SOME PROBLEMS OF
PHILOSOPHY
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SOME PROBLEMS
OF PHILOSOPHY
A BEGINNING OF AN INTRODUCTION
TO PHILOSOPHY
BY
WILLIAM JAMES
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK
LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
1916
COPYRIGHT, IQII, BY HENRY JAMES JR.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
First Edition May, 1911
Reprinted July, 1911
August, 1916
'. . . he [Charles Renouvier] was
one of the greatest of philosophic
characters, and but for the decisive
impression made on me in the
seventies by his masterly advocacy
of pluralism, I might never have
got free from the monistic supersti
tion under which I had grown up.
The present volume, in short, might
never have been written. This is
why, feeling endlessly thankful as
I do, I dedicate this text-book to the
great Renouvier9 s memory.9 [165]
PREFATORY NOTE
FOR several years before his death Professor Wil
liam James cherished the purpose of stating his
views on certain problems of metaphysics in a
book addressed particularly to readers of phi
losophy. He began the actual writing of this
'introductory text-book for students in metaphys
ics,' as he once called it, in March, 1909, and to
complete it was at last his dearest ambition.
But illness, and other demands on his diminished
strength, continued to interfere, and what is now
published is all that he had succeeded in writing
when he died in August, 1910.
Two typewritten copies of his unfinished manu
script were found. They had been corrected sep
arately. A comparison of the independent alter
ations in the two copies showed few and slight
differences of phrase and detail, and indicated no
formed intention to make substantial changes; yet
the author perhaps expected to make some further
alterations in a final revision if he could finish the
book, for in a memorandum dated July 26, 1910, in
which he directed the publication of the manu
script, he wrote: 'Say it is fragmentary and unre-
vised.9
This memorandum continues, 'Call it "A begin-
vii
PREFATORY NOTE
ning of an introduction to philosophy" Say that 1
hoped by it to round out my system, which now is too
much like an arch built only on one side.9
In compliance with the author's request left in
the same memorandum, his pupil and friend, Dr.
H. M. Kallen, has compared the two versions of the
manuscript and largely prepared the book for the
press. The divisions and headings in the manu
script were incomplete, and for helpful suggestions
as to these grateful acknowledgments are also due
to Professor R. B. Perry.
HENRY JAMES, JR.
CAMBRIDGE, March 25, 1911.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS 3
Philosophy and those who write it, 3. What philosophy is,
4. Its value, 6. Its enemies and their objections, 8. Objec
tion that it is unpractical answered, 9. This objection in the
light of history, 10. Philosophy as * man thinking,' 15. Origin
of man's present ways of thinking, 16. Science as specialized
philosophy, 21. Philosophy the residuum of problems unsolved
by science, 23. Philosophy need not be dogmatic, 25. Not
divorced from reality, 26. Philosophy as " metaphysics, " 27.
CHAPTER II
THE PROBLEMS OF METAPHYSICS 29
Examples of metaphysical problems, 29. Metaphysics de
nned, 31. Nature of metaphysical problems, 32. Rationalism
and empiricism in metaphysics, 34.
CHAPTER III
THE PROBLEM OF BEING 38
Schopenhauer on the origin of the problem, 38. Various
treatments of the problem, 40. Rationalist and empiricist
treatments, 42. Same amount of existence must be begged by
all, 45. Conservation vs. creation, 45.
CHAPTER IV
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT — THE IMPORT OF CONCEPTS . 47
Their difference, 47. The conceptual order, 50. Concept
ual knowledge ; the rationalist view, 55. Conceptual know
ledge ; the empiricist view, 57. The content and function of
concepts, 58. The pragmatic rule, 59. Examples, 62. Ori
gin of concepts in their utility, 63. The theoretic use of con
cepts, 65. In the a priori sciences, 67. And in physics, 70.
Concepts bring new values, 71. Summary, 73.
ix
CONTENTS
CHAPTER V
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT — THE ABUSE OF CONCEPTS . 75
The intellectualist creed, 75. Defects of the conceptual
translation, 78. The insuperability of sensation, 79. Why con
cepts are inadequate, 81. Origin of intellectualism, 83. Inad
equacy of intellectualism, 84. Examples of puzzles introduced
by the conceptual translation, 85. Relation of philosophers
to the dialectic difficulties, 91. The sceptics and Hegel, 92.
Bradley on percept and concept, 92. Criticism of Bradley, 95.
Summary, 96.
CHAPTER VI
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT — SOME COROLLARIES ... 98
I. Novelty becomes possible, 98. II. Conceptual systems
are distinct realms of reality, 101. III. The self -sameness of
ideal objects, 102. IV. Concepts and percepts are consubstan-
tial, 107. V. An objection replied to, 109.
CHAPTER VII
THE ONE AND THE MANY 113
Pluralism vs. monism, 113. Kinds of monism, 116. Mys
tical monism, 116. Monism of substance, 119. Critique of
substance, 121. Pragmatic analysis of oneness, 124. Kinds
of oneness, 126. Unity by concatenation, 129. Unity of pur
pose, meaning, 131. Unity of origin, 132. Summary, 132.
CHAPTER VIII
THE ONE AND THE MANY (CONTINUED) — VALUES AND
DEFECTS 135
The monistic theory, 135. The value of absolute oneness,
136. Its defects, 138. The pluralistic theory, 140. Its de
fects, 142. Its advantages, 142. Monism, pluralism and nov
elty, 145.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER IX
THE PROBLEM OF NOVELTY 147
Perceptual novelty, 148. Science and novelty, 149. Personal
experience and novelty, 151. Novelty and the infinite, 153.
CHAPTER X
NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE — THE CONCEPTUAL
VIEW 154
The discontinuity theory, 154. The continuity theory, 155.
Zeno's paradoxes, 157. Kant's antinomies, 160. Ambiguity
of Kant's statement of the problem, 162. Renouvier's solu
tion, 164. His solution favors novelty, 164.
CHAPTER XI
NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE — THE PERCEPTUAL
VIEW 166
The standing infinite, 167. Its pragmatic definition, 168.
The growing infinite, 170. The growing infinite must be
treated as discontinuous, 172. Objections, 173. (1) The
number-continuum, 173. (2) The "new infinite," 175.
The new infinite is paradoxical, 176. " Transfinite numbers,"
177. Their uses and defects, 178. Russell's solution of Zeno's
paradox by their means, 180. The solution criticized, 181.
Conclusions, 184. (1) Conceptual transformation of percep
tual experience turns the infinite into a problem, 185. (2) It
leaves the problem of novelty where it was, 187.
CHAPTER XII
NOVELTY AND CAUSATION — THE CONCEPTUAL
VIEW 189
The principle of causality, 189. Aristotle on causation, 190.
Scholasticism on the efficient cause, 191. Occasionalism, 194.
Leibnitz, 195. Hume, 196. Criticism of Hume, 198. Kant,
xi
CONTENTS
201. Positivism, 203. Deductive theories of causation, 204.
Summary and conclusion, 205.
CHAPTER XIII
NOVELTY AND CAUSATION — THE PERCEPTUAL
VIEW 208
Defects of the perceptual view do not warrant skepticism,
209. The perpetual experience of causation, 210. In it ' final '
and 'efficient' causation coincide, 212. And novelties arise,
213. Perceptual causation sets a problem, 215. This is the
problem of the relation of mind to brain, 217. Conclusion,
217.
APPENDIX
FAITH AND THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE .... 221
INDEX 233
SOME PROBLEMS OF
PHILOSOPHY
CHAPTER I
PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS
THE progress of society is due to the fact that
individuals vary from the human average in
all sorts of directions, and that the originality
is often so attractive or useful that they are
recognized by their tribe as leaders, and be
come objects of envy or admiration, and set
ters of new ideals.
Among the variations, every generation of
men produces some individuals exceptionally
Phiioso- preoccupied with theory. Such men
those who ^n(^ matter for puzzle and astonish
ment where no one else does. Their
imagination invents explanations and com
bines them. They store up the learning of their
time, utter prophecies and warnings, and are
regarded as sages. Philosophy, etymologic-
ally meaning the love of wisdom, is the work
of this class of minds, regarded with an indul
gent relish, if not with admiration, even by
those who do not understand them or believe
much in the truth which they proclaim.
3
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
Philosophy, thus become a race-heritage,
forms in its totality a monstrously unwieldy
mass of learning. So taken, there is no reason
why any special science like chemistry, or as
tronomy, should be excluded from it. By com
mon consent, however, special sciences are
to-day excluded, for reasons presently to be
explained; and what remains is manageable
What enough to be taught under the name
philoso
phy is of philosophy by one man if his in
terests be broad enough.
If this were a German textbook I should first
give my abstract definition of the topic, thus
limited by usage, then proceed to display its
'Begriff, und Eintheilung,' and its 'Aufgabe
und Methode.' But as such displays are usu
ally unintelligible to beginners, and unneces
sary after reading the book, it will conduce to
brevity to omit that chapter altogether, useful
though it might possibly be to more advanced
readers as a summary of what is to follow.
I will tarry a moment, however, over the
matter of definition. Limited by the omission
of the special sciences, the name of philosophy
4
PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS
has come more and more to denote ideas of
universal scope exclusively. The principles of
explanation that underlie all things without
exception, the elements common to gods and
men and animals and stones, the first whence
and the last whither of the whole cosmic pro
cession, the conditions of all knowing, and the
most general rules of human action — these
furnish the problems commonly deemed phi
losophic par excellence; and the philosopher is
the man who finds the most to say about them.
Philosophy is defined in the usual scholastic
textbooks as 'the knowledge of things in gen
eral by their ultimate causes, so far as natural
reason can attain to such knowledge.' This
means that explanation of the universe at
large, not description of its details, is what
philosophy must aim at; and so it happens that
a view of anything is termed philosophic just
in proportion as it is broad and connected with
other views, and as it uses principles not proxi
mate, or intermediate, but ultimate and all-
embracing, to justify itself. Any very sweep
ing view of the world is a philosophy in this
5
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
sense, even though it may be a vague one. It is
a Weltanschauung, an intellectualized attitude
towards life. Professor Dewey well describes
the constitution of all the philosophies that
actually exist, when he says that philosophy
expresses a certain attitude, purpose and tem
per of conjoined intellect and will, rather than
a discipline whose boundaries can be neatly
marked off.1
To know the chief rival attitudes towards
life, as the history of human thinking has de-
its value veloped them, and to have heard
some of the reasons they can give for them
selves, ought to be considered an essential
part of liberal education. Philosophy, indeed,
in one sense of the term is only a compend
ious name for the spirit in education which
the word 'college' stands for in America.
Things can be taught in dry dogmatic ways
or in a philosophic way. At a technical school
a man may grow into a first-rate instrument
for doing a certain job, but he may miss all
1 Compare the article ' Philosophy ' in Baldwin's Dictionary of
Philosophy and Psychology.
PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS
the graciousness of mind suggested by the
term liberal culture. He may remain a cad,
and not a gentleman, intellectually pinned
down to his one narrow subject, literal, unable
to suppose anything different from what he
has seen, without imagination, atmosphere, or
mental perspective.
Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato
and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything
different from what it is. It sees the familiar
as if it were strange, and the strange as if it
were familiar. It can take things up and lay
them down again. Its mind is full of air that
plays round every subject. It rouses us from
our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up
our caked prejudices. Historically it has al
ways been a sort of fecundation of four differ
ent human interests, science, poetry, religion,
and logic, by one another. It has sought by
hard reasoning for results emotionally valu
able. To have some contact with it, to catch
its influence, is thus good for both literary and
scientific students. By its poetry it appeals to
literary minds; but its logic stiffens them up
7
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
and remedies their softness. By its logic it
appeals to the scientific; but softens them by
its other aspects, and saves them from too dry
a technicality. Both types of student ought
to get from philosophy a livelier spirit, more
air, more mental background. 'Hast any phi
losophy in thee, Shepherd?' — this question
of Touchstone's is the one with which men
should always meet one another. A man with
no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious
and unprofitable of all possible social mates.
I say nothing in all this of what may be
called the gymnastic use of philosophic study,
the purely intellectual power gained by defin
ing the high and abstract concepts of the phi
losopher, and discriminating between them.
In spite of the advantages thus enumer
ated, the study of philosophy has systematic
itsene- enemies, and they were never as
numerous as at the present day. The
jections definite conquests of science and the
apparent indefiniteness of philosophy's results
partly account for this; to say nothing of man's
native rudeness of mind, which maliciously
8
PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CKITICS
enjoys deriding long words and abstractions.
'Scholastic jargon/ 'mediaeval dialectics,' are
for many people synonyms of the word phi
losophy. With his obscure and uncertain spec
ulations as to the intimate nature and causes
of things, the philosopher is likened to a
' blind man in a dark room looking for a black
hat that is not there.' His occupation is de
scribed as the art of 'endlessly disputing
without coming to any conclusion,' or more
contemptuously still as ihe'systematischeMiss-
brauch einer eben zu diesem Zwecke erfundenen
Terminologies
Only to a very limited degree is this sort of
hostility reasonable. I will take up some of the
current objections in successive order, since to
reply to them will be a convenient way of
entering into the interior of our subject.
Objection 1. Whereas the sciences make
Ob'ec- steady progress and yield applica
tion that tions of matchless utility, philosophy
it is un
practical makes no progress and has no practi-
answered , .
cal applications.
Reply. The opposition is unjustly founded,
9
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
for the sciences are themselves branches of the
tree of philosophy. As fast as questions got
accurately answered, the answers were called
* scientific/ and what men call * philosophy*
to-day is but the residuum of questions still
unanswered. At this very moment we are see
ing two sciences, psychology and general biol
ogy, drop off from the parent trunk and take
independent root as specialties. The more
general philosophy cannot as a rule follow the
voluminous details of any special science.
A backward glance at the evolution of phi
losophy will reward us here. The earliest phi-
Thisob- losophers in every land were ency-
the light* clopsedic sages, lovers of wisdom,
of history sometimes with, and sometimes with
out a dominantly ethical or religious interest.
They were just men curious beyond immedi
ate practical needs, and no particular problems,
but rather the problematic generally, was
their specialty. China, Persia, Egypt, India,
had such wise men, but those of Greece are the
only sages who until very recently have in
fluenced the course of western thinking. The
10
PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS
earlier Greek philosophy lasted, roughly speak
ing, for about two hundred and fifty years,
say from 600 B. c. onwards. Such men as
Thales, Heracleitus, Pythagoras, Parmenides,
Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, were
mathematicians, theologians, politicians, as
tronomers, and physicists. All the learning of
their time, such as it was, was at their disposal.
Plato and Aristotle continued their tradition,
and the great mediaeval philosophers only
enlarged its field of application. If we turn to
Saint Thomas Aquinas's great eSumma,' writ
ten in the thirteenth century, we find opinions
expressed about literally everything, from God
down to matter, with angels, men, and demons
taken in on the way. The relations of almost
everything with everything else, of the cre
ator with his creatures, of the knower with
the known, of substances with forms, of mind
with body, of sin with salvation, come success
ively up for treatment. A theology, a psy
chology, a system of duties and morals, are
given in fullest detail, while physics and logic
are established in their universal principles.
11
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
The impression made cm the reader is of al
most superhuman intellectual resources. It is
true that Saint Thomas's method of handling
the mass of fact, or supposed fact, which
he treated, was different from that to which
we are accustomed. He deduced and proved
everything, either from fixed principles of
reason, or from holy Scripture. The properties
and changes of bodies, for example, were ex
plained by the two principles of matter and
form, as Aristotle had taught. Matter was the
quantitative, determinable, passive element;
form, the qualitative, unifying, determining,
and active principle. All activity was for an
end. Things could act on each other only when
in contact. The number of species of things
was determinate, and their differences dis
crete, etc., etc.1
By the beginning of the seventeenth century,
men were tired of the elaborate a priori methods
of scholasticism. Suarez's treatises availed not
1 J. Rickaby's General Metaphysics (Longmans, Green and Co.)
gives a popular account of the essentials of St. Thomas's philosophy of
nature. Thomas J. Harper's Metaphysics of the School (Macmillan)
goes into minute detail.
PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS
to keep them in fashion. But the new phi
losophy of Descartes, which displaced the
scholastic teaching, sweeping over Europe like
wildfire, preserved the same encyclopaedic
character. We think of Descartes nowadays
as the metaphysician who said 'Cogito, ergo
sum,' separated mind from matter as two con
trasted substances, and gave a renovated proof
of God's existence. But his contemporaries
thought of him much more as we think of
Herbert Spencer in our day, as a great cosmic
evolutionist, who explained, by 'the redistri
bution of matter and motion,' and the laws of
impact, the rotations of the heavens, the circu
lation of the blood, the refraction of light, ap
paratus of vision and of nervous action, the
passings of the soul, and the connection of the
mind and body.
Descartes died in 1650. With Locke's
'Essay Concerning Human Understanding/
published in 1690, philosophy for the first time
turned more exclusively to the problem of
knowledge, and became 'critical.' This sub
jective tendency developed; and although the
13
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
school of Leibnitz, who was the pattern of a
universal sage, still kept up the more universal
tradition — Leibnitz's follower Wolff published
systematic treatises on everything, physical
as well as moral — Hume, who succeeded
Locke, woke Kant 'from his dogmatic slum
ber,' and since Kant's time the word 'philoso
phy' has come to stand for mental and moral
speculations far more than for physical the
ories. Until a comparatively recent time,
philosophy was taught in our colleges un
der the name of 'mental and moral philoso
phy,' or 'philosaphy of the human mind,'
exclusively, to distinguish it from 'natural
philosophy.'
But the older tradition is the better as well
as the completer one. To know the actual
peculiarities of the world we are born into is
surely as important as to know what makes
worlds anyhow abstractly possible. Yet this
latter knowledge has been treated by many
since Kant's time as the only knowledge worthy
of being called philosophical. Common men
feel the question 'What is Nature like?' to be
14
PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS
as meritorious as the Kantian question 'How
is Nature possible?' So philosophy, in order
not to lose human respect, must take some
notice of the actual constitution of reality.
There are signs to-day of a return to the more
objective tradition.1
Philosophy in the full sense is only man
thinking, thinking about generalities rather
than about particulars. But whether
Philoso
phy is about generalities or particulars,
only
'man man thinks always by the same
methods. He observes, discriminates,
generalizes, classifies, looks for causes, traces
analogies, and makes hypotheses. Philosophy,
taken as something distinct from science or
from practical affairs, follows no method
peculiar to itself. All our thinking to-day has
evolved gradually out of primitive human
thought, and the only really important changes
that have come over its manner (as distin
guished from the matters in which it believes)
are a greater hesitancy in asserting its convic-
1 For an excellent defence of it I refer my readers to Paulsen's
Introduction to Philosophy, translated by Thilly (1895), pp. 19-44.
15
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
tions, and the habit of seeking verification 1 for
them whenever it can.
i It will be instructive to trace very briefly the
origins of our present habits of thought.
; Auguste Comte, the founder of a philosophy
which he called 'positive,'2 said that human
Origin of theory on any subject always took
man's three forms in succession. In the
present
ways of theological stage of theorizing, phe-
thinking
nomena are explained by spirits pro
ducing them; in the metaphysical stage, their
essential feature is made into an abstract idea,
and this is placed behind them as if it were an
explanation; in the positive stage, phenomena
are simply described as to their coexistences
and successions. Their 'laws' are formulated,
but no explanation of their natures or existence
is sought after. Thus a 'spiritus rector9 would
be a metaphysical, — a 'principle of attraction'
a theological, — and a Maw of the squares'
would, be a positive theory of the planetary
movements.
1 Compare G. H. Lewes: Aristotle (1864), chap. 4.
2 Cours de philosophic positive, 6 volumes, Paris, 1830-1842.
16
PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS
Comte's account is too sharp and definite.
Anthropology shows that the earliest attempts
at human theorizing mixed the theological and
metaphysical together. Common things needed
no special explanation, remarkable things
alone, odd things, especially deaths, calami
ties, diseases, called for it. What made things
act was the mysterious energy in them, and
the more awful they were, the more of this
mana they possessed. The great thing was to
acquire mana oneself. 'Sympathetic magic*
is the collective name for what seems to have
been the primitive philosophy here. You could
act on anything by controlling anything else
that either was associated with it or resembled
it. If you wished to injure an enemy, you
should either make an image of him, or get
some of his hair or other belongings, or get his
name written. Injuring the substitute, you
thus made him suffer correspondingly. If you
wished the rain to come, you sprinkled the
ground, if the wind, you whistled, etc. If you
would have yams grow well in your garden,
put a stone there that looks like a yam. Would
17
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
you cure jaundice, give tumeric, that makes
things look yellow; or give poppies for troubles
of the head, because their seed vessels form a
'head.' This 'doctrine of signatures' played
a great part in early medicine. The various
'-mancies' and '-mantics' come in here, in
which witchcraft and incipient science are
indistinguishably mixed. 'Sympathetic' the
orizing persists to the present day. 'Thoughts
are things,' for a contemporary school --and
on the whole a good school - - of practical
philosophy. Cultivate the thought of what
you desire, affirm it, and it will bring all sim
ilar thoughts from elsewhere to reinforce it,
so that finally your wish will be fulfilled.1
Little by little, more positive ways of con
sidering things began to prevail. Common ele
ments in phenomena began to be singled out
and to form the basis of generalizations. But
these elements at first had necessarily to be the
1 Compare Prentice Mulford and others of the ' new thought '
type. For primitive sympathetic magic consult J. Jastrow in Fact
and Fable in Psychology, the chapter on Analogy; F. B. Jevons: In
troduction to the History of Religion, chap, iv; J. G. Frazer: The
Golden Bough, i, 2 ; R. R. Marett : The Threshold of Religion, pas
sim ; A. O. Lovejoy : The Monist, xvi, 357.
18
PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS
more dramatic or humanly interesting ones.
The hot, the cold, the wet, the dry in things
explained their behavior. Some bodies were
naturally warm, others cold. Motions were
natural or violent. The heavens moved in
circles because circular motion was the most
perfect. The lever was explained by the greater
quantity of perfection embodied in the move
ment of its longer arm.1 The sun went south
in winter to escape the cold. Precious or
beautiful things had exceptional properties.
Peacock's flesh resisted putrefaction. The
lodestone would drop the iron which it held if
the superiorly powerful diamond was brought
near, etc.
Such ideas sound to us grotesque, but im
agine no tracks made for us by scientific an
cestors, and what aspects would we single out
from nature to understand things by? Not till
the beginning of the seventeenth century did
the more insipid kinds of regularity in things
abstract men's attention away from the prop-
1 On Greek science, see W. Whewell's History of the Inductive
Sciences, vol. i, book i; G. H. Lewes, Aristotle, passim.
19
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
erties originally picked out. Few of us realize
how short the career of what we know as
* science' has been. Three hundred and fifty
years ago hardly any one believed in the Coper-
nican planetary theory. Optical combinations
were not discovered. The circulation of the
blood, the weight of air, the conduction of
heat, the laws of motion were unknown; the
common pump was inexplicable; there were no
clocks; no thermometers; no general gravita
tion; the world was five thousand years old;
spirits moved the planets; alchemy, magic,
astrology, imposed on every one's belief. Mod
ern science began only after 1600, with Kep
ler, Galileo, Descartes, Torricelli, Pascal, Har
vey, Newton, Huygens, and Boyle. Five men
telling one another in succession the discover
ies which their lives had witnessed, could de
liver the whole of it into our hands: Harvey
might have told Newton, who might have told
Voltaire; Voltaire might have told Dalton,
who might have told Huxley, who might have
told the readers of this book.
The men who began this work of emancipa-
20
PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS
tion were philosophers in the original sense of
the word, universal sages. Galileo said that
Science is ne na(l sPent more years on philoso
phy than months on mathematics,
losophy Descartes was a universal philoso
pher in the fullest sense of the term. But the
fertility of the newer conceptions made special
departments of truth grow at such a rate that
they became too unwieldy with details for the
more universal minds to carry them, so the
special sciences of mechanics, astronomy, and
physics began to drop off from the parent stem.
No one could have foreseen in advance the
extraordinary fertility of the more insipid
mathematical aspects which these geniuses fer
reted out. No one could have dreamed of the
control over nature which the search for their
concomitant variations would give. 'Laws ' de
scribe these variations ; and all our present laws
of nature have as their model the proportion
ality of v to t, and of s to t2 which Galileo first
laid bare. Pascal's discovery of the proportion
ality of altitude to barometric height, New
ton's of acceleration to distance, Boyle's of
21
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
air- volume to pressure, Descartes' of sine to co
sine in the refracted ray, were the first fruits of
Galileo's discovery. There was no question of
agencies, nothing animistic or sympathetic in
this new way of taking nature. It was descrip
tion only, of concomitant variations, after the
particular quantities that varied had been
successfully abstracted out. The result soon
showed itself in a differentiation of human
knowledge into two spheres, one called 'Sci
ence,' within which the more definite laws
apply, the other ' General Philosophy/ in which
they do not. The state of mind called positi-
vistic is the result. 'Down with philosophy!'
is the cry of innumerable scientific minds.
'Give us measurable facts only, phenomena,
without the mind's additions, without entities
or principles that pretend to explain.' It is
largely from this kind of mind that the objec
tion that philosophy has made no progress,
proceeds.
It is obvious enough that if every step for
ward which philosophy makes, every question
to which an accurate answer is found, gets ao
PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS
credited to science the residuum of unan
swered problems will alone remain to consti-
Phiioso ^u^e ^e Domain of philosophy, and
phy is the w yj alone bear her name. In point of
residuum
of prob- fact this is just what is happening.
lems un- .
solved by Philosophy has become a collective
name for questions that have not
yet been answered to the satisfaction of all by
whom they have been asked. It does not fol
low, because some of these questions have
waited two thousand years for an answer, that
no answer will ever be forthcoming. Two
thousand years probably measure but one para
graph in that great romance of adventure called
the history of the intellect of man. The ex
traordinary progress of the last three hundred
years is due to a rather sudden finding of the
way in which a certain order of questions ought
to be attacked, questions admitting of mathe
matical treatment. But to assume therefore,
that the only possible philosophy must be
mechanical and mathematical, and to dispar
age all enquiry into the other sorts of question,
is to forget the extreme diversity of aspects
23
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
under which reality undoubtedly exists. To
the spiritual questions the proper avenues of
philosophic approach will also undoubtedly be
found. They have, to some extent, been found
already. In some respects, indeed, 'science'
has made less progress than 'philosophy'
its most general conceptions would astonish
neither Aristotle nor Descartes, could they
revisit our earth. The composition of things
from elements, their evolution, the conserva
tion of energy, the idea of a universal deter
minism, would seem to them commonplace
enough --the little things, the microscopes,
electric lights, telephones, and details of the
sciences, would be to them the awe-inspiring
things. But if they opened our books on meta
physics, or visited a philosophic lecture room,
everything would sound strange. The whole
idealistic or 'critical' attitude of our time
would be novel, and it would be long before
they took it in.1
Objection 2. Philosophy is dogmatic, and
1 The reader will find all that I have said, and much more, set forth
in an excellent article by James Ward in Mind, vol. 15, no. Iviii: 'The
Progress of Philosophy.'
24
PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS
pretends to settle things by pure reason,
whereas the only fruitful mode of getting at
truth is to appeal to concrete experience. Sci
ence collects, classes, and analyzes facts, and
thereby far outstrips philosophy.
Reply. This objection is historically valid.
Too many philosophers have aimed at closed
Phiioso- systems, established a priori, claim-
nofbe*6 m£ infallibility, and to be accepted
dogmatic or rejecte(j oniy as totals. The sci
ences on the other hand, using hypotheses only,
but always seeking to verify them by experi
ment and observation, open a way for indefi
nite self-correction and increase. At the pres
ent day, it is getting more and more difficult
for dogmatists claiming finality for their sys
tems, to get a hearing in educated circles.
Hypothesis and verification, the watchwords
of science, have set the fashion too strongly in
academic minds.
Since philosophers are only men thinking
about things in the most comprehensive pos
sible way, they can use any method whatsoever
freely. Philosophy must, in any case, com-
25
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
plete the sciences, and must incorporate their
methods. One cannot see why, if such a policy
should appear advisable, philosophy might
not end by forswearing all dogmatism what
ever, and become as hypothetical in her man
ners as the most empirical science of them all.
Objection 3. Philosophy is out of touch with
real life, for which it substitutes abstractions.
The real world is various, tangled, painful.
Philosophers have, almost without exception,
treated it as noble, simple, and perfect, ignoring
the complexity of fact, and indulging in a sort
of optimism that exposes their systems to the
contempt of common men, and to the satire
of such writers as Voltaire and Schopenhauer.
The great popular success of Schopenhauer is
due to the fact that, first among philosophers,
he spoke the concrete truth about the ills of life.
Reply. This objection also is historically
valid, but no reason appears why philosophy
Nor is it should keep aloof from reality per-
divorced , i TT i
from manently. Her manners may change
reality as S^Q successfully develops. The
thin and noble abstractions may give way to
26
PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS
more solid and real constructions, when the
materials and methods for making such con
structions shall be more and more securely
ascertained. In the end philosophers may get
into as close contact as realistic novelists with
the facts of life.
In conclusion. In its original acceptation,
meaning the completest knowledge of the uni-
Phiioso- verse, philosophy must include the
meta*-8 results of all the sciences, and cannot
physics be. contrasted with the latter. It
simply aims at making of science what Herbert
Spencer calls a * system of completely unified
knowledge.'1 In the more modern sense, of
something contrasted with the sciences, phi
losophy means 'metaphysics.' The older sense
is the more worthy sense, and as the results of
the sciences get more available for co-ordina
tion, and the conditions for finding truth in
different kinds of question get more methodic
ally defined, we may hope that the term will
revert to its original meaning. Science, meta-
1 See the excellent chapter in Spencer's First Principles, entitled:
* Philosophy Defined.'
27
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
physics, and religion may then again form a
single body of wisdom, and lend each other
mutual support.
At present this hope is far from its fulfil
ment. I propose in this book to take philoso
phy in the narrow sense of metaphysics, and
to let both religion and the results of the sci
ences alone.
CHAPTER II
THE PROBLEMS OF METAPHYSICS
JNo exact definition of the term 'metaphys
ics ' is possible, and to name some of the prob-
Exampies lems it treats of is the best way of
ph^icaT getting at the meaning of the word,
problems j^ means the discussion of various
obscure, abstract, and universal questions
which the sciences and life in general suggest
but do not solve; questions left over, as it were;
questions, all of them very broad and deep, and
relating to the whole of things, or to the ulti
mate elements thereof. Instead of a definition
let me cite a few examples, in a random order,
of such questions: —
What are 'thoughts,' and what are 'things'?
and how are they connected?
What do we mean when we say 'truth'?
Is there a common stuff out of which all
facts are made?
How comes there to be a world at all? and,
Might it as well not have been?
29
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
Which is the most real kind of reality?
What binds all things into one universe?
Is unity or diversity more fundamental?
Have all things one origin? or many?
Is everything predestined, or are some things
(our wills for example) free?
Is the world infinite or finite in amount?
Are its parts continuous, or are there vacua?
What is God? — or the gods?
How are mind and body joined? Do they
act on each other?
How does anything act on anything else?
How can one thing change or grow out of
another thing?
Are space and/time beings? — or what?
In knowledge, how does the object get into
the mind? — or the mind get at the object?
We know by means of universal notions.
Are these also real? Or are only particular
things real?
What is meant by a ' thing'?
' Principles of reason,' - — are they inborn
or derived?
Are ' beauty' and 'good' matters of opinion
30
THE PROBLEMS OF METAPHYSICS
only? Or have they objective validity? And,
if so, what does the phrase mean?
Such are specimens of the kind of question
termed metaphysical. Kant said that the three
essential metaphysical questions were: —
What can I know?
What should I do?
What may I hope?
A glance at all such questions suffices to rule
out such a definition of metaphysics as that of
Meta- Christian Wolff, who called it 'the
physics
defined science of what is possible,' as dis
tinguished from that of what is actual, for most
of the questions relate to what is actual fact. One
may say that metaphysics inquires into the
cause, the substance, the meaning, and the out
come of all things. Or one may call it the sci
ence of the most universal principles of reality
(whether experienced by us or not), in their
connection with one another and with our pow
ers of knowledge. 'Principles' here may mean
either entities, like 'atoms,' 'souls,' or logical
laws like : ' A thing must either exist or not exist ' ;
or generalized facts, like 'things can act only
31
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
after they exist/ But the principles are so num
erous, and the 'science' of them is so far from
completion, that such definitions have only a
decorative value. The serious work of meta
physics is done over the separate single ques
tions. If these should get cleared up, talk of met
aphysics as a unified science might properly be
gin. This book proposes to handle only a few
separate problems, leaving others untouched.
