itself_ or _less distinctly_, when
it enters into our higher relational consciousness and is there
distinguished and defined.

--But here I must stop my reporting and send you to his volumes. Thus
is the universe alive, according to this philosopher! I think you
will admit that he makes it more _thickly_ alive than do the other
philosophers who, following rationalistic methods solely, gain the
same results, but only in the thinnest outlines. Both Fechner and
Professor Royce, for example, believe ultimately in one all-inclusive
mind. Both believe that we, just as we stand here, are constituent
parts of that mind. No other _content_ has it than us, with all the
other creatures like or unlike us, and the relations which it finds
between us. Our eaches, collected into one, are substantively
identical with its all, tho the all is perfect while no each is
perfect, so that we have to admit that new qualities as well as
unperceived relations accrue from the collective form. It is thus
superior to the distributive form. But having reached this result,
Royce (tho his treatment of the subject on its moral side seems to
me infinitely richer and thicker than that of any other contemporary
idealistic philosopher) leaves us very much to our own devices.
Fechner, on the contrary, tries to trace the superiorities due to the
more collective form in as much detail as he can. He marks the various
intermediary stages and halting places of collectivity,--as we are to
our separate senses, so is the earth to us, so is the solar system
to the earth, etc.,--and if, in order to escape an infinitely long
summation, he posits a complete God as the all-container and leaves
him about as indefinite in feature as the idealists leave their
absolute, he yet provides us with a very definite gate of approach to
him in the shape of the earth-soul, through which in the nature of
things we must first make connexion with all the more enveloping
superhuman realms, and with which our more immediate religious
commerce at any rate has to be carried on.

Ordinary monistic idealism leaves everything intermediary out. It
recognizes only the extremes, as if, after the first rude face of the
phenomenal world in all its particularity, nothing but the supreme in
all its perfection could be found. First, you and I, just as we are in
this room; and the moment we get below that surface, the unutterable
absolute itself! Doesn't this show a singularly indigent imagination?
Isn't this brave universe made on a richer pattern, with room in
it for a long hierarchy of beings? Materialistic science makes it
infinitely richer in terms, with its molecules, and ether, and
electrons, and what not. Absolute idealism, thinking of reality only
under intellectual forms, knows not what to do with _bodies_ of
any grade, and can make no use of any psychophysical analogy or
correspondence. The resultant thinness is startling when compared with
the thickness and articulation of such a universe as Fechner paints.
May not satisfaction with the rationalistic absolute as the alpha
and omega, and treatment of it in all its abstraction as an adequate
religious object, argue a certain native poverty of mental demand?
Things reveal themselves soonest to those who most passionately want
them, for our need sharpens our wit. To a mind content with little,
the much in the universe may always remain hid.

To be candid, one of my reasons for saying so much about Fechner has
been to make the thinness of our current transcendentalism appear
more evident by an effect of contrast. Scholasticism ran thick; Hegel
himself ran thick; but english and american transcendentalisms run
thin. If philosophy is more a matter of passionate vision than of
logic,--and I believe it is, logic only finding reasons for the vision
afterwards,--must not such thinness come either from the vision being
defective in the disciples, or from their passion, matched with
Fechner's or with Hegel's own passion, being as moonlight unto
sunlight or as water unto wine?[4]

But I have also a much deeper reason for making Fechner a part of my
text. His _assumption that conscious experiences freely compound and
separate themselves_, the same assumption by which absolutism explains
the relation of our minds to the eternal mind, and the same by
which empiricism explains the composition of the human mind out of
subordinate mental elements, is not one which we ought to let pass
without scrutiny. I shall scrutinize it in the next lecture.




LECTURE V


THE COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

In my last lecture I gave a miserably scanty outline of the way
of thinking of a philosopher remarkable for the almost unexampled
richness of his imagination of details. I owe to Fechner's shade an
apology for presenting him in a manner so unfair to the most essential
quality of his genius; but the time allotted is too short to say more
about the particulars of his work, so I proceed to the programme
I suggested at the end of our last hour. I wish to discuss the
assumption that states of consciousness, so-called, can separate and
combine themselves freely, and keep their own identity unchanged while
forming parts of simultaneous fields of experience of wider scope.

Let me first explain just what I mean by this. While you listen to
my voice, for example, you are perhaps inattentive to some bodily
sensation due to your clothing or your posture. Yet that sensation
would seem probably to be there, for in an instant, by a change of
attention, you can have it in one field of consciousness with the
voice. It seems as if it existed first in a separate form, and then as
if, without itself changing, it combined with your other co-existent
sensations. It is after this analogy that pantheistic idealism thinks
that we exist in the absolute. The absolute, it thinks, makes the
world by knowing the whole of it at once in one undivided eternal
act.[1] To 'be,' _really_ to be, is to be as it knows us to be, along
with everything else, namely, and clothed with the fulness of our
meaning. Meanwhile we _are_ at the same time not only really and as it
knows us, but also apparently, for to our separate single selves we
appear _without_ most other things and unable to declare with
any fulness what our own meaning is. Now the classic doctrine of
pantheistic idealism, from the Upanishads down to Josiah Royce, is
that the finite knowers, in spite of their apparent ignorance, are one
with the knower of the all. In the most limited moments of our private
experience, the absolute idea, as Dr. McTaggart told us, is implicitly
contained. The moments, as Royce says, exist only in relation to it.
They are true or erroneous only through its overshadowing presence. Of
the larger self that alone eternally is, they are the organic parts.
They _are_, only inasmuch as they are implicated in its being.

There is thus in reality but this one self, consciously inclusive of
all the lesser selves, _logos_, problem-solver, and all-knower; and
Royce ingeniously compares the ignorance that in our persons breaks
out in the midst of its complete knowledge and isolates me from you
and both of us from it, to the inattention into which our finite minds
are liable to fall with respect to such implicitly present details as
those corporeal sensations to which I made allusion just now. Those
sensations stand to our total private minds in the same relation in
which our private minds stand to the absolute mind. Privacy means
ignorance--I still quote Royce--and ignorance means inattention. We
are finite because our wills, as such, are only fragments of the
absolute will; because will means interest, and an incomplete will
means an incomplete interest; and because incompleteness of interest
means inattention to much that a fuller interest would bring us to
perceive.[2]

In this account Royce makes by far the manliest of the post-hegelian
attempts to read some empirically apprehensible content into the
notion of our relation to the absolute mind.

I have to admit, now that I propose to you to scrutinize this
assumption rather closely, that trepidation seizes me. The subject is
a subtle and abstruse one. It is one thing to delve into subtleties by
one's self with pen in hand, or to study out abstruse points in
books, but quite another thing to make a popular lecture out of them.
Nevertheless I must not flinch from my task here, for I think that
this particular point forms perhaps the vital knot of the present
philosophic situation, and I imagine that the times are ripe, or
almost ripe, for a serious attempt to be made at its untying.

It may perhaps help to lessen the arduousness of the subject if I put
the first part of what I have to say in the form of a direct personal
confession.

In the year 1890 I published a work on psychology in which it became
my duty to discuss the value of a certain explanation of our higher
mental states that had come into favor among the more biologically
inclined psychologists. Suggested partly by the association of ideas,
and partly by the analogy of chemical compounds, this opinion was
that complex mental states are resultants of the self-compounding of
simpler ones. The Mills had spoken of mental chemistry; Wundt of a
'psychic synthesis,' which might develop properties not contained in
the elements; and such writers as Spencer, Taine, Fiske, Barratt, and
Clifford had propounded a great evolutionary theory in which, in the
absence of souls, selves, or other principles of unity, primordial
units of mind-stuff or mind-dust were represented as summing
themselves together in successive stages of compounding and
re-compounding, and thus engendering our higher and more complex
states of mind. The elementary feeling of A, let us say, and the
elementary feeling of B, when they occur in certain conditions,
combine, according to this doctrine, into a feeling of A-plus-B, and
this in turn combines with a similarly generated feeling of C-plus-D,
until at last the whole alphabet may appear together in one field of
awareness, without any other witnessing principle or principles beyond
the feelings of the several letters themselves, being supposed to
exist. What each of them witnesses separately, 'all' of them are
supposed to witness in conjunction. But their distributive knowledge
doesn't _give rise_ to their collective knowledge by any act, it _is_
their collective knowledge. The lower forms of consciousness 'taken
together' _are_ the higher. It, 'taken apart,' consists of nothing
and _is_ nothing but them. This, at least, is the most obvious way
of understanding the doctrine, and is the way I understood it in the
chapter in my psychology.

Superficially looked at, this seems just like the combination of H_2
and O into water, but looked at more closely, the analogy halts badly.
When a chemist tells us that two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen
combine themselves of their own accord into the new compound substance
'water,' he knows (if he believes in the mechanical view of nature)
that this is only an elliptical statement for a more complex fact.
That fact is that when H_2 and O, instead of keeping far apart, get
into closer quarters, say into the position H-O-H, they _affect
surrounding bodies differently_: they now wet our skin, dissolve
sugar, put out fire, etc., which they didn't in their former
positions. 'Water' is but _our name_ for what acts thus peculiarly.
But if the skin, sugar, and fire were absent, no witness would speak
of water at all. He would still talk of the H and O distributively,
merely noting that they acted now in the new position H-O-H.

In the older psychologies the soul or self took the place of the
sugar, fire, or skin. The lower feelings produced _effects on it_,
and their apparent compounds were only its reactions. As you tickle
a man's face with a feather, and he laughs, so when you tickle his
intellectual principle with a retinal feeling, say, and a muscular
feeling at once, it laughs responsively by its category of 'space,'
but it would be false to treat the space as simply made of those
simpler feelings. It is rather a new and unique psychic creation which
their combined action on the mind is able to evoke.

I found myself obliged, in discussing the mind-dust theory, to urge
this last alternative view. The so-called mental compounds are simple
psychic reactions of a higher type. The form itself of them, I said,
is something new. We can't say that awareness of the alphabet as
such is nothing more than twenty-six awarenesses, each of a separate
letter; for those are twenty-six distinct awarenesses, of single
letters _without_ others, while their so-called sum is one awareness,
of every letter _with_ its comrades. There is thus something new in
the collective consciousness. It knows the same letters, indeed, but
it knows them in this novel way. It is safer, I said (for I fought shy
of admitting a self or soul or other agent of combination), to treat
the consciousness of the alphabet as a twenty-seventh fact, the
substitute and not the sum of the twenty-six simpler consciousnesses,
and to say that while under certain physiological conditions they
alone are produced, other more complex physiological conditions result
in its production instead. Do not talk, therefore, I said, of the
higher states _consisting_ of the simpler, or _being_ the same with
them; talk rather of their _knowing the same things_. They are
different mental facts, but they apprehend, each in its own peculiar
way, the same objective A, B, C, and D.

The theory of combination, I was forced to conclude, is thus
untenable, being both logically nonsensical and practically
unnecessary. Say what you will, twelve thoughts, each of a single
word, are not the self-same mental thing as one thought of the whole
sentence. The higher thoughts, I insisted, are psychic units, not
compounds; but for all that, they may know together as a collective
multitude the very same objects which under other conditions are known
separately by as many simple thoughts.

For many years I held rigorously to this view,[3] and the reasons for
doing so seemed to me during all those years to apply also to the
opinion that the absolute mind stands to our minds in the relation of
a whole to its parts. If untenable in finite psychology, that opinion
ought to be untenable in metaphysics also. The great transcendentalist
metaphor has always been, as I lately reminded you, a grammatical
sentence. Physically such a sentence is of course composed of clauses,
these of words, the words of syllables, and the syllables of letters.
We may take each word in, yet not understand the sentence; but if
suddenly the meaning of the whole sentence flashes, the sense of each
word is taken up into that whole meaning. Just so, according to
our transcendentalist teachers, the absolute mind thinks the whole
sentence, while we, according to our rank as thinkers, think a clause,
a word, a syllable, or a letter. Most of us are, as I said, mere
syllables in the mouth of Allah. And as Allah comes first in the order
of being, so comes first the entire sentence, the _logos_ that forms
the eternal absolute thought. Students of language tell us that speech
began with men's efforts to make _statements_. The rude synthetic
vocal utterances first used for this effect slowly got stereotyped,
and then much later got decomposed into grammatical parts. It is not
as if men had first invented letters and made syllables of them, then
made words of the syllables and sentences of the words;--they actually
followed the reverse order. So, the transcendentalists affirm, the
complete absolute thought is the pre-condition of our thoughts, and
we finite creatures _are_ only in so far as it owns us as its verbal
fragments.

The metaphor is so beautiful, and applies, moreover, so literally to
such a multitude of the minor wholes of experience, that by merely
hearing it most of us are convinced that it must apply universally.
We see that no smallest raindrop can come into being without a whole
shower, no single feather without a whole bird, neck and crop, beak
and tail, coming into being simultaneously: so we unhesitatingly lay
down the law that no part of anything can be except so far as the
whole also is. And then, since everything whatever is part of the
whole universe, and since (if we are idealists) nothing, whether part
or whole, exists except for a witness, we proceed to the conclusion
that the unmitigated absolute as witness of the whole is the one sole
ground of being of every partial fact, the fact of our own existence
included. We think of ourselves as being only a few of the feathers,
so to speak, which help to constitute that absolute bird. Extending
the analogy of certain wholes, of which we have familiar experience,
to the whole of wholes, we easily become absolute idealists.

But if, instead of yielding to the seductions of our metaphor, be
it sentence, shower, or bird, we analyze more carefully the notion
suggested by it that we are constituent parts of the absolute's
eternal field of consciousness, we find grave difficulties arising.
First, the difficulty I found with the mind-dust theory. If the
absolute makes us by knowing us, how can we exist otherwise than _as_
it knows us? But it knows each of us indivisibly from everything else.
Yet if to exist means nothing but to be experienced, as idealism
affirms, we surely exist otherwise, for we experience _ourselves_
ignorantly and in division. We indeed differ from the absolute not
only by defect, but by excess. Our ignorances, for example, bring
curiosities and doubts by which it cannot be troubled, for it owns
eternally the solution of every problem. Our impotence entails pains,
our imperfection sins, which its perfection keeps at a distance. What
I said of the alphabet-form and the letters holds good of the absolute
experience and our experiences. Their relation, whatever it may be,
seems not to be that of identity.

It is impossible to reconcile the peculiarities of our experience with
our being only the absolute's mental objects. A God, as distinguished
from the absolute, creates things by projecting them beyond himself as
so many substances, each endowed with _perseity_, as the scholastics
call it. But objects of thought are not things _per se_. They are
there only _for_ their thinker, and only _as_ he thinks them. How,
then, can they become severally alive on their own accounts and think
themselves quite otherwise than as he thinks them? It is as if the
characters in a novel were to get up from the pages, and walk away and
transact business of their own outside of the author's story.

A third difficulty is this: The bird-metaphor is physical, but we
see on reflection that in the _physical_ world there is no real
compounding. 'Wholes' are not realities there, parts only are
realities. 'Bird' is only our _name_ for the physical fact of a
certain grouping of organs, just as 'Charles's Wain' is our name for a
certain grouping of stars. The 'whole,' be it bird or constellation,
is nothing but our vision, nothing but an effect on our sensorium when
a lot of things act on it together. It is not realized by any organ
or any star, or experienced apart from the consciousness of an
onlooker.[4] In the physical world taken by itself there _is_ thus no
'all,' there are only the 'eaches'--at least that is the 'scientific'
view.

In the mental world, on the contrary, wholes do in point of fact
realize themselves _per se_. The meaning of the whole sentence is
just as much a real experience as the feeling of each word is; the
absolute's experience _is_ for itself, as much as yours is for
yourself or mine for myself. So the feather-and-bird analogy won't
work unless you make the absolute into a distinct sort of mental agent
with a vision produced in it _by_ our several minds analogous to the
'bird'-vision which the feathers, beak, etc., produce _in_ those same
minds. The 'whole,' which is _its_ experience, would then be its
unifying reaction on our experiences, and not those very experiences
self-combined. Such a view as this would go with theism, for the
theistic God is a separate being; but it would not go with pantheistic
idealism, the very essence of which is to insist that we are literally
_parts_ of God, and he only ourselves in our totality--the word
'ourselves' here standing of course for all the universe's finite
facts.

I am dragging you into depths unsuitable, I fear, for a rapid lecture.
Such difficulties as these have to be teased out with a needle, so to
speak, and lecturers should take only bird's-eye views. The practical
upshot of the matter, however, so far as I am concerned, is this, that
if I had been lecturing on the absolute a very few years ago, I should
unhesitatingly have urged these difficulties, and developed them at
still greater length, to show that the hypothesis of the absolute
was not only non-coercive from the logical point of view, but
self-contradictory as well, its notion that parts and whole are only
two names for the same thing not bearing critical scrutiny. If you
stick to purely physical terms like stars, there is no whole. If you
call the whole mental, then the so-called whole, instead of being one
fact with the parts, appears rather as the integral reaction on those
parts of an independent higher witness, such as the theistic God is
supposed to be.

So long as this was the state of my own mind, I could accept the
notion of self-compounding in the supernal spheres of experience no
more easily than in that chapter on mind-dust I had accepted it in
the lower spheres. I found myself compelled, therefore, to call
the absolute impossible; and the untrammelled freedom with which
pantheistic or monistic idealists stepped over the logical barriers
which Lotze and others had set down long before I had--I had done
little more than quote these previous critics in my chapter--surprised
me not a little, and made me, I have to confess, both resentful and
envious. Envious because in the bottom of my heart I wanted the same
freedom myself, for motives which I shall develop later; and resentful
because my absolutist friends seemed to me to be stealing the
privilege of blowing both hot and cold. To establish their absolute
they used an intellectualist type of logic which they disregarded when
employed against it. It seemed to me that they ought at least to have
mentioned the objections that had stopped me so completely. I had
yielded to them against my 'will to believe,' out of pure logical
scrupulosity. They, professing to loathe the will to believe and to
follow purest rationality, had simply ignored them. The method was
easy, but hardly to be called candid. Fechner indeed was candid
enough, for he had never thought of the objections, but later writers,
like Royce, who should presumably have heard them, had passed them by
in silence. I felt as if these philosophers were granting their will
to believe in monism too easy a license. My own conscience would
permit me no such license.

So much for the personal confession by which you have allowed me to
introduce the subject. Let us now consider it more objectively.

The fundamental difficulty I have found is the number of
contradictions which idealistic monists seem to disregard. In the
first place they attribute to all existence a mental or experiential
character, but I find their simultaneous belief that the higher and
the lower in the universe are entitatively identical, incompatible
with this character. Incompatible in consequence of the generally
accepted doctrine that, whether Berkeley were right or not in saying
of material existence that its _esse_ is _sentiri_, it is undoubtedly
right to say of _mental_ existence that its _esse_ is _sentiri_ or
_experiri_. If I feel pain, it is just pain that I feel, however I
may have come by the feeling. No one pretends that pain as such only
appears like pain, but in itself is different, for to be as a mental
experience _is_ only to appear to some one.

The idealists in question ought then to do one of two things, but they
do neither. They ought either to refute the notion that as mental
states appear, so they are; or, still keeping that notion, they
ought to admit a distinct agent of unification to do the work of
the all-knower, just as our respective souls or selves in popular
philosophy do the work of partial knowers. Otherwise it is like a
joint-stock company all shareholders and no treasurer or director. If
our finite minds formed a billion facts, then its mind, knowing our
billion, would make a universe composed of a billion and one facts.
But transcendental idealism is quite as unfriendly to active
principles called souls as physiological psychology is, Kant having,
as it thinks, definitively demolished them. And altho some disciples
speak of the transcendental ego of apperception (which they celebrate
as Kant's most precious legacy to posterity) as if it were a combining
agent, the drift of monistic authority is certainly in the direction
of treating it as only an all-witness, whose field of vision we finite
witnesses do not cause, but constitute rather. We are the letters, it
is the alphabet; we are the features, it is the face; not indeed as if
either alphabet or face were something additional to the letters or
the features, but rather as if it were only another name for the very
letters or features themselves. The all-form assuredly differs from
the each-form, but the _matter_ is the same in both, and the each-form
only an unaccountable appearance.

But this, as you see, contradicts the other idealist principle, of
a mental fact being just what it appears to be. If their forms
of appearance are so different, the all and the eaches cannot be
identical.

The way out (unless, indeed, we are willing to discard the logic of
identity altogether) would seem to be frankly to write down the all
and the eaches as two distinct orders of witness, each minor witness
being aware of its own 'content' solely, while the greater witness
knows the minor witnesses, knows their whole content pooled together,
knows their relations to one another, and knows of just how much each
one of them is ignorant.

The two types of witnessing are here palpably non-identical. We get a
pluralism, not a monism, out of them. In my psychology-chapter I
had resorted openly to such pluralism, treating each total field of
consciousness as a distinct entity, and maintaining that the higher
fields merely supersede the lower functionally by knowing more about
the same objects.

The monists themselves writhe like worms on the hook to escape
pluralistic or at least dualistic language, but they cannot escape it.
They speak of the eternal and the temporal 'points of view'; of the
universe in its infinite 'aspect' or in its finite 'capacity'; they
say that '_quâ_ absolute' it is one thing, '_quâ_ relative' another;
they contrast its 'truth' with its appearances; they distinguish the
total from the partial way of 'taking' it, etc.; but they forget that,
on idealistic principles, to make such distinctions is tantamount to
making different beings, or at any rate that varying points of view,
aspects, appearances, ways of taking, and the like, are meaningless
phrases unless we suppose outside of the unchanging content of reality
a diversity of witnesses who experience or take it variously, the
absolute mind being just the witness that takes it most completely.

For consider the matter one moment longer, if you can. Ask what this
notion implies, of appearing differently from different points of
view. If there be no outside witness, a thing can appear only to
itself, the eaches or parts to their several selves temporally, the
all or whole to itself eternally. Different 'selves' thus break out
inside of what the absolutist insists to be intrinsically one fact.
But how can what is _actually_ one be _effectively_ so many? Put your
witnesses anywhere, whether outside or inside of what is witnessed,
in the last resort your witnesses must on idealistic principles be
distinct, for what is witnessed is different.

I fear that I am expressing myself with terrible obscurity--some of
you, I know, are groaning over the logic-chopping. Be a pluralist or
be a monist, you say, for heaven's sake, no matter which, so long as
you stop arguing. It reminds one of Chesterton's epigram that the only
thing that ever drives human beings insane is logic. But whether I be
sane or insane, you cannot fail, even tho you be transcendentalists
yourselves, to recognize to some degree by my trouble the difficulties
that beset monistic idealism. What boots it to call the parts and the
whole the same body of experience, when in the same breath you have to
say that the all 'as such' means one sort of experience and each part
'as such' means another?

Difficulties, then, so far, but no stable solution as yet, for I have
been talking only critically. You will probably be relieved to hear,
then, that having rounded this corner, I shall begin to consider what
may be the possibilities of getting farther.

To clear the path, I beg you first to note one point. What has so
troubled my logical conscience is not so much the absolute by itself
as the whole class of suppositions of which it is the supreme
example, collective experiences namely, claiming identity with their
constituent parts, yet experiencing things quite differently from
these latter. If _any_ such collective experience can be, then of
course, so far as the mere logic of the case goes, the absolute may
be. In a previous lecture I have talked against the absolute from
other points of view. In this lecture I have meant merely to take it
as the example most prominent at Oxford of the thing which has given
me such logical perplexity. I don't logically see how a collective
experience of any grade whatever can be treated as logically identical
with a lot of distributive experiences. They form two different
concepts. The absolute happens to be the only collective experience
concerning which Oxford idealists have urged the identity, so I took
it as my prerogative instance. But Fechner's earth-soul, or any stage
of being below or above that, would have served my purpose just
as well: the same logical objection applies to these collective
experiences as to the absolute.