These problems are for the most part real;
that is, but few of them result from a misuse
Nature of of terms in stating them. 'Things/
physical ^or example> are or are n°t composed
problems of one stuff ; they either have or have
not a single origin; they either are or are not
completely predetermined, etc. Such alterna
tives may indeed be impossible of decision;
but until this is conclusively proved of them,
they confront us legitimately, and some one
must take charge of them and keep account of
the solutions that are proposed, even if he does
not himself add new ones. The opinions of the
learned regarding them must, in short, be
classified and responsibly discussed. For in-
32
THE PROBLEMS OF METAPHYSICS
stance, how many opinions are possible as to
the origin of the world? Spencer says that the
world must have been either eternal, or self-
created, or created by an outside power. So
for him there are only three. Is this correct?
If so, which of the three views seems the most
reasonable? and why? In a moment we are in
the thick of metaphysics. We have to be meta
physicians even to decide with Spencer that
neither mode of origin is thinkable and that
the whole problem is unreal.
Some hypotheses may be absurd on their
face, because they are self-contradictory. If,
for example, infinity means 'what can never
be completed by successive syntheses,' the
notion of anything made by the successive
addition of infinitely numerous parts, and yet
completed, is absurd. Other hypotheses, for
example that everything in nature contributes
to a single supreme purpose, may be insuscep
tible either of proof or of disproof. Other
hypotheses again, for instance that vacua
exist, may be susceptible of probable solution.
The classing of the hypotheses is thus as neces-
33
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
sary as the classing of the problems, and both
must be recognized as constituting a serious
branch of learning.1 There must in short be
metaphysicians. Let us for a while become
metaphysicians ourselves.
As we survey the history of metaphysics we
soon realize that two pretty distinct types of
Rational- mind have filled it with their war-
empiri- fare. Let us call them the rationalist
and the empiricist types of mind. A
cism in
meta
physics saying of Coleridge's is often quoted,
to the effect that every one is born either a
platonist or an aristotelian. By aristotelian, he
means empiricist, and by platonist, he means
rationalist; but although the contrast between
the two Greek philosphers exists in the sense
in which Coleridge meant it, both of them
were rationalists as compared with the kind of
empiricism which Democritus and Protagoras
developed; and Coleridge had better have
taken either of those names instead of Aris
totle as his empiricist example.
1 Consult here Paul Janet: Principes de Metaphysique, etc., 1897,
legons 1, 2.
34
THE PROBLEMS OF METAPHYSICS
Rationalists are the men of principles, empiri
cists the men of facts; but, since principles are
universals, and facts are particulars, perhaps
the best way of characterizing the two ten
dencies is to say that rationalist thinking pro
ceeds most willingly by going from wholes to
parts, while empiricist thinking proceeds by
going from parts to wholes. Plato, the arch-
rationalist, explained the details of nature by
their participation in 'ideas,' which all de
pended on the supreme idea of the "good.5
Protagoras and Democritus were empiricists.
The latter explained the whole cosmos, includ
ing gods as well as men, and thoughts as well
as things, by their composition out of atomic
elements; Protagoras explained truth, which
for Plato was the absolute system of the ideas,
as a collective name for men's opinions.
Rationalists prefer to deduce facts from
principles. Empiricists prefer to explain prin
ciples as inductions from facts. Is thought for
the sake of life? or is life for the sake of thought?
Empiricism inclines to the former, rationalism
to the latter branch of the alternative. God's
35
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
life, according to Aristotle and Hegel, is pure
theory. The mood of admiration is natural to
rationalism. Its theories are usually optimis
tic, supplementing the experienced world by
clean and pure ideal constructions. Aristotle
and Plato, the Scholastics, Descartes, Spinoza,
Leibnitz, Kant, and Hegel are examples of
this. They claimed absolute finality for their
systems, in the noble architecture of which, as
their authors believed, truth was eternally
embalmed. This temper of finality is foreign
to empiricist minds. They may be dogmatic
about their method of building on 'hard facts/
but they are willing to be sceptical about any
conclusions reached by the method at a given
time. They aim at accuracy of detail rather
than at completeness; are contented to be
fragmentary; are less inspiring than the ra
tionalists, often treating the high as a case of
' nothing but' the low ('nothing but' self-in
terest well understood, etc.), but they usually
keep more in touch with actual life, are less
subjective, and their spirit is obviously more
'scientific' in the hackneyed sense of that
36
THE PROBLEMS OF METAPHYSICS
term. Socrates, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, the
Mills, F. A. Lange, J. Dewey, F. C. S. Schiller,
Bergson, and other contemporaries are speci
mens of this type. Of course we find mixed
minds in abundance, and few philosophers are
typical in either class. Kant may fairly be
called mixed. Lotze and Royce are mixed.
The author of this volume is weakly endowed
on the rationalist side, and his book will show
a strong leaning towards empiricism. The
clash of the two ways of looking at things will
be emphasized throughout the volume.1
I will now enter the interior of the subject
by discussing special problems as examples of
metaphysical inquiry; and in order not to con
ceal any of the skeletons in the philosophic
closet, I will start with the worst problem
possible, the so-called 'ontological problem,'
or question of how there comes to be anything
at all.
1 Compare W. James: 'The Sentiment of Rationality/ in The Will
to Believe (Longmans, Green and Co., 1899), p. 63 f.; Pragmatism,
(ibid.), chap, i; A Pluralistic Universe (ibid.), chap. i.
CHAPTER III
THE PROBLEM OF BEING
How comes the world to be here at all instead
of the nonentity which might be imagined in
its place? Schopenhauer's remarks on this
question may be considered classical. 'Apart
from man,' he says, 'no being wonders at its
own existence. When man first becomes con
scious, he takes himself for granted, as some
thing needing no explanation. But not for
long; for, with the rise of the first reflection,
Scho en- that wonder begins which is the
iiaueron mother of metaphysics, and which
the origin
of the made Aristotle say that men now
and always seek to philosophize
because of wonder — The lower a man stands
in intellectual respects the less of a riddle does
existence seem to him . . . but, the clearer his
consciousness becomes the more the problem
grasps him in its greatness. In fact the unrest
which keeps the never stopping clock of meta
physics going is the thought that the non-ex
istence of this world is just as possible as its
38
THE PROBLEM OF BEING
existence. Nay more, we soon conceive the
world as something the non-existence of which
not only is conceivable but would indeed be
preferable to its existence; so that our wonder
passes easily into a brooding over that fatality
which nevertheless could call such a world into
being, and mislead the immense force that
could produce and preserve it into an activity
so hostile to its own interests. The philosophic
wonder thus becomes a sad astonishment, and
like the overture to Don Giovanni, philosophy
begins with a minor chord.' 1
One need only shut oneself in a closet and
begin to think of the fact of one's being there,
of one's queer bodily shape in the darkness (a
thing to make children scream at, as Steven
son says), of one's fantastic character and all,
to have the wonder steal over the detail as
much as over the general fact of being, and to
see that it is only familiarity that blunts it.
Not only that anything should be, but that this
very thing should be, is mysterious! Philoso-
1 The World as Will and Representation: Appendix 17, 'On the
metaphysical need of man,' abridged.
39
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
phy stares, but brings no reasoned solution,
for from nothing to being there is no logical
bridge.
}. Attempts are sometimes made to banish the
question rather than to give it an answer.
Those who ask it, we are told, extend illegit
imately to the whole of being the contrast
Various to a supposed alternative non-being
treatments , . , , ,• i i •
of the which only particular beings possess,
problem These, indeed, were not, and now
are. But being in general, or in some shape,
always was, and you cannot rightly bring the
whole of it into relation with a primordial non
entity. Whether as God or as material atoms,
it is itself primal and eternal. But if you call
any being whatever eternal, some philosophers
have always been ready to taunt you with the
paradox inherent in the assumption. Is past
eternity completed? they ask: If so, they go on,
it must have had a beginning ; for whether
your imagination traverses it forwards or back
wards, it offers an identical content or stuff to
be measured; and if the amount comes to an
end in one way, it ought to come to an end in
40
THE PROBLEM OF BEING
the other. In other words, since we now witness
its end, some past moment must have wit
nessed its beginning. If, however, it had a be
ginning, when was that, and why?
You are up against the previous nothing, and
do not see how it ever passed into being. This
dilemma, of having to choose between a regress
which, although called infinite, has neverthe
less come to a termination, and an absolute
first, has played a great part in philosophy's
history.
Other attempts still are made at exorcising
the question. Non-being is not, said Parmen-
ides and Zeno; only being is. Hence what is, is
necessarily being — being, in short, is neces
sary. Others, calling the idea of nonentity
no real idea, have said that on the absence
of an idea can no genuine problem be founded.
More curtly still, the whole ontological wonder
has been called diseased, a case of Grilbelsucht
like asking, 'Why am I myself?' or 'Why is a
triangle a triangle?'
Rationalistic minds here and there have
sought to reduce the mystery. Some forms of
41
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
being have been deemed more natural, so to
say, or more inevitable and necessary than
Rational- others. Empiricists of the evolution-
empiricist ary type --Herbert Spencer seems
treatments a go()(j example — nave assumed
that whatever had the least of reality, was
weakest, faintest, most imperceptible, most
nascent, might come easiest first, and be the
earliest successor to nonentity. Little by little
the fuller grades of being might have added
themselves in the same gradual way until the
whole universe grew up.
To others not the minimum, but the maxi
mum of being has seemed the earliest First for
the intellect to accept. 'The perfection of a
thing does not keep it from existing,' Spinoza
said, 'on the contrary, it founds its existence.' l
It is mere prejudice to assume that it is harder
for the great than for the little to be, and that
easiest of all it is to be nothing. What makes
things difficult in any line is the alien obstruc
tions that are met with, and the smaller and
weaker the thing the more powerful over it
1 Ethics, part i, prop, xi, scholium.
42
THE PROBLEM OF BEING
these become. Some things are so great and
inclusive that to be is implied in their very na
ture. The anselmian or ontological proof of
God's existence, sometimes called the cartesian
proof, criticised by Saint Thomas, rejected by
Kant, re-defended by Hegel, follows this line of
thought. What is conceived as imperfect may
lack being among its other lacks, but if God,
who is expressly defined as Ens perfectissi-
mum, lacked anything whatever, he would
contradict his own definition. He cannot lack
being therefore: He is Ens necessarium, Ens
realissimum, as well as Ens perfectissimum.1
Hegel in his lordly way says: 'It would be
strange if God were not rich enough to embrace
so poor a category as Being, the poorest and
most abstract of all.' This is somewhat in line
with Kant's saying that a real dollar does not
contain one cent more than an imaginary dol
lar. At the beginning of his logic Hegel seeks in
another way to mediate nonentity with being.
1 St. Anselm: Proslogium, etc. Translated by Doane: Chicago,
1903; Descartes: Meditations, p. 5; Kant: Critique of Pure Reason,
Transcendental Dialectic, 'On the impossibility of an ontological
proof, etc.'
43
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
Since ' being ' in the abstract, mere being, means
nothing in particular, it is indistinguishable
from ' nothing ' ; and he seems dimly to think
that this constitutes an identity between the
two notions, of which some use may be made
in getting from one to the other. Other still
queerer attempts show well the rationalist
temper. Mathematically you can deduce 1
from 0 by the following process: o=ra=l-
Or physically if all being has (as it seems to
have) a 'polar' construction, so that every
positive part of it has its negative, we get the
simple equation: +1—1 = 0, plus and minus
being the signs of polarity in physics.
It is not probable that the reader will be
satisfied with any of these solutions, and con
temporary philosophers, even rationalistically
minded ones, have on the whole agreed that no
one has intelligibly banished the mystery of
fact. Whether the original nothing burst into
God and vanished, as night vanishes in day,
while God thereupon became the creative
principle of all lesser beings; or whether all
things have foisted or shaped themselves im-
44
THE PROBLEM OF BEING
perceptibly into existence, the same amount
of existence has in the end to be assumed
The same and begged by the philosopher. To
amount of . , ,.~, ,
existence comminute the dimculty is not to
b quench it. If you are a rationalist
a11 you beg a kilogram of being at once,
we will say; if you are an empiricist you beg a
thousand successive grams; but you beg the
same amount in each case, and you are the
same beggar whatever you may pretend. You
leave the logical riddle untouched, of how the
coming of whatever is, came it all at once, or
came it piecemeal, can be intellectually under
stood.1
i If being gradually grew, its quantity was of
course not always the same, and may not be
Conser- t}ie same hereafter. To most phi-
vation vs.
creation losophers this view has seemed ab
surd, neither God, nor primordial matter, nor
energy being supposed to admit of increase or
decrease. The orthodox opinion is that the
1 In more technical language, one may say that fact or being is
'contingent,' or matter of 'chance,' so far as our intellect is concerned.
The conditions of its appearance are uncertain, unforeseeable, when
future, and when past, elusive.
45
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
quantity of reality must at all costs be con
served, and the waxing and waning of our
phenomenal experiences must be treated as
surface appearances which leave the deeps un
touched.
Nevertheless, within experience, phenomena
come and go. There are novelties; there are
losses. The world seems, on the concrete and
proximate level at least, really to grow. So the
question recurs : How do our finite experiences
come into being from moment to moment?
By inertia? By perpetual creation? Do the
new ones come at the call of the old ones? Why
do not they all go out like a candle?
Who can tell off-hand? The question of be
ing is the darkest in all philosophy. All of us
are beggars here, and no school can speak dis
dainfully of another or give itself superior airs.
For all of us alike, Fact forms a datum, gift? or
Vorgefundenes, which we cannot burrow under,
explain or get behind. It makes itself some
how, and our business is far more with its
What than with its Whence or Why.
CHAPTER IV
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT-THE IMPORT
OF CONCEPTS
THE problem convenient to take up next in
order will be that of the difference between
thoughts and things. ' Things ' are known to us
by our senses, and are called 'presentations'
by some authors, to distinguish them from the
ideas or 'representations' which we may have
when our senses are closed. I myself have
grown accustomed to the words 'percept' and
'concept' in treating of the contrast, but con
cepts flow out of percepts and into them again,
Their they are so interlaced, and our life
rests on them so interchangeably and
undiscriminatingly, that it is often difficult to
impart quickly to beginners a clear notion of
the difference meant. Sensation and thought
in man are mingled, but they vary independ
ently. In our quadrupedal relatives thought
proper is at a minimum, but we have no reason
to suppose that their immediate life of feeling
is either less or more copious than ours. Feel-
47
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
ing must have been originally self-sufficing;
and thought appears as a superadded function,
adapting us to a wider environment than that
of which brutes take account. Some parts of the
stream of feeling must be more intense, em
phatic, and exciting than others in animals as
well as in ourselves; but whereas lower animals
simply react upon these more salient sensa
tions by appropriate movements, higher ani
mals remember them, and men react on them
intellectually, by using nouns, adjectives, and
verbs to identify them when they meet them
elsewhere.
'. The great difference between percepts and
concepts1 is that percepts are continuous and
concepts are discrete. Not discrete in their
being, for conception as an act is part of the
flux of feeling, but discrete from each other in
their several meanings. Each concept means
1 In what follows I shall freely use synonyms for these two terms.
'Idea,' 'thought,' and 'intellection' are synonymous with 'concept.'
Instead of ' percept ' I shall often speak of ' sensation,' ' feeling,' ' intui
tion,' and sometimes of ' sensible experience ' or of the ' immediate
flow ' of conscious life. Since Hegel's time what is simply perceived
has been called the 'immediate,' while the 'mediated ' is synonymous
with what is conceived.
48
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
just what it singly means, and nothing else;
and if the conceiver does not know whether he
means this or means that, it shows that his
concept is imperfectly formed. The perceptual
flux as such, on the contrary, means nothing,
and is but what it immediately is. No matter
how small a tract of it be taken, it is always a
much-at-once, and contains innumerable as
pects and characters which conception can
pick out, isolate, and thereafter always intend.