So much, then, in order that you may not be confused about my
strategical objective. The real point to defend against the logic that
I have used is the identity of the collective and distributive anyhow,
not the particular example of such identity known as the absolute.

So now for the directer question. Shall we say that every complex
mental fact is a separate psychic entity succeeding upon a lot of
other psychic entities which are erroneously called its parts, and
superseding them in function, but not literally being composed of
them? This was the course I took in my psychology; and if followed in
theology, we should have to deny the absolute as usually conceived,
and replace it by the 'God' of theism. We should also have to deny
Fechner's 'earth-soul' and all other superhuman collections of
experience of every grade, so far at least as these are held to be
compounded of our simpler souls in the way which Fechner believed
in; and we should have to make all these denials in the name of the
incorruptible logic of self-identity, teaching us that to call a thing
and its other the same is to commit the crime of self-contradiction.

But if we realize the whole philosophic situation thus produced,
we see that it is almost intolerable. Loyal to the logical kind of
rationality, it is disloyal to every other kind. It makes the universe
discontinuous. These fields of experience that replace each other
so punctually, each knowing the same matter, but in ever-widening
contexts, from simplest feeling up to absolute knowledge, _can_
they have no _being_ in common when their cognitive function is so
manifestly common? The regular succession of them is on such terms an
unintelligible miracle. If you reply that their common _object_ is
of itself enough to make the many witnesses continuous, the same
implacable logic follows you--how _can_ one and the same object appear
so variously? Its diverse appearances break it into a plurality; and
our world of objects then falls into discontinuous pieces quite as
much as did our world of subjects. The resultant irrationality is
really intolerable.

I said awhile ago that I was envious of Fechner and the other
pantheists because I myself wanted the same freedom that I saw them
unscrupulously enjoying, of letting mental fields compound themselves
and so make the universe more continuous, but that my conscience held
me prisoner. In my heart of hearts, however, I knew that my situation
was absurd and could be only provisional. That secret of a continuous
life which the universe knows by heart and acts on every instant
cannot be a contradiction incarnate. If logic says it is one, so
much the worse for logic. Logic being the lesser thing, the static
incomplete abstraction, must succumb to reality, not reality to logic.
Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in its
chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the
universe that engendered it. Fechner, Royce, and Hegel seem on the
truer path. Fechner has never heard of logic's veto, Royce hears the
voice but cannily ignores the utterances, Hegel hears them but to
spurn them--and all go on their way rejoicing. Shall we alone obey the
veto?

Sincerely, and patiently as I could, I struggled with the problem for
years, covering hundreds of sheets of paper with notes and memoranda
and discussions with myself over the difficulty. How can many
consciousnesses be at the same time one consciousness? How can one and
the same identical fact experience itself so diversely? The struggle
was vain; I found myself in an _impasse_. I saw that I must either
forswear that 'psychology without a soul' to which my whole
psychological and kantian education had committed me,--I must, in
short, bring back distinct spiritual agents to know the mental states,
now singly and now in combination, in a word bring back scholasticism
and common sense--or else I must squarely confess the solution of
the problem impossible, and then either give up my intellectualistic
logic, the logic of identity, and adopt some higher (or lower) form
of rationality, or, finally, face the fact that life is logically
irrational.

Sincerely, this is the actual trilemma that confronts every one of us.
Those of you who are scholastic-minded, or simply common-sense minded,
will smile at the elaborate groans of my parturient mountain resulting
in nothing but this mouse. Accept the spiritual agents, for heaven's
sake, you will say, and leave off your ridiculous pedantry. Let but
our 'souls' combine our sensations by their intellectual faculties,
and let but 'God' replace the pantheistic world-soul, and your wheels
will go round again--you will enjoy both life and logic together.

This solution is obvious and I know that many of you will adopt it. It
is comfortable, and all our habits of speech support it. Yet it is not
for idle or fantastical reasons that the notion of the substantial
soul, so freely used by common men and the more popular philosophies,
has fallen upon such evil days, and has no prestige in the eyes of
critical thinkers. It only shares the fate of other unrepresentable
substances and principles. They are without exception all so barren
that to sincere inquirers they appear as little more than names
masquerading--Wo die begriffe fehlen da stellt ein wort zur rechten
zeit sich ein. You see no deeper into the fact that a hundred
sensations get compounded or known together by thinking that a 'soul'
does the compounding than you see into a man's living eighty years by
thinking of him as an octogenarian, or into our having five fingers by
calling us pentadactyls. Souls have worn out both themselves and
their welcome, that is the plain truth. Philosophy ought to get the
manifolds of experience unified on principles less empty. Like the
word 'cause,' the word 'soul' is but a theoretic stop-gap--it marks a
place and claims it for a future explanation to occupy.

This being our post-humian and post-kantian state of mind, I will ask
your permission to leave the soul wholly out of the present discussion
and to consider only the residual dilemma. Some day, indeed, souls may
get their innings again in philosophy--I am quite ready to admit that
possibility--they form a category of thought too natural to the human
mind to expire without prolonged resistance. But if the belief in the
soul ever does come to life after the many funeral-discourses which
humian and kantian criticism have preached over it, I am sure it will
be only when some one has found in the term a pragmatic significance
that has hitherto eluded observation. When that champion speaks, as
he well may speak some day, it will be time to consider souls more
seriously.

Let us leave out the soul, then, and confront what I just called
the residual dilemma. Can we, on the one hand, give up the logic
of identity?--can we, on the other, believe human experience to be
fundamentally irrational? Neither is easy, yet it would seem that we
must do one or the other.

Few philosophers have had the frankness fairly to admit the necessity
of choosing between the 'horns' offered. Reality must be rational,
they have said, and since the ordinary intellectualist logic is
the only usual test of rationality, reality and logic must agree
'somehow.' Hegel was the first non-mystical writer to face the
dilemma squarely and throw away the ordinary logic, saving a
pseudo-rationality for the universe by inventing the higher logic of
the 'dialectic process.' Bradley holds to the intellectualist logic,
and by dint of it convicts the human universe of being irrationality
incarnate. But what must be and can be, is, he says; there must and
can be relief from _that_ irrationality; and the absolute must already
have got the relief in secret ways of its own, impossible for us to
guess at. _We_ of course get no relief, so Bradley's is a rather
ascetic doctrine. Royce and Taylor accept similar solutions, only they
emphasize the irrationality of our finite universe less than Bradley
does; and Royce in particular, being unusually 'thick' for an
idealist, tries to bring the absolute's secret forms of relief more
sympathetically home to our imagination.

Well, what must we do in this tragic predicament? For my own part, I
have finally found myself compelled to _give up the logic_, fairly,
squarely, and irrevocably. It has an imperishable use in human life,
but that use is not to make us theoretically acquainted with the
essential nature of reality--just what it is I can perhaps suggest
to you a little later. Reality, life, experience, concreteness,
immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows and
surrounds it. If you like to employ words eulogistically, as most
men do, and so encourage confusion, you may say that reality obeys a
higher logic, or enjoys a higher rationality. But I think that
even eulogistic words should be used rather to distinguish than
to commingle meanings, so I prefer bluntly to call reality if not
irrational then at least non-rational in its constitution,--and by
reality here I mean reality where things _happen_, all temporal
reality without exception. I myself find no good warrant for even
suspecting the existence of any reality of a higher denomination than
that distributed and strung-along and flowing sort of reality which we
finite beings swim in. That is the sort of reality given us, and that
is the sort with which logic is so incommensurable. If there be any
higher sort of reality--the 'absolute,' for example--that sort, by
the confession of those who believe in it, is still less amenable
to ordinary logic; it transcends logic and is therefore still less
rational in the intellectualist sense, so it cannot help us to save
our logic as an adequate definer and confiner of existence.

These sayings will sound queer and dark, probably they will sound
quite wild or childish in the absence of explanatory comment. Only the
persuasion that I soon can explain them, if not satisfactorily to all
of you, at least intelligibly, emboldens me to state them thus baldly
as a sort of programme. Please take them as a thesis, therefore, to be
defended by later pleading.

I told you that I had long and sincerely wrestled with the dilemma. I
have now to confess (and this will probably re-animate your interest)
that I should not now be emancipated, not now subordinate logic with
so very light a heart, or throw it out of the deeper regions of
philosophy to take its rightful and respectable place in the world of
simple human practice, if I had not been influenced by a comparatively
young and very original french writer, Professor Henri Bergson.
Reading his works is what has made me bold. If I had not read
Bergson, I should probably still be blackening endless pages of paper
privately, in the hope of making ends meet that were never meant to
meet, and trying to discover some mode of conceiving the behavior of
reality which should leave no discrepancy between it and the accepted
laws of the logic of identity. It is certain, at any rate, that
without the confidence which being able to lean on Bergson's authority
gives me I should never have ventured to urge these particular views
of mine upon this ultra-critical audience.

I must therefore, in order to make my own views more intelligible,
give some preliminary account of the bergsonian philosophy. But here,
as in Fechner's case, I must confine myself only to the features
that are essential to the present purpose, and not entangle you in
collateral details, however interesting otherwise. For our present
purpose, then, the essential contribution of Bergson to philosophy
is his criticism of intellectualism. In my opinion he has killed
intellectualism definitively and without hope of recovery. I don't
see how it can ever revive again in its ancient platonizing rôle of
claiming to be the most authentic, intimate, and exhaustive definer
of the nature of reality. Others, as Kant for example, have denied
intellectualism's pretensions to define reality _an sich_ or in its
absolute capacity; but Kant still leaves it laying down laws--and laws
from which there is no appeal--to all our human experience; while what
Bergson denies is that its methods give any adequate account of this
human experience in its very finiteness. Just how Bergson accomplishes
all this I must try to tell in my imperfect way in the next lecture;
but since I have already used the words 'logic,' 'logic of identity,
intellectualistic logic,' and 'intellectualism' so often, and
sometimes used them as if they required no particular explanation, it
will be wise at this point to say at greater length than heretofore in
what sense I take these terms when I claim that Bergson has refuted
their pretension to decide what reality can or cannot be. Just what I
mean by intellectualism is therefore what I shall try to give a fuller
idea of during the remainder of this present hour.

In recent controversies some participants have shown resentment
at being classed as intellectualists. I mean to use the word
disparagingly, but shall be sorry if it works offence. Intellectualism
has its source in the faculty which gives us our chief superiority to
the brutes, our power, namely, of translating the crude flux of our
merely feeling-experience into a conceptual order. An immediate
experience, as yet unnamed or classed, is a mere _that_ that we
undergo, a thing that asks, '_What_ am I?' When we name and class it,
we say for the first time what it is, and all these whats are abstract
names or concepts. Each concept means a particular _kind_ of thing,
and as things seem once for all to have been created in kinds, a far
more efficient handling of a given bit of experience begins as soon as
we have classed the various parts of it. Once classed, a thing can be
treated by the law of its class, and the advantages are endless. Both
theoretically and practically this power of framing abstract concepts
is one of the sublimest of our human prerogatives. We come back
into the concrete from our journey into these abstractions, with an
increase both of vision and of power. It is no wonder that earlier
thinkers, forgetting that concepts are only man-made extracts from the
temporal flux, should have ended by treating them as a superior type
of being, bright, changeless, true, divine, and utterly opposed in
nature to the turbid, restless lower world. The latter then appears as
but their corruption and falsification.

Intellectualism in the vicious sense began when Socrates and Plato
taught that what a thing really is, is told us by its _definition_.
Ever since Socrates we have been taught that reality consists of
essences, not of appearances, and that the essences of things are
known whenever we know their definitions. So first we identify
the thing with a concept and then we identify the concept with a
definition, and only then, inasmuch as the thing _is_ whatever the
definition expresses, are we sure of apprehending the real essence of
it or the full truth about it.

So far no harm is done. The misuse of concepts begins with the habit
of employing them privatively as well as positively, using them not
merely to assign properties to things, but to deny the very properties
with which the things sensibly present themselves. Logic can extract
all its possible consequences from any definition, and the logician
who is _unerbittlich consequent_ is often tempted, when he cannot
extract a certain property from a definition, to deny that the
concrete object to which the definition applies can possibly possess
that property. The definition that fails to yield it must exclude or
negate it. This is Hegel's regular method of establishing his system.

It is but the old story, of a useful practice first becoming a method,
then a habit, and finally a tyranny that defeats the end it was used
for. Concepts, first employed to make things intelligible, are clung
to even when they make them unintelligible. Thus it comes that when
once you have conceived things as 'independent,' you must proceed to
deny the possibility of any connexion whatever among them, because
the notion of connexion is not contained in the definition of
independence. For a like reason you must deny any possible forms or
modes of unity among things which you have begun by defining as a
'many.' We have cast a glance at Hegel's and Bradley's use of this
sort of reasoning, and you will remember Sigwart's epigram that
according to it a horseman can never in his life go on foot, or a
photographer ever do anything but photograph.

The classic extreme in this direction is the denial of the possibility
of change, and the consequent branding of the world of change as
unreal, by certain philosophers. The definition of A is changeless,
so is the definition of B. The one definition cannot change into
the other, so the notion that a concrete thing A should change into
another concrete thing B is made Out to be contrary to reason. In Mr.
Bradley's difficulty in seeing how sugar can be sweet intellectualism
outstrips itself and becomes openly a sort of verbalism. Sugar is just
sugar and sweet is just sweet; neither is the other; nor can the
word 'is' ever be understood to join any subject to its predicate
rationally. Nothing 'between' things can connect them, for 'between'
is just that third thing, 'between,' and would need itself to be
connected to the first and second things by two still finer betweens,
and so on ad infinitum.

The particular intellectualistic difficulty that had held my own
thought so long in a vise was, as we have seen at such tedious length,
the impossibility of understanding how 'your' experience and 'mine,'
which 'as such' are defined as not conscious of each other, can
nevertheless at the same time be members of a world-experience defined
expressly as having all its parts co-conscious, or known together. The
definitions are contradictory, so the things defined can in no way be
united. You see how unintelligible intellectualism here seems to make
the world of our most accomplished philosophers. Neither as they
use it nor as we use it does it do anything but make nature look
irrational and seem impossible.

In my next lecture, using Bergson as my principal topic, I shall enter
into more concrete details and try, by giving up intellectualism
frankly, to make, if not the world, at least my own general thesis,
less unintelligible.




LECTURE VI


BERGSON AND HIS CRITIQUE OF INTELLECTUALISM

I gave you a very stiff lecture last time, and I fear that this one
can be little less so. The best way of entering into it will be to
begin immediately with Bergson's philosophy, since I told you that
that was what had led me personally to renounce the intellectualistic
method and the current notion that logic is an adequate measure of
what can or cannot be.

Professor Henri Bergson is a young man, comparatively, as influential
philosophers go, having been born at Paris in 1859. His career has
been the perfectly routine one of a successful french professor.
Entering the école normale supérieure at the age of twenty-two, he
spent the next seventeen years teaching at _lycées_, provincial or
parisian, until his fortieth year, when he was made professor at the
said école normale. Since 1900 he has been professor at the College de
France, and member of the Institute since 1900. So far as the outward
facts go, Bergson's career has then been commonplace to the utmost.
Neither one of Taine's famous principles of explanation of great
men, _the race, the environment, or the moment_, no, nor all three
together, will explain that peculiar way of looking at things that
constitutes his mental individuality. Originality in men dates from
nothing previous, other things date from it, rather. I have to confess
that Bergson's originality is so profuse that many of his ideas baffle
me entirely. I doubt whether any one understands him all over, so to
speak; and I am sure that he would himself be the first to see that
this must be, and to confess that things which he himself has not yet
thought out clearly, had yet to be mentioned and have a tentative
place assigned them in his philosophy. Many of us are profusely
original, in that no man can understand us--violently peculiar ways
of looking at things are no great rarity. The rarity is when great
peculiarity of vision is allied with great lucidity and unusual
command of all the classic expository apparatus. Bergson's resources
in the way of erudition are remarkable, and in the way of expression
they are simply phenomenal. This is why in France, where _l'art de
bien dire_ counts for so much and is so sure of appreciation, he has
immediately taken so eminent a place in public esteem. Old-fashioned
professors, whom his ideas quite fail to satisfy, nevertheless speak
of his talent almost with bated breath, while the youngsters flock to
him as to a master.

If anything can make hard things easy to follow, it is a style like
Bergson's. A 'straightforward' style, an american reviewer lately
called it; failing to see that such straightforwardness means a
flexibility of verbal resource that follows the thought without a
crease or wrinkle, as elastic silk underclothing follows the movements
of one's body. The lucidity of Bergson's way of putting things is what
all readers are first struck by. It seduces you and bribes you in
advance to become his disciple. It is a miracle, and he a real
magician.

M. Bergson, if I am rightly informed, came into philosophy through the
gateway of mathematics. The old antinomies of the infinite were,
I imagine, the irritant that first woke his faculties from their
dogmatic slumber. You all remember Zeno's famous paradox, or sophism,
as many of our logic books still call it, of Achilles and the
tortoise. Give that reptile ever so small an advance and the swift
runner Achilles can never overtake him, much less get ahead of him;
for if space and time are infinitely divisible (as our intellects
tell us they must be), by the time Achilles reaches the tortoise's
starting-point, the tortoise has already got ahead of _that_
starting-point, and so on _ad infinitum_, the interval between the
pursuer and the pursued growing endlessly minuter, but never becoming
wholly obliterated. The common way of showing up the sophism here is
by pointing out the ambiguity of the expression 'never can overtake.'
What the word 'never' falsely suggests, it is said, is an infinite
duration of time; what it really means is the inexhaustible number of
the steps of which the overtaking must consist. But if these steps are
infinitely short, a finite time will suffice for them; and in point of
fact they do rapidly converge, whatever be the original interval
or the contrasted speeds, toward infinitesimal shortness. This
proportionality of the shortness of the times to that of the spaces
required frees us, it is claimed, from the sophism which the word
'never' suggests.

But this criticism misses Zeno's point entirely. Zeno would have been
perfectly willing to grant that if the tortoise can be overtaken at
all, he can be overtaken in (say) twenty seconds, but he would still
have insisted that he can't be overtaken at all. Leave Achilles and
the tortoise out of the account altogether, he would have said--they
complicate the case unnecessarily. Take any single process of change
whatever, take the twenty seconds themselves elapsing. If time be
infinitely divisible, and it must be so on intellectualist principles,
they simply cannot elapse, their end cannot be reached; for no matter
how much of them has already elapsed, before the remainder, however
minute, can have wholly elapsed, the earlier half of it must first
have elapsed. And this ever re-arising need of making the earlier half
elapse _first_ leaves time with always something to do _before_ the
last thing is done, so that the last thing never gets done. Expressed
in bare numbers, it is like the convergent series 1/2 plus 1/4 plus
1/8..., of which the limit is one. But this limit, simply because it
is a limit, stands outside the series, the value of which approaches
it indefinitely but never touches it. If in the natural world there
were no other way of getting things save by such successive addition
of their logically involved fractions, no complete units or whole
things would ever come into being, for the fractions' sum would always
leave a remainder. But in point of fact nature doesn't make eggs by
making first half an egg, then a quarter, then an eighth, etc., and
adding them together. She either makes a whole egg at once or none
at all, and so of all her other units. It is only in the sphere of
change, then, where one phase of a thing must needs come into being
before another phase can come that Zeno's paradox gives trouble.

And it gives trouble then only if the succession of steps of change
be infinitely divisible. If a bottle had to be emptied by an infinite
number of successive decrements, it is mathematically impossible that
the emptying should ever positively terminate. In point of fact,
however, bottles and coffee-pots empty themselves by a finite number
of decrements, each of definite amount. Either a whole drop emerges or
nothing emerges from the spout. If all change went thus drop-wise,
so to speak, if real time sprouted or grew by units of duration of
determinate amount, just as our perceptions of it grow by pulses,
there would be no zenonian paradoxes or kantian antinomies to trouble
us. All our sensible experiences, as we get them immediately, do thus
change by discrete pulses of perception, each of which keeps us saying
'more, more, more,' or 'less, less, less,' as the definite increments
or diminutions make themselves felt. The discreteness is still more
obvious when, instead of old things changing, they cease, or when
altogether new things come. Fechner's term of the 'threshold,' which
has played such a part in the psychology of perception, is only one
way of naming the quantitative discreteness in the change of all our
sensible experiences. They come to us in drops. Time itself comes in
drops.

Our ideal decomposition of the drops which are all that we feel into
still finer fractions is but an incident in that great transformation
of the perceptual order into a conceptual order of which I spoke in
my last lecture. It is made in the interest of our rationalizing
intellect solely. The times directly _felt_ in the experiences of
living subjects have originally no common measure. Let a lump of sugar
melt in a glass, to use one of M. Bergson's instances. We feel the
time to be long while waiting for the process to end, but who knows
how long or how short it feels to the sugar? All _felt_ times coexist
and overlap or compenetrate each other thus vaguely, but the artifice
of plotting them on a common scale helps us to reduce their aboriginal
confusion, and it helps us still more to plot, against the same scale,
the successive possible steps into which nature's various changes may
be resolved, either sensibly or conceivably. We thus straighten out
the aboriginal privacy and vagueness, and can date things publicly, as
it were, and by each other. The notion of one objective and 'evenly
flowing' time, cut into numbered instants, applies itself as a common
measure to all the steps and phases, no matter how many, into which we
cut the processes of nature. They are now definitely contemporary,
or later or earlier one than another, and we can handle them
mathematically, as we say, and far better, practically as well as
theoretically, for having thus correlated them one to one with each
other on the common schematic or conceptual time-scale.

Motion, to take a good example, is originally a turbid sensation, of
which the native shape is perhaps best preserved in the phenomenon of
vertigo. In vertigo we feel that movement _is_, and is more or less
violent or rapid, more or less in this direction or that, more or less
alarming or sickening. But a man subject to vertigo may gradually
learn to co-ordinate his felt motion with his real position and that
of other things, and intellectualize it enough to succeed at last in
walking without staggering. The mathematical mind similarly organizes
motion in its way, putting it into a logical definition: motion is now
conceived as 'the occupancy of serially successive points of space
at serially successive instants of time.' With such a definition we
escape wholly from the turbid privacy of sense. But do we not also
escape from sense-reality altogether? Whatever motion really may be,
it surely is not static; but the definition we have gained is of the
absolutely static. It gives a set of one-to-one relations between
space-points and time-points, which relations themselves are as fixed
as the points are. It gives _positions_ assignable ad infinitum, but
how the body gets from one position to another it omits to mention.
The body gets there by moving, of course; but the conceived positions,
however numerously multiplied, contain no element of movement, so
Zeno, using nothing but them in his discussion, has no alternative
but to say that our intellect repudiates motion as a non-reality.
Intellectualism here does what I said it does--it makes experience
less instead of more intelligible.

We of course need a stable scheme of concepts, stably related with
one another, to lay hold of our experiences and to co-ordinate them
withal. When an experience comes with sufficient saliency to stand
out, we keep the thought of it for future use, and store it in our
conceptual system. What does not of itself stand out, we learn to
_cut_ out; so the system grows completer, and new reality, as it
comes, gets named after and conceptually strung upon this or that
element of it which we have already established. The immutability
of such an abstract system is its great practical merit; the same
identical terms and relations in it can always be recovered and
referred to--change itself is just such an unalterable concept. But
all these abstract concepts are but as flowers gathered, they are only
moments dipped out from the stream of time, snap-shots taken, as by
a kinetoscopic camera, at a life that in its original coming is
continuous. Useful as they are as samples of the garden, or to
re-enter the stream with, or to insert in our revolving lantern, they
have no value but these practical values. You cannot explain by them
what makes any single phenomenon be or go--you merely dot out the path
of appearances which it traverses. For you cannot make continuous
being out of discontinuities, and your concepts are discontinuous. The
stages into which you analyze a change are _states_, the change itself
goes on between them. It lies along their intervals, inhabits what
your definition fails to gather up, and thus eludes conceptual
explanation altogether.

'When the mathematician,' Bergson writes, 'calculates the state of
a system at the end of a time _t_, nothing need prevent him from
supposing that betweenwhiles the universe vanishes, in order suddenly
to appear again at the due moment in the new configuration. It is
only the _t_-th moment that counts--that which flows throughout the
intervals, namely real time, plays no part in his calculation.... In
short, the world on which the mathematician operates is a world which
dies and is born anew at every instant, like the world which Descartes
thought of when he spoke of a continued creation.' To know adequately
what really _happens_ we ought, Bergson insists, to see into the
intervals, but the mathematician sees only their extremities. He
fixes only a few results, he dots a curve and then interpolates, he
substitutes a tracing for a reality.

This being so undeniably the case, the history of the way in which
philosophy has dealt with it is curious. The ruling tradition in
philosophy has always been the platonic and aristotelian belief that
fixity is a nobler and worthier thing than change. Reality must be one
and unalterable. Concepts, being themselves fixities, agree best with
this fixed nature of truth, so that for any knowledge of ours to be
quite true it must be knowledge by universal concepts rather than
by particular experiences, for these notoriously are mutable and
corruptible. This is the tradition known as rationalism in philosophy,
and what I have called intellectualism is only the extreme application
of it. In spite of sceptics and empiricists, in spite of Protagoras,
Hume, and James Mill, rationalism has never been seriously questioned,
for its sharpest critics have always had a tender place in their
hearts for it, and have obeyed some of its mandates. They have not
been consistent; they have played fast and loose with the enemy; and
Bergson alone has been radical.

To show what I mean by this, let me contrast his procedure with that
of some of the transcendentalist philosophers whom I have lately
mentioned. Coming after Kant, these pique themselves on being
'critical,' on building in fact upon Kant's 'critique' of pure reason.
What that critique professed to establish was this, that concepts do
not apprehend reality, but only such appearances as our senses
feed out to them. They give immutable intellectual forms to these
appearances, it is true, but the reality _an sich_ from which in
ultimate resort the sense-appearances have to come remains forever
unintelligible to our intellect. Take motion, for example. Sensibly,
motion comes in drops, waves, or pulses; either some actual amount of
it, or none, being apprehended. This amount is the datum or _gabe_
which reality feeds out to our intellectual faculty; but our intellect
makes of it a task or _aufgabe_--this pun is one of the most memorable
of Kant's formulas--and insists that in every pulse of it an infinite
number of successive minor pulses shall be ascertainable. These minor
pulses _we_ can indeed _go on_ to ascertain or to compute indefinitely
if we have patience; but it would contradict the definition of an
infinite number to suppose the endless series of them to have actually
counted _themselves_ out piecemeal. Zeno made this manifest; so the
infinity which our intellect requires of the sense-datum is thus
a future and potential rather than a past and actual infinity of
structure. The datum after it has made itself must be decompos_able_
ad infinitum by our conception, but of the steps by which that
structure actually got composed we know nothing. Our intellect casts,
in short, no ray of light on the processes by which experiences _get
made_.

Kant's monistic successors have in general found the data of immediate
experience even more self-contradictory, when intellectually treated,
than Kant did. Not only the character of infinity involved in the
relation of various empirical data to their 'conditions,' but the very
notion that empirical things should be related to one another at all,
has seemed to them, when the intellectualistic fit was upon them, full
of paradox and contradiction. We saw in a former lecture numerous
instances of this from Hegel, Bradley, Royce, and others. We saw also
where the solution of such an intolerable state of things was sought
for by these authors. Whereas Kant had placed it outside of and
_before_ our experience, in the _dinge an sich_ which are the causes
of the latter, his monistic successors all look for it either _after_
experience, as its absolute completion, or else consider it to be even
now implicit within experience as its ideal signification. Kant and
his successors look, in short, in diametrically opposite directions.
Do not be misled by Kant's admission of theism into his system.
His God is the ordinary dualistic God of Christianity, to whom his
philosophy simply opens the door; he has nothing whatsoever in common
with the 'absolute spirit' set up by his successors. So far as this
absolute spirit is logically derived from Kant, it is not from his
God, but from entirely different elements of his philosophy. First
from his notion that an unconditioned totality of the conditions of
any experience must be assignable; and then from his other notion that
the presence of some witness, or ego of apperception, is the most
universal of all the conditions in question. The post-kantians make
of the witness-condition what is called a concrete universal, an
individualized all-witness or world-self, which shall imply in its
rational constitution each and all of the other conditions put
together, and therefore necessitate each and all of the conditioned
experiences.

Abridgments like this of other men's opinions are very unsatisfactory,
they always work injustice; but in this case those of you who are
familiar with the literature will see immediately what I have in mind;
and to the others, if there be any here, it will suffice to say that
what I am trying so pedantically to point out is only the fact that
monistic idealists after Kant have invariably sought relief from the
supposed contradictions of our world of sense by looking forward
toward an _ens rationis_ conceived as its integration or logical
completion, while he looked backward toward non-rational _dinge an
sich_ conceived as its cause. Pluralistic empiricists, on the other
hand, have remained in the world of sense, either naïvely and because
they overlooked the intellectualistic contradictions, or because, not
able to ignore them, they thought they could refute them by a superior
use of the same intellectualistic logic. Thus it is that John Mill
pretends to refute the Achilles-tortoise fallacy.

The important point to notice here is the intellectualist logic. Both
sides treat it as authoritative, but they do so capriciously: the
absolutists smashing the world of sense by its means, the empiricists
smashing the absolute--for the absolute, they say, is the quintessence
of all logical contradictions. Neither side attains consistency.
The Hegelians have to invoke a higher logic to supersede the purely
destructive efforts of their first logic. The empiricists use their
logic against the absolute, but refuse to use it against finite
experience. Each party uses it or drops it to suit the vision it has
faith in, but neither impugns in principle its general theoretic
authority.

Bergson alone challenges its theoretic authority in principle. He
alone denies that mere conceptual logic can tell us what is impossible
or possible in the world of being or fact; and he does so for reasons
which at the same time that they rule logic out from lordship over the
whole of life, establish a vast and definite sphere of influence where
its sovereignty is indisputable. Bergson's own text, felicitous as
it is, is too intricate for quotation, so I must use my own inferior
words in explaining what I mean by saying this.

In the first place, logic, giving primarily the relations between
concepts as such, and the relations between natural facts only
secondarily or so far as the facts have been already identified with
concepts and defined by them, must of course stand or fall with the
conceptual method. But the conceptual method is a transformation which
the flux of life undergoes at our hands in the interests of practice
essentially and only subordinately in the interests of theory. We
live forward, we understand backward, said a danish writer; and to
understand life by concepts is to arrest its movement, cutting it up
into bits as if with scissors, and immobilizing these in our logical
herbarium where, comparing them as dried specimens, we can ascertain
which of them statically includes or excludes which other. This
treatment supposes life to have already accomplished itself, for the
concepts, being so many views taken after the fact, are retrospective
and post mortem. Nevertheless we can draw conclusions from them and
project them into the future. We cannot learn from them how life made
itself go, or how it will make itself go; but, on the supposition that
its ways of making itself go are unchanging, we can calculate what
positions of imagined arrest it will exhibit hereafter under given
conditions. We can compute, for instance, at what point Achilles
will be, and where the tortoise will be, at the end of the twentieth
minute. Achilles may then be at a point far ahead; but the full detail
of how he will have managed practically to get there our logic never
gives us--we have seen, indeed, that it finds that its results
contradict the facts of nature. The computations which the other
sciences make differ in no respect from those of mathematics. The
concepts used are all of them dots through which, by interpolation or
extrapolation, curves are drawn, while along the curves other dots are
found as consequences. The latest refinements of logic dispense
with the curves altogether, and deal solely with the dots and their
correspondences each to each in various series. The authors of these
recent improvements tell us expressly that their aim is to abolish the
last vestiges of intuition, _videlicet_ of concrete reality, from the
field of reasoning, which then will operate literally on mental dots
or bare abstract units of discourse, and on the ways in which they may
be strung in naked series.

This is all very esoteric, and my own understanding of it is most
likely misunderstanding. So I speak here only by way of brief reminder
to those who know. For the rest of us it is enough to recognize this
fact, that altho by means of concepts cut out from the sensible flux
of the past, we can re-descend upon the future flux and, making
another cut, say what particular thing is likely to be found there;
and that altho in this sense concepts give us knowledge, and may be
said to have some theoretic value (especially when the particular
thing foretold is one in which we take no present practical interest);
yet in the deeper sense of giving _insight_ they have no theoretic
value, for they quite fail to connect us with the inner life of the
flux, or with the causes that govern its direction. Instead of being
interpreters of reality, concepts negate the inwardness of reality
altogether. They make the whole notion of a causal influence between
finite things incomprehensible. No real activities and indeed no real
connexions of any kind can obtain if we follow the conceptual logic;
for to be distinguishable, according to what I call intellectualism,
is to be incapable of connexion. The work begun by Zeno, and continued
by Hume, Kant, Herbart, Hegel, and Bradley, does not stop till
sensible reality lies entirely disintegrated at the feet of 'reason.'

Of the 'absolute' reality which reason proposes to substitute for
sensible reality I shall have more to say presently. Meanwhile you see
what Professor Bergson means by insisting that the function of the
intellect is practical rather than theoretical. Sensible reality is
too concrete to be entirely manageable--look at the narrow range of it
which is all that any animal, living in it exclusively as he does, is
able to compass. To get from one point in it to another we have to
plough or wade through the whole intolerable interval. No detail is
spared us; it is as bad as the barbed-wire complications at Port
Arthur, and we grow old and die in the process. But with our faculty
of abstracting and fixing concepts we are there in a second, almost as
if we controlled a fourth dimension, skipping the intermediaries as
by a divine winged power, and getting at the exact point we require
without entanglement with any context. What we do in fact is to
_harness up_ reality in our conceptual systems in order to drive it
the better. This process is practical because all the termini to which
we drive are _particular_ termini, even when they are facts of the
mental order. But the sciences in which the conceptual method chiefly
celebrates its triumphs are those of space and matter, where the
transformations of external things are dealt with. To deal with moral
facts conceptually, we have first to transform them, substitute
brain-diagrams or physical metaphors, treat ideas as atoms, interests
as mechanical forces, our conscious 'selves' as 'streams,' and the
like. Paradoxical effect! as Bergson well remarks, if our intellectual
life were not practical but destined to reveal the inner natures.
One would then suppose that it would find itself most at home in the
domain of its own intellectual realities. But it is precisely there
that it finds itself at the end of its tether. We know the inner
movements of our spirit only perceptually. We feel them live in us,
but can give no distinct account of their elements, nor definitely
predict their future; while things that lie along the world of space,
things of the sort that we literally _handle_, are what our intellects
cope with most successfully. Does not this confirm us in the view that
the original and still surviving function of our intellectual life
is to guide us in the practical adaptation of our expectancies and
activities?

One can easily get into a verbal mess at this point, and my own
experience with pragmatism' makes me shrink from the dangers that lie
in the word 'practical,' and far rather than stand out against you for
that word, I am quite willing to part company with Professor Bergson,
and to ascribe a primarily theoretical function to our intellect,
provided you on your part then agree to discriminate 'theoretic' or
scientific knowledge from the deeper 'speculative' knowledge aspired
to by most philosophers, and concede that theoretic knowledge,
which is knowledge _about_ things, as distinguished from living or
sympathetic acquaintance with them, touches only the outer surface of
reality. The surface which theoretic knowledge taken in this sense
covers may indeed be enormous in extent; it may dot the whole diameter
of space and time with its conceptual creations; but it does not
penetrate a millimeter into the solid dimension. That inner dimension
of reality is occupied by the _activities_ that keep it going, but the
intellect, speaking through Hume, Kant & Co., finds itself obliged to
deny, and persists in denying, that activities have any intelligible
existence. What exists for _thought_, we are told, is at most the
results that we illusorily ascribe to such activities, strung along
the surfaces of space and time by _regeln der verknüpfung_, laws of
nature which state only coexistences and successions.[1]

Thought deals thus solely with surfaces. It can name the thickness
of reality, but it cannot fathom it, and its insufficiency here is
essential and permanent, not temporary.

The only way in which to apprehend reality's thickness is either to
experience it directly by being a part of reality one's self, or to
evoke it in imagination by sympathetically divining some one else's
inner life. But what we thus immediately experience or concretely
divine is very limited in duration, whereas abstractly we are able to
conceive eternities. Could we feel a million years concretely as we
now feel a passing minute, we should have very little employment for
our conceptual faculty. We should know the whole period fully at every
moment of its passage, whereas we must now construct it laboriously by
means of concepts which we project. Direct acquaintance and conceptual
knowledge are thus complementary of each other; each remedies the
other's defects. If what we care most about be the synoptic treatment
of phenomena, the vision of the far and the gathering of the scattered
like, we must follow the conceptual method. But if, as metaphysicians,
we are more curious about the inner nature of reality or about what
really makes it go, we must turn our backs upon our winged concepts
altogether, and bury ourselves in the thickness of those passing
moments over the surface of which they fly, and on particular points
of which they occasionally rest and perch.

Professor Bergson thus inverts the traditional platonic doctrine
absolutely. Instead of intellectual knowledge being the profounder,
he calls it the more superficial. Instead of being the only adequate
knowledge, it is grossly inadequate, and its only superiority is the
practical one of enabling us to make short cuts through experience
and thereby to save time. The one thing it cannot do is to reveal the
nature of things--which last remark, if not clear already, will become
clearer as I proceed. Dive back into the flux itself, then, Bergson
tells us, if you wish to _know_ reality, that flux which Platonism, in
its strange belief that only the immutable is excellent, has always
spurned; turn your face toward sensation, that flesh-bound thing which
rationalism has always loaded with abuse.--This, you see, is exactly
the opposite remedy from that of looking forward into the absolute,
which our idealistic contemporaries prescribe. It violates our mental
habits, being a kind of passive and receptive listening quite contrary
to that effort to react noisily and verbally on everything, which is
our usual intellectual pose.

What, then, are the peculiar features in the perceptual flux which the
conceptual translation so fatally leaves out?

The essence of life is its continuously changing character; but our
concepts are all discontinuous and fixed, and the only mode of making
them coincide with life is by arbitrarily supposing positions of
arrest therein. With such arrests our concepts may be made congruent.
But these concepts are not _parts_ of reality, not real positions
taken by it, but _suppositions_ rather, notes taken by ourselves, and
you can no more dip up the substance of reality with them than you can
dip up water with a net, however finely meshed.

When we conceptualize, we cut out and fix, and exclude everything
but what we have fixed. A concept means a _that-and-no-other_.
Conceptually, time excludes space; motion and rest exclude each other;
approach excludes contact; presence excludes absence; unity excludes
plurality; independence excludes relativity; 'mine' excludes 'yours';
this connexion excludes that connexion--and so on indefinitely;
whereas in the real concrete sensible flux of life experiences
compenetrate each other so that it is not easy to know just what is
excluded and what not. Past and future, for example, conceptually
separated by the cut to which we give the name of present, and defined
as being the opposite sides of that cut, are to some extent, however
brief, co-present with each other throughout experience. The literally
present moment is a purely verbal supposition, not a position; the
only present ever realized concretely being the 'passing moment' in
which the dying rearward of time and its dawning future forever mix
their lights. Say 'now' and it _was_ even while you say it.

It is just intellectualism's attempt to substitute static cuts
for units of experienced duration that makes real motion so
unintelligible. The conception of the first half of the interval
between Achilles and the tortoise excludes that of the last half, and
the mathematical necessity of traversing it separately before the last
half is traversed stands permanently in the way of the last half ever
being traversed. Meanwhile the living Achilles (who, for the purposes
of this discussion, is only the abstract name of one phenomenon of
impetus, just as the tortoise is of another) asks no leave of logic.
The velocity of his acts is an indivisible nature in them like the
expansive tension in a spring compressed. We define it conceptually as
[_s/t_], but the _s_ and _t_ are only artificial cuts made after the
fact, and indeed most artificial when we treat them in both runners
as the same tracts of 'objective' space and time, for the experienced
spaces and times in which the tortoise inwardly lives are probably
as different as his velocity from the same things in Achilles. The
impetus of Achilles is one concrete fact, and carries space, time, and
conquest over the inferior creature's motion indivisibly in it. He
perceives nothing, while running, of the mathematician's homogeneous
time and space, of the infinitely numerous succession of cuts in both,
or of their order. End and beginning come for him in the one onrush,
and all that he actually experiences is that, in the midst of a
certain intense effort of his own, the rival is in point of fact
outstripped.

We are so inveterately wedded to the conceptual decomposition of life
that I know that this will seem to you like putting muddiest confusion
in place of clearest thought, and relapsing into a molluscoid state
of mind. Yet I ask you whether the absolute superiority of our higher
thought is so very clear, if all that it can find is impossibility in
tasks which sense-experience so easily performs.

What makes you call real life confusion is that it presents, as
if they were dissolved in one another, a lot of differents which
conception breaks life's flow by keeping apart. But _are_ not
differents actually dissolved in one another? Hasn't every bit of
experience its quality, its duration, its extension, its intensity,
its urgency, its clearness, and many aspects besides, no one of which
can exist in the isolation in which our verbalized logic keeps it?
They exist only _durcheinander_. Reality always is, in M. Bergson's
phrase, an endosmosis or conflux of the same with the different: they
compenetrate and telescope. For conceptual logic, the same is nothing
but the same, and all sames with a third thing are the same with each
other. Not so in concrete experience. Two spots on our skin, each of
which feels the same as a third spot when touched along with it, are
felt as different from each other. Two tones, neither distinguishable
from a third tone, are perfectly distinct from each other. The whole
process of life is due to life's violation of our logical axioms.
Take its continuity as an example. Terms like A and C appear to be
connected by intermediaries, by B for example. Intellectualism calls
this absurd, for 'B-connected-with-A' is, 'as such,' a different term
from 'B-connected-with-C.' But real life laughs at logic's veto.
Imagine a heavy log which takes two men to carry it. First A and B
take it. Then C takes hold and A drops off; then D takes hold and B
drops off, so that C and D now bear it; and so on. The log meanwhile
never drops, and keeps its sameness throughout the journey. Even so
it is with all our experiences. Their changes are not complete
annihilations followed by complete creations of something absolutely
novel. There is partial decay and partial growth, and all the while a
nucleus of relative constancy from which what decays drops off, and
which takes into itself whatever is grafted on, until at length
something wholly different has taken its place. In such a process we
are as sure, in spite of intellectualist logic with its 'as suches,'
that it _is_ the same nucleus which is able now to make connexion with
what goes and again with what comes, as we are sure that the same
point can lie on diverse lines that intersect there. Without being one
throughout, such a universe is continuous. Its members interdigitate
with their next neighbors in manifold directions, and there are no
clean cuts between them anywhere.

The great clash of intellectualist logic with sensible experience is
where the experience is that of influence exerted. Intellectualism
denies (as we saw in lecture ii) that finite things can act on one
another, for all things, once translated into concepts, remain shut up
to themselves. To act on anything means to get into it somehow; but
that would mean to get out of one's self and be one's other, which is
self-contradictory, etc. Meanwhile each of us actually _is_ his own
other to that extent, livingly knowing how to perform the trick which
logic tells us can't be done. My thoughts animate and actuate this
very body which you see and hear, and thereby influence your thoughts.
The dynamic current somehow does get from me to you, however numerous
the intermediary conductors may have to be. Distinctions may be
insulators in logic as much as they like, but in life distinct things
can and do commune together every moment.

The conflict of the two ways of knowing is best summed up in the
intellectualist doctrine that 'the same cannot exist in many
relations.' This follows of course from the concepts of the two
relations being so distinct that 'what-is-in-the-one' means 'as such'
something distinct from what 'what-is-in-the-other' means. It is like
Mill's ironical saying, that we should not think of Newton as both an
Englishman and a mathematician, because an Englishman as such is not
a mathematician and a mathematician as such is not an Englishman. But
the real Newton was somehow both things at once; and throughout the
whole finite universe each real thing proves to be many differents
without undergoing the necessity of breaking into disconnected
editions of itself.

These few indications will perhaps suffice to put you at the
bergsonian point of view. The immediate experience of life solves the
problems which so baffle our conceptual intelligence: How can what is
manifold be one? how can things get out of themselves? how be their
own others? how be both distinct and connected? how can they act on
one another? how be for others and yet for themselves? how be absent
and present at once? The intellect asks these questions much as we
might ask how anything can both separate and unite things, or how
sounds can grow more alike by continuing to grow more different. If
you already know space sensibly, you can answer the former question by
pointing to any interval in it, long or short; if you know the musical
scale, you can answer the latter by sounding an octave; but then you
must first have the sensible knowledge of these realities. Similarly
Bergson answers the intellectualist conundrums by pointing back to our
various finite sensational experiences and saying, 'Lo, even thus;
even so are these other problems solved livingly.'

When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can
reconstruct it in its wholeness. Out of no amount of discreteness
can you manufacture the concrete. But place yourself at a bound, or
_d'emblée_, as M. Bergson says, inside of the living, moving, active
thickness of the real, and all the abstractions and distinctions
are given into your hand: you can now make the intellectualist
substitutions to your heart's content. Install yourself in phenomenal
movement, for example, and velocity, succession, dates, positions, and
innumerable other things are given you in the bargain. But with only
an abstract succession of dates and positions you can never patch up
movement itself. It slips through their intervals and is lost.

So it is with every concrete thing, however complicated. Our
intellectual handling of it is a retrospective patchwork, a
post-mortem dissection, and can follow any order we find most
expedient. We can make the thing seem self-contradictory whenever
we wish to. But place yourself at the point of view of the thing's
interior _doing_, and all these back-looking and conflicting
conceptions lie harmoniously in your hand. Get at the expanding centre
of a human character, the _élan vital_ of a man, as Bergson calls it,
by living sympathy, and at a stroke you see how it makes those who see
it from without interpret it in such diverse ways. It is something
that breaks into both honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice,
stupidity and insight, at the touch of varying circumstances, and you
feel exactly why and how it does this, and never seek to identify
it stably with any of these single abstractions. Only your
intellectualist does that,--and you now also feel why _he_ must do it
to the end.

Place yourself similarly at the centre of a man's philosophic vision
and you understand at once all the different things it makes him write
or say. But keep outside, use your post-mortem method, try to build
the philosophy up out of the single phrases, taking first one and then
another and seeking to make them fit, and of course you fail. You
crawl over the thing like a myopic ant over a building, tumbling
into every microscopic crack or fissure, finding nothing but
inconsistencies, and never suspecting that a centre exists. I hope
that some of the philosophers in this audience may occasionally have
had something different from this intellectualist type of criticism
applied to their own works!

What really _exists_ is not things made but things in the making. Once
made, they are dead, and an infinite number of alternative conceptual
decompositions can be used in defining them. But put yourself _in the
making_ by a stroke of intuitive sympathy with the thing and, the
whole range of possible decompositions coming at once into your
possession, you are no longer troubled with the question which of
them is the more absolutely true. Reality _falls_ in passing into
conceptual analysis; it _mounts_ in living its own undivided life--it
buds and bourgeons, changes and creates. Once adopt the movement of
this life in any given instance and you know what Bergson calls the
_devenir réel_ by which the thing evolves and grows. Philosophy should
seek this kind of living understanding of the movement of reality,
not follow science in vainly patching together fragments of its dead
results.