It shows duration, intensity, complexity or
simplicity, interestingness, excitingness, pleas
antness or their opposites. Data from all our
senses enter into it, merged in a general ex-
tensiveness of which each occupies a big or
little share. Yet all these parts leave its unity
unbroken. Its boundaries are no more distinct
than are those of the field of vision. Boundaries
are things that intervene; but here nothing
intervenes save parts of the perceptual flux
itself, and these are overflowed by what they
separate, so that whatever we distinguish and
isolate conceptually is found perceptually to
telescope and compenetrate and diffuse into
49
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
its neighbors. The cuts we make are purely
ideal. If my reader can succeed in abstracting
from all conceptual interpretation and lapse
back into his immediate sensible life at this
very moment, he will find it to be what some
one has called a big blooming buzzing confu
sion, as free from contradiction in its 'much-
at-onceness' as it is all alive and evidently
there.1
Out of this aboriginal sensible muchness
attention carves out objects, which conception
The con- then names and identifies forever —
ceptual
order in the sky 'constellations,' on the
earth 'beach,' 'sea,' 'cliff,' 'bushes,' 'grass/
Out of time we cut 'days' and 'nights,' 'sum
mers' and 'winters.' We say what each part
of the sensible continuum is, and all these ab
stracted whats are concepts.2
1 Compare W. James: A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 282-288. Also
Psychology, Briefer Course, pp. 157-166.
2 On the function of conception consult: Sir William Hamilton's
Lectures on Logic, 9, 10; H. L. Mansel, Prolegomena Logica, chap, i;
A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will, etc., Supplements 6, 7 to book ii;
W. James, Principles of Psychology, chap, xii; Briefer Course, chap. xiv.
Also J.G.Romanes: Mental Evolution in Man, chaps, iii, iv; Th. Ribot:
V Evolution des Idees Generales, chap, vi; Th. Ruyssen, Essai sur /' Evolu
tion psychologique du Jugement, chap, vii; Laromiguiere, Lemons de Phil-
50
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
The intellectual life of man consists almost
wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order
for the perceptual order in which his experience
originally comes. But before tracing the conse
quences of the substitution, I must say some
thing about the conceptual order itself.1
Trains of concepts unmixed with percepts
grow frequent in the adult mind; and parts of
these conceptual trains arrest our attention
just as parts of the perceptual flow did, giving
rise to concepts of a higher order of abstract-
ness. So subtile is the discernment of man, and
so great the power of some men to single out
osophie, part 2, lesson 12. The account I give directly contradicts that
which Kant gave which has prevailed since Kant's time. Kant
always speaks of the aboriginal sensible flux as a ' manifold ' of which
he considers the essential character to be its disconnectedness. To get
any togetherness at all into it requires, he thinks, the agency of the
'transcendental ego of apperception,' and to get any definite connec
tions requires the agency of the understanding, with its synthetizing
concepts or 'categories.' 'Die Verbindung (conjunctio) eines Man-
nigfaltigen kann iiberhaupt niemals durch Sinne in uns kommen, und
kann also auch nicht in der reinen Form der sinnlichen Anschauung
zugleich mit en thai ten sein; denn sie ist ein Actus der Spontaneitat
der Einbildungskraft, und, da man diese, zum Unterschiede von der
Sinnlichkeit, Verstand nennen muss, so ist alle Verbindung . . . eine
Verstandeshandlung.' K. d. r. V., 2te, Aufg., pp. 129-130. The reader
must decide which account agrees best with his own actual experience.
1 The substitution was first described in these terms by S. H. Hodg
son in his Philosophy of Reflection, i, 288-310.
51
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
the most fugitive elements of what passes
before them, that these new formations have
no limit. Aspect within aspect, quality after
quality, relation upon relation, absences and
negations as well as present features, end by
being noted and their names added to the store
of nouns, verbs, adjectives, conjunctions, and
prepositions by which the human mind inter
prets life. Every new book verbalizes some
new concept, which becomes important in pro
portion to the use that can be made of it. Dif
ferent universes of thought thus arise, with
specific sorts of relation among their ingredi
ents. The world of common-sense ' things ' ; the
world of material tasks to be done; the mathe
matical world of pure forms; the world of
ethical propositions; the worlds of logic, of
music, etc., all abstracted and generalized from
long forgotten perceptual instances, from which
they have as it were flowered out, return and
merge themselves again in the particulars of
our present and future perception. By those
whats we apperceive all our tliises. Percepts
and concepts interpenetrate and melt together,
52
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
impregnate and fertilize each other. Neither,
taken alone, knows reality in its completeness.
We need them both, as we need both our legs
to walk with.
From Aristotle downwards philosophers
have frankly admitted the indispensability, for
complete knowledge of fact, of both the sensa
tional and the intellectual contribution.1 For
complete knowledge of fact, I say; but facts
are particulars and connect themselves with
practical necessities and the arts; and Greek
philosophers soon formed the notion that a
knowledge of so-called 'universals,' consisting
of concepts of abstract forms, qualities, num
bers, and relations was the only knowledge
worthy of the truly philosophic mind. Particu
lar facts decay and our perceptions of them
vary. A concept never varies; and between
such unvarying terms the relations must be
constant and express eternal verities. Hence
there arose a tendency, which has lasted all
through philosophy, to contrast the know-
1 See, for example, book i, chap, ii, of Aristotle's Metaphysics.'
53
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
ledge of universals and intelligibles, as god
like, dignified, and honorable to the-knower,
with that of particulars and sensibles as some
thing relatively base which more allies us with
the beasts.1
1 Plato in numerous places, but chiefly in books 6 and 7 of the Re
public, contrasts perceptual knowledge as 'opinion' with real know
ledge, to the latter's glory. For an excellent historic sketch of this
platonistic view see the first part of E. Laas's Idealismus und Positivis-
mus, 1879. For expressions of the ultra-intellectualistic view, read the
passage from Plotinus on the Intellect in C. M. BakewelPs Source-book
in Ancient Philosophy, N. Y. 1907, pp. 353 f.; Bossuet, Traite de la
Connaissance de Dieu, chap, iv, §§ v, vi; R. Cudworth, A Treatise con
cerning eternal amd immutable Morality, books iii, iv. — 'Plato,' writes
Prof. Santayana, 'thought that all the truth and meaning of earthly
things was the reference they contained to a heavenly original. This
heavenly original we remember to recognize even among the distor
tions, disappearances, and multiplications of its ephemeral copies. . . .
The impressions themselves have no permanence, no intelligible es
sence, but are always either arising or ceasing to be. There must be,
he tells us, an eternal and clearly definable object of which the visible
appearances to us are the multiform semblance; now by one trait,
now by another, the phantom before us reminds us of that half-
forgotten celestial reality and makes us utter its name. . . . We and
the whole universe exist only in the attempt to return to our perfec
tion, to lose ourselves again in God. That ineffable good is our natu
ral possession; and all we honor in this life is but a partial recovery
of our birthright; every delightful thing is like a rift in the clouds,
through which we catch a glimpse of our native heaven. And if that
heaven seems so far away, and the idea of it so dim and unreal, it is
because we are so far from perfect, so immersed in what is alien and
destructive to the soul.' (' Platonic Love in some Italian Poets,' in
Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 189G.)
This is the interpretation of Plato which has been current since
54
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
For rationalistic writers conceptual know
ledge was not only the more noble knowledge,
but it originated independently of
uai know- au perceptual particulars. Such con-
ledge — the
rational- cepts as God, perfection, eternity, in
finity, immutability, identity, abso
lute beauty, truth, justice, necessity, freedom,
duty, worth, etc., and the part they play in
our mind, are, it was supposed, impossible to
explain as results of practical experience. The
empiricist view, and probably the true view, is
that they do result from practical experience.1
But a more important question than that as to
the origin of our concepts is that as to their
Aristotle. It should be said that its profundity has been challenged by
Prof. A. J. Stewart. (Plato's Doctrine of Ideas, Oxford, 1909.)
Aristotle found great fault with Plato's treatment of ideas as heav
enly originals, but he agreed with him fully as to the superior excel
lence of the conceptual or theoretic life. In chapters vii and viii of book
x of the Nicomachean Ethics he extols contemplation of universal rela
tions as alone yielding pure happiness. ' The life of God, in all its ex
ceeding blessedness, will consist in the exercise of philosophic thought;
and of all human activities, that will be the happiest which is most
akin to the divine.'
1 John Locke, in his Essay concerning Human Understanding, books
i, ii, was the great popularizer of this doctrine. frCondillac's TraitS
des Sensations, Helvetius's work, De VHomme, and James Mill's
Analysis of the Human Mind, were more radical successors of Locke's
great book.
55
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
functional use and value; --is that tied down
to perceptual experience, or out of all relation
to it? Is conceptual knowledge self-sufficing
and a revelation all by itself, quite apart from
its uses in helping to a better understanding
of the world of sense?
Rationalists say, Yes. For, as we shall see
in later places (page 68), the various conceptual
universes referred to on page 52 can be con
sidered in complete abstraction from percept
ual reality, and when they are so considered,
all sorts of fixed relations can be discovered
among their parts. From these the a priori
sciences of logic, mathematics, ethics, and
aesthetics (so far as the last two can be called
sciences at all) result. Conceptual knowledge
must thus be called a self-sufficing revelation;
and by rationalistic writers it has always been
treated as admitting us to a diviner world, the
world of universal rather than that of perish
ing facts, of essential qualities, immutable rela
tions, eternaj principles of truth and right.
Emerson writes: 'Generalization is always a
new influx of divinity into the mind: hence the
56
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
thrill that attends it.' And a disciple of Hegel,
after exalting the knowledge of 'the General,
Unchangeable, and alone Valuable ' above that
of 'the Particular, Sensible and Transient,'
adds that if you reproach philosophy with
being unable to make a single grass-blade grow,
or even to know how it does grow, the reply is
that since such a particular 'how' stands not
above but below knowledge, strictly so-called,
such an ignorance argues no defect.1
To this ultra-rationalistic opinion the em
piricist contention that the significance of con-
Concept- cepts consists always in their relation
ledge — ' t° perceptual particulars has been op- «f
posed. Made of percepts, or distilled
view from parts of percepts, their essen
tial office, it has been said, is to coalesce with
percepts again, bringing the mind back into
the perceptual world with a better command of
the situation there. Certainly whenever we
can do this with our concepts, we do more with
1 Michelet, Hegel's Werke, vii, 15, quoted by A. Gratry, De la
Connaissance de rAme, i, 231. Compare the similar claim for phi
losophy in W. Wallace's Prolegomena to Hegel, 2d ed., 1894, pp.
28-29, and the long and radical statement of the same view in book
iv of Ralph Cudworth's Treatise on Eternal and Immutable Morality.
57
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
them than when we leave them flocking with
their abstract and motionless companions. It
is possible therefore, to join the rationalists in
allowing conceptual knowledge to be self-suffic
ing, while at the same time one joins the em
piricists in maintaining that the full value of
such knowledge is got only by combining it
with perceptual reality again. This mediating
attitude is that which this book must adopt.
But to understand the nature of concepts
better we must now go on to distinguish their
function from their content.
The concept 'man/ to take an example, is
three things: 1, the word itself; 2, a vague
picture of the human form which has
The con
tent and its own value in the. way of beauty or
function
of con- not; and 3, an instrument lor sym
bolizing certain objects from which
we may expect human treatment when occa
sion arrives. Similarly of 'triangle,' 'cosine/ —
they have their substantive value both as words
and as images suggested, but they also have a
functional value whenever they lead us else
where in discourse.
58
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
There are concepts, however, the image-part
of which is so faint that their whole value
seems to be functional. 'God/ 'cause/ 'num
ber/ 'substance/ 'soul/ for example, suggest
no definite picture; and their significance
seems to consist entirely in their tendency, in
the further turn which they may give to our
action or our thought.1 We cannot rest in the
contemplation of their form, as we can in that
of a 'circle' or a 'man'; we must pass beyond.
Now however beautiful or otherwise worthy
of stationary contemplation the substantive
part of a concept may be, the more important
part of its significance may naturally be held
to be the consequences to which it leads. These
The prag- ma^ ^e e^ner m tne wav °f making
matic rule us think, or in the way of making us
act. Whoever has a clear idea of these knows
effectively what the concept practically signi
fies, whether its substantive content be inter
esting in its own right or not.
This consideration has led to a method of
1 On this functional tendency compare H. Taine, On Intelligence,
book i, chap, ii (1870).
59
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
interpreting concepts to which I shall give the
name of the Pragmatic Rule.1
The pragmatic rule is that the meaning of a
concept may always be found, if not in some
sensible particular which it directly designates,
then in some particular difference in the course
of human experience which its being true will
make. Test every concept by the question
'What sensible difference to anybody will its
truth make?' and you are in the best possible
position for understanding what it means and
for discussing its importance. If, questioning
whether a certain concept be true or false, you
can think of absolutely nothing that would
practically differ in the two cases, you may as
sume that the alternative is meaningless and
that your concept is no distinct idea. If two
concepts lead you to infer the same particular
consequence, then you may assume that they
embody the same meaning under different
names.
This rule applies to concepts of every order
1 Compare W. James, Pragmatism, chap, ii and passim; also Bald
win's Dictionary of Philosophy, article ' Pragmatism,' by C. S. Peirce.
60
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
of complexity, from simple terms to proposi
tions uniting many terms.
So many disputes in philosophy hinge upon
ill-defined words and ideas, each side claim
ing its own word or idea to be true, that any
accepted method of making meanings clear
must be of great utility. No method can be
handier of application than our pragmatic
rule. If you claim that any idea is true, assign
at the same time some difference that its being
true will make in some possible person's his
tory, and we shall know not only just what you
are really claiming but also how important an
issue it is, and how to go to work to verify the
claim. In obeying this rule we neglect the sub
stantive content of the concept, and follow its
function only. This neglect might seem at first
sight to need excuse, for the content often has
a value of its own which might conceivably add
lustre to reality, if it existed, apart from any
modification wrought by it in the other parts
of reality. Thus it is often supposed that
'Idealism' is a theory precious in itself, even
though no definite change in the details of our
61
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
experience can be deduced from it. Later dis
cussion will show that this is a superficial view,
and that particular consequences are the only
criterion of a concept's meaning, and the only
test of its truth.
Instances are hardly called for, they are so
obvious. That A and B are ' equal,' for example,
Examples means either that 'you W*U find no
difference' when you pass from one to the
other, or that in substituting one for the other
in certain operations 'you will get the same
result both times.' 'Substance' means that 'a
definite group of sensations will recur.' 'In
commensurable' means that 'you are always
confronted with a remainder.' 6 Infinite'
means either that, or that 'you can count as
many units in a part as you can in the whole.'
'More' and 'less' mean certain sensations,
varying according to the matter. 'Freedom'
means 'no feeling of sensible restraint.' 'Ne
cessity ' means that 'your way is blocked in all
directions save one.' 'God 'means that 'you
can dismiss certain kinds of fear,' 'cause' that
'you may expect certain sequences,' etc. etc.
62
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
We shall find plenty of examples in the rest of
this book; so I go back now to the more general
question of whether the whole import of the
world of concepts lies in its relation to percep
tual experience, or whether it be also an inde
pendent revelation of reality. Great ambiguity
is possible in answering this question, so we
must mind our Ps and Qs.
The first thing to notice is that in the earliest
stages of human intelligence, so far as we can
guess at them, thought proper must have had
an exclusively practical use. Men classed their
Origin of sensations, substituting concepts for
in^heif3 them, in order to 'work them for
utility what they were worth/ and to pre
pare for what might lie ahead. Class-names
suggest consequences that have attached
themselves on other occasions to other mem
bers of the class — consequences which the
present percept will also probably or certainly
show.1 The present percept in its immediacy
may thus often sink to the status of a bare sign
1 For practical uses of conception compare W. James, Principles oj
Psychology, chap, xxii; J. E. Miller, The Psychology of Thinking, 1909,
passim, but especially chaps, xv, xvi, xvii.
63
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
of the consequences which the substituted con
cept suggests.
The substitution of concepts and their
connections, of a whole conceptual order, in
short, for the immediate perceptual flow, thus
widens enormously our mental panorama. Had
we no concepts we should live simply ' getting '
each successive moment of experience, as the
sessile sea-anemone on its rock receives what
ever nourishment the wash of the waves may
bring. With concepts we go in quest of the ab
sent, meet the remote, actively turn this way or
that, bend our experience, and make it tell us
whither it is bound. We change its order, run
it backwards, bring far bits together and sepa
rate near bits, jump about over its surface in
stead of plowing through its continuity, string
its items on as many ideal diagrams as our
mind can frame. All these are ways of handling
the perceptual flux and meeting distant parts of
it; and as far as this primary function of con
ception goes, we can only conclude it to be
what I began by calling it, a faculty superadded
to our barely perceptual consciousness for its
64
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
use in practically adapting us to a larger en
vironment than that of which brutes take ac
count.1 We harness perceptual reality in con
cepts in order to drive it better to our ends.