Thus much of M. Bergson's philosophy is sufficient for my purpose in
these lectures, so here I will stop, leaving unnoticed all its other
constituent features, original and interesting tho they be. You may
say, and doubtless some of you now are saying inwardly, that his
remanding us to sensation in this wise is only a regress, a return to
that ultra-crude empiricism which your own idealists since Green
have buried ten times over. I confess that it is indeed a return to
empiricism, but I think that the return in such accomplished shape
only proves the latter's immortal truth. What won't stay buried must
have some genuine life. _Am anfang war die tat_; fact is a _first_; to
which all our conceptual handling comes as an inadequate second,
never its full equivalent. When I read recent transcendentalist
literature--I must partly except my colleague Royce!--I get nothing
but a sort of marking of time, champing of jaws, pawing of the ground,
and resettling into the same attitude, like a weary horse in a stall
with an empty manger. It is but turning over the same few threadbare
categories, bringing the same objections, and urging the same answers
and solutions, with never a new fact or a new horizon coming into
sight. But open Bergson, and new horizons loom on every page you read.
It is like the breath of the morning and the song of birds. It tells
of reality itself, instead of merely reiterating what dusty-minded
professors have written about what other previous professors have
thought. Nothing in Bergson is shop-worn or at second hand.

That he gives us no closed-in system will of course be fatal to him in
intellectualist eyes. He only evokes and invites; but he first annuls
the intellectualist veto, so that we now join step with reality with
a philosophical conscience never quite set free before. As a french
disciple of his well expresses it: 'Bergson claims of us first of all
a certain inner catastrophe, and not every one is capable of such a
logical revolution. But those who have once found themselves flexible
enough for the execution of such a psychological change of front,
discover somehow that they can never return again to their ancient
attitude of mind. They are now Bergsonians ... and possess the
principal thoughts of the master all at once. They have understood in
the fashion in which one loves, they have caught the whole melody and
can thereafter admire at their leisure the originality, the fecundity,
and the imaginative genius with which its author develops, transposes,
and varies in a thousand ways by the orchestration of his style and
dialectic, the original theme.'[2]

This, scant as it is, is all I have to say about Bergson on this
occasion--I hope it may send some of you to his original text. I must
now turn back to the point where I found it advisable to appeal to his
ideas. You remember my own intellectualist difficulties in the last
lecture, about how a lot of separate consciousnesses can at the same
time be one collective thing. How, I asked, can one and the same
identical content of experience, of which on idealist principles the
_esse_ is to be felt, be felt so diversely if itself be the only
feeler? The usual way of escape by 'quatenus' or 'as such' won't
help us here if we are radical intellectualists, I said, for
appearance-together is as such _not_ appearance-apart, the world _quâ_
many is not the world _quâ_ one, as absolutism claims. If we hold to
Hume's maxim, which later intellectualism uses so well, that whatever
things are distinguished are as separate as if there were no manner of
connexion between them, there seemed no way out of the difficulty save
by stepping outside of experience altogether and invoking different
spiritual agents, selves or souls, to realize the diversity required.
But this rescue by 'scholastic entities' I was unwilling to accept any
more than pantheistic idealists accept it.

Yet, to quote Fechner's phrase again, 'nichts wirkliches kann
unmöglich sein,' the actual cannot be impossible, and what _is_ actual
at every moment of our lives is the sort of thing which I now
proceed to remind you of. You can hear the vibration of an electric
contact-maker, smell the ozone, see the sparks, and feel the thrill,
co-consciously as it were or in one field of experience. But you can
also isolate any one of these sensations by shutting out the rest. If
you close your eyes, hold your nose, and remove your hand, you can get
the sensation of sound alone, but it seems still the same sensation
that it was; and if you restore the action of the other organs, the
sound coalesces with the feeling, the sight, and the smell sensations
again. Now the natural way of talking of all this[3] is to say that
certain sensations are experienced, now singly, and now together
with other sensations, in a common conscious field. Fluctuations of
attention give analogous results. We let a sensation in or keep it out
by changing our attention; and similarly we let an item of memory in
or drop it out. [Please don't raise the question here of how these
changes _come to pass_. The immediate condition is probably cerebral
in every instance, but it would be irrelevant now to consider it, for
now we are thinking only of results, and I repeat that the natural way
of thinking of them is that which intellectualist criticism finds so
absurd.]

The absurdity charged is that the self-same should function so
differently, now with and now without something else. But this it
sensibly seems to do. This very desk which I strike with my hand
strikes in turn your eyes. It functions at once as a physical object
in the outer world and as a mental object in our sundry mental worlds.
The very body of mine that _my_ thought actuates is the body whose
gestures are _your_ visual object and to which you give my name. The
very log which John helped to carry is the log now borne by James. The
very girl you love is simultaneously entangled elsewhere. The very
place behind me is in front of you. Look where you will, you gather
only examples of the same amid the different, and of different
relations existing as it were in solution in the same thing. _Quâ_
this an experience is not the same as it is _quâ_ that, truly enough;
but the _quâs_ are conceptual shots of ours at its post-mortem
remains, and in its sensational immediacy everything is all at once
whatever different things it is at once at all. It is before C and
after A, far from you and near to me, without this associate and with
that one, active and passive, physical and mental, a whole of
parts and part of a higher whole, all simultaneously and without
interference or need of doubling-up its being, so long as we keep to
what I call the 'immediate' point of view, the point of view in which
we follow our sensational life's continuity, and to which all living
language conforms. It is only when you try--to continue using the
hegelian vocabulary--to 'mediate' the immediate, or to substitute
concepts for sensational life, that intellectualism celebrates
its triumph and the immanent-self-contradictoriness of all this
smooth-running finite experience gets proved.

Of the oddity of inventing as a remedy for the inconveniences
resulting from this situation a supernumerary conceptual object
called an absolute, into which you pack the self-same contradictions
unreduced, I will say something in the next lecture. The absolute is
said to perform its feats by taking up its other into itself. But
that is exactly what is done when every individual morsel of the
sensational stream takes up the adjacent morsels by coalescing with
them. This is just what we mean by the stream's sensible continuity.
No element _there_ cuts itself off from any other element, as concepts
cut themselves from concepts. No part _there_ is so small as not to be
a place of conflux. No part there is not really _next_ its neighbors;
which means that there is literally nothing between; which means
again that no part goes exactly so far and no farther; that no part
absolutely excludes another, but that they compenetrate and are
cohesive; that if you tear out one, its roots bring out more with
them; that whatever is real is telescoped and diffused into other
reals; that, in short, every minutest thing is already its hegelian
'own other,' in the fullest sense of the term.

Of course this _sounds_ self-contradictory, but as the immediate facts
don't sound at all, but simply _are_, until we conceptualize and name
them vocally, the contradiction results only from the conceptual
or discursive form being substituted for the real form. But if, as
Bergson shows, that form is superimposed for practical ends only, in
order to let us jump about over life instead of wading through it;
and if it cannot even pretend to reveal anything of what life's inner
nature is or ought to be; why then we can turn a deaf ear to its
accusations. The resolve to turn the deaf ear is the inner crisis or
'catastrophe' of which M. Bergson's disciple whom I lately quoted
spoke. We are so subject to the philosophic tradition which treats
_logos_ or discursive thought generally as the sole avenue to truth,
that to fall back on raw unverbalized life as more of a revealer, and
to think of concepts as the merely practical things which Bergson
calls them, comes very hard. It is putting off our proud maturity of
mind and becoming again as foolish little children in the eyes of
reason. But difficult as such a revolution is, there is no other way,
I believe, to the possession of reality, and I permit myself to hope
that some of you may share my opinion after you have heard my next
lecture.




LECTURE VII


THE CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE

I fear that few of you will have been able to obey Bergson's call upon
you to look towards the sensational life for the fuller knowledge of
reality, or to sympathize with his attempt to limit the divine right
of concepts to rule our mind absolutely. It is too much like looking
downward and not up. Philosophy, you will say, doesn't lie flat on its
belly in the middle of experience, in the very thick of its sand and
gravel, as this Bergsonism does, never getting a peep at anything from
above. Philosophy is essentially the vision of things from above.
It doesn't simply feel the detail of things, it comprehends their
intelligible plan, sees their forms and principles, their categories
and rules, their order and necessity. It takes the superior point of
view of the architect. Is it conceivable that it should ever forsake
that point of view and abandon itself to a slovenly life of immediate
feeling? To say nothing of your traditional Oxford devotion to
Aristotle and Plato, the leaven of T.H. Green probably works still
too strongly here for his anti-sensationalism to be outgrown quickly.
Green more than any one realized that knowledge _about_ things was
knowledge of their relations; but nothing could persuade him that our
sensational life could contain any relational element. He followed
the strict intellectualist method with sensations. What they were not
expressly defined as including, they must exclude. Sensations are not
defined as relations, so in the end Green thought that they could
get related together only by the action on them from above of a
'self-distinguishing' absolute and eternal mind, present to that which
is related, but not related itself. 'A relation,' he said, 'is not
contingent with the contingency of feeling. It is permanent with
the permanence of the combining and comparing thought which alone
constitutes it.'[1] In other words, relations are purely conceptual
objects, and the sensational life as such cannot relate itself
together. Sensation in itself, Green wrote, is fleeting, momentary,
unnameable (because, while we name it, it has become another), and for
the same reason unknowable, the very negation of knowability. Were
there no permanent objects of conception for our sensations to be
'referred to,' there would be no significant names, but only noises,
and a consistent sensationalism must be speechless.[2] Green's
intellectualism was so earnest that it produced a natural and an
inevitable effect. But the atomistic and unrelated sensations which he
had in mind were purely fictitious products of his rationalist fancy.
The psychology of our own day disavows them utterly,[3] and Green's
laborious belaboring of poor old Locke for not having first seen that
his ideas of sensation were just that impracticable sort of thing, and
then fled to transcendental idealism as a remedy,--his belaboring of
poor old Locke for this, I say, is pathetic. Every examiner of the
sensible life _in concreto_ must see that relations of every sort, of
time, space, difference, likeness, change, rate, cause, or what not,
are just as integral members of the sensational flux as terms are, and
that conjunctive relations are just as true members of the flux as
disjunctive relations are.[4] This is what in some recent writings of
mine I have called the 'radically empiricist' doctrine (in distinction
from the doctrine of mental atoms which the name empiricism so
often suggests). Intellectualistic critics of sensation insist that
sensations are _disjoined_ only. Radical empiricism insists
that conjunctions between them are just as immediately given as
disjunctions are, and that relations, whether disjunctive or
conjunctive, are in their original sensible givenness just as fleeting
and momentary (in Green's words), and just as 'particular,' as terms
are. Later, both terms and relations get universalized by being
conceptualized and named.[5] But all the thickness, concreteness, and
individuality of experience exists in the immediate and relatively
unnamed stages of it, to the richness of which, and to the standing
inadequacy of our conceptions to match it, Professor Bergson so
emphatically calls our attention. And now I am happy to say that we
can begin to gather together some of the separate threads of our
argument, and see a little better the general kind of conclusion
toward which we are tending. Pray go back with me to the lecture
before the last, and recall what I said about the difficulty of seeing
how states of consciousness can compound themselves. The difficulty
seemed to be the same, you remember, whether we took it in psychology
as the composition of finite states of mind out of simpler finite
states, or in metaphysics as the composition of the absolute mind out
of finite minds in general. It is the general conceptualist difficulty
of any one thing being the same with many things, either at once or
in succession, for the abstract concepts of oneness and manyness must
needs exclude each other. In the particular instance that we have
dwelt on so long, the one thing is the all-form of experience, the
many things are the each-forms of experience in you and me. To call
them the same we must treat them as if each were simultaneously
its own other, a feat on conceptualist principles impossible of
performance.

On the principle of going behind the conceptual function altogether,
however, and looking to the more primitive flux of the sensational
life for reality's true shape, a way is open to us, as I tried in my
last lecture to show. Not only the absolute is its own other, but the
simplest bits of immediate experience are their own others, if that
hegelian phrase be once for all allowed. The concrete pulses of
experience appear pent in by no such definite limits as our conceptual
substitutes for them are confined by. They run into one another
continuously and seem to interpenetrate. What in them is relation and
what is matter related is hard to discern. You feel no one of them as
inwardly simple, and no two as wholly without confluence where they
touch. There is no datum so small as not to show this mystery, if
mystery it be. The tiniest feeling that we can possibly have comes
with an earlier and a later part and with a sense of their continuous
procession. Mr. Shadworth Hodgson showed long ago that there is
literally no such object as the present moment except as an unreal
postulate of abstract thought.[6] The 'passing' moment is, as I
already have reminded you, the minimal fact, with the 'apparition of
difference' inside of it as well as outside. If we do not feel both
past and present in one field of feeling, we feel them not at all. We
have the same many-in-one in the matter that fills the passing time.
The rush of our thought forward through its fringes is the everlasting
peculiarity of its life. We realize this life as something always off
its balance, something in transition, something that shoots out of a
darkness through a dawn into a brightness that we feel to be the dawn
fulfilled. In the very midst of the continuity our experience comes as
an alteration. 'Yes,' we say at the full brightness, '_this_ is what I
just meant.' 'No,' we feel at the dawning, 'this is not yet the full
meaning, there is more to come.' In every crescendo of sensation, in
every effort to recall, in every progress towards the satisfaction
of desire, this succession of an emptiness and fulness that have
reference to each other and are one flesh is the essence of the
phenomenon. In every hindrance of desire the sense of an ideal
presence which is absent in fact, of an absent, in a word, which the
only function of the present is to _mean_, is even more notoriously
there. And in the movement of pure thought we have the same
phenomenon. When I say _Socrates is mortal_, the moment _Socrates_ is
incomplete; it falls forward through the _is_ which is pure movement,
into the _mortal_ which is indeed bare mortal on the tongue, but
for the mind is _that mortal_, the _mortal Socrates_, at last
satisfactorily disposed of and told off.[7]

Here, then, inside of the minimal pulses of experience, is realized
that very inner complexity which the transcendentalists say only the
absolute can genuinely possess. The gist of the matter is always the
same--something ever goes indissolubly with something else. You cannot
separate the same from its other, except by abandoning the real
altogether and taking to the conceptual system. What is immediately
given in the single and particular instance is always something pooled
and mutual, something with no dark spot, no point of ignorance. No one
elementary bit of reality is eclipsed from the next bit's point of
view, if only we take reality sensibly and in small enough pulses--and
by us it has to be taken pulse-wise, for our span of consciousness is
too short to grasp the larger collectivity of things except nominally
and abstractly. No more of reality collected together at once is
extant anywhere, perhaps, than in my experience of reading this page,
or in yours of listening; yet within those bits of experience as
they come to pass we get a fulness of content that no conceptual
description can equal. Sensational experiences _are_ their 'own
others,' then, both internally and externally. Inwardly they are one
with their parts, and outwardly they pass continuously into their next
neighbors, so that events separated by years of time in a man's life
hang together unbrokenly by the intermediary events. Their _names_,
to be sure, cut them into separate conceptual entities, but no cuts
existed in the continuum in which they originally came.

If, with all this in our mind, we turn to our own particular
predicament, we see that our old objection to the self-compounding of
states of consciousness, our accusation that it was impossible for
purely logical reasons, is unfounded in principle. Every smallest
state of consciousness, concretely taken, overflows its own
definition. Only concepts are self-identical; only 'reason' deals with
closed equations; nature is but a name for excess; every point in
her opens out and runs into the more; and the only question, with
reference to any point we may be considering, is how far into the
rest of nature we may have to go in order to get entirely beyond its
overflow. In the pulse of inner life immediately present now in each
of us is a little past, a little future, a little awareness of our own
body, of each other's persons, of these sublimities we are trying to
talk about, of the earth's geography and the direction of history,
of truth and error, of good and bad, and of who knows how much more?
Feeling, however dimly and subconsciously, all these things, your
pulse of inner life is continuous with them, belongs to them and they
to it. You can't identify it with either one of them rather than with
the others, for if you let it develop into no matter which of those
directions, what it develops into will look back on it and say, 'That
was the original germ of me.'

In _principle_, then, the real units of our immediately-felt life are
unlike the units that intellectualist logic holds to and makes its
calculations with. They are not separate from their own others, and
you have to take them at widely separated dates to find any two of
them that seem unblent. Then indeed they do appear separate even as
their concepts are separate; a chasm yawns between them; but the chasm
itself is but an intellectualist fiction, got by abstracting from the
continuous sheet of experiences with which the intermediary time was
filled. It is like the log carried first by William and Henry, then
by William, Henry, and John, then by Henry and John, then by John and
Peter, and so on. All real units of experience _overlap_. Let a row of
equidistant dots on a sheet of paper symbolize the concepts by which
we intellectualize the world. Let a ruler long enough to cover at
least three dots stand for our sensible experience. Then the conceived
changes of the sensible experience can be symbolized by sliding the
ruler along the line of dots. One concept after another will apply to
it, one after another drop away, but it will always cover at least two
of them, and no dots less than three will ever adequately cover _it_.
You falsify it if you treat it conceptually, or by the law of dots.

What is true here of successive states must also be true of
simultaneous characters. They also overlap each other with their
being. My present field of consciousness is a centre surrounded by a
fringe that shades insensibly into a subconscious more. I use three
separate terms here to describe, this fact; but I might as well use
three hundred, for the fact is all shades and no boundaries. Which
part of it properly is in my consciousness, which out? If I name what
is out, it already has come in. The centre works in one way while the
margins work in another, and presently overpower the centre and are
central themselves. What we conceptually identify ourselves with and
say we are thinking of at any time is the centre; but our _full_ self
is the whole field, with all those indefinitely radiating subconscious
possibilities of increase that we can only feel without conceiving,
and can hardly begin to analyze. The collective and the distributive
ways of being coexist here, for each part functions distinctly, makes
connexion with its own peculiar region in the still wider rest of
experience and tends to draw us into that line, and yet the whole is
somehow felt as one pulse of our life,--not conceived so, but felt so.

In principle, then, as I said, intellectualism's edge is broken; it
can only approximate to reality, and its logic is inapplicable to our
inner life, which spurns its vetoes and mocks at its impossibilities.
Every bit of us at every moment is part and parcel of a wider self, it
quivers along various radii like the wind-rose on a compass, and the
actual in it is continuously one with possibles not yet in our present
sight.[8] And just as we are co-conscious with our own momentary
margin, may not we ourselves form the margin of some more really
central self in things which is co-conscious with the whole of us? May
not you and I be confluent in a higher consciousness, and confluently
active there, tho we now know it not?

I am tiring myself and you, I know, by vainly seeking to describe
by concepts and words what I say at the same time exceeds either
conceptualization or verbalization. As long as one continues
_talking_, intellectualism remains in undisturbed possession of the
field. The return to life can't come about by talking. It is an _act_;
to make you return to life, I must set an example for your imitation,
I must deafen you to talk, or to the importance of talk, by showing
you, as Bergson does, that the concepts we talk with are made for
purposes of _practice_ and not for purposes of insight. Or I must
_point_, point to the mere _that_ of life, and you by inner sympathy
must fill out the _what_ for yourselves. The minds of some of you,
I know, will absolutely refuse to do so, refuse to think in
non-conceptualized terms. I myself absolutely refused to do so
for years together, even after I knew that the denial of
manyness-in-oneness by intellectualism must be false, for the same
reality does perform the most various functions at once. But I hoped
ever for a revised intellectualist way round the difficulty, and it
was only after reading Bergson that I saw that to continue using the
intellectualist method was itself the fault. I saw that philosophy had
been on a false scent ever since the days of Socrates and Plato, that
an _intellectual_ answer to the intellectualist's difficulties will
never come, and that the real way out of them, far from consisting in
the discovery of such an answer, consists in simply closing one's ears
to the question. When conceptualism summons life to justify itself
in conceptual terms, it is like a challenge addressed in a foreign
language to some one who is absorbed in his own business; it is
irrelevant to him altogether--he may let it lie unnoticed. I went thus
through the 'inner catastrophe' of which I spoke in the last lecture;
I had literally come to the end of my conceptual stock-in-trade, I was
bankrupt intellectualistically, and had to change my base. No words
of mine will probably convert you, for words can be the names only of
concepts. But if any of you try sincerely and pertinaciously on your
own separate accounts to intellectualize reality, you may be similarly
driven to a change of front. I say no more: I must leave life to teach
the lesson.

We have now reached a point of view from which the self-compounding of
mind in its smaller and more accessible portions seems a certain
fact, and in which the speculative assumption of a similar but wider
compounding in remoter regions must be reckoned with as a legitimate
hypothesis. The absolute is not the impossible being I once thought
it. Mental facts do function both singly and together, at once, and we
finite minds may simultaneously be co-conscious with one another in a
superhuman intelligence. It is only the extravagant claims of coercive
necessity on the absolute's part that have to be denied by _a priori_
logic. As an hypothesis trying to make itself probable on analogical
and inductive grounds, the absolute is entitled to a patient hearing.
Which is as much as to say that our serious business from now onward
lies with Fechner and his method, rather than with Hegel, Royce, or
Bradley. Fechner treats the superhuman consciousness he so fervently
believes in as an hypothesis only, which he then recommends by all the
resources of induction and persuasion.

It is true that Fechner himself is an absolutist in his books, not
actively but passively, if I may say so. He talks not only of the
earth-soul and of the star-souls, but of an integrated soul of all
things in the cosmos without exception, and this he calls God just
as others call it the absolute. Nevertheless he _thinks_ only of
the subordinate superhuman souls, and content with having made his
obeisance once for all to the august total soul of the cosmos, he
leaves it in its lonely sublimity with no attempt to define its
nature. Like the absolute, it is 'out of range,' and not an object for
distincter vision. Psychologically, it seems to me that Fechner's
God is a lazy postulate of his, rather than a part of his system
positively thought out. As we envelop our sight and hearing, so the
earth-soul envelops us, and the star-soul the earth-soul, until--what?
Envelopment can't go on forever; it must have an _abschluss_, a total
envelope must terminate the series, so God is the name that Fechner
gives to this last all-enveloper. But if nothing escapes this
all-enveloper, he is responsible for everything, including evil, and
all the paradoxes and difficulties which I found in the absolute
at the end of our third lecture recur undiminished. Fechner tries
sincerely to grapple with the problem of evil, but he always solves it
in the leibnitzian fashion by making his God non-absolute, placing
him under conditions of 'metaphysical necessity' which even his
omnipotence cannot violate. His will has to struggle with conditions
not imposed on that will by itself. He tolerates provisionally what he
has not created, and then with endless patience tries to overcome it
and live it down. He has, in short, a history. Whenever Fechner tries
to represent him clearly, his God becomes the ordinary God of theism,
and ceases to be the absolutely totalized all-enveloper.[9] In this
shape, he represents the ideal element in things solely, and is our
champion and our helper and we his helpers, against the bad parts of
the universe.

Fechner was in fact too little of a metaphysician to care for perfect
formal consistency in these abstract regions. He believed in God in
the pluralistic manner, but partly from convention and partly from
what I should call intellectual laziness, if laziness of any kind
could be imputed to a Fechner, he let the usual monistic talk about
him pass unchallenged. I propose to you that we should discuss the
question of God without entangling ourselves in advance in the
monistic assumption. Is it probable that there is any superhuman
consciousness at all, in the first place? When that is settled, the
further question whether its form be monistic or pluralistic is in
order.