Does our conceptual translation of the per
ceptual flux enable us also to understand the
The theo- latter better ? What do we mean
of con-86 by making us ' understand ' ? Apply-
cepts jng our pragmatic rule to the inter
pretation of the word, we see that the better
we understand anything the more we are
able to tell about it. Judged by this test,
concepts do make us understand our percepts
better: knowing what these are, we can tell all
sorts of farther truths about them, based on the
relation of those whats to other whats. The
whole system of relations, spatial, temporal,
and logical, of our fact, gets plotted out. An
ancient philosophical opinion, inherited from
Aristotle, is that we do not understand a thing
until we know it by its causes. When the maid
servant says that * the cat ' broke the tea-cup,
1 Herbert Spencer in his Psychology, parts iii and iv, has at great
length tried to show that such adaptation is the sole meaning of our
intellect.
65
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
she would have us conceive the fracture in a
causally explanatory way. No otherwise when
Clerk-Maxwell asks us to conceive of gas-elec
tricity as due to molecular bombardment. An
imaginary agent out of sight becomes in each
case a part of the cosmic context in which we
now place the percept to be explained ; and the
explanation is valid in so far as the new causal
that is itself conceived in a context that makes
its existence probable, and with a nature
agreeable to the effects it is imagined to pro
duce. All our scientific explanations would
seem to conform to this simple type of the
'necessary cat.' The conceived order of nature
built round the perceived order and explain
ing it theoretically, as we say, is only a system
of hypothetically imagined thats, the whats
of which harmoniously connect themselves
with the what of any that which we immediately
perceive.
The system is essentially a topographic sys
tem, a system of the distribution of things. It
tells us what 's what, and where 's where. In so
far forth it merely prolongs that opening up of
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
the perspective of practical consequences
which we found to be the primordial utility of
the conceiving faculty: it adapts us to an im
mense environment. Working by the causes of
things we gain advantages which we never
should have compassed had we worked by the
things alone.
But in order to reach such results the con
cepts in the explanatory system must, I said,
in the a 'harmoniously connect.' What does
sciences that mean? Is this also only a prac
tical advantage, or is it sometning more? It
seems something more, for it points to the fact
that when concepts of various sorts are once
abstracted or constructed, new relations are
then found between them, connecting them in
peculiarly intimate, 'rational,' and unchange
able ways. In another book1 I have tried to
show that these rational relations are all prod
ucts of our faculty of comparison and of our
sense of 'more.'
The sciences which exhibit these relations
are the so-called a priori sciences of mathe-
1 Principles of Psychology, 1890, chap, xxviii.
67
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
"•feSa
maties and logic.1 But these sciences express
relations of comparison and identification ex
clusively. Geometry and algebra, for example,
first define certain conceptual objects, and then
establish equations between them, substituting
equals for equals. Logic has been defined as
the 'substitution of similars'; and in general
one may say that the perception of likeness
and unlikeness generates the whole of 'ra
tional' or 'necessary' truth. Nothing happens
in the worlds of logic, mathematics or moral
and aesthetic preference. The static nature of
the relations in these worlds is what gives to
the propositions that express them their ' eter
nal ' character: The binomial theorem, e. g.,
expresses the value of any power of any sum of
two terms, to the end of time.
These vast unmoving systems of universal
terms form the new worlds of thought of which
I spoke on page 56. The terms are elements
(or are framed of elements) abstracted from
, l The 'necessary' character of the abstract truths which these
sciences exhibit is well explained by G. H. Lewes: Problems of Life and
Mind, Problem 1, chapters iv, xiii, especially p. 405 f. of the English
edition (1874).
68
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
the perceptual flux; but in their abstract shape
we note relations between them (and again be
tween these relations) which enable us to set
up various schemes of fixed serial orders or of
'more and more.' The terms are indeed man-
made, but the order, being established solely
by comparison, is fixed by the nature of the
terms on the one hand and by our power of per-
'ceiving relations on the other. Thus two ab
stract twos are always the same as an abstract
four; what contains the container contains the
contained of whatever material either be made;
equals added to equals always give equal re
sults, in the world in which abstract equality
is the only property the terms are supposed to
possess; the more than the more is more than
the less, no matter in what direction of more-
ness we advance; if you dot off a term in one
series every time you dot one off in another, the
two series will either never end, or will come
to an end together, or one will be exhausted
first, etc. etc. ; the result being those skeletons
of 'rational' or 'necessary' truth in which
our logic- and mathematics-books (sometimes
69
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
our philosophy-books) arrange their universal
terms.
The 'rationalization' of any mass of per
ceptual fact consists in assimilating its con-
And in crete terms, one by one, to so many
terms of the conceptual series, and
then in assuming that the relations intuitively
found among the latter are what connect the
former too. Thus we rationalize gas-pressure
by identifying it with the blows of hypothetic
molecules; then we see that the more closely
the molecules are crowded the more frequent
the blows upon the containing walls will be
come; then we discern the exact proportion
ality of the crowding with the number of blows;
so that finally Mariotte's empirical law gets
rationally explained. All our transformations
of the sense-order into a more rational equiva
lent are similar to this one. We interrogate
the beautiful apparition, as Emerson calls it,
which our senses ceaselessly raise upon our
path, and the items there refer us to their
interpretants in the shape of ideal construc
tions in some static arrangement which our
70
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
mind has already made out of its concepts
alone. The interpretants are then substituted
for the sensations, which thus get rationally
conceived. To 'explain' means to coordinate,
one to one, the thises of the perceptual flow
with the whats of the ideal manifold, whichever
it be.1
We may well call this a theoretic conquest
over the order in which nature originally comes.
The conceptual order into which we translate
our experience seems not only a means of prac
tical adaptation, but the revelation of a deeper
level of reality in things. Being more constant,
it is truer, less illusory than the perceptual
order, and ought to command our attention
more.
There is still another reason why conception
appears such an exalted function. Concepts
Concepts noj- Only guide us over the map of
bring new
values life, but we revalue life by their use.
Their relation to percepts is like that of sight
to touch. Sight indeed helps us by preparing
1 Compare W. Ostwald: Vorlesungen uber Natur philosophic, Sechste
Vorlesung.
71
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
us for contacts while they are yet far off, but
it endows us in addition with a new world of
optical splendor, interesting enough all by
itself to occupy a busy life. Just so do concepts
bring their proper splendor. The mere pos
session of such vast and simple pictures is an
inspiring good: they arouse new feelings of
sublimity, power, and admiration, new inter
ests and motivations.
Ideality often clings to things only when
they are taken thus abstractly. " Causes, as
anti-slavery, democracy, etc., dwindle when
realized in their sordid particulars. Abstrac
tions will touch us when we are callous to the
concrete instances in which they lie embodied.
Loyal in our measure to particular ideals, we
soon set up abstract loyalty as something of
a superior order, to be infinitely loyal to; and
truth at large becomes a 'momentous issue'
compared with which truths in detail are
'poor scraps, mere crumbling successes.'"1
1 J. Royce: The Philosophy of Loyalty, 1908, particularly Lecture
vii, § 5.
Emerson writes : ' Each man sees over his own experience a certain
stain of error, whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal. Let any
72
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
So strongly do objects that come as universal
and eternal arouse our sensibilities, so greatly
do life's values deepen when we translate per
cepts into ideas! The translation appears as
far more than the original's equivalent.
Concepts thus play three distinct parts in hu-
Summary man life.
1. They steer us practically every day, and
provide an immense map of relations among
the elements of things, which, though not now,
yet on some possible future occasion, may help
to steer us practically;
2. They bring new values into our perceptual
life, they reanimate our wills, and make our
action turn upon new points of emphasis ;
3. The map which the mind frames out of
man go back to those delicious relations which make the beauty of his
life, which have given him sincerest instruction and nourishment, he
will shrink and moan. Alas! I know not why, but infinite compunc
tions embitter in mature life the remembrances of budding joy, and
cover every beloved name. Everything is beautiful seen from the point
of view of the intellect, or as truth, but all is sour, if seen as experience.
Details are melancholy; the plan is seemly and noble. In the actual
world — the painful kingdom of time and place — dwell care, and
canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity,
the rose of Joy. Round it all the muses sing. But grief clings to names
and persons, and the partial interests of to-day and yesterday.' (Essay
on Love.)
73
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
them is an object which possesses, when once
it has been framed, an independent existence.
It suffices all by itself for purposes of study.
The ' eternal ' truths it contains would have to
be acknowledged even were the world of sense
annihilated.
We thus see clearly what is gained and what
is lost when percepts are translated into con
cepts. Perception is solely of the here and now ;
conception is of the like and unlike, of the
future, of the past, and of the far away. But
this map of what surrounds the present, like
all maps, is only a surface; its features are but
abstract signs and symbols of things that in
themselves are concrete bits of sensible experi
ence. We have but to weigh extent against
content, thickness against spread, and we see
that for some purposes the one, for other pur
poses the other, has the higher value. Who
can decide offhand which is absolutely better
to live or to understand life? We must do both
alternately, and a man can no more limit him
self to either than a pair of scissors can cut with
a single one of its blades.
CHAPTER V
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT — THE ABUSE
OF CONCEPTS1
IN spite of this obvious need of holding our
percepts fast if our conceptual powers are to
mean anything distinct, there has always been
a tendency among philosophers to treat con
ception as the more essential thing in know-
Thein- ledge.2 The Platonizing persuasion
tellectual-
ist creed has ever been that the intelligible
order ought to supersede the senses rather than
interpret them. The senses, according to this
opinion, are organs of wavering illusion that
stand in the way of 'knowledge/ in the unal
terable sense of that term. They are an unfor
tunate complication on which philosophers
may safely turn their backs.
'Your sensational modalities/ writes one of
1 [This chapter and the following chapter do not appear as separate
chapters in the manuscript. ED.]
3 The traditional rationalist view would have it that to understand
life, without entering its turmoil, is the absolutely better part. Phi
losophy's 'special work,' writes William Wallace, 'is to comprehend the
world, not try to make it better ' (Prolegomena to the Study of HegeVa
Philosophy, 2d edition, Oxford, 1894, p. 29).
75
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
these, 'are but darkness, remember that.
Mount higher, up to reason, and you will see
light. Impose silence on your senses, your
imagination, and your passions, and you will
then hear the pure voice of interior truth, the
clear and evident replies of our common mis
tress [reason]. Never confound that evidence
which results from the comparison of ideas
with the vivacity of those feelings which move
and touch you. . . . We must follow reason
despite the caresses, the threats and the in
sults of the body to which we are conjoined,
despite the action of the objects that surround
us. ... I exhort you to recognize the differ
ence there is between knowing and feeling,
between our clear ideas, and our sensations
always obscure and confused.'1
This is the traditional intellectualist creed.
When Plato, its originator, first thought of
concepts as forming an entirely separate world
and treated this as the only object fit for the
study of immortal minds, he lit up an entirely
1 Malebranche: Entretiens sur la Metaphysique, 3me. Entretien,
viii, 9.
76
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
new sort of enthusiasm in the human breast.
These objects were precious objects, concrete
things were dross. Introduced by Dion, who
had studied at Athens, to the corrupt and
worldly court of the tyrant of Syracuse, Plato,
as Plutarch tells us, 'was received with won
derful kindness and respect. . . . The citizens
began to entertain marvellous hopes of a speedy
reformation when they observed the modesty
which now ruled the banquets, and the general
decorum which reigned in all the court, their
tyrant also behaving himself with gentleness
and humanity. . . . There was a general pas
sion for reasoning and philosophy, so much so
that the very palace, it is reported, was filled
with dust by the concourse of the students in
mathematics who were working their problems
there ' in the sand. Some ' professed to be
indignant that the Athenians, who formerly
had come to Syracuse with a great fleet and
numerous army, and perished miserably with
out being able to take the city, should now, by
means of one sophister, overturn the sover
eignty of Dionysius; inveigling him to cashier
77
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
his guard of 10,000 lances, dismiss a navy of
400 galleys, disband an army of 10,000 horse
and many times over that number of foot, and
go seek in the schools an unknown and imagin
ary bliss, and learn by the mathematics how
to be happy.'
Having now set forth the merits of the con
ceptual translation, I must proceed to show
We extend our
Defect f
the con- view when we insert our percepts
ceptual
transia- into our conceptual map. We learn
about them, and of some of them we
transfigure the value; but the map remains
superficial through the abstractness, and false
through the discreteness of its elements; and
the whole operation, so far from making things
appear more rational, becomes the source of
quite gratuitous unintelligibilities. Conceptual
knowledge is forever inadequate to the fulness
of the reality to be known. Reality consists of
existential particulars as well as of essences
and universals and class-names, and of exist
ential particulars we become aware only in
the perceptual flux. The flux can never be
78
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
superseded. We must carry it with us to the
bitter end of our cognitive business, keeping it
in the midst of the translation even when the
The insu- latter proves illuminating, and f all-
of sensa- m£ back on it alone when the trans
lation gives out. 'The insuperability
of sensation ' would be a short expression of
my thesis.
To prove it, I must show: 1. That concepts
are secondary formations, inadequate, and
only ministerial; and 2. That they falsify as
well as omit, and make the flux impossible to
understand.
1. Conception is a secondary process, not
indispensable to life. It presupposes percep
tion, which is self-sufficing, as all lower crea
tures, in whom conscious life goes on by reflex
adaptations, show.
To understand a concept you must know
what it means. It means always some this, or
some abstract portion of a this, with which
we first made acquaintance in the perceptual
world, or else some grouping of such abstract
portions. All conceptual content is borrowed:
79
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
to know what the concept 'color' means you
must have seen red or blue, or green. To know
what 'resistance' means, you must have made
some effort; to know what 'motion 'means, you
must have had some experience, active or pas
sive, thereof. This applies as much to con
cepts of the most rarified order as to qualities
like 'bright' and 'loud.' To know what the
word 'illation' means one must once have
sweated through some particular argument.
To know what a 'proportion' means one must
have compared ratios in some sensible case.
You can create new concepts out of old ele
ments, but the elements must have been per
ceptually given; and the famous world of
universals would disappear like a soap-bubble
if the definite contents of feeling, the thises and
thats, which its terms severally denote, could
be at once withdrawn. Whether our concepts
live by returning to the perceptual world or
not, they live by having come from it. It is
the nourishing ground from which their sap is
drawn.
£. Conceptual treatment of perceptual real-
80
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
ity makes it seem paradoxical and incompre
hensible; and when radically and consistently
carried out, it leads to the opinion that per
ceptual experience is not reality at all, but an
appearance or illusion.
Briefly, this is a consequence "of two facts:
First, that when we substitute concepts for
Why con- percepts, we substitute their rela-
inade-^ tions also. But since the relations of
quate concepts are of static comparison
only, it is impossible to substitute them for the
dynamic relations with which the perceptual
flux is rilled. Secondly, the conceptual scheme,
consisting as it does of discontinuous terms, can
only cover the perceptual flux in spots and
incompletely. The one is no full measure of
the other, essential features of the flux escaping
whenever we put concepts in its place.
This needs considerable explanation, for we
have concepts not only of qualities and rela
tions, but of happenings and actions; and it
might seem as if these could make the con
ceptual order active.1 But this would be a false
1 Prof. Hibben, in an article in the Philosophic Review, vol. xix, pp.
81
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
interpretation. The concepts themselves are
fixed, even though they designate parts that
move in the flux; they do not act, even though
they designate activities; and when we substi
tute them and their order, we substitute a
scheme the intrinsically stationary nature of
which is not altered by the fact that some of
its terms symbolize changing originals. The
concept of 'change,' for example, is always that
125 ff. (1910), seeks to defend the conceptual order against attacks
similar to those in the text, which, he thinks, come from misapprehen
sions of the true function of logic. ' The peculiar function of thought
is to represent the continuous,' he says, and he proves it by the exam
ple of the calculus. I reply that the calculus, in substituting for cer
tain perceptual continuities its peculiar symbols, lets us follow changes
point by point, and is thus their practical, but not their sensible equiv
alent. It cannot reveal any change to one who never felt it, but it can
lead him to where the change would lead him. It may practically re
place the change, but it cannot reproduce it. What I am contending
for is that the non-reproducible part of reality is an essential part of
the content of philosophy, whilst Hibben and the logicists seem to
believe that conception, if only adequately attained to, might be all-
sufficient. 'It is the peculiar duty and privilege of philosophy,' Mr.