Before advancing to either question, however, and I shall have to deal
with both but very briefly after what has been said already, let me
finish our retrospective survey by one more remark about the curious
logical situation of the absolutists. For what have they invoked the
absolute except as a being the peculiar inner form of which shall
enable it to overcome the contradictions with which intellectualism
has found the finite many as such to be infected? The many-in-one
character that, as we have seen, every smallest tract of finite
experience offers, is considered by intellectualism to be fatal to the
reality of finite experience. What can be distinguished, it tells us,
is separate; and what is separate is unrelated, for a relation, being
a 'between,' would bring only a twofold separation. Hegel, Royce,
Bradley, and the Oxford absolutists in general seem to agree about
this logical absurdity of manyness-in-oneness in the only places where
it is empirically found. But see the curious tactics! Is the absurdity
_reduced_ in the absolute being whom they call in to relieve it? Quite
otherwise, for that being shows it on an infinitely greater scale, and
flaunts it in its very definition. The fact of its not being related
to any outward environment, the fact that all relations are inside of
itself, doesn't save it, for Mr. Bradley's great argument against the
finite is that _in_ any given bit of it (a bit of sugar, for instance)
the presence of a plurality of characters (whiteness and sweetness,
for example) is self-contradictory; so that in the final end all that
the absolute's name appears to stand for is the persistent claim of
outraged human nature that reality _shall_ not be called
absurd. _Somewhere_ there must be an aspect of it guiltless of
self-contradiction. All we can see of the absolute, meanwhile, is
guilty in the same way in which the finite is. Intellectualism sees
what it calls the guilt, when comminuted in the finite object; but
is too near-sighted to see it in the more enormous object. Yet the
absolute's constitution, if imagined at all, has to be imagined after
the analogy of some bit of finite experience. Take any _real_ bit,
suppress its environment and then magnify it to monstrosity, and you
get identically the type of structure of the absolute. It is obvious
that all your difficulties here remain and go with you. If the
relative experience was inwardly absurd, the absolute experience is
infinitely more so. Intellectualism, in short, strains off the gnat,
but swallows the whole camel. But this polemic against the absolute
is as odious to me as it is to you, so I will say no more about that
being. It is only one of those wills of the wisp, those lights that
do mislead the morn, that have so often impeded the clear progress of
philosophy, so I will turn to the more general positive question of
whether superhuman unities of consciousness should be considered as
more probable or more improbable.

In a former lecture I went over some of the fechnerian reasons for
their plausibility, or reasons that at least replied to our more
obvious grounds of doubt concerning them. The numerous facts of
divided or split human personality which the genius of certain medical
men, as Janet, Freud, Prince, Sidis, and others, have unearthed were
unknown in Fechner's time, and neither the phenomena of automatic
writing and speech, nor of mediumship and 'possession' generally, had
been recognized or studied as we now study them, so Fechner's stock of
analogies is scant compared with our present one. He did the best with
what he had, however. For my own part I find in some of these abnormal
or supernormal facts the strongest suggestions in favor of a superior
co-consciousness being possible. I doubt whether we shall ever
understand some of them without using the very letter of Fechner's
conception of a great reservoir in which the memories of earth's
inhabitants are pooled and preserved, and from which, when the
threshold lowers or the valve opens, information ordinarily shut out
leaks into the mind of exceptional individuals among us. But those
regions of inquiry are perhaps too spook-haunted to interest an
academic audience, and the only evidence I feel it now decorous to
bring to the support of Fechner is drawn from ordinary religious
experience. I think it may be asserted that there _are_ religious
experiences of a specific nature, not deducible by analogy or
psychological reasoning from our other sorts of experience. I think
that they point with reasonable probability to the continuity of
our consciousness with a wider spiritual environment from which
the ordinary prudential man (who is the only man that scientific
psychology, so called, takes cognizance of) is shut off. I shall begin
my final lecture by referring to them again briefly.




LECTURE VIII


CONCLUSIONS

At the close of my last lecture I referred to the existence of
religious experiences of a specific nature. I must now explain just
what I mean by such a claim. Briefly, the facts I have in mind may
all be described as experiences of an unexpected life succeeding upon
death. By this I don't mean immortality, or the death of the body. I
mean the deathlike termination of certain mental processes within the
individual's experience, processes that run to failure, and in some
individuals, at least, eventuate in despair. Just as romantic love
seems a comparatively recent literary invention, so these experiences
of a life that supervenes upon despair seem to have played no great
part in official theology till Luther's time; and possibly the best
way to indicate their character will be to point to a certain contrast
between the inner life of ourselves and of the ancient Greeks and
Romans.

Mr. Chesterton, I think, says somewhere, that the Greeks and Romans,
in all that concerned their moral life, were an extraordinarily solemn
set of folks. The Athenians thought that the very gods must admire the
rectitude of Phocion and Aristides; and those gentlemen themselves
were apparently of much the same opinion. Cato's veracity was so
impeccable that the extremest incredulity a Roman could express of
anything was to say, 'I would not believe it even if Cato had told
me.' Good was good, and bad was bad, for these people. Hypocrisy,
which church-Christianity brought in, hardly existed; the naturalistic
system held firm; its values showed no hollowness and brooked no
irony. The individual, if virtuous enough, could meet all possible
requirements. The pagan pride had never crumbled. Luther was the first
moralist who broke with any effectiveness through the crust of all
this naturalistic self-sufficiency, thinking (and possibly he was
right) that Saint Paul had done it already. Religious experience of
the lutheran type brings all our naturalistic standards to bankruptcy.
You are strong only by being weak, it shows. You cannot live on pride
or self-sufficingness. There is a light in which all the naturally
founded and currently accepted distinctions, excellences, and
safeguards of our characters appear as utter childishness. Sincerely
to give up one's conceit or hope of being good in one's own right is
the only door to the universe's deeper reaches.

These deeper reaches are familiar to evangelical Christianity and
to what is nowadays becoming known as 'mind-cure' religion or 'new
thought.' The phenomenon is that of new ranges of life succeeding on
our most despairing moments. There are resources in us that naturalism
with its literal and legal virtues never recks of, possibilities that
take our breath away, of another kind of happiness and power, based on
giving up our own will and letting something higher work for us, and
these seem to show a world wider than either physics or philistine
ethics can imagine. Here is a world in which all is well, in _spite_
of certain forms of death, indeed _because_ of certain forms of
death--death of hope, death of strength, death of responsibility,
of fear and worry, competency and desert, death of everything that
paganism, naturalism, and legalism pin their faith on and tie their
trust to.

Reason, operating on our other experiences, even our psychological
experiences, would never have inferred these specifically religious
experiences in advance of their actual coming. She could not suspect
their existence, for they are discontinuous with the 'natural'
experiences they succeed upon and invert their values. But as they
actually come and are given, creation widens to the view of their
recipients. They suggest that our natural experience, our strictly
moralistic and prudential experience, may be only a fragment of real
human experience. They soften nature's outlines and open out the
strangest possibilities and perspectives.

This is why it seems to me that the logical understanding, working in
abstraction from such specifically religious experiences, will always
omit something, and fail to reach completely adequate conclusions.
Death and failure, it will always say, _are_ death and failure
simply, and can nevermore be one with life; so religious experience,
peculiarly so called, needs, in my opinion, to be carefully considered
and interpreted by every one who aspires to reason out a more complete
philosophy.

The sort of belief that religious experience of this type naturally
engenders in those who have it is fully in accord with Fechner's
theories. To quote words which I have used elsewhere, the believer
finds that the tenderer parts of his personal life are continuous
with a _more_ of the same quality which is operative in the universe
outside of him and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a
fashion get on board of and save himself, when all his lower being has
gone to pieces in the wreck. In a word, the believer is continuous,
to his own consciousness, at any rate, with a wider self from which
saving experiences flow in. Those who have such experiences distinctly
enough and often enough to live in the light of them remain quite
unmoved by criticism, from whatever quarter it may come, be it
academic or scientific, or be it merely the voice of logical
common sense. They have had their vision and they _know_--that is
enough--that we inhabit an invisible spiritual environment from which
help comes, our soul being mysteriously one with a larger soul whose
instruments we are.

One may therefore plead, I think, that Fechner's ideas are not without
direct empirical verification. There is at any rate one side of life
which would be easily explicable if those ideas were true, but of
which there appears no clear explanation so long as we assume either
with naturalism that human consciousness is the highest consciousness
there is, or with dualistic theism that there is a higher mind in the
cosmos, but that it is discontinuous with our own. It has always been
a matter of surprise with me that philosophers of the absolute should
have shown so little interest in this department of life, and so
seldom put its phenomena in evidence, even when it seemed obvious that
personal experience of some kind must have made their confidence in
their own vision so strong. The logician's bias has always been too
much with them. They have preferred the thinner to the thicker method,
dialectical abstraction being so much more dignified and academic than
the confused and unwholesome facts of personal biography.

In spite of rationalism's disdain for the particular, the personal,
and the unwholesome, the drift of all the evidence we have seems to
me to sweep us very strongly towards the belief in some form
of superhuman life with which we may, unknown to ourselves, be
co-conscious. We may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our
libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having
no inkling of the meaning of it all. The intellectualist objections
to this fall away when the authority of intellectualist logic is
undermined by criticism, and then the positive empirical evidence
remains. The analogies with ordinary psychology and with the facts of
pathology, with those of psychical research, so called, and with those
of religious experience, establish, when taken together, a decidedly
_formidable_ probability in favor of a general view of the world
almost identical with Fechner's. The outlines of the superhuman
consciousness thus made probable must remain, however, very vague, and
the number of functionally distinct 'selves' it comports and carries
has to be left entirely problematic. It may be polytheistically or
it may be monotheistically conceived of. Fechner, with his distinct
earth-soul functioning as our guardian angel, seems to me clearly
polytheistic; but the word 'polytheism' usually gives offence, so
perhaps it is better not to use it. Only one thing is certain, and
that is the result of our criticism of the absolute: the only way
to escape from the paradoxes and perplexities that a consistently
thought-out monistic universe suffers from as from a species of
auto-intoxication--the mystery of the 'fall' namely, of reality
lapsing into appearance, truth into error, perfection into
imperfection; of evil, in short; the mystery of universal determinism,
of the block-universe eternal and without a history, etc.;--the only
way of escape, I say, from all this is to be frankly pluralistic and
assume that the superhuman consciousness, however vast it may be, has
itself an external environment, and consequently is finite. Present
day monism carefully repudiates complicity with spinozistic monism. In
that, it explains, the many get dissolved in the one and lost, whereas
in the improved idealistic form they get preserved in all their
manyness as the one's eternal object. The absolute itself is thus
represented by absolutists as having a pluralistic object. But if even
the absolute has to have a pluralistic vision, why should we ourselves
hesitate to be pluralists on our own sole account? Why should we
envelop our many with the 'one' that brings so much poison in its
train?

The line of least resistance, then, as it seems to me, both in
theology and in philosophy, is to accept, along with the superhuman
consciousness, the notion that it is not all-embracing, the notion,
in other words, that there is a God, but that he is finite, either in
power or in knowledge, or in both at once. These, I need hardly tell
you, are the terms in which common men have usually carried on their
active commerce with God; and the monistic perfections that make the
notion of him so paradoxical practically and morally are the colder
addition of remote professorial minds operating _in distans_ upon
conceptual substitutes for him alone.

Why cannot 'experience' and 'reason' meet on this common ground? Why
cannot they compromise? May not the godlessness usually but needlessly
associated with the philosophy of immediate experience give way to a
theism now seen to follow directly from that experience more widely
taken? and may not rationalism, satisfied with seeing her _a priori_
proofs of God so effectively replaced by empirical evidence, abate
something of her absolutist claims? Let God but have the least
infinitesimal _other_ of any kind beside him, and empiricism and
rationalism might strike hands in a lasting treaty of peace. Both
might then leave abstract thinness behind them, and seek together, as
scientific men seek, by using all the analogies and data within reach,
to build up the most probable approximate idea of what the divine
consciousness concretely may be like. I venture to beg the younger
Oxford idealists to consider seriously this alternative. Few men are
as qualified by their intellectual gifts to reap the harvests that
seem certain to any one who, like Fechner and Bergson, will leave the
thinner for the thicker path.

Compromise and mediation are inseparable from the pluralistic
philosophy. Only monistic dogmatism can say of any of its hypotheses,
'It is either that or nothing; take it or leave it just as it stands.'
The type of monism prevalent at Oxford has kept this steep and brittle
attitude, partly through the proverbial academic preference for thin
and elegant logical solutions, partly from a mistaken notion that the
only solidly grounded basis for religion was along those lines. If
Oxford men could be ignorant of anything, it might almost seem that
they had remained ignorant of the great empirical movement towards
a pluralistic panpsychic view of the universe, into which our own
generation has been drawn, and which threatens to short-circuit their
methods entirely and become their religious rival unless they are
willing to make themselves its allies. Yet, wedded as they seem to
be to the logical machinery and technical apparatus of absolutism,
I cannot but believe that their fidelity to the religious ideal in
general is deeper still. Especially do I find it hard to believe that
the more clerical adherents of the school would hold so fast to its
particular machinery if only they could be made to think that religion
could be secured in some other way. Let empiricism once become
associated with religion, as hitherto, through some strange
misunderstanding, it has been associated with irreligion, and I
believe that a new era of religion as well as of philosophy will be
ready to begin. That great awakening of a new popular interest in
philosophy, which is so striking a phenomenon at the present day in
all countries, is undoubtedly due in part to religious demands. As
the authority of past tradition tends more and more to crumble, men
naturally turn a wistful ear to the authority of reason or to the
evidence of present fact. They will assuredly not be disappointed if
they open their minds to what the thicker and more radical empiricism
has to say. I fully believe that such an empiricism is a more natural
ally than dialectics ever were, or can be, of the religious life. It
is true that superstitions and wild-growing over-beliefs of all
sorts will undoubtedly begin to abound if the notion of higher
consciousnesses enveloping ours, of fechnerian earth-souls and the
like, grows orthodox and fashionable; still more will they superabound
if science ever puts her approving stamp on the phenomena of which
Frederic Myers so earnestly advocated the scientific recognition, the
phenomena of psychic research so-called--and I myself firmly believe
that most of these phenomena are rooted in reality. But ought one
seriously to allow such a timid consideration as that to deter one
from following the evident path of greatest religious promise? Since
when, in this mixed world, was any good thing given us in purest
outline and isolation? One of the chief characteristics of life is
life's redundancy. The sole condition of our having anything, no
matter what, is that we should have so much of it, that we are
fortunate if we do not grow sick of the sight and sound of it
altogether. Everything is smothered in the litter that is fated to
accompany it. Without too much you cannot have enough, of anything.
Lots of inferior books, lots of bad statues, lots of dull speeches, of
tenth-rate men and women, as a condition of the few precious specimens
in either kind being realized! The gold-dust comes to birth with the
quartz-sand all around it, and this is as much a condition of religion
as of any other excellent possession. There must be extrication; there
must be competition for survival; but the clay matrix and the noble
gem must first come into being unsifted. Once extricated, the gem can
be examined separately, conceptualized, defined, and insulated. But
this process of extrication cannot be short-circuited--or if it is,
you get the thin inferior abstractions which we have seen, either
the hollow unreal god of scholastic theology, or the unintelligible
pantheistic monster, instead of the more living divine reality with
which it appears certain that empirical methods tend to connect men in
imagination.

Arrived at this point, I ask you to go back to my first lecture and
remember, if you can, what I quoted there from your own Professor
Jacks--what he said about the philosopher himself being taken up into
the universe which he is accounting for. This is the fechnerian as
well as the hegelian view, and thus our end rejoins harmoniously our
beginning. Philosophies are intimate parts of the universe, they
express something of its own thought of itself. A philosophy may
indeed be a most momentous reaction of the universe upon itself. It
may, as I said, possess and handle itself differently in consequence
of us philosophers, with our theories, being here; it may trust itself
or mistrust itself the more, and, by doing the one or the other,
deserve more the trust or the mistrust. What mistrusts itself deserves
mistrust.

This is the philosophy of humanism in the widest sense. Our
philosophies swell the current of being, add their character to it.
They are part of all that we have met, of all that makes us be. As
a French philosopher says, 'Nous sommes du réel dans le réel.' Our
thoughts determine our acts, and our acts redetermine the previous
nature of the world.

Thus does foreignness get banished from our world, and far more so
when we take the system of it pluralistically than when we take it
monistically. We are indeed internal parts of God and not external
creations, on any possible reading of the panpsychic system. Yet
because God is not the absolute, but is himself a part when the system
is conceived pluralistically, his functions can be taken as not wholly
dissimilar to those of the other smaller parts,--as similar to our
functions consequently.

Having an environment, being in time, and working out a history just
like ourselves, he escapes from the foreignness from all that is
human, of the static timeless perfect absolute.

Remember that one of our troubles with that was its essential
foreignness and monstrosity--there really is no other word for it than
that. Its having the all-inclusive form gave to it an essentially
heterogeneous _nature_ from ourselves. And this great difference
between absolutism and pluralism demands no difference in the
universe's material content--it follows from a difference in the form
alone. The all-form or monistic form makes the foreignness result, the
each-form or pluralistic form leaves the intimacy undisturbed.

No matter what the content of the universe may be, if you only allow
that it is _many_ everywhere and always, that _nothing_ real escapes
from having an environment; so far from defeating its rationality, as
the absolutists so unanimously pretend, you leave it in possession of
the maximum amount of rationality practically attainable by our minds.
Your relations with it, intellectual, emotional, and active, remain
fluent and congruous with your own nature's chief demands.

It would be a pity if the word 'rationality' were allowed to give us
trouble here. It is one of those eulogistic words that both sides
claim--for almost no one is willing to advertise his philosophy as a
system of irrationality. But like most of the words which people used
eulogistically, the word 'rational' carries too many meanings. The
most objective one is that of the older logic--the connexion between
two things is rational when you can infer one from the other, mortal
from Socrates, _e.g.;_ and you can do that only when they have a
quality in common. But this kind of rationality is just that logic
of identity which all disciples of Hegel find insufficient. They
supersede it by the higher rationality of negation and contradiction
and make the notion vague again. Then you get the aesthetic or
teleologic kinds of rationality, saying that whatever fits in any way,
whatever is beautiful or good, whatever is purposive or gratifies
desire, is rational in so far forth. Then again, according to Hegel,
whatever is 'real' is rational. I myself said awhile ago that whatever
lets loose any action which we are fond of exerting seems rational. It
would be better to give up the word 'rational' altogether than to get
into a merely verbal fight about who has the best right to keep it.

Perhaps the words 'foreignness' and 'intimacy,' which I put forward
in my first lecture, express the contrast I insist on better than the
words 'rationality' and 'irrationality'--let us stick to them, then.
I now say that the notion of the 'one' breeds foreignness and that of
the 'many' intimacy, for reasons which I have urged at only too great
length, and with which, whether they convince you or not, I may
suppose that you are now well acquainted. But what at bottom is meant
by calling the universe many or by calling it one?

Pragmatically interpreted, pluralism or the doctrine that it is
many means only that the sundry parts of reality _may be externally
related_. Everything you can think of, however vast or inclusive, has
on the pluralistic view a genuinely 'external' environment of some
sort or amount. Things are 'with' one another in many ways, but
nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. The word
'and' trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes.
'Ever not quite' has to be said of the best attempts made anywhere in
the universe at attaining all-inclusiveness. The pluralistic world is
thus more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom.
However much may be collected, however much may report itself as
present at any effective centre of consciousness or action, something
else is self-governed and absent and unreduced to unity.

Monism, on the other hand, insists that when you come down to reality
as such, to the reality of realities, everything is present
to _everything_ else in one vast instantaneous co-implicated
completeness--nothing can in _any_ sense, functional or substantial,
be really absent from anything else, all things interpenetrate and
telescope together in the great total conflux.

For pluralism, all that we are required to admit as the constitution
of reality is what we ourselves find empirically realized in every
minimum of finite life. Briefly it is this, that nothing real is
absolutely simple, that every smallest bit of experience is a _multum
in parvo_ plurally related, that each relation is one aspect,
character, or function, way of its being taken, or way of its taking
something else; and that a bit of reality when actively engaged in one
of these relations is not _by that very fact_ engaged in all the other
relations simultaneously. The relations are not _all_ what the French
call _solidaires_ with one another. Without losing its identity a
thing can either take up or drop another thing, like the log I spoke
of, which by taking up new carriers and dropping old ones can travel
anywhere with a light escort.

For monism, on the contrary, everything, whether we realize it or not,
drags the whole universe along with itself and drops nothing. The log
starts and arrives with all its carriers supporting it. If a thing
were once disconnected, it could never be connected again, according
to monism. The pragmatic difference between the two systems is thus a
definite one. It is just thus, that if _a_ is once out of sight of _b_
or out of touch with it, or, more briefly, 'out' of it at all, then,
according to monism, it must always remain so, they can never get
together; whereas pluralism admits that on another occasion they may
work together, or in some way be connected again. Monism allows for
no such things as 'other occasions' in reality--in _real_ or absolute
reality, that is.

The difference I try to describe amounts, you see, to nothing more
than the difference between what I formerly called the each-form and
the all-form of reality. Pluralism lets things really exist in the
each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or
collective-unit form is the only form that is rational. The all-form
allows of no taking up and dropping of connexions, for in the all the
parts are essentially and eternally co-implicated. In the each-form,
on the contrary, a thing may be connected by intermediary things, with
a thing with which it has no immediate or essential connexion. It
is thus at all times in many possible connexions which are not
necessarily actualized at the moment. They depend on which actual path
of intermediation it may functionally strike into: the word 'or' names
a genuine reality. Thus, as I speak here, I may look ahead _or_ to the
right _or_ to the left, and in either case the intervening space and
air and ether enable me to see the faces of a different portion of
this audience. My being here is independent of any one set of these
faces.

If the each-form be the eternal form of reality no less than it is the
form of temporal appearance, we still have a coherent world, and not
an incarnate incoherence, as is charged by so many absolutists. Our
'multiverse' still makes a 'universe'; for every part, tho it may not
be in actual or immediate connexion, is nevertheless in some possible
or mediated connexion, with every other part however remote, through
the fact that each part hangs together with its very next neighbors in
inextricable interfusion. The type of union, it is true, is different
here from the monistic type of _all-einheit_. It is not a universal
co-implication, or integration of all things _durcheinander_. It is
what I call the strung-along type, the type of continuity, contiguity,
or concatenation. If you prefer greek words, you may call it the
synechistic type. At all events, you see that it forms a definitely
conceivable alternative to the through-and-through unity of all things
at once, which is the type opposed to it by monism. You see also that
it stands or falls with the notion I have taken such pains to defend,
of the through-and-through union of adjacent minima of experience, of
the confluence of every passing moment of concretely felt experience
with its immediately next neighbors. The recognition of this fact of
coalescence of next with next in concrete experience, so that all
the insulating cuts we make there are artificial products of the
conceptualizing faculty, is what distinguishes the empiricism which
I call 'radical,' from the bugaboo empiricism of the traditional
rationalist critics, which (rightly or wrongly) is accused of chopping
up experience into atomistic sensations, incapable of union with one
another until a purely intellectual principle has swooped down upon
them from on high and folded them in its own conjunctive categories.

Here, then, you have the plain alternative, and the full mystery of
the difference between pluralism and monism, as clearly as I can
set it forth on this occasion. It packs up into a nutshell:--Is the
manyness in oneness that indubitably characterizes the world we
inhabit, a property only of the absolute whole of things, so that you
must postulate that one-enormous-whole indivisibly as the _prius_
of there being any many at all--in other words, start with the
rationalistic block-universe, entire, unmitigated, and complete?--or
can the finite elements have their own aboriginal forms of manyness in
oneness, and where they have no immediate oneness still be continued
into one another by intermediary terms--each one of these terms being
one with its next neighbors, and yet the total 'oneness' never getting
absolutely complete?