Hibben writes, ' to exalt the prerogatives of intellect.' He claims that
universals are able to deal adequately with particulars, and that con
cepts do not so exclude each other, as my text has accused them of
doing. Of course 'synthetic' concepts abound, with subconcepts in
cluded in them, and the a priori world is full of them. But they are
all designative; and I think that no careful reader of my text will ac
cuse me of identifying ' knowledge ' with either perception or concep.
tion absolutely or exclusively. Perception gives ' intension,' concep
tion gives 'extension ' to our knowledge.
82
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
fixed concept. If it changed, its original self
would have to stay to mark what it had changed
from; and even then the change would be a
perceived continuous process, of which the
translation into concepts could only consist in
the judgment that later and earlier parts of it
differed — such 'differences' being conceived
as absolutely static relations.
Whenever we conceive a thing we define it ;
Origin of an(j jf we si{\\ don't understand, we
intellect-
uaiism define our definition. Thus I define
a certain percept by saying 'this is motion,' or
' I am moving ' ; and then I define motion by
calling it the 'being in new positions at new
moments of time.5 This habit of telling what
everything is becomes inveterate. The farther
we push it, the more we learn about our subject
of discourse, and we end by thinking that
knowing the latter always consists in getting
farther and farther away from the perceptual
type of experience. This uncriticized habit,
added to the intrinsic charm of the conceptual
form, is the source of 'intellectualism' in phi
losophy.
83
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
But intellectualism quickly breaks down.
When we try to exhaust motion by conceiving
inade- it as a summation of parts, ad in-
foteifectL finitum, we find only insufficiency,
alism Although, when you have a contin
uum given, you can make cuts and dots in it,
ad libitum, enumerating the dots and cuts will
not give you your continuum back. The ra
tionalist mind admits this; but instead of see
ing that the fault is with the concepts, it
blames the perceptual flux. This, Kant con
tends, has no reality in itself, being a mere
apparitional birth-place for concepts, to be
substituted indefinitely. When these them
selves are seen never to attain to a completed
sum, reality is sought by such thinkers outside
both of the perceptual flow and of the concept
ual scheme. Kant lodges it before the flow, in
the shape of so-called 'things in themselves';1
others place it beyond perception, as an Abso
lute (Bradley), or represent it as a Mind whose
1 * We must suppose Noumena,' says Kant, ' in order to set bounds
to the objective validity of sense-knowledge ' (Krit. d. reinen Ver-
nunft, 2d ed., p. 310). The old moral need of somehow rebuking
'Sinnlichkeit'!
84
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
ways of thinking transcend ours (Green, the
Cairds, Royce). In either case, both our per
cepts and our concepts are held by such phi
losophers to falsify reality; but the concepts
less than the percepts, for they are static, and
by all rationalist authors the ultimate reality
is supposed to be static also, while perceptual
life fairly boils over with activity and change.
If we take a few examples, we can see how
many of the troubles of philosophy come from
Examples assuming that to be understood (or
of puzzles
intro- known in the only worthy sense of
byC<x>n- *^e word) our flowing life must be
ceptual cuj- jnto discrete bits and pinned
transla
tion upon a fixed relational scheme.
Example 1. Activity and causation are in
comprehensible, for the conceptual scheme
yields nothing like them. Nothing happens
therein: concepts are 'timeless,' and can only
be juxtaposed and compared. The concept
'dog' does not bite; the concept 'cock' does
not crow. So Hume and Kant translate the
fact of causation into the crude juxtaposition
of two phenomena. Later authors, wishing to
85
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
mitigate the crudeness, resolve the adjacency,
whenever they can, into identity: cause and
effect must be the same reality in disguise, and
our perception of difference in these successions
thus becomes an illusion. Lotze elaborately
establishes that the 'influencing' of one thing
by another is inconceivable. 'Influence' is a
concept, and, as such, a distinct third thing,
to be identified neither with the agent nor the
patient. What becomes of it on its way from
the former to the latter? And when it finds the
latter, how does it act upon it? By a second
influence which it puts forth in turn? — But
then again how? and so forth, and so forth till
our whole intuition of activity gets branded as
illusory because you cannot possibly reproduce
its flowing substance by juxtaposing the dis
crete. Intellectualism draws the dynamic con
tinuity out of nature as you draw the thread
out of a string of beads.
Example 2. Knowledge is impossible; for
knower is one concept, and known is another.
Discrete, separated by a chasm, they are mu
tually 'transcendent' things, so that how an
86
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
object can ever get into a subject, or a subject
ever get at an object, has become the most
unanswerable of philosophic riddles. An insin
cere riddle, too, for the most hardened 'epis-
temologist' never really doubts that know
ledge somehow does come off.
Example 3. Personal identity is conceptually
impossible. 'Ideas' and 'states of mind' are
discrete concepts, and a series of them in time
means a plurality of disconnected terms. To
such an atomistic plurality the associationists
reduce our mental life. Shocked at the discon
tinuous character of their scheme, the spiritu
alists assume a 'soul' or 'ego' to melt the
separate ideas into one collective consciousness.
But this ego itself is but another discrete con
cept; and the only way not to pile up more
puzzles is to endow it with an incomprehensi
ble power of producing that very character of
manyness-in-oneness of which rationalists re
fuse the gift when offered in its immediate per
ceptual form.
Example 4. Motion and change are impos
sible. Perception changes pulsewise, but the
87
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
pulses continue each other and melt their
bounds. In conceptual translation, however, a
continuum can only stand for elements with
other elements between them ad infinitum, all
separately conceived; and such an infinite
series can never be exhausted by successive
addition. From the time of Zeno the Eleatic,
this intrinsic contradictoriness of continuous
change has been one of the worst skulls at
intellectualism's banquet.
Example 5. Resemblance, in the way in
which we naively perceive it, is an illusion. Re
semblance must be defined; and when defined
it reduces to a mixture of identity with other
ness. To know a likeness understandingly we
must be able to abstract the identical point
distinctly. If we fail of this, we remain in our
perceptual limbo of 'confusion.'
Example 6. Our immediate life is full of the
sense of direction, but no concept of the direction
of a process is possible until the process is com
pleted. Defined as it is by a beginning and an
ending, a direction can never be prospectively
but only retrospectively known. Our percept-
88
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
ual discernment beforehand of the way we are
going, and all our dim foretastes of the future,
have therefore to be treated as inexplicable
or illusory features of experience.
Example 7. No real thing can be in two rela
tions at once; the same moon, for example, can
not be seen both by you and by me. For the
concept 'seen by you' is not the concept 'seen
by me'; and if, taking the moon as a gram
matical subject and, predicating one of these
concepts of it, you then predicate the other
also, you become guilty of the logical sin of
saying that a thing can both be A and not-A
at once. Learned trifling again; for clear
though the conceptual contradictions be, no
body sincerely disbelieves that two men see the
same thing.
Example 8. No relation can be comprehended
or held to be real in the form in which we inno
cently assume it. A relation is a distinct con
cept ; and when you try to make two other con
cepts continuous by putting a relation between
them, you only increase the discontinuity.
You have now conceived three things instead
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
of two, and have two gaps instead of one to
bridge over. Continuity is impossible in the
conceptual world.
Example 9. The very relation of subject to
predicate in our judgments, the backbone of con-
ceptual thinking itself, is unintelligible and self-
contradictory. Predicates are ready-made uni
versal ideas by which we qualify perceptual
singulars or other ideas. Sugar, for example,
we say 'is' sweet. But if the sugar was already
sweet, you have made no step in knowledge;
whilst if not so already, you are identifying it
with a concept, with which, in its universality,
the particular sugar cannot be identical. Thus
neither the sugar as described, nor your de
scription, is comprehensible.1
1 I have cited in the text only such conceptual puzzles as have be
come classic in philosophy, but the concepts current in physical science
have also developed mutual oppugnancies which (although not yet
classic commonplaces in philosophy) are beginning to make physicists
doubt whether such notions develop unconditional 'truth.' Many
physicists now think that the concepts of 'matter,' 'mass,' 'atom,'
'ether,' 'inertia,' 'force,' etc. are not so much duplicates of hidden
realities in nature as mental instruments to handle nature by after-
substitution of their scheme. They are considered, like the kilogram
or the imperial yard, ' artefacts,' not revelations. The literature here is
copious: J. B. Stallo's Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics (1882);
pp. 136-140 especially, are fundamental. Mach, Ostwald, Pearson
90
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
These profundities of inconceivability, and
many others like them, arise from the vain
Attitude attempt to reconvert the manifold
losophers ^o which our conception has re-
Miaiectic1 so've<i things, back into the con-
difficulties tinuum out of which it came. The
concept 'many' is' not the concept 'one';
therefore the manyness-in-oneness which per
ception offers is impossible to construe intel
lectually. Youthful readers will find such
difficulties too whimsical to be taken seriously;
but since the days of the Greek sophists these
dialectic puzzles have lain beneath the surface
of all our thinking like the shoals and snags in
the Mississippi river; and the more intellectu
ally conscientious the thinkers have been, the
less they have allowed themselves to disregard
them. But most philosophers have noticed
this or that puzzle only, and ignored the others.
The pyrrhonian Sceptics first, then Hegel,1
then in our day Bradley and Bergson, are the
only writers I know who have faced them col-
Duhem, Milhaud, LeRoy, Wilbois, H. Poincare, are other critics of a
similar sort.
1 I omit Herbart, perhaps wrongly.
91
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
lectively, and proposed a solution applicable
to them all.
The sceptics gave up the whole notion of
truth light-heartedly, and advised their pupils
The seep- not to care about it.1 Hegel wrote so
tics and
Hegel abominably that I cannot under
stand him, and will say nothing about him
liere.2 Bradley and Bergson write with beauti
ful clearness and their arguments continue all
that I have said.
Mr. Bradley agrees that immediate feeling
possesses a native wholeness which conceptual
Bradley treatment analyzes into a many, but
on per- •. • T < , i • >
ceptand cannot unite again. In every this
concept as merely felt? Bradley says, we 'en
counter' reality, but we encounter it only as a
fragment, see it, as it were, only 'through a
1 See any history of philosophy, sub voce 'Pyrrho.'
2 Hegel connects immediate perception with ideal truth by a ladder
of intermediary concepts — at least, I suppose they are concepts. The
best opinion among his interpreters seems to be that ideal truth does
not abolish immediate perception, but preserves it as an indispensable
'moment.' Compare, e. g., H. W. Dresser: The Philosophy of the Spirit,
1908; Supplementary Essay: 'On the Element of Irrationality in the
Hegelian Dialectic.' In other words Hegel does not pull up the ladder
after him when he gets to the top, and may therefore be counted as a
non-intellectualist, in spite of his desperately intellectualist tone.
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
hole.'1 Our sole practicable way of extending
and completing this fragment is by using our
intellect with its universal ideas. But with ideas,
that harmonious compenetration of manyness-
in-oneness which feeling originally gave is no
longer possible. Concepts indeed extend our
this, but lose the inner secret of its wholeness;
when ideal 'truth' is substituted for * reality '
the very nature of ' reality ' disappears.
The fault being due entirely to the concep
tual form in which we have to think things, one
might naturally expect that one who recognizes
its inferiority to the perceptual form as clearly
as Mr. Bradley does, would try to save both
forms for philosophy, delimiting their scopes,
and showing how, as our experience works,
they supplement each other. This is M. Berg-
son's procedure; but Bradley, though a traitor
to orthodox intellectualism in holding fast to
feeling as a revealer of the inner oneness of
reality, has yet remained orthodox enough to
refuse to admit immediate feeling into 'philos
ophy' at all. 'For worse or for better,' he
1 F. H. Bradley: The Principles of Logic, book i, chap, ii, pp. 29-32.
93
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
_ i •
writes, 'the man who stays on particular feel
ing must remain outside philosophy.' The
philosopher's business, according to Mr. Brad
ley, is to qualify the real * ideally ' (i. e. by con
cepts), and never to look back. The 'ideas'
meanwhile yield nothing but a patchwork, and
show no unity like that which the living per
ception gave. What shall one do in these per
plexing circumstances? Unwilling to go back,
Bradley only goes more desperately forward.
He makes a flying leap ahead, and assumes,
beyond the vanishing point of the whole con
ceptual perspective, an 'absolute' reality, in
which the coherency of feeling and the com
pleteness of the intellectual ideal shall unite in
some indescribable way. Such an absolute
totality-in unity can be, it must be, it shall be,
it is he says. Upon this incomprehensible
metaphysical object the Bradleyan metaphysic
establishes its domain.1
The sincerity of Bradley 's criticisms has
cleared the air of metaphysics and made havoc
1 Mr. Bradley has expressed himself most pregnantly in an article
in volume xviii, N. S. of Mind, p. 489. See also his Appearance and
Reality, passim, especially the Appendix to the se«ond edition.
94
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
with old party lines. But, critical as he is,
Mr. Bradley preserves one prejudice uncriti-
Criticism cized. Perception 'untransmuted/
of Bradley he bejjeves? must not> Cannot5 shall
not, enter into final 'truth,'
Such loyalty to a blank direction in thought,
no matter where it leads you, is pathetic: con
cepts disintegrate — no matter, their way
must be pursued; percepts are integral — no
matter, they must be left behind. When anti-
sensationalism has become an obstinacy like
this, one feels that it draws near its end.
Since it is only the conceptual form which
forces the dialectic contradictions upon the in
nocent sensible reality, the remedy would seem
to be simple. Use concepts when they help,
and drop them when they hinder understand
ing; and take reality bodily and integrally up
into philosophy in exactly the perceptual shape
in which it comes. The aboriginal flow of feel
ing sins only by a quantitative defect. There is
always much-at-once of it, but there is never
enough, and we desiderate the rest. The only
way to get the rest without wading through all
95
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
future time in the person of numberless per-
ceivers, is to substitute our various conceptual
systems which, monstrous abridgments though
they be, are nevertheless each an equivalent,
for some partial aspect of the full perceptual
reality which we can never grasp.
This, essentially, is Bergson's view of the
matter, and with it I think that we should rest
content.1
I will now sum up compendiously the result
of what precedes. If the aim of philosophy
Summary were the taking full possession of all
reality by the mind, then nothing short of
the whole of immediate perceptual experience
could be the subject-matter of philosophy, for
only in such experience is reality intimately
and concretely found. But the philosopher,
although he is unable as a finite being to com
pass more than a few passing moments of such
experience, is yet able to extend his knowledge
beyond such moments by the ideal symbol of
1 Bergson's most compendious statement of his doctrine is in the
'Introduction a la Metaphysique,' in the Revue de Metaphysique et de
Morale, 1903, p. i. For a brief comparison between him and Bradley,
see an essay by W. James, in the Journal of Philosophy, vol. vii, no. 2.
96
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
the other moments.1 He thus commands vi
cariously innumerable perceptions that are out
of range. But the concepts by which he does
this, being thin extracts from perception, are
always insufficient representatives thereof; and,
although they yield wider information, must
never be treated after the rationalistic fashion,
as if they gave a deeper quality of truth. The
deeper features of reality are found only in
perceptual experience. Here alone do we ac
quaint ourselves with continuity, or the im
mersion of one thing in another, here alone with
self, with substance, with qualities, with ac
tivity in its various modes, with time, with
cause, with change, with novelty, with tend
ency, and with freedom. Against all such fea
tures of reality the method of conceptual trans
lation, when candidly and critically followed
out, can only raise its non possumus, and brand
them as unreal or absurd.
1 It would seem that in ' mystical ' ways, he may extend his vision to
an even wider perceptual panorama than that usually open to the sci
entific mind. I understand Bergson to favor some such idea as this .
SeeW. James: 'A Suggestion about Mysticism,' Journal of Philosophy,
vii, 4. The subject of mystical knowledge, as yet very imperfectly un
derstood, has been neglected both by philosophers and scientific men.
CHAPTER VI
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT — SOME
COROLLARIES
THE first corollary of the conclusions of the
foregoing chapter is that the tendency known in
philosophy as empiricism, becomes confirmed.
Empiricism proceeds from parts to wholes,
treating the parts as fundamental both in the
order of being and in the order of our know
ledge.1 In human experience the parts are per-
i. Novelty cepts, built out into wholes by our
becomes
possible conceptual additions. The percepts
are singulars that change incessantly and never
return exactly as they were before. This brings
an element of concrete novelty into our experi
ence. This novelty finds no representation in
the conceptual method, for concepts are ab
stracted from experiences already seen or given,
1 Naturally this applies in the present place only to the greater
whole which philosophy considers; the universe namely, and its parts,
for there are plenty of minor wholes (animal and social organisms, for
example) in which both the being of the parts and our understanding
of the parts are founded.