The alternative is definite. It seems to me, moreover, that the two
horns of it make pragmatically different ethical appeals--at least
they _may_ do so, to certain individuals. But if you consider the
pluralistic horn to be intrinsically irrational, self-contradictory,
and absurd, I can now say no more in its defence. Having done what
I could in my earlier lectures to break the edge of the
intellectualistic _reductiones ad absurdum_, I must leave the issue
in your hands. Whatever I may say, each of you will be sure to take
pluralism or leave it, just as your own sense of rationality moves and
inclines. The only thing I emphatically insist upon is that it is a
fully co-ordinate hypothesis with monism. This world _may_, in the
last resort, be a block-universe; but on the other hand it _may_ be a
universe only strung-along, not rounded in and closed. Reality _may_
exist distributively just as it sensibly seems to, after all. On that
possibility I do insist.

One's general vision of the probable usually decides such
alternatives. They illustrate what I once wrote of as the 'will to
believe.' In some of my lectures at Harvard I have spoken of what
I call the 'faith-ladder,' as something quite different from the
_sorites_ of the logic-books, yet seeming to have an analogous form. I
think you will quickly recognize in yourselves, as I describe it, the
mental process to which I give this name.

A conception of the world arises in you somehow, no matter how. Is it
true or not? you ask.

It _might_ be true somewhere, you say, for it is not
self-contradictory.

It _may_ be true, you continue, even here and now.

It is _fit_ to be true, it would be _well if it were true_, it _ought_
to be true, you presently feel.

It _must_ be true, something persuasive in you whispers next; and
then--as a final result--

It shall be _held for true_, you decide; it _shall be_ as if true, for
_you_.

And your acting thus may in certain special cases be a means of making
it securely true in the end.

Not one step in this process is logical, yet it is the way in which
monists and pluralists alike espouse and hold fast to their visions.
It is life exceeding logic, it is the practical reason for which the
theoretic reason finds arguments after the conclusion is once there.
In just this way do some of us hold to the unfinished pluralistic
universe; in just this way do others hold to the timeless universe
eternally complete.

Meanwhile the incompleteness of the pluralistic universe, thus assumed
and held to as the most probable hypothesis, is also represented by
the pluralistic philosophy as being self-reparative through us, as
getting its disconnections remedied in part by our behavior. 'We use
what we are and have, to know; and what we know, to be and have still
more.'[1] Thus do philosophy and reality, theory and action, work in
the same circle indefinitely.


I have now finished these poor lectures, and as you look back on them,
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.

Most rationalists nowadays will agree that naturalism gives a true
enough account of the way in which our intellect arose at first, but
they will deny these latter implications. The case, they will say,
resembles that of sexual love. Originating in the animal need
of getting another generation born, this passion has developed
secondarily such imperious spiritual needs that, if you ask why
another generation ought to be born at all, the answer is: 'Chiefly
that love may go on.' Just so with our intellect: it originated as a
practical means of serving life; but it has developed incidentally the
function of understanding absolute truth; and life itself now seems to
be given chiefly as a means by which that function may be prosecuted.
But truth and the understanding of it lie among the abstracts and
universals, so the intellect now carries on its higher business wholly
in this region, without any need of redescending into pure experience
again.

If the contrasted tendencies which I thus designate as naturalistic
and rationalistic are not recognized by the reader, perhaps an example
will make them more concrete. Mr. Bradley, for instance, is an
ultra-rationalist. He admits that our intellect is primarily
practical, but says that, for philosophers, the practical need is
simply Truth.[1] Truth, moreover, must be assumed 'consistent.'
Immediate experience has to be broken into subjects and qualities,
terms and relations, to be understood as truth at all. Yet when
so broken it is less consistent than ever. Taken raw, it is all
undistinguished. Intellectualized, it is all distinction without
oneness. 'Such an arrangement may _work_, but the theoretic problem is
not solved' (p. 23). The question is, '_How_ the diversity can exist
in harmony with the oneness' (p. 118). To go back to pure experience
is unavailing. 'Mere feeling gives no answer to our riddle' (p. 104).
Even if your intuition is a fact, it is not an _understanding_. 'It is
a mere experience, and furnishes no consistent view' (pp. 108-109).
The experiences offered as facts or truths 'I find that my intellect
rejects because they contradict themselves. They offer a complex of
diversities conjoined in a way which it feels is not its way and which
it cannot repeat as its own.... For to be satisfied, my intellect must
understand, and it cannot understand by taking a congeries in
the lump' (p. 570). So Mr. Bradley, in the sole interests of
'understanding' (as he conceives that function), turns his back on
finite

[Footnote 1: _Appearance and Reality_, pp. 152-133.]

experience forever. Truth must lie in the opposite direction,
the direction of the absolute; and this kind of rationalism and
naturalism, or (as I will now call it) pragmatism, walk thenceforward
upon opposite paths. For the one, those intellectual products are most
true which, turning their face towards the absolute, come nearest to
symbolizing its ways of uniting the many and the one. For the other,
those are most true which most successfully dip back into the finite
stream of feeling and grow most easily confluent with some particular
wave or wavelet. Such confluence not only proves the intellectual
operation to have been true (as an addition may 'prove' that a
subtraction is already rightly performed), but it constitutes,
according to pragmatism, all that we mean by calling it true. Only in
so far as they lead us, successfully or unsuccessfully, into sensible
experience again, are our abstracts and universals true or false at
all.


III

In Section the 6th of my article, 'A world of pure experience,' I
adopted in a general way the common-sense belief that one and the same
world is cognized by our different minds; but I left undiscussed the
dialectical arguments which maintain that this is logically absurd.
The usual reason given for its being absurd is that it assumes one
object (to wit, the world) to stand in two relations at once; to my
mind, namely, and again to yours; whereas a term taken in a second
relation cannot logically be the same term which it was at first.

I have heard this reason urged so often in discussing with
absolutists, and it would destroy my radical empiricism so utterly,
if it were valid, that I am bound to give it an attentive ear, and
seriously to search its strength.

For instance, let the matter in dispute be a term _M_, asserted to be
on the one hand related to _L_, and on the other to _N_; and let the
two cases of relation be symbolized by _L--M_ and _M--N_ respectively.
When, now, I assume that the experience may immediately come and be
given in the shape _L--M--N_, with no trace of doubling or internal
fission in the _M_, I am told that this is all a popular delusion;
that _L--M--N_ logically means two different experiences, _L--M_ and
_M--N_, namely; and that although the absolute may, and indeed must,
from its superior point of view, read its own kind of unity into _M_'s
two editions, yet as elements in finite experience the two _M_'s
lie irretrievably asunder, and the world between them is broken and
unbridged.

In arguing this dialectic thesis, one must avoid slipping from the
logical into the physical point of view. It would be easy, in taking
a concrete example to fix one's ideas by, to choose one in which the
letter _M_ should stand for a collective noun of some sort, which
noun, being related to _L_ by one of its parts and to _N_ by another,
would inwardly be two things when it stood outwardly in both
relations. Thus, one might say: 'David Hume, who weighed so many stone
by his body, influences posterity by his doctrine.' The body and the
doctrine are two things, between which our finite minds can discover
no real sameness, though the same name covers both of them. And then,
one might continue: 'Only an absolute is capable of uniting such a
non-identity.' We must, I say, avoid this sort of example; for the
dialectic insight, if true at all, must apply to terms and relations
universally. It must be true of abstract units as well as of nouns
collective; and if we prove it by concrete examples, we must take the
simplest, so as to avoid irrelevant material suggestions.

Taken thus in all its generality, the absolutist contention seems
to use as its major premise Hume's notion 'that all our distinct
perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives
any real connexion among distinct existences.' Undoubtedly, since we
use two phrases in talking first about '_M_'s relation to _L_' and
then again about '_M_'s relation to _N_,' we must be having, or must
have had, two distinct perceptions;--and the rest would then seem to
follow duly. But the starting-point of the reasoning here seems to be
the fact of the two _phrases_; and this suggests that the argument
may be merely verbal. Can it be that the whole dialectic achievement
consists in attributing to the experience talked-about a constitution
similar to that of the language in which we describe it? Must we
assert the objective doubleness of the _M_ merely because we have to
name it twice over when we name its two relations?

Candidly, I can think of no other reason than this for the dialectic
conclusion![1] for, if we think, not of our words, but of any simple
concrete matter which they may be held to signify, the experience
itself belies the paradox asserted. We use indeed two separate
concepts in analyzing our object, but we know them all the while to be
but substitutional, and that the _M_ in _L--M_ and the _M_ in _M--N_
_mean_ (_i.e._, are capable of leading to and terminating in) one
self-same piece, _M_, of sensible experience. This persistent identity
of certain units, or emphases, or points, or objects, or members--call
them what you will--of the experience-continuum, is just one of
those conjunctive features of it, on which I am obliged to insist so
emphatically. For samenesses are parts of experience's indefeasible
structure. When I hear a bell-stroke and, as life flows on, its
after-image dies away, I still hark back to it as 'that same

[Footnote 1: Technically, it seems classable as a 'fallacy of
composition.' A duality, predicable of the two wholes, _L--M_ and
_M--N_, is forthwith predicated of one of their parts, _M_.]

bell-stroke.' When I see a thing _M_, with _L_ to the left of it and
_N_ to the right of it, I see it _as_ one _M_; and if you tell me I
have had to 'take' it twice, I reply that if I 'took' it a thousand
times, I should still _see_ it as a unit.[1] Its unity is aboriginal,
just as the multiplicity of my successive takings is aboriginal. It
comes unbroken as _that M_, as a singular which I encounter; they come
broken, as _those_ takings, as my plurality of operations. The unity
and the separateness are strictly co-ordinate. I do not easily fathom
why my opponents should find the separateness so much more easily
understandable that they must needs infect the whole of finite
experience with it, and relegate the unity (now taken as a bare
postulate and no longer as a thing positively perceivable) to the
region of the absolute's mysteries. I do not easily fathom this, I
say, for the said opponents are above mere verbal quibbling; yet all
that I can catch in their talk is the substitution of what is true of
certain words for what is true of what they signify. They stay with
the words,--not returning to the stream of life whence all the meaning
of them came, and which is always ready to reabsorb them.

[Footnote 1: I may perhaps refer here to my _Principles of
Psychology_, vol. i, pp. 459 ff. It really seems 'weird' to have to
argue (as I am forced now to do) for the notion that it is one sheet
of paper (with its two surfaces and all that lies between) which is
both under my pen and on the table while I write--the 'claim' that it
is two sheets seems so brazen. Yet I sometimes suspect the absolutists
of sincerity!]


IV

For aught this argument proves, then, we may continue to believe that
one thing can be known by many knowers. But the denial of one thing in
many relations is but one application of a still profounder dialectic
difficulty. Man can't be good, said the sophists, for man is _man_ and
_good_ is good; and Hegel and Herbart in their day, more recently H.
Spir, and most recently and elaborately of all, Mr. Bradley, inform us
that a term can logically only be a punctiform unit, and that not one
of the conjunctive relations between things, which experience seems to
yield, is rationally possible.

Of course, if true, this cuts off radical empiricism without even a
shilling. Radical empiricism takes conjunctive relations at their
face-value, holding them to be as real as the terms united by them.
The world it represents as a collection, some parts of which are
conjunctively and others disjunctively related. Two parts, themselves
disjoined, may nevertheless hang together by intermediaries with which
they are severally connected, and the whole world eventually may hang
together similarly, inasmuch as _some_ path of conjunctive transition
by which to pass from one of its parts to another may always be
discernible. Such determinately various hanging-together may be called
_concatenated_ union, to distinguish it from the 'through-and-through'
type of union, 'each in all and all in each' (union of _total
conflux_, as one might call it), which monistic systems hold to obtain
when things are taken in their absolute reality. In a concatenated
world a partial conflux often is experienced. Our concepts and our
sensations are confluent; successive states of the same ego, and
feelings of the same body are confluent. Where the experience is not
of conflux, it may be of conterminousness (things with but one thing
between); or of contiguousness (nothing between); or of likeness; or
of nearness; or of simultaneousness; or of in-ness; or of on-ness; or
of for-ness; or of simple with-ness; or even of mere and-ness, which
last relation would make of however disjointed a world otherwise, at
any rate for that occasion a universe 'of discourse.' Now Mr. Bradley
tells us that none of these relations, as we actually experience them,
can possibly be real.[1] My next duty, accordingly, must be to rescue
radical empiricism from Mr. Bradley. Fortunately, as it seems to me,
his general contention, that the very notion of relation is

[Footnote 1: Here again the reader must beware of slipping from
logical into phenomenal considerations. It may well be that we
_attribute_ a certain relation falsely, because the circumstances of
the case, being complex, have deceived us. At a railway station we
may take our own train, and not the one that fills our window, to be
moving. We here put motion in the wrong place in the world, but in its
original place the motion is a part of reality. What Mr. Bradley
means is nothing like this, but rather that such things as motion
are nowhere real, and that, even in their aboriginal and empirically
incorrigible seats, relations are impossible of comprehension.]

unthinkable clearly, has been successfully met by many critics.[1]

It is a burden to the flesh, and an injustice both to readers and to
the previous writers, to repeat good arguments already printed. So,
in noticing Mr. Bradley, I will confine myself to the interests of
radical empiricism solely.


V

The first duty of radical empiricism, taking given conjunctions at
their face-value, is to class some of them as more intimate and some
as more external. When two terms are _similar_, their very natures
enter into the relation. Being _what_ they are, no matter where or
when, the likeness never can be denied, if asserted. It continues
predicable as long as the terms continue. Other relations, the _where_
and the _when_, for example, seem adventitious. The sheet of paper
may be 'off' or 'on' the table, for example; and in either case the
relation involves only the outside of its terms. Having an outside,
both of them, they contribute by it to the relation. It is external:
the term's inner nature is irrelevant to it. Any

[Footnote 1: Particularly so by Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, in his
_Man and the Cosmos_; by L.T. Hobhouse, in chapter xii (the Validity
of Judgment) of his _Theory of Knowledge_; and by F.C.S. Schiller,
in his _Humanism_, Essay XI. Other fatal reviews (in my opinion) are
Hodder's, in the _Psychological Review_, vol. i, 307; Stout's, in
the _Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society_, 1901-02, p. 1; and
MacLennan's, in the _Journal of Philosophy_, etc., vol. i, 403.]

book, any table, may fall into the relation, which is created _pro hac
vice_, not by their existence, but by their casual situation. It
is just because so many of the conjunctions of experience seem so
external that a philosophy of pure experience must tend to pluralism
in its ontology. So far as things have space-relations, for example,
we are free to imagine them with different origins even. If they could
get to _be_, and get into space at all, then they may have done so
separately. Once there, however, they are _additives_ to one another,
and, with no prejudice to their natures, all sorts of space-relations
may supervene between them. The question of how things could come
to be, anyhow, is wholly different from the question what their
relations, once the being accomplished, may consist in.

Mr. Bradley now affirms that such external relations as the
space-relations which we here talk of must hold of entirely different
subjects from those of which the absence of such relations might
a moment previously have been plausibly asserted. Not only is the
_situation_ different when the book is on the table, but the _book
itself_ is different as a book, from what it was when it was off the
table. He admits that 'such external relations

[Footnote 1: Once more, don't slip from logical into physical
situations. Of course, if the table be wet, it will moisten the book,
or if it be slight enough and the book heavy enough, the book will
break it down. But such collateral phenomena are not the point at
issue. The point is whether the successive relations 'on' and 'not-on'
can rationally (not physically) hold of the same constant terms,
abstractly taken. Professor A.E. Taylor drops from logical into
material considerations when he instances color-contrast as a proof
that _A_, 'as contra-distinguished from _B_, is not the same thing as
mere _A_ not in any way affected' (_Elements of Metaphysics_, 1903, p.
145). Note the substitution, for 'related,' of the word 'affected,'
which begs the whole question.]

seem possible and even existing.... That you do not alter what you
compare or rearrange in space seems to common sense quite obvious,
and that on the other side there are as obvious difficulties does not
occur to common sense at all. And I will begin by pointing out these
difficulties.... There is a relation in the result, and this relation,
we hear, is to make no difference in its terms. But, if so, to what
does it make a difference? [_doesn't it make a difference to us
onlookers, at least?_] and what is the meaning and sense of qualifying
the terms by it? [_Surely the meaning is to tell the truth about their
relative position_.[1]] If, in short, it is external to the terms, how
can it possibly be true _of_ them? [_Is it the 'intimacy' suggested by
the little word 'of,' here, which I have underscored, that is the root
of Mr. Bradley's trouble?_].... If the terms from their inner nature
do not enter into the relation, then, so far as they are concerned,
they seem related for no reason at all.... Things are spatially
related, first in one way, and then become related in another way, and
yet in no way themselves

[Footnote 1: But 'is there any sense,' asks Mr. Bradley, peevishly,
on p. 579, 'and if so, what sense, in truth that is only outside and
"about" things?' Surely such a question may be left unanswered.]

are altered; for the relations, it is said, are but external. But I
reply that, if so, I cannot _understand_ the leaving by the terms of
one set of relations and their adoption of another fresh set. The
process and its result to the terms, if they contribute nothing to it
[_surely they contribute to it all there is 'of' it!_] seem irrational
throughout. [_If 'irrational' here means simply 'non-rational,'
or non-deducible from the essence of either term singly, it is no
reproach; if it means 'contradicting' such essence, Mr. Bradley should
show wherein and how_.] But, if they contribute anything, they must
surely be affected internally. [_Why so, if they contribute only their
surface? In such relations as 'on,' 'a foot away,' 'between,' 'next,'
etc., only surfaces are in question_.] ... If the terms contribute
anything whatever, then the terms are affected [_inwardly altered?_]
by the arrangement.... That for working purposes we treat, and do well
to treat, some relations as external merely, I do not deny, and that
of course is not the question at issue here. That question is ...
whether in the end and in principle a mere external relation [_i.e.,
a relation which can change without forcing its terms to change their
nature simultaneously_] is possible and forced on us by the facts.'[1]

Mr. Bradley next reverts to the antinomies of space, which, according
to him, prove it to be unreal, although it appears as so prolific a
medium of external relations;

[Footnote 1: _Appearance and Reality_, 2d edition, pp. 575-576.]

and he then concludes that 'Irrationality and externality cannot be
the last truth about things. Somewhere there must be a reason why this
and that appear together. And this reason and reality must reside in
the whole from which terms and relations are abstractions, a whole in
which their internal connexion must lie, and out of which from the
background appear those fresh results which never could have come
from the premises' (p. 577). And he adds that 'Where the whole is
different, the terms that qualify and contribute to it must so far be
different.... They are altered so far only [_how far? farther than
externally, yet not through and through?_], but still they are
altered.... I must insist that in each case the terms are qualified by
their whole [_qualified how?--do their external relations, situations,
dates, etc., changed as these are in the new whole, fail to qualify
them 'far' enough?_], and that in the second case there is a whole
which differs both logically and psychologically from the first whole;
and I urge that in contributing to the change the terms so far are
altered' (p. 579).

Not merely the relations, then, but the terms are altered: _und
zwar_ 'so far.' But just _how_ far is the whole problem; and
'through-and-through' would seem (in spite of Mr. Bradley's somewhat
undecided utterances[1])

[Footnote 1: I say 'undecided,' because, apart from the 'so far,'
which sounds terribly half-hearted, there are passages in these very
pages in which Mr. Bradley admits the pluralistic thesis. Read, for
example, what he says, on p. 578, of a billiard ball keeping its
'character' unchanged, though, in its change of place, its 'existence'
gets altered; or what he says, on p. 579, of the possibility that
an abstract quality A, B, or C, in a thing, 'may throughout remain
unchanged' although the thing be altered; or his admission that in
red-hairedness, both as analyzed out of a man and when given with
the rest of him, there may be 'no change' (p. 580). Why does he
immediately add that for the pluralist to plead the non-mutation of
such abstractions would be an _ignoratio elenchi_? It is impossible to
admit it to be such. The entire _elenchus_ and inquest is just as to
whether parts which you can abstract from existing wholes can also
contribute to other wholes without changing their inner nature. If
they can thus mould various wholes into new _gestalt-qualitäten_,
then it follows that the same elements are logically able to exist in
different wholes [whether physically able would depend on
additional hypotheses]; that partial changes are thinkable, and
through-and-through change not a dialectic necessity; that monism is
only an hypothesis; and that an additively constituted universe is
a rationally respectable hypothesis also. All the theses of radical
empiricism, in short, follow.]

to be the full bradleyan answer. The 'whole' which he here treats as
primary and determinative of each part's manner of 'contributing,'
simply _must_, when it alters, alter in its entirety. There _must_
be total conflux of its parts, each into and through each other. The
'must' appears here as a _Machtspruch_, as an _ipse dixit_ of Mr.
Bradley's absolutistically tempered 'understanding,' for he candidly
confesses that how the parts _do_ differ as they contribute to
different wholes, is unknown to him (p. 578).

Although I have every wish to comprehend the authority by which Mr.
Bradley's understanding speaks, his words leave me wholly unconverted.
'External relations' stand with their withers all unwrung, and remain,
for aught he proves to the contrary, not only practically workable,
but also perfectly intelligible factors of reality.


VI

Mr. Bradley's understanding shows the most extraordinary power of
perceiving separations and the most extraordinary impotence in
comprehending conjunctions. One would naturally say 'neither or both,'
but not so Mr. Bradley. When a common man analyzes certain _whats_
from out the stream of experience, he understands their distinctness
_as thus isolated_. But this does not prevent him from equally well
understanding their combination with each other as _originally
experienced in the concrete_, or their confluence with new sensible
experiences in which they recur as 'the same.' Returning into the
stream of sensible presentation, nouns and adjectives, and _thats_ and
abstract _whats_, grow confluent again, and the word 'is' names
all these experiences of conjunction. Mr. Bradley understands the
isolation of the abstracts, but to understand the combination is to
him impossible.[1] 'To understand a complex _AB_,' he

[Footnote 1: So far as I catch his state of mind, it is somewhat like
this: 'Book,' 'table,' 'on'--how does the existence of these three
abstract elements result in _this_ book being livingly on _this_
table? Why isn't the table on the book? Or why doesn't the 'on'
connect itself with another book, or something that is not a table?
Mustn't something _in_ each of the three elements already determine
the two others to _it_, so that they do not settle elsewhere or float
vaguely? Mustn't the whole fact be _prefigured in each part_, and
exist _de jure_ before it can exist _de facto_? But, if so, in what
can the jural existence consist, if not in a spiritual miniature of
the whole fact's constitution actuating; every partial factor as its
purpose? But is this anything but the old metaphysical fallacy of
looking behind a fact _in esse_ for the ground of the fact, and
finding it in the shape of the very same fact _in posse_? Somewhere we
must leave off with a _constitution_ behind which there is nothing.]

says, 'I must begin with _A_ or _B_. And beginning, say with _A_, if
I then merely find _B_, I have either lost _A_, or I have got beside
_A_, [_the word 'beside' seems here vital, as meaning a conjunction
'external' and therefore unintelligible_] something else, and in
neither case have I understood.[1] For my intellect cannot simply
unite a diversity, nor has it in itself any form or way of
togetherness, and you gain nothing if, beside _A_ and _B_, you offer
me their conjunction in fact. For to my intellect that is no more
than another external element. And "facts," once for all, are for my
intellect not true unless they satisfy it.... The intellect has in its
nature no principle of mere togetherness' (pp. 570, 572).

Of course Mr. Bradley has a right to define 'intellect' as the power
by which we perceive separations but not unions--provided he give
due notice to the reader. But why then claim that such a maimed and
amputated power must reign supreme in philosophy, and accuse on its
behoof the whole empirical world of irrationality? It is true that he
elsewhere (p. 568) attributes to the intellect a _proprius motus_ of
transition, but says that

[Footnote 1: Apply this to the case of 'book-on-table'! W.J.]

when he looks for _these_ transitions in the detail of living
experience, he 'is unable to verify such a solution' (p. 569).

Yet he never explains what the intellectual transitions would be like
in case we had them. He only defines them negatively--they are not
spatial, temporal, predicative, or causal; or qualitatively or
otherwise serial; or in any way relational as we naïvely trace
relations, for relations _separate_ terms, and need themselves to be
hooked on _ad infinitum_. The nearest approach he makes to describing
a truly intellectual transition is where he speaks of _A_ and _B_
as being 'united, each from its own nature, in a whole which is the
nature of both alike' (p. 570). But this (which, _pace_ Mr. Bradley,
seems exquisitely analogous to 'taking a congeries in a lump,' if
not to 'swamping') suggests nothing but that _conflux_ which pure
experience so abundantly offers, as when 'space,' 'white,' and 'sweet'
are confluent in a 'lump of sugar,' or kinesthetic, dermal, and
optical sensations confluent in 'my hand.'[1] All that I can verify
in the transitions which Mr. Bradley's intellect desiderates as
its _proprius motus_ is a reminiscence of these and other sensible
conjunctions (especially space-conjunctions),

[Footnote 1: How meaningless is the contention that in such wholes
(or in 'book-on-table,' 'watch-in-pocket,' etc.) the relation is an
additional entity _between_ the terms, needing itself to be related
again to each! Both Bradley (_Appearance and Reality_, pp. 32-33) and
Royce (_The World and the Individual_, i, 128) lovingly repeat this
piece of profundity.]

but a reminiscence so vague that its originals are not recognized.
Bradley, in short, repeats the fable of the dog, the bone, and its
image in the water. With a world of particulars, given in loveliest
union, in conjunction definitely various, and variously definite,
the 'how' of which you 'understand' as soon as you see the fact of
them,[1] for there is no how except the constitution of the fact as
given; with all this given him, I say, in pure experience, he asks for
some ineffable union in the abstract instead, which, if he gained
it, would only be a duplicate of what he has already in his full
possession. Surely he abuses the privilege which society grants to all
of us philosophers, of being puzzle-headed.

Polemic writing like this is odious; but with absolutism in possession
in so many quarters, omission to defend my radical empiricism against
its best known champion would count as either superficiality or
inability. I have to conclude that its dialectic has not invalidated
in the least degree the usual conjunctions by which the world, as
experienced, hangs so variously together. In particular it leaves an
empirical theory of knowledge intact, and lets us continue to believe
with common sense that one object _may_ be known, if we have any
ground for thinking that it _is_ known, to many knowers.

[Footnote 1: The 'why' and the 'whence' are entirely other questions,
not under discussion, as I understand Mr. Bradley. Not how experience
gets itself born, but how it can be what it is after it is born, is
the puzzle.]




APPENDIX B


THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY[1]

... Mr. Bradley calls the question of activity a scandal to
philosophy, and if one turns to the current literature of the
subject--his own writings included--one easily gathers what he means.
The opponents cannot even understand one another. Mr. Bradley says to
Mr. Ward: 'I do not care what your oracle is, and your preposterous
psychology may here be gospel if you please; ... but if the revelation
does contain a meaning, I will commit myself to this: either the
oracle is so confused that its signification is not discoverable,
or, upon the other hand, if it can be pinned down to any definite
statement, then that statement will be false.'[2] Mr. Ward in turn
says of Mr. Bradley: 'I cannot even imagine the state of mind to which
his description applies.... It reads like an unintentional travesty of
Herbartian Psychology by one who has tried to improve upon it without
being at the pains to master it.' Münsterberg excludes a view opposed
to his own by saying that with any one who holds it a _verständigung_
with him is '_grundsätzlich ausgeschlossen_'; and Royce,

[Footnote 1: President's Address before the American Psychological
Association, December, 1904. Reprinted from the _Psychological
Review_, vol. xii, 1905, with slight verbal revision.]

[Footnote 2: _Appearance and Reality_, p. 117. Obviously written _at_
Ward, though Ward's name is not mentioned.]

in a review of Stout,[1] hauls him over the coals at great length for
defending 'efficacy' in a way which I, for one, never gathered from
reading him, and which I have heard Stout himself say was quite
foreign to the intention of his text.

In these discussions distinct questions are habitually jumbled and
different points of view are talked of _durcheinander_.

(1) There is a psychological question: Have we perceptions of
activity? and if so, what are they like, and when and where do we have
them?

(2) There is a metaphysical question: Is there a _fact_ of activity?
and if so, what idea must we frame of it? What is it like? and what
does it do, if it does anything? And finally there is a logical
question:

(3) Whence do we _know_ activity? By our own feelings of it solely? or
by some other source of information? Throughout page after page of the
literature one knows not which of these questions is before one; and
mere description of the surface-show of experience is proffered as if
it implicitly answered every one of them. No one of the disputants,
moreover, tries to show what pragmatic consequences his own view
would carry, or what assignable particular differences in any one's
experience it would make if his adversary's were triumphant.

[Footnote 1: _Mind_, N.S., VI, 379.]

It seems to me that if radical empiricism be good for anything, it
ought, with its pragmatic method and its principle of pure experience,
to be able to avoid such tangles, or at least to simplify them
somewhat. The pragmatic method starts from the postulate that there
is no difference of truth that doesn't make a difference of fact
somewhere; and it seeks to determine the meaning of all differences of
opinion by making the discussion hinge as soon as possible upon some
practical or particular issue. The principle of pure experience is
also a methodical postulate. Nothing shall be admitted as fact, it
says, except what can be experienced at some definite time by some
experient; and for every feature of fact ever so experienced, a
definite place must be found somewhere in the final system of reality.
In other words: Everything real must be experienceable somewhere, and
every kind of thing experienced must somewhere be real.

Armed with these rules of method, let us see what face the problems of
activity present to us.

By the principle of pure experience, either the word 'activity' must
have no meaning at all, or else the original type and model of what
it means must lie in some concrete kind of experience that can be
definitely pointed out. Whatever ulterior judgments we may eventually
come to make regarding activity, _that sort_ of thing will be what the
judgments are about. The first step to take, then, is to ask where in
the stream of experience we seem to find what we speak of as activity.
What we are to think of the activity thus found will be a later
question.

Now it is obvious that we are tempted to affirm activity wherever
we find anything _going on_. Taken in the broadest sense, any
apprehension of something _doing_, is an experience of activity. Were
our world describable only by the words 'nothing happening,' 'nothing
changing,' 'nothing doing,' we should unquestionably call it an
'inactive' world. Bare activity, then, as we may call it, means the
bare fact of event or change. 'Change taking place' is a unique
content of experience, one of those 'conjunctive' objects which
radical empiricism seeks so earnestly to rehabilitate and preserve.
The sense of activity is thus in the broadest and vaguest way
synonymous with the sense of 'life.' We should feel our own subjective
life at least, even in noticing and proclaiming an otherwise inactive
world. Our own reaction on its monotony would be the one thing
experienced there in the form of something coming to pass.

This seems to be what certain writers have in mind when they insist
that for an experient to be at all is to be active. It seems to
justify, or at any rate to explain, Mr. Ward's expression that we
_are_ only as we are active,[1]

[Footnote 1: _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, vol. ii, p. 245. One thinks
naturally of the peripatetic _actus primus_ and _actus secundus_
here.]

for we _are_ only as experients; and it rules out Mr. Bradley's
contention that 'there is no original experience of anything like
activity.' What we ought to say about activities thus simply given,
whose they are, what they effect, or whether indeed they effect
anything at all--these are later questions, to be answered only when
the field of experience is enlarged.

Bare activity would thus be predicable, though there were no definite
direction, no actor, and no aim. Mere restless zigzag movement, or a
wild _ideenflucht_, or _rhapsodie der wahrnehmungen_, as Kant would
say, would constitute an active as distinguished from an inactive
world.

But in this actual world of ours, as it is given, a part at least of
the activity comes with definite direction; it comes with desire
and sense of goal; it comes complicated with resistances which it
overcomes or succumbs to, and with the efforts which the feeling of
resistance so often provokes; and it is in complex experiences like
these that the notions of distinct agents, and of passivity as opposed
to activity arise. Here also the notion of causal efficacy comes
to birth. Perhaps the most elaborate work ever done in descriptive
psychology has been the analysis by various recent writers of the more
complex activity-situations. In their descriptions, exquisitely subtle
some of them,[1] the activity appears as the _gestalt-qualität_

[Footnote 1: Their existence forms a curious commentary on Professor
Munsterberg's dogma that will-attitudes are not describable. He
himself has contributed in a superior way to their description, both
in his _Willenshandlung_, and in his _Grundzüge_, Part II, chap, ix, §
7.]

or the _fundirte inhalt_ (or as whatever else you may please to call
the conjunctive form) which the content falls into when we experience
it in the ways which the describers set forth. Those factors in those
relations are what we _mean_ by activity-situations; and to the
possible enumeration and accumulation of their circumstances and
ingredients there would seem to be no natural bound. Every hour of
human life could contribute to the picture gallery; and this is the
only fault that one can find with such descriptive industry--where is
it going to stop? Ought we to listen forever to verbal pictures of
what we have already in concrete form in our own breasts?[1]
They never take us off the superficial plane. We knew the facts
already--less spread out and separated, to be sure--but we knew them
still. We always felt our own activity, for example, as 'the expansion
of an idea with which our Self is identified, against an obstacle';
and the following out of such a definition through a multitude of
cases elaborates the obvious so as to be little more than an exercise
in synonymic speech.

All the descriptions have to trace familiar outlines, and to use
familiar terms. The activity is, for example,

[Footnote 1: I ought myself to cry _peccavi_, having been a voluminous
sinner in my own chapter on the will.]

attributed either to a physical or to a mental agent, and is either
aimless or directed. If directed, it shows tendency. The tendency may
or may not be resisted. If not, we call the activity immanent, as when
a body moves in empty space by its momentum, or our thoughts wander at
their own sweet will. If resistance is met, _its_ agent complicates
the situation. If now, in spite of resistance, the original tendency
continues, effort makes its appearance, and along with effort, strain
or squeeze. Will, in the narrower sense of the word, then comes upon
the scene, whenever, along with the tendency, the strain and squeeze
are sustained. But the resistance may be great enough to check the
tendency, or even to reverse its path. In that case, we (if 'we' were
the original agents or subjects of the tendency) are overpowered.
The phenomenon turns into one of tension simply, or of necessity
succumbed--to, according as the opposing power is only equal, or is
superior to ourselves.

Whosoever describes an experience in such terms as these, describes an
experience _of_ activity. If the word have any meaning, it must denote
what there is found. _There_ is complete activity in its original and
first intention. What it is 'known-as' is what there appears. The
experiencer of such a situation possesses all that the idea contains.
He feels the tendency, the obstacle, the will, the strain, the
triumph, or the passive giving up, just as he feels the time, the
space, the swiftness or intensity, the movement, the weight and
color, the pain and pleasure, the complexity, or whatever remaining
characters the situation may involve. He goes through all that ever
can be imagined where activity is supposed. If we suppose activities
to go on outside of our experience, it is in forms like these that we
must suppose them, or else give them some other name; for the word
'activity' has no imaginable content whatever save these experiences
of process, obstruction, striving, strain, or release, ultimate
_qualia_ as they are of the life given us to be known.

Were this the end of the matter, one might think that whenever we had
successfully lived through an activity-situation we should have to be
permitted, without provoking contradiction, to say that we had
been really active, that we had met real resistance and had really
prevailed. Lotze somewhere says that to be an entity all that is
necessary is to _gelten_ as an entity, to operate, or be felt,
experienced, recognized, or in any way realized, as such. In our
activity-experiences the activity assuredly fulfils Lotze's demand.
It makes itself _gelten_. It is witnessed at its work. No matter what
activities there may really be in this extraordinary universe of ours,
it is impossible for us to conceive of any one of them being either
lived through or authentically known otherwise than in this dramatic
shape of something sustaining a felt purpose against felt obstacles
and overcoming or being overcome. What 'sustaining' means here is
clear to any one who has lived through the experience, but to no one
else; just as 'loud,' 'red,' 'sweet,' mean something only to beings
with ears, eyes, and tongues. The _percipi_ in these originals of
experience is the _esse_; the curtain is the picture. If there is
anything hiding in the background, it ought not to be called activity,
but should get itself another name.

This seems so obviously true that one might well experience
astonishment at finding so many of the ablest writers on the subject
flatly denying that the activity we live through in these situations
is real. Merely to feel active is not to be active, in their sight.
The agents that appear in the experience are not real agents, the
resistances do not really resist, the effects that appear are not
really effects at all.[1] It is evident from this that

[Footnote 1: _Verborum gratiâ_:'The feeling of activity is not able,
quâ feeling, to tell us anything about activity' (Loveday: _Mind_,
N.S., X., 403); 'A sensation or feeling or sense of activity ... is
not, looked at in another way, a feeling of activity at all. It is a
mere sensation shut up within which you could by no reflection get the
idea of activity.... Whether this experience is or is not later on a
character essential to our perception and our idea of activity, it, as
it comes first, is not in itself an experience of activity at all. It,
as it comes first, is only so for extraneous reasons and only so for
an outside observer' (Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, 2d edition,
p. 605); 'In dem tätigkeitsgefühle leigt an sich nicht der
geringste beweis für das vorhandensein einer psychischen tätigkeit'
(Münsterberg: _Grundzüge_, etc., p. 67). I could multiply similar
quotations, and would have introduced some of them into my text to
make it more concrete, save that the mingling of different points of
view in most of these author's discussions (not in Münsterberg's) make
it impossible to disentangle exactly what they mean. I am sure in any
case to be accused of misrepresenting them totally, even in this note,
by omission of the context, so the less I name names and the more
I stick to abstract characterization of a merely possible style of
opinion, the safer it will be. And apropos of misunderstandings, I may
add to this note a complaint on my own account. Professor Stout, in
the excellent chapter on 'Mental Activity,' in vol. i of his _Analytic
Psychology_, takes me to task for identifying spiritual activity with
certain muscular feelings, and gives quotations to bear him out. They
are from certain paragraphs on 'the Self,' in which my attempt was to
show what the central nucleus of the activities that we call 'ours'
is. I found it in certain intracephalic movements which we habitually
oppose, as 'subjective,' to the activities of the transcorporeal
world. I sought to show that there is no direct evidence that we feel
the activity of an inner spiritual agent as such (I should now say the
activity of 'consciousness' as such, see my paper 'Does consciousness
exist?' in the _Journal of Philosophy_, vol. i, p. 477). There are, in
fact, three distinguishable 'activities' in the field of discussion:
the elementary activity involved in the mere _that_ of experience, in
the fact that _something_ is going on, and the farther specification
of this _something_ into two _whats_, an activity felt as 'ours,' and
an activity ascribed to objects. Stout, as I apprehend him, identifies
'our' activity with that of the total experience-process, and when I
circumscribe it as a part thereof, accuses me of treating it as a sort
of external appendage to itself (pp. 162-163), as if I 'separated the
activity from the process which is active.' But all the processes in
question are active, and their activity is inseparable from their
being. My book raised only the question of _which_ activity deserved
the name of 'ours.' So far as we are 'persons,' and contrasted and
opposed to an 'environment,' movements in our body figure as our
activities; and I am unable to find any other activities that are ours
in this strictly personal sense. There is a wider sense in which
the whole 'choir of heaven and furniture of the earth,' and their
activities, are ours, for they are our 'objects.' But 'we' are here
only another name for the total process of experience, another name
for all that is, in fact; and I was dealing with the personal and
individualized self exclusively in the passages with which Professor
Stout finds fault.

The individualized self, which I believe to be the only thing properly
called self, is a part of the content of the world experienced. The
world experienced (otherwise called the 'field of consciousness')
comes at all times with our body as its centre, centre of vision,
centre of action, centre of interest. Where the body is is 'here';
when the body acts is 'now'; what the body touches is 'this'; all
other things are 'there' and 'then' and 'that.' These words of
emphasized position imply a systematization of things with reference
to a focus of action and interest which lies in the body; and the
systematization is now so instinctive (was it ever not so?) that no
developed or active experience exists for us at all except in that
ordered form. So far as 'thoughts' and 'feelings' can be active, their
activity terminates in the activity of the body, and only through
first arousing its activities can they begin to change those of
the rest of the world. The body is the storm centre, the origin
of co-ordinates, the constant place of stress in all that
experience-train. Everything circles round it, and is felt from its
point of view. The word 'I,' then, is primarily a noun of position,
just like 'this' and 'here.' Activities attached to 'this' position
have prerogative emphasis, and, if activities have feelings, must be
felt in a peculiar way. The word 'my' designates the kind of emphasis.
I see no inconsistency whatever in defending, on the one hand, 'my'
activities as unique and opposed to those of outer nature, and, on the
other hand, in affirming, after introspection, that they consist in
movements in the head. The 'my' of them is the emphasis, the feeling
of perspective-interest in which they are dyed.]

mere descriptive analysis of any one of our activity-experiences is
not the whole story, that there is something still to tell _about_
them that has led such able writers to conceive of a _Simon-pure_
activity, of an activity _an sich_, that does, and doesn't merely
appear to us to do, and compared with whose real doing all this
phenomenal activity is but a specious sham.

The metaphysical question opens here; and I think that the state of
mind of one possessed by it is often something like this: 'It is
all very well,' we may imagine him saying, 'to talk about certain
experience-series taking on the form of feelings of activity, just as
they might take on musical or geometric forms. Suppose that they do
so; suppose that what we feel is a will to stand a strain. Does our
feeling do more than _record_ the fact that the strain is sustained?
The _real_ activity, meanwhile, is the _doing_ of the fact; and what
is the doing made of before the record is made? What in the will
_enables_ it to act thus? And these trains of experience themselves,
in which activities appear, what makes them _go_ at all? Does the
activity in one bit of experience bring the next bit into being? As an
empiricist you cannot say so, for you have just declared activity
to be only a kind of synthetic object, or conjunctive relation
experienced between bits of experience already made. But what made
them at all? What propels experience _überhaupt_ into being? _There_
is the activity that _operates_; the activity _felt_ is only its
superficial sign.'

To the metaphysical question, popped upon us in this way, I must pay
serious attention ere I end my remarks, but, before doing so, let me
show that without leaving the immediate reticulations of experience,
or asking what makes activity itself act, we still find the
distinction between less real and more real activities forced upon us,
and are driven to much soul-searching on the purely phenomenal plane.

We must not forget, namely, in talking of the ultimate character of
our activity-experiences, that each of them is but a portion of a
wider world, one link in the vast chain of processes of experience
out of which history is made. Each partial process, to him who lives
through it, defines itself by its origin and its goal; but to an
observer with a wider mind-span who should live outside of it,
that goal would appear but as a provisional halting-place, and the
subjectively felt activity would be seen to continue into objective
activities that led far beyond. We thus acquire a habit, in discussing
activity-experiences, of defining them by their relation to something
more. If an experience be one of narrow span, it will be mistaken as
to what activity it is and whose. You think that _you_ are acting
while you are only obeying some one's push. You think you are doing
_this_, but you are doing something of which you do not dream. For
instance, you think you are but drinking this glass; but you are
really creating the liver-cirrhosis that will end your days. You think
you are just driving this bargain, but, as Stevenson says somewhere,
you are laying down a link in the policy of mankind.

Generally speaking, the onlooker, with his wider field of vision,
regards the _ultimate outcome_ of an activity as what it is more
really doing; and _the most previous agent_ ascertainable, being the
first source of action, he regards as the most real agent in the
field. The others but transmit that agent's impulse; on him we put
responsibility; we name him when one asks us, 'Who's to blame?'

But the most previous agents ascertainable, instead of being of longer
span, are often of much shorter span than the activity in view.
Brain-cells are our best example. My brain-cells are believed to
excite each other from next to next (by contiguous transmission of
katabolic alteration, let us say), and to have been doing so long
before this present stretch of lecturing-activity on my part began.
If any one cell-group stops its activity, the lecturing will cease or
show disorder of form. _Cessante causa, cessat et effectus_--does not
this look as if the short-span brain activities were the more real
activities, and the lecturing activities on my part only their
effects? Moreover, as Hume so clearly pointed out, in my mental
activity-situation the words physically to be uttered are represented
as the activity's immediate goal. These words, however, cannot be
uttered without intermediate physical processes in the bulb and vagi
nerves, which processes nevertheless fail to figure in the mental
activity-series at all. That series, therefore, since it leaves out
vitally real steps of action, cannot represent the real activities. It
is something purely subjective; the _facts_ of activity are elsewhere.
They are something far more interstitial, so to speak, than what my
feelings record.

The _real_ facts of activity that have in point of fact been
systematically pleaded for by philosophers have, so far as my
information goes, been of three principal types.

The first type takes a consciousness of wider time-span than ours to
be the vehicle of the more real activity. Its will is the agent, and
its purpose is the action done.

The second type assumes that 'ideas' struggling with one another are
the agents, and that the prevalence of one set of them is the action.

The third type believes that nerve-cells are the agents, and that
resultant motor discharges are the acts achieved.

Now if we must de-realize our immediately felt activity-situations for
the benefit of either of these types of substitute, we ought to know
what the substitution practically involves. _What practical difference
ought it to make if_, instead of saying naively that 'I' am active now
in delivering this address, I say that _a wider thinker is active_,
or that _certain ideas are active_, or that _certain nerve-cells are
active_, in producing the result?

This would be the pragmatic meaning of the three hypotheses. Let us
take them in succession in seeking a reply.

If we assume a wider thinker, it is evident that his purposes envelop
mine. I am really lecturing _for_ him; and altho I cannot surely know
to what end, yet if I take him religiously, I can trust it to be a
good end, and willingly connive. I can be happy in thinking that my
activity transmits his impulse, and that his ends prolong my own. So
long as I take him religiously, in short, he does not de-realize my
activities. He tends rather to corroborate the reality of them, so
long as I believe both them and him to be good.

When now we turn to ideas, the case is different, inasmuch as ideas
are supposed by the association psychology to influence each other
only from next to next. The 'span' of an idea, or pair of ideas, is
assumed to be much smaller instead of being larger than that of my
total conscious field. The same results may get worked out in both
cases, for this address is being given anyhow. But the ideas supposed
to 'really' work it out had no prevision of the whole of it; and if
I was lecturing for an absolute thinker in the former case, so,
by similar reasoning, are my ideas now lecturing for me, that is,
accomplishing unwittingly a result which I approve and adopt. But,
when this passing lecture is over, there is nothing in the bare notion
that ideas have been its agents that would seem to guarantee that my
present purposes in lecturing will be prolonged. _I_ may have ulterior
developments in view; but there is no certainty that my ideas as such
will wish to, or be able to, work them out.

The like is true if nerve-cells be the agents. The activity of a
nerve-cell must be conceived of as a tendency of exceedingly short
reach, an 'impulse' barely spanning the way to the next cell--for
surely that amount of actual 'process' must be 'experienced' by the
cells if what happens between them is to deserve the name of activity
at all. But here again the gross resultant, as _I_ perceive it, is
indifferent to the agents, and neither wished or willed or foreseen.
Their being agents now congruous with my will gives me no guarantee
that like results will recur again from their activity. In point of
fact, all sorts of other results do occur. My mistakes, impotencies,
perversions, mental obstructions, and frustrations generally, are also
results of the activity of cells. Altho these are letting me lecture
now, on other occasions they make me do things that I would willingly
not do.