98
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
and he who uses them to divine the new can
never do so but in ready-made and ancient
terms. Whatever actual novelty the future
may contain (and the singularity and individu
ality of each moment makes it novel) escapes
conceptual treatment altogether. Properly
speaking, concepts are post-mortem prepara
tions, sufficient only for retrospective under
standing; and when we use them to define the
universe prospectively we ought to realize that
they can give only a bare abstract outline or
approximate sketch, in the filling out of which
perception must be invoked.
Rationalistic philosophy has always aspired
to a rounded-in view of the whole of things, a
closed system of kinds, from which the notion
of essential novelty being possible is ruled out
in advance. For empiricism, on the other hand,
reality cannot be thus confined by a conceptual
ring-fence. It overflows, exceeds, and alters.
It may turn into novelties, and can be known
adequately only by following its singularities
from moment to moment as our experience
grows. Empiricist philosophy thus renounces
99
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
the pretension to an all-inclusive vision. It
ekes out the narrowness of personal experience
by concepts which it finds useful but not
sovereign; but it stays inside the flux of life
expectantly, recording facts, not formulat
ing laws, and never pretending that man's
relation to the totality of things as a philoso
pher is essentially different from his relation
to the parts of things as a daily patient or
agent in the practical current of events. Phi
losophy, like life, must keep the doors and
windows open.
In the remainder of this book we shall hold
fast to this empiricist view. We shall insist
that, as reality is created temporally day by
day, concepts, although a magnificent sketch-
map for showing us our bearings, can never
fitly supersede perception, and that the 'eter
nal' systems wrhich they form should least of
all be regarded as realms of being to know
which is a kind of knowing that casts the know
ledge of particulars altogether into the shade.
That rationalist assumption is quite beside the
mark. Thus does philosophy prove again that
100
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
essential identity with science which we argued
for in our first chapter.1
The last paragraph does not mean that con
cepts and the relations between them are not
2 Con- 3ust as * rea^ ' m tne^r * eternal ' way as
ceptual percepts are in their temporal way.
systems
are dis- What is it to be 'real'? The best
realms of definition I know is that which the
pragmatist rule gives: 'anything is>
real of which we find ourselves obliged to take
account in any way.'2 Concepts are thus as
real as percepts, for we cannot live a moment
without taking account of them. But the
' eternal' kind of being which they enjoy is in
ferior to the temporal kind, because it is so
static and schematic and lacks so many charac
ters which temporal reality possesses. Philoso
phy must thus recognize many realms of reality
1 One way of stating the empiricist contention is to say that the
'alogical ' enters into philosophy on an equal footing with the 'logical.'
Mr. Belfort Bax, in his book, The Roots of Reality (1907), formulates
his empiricism (such as it is) in this way. (See particularly chap, iii.)
Compare also E. D. Fawcett: The Individual and Reality, passim, but
especially part ii, chaps, iv and v.
2 Prof. A. E. Taylor gives this pragmatist definition in his Elements
of Metaphysics (1903), p. 51. On the nature of logical reality, cf. B.
Russell: Principles of Mathematics.
101
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
which mutually interpenetrate. The concept
ual systems of mathematics, logic, aesthetics,
ethics, are such realms, each strung upon some
peculiar form of relation, and each differing
from perceptual reality in that in no one of
them is history or happening displayed. Per
ceptual reality involves and contains all these
ideal systems, and vastly more besides.
A concept, it was said above, means always
the same thing : Change means always change,
The white always white, a circle always a
self-same- circle. On this self-sameness of con-
ness of
ideal ceptual objects the static and 'eter
nal ' character of our systems of ideal
truth is based ; for a relation, once perceived to
obtain, must obtain always, between terms
that do not alter. But many persons find
difficulty in admitting that a concept used in
different contexts can be intrinsically the same.
When we call both snow and paper ' white ' it is
supposed by these thinkers that there must be
two predicates in the field. As James Mill
says:1 "Every colour is an individual colour,
1 Analysis of the Human Mind (1869), i, 249.
102
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
every size is an individual size, every shape is
an individual shape. But things have no indi
vidual colour in common, no individual shape
in common; no individual size in common; that
is to say, they have neither shape, colour, nor
size in common. What, then, is it which they
have in common which the mind can take into
view? Those who affirmed that it was some
thing, could by no means tell. They substi
tuted words for things; using vague and mys
tical phrases, which, when examined, meant
nothing/ The truth, according to this nominal
ist author, is that the only thing that can be pos
sessed in common by two objects is the same
name. Black in the coat and black in the shoe
are the same in so far forth as both shoe and
coat are called black — the fact that on this
view the name can never twice be the ' same '
being quite overlooked. What now does the
concept 'same' signify? Applying, as usual,
the pragmatic rule, we find that when we call
two objects the same we mean either (a) that
no difference can be found between them when
compared, or (b) that we can substitute the one
103
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
for the other in certain operations without
changing the result. If we are to discuss same
ness profitably we must bear these pragmatic
meanings in mind.
Do then the snow and the paper show no
difference in color? And can we use them in
differently in operations? They may certainly
replace each other for reflecting light, or be
used indifferently as backgrounds to set off
anything dark, or serve as equally good samples
of what the word 'white' signifies. But the
snow may be dirty, and the paper pinkish or
yellowish without ceasing to be called 'white ';
or both snow and paper in one light may differ
from their own selves in another and still be
'white,' - - so the no-difference criterion seems
to be at fault. This physical difficulty (which all
house painters know) of matching two tints so
exactly as to show no difference seems to be
the sort of fact that nominalists have in mind
when they say that our ideal meanings are
never twice the same. Must we therefore ad
mit that such a concept as 'white' can never
keep exactly the same meaning?
104
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
It would be absurd to say so, for we know
that under all the modifications wrought by
changing light, dirt, impurity in pigment, etc.,
there is an element of color-quality, different
from other color-qualities, which we mean that
our word shall inalterably signify. The impossi
bility of isolating and fixing this quality physi
cally is irrelevant, so long as we can isolate
and fix it mentally, and decide that whenever
we say 'white,' that identical quality, whether
applied rightly or wrongly, is what we shall be
held to mean. Our meanings can be the same as
often as we intend to have them so, quite irre
spective of whether what is meant be a physi
cal possibility or not. Half the ideas we make
use of are of impossible or problematic things,
— zeros, infinites, fourth dimensions, limits
of ideal perfection, forces, relations sundered
from their terms, or terms defined only con
ceptually, by their relations to other terms
which may be equally fictitious. 'White'
means a color quality of which the mind ap
points the standard, and which it can decree to
be there under all physical disguises. That
105
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
white is always the same white. What sense
can there be in insisting that although we our
selves have fixed it as the same, it cannot be
the same twice over? It works perfectly for
us on the supposition that it is there self-
identically; so the nominalist doctrine is false
of things of that conceptual sort, and true only
of things in the perceptual flux.
What I am affirming here is the platonic
doctrine that concepts are singulars, that con
cept-stuff is inalterable, and that physical
realities are constituted by the various con
cept-stuff s of which they 'partake.' It is known
as c logical realism ' in the history of philosophy ;
and has usually been more favored by rational
istic than by empiricist minds. For rational
ism, concept-stuff is primordial and perceptual
things are secondary in nature. The present
book, which treats concrete percepts as pri
mordial and concepts as of secondary origin,
may be regarded as somewhat eccentric in its
attempt to combine logical realism with an
otherwise empiricist mode of thought.1
1 For additional remarks in favor of the sameness of conceptual ob-
106
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
I mean by this that they are made of the
same kind of stuff, and melt into each other
4. Con- when we handle them together. How
percepts could it be otherwise when the con-
are con- cepts are like evaporations out of the
substan-
tial bosom of perception, into which they
condense again whenever practical service
summons them? No one can tell, of the things
he now holds in his hand and reads, how much
comes in through his eyes and fingers, and how
much, from his apperceiving intellect, unites
with that and makes of it this particular
'book'? The universal and the particular
parts of the experience are literally immersed
in each other, and both are indispensable.
Conception is not like a painted hook, on
which no real chain can be hung; for we hang
* concepts upon percepts, and percepts upon
concepts interchangeably and indefinitely; and
the relation of the two is much more like
what we find in those cylindrical ' panoramas '
jects, see W. James in Mind, vol. iv, 1879, pp. 331-333; F. H. Bradley:
Ethical Studies (1876), pp. 151-154, and Principles of Logic (1883), pp.
260 ff., 282 ff. The nominalist view is presented by James Mill, as
above, and by John Stuart Mill in his System of Logic, 8th ed. i, 77.
107
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
in which a painted background continues a real
foreground so cunningly that one fails to de
tect the joint. The world we practically live
in is one in which it is impossible, except by
theoretic retrospection, to disentangle the con
tributions of intellect from those of sense. They
are wrapt and rolled together as a gunshot in
the mountains is wrapt and rolled in fold on
fold of echo and reverberative clamor. Even
so do intellectual reverberations enlarge and
prolong the perceptual experience which they
envelop, associating it with remoter parts of
existence. And the ideas of these in turn work
like those resonators that pick out partial
tones in complex sounds. They help us to
decompose our percept into parts and to ab
stract and isolate its elements.
The two mental functions thus play into
each other's hands. Perception prompts our
thought, and thought in turn enriches our per
ception. The more we see, the more we think;
while the more we think, the more we see in
our immediate experiences, and the greater
grows the detail and the more significant the
108
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
articulateness of our perception.1 Later, when
we come to treat of causal activity, we shall see
how practically momentous is this enlargement
of the span of our knowledge through the wrap
ping of our percepts in ideas. It is the whole
coil and compound of both by which effects are
determined, and they may then be different
effects from those to which the perceptual
nucleus would by itself give rise. But the point
is a difficult one and at the present stage of our
argument this brief mention of it must suffice.
Readers who by this time agree that our con
ceptual systems are secondary and on the
5. An ob- whole imperfect and ministerial forms
jection
replied to of being, will now feel able to return
and embrace the flux of their hourly experience
with a hearty feeling that, however little of it
at a time be given, what is given is absolutely
1 Cf. F. C. S. Schiller: ' Thought and Immediacy,' in the Journal
of Philosophy, etc., iii, 231. The interpretation goes so deep that
we may even act as if experience consisted of nothing but the
different kinds of concept-stuff into which we analyze it. Such
concept-stuff may often be treated, for purposes of action and even
of discussion, as if it were a full equivalent for reality. But it is
needless to repeat, after what precedes, that no amount of it can
ever be a full equivalent, and that in point of genesis it remains a
secondary formation.
109
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
real. Rationalistic thought, with its exclusive
interest in the unchanging and the general,
has always de-realized the passing pulses of
our life. It is no small service on empiricism's
part to have exorcised rationalism's veto, and
reflectively justified our instinctive feeling
about immediate experience. 'Other world?'
says Emerson, 'there is no other world,' —
than this one, namely, in which our several
biographies are founded.
' Natur hat weder Kern noch Schale;
Alles ist sie mit einem male.
Dich priife du nur allermeist,
Ob du Kern oder Schale seist.'
The belief in the genuineness of each particular
moment in which we feel the squeeze of this
world's life, as we actually do work here, or
work is done upon us, is an Eden from which
rationalists seek in vain to expel us, now that
we have criticized their state of mind.
But they still make one last attempt, and
charge us with self-stultification.
'Your belief in the particular moments,' they
insist, 'so far as it is based on reflective argu-
110
PERCEPT AND CONCEPT
ment (and is not a mere omission to doubt, like
that of cows and horses) is grounded in abstrac
tion and conception. Only by using concepts
have you established percepts in reality. The
concepts are the vital things, then, and the
percepts are dependent on them for the char
acter of "reality" with which your reasoning
endows them. You stand self -contradicted :
concepts appear as the sole triumphant instru
ments of truth, for you have to employ their
proper authority, even when seeking to install
perception in authority above them.'
The objection is specious; but it disappears
the moment one recollects that in the last
resort a concept can only be designative; and
that the concept * reality,' which we restore to
immediate perception, is no new conceptual
creation, but only a kind of practical relation
to our Will, perceptively experienced,1 which
reasoning had temporarily interfered with,
but which, when the reasoning was neutralized
by still further reasoning, reverted to its
1 Compare W. James: Principles of Psychology, chap, xxi, "The
Perception of Reality.'
Ill
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
original seat as if nothing had happened. That
concepts can neutralize other concepts is one
of their great practical functions. This an
swers also the charge that it is self -contradic
tory to use concepts to undermine the credit
of conception in general. The best way to show
that a knife will not cut is to try to cut with it.
Rationalism itself it is that has so fatally un
dermined conception, by finding that, when
worked beyond a certain point, it only piles up
dialectic contradictions.1
1 Compare further, as to this objection, a note in W. James: A Plu
ralistic Universe, pp. 339-343.
CHAPTER VII
THE ONE AND THE MANY
THE full nature, as distinguished from the full
amount, of reality, we now believe to be given
only in the perceptual flux. But, though the
flux is continuous from next to next, non-
adjacent portions of it are separated by parts
that intervene, and such separation seems in a
variety of cases to work a positive disconnec
tion. The latter part, e. g., may contain no
element surviving from the earlier part, may
be unlike it, may forget it, may be shut off
from it by physical barriers, or whatnot. Thus
Pluralism when we use our intellect for cutting
vs. mon
ism up the flux and individualizing its
members, we have (provisionally and prac
tically at any rate) to treat an enormous num
ber of these as if they were unrelated or related
only remotely, to one another. We handle
them piecemeal or distributively, and look at
the entire flux as if it were their sum or collec
tion. This encourages the empiricist notion,
113
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
that the parts are distinct and that the whole
is a resultant.
This doctrine rationalism opposes, contend
ing that the whole is fundamental, that the
parts derive from it and all belong with one-
another, that the separations we uncritically
accept are illusory, and that the entire uni
verse, instead of being a sum, is the only gen
uine unit in existence, constituting (in the
words often quoted from d'Alembert) 'un seul
fait et une grande verite.'
The alternative here is known as that be
tween pluralism and monism. It is the most
pregnant of all the dilemmas of philosophy,
although it is only in our time that it has been
articulated distinctly. Does reality exist dis-
tributively? or collectively? — in the shape of
eaches, every s, anys, eithers? or only in the
shape of an all or whole? An identical content
is compatible with either form obtaining, the
Latin omnes, or cuncti, or the German alle or
sdmmtliche expressing the alternatives famil
iarly. Pluralism stands for the distributive,
monism for the collective form of being.
114
THE ONE AND THE MANY
Please note that pluralism need not be sup
posed at the outset to stand for any particular
kind or amount of disconnection between the
many things which it assumes. It only has the
negative significance of contradicting mon
ism's thesis that there is absolutely no discon
nection. The irreducible outness of am/thing,
however infinitesimal, from am/thing else, in
any respect, would be enough, if it were solidly
established, to ruin the monistic doctrine.
I hope that the reader begins to be pained
here by the extreme vagueness of the terms I
am using. To say that there is 'no disconnec
tion/ is on the face of it simply silly, for we find
practical disconnections without number. My
pocket is disconnected with Mr. Morgan's
bank-account, and King Edward VII's mind is
disconnected with this book. Monism must
mean that all such apparent disconnections
are bridged over by some deeper absolute union
in which it believes, and this union must in
some way be more real than the practical
separations that appear upon the surface.
In point of historical fact monism has gen-
115
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
erally kept itself vague and mystical as regards
the ultimate principle of unity. To be One is
Kinds of more wonderful than to be many, so
the principle of things must be One,
but of that One no exact account is given.
Plotinus simply calls it the One. 'The One is
all things and yet no one of them. . . . For
the very reason that none of them was in the
One, are all derived from it. Furthermore, in
order that they may be real existences, the One
Mystical is not an existence, but the father
of existences. And the generation of
existence is as it were the first act of gener
ation. Being perfect by reason of neither
seeking nor possessing nor needing anything,
the One overflows, as it were, and what over
flows forms another hypostasis. . . . How
should the most perfect and primal good
stay shut up in itself as if it were envious or
impotent? . . . Necessarily then something
comes from it.'1
This is like the Hindoo doctrine of the Brah-
1 Compare the passages in C. M. Bakewell's Source-Book in Ancient
Philosophy, pp. 363-370, or the first four books of the Vth Ennead
generally, in F. Bouillier's translation.