The question _Whose is the real activity?_ is thus tantamount to the
question _What will be the actual results?_ Its interest is dramatic;
how will things work out? If the agents are of one sort, one way; if
of another sort, they may work out very differently. The pragmatic
meaning of the various alternatives, in short, is great. It makes more
than a merely verbal difference which opinion we take up.

You see it is the old dispute come back! Materialism and teleology;
elementary short-span actions summing themselves 'blindly,' or far
foreseen ideals coming with effort into act.

Naïvely we believe, and humanly and dramatically we like to believe,
that activities both of wider and of narrower span are at work in life
together, that both are real, and that the long-span tendencies yoke
the others in their service, encouraging them in the right direction,
and damping them when they tend in other ways. But how to represent
clearly the _modus operandi_ of such steering of small tendencies
by large ones is a problem which metaphysical thinkers will have to
ruminate upon for many years to come. Even if such control should
eventually grow clearly picturable, the question how far it is
successfully exerted in this actual world can be answered only by
investigating the details of fact. No philosophic knowledge of the
general nature and constitution of tendencies, or of the relation
of larger to smaller ones, can help us to predict which of all the
various competing tendencies that interest us in this universe are
likeliest to prevail. We know as an empirical fact that far-seeing
tendencies often carry out their purpose, but we know also that they
are often defeated by the failure of some contemptibly small process
on which success depends. A little thrombus in a statesman's meningeal
artery will throw an empire out of gear. Therefore I cannot even hint
at any solution of the pragmatic issue. I have only wished to show you
that that issue is what gives the real interest to all inquiries into
what kinds of activity may be real. Are the forces that really act in
the world more foreseeing or more blind? As between 'our' activities
as 'we' experience them, and those of our ideas, or of our
brain-cells, the issue is well defined.

I said awhile back (p. 381) that I should return to the 'metaphysical'
question before ending; so, with a few words about that, I will now
close my remarks.

In whatever form we hear this question propounded, I think that it
always arises from two things, a belief that _causality_ must be
exerted in activity, and a wonder as to how causality is made. If we
take an activity-situation at its face-value, it seems as if we caught
_in flagrante delicto_ the very power that makes facts come and be. I
now am eagerly striving, for example, to get this truth which I seem
half to perceive, into words which shall make it show more clearly. If
the words come, it will seem as if the striving itself had drawn or
pulled them into actuality out from the state of merely possible being
in which they were. How is this feat performed? How does the pulling
_pull_? How do I get my hold on words not yet existent, and when they
come, by what means have I _made_ them come? Really it is the problem
of creation; for in the end the question is: How do I make them _be?_
Real activities are those that really make things be, without which
the things are not, and with which they are there. Activity, so far as
we merely feel it, on the other hand, is only an impression of ours,
it may be maintained; and an impression is, for all this way of
thinking, only a shadow of another fact.

Arrived at this point, I can do little more than indicate the
principles on which, as it seems to me, a radically empirical
philosophy is obliged to rely in handling such a dispute.

If there _be_ real creative activities in being, radical empiricism
must say, somewhere they must be immediately lived. Somewhere the
_that_ of efficacious causing and the _what_ of it must be experienced
in one, just as the what and the that of 'cold' are experienced in one
whenever a man has the sensation of cold here and now. It boots not to
say that our sensations are fallible. They are indeed; but to see the
thermometer contradict us when we say 'it is cold' does not abolish
cold as a specific nature from the universe. Cold is in the arctic
circle if not here. Even so, to feel that our train is moving when the
train beside our window moves, to see the moon through a telescope
come twice as near, or to see two pictures as one solid when we look
through a stereoscope at them, leaves motion, nearness, and solidity
still in being--if not here, yet each in its proper seat elsewhere.
And wherever the seat of real causality _is_, as ultimately known 'for
true' (in nerve-processes, if you will, that cause our feelings of
activity as well as the movements which these seem to prompt), a
philosophy of pure experience can consider the real causation as no
other _nature_ of thing than that which even in our most erroneous
experiences appears to be at work. Exactly what appears there is what
we _mean_ by working, tho we may later come to learn that working was
not exactly _there_. Sustaining, persevering, striving, paying with
effort as we go, hanging on, and finally achieving our intention--this
_is_ action, this _is_ effectuation in the only shape in which, by
a pure experience-philosophy, the whereabouts of it anywhere can be
discussed. Here is creation in its first intention, here is causality
at work.[1] To treat this offhand as the bare illusory

[Footnote 1: Let me not be told that this contradicts a former article
of mine, 'Does consciousness exist?' in the _Journal of Philosophy_
for September 1, 1904 (see especially page 489), in which it was said
that while 'thoughts' and 'things' have the same natures, the natures
work 'energetically' on each other in the things (fire burns, water
wets, etc.), but not in the thoughts. Mental activity-trains are
composed of thoughts, yet their members do work on each other: they
check, sustain, and introduce. They do so when the activity is merely
associational as well as when effort is there. But, and this is my
reply, they do so by other parts of their nature than those that
energize physically. One thought in every developed activity-series is
a desire or thought of purpose, and all the other thoughts acquire a
feeling tone from their relation of harmony or oppugnancy to this.
The interplay of these secondary tones (among which 'interest,'
'difficulty,' and 'effort' figure) runs the drama in the mental
series. In what we term the physical drama these qualities play
absolutely no part. The subject needs careful working out; but I can
see no inconsistency.]

surface of a world whose real causality is an unimaginable ontological
principle hidden in the cubic deeps, is, for the more empirical way of
thinking, only animism in another shape. You explain your given fact
by your 'principle,' but the principle itself, when you look clearly
at it, turns out to be nothing but a previous little spiritual copy
of the fact. Away from that one and only kind of fact your mind,
considering causality, can never get.[1]

[Footnote 1: I have found myself more than once accused in print of
being the assertor of a metaphysical principle of activity. Since
literary misunderstandings retard the settlement of problems, I should
like to say that such an interpretation of the pages I have published
on effort and on will is absolutely foreign to what I meant to
express. I owe all my doctrines on this subject to Renouvier; and
Renouvier, as I understand him, is (or at any rate then was) an out
and out phenomenist, a denier of 'forces' in the most strenuous
sense. Single clauses in my writing, or sentences read out of their
connexion, may possibly have been compatible with a transphenomenal
principle of energy; but I defy any one to show a single sentence
which, taken with its context, should be naturally held to advocate
that view. The misinterpretation probably arose at first from my
having defended (after Renouvier) the indeterminism of our efforts.
'Free will' was supposed by my critics to involve a supernatural
agent. As a matter of plain history, the only 'free will' I have
ever thought of defending is the character of novelty in fresh
activity-situations. If an activity-process is the form of a whole
'field of consciousness,' and if each field of consciousness is not
only in its totality unique (as is now commonly admitted), but has
its elements unique (since in that situation they are all dyed in
the total), then novelty is perpetually entering the world and what
happens there is not pure _repetition_, as the dogma of the literal
uniformity of nature requires. Activity-situations come, in short,
each with an original touch. A 'principle' of free will, if there were
one, would doubtless manifest itself in such phenomena, but I never
saw, nor do I now see, what the principle could do except rehearse the
phenomenon beforehand, or why it ever should be invoked.]

I conclude, then, that real effectual causation as an ultimate nature,
as a 'category,' if you like, of reality, is _just what we feel it
to be_, just that kind of conjunction which our own activity-series
reveal. We have the whole butt and being of it in our hands; and the
healthy thing for philosophy is to leave off grubbing underground for
what effects effectuation, or what makes action act, and to try to
solve the concrete questions of where effectuation in this world is
located, of which things are the true causal agents there, and of what
the more remote effects consist.

From this point of view the greater sublimity traditionally attributed
to the metaphysical inquiry, the grubbing inquiry, entirely
disappears. If we could know what causation really and
transcendentally is in itself, the only _use_ of the knowledge would
be to help us to recognize an actual cause when we had one, and so to
track the future course of operations more intelligently out. The mere
abstract inquiry into causation's hidden nature is not more sublime
than any other inquiry equally abstract. Causation inhabits no more
sublime level than anything else. It lives, apparently, in the dirt of
the world as well as in the absolute, or in man's unconquerable mind.
The worth and interest of the world consists not in its elements,
be these elements things, or be they the conjunctions of things; it
exists rather in the dramatic outcome of the whole process, and in the
meaning of the succession stages which the elements work out.

My colleague and master, Josiah Royce, in a page of his review of
Stout's _Analytic Psychology_, in _Mind_ for 1897, has some fine words
on this point with which I cordially agree. I cannot agree with his
separating the notion of efficacy from that of activity altogether
(this I understand to be one contention of his), for activities are
efficacious whenever they are real activities at all. But the inner
nature both of efficacy and of activity are superficial problems, I
understand Royce to say; and the only point for us in solving them
would be their possible use in helping us to solve the far deeper
problem of the course and meaning of the world of life. Life, says
our colleague, is full of significance, of meaning, of success and of
defeat, of hoping and of striving, of longing, of desire, and of inner
value. It is a total presence that embodies worth. To live our own
lives better in this presence is the true reason why we wish to know
the elements of things; so even we psychologists must end on this
pragmatic note.

The urgent problems of activity are thus more concrete. They all
are problems of the true relation of longer-span to shorter-span
activities. When, for example, a number of 'ideas' (to use the name
traditional in psychology) grow confluent in a larger field of
consciousness, do the smaller activities still coexist with the wider
activities then experienced by the conscious subject? And, if so, do
the wide activities accompany the narrow ones inertly, or do they
exert control? Or do they perhaps utterly supplant and replace them
and short-circuit their effects? Again, when a mental activity-process
and a brain-cell series of activities both terminate in the same
muscular movement, does the mental process steer the neural processes
or not? Or, on the other hand, does it independently short-circuit
their effects? Such are the questions that we must begin with. But so
far am I from suggesting any definitive answer to such questions,
that I hardly yet can put them clearly. They lead, however, into that
region of panpsychic and ontologic speculation of which Professors
Bergson and Strong have lately enlarged the literature in so able and
interesting a way. The results of these authors seem in many respects
dissimilar, and I understand them as yet but imperfectly; but I cannot
help suspecting that the direction of their work is very promising,
and that they have the hunter's instinct for the fruitful trails.




APPENDIX C


ON THE NOTION OF REALITY AS CHANGING

In my _Principles of Psychology_ (vol. ii, p. 646) I gave the name of
the 'axiom of skipped intermediaries and transferred relations' to a
serial principle of which the foundation of logic, the _dictum de omni
et nullo_ (or, as I expressed it, the rule that what is of a kind is
of that kind's kind), is the most familiar instance. More than the
more is more than the less, equals of equals are equal, sames of the
same are the same, the cause of a cause is the cause of its effects,
are other examples of this serial law. Altho it applies infallibly
and without restriction throughout certain abstract series, where the
'sames,' 'causes,' etc., spoken of, are 'pure,' and have no properties
save their sameness, causality, etc., it cannot be applied offhand to
concrete objects with numerous properties and relations, for it is
hard to trace a straight line of sameness, causation, or whatever it
may be, through a series of such objects without swerving into some
'respect' where the relation, as pursued originally, no longer holds:
the objects have so many 'aspects' that we are constantly deflected
from our original direction, and find, we know not why, that we are
following something different from what we started with. Thus a cat is
in a sense the same as a mouse-trap, and a mouse-trap the same as a
bird-cage; but in no valuable or easily intelligible sense is a cat
the same as a bird-cage. Commodore Perry was in a sense the cause
of the new régime in Japan, and the new régime was the cause of the
russian Douma; but it would hardly profit us to insist on holding to
Perry as the cause of the Douma: the terms have grown too remote to
have any real or practical relation to each other. In every series of
real terms, not only do the terms themselves and their associates
and environments change, but we change, and their _meaning_ for
us changes, so that new kinds of sameness and types of causation
continually come into view and appeal to our interest. Our earlier
lines, having grown irrelevant, are then dropped. The old terms can no
longer be substituted nor the relations 'transferred,' because of so
many new dimensions into which experience has opened. Instead of a
straight line, it now follows a zigzag; and to keep it straight, one
must do violence to its spontaneous development. Not that one might
not possibly, by careful seeking (tho I doubt it), _find_ some line in
nature along which terms literally the same, or causes causal in the
same way, might be serially strung without limit, if one's interest
lay in such finding. Within such lines our axioms might hold, causes
might cause their effect's effects, etc.; but such lines themselves
would, if found, only be partial members of a vast natural network,
within the other lines of which you could not say, in any sense that
a wise man or a sane man would ever think of, in any sense that would
not be concretely _silly_, that the principle of skipt intermediaries
still held good. In the _practical_ world, the world whose
significances we follow, sames of the same are certainly not sames of
one another; and things constantly cause other things without being
held responsible for everything of which those other things are
causes.

Professor Bergson, believing as he does in a heraclitean 'devenir
réel,' ought, if I rightly understand him, positively to deny that in
the actual world the logical axioms hold good without qualification.
Not only, according to him, do terms change, so that after a certain
time the very elements of things are no longer what they were, but
relations also change, so as no longer to obtain in the same identical
way between the new things that have succeeded upon the old ones. If
this were really so, then however indefinitely sames might still
be substituted for sames in the logical world of nothing but pure
sameness, in the world of real operations every line of sameness
actually started and followed up would eventually give out, and cease
to be traceable any farther. Sames of the same, in such a world, will
not always (or rather, in a strict sense will never) be the same
as one another, for in such a world there _is_ no literal or ideal
sameness among numerical differents. Nor in such a world will it be
true that the cause of the cause is unreservedly the cause of
the effect; for if we follow lines of real causation, instead of
contenting ourselves with Hume's and Kant's eviscerated schematism, we
find that remoter effects are seldom aimed at by causal intentions,[1]
that no one kind of causal activity continues indefinitely, and that
the principle of skipt intermediaries can be talked of only _in
abstracto_.[2]

Volumes i, ii, and iii of the _Monist_ (1890-1893) contain a number of
articles by Mr. Charles S. Peirce, articles the originality of which
has apparently prevented their making an immediate impression, but
which, if I mistake not, will prove a gold-mine of ideas for thinkers
of the coming generation. Mr. Peirce's views, tho reached so
differently, are altogether congruous with Bergson's. Both
philosophers believe that the appearance of novelty in things is
genuine. To an observer standing outside of its generating causes,
novelty can appear only as so much 'chance'; to one who stands inside
it is the expression of 'free creative activity.' Peirce's 'tychism'
is thus practically synonymous with Bergson's 'devenir réel.' The
common objection to admitting novelties is that by jumping abruptly
in, _ex nihilo_, they shatter the world's rational continuity. Peirce
meets this objection by combining his tychism

[Footnote 1: Compare the douma with what Perry aimed at.]

[Footnote 2: Compare Appendix B, as to what I mean here by 'real'
casual activity.]

with an express doctrine of 'synechism' or continuity, the two
doctrines merging into the higher synthesis on which he bestows the
name of 'agapasticism (_loc. cit._, iii, 188), which means exactly the
same thing as Bergson's 'évolution créatrice.' Novelty, as empirically
found, doesn't arrive by jumps and jolts, it leaks in insensibly, for
adjacents in experience are always interfused, the smallest real datum
being both a coming and a going, and even numerical distinctness being
realized effectively only after a concrete interval has passed. The
intervals also deflect us from the original paths of direction, and
all the old identities at last give out, for the fatally continuous
infiltration of otherness warps things out of every original rut.
Just so, in a curve, the same direction is _never_ followed, and the
conception of it as a myriad-sided polygon falsifies it by
supposing it to do so for however short a time. Peirce speaks of an
'infinitesimal' tendency to diversification. The mathematical notion
of an infinitesimal contains, in truth, the whole paradox of the same
and yet the nascent other, of an identity that won't _keep_ except so
far as it keeps _failing_, that won't _transfer_, any more than the
serial relations in question transfer, when you apply them to reality
instead of applying them to concepts alone.

A friend of mine has an idea, which illustrates on such a magnified
scale the impossibility of tracing the same line through reality, that
I will mention it here. He thinks that nothing more is needed to make
history 'scientific' than to get the content of any two epochs (say
the end of the thirteenth and the end of the nineteenth century)
accurately defined, then accurately to define the direction of the
change that led from the one epoch into the other, and finally to
prolong the line of that direction into the future. So prolonging the
line, he thinks, we ought to be able to define the actual state
of things at any future date we please. We all feel the essential
unreality of such a conception of 'history' as this; but if such a
synechistic pluralism as Peirce, Bergson, and I believe in, be what
really exists, every phenomenon of development, even the simplest,
would prove equally rebellious to our science should the latter
pretend to give us literally accurate instead of approximate, or
statistically generalized, pictures of the development of reality.

I can give no further account of Mr. Peirce's ideas in this note, but
I earnestly advise all students of Bergson to compare them with those
of the french philosopher.




INDEX


INDEX TO THE LECTURES

  Absolute, the, 49, 108-109, 114 ff., 173, 175, 190 ff., 203, 271, 292 ff.,
  311; not the same as God, 111, 134; its rationality, 114 f.; its
  irrationality, 117-129; difficulty of conceiving it, 195.

  Absolutism, 34, 38, 40, 54, 72 f, 79, 122, 310. See Monism.

  Achilles and tortoise, 228, 255.

  All-form, the, 34, 324.

  Analogy, 8, 151 f.

  Angels, 164.

  Antinomies, 231, 239.

  ARISTIDES, 304.


  BAILEY, S., 5.

  BERGSON, H., Lecture VI, _passim_. His characteristics, 226 f, 266.

  'Between,' 70.

  Block-universe, 310, 328.

  BRADLEY, F.H., 46, 69, 79, 211, 220, 296.

  Brain, 160.


  CAIRD, E., 89, 95, 137.

  CATO, 304.

  Causation, 258. See Influence.

  Change, 231, 253.

  CHESTERTON, 203, 303.

  Compounding of mental states, 168, 173, 186 f., 268, 281, 284, 292, 296.

  Concepts, 217, 234 f.

  Conceptual method, 243 f., 246, 253.

  Concrete reality, 283, 286.

  Confluence, 326.

  Conflux, 257.

  Consciousness, superhuman, 156, 310 f.; its compound nature, 168, 173,
  186 f., 289.

  Continuity, 256 f., 325.

  Contradiction, in Hegel, 89 f.

  Creation, 29, 119.


  Death, 303.

  Degrees, 74.

  Dialectic method, 89.

  Difference, 257 f.

  Diminutive epithets, 12, 24.
  Discreteness of change, 231.


  'Each-form,' the, 34, 325.

  Earth, the, in Fechner's philosophy, 156; is an angel, 164.

  Earth-soul, 152 f.

  Elan vital, 262.

  Empiricism, 264, 277; and religion, 314; defined, 7.

  Endosmosis, 257.

  Epithets. See Diminutive.

  Evil, 310.

  Experience, 312; religious, 307.

  Extremes, 67, 74.


  'Faith-ladder,' 328.

  'Fall,' the, 119, 310.

  FECHNER, Lecture IV, _passim._ His life, 145-150; he reasons by analogy,
  151; his genius, 154; compared with Royce, 173, 207; not a genuine
  monist, 293; his God; and religious experience, 308.

  FERRIER, Jas., 13.

  Finite experience, 39, 48, 182, 192-193.

  Finiteness, of God, 111, 124, 294.

  Foreignness, 31.


  German manner of philosophizing, 17.

  GOD, 24 f., 111, 124, 193, 240, 294.

  GREEN, T.H., 6, 24, 137, 278.


  HALDANE, R.B., 138.

  HEGEL, Lecture III, _passim_, 11, 85, 207, 211, 219, 296. His vision,
  88, 98 f., 104; his use of double negation, 102; his vicious
  intellectualism 106; Haldane on, 138; McTaggart on, 140; Royce on, 143.

  HODGSON, S.H., 282.

  Horse, 265.

  HUME, 19, 267.


  Idealism, 36. See Absolutism.

  Identity, 93.

  Immortality, Fechner's view of, 171.

  'Independent' beings, 55, 58.

  Indeterminism, 77.

  Infinity, 229.

  Influence, 258, 561.

  Intellect, its function is practical, 247 f., 252.

  Intellectualism, vicious, 60, 218.

  Intellectualist logic, 216, 259, 261.

  Intellectualist method, 291.

  Interaction, 56.

  Intimacy, 31.

  Irrationality, 81; of the absolute, 117-129.


  JACKS, L.P., 35.

  JOACHIM, H., 121, 141.

  JONES, H., 52.


  KANT, 19, 199, 238, 240.


  LEIBNITZ, 119.

  Life, 523.

  Log, 323.

  Logic, 92, 211; Intellectualist, 217, 242.

  LOTZE, 55, 120.

  LUTHER, 304.


  McTAGGART, 51, 74 f., 120, 140 f., 183.

  Manyness in oneness, 322. See Compounding.

  Mental chemistry, 185.

  MILL, J.S., 242, 260.

  Mind, dust theory, 189.

  Mind, the eternal, 137. See Absolute.

  Monism, 36, 117, 125, 201, 313, 321 f.; Fechner's, 153. See Absolutism.

  Monomaniacs, 78.

  Motion, 233, 238, 254; Zeno on, 228.

  MYERS, F.W.H., 315.


  Nature, 21, 286.

  Negation, 93 f.; double, 102.

  Newton, 260.


  Other, 95, 312; 'its own other,' 108 f., 282.

  Oxford, _3_, 313, 331.


  Pantheism, 24, 28.

  PAULSEN, 18, 22.

  Personality, divided, 298.

  Philosophers, their method, 9; their common desire, 11 f.; they must
  reason, 13.

  Philosophies, their types, 23, 31.

  PHOCION, 304.

  Plant-soul, 165 f.

  Pluralism, 45, 76, 79, 311, 319, 321 f.

  Polytheism, 310.

  Practical reason, 329.

  Psychic synthesis, 185. See Compounding.

  Psychical research, 299.


  'Quâ,' 39, 47, 267, 270.

  'Quatenus,' 47, 267.


  Rationalism defined, 7, 98; its thinness, 144, 237.

  Rationality, 81, 112 f., 319 f.

  Reality, 262 f., 264, 283 f.

  Reason, 286, 312.

  Relating, 7.

  Relations, 70, 278 ff.; 'external,' 80.

  Religious experiences, 305 f.

  RITCHIE, 72.

  ROYCE, 61 f., 115, 173, 182 f., 197, 207, 212, 265, 296.


  Same, 269, 281.

  Savage philosophy, 21.

  Science, 145.

  Sensations, 279.

  Socialism, 78.

  SOCRATES, 284.

  Soul, 199, 209.

  'Some,' 79.

  Sphinx, 22.

  SPINOZA, 47.

  Spiritualistic philosophy, 23.

  Sugar, 220, 232.

  Synthesis, psychic. See Compounding.


  TAYLOR, A.E., 76, 139, 212.

  Theism, 24.

  Thick, the, 136.

  'Thickness' of Fechner's philosophy, 144.

  Thin, the, 136.

  Thinness of the current transcendentalism, 144, 174 f.

  Time, 232.


  Units of reality, 287.


  Vision, in philosophy, 20.


  WELLS, H.G., 78.

  Will to believe, 328.

  Witnesses, as implied in experience, 200.

  WUNDT, W., 185.


  ZENO, 228.







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