116
THE ONE AND THE MANY
A
man, or of the Atman. In the Bhagavat-gita
the holy Krishna speaking for the One, says:
'I am the immolation. I am the sacrificial rite.
I am the libation offered to ancestors. I am the
drug. I am the incantation. I am the sacrificial
butter also. I am the fire. I am the incense. I
am the father, the mother, the sustainer, the
grandfather of the universe — the mystic doc
trine, the purification, the syllable "Om" . . .
the path, the supporter, the master, the wit
ness, the habitation, the refuge, the friend, the
origin, the dissolution, the place, the receptacle,
the inexhaustible seed. I heat (the world) I
withhold and pour out the rain. I am ambrosia
and death, the existing and the non-existing.
... I am the same to all beings. I have neither
foe nor friend. . . . Place thy heart on me, wor
shipping me, sacrificing to me, saluting me.'1
I call this sort of monism mystical, for it not
only revels in formulas that defy understand
ing,2 but it accredits itself by appealing to
states of illumination not vouchsafed to com-
1 J. C. Thomson's translation, chap. iv.
2 Al-Ghazzali, the Mohammedan philosopher and mystic, gives a
more theistic version of essentially the same idea: 'Allah is the gtiider
117
SOME PROBLEMS OP PHILOSOPHY
mon men. Thus Porphyry, in his life of Plo-
tinus, after saying that he himself once had
such an insight, when 68 years old, adds that
whilst he lived with Plotinus, the latter four
times had the happiness of approaching the su
preme God and consciously uniting with him
in a real and ineffable act.
The regular mystical way of attaining the
vision of the One is by ascetic training, funda
mentally the same in all religious systems. But
this ineffable kind of Oneness is not strictly
philosophical, for philosophy is essentially
talkative and explicit, so I must pass it by.
The usual philosophic way of reaching deeper
oneness has been by the conception of sub
stance. First used by the Greeks, this notion
aright and the leader astray; he does what he wills and decides what he
wishes; there is no opposer of his decision and no repeller of his decree.
He created the Garden, and created for it a people, then used them in
obedience. And he created the Fire, and created for it a people, then
used them in rebellion. . . . Then he said, as has been handed down
from the Prophet: "These are in the Garden, and I care not; and these
are in the Fire, and I care not." So he is Allah, the Most High, the
King, the Reality. He is not asked concerning what he does; but they
are asked.' (D. B. MacDonald's translation, in Hartford Seminary Re
cord, January, 1910.) Compare for other quotations, W. James: The
Varieties of 'Religious Experience, pp. 415-422.
118
THE ONE AND THE MANY
was elaborated with great care during the
Middle Ages. Defined as any being that exists
Monism per se? so that it needs no further sub-
of sub
stance ject in which to inhere (Ens ita per
se existens, ut non indigeat alio tamquam sub-
jecto, cui inhaereat, ad existendum) a ' substance *
was first distinguished from all 'accidents'
(which do require such a subject of inhesion -
cujus esse est inesse). It was then identified
with the 'principle of individuality' in things,
and with their 'essence,' and divided into va
rious types, for example into first and second,
simple and compound, complete and incom
plete, specific and individual, material and
spiritual substances. God, on this view, is a
substance, for he exists per se, as well as a se;
but of secondary beings, he is the creator, not
the substance, for once created, they also exist
per se though not a se. Thus, for scholasticism,
the notion of substance is only a partial unifier,
and in its totality, the universe forms a plural
ism from the substance-point-of-view.1
1 Consult the word ' substance ' in the index of any scholastic man
ual, such as J. Rickaby: General Metaphysics; A. Stockl: Lehrbuch d.
Phil.; or P. M. Liberatore: Compendium Logicce et Metophy sices.
119
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
Spinoza broke away from the scholastic doc
trine. He began his 'Ethics ' by demonstrating
that only one substance is possible, and that
that substance can only be the infinite and
necessary God.1 This heresy brought reproba-
1 Spinoza has expressed his doctrine briefly in part i of the Appendix
to his Ethics: 'I have now explained,' he says, 'the nature of God, and
his properties; such as that he exists necessarily; that he is unique;
that what he is and does flows from the sole necessity of his nature;
that he is the free cause of all things whatever; that all things are in
God and depend on him in such wise that they can neither be nor be
conceived without him; and finally, that all things have been predeter
mined by God, not indeed by the freedom of his will, or according to
his good pleasure, but in virtue of his absolute nature or his infinite
potentiality.' — Spinoza goes on to refute the vulgar notion of final
causes. God pursues no ends — if he did he would lack something. He
acts out of the logical necessity of the fulness of his nature. — I find
another good monistic statement in a book of the spinozistic type : —
'. . . The existence of every compound object in manifestation does
not lie in the object itself, but lies in the universal existence which
is an absolute unit, containing in itself all that is manifested. All the
particularized beings, therefore, . . . are incessantly changing one
into the other, coming and going, forming an.d dissolving through the
one universal cause of the potential universe, which is the absolute unit
of universal existence, depending on the one general law, the one math
ematical bond, which is the absolute being, and it changes not in all
eternity. Thus, ... it is the universe as a whole, in its potential
being, from which the physical universe is individualized; and its being
is a mathematical inference from a mathematical or an intellectual
universe which was and ever is previously formed by an intellect
standing and existing by itself. This mathematical or intellectual uni
verse I call Absolute Intellectuality, the God of the Universe.'
(Solomon J. Silberstein: The Disclosures of the Universal Mysteries,
New York, 1906, pp. 12-13.)
120
THE ONE AND THE MANY
tion on Spinoza, but it has been favored by
philosophers and poets ever since. The panthe
istic spinozistic unity was too sublime a pros
pect not to captivate the mind. It was not till
Locke, Berkeley, and Hume began to put in
their 'critical' work that the suspicion began
to gain currency that the notion of substance
might be only v a word masquerading in the
shape of an idea.1
Locke believed in substances, yet confessed
that 'we have no such clear idea at all, but only
Critique an uncertain supposition of we know
of sub
stance not what, which we take to be the
substratum, or support of those ideas we do
not know.'2 He criticized the notion of per
sonal substance as the principles of self-same-
1 No one believes that such words as 'winter/ 'army,' 'house,' de
note substances. They designate collective facts, of which the parts
are held together by means that can be experimentally traced. Even
when we can't define what groups the effects together, as in 'poison,'
'sickness,' 'strength,' we don't assume a substance, but are willing
that the word should designate some phenomenal agency yet to be
found out. Nominalists treat all substances after this analogy, and
consider 'matter,' 'gold,' 'soul,' as but the names of so many grouped
properties, of which the bond of union must be, not some unknowable
substance corresponding to the name, but rather some hidden portion
of the whole phenomenal fact.
2 Essay concerning Human Under standing, book i, chap, iv, § 18.
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
ness in our different minds. Experientially , our
personal identity consists, he said, in nothing
more than the functional and perceptible fact
that our later states of mind continue and re
member our earlier ones.1
Berkeley applied the same sort of criticism
to the notion of bodily substance. 'When I
consider,' he says, 'the two parts ("being" in
general, and "supporting accidents") which
make the signification of the words "material
substance," I am convinced there is no distinct
meaning annexed to them. . . . Suppose an
intelligence without the help of external bodies
to be affected with the same train of sensations
that you are, imprinted in the same order, and
with like vividness in his mind. I ask whether
that intelligence hath not all the reason to be
lieve the existence of corporeal substances,
represented by his ideas, and exciting them in
his mind, that you can possibly have for be
lieving the same thing. '2 Certain grouped sensa
tions, in short, are all that corporeal sub-
1 Ibid., book ii, chap, xxvii, §§ 9-27.
2 Principles of Human Knowledge, part i, §5 17, 20.
THE ONE AND THE MANY
stances are known-as, therefore the only mean
ing which the word ' matter 9 can claim is that
it denotes such sensations and their groupings.
They are the only verifiable aspect of the word.
The reader will recognize that in these criti
cisms our own pragmatic rule is used. What
difference in practical experience is it supposed
to make that we have each a personal substan
tial principle? This difference, that we can re
member and appropriate our past, calling it
'mine.' What difference that in this book there
is a substantial principle? This, that certain
optical and tactile sensations cling permanently
together in a cluster. The fact that certain
perceptual experiences do seern to belong to
gether is thus all that the word substance means.
Hume carries the criticism to the last degree of
clearness. 'We have no idea of substance,' he
says, 'distinct from that of a collection of par
ticular qualities, nor have we any other mean
ing when we either talk or reason concerning it.
The idea of a substance . . . is nothing but a
collection of simple ideas that are united by
the imagination and have a particular name
123
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
assigned them by which we are able to recall
that collection.'1 Kant's treatment of sub
stance agrees with Hume's in denying all posi
tive content to the notion. It differs in insist
ing that, by attaching shifting percepts to the
permanent name, the category of substance
unites them necessarily together, and thus
makes nature intelligible.2 It is impossible to
.assent to this. The grouping of qualities be
comes no more intelligible when you call sub
stance a 'category' than when you call it a
bare word.
Let us now turn our backs upon ineffable
or unintelligible ways of accounting for the
Pragmatic world's oneness, and inquire whether,
analysis of
oneness instead of being a principle, the one
ness' affirmed may not merely be a name like
'substance,' descriptive of the fact that certain
specific and verifiable connections are found
among the parts of the experiential flux. This
1 Treatise on Human Nature, part 1, § 6.
2 Critique of Pure Reason : First Analogy of Experience. For further
criticism of the substance-concept see J. S. Mill: A System of Logic,
book i, chap, iii, §§ 6-9; B. P. Bowne: Metaphysics, part 1, chap. i.
Bowne uses the words being and substance as synonymous.
124
THE ONE AND THE MANY
brings us back to our pragmatic rule: Suppose
there is a oneness in things, what may it be
known-as? What differences to you and me
will it make?
Our question thus turns upside down, and
sets us on a much more promising inquiry. We
can easily conceive of things that shall have
no connection whatever with each other. We
may assume them to inhabit different times
and spaces, as the dreams of different persons
do even now. They may be so unlike and in
commensurable, and so inert towards one an
other, as never to jostle or interfere. Even now
there may actually be whole universes so dis
parate from ours that we who know ours have
no means of perceiving that they exist. We con
ceive their diversity, however; and by that fact
the whole lot of them form what is known in
logic as one 'universe of discourse.' To form
a universe of discourse argues, as this example
shows, no further kind of connection. The im
portance attached by certain monistic writers
to the fact that any chaos may become a uni
verse by being merely named, is to me incom-
125
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
prehensible. We must seek something better in
the way of oneness than this susceptibility of
being mentally considered together, and named
by a collective noun.
What connections may be perceived con
cretely or in point of fact, among the parts
of the collection abstractly designated as our
' world'?
There are innumerable modes of union
among its parts, some obtaining on a larger,
some on a smaller scale. Not all the parts of
our world are united mechanically, for some
can move without the others moving. They all
seem united by gravitation, however, so far as
Kinds of they are material things. Some again
oneness of ^hese are united chemically, while
others are not; and the like is true of thermic,
optical, electrical, and other physical connec
tions. These connections are specifications of
what we mean by the word oneness when we
apply it to our world. We should not call it one
unless its parts were connected in these and
other ways. But then it is clear that by the
same logic -we ought to call it 'many.' so far as
126
THE ONE AND THE MANY
its parts are disconnected in these same ways,
chemically inert towards one another or non
conductors to electricity, light and heat. In
all these modes of union, some parts of the
world prove to be conjoined with other parts,
so that if you choose your line of influence
and your items rightly, you may travel from
pole to pole without an interruption. If, how
ever, you choose them wrongly, you meet
with obstacles and non-conductors from the
outset, and cannot travel at all. There is
thus neither absolute oneness nor absolute
manyness from the physical point of view,
but a mixture of well-definable modes of
both. Moreover, neither the oneness nor the
manyness seems the more essential attribute,
they are co-ordinate features of the natural
world.
There are plenty of other practical differ
ences meant by calling a thing One. Our world,
being strung along in time and space, has tem
poral and spatial unity. But time and space
relate things by determinately sundering them,
so it is hard to say whether the world ought
127
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
more to be called ' one ' or ( many ' in this spatial
or temporal regard.
The like is true of the generic oneness which
comes from so many of the world's parts being
similar. When two things are similar you can
make inferences from the one which will hold
good of the other, so that this kind of union
among things, so far as it obtains, is inexpres
sibly precious from the logical point of view.
But an infinite heterogeneity among things
exists alongside of whatever likeness of kind
we discover; and our world appears no more
distinctly or essentially as a One than as a
Many, from this generic point of view.
We have touched on the noetic unity pre-
dicable of the world in consequence of our
being able to mean the whole of it at once.
Widely different from unification by an ab
stract designation, would be the concrete noetic
union wrought by an all-knower of perceptual
type who should be acquainted at one stroke
with every part of what exists. In such an ab
solute all-knower idealists believe. Kant, they
say, virtually replaced the notion of Substance,
128
THE ONE AND THE MANY
by the more intelligible notion of Subject. The
'I am conscious of it,' which on some witness's
part must accompany every possible experi
ence, means in the last resort, we are told, one
individual witness of the total frame of things,
world without end, amen. You may call his
undivided act of omniscience instantaneous or
eternal, whichever you like, for time is its ob
ject just as everything else is, and itself is not
in time.
We shall find reasons later for treating noetic
monism as an unverified hypothesis. Over
Unity by against it there stands the noetic
concate
nation pluralism which we verify every
moment when we seek information from our
friends. According to this, everything in the
world might be known by somebody, yet not
everything by the same knower, or in one single
cognitive act, — much as all mankind is knit
in one network of acquaintance, A knowing B,
B knowing C, - - Y knowing Z, and Z possibly
knowing A again, without the possibility of
anyone knowing everybody at once. This
* concatenated' knowing, going from next to
129
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
next, is altogether different from the c consoli
dated ' knowing supposed to be exercised by
the absolute mind. It makes a coherent type
of universe in which the widest knower that
exists may yet remain ignorant of much that
is known to others.
There are other systems of concatenation
besides the noetic concatenation. We ourselves
are constantly adding to the connections of
things, organizing labor-unions, establishing
postal, consular, mercantile, railroad, tele
graph, colonial, and other systems that bind
us and things together in ever wider reticula
tions. Some of these systems involve others,
some do not. You cannot have a telephone
system without air and copper connections,
but you can have air and copper connections
without telephones. You cannot have love
without acquaintance, but you can have ac
quaintance without love, etc. The same thing,
moreover, can belong to many systems, as
when a man is connected with other objects by
heat, by gravitation, by love, and by know
ledge.
130
THE ONE AND THE MANY
From the point of view of these partial sys
tems, the world hangs together from next to
next in a variety of ways, so that when you
are off of one thing you can always be on to
something else, without ever dropping out of
your world. Gravitation is the only positively
known sort of connection among things that
reminds us of the consolidated or monistic
form of union. If a 'mass' should change any
where, the mutual gravitation of all things
would instantaneously alter.
Teleological and aesthetic unions are other
forms of systematic union. The world is full
Unity of of partial purposes, of partial stories.
purpose,
meaning That they all form chapters of one
supreme purpose and inclusive story is the
monistic conjecture. They seem, meanwhile,
simply to run alongside of each other — either
irrelevantly, or, where they interfere, leading
to mutual frustrations, — so the appearance
of things is invincibly pluralistic from this
purposive point of view.
It is a common belief that all particular be
ings have one origin and source, either in God,
131
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
or in atoms all equally old. There is no
real novelty, it is believed, in the universe,
Unity of the new things that appear having
either been eternally prefigured in
the absolute, or being results of the same pri-
mordia rerum, atoms, or monads, getting into
new mixtures. But the question of being is so
obscure anyhow, that whether realities have
burst into existence all at once, by a single
'bang,' as it were; or whether they came piece
meal, and have different ages (so that real
novelties may be leaking into our universe all
the time), may here be left an open question,
though it is undoubtedly intellectually eco
nomical to suppose that all things are equally
old, and that no novelties leak in.
These results are what the Oneness of the
Universe is known-as. They are the oneness,
Summary pragmatically considered. A world
coherent in any of these ways would be no
chaos, but a* universe of such or such a
grade. (The grades might differ, however. The
parts, e. g., might have space-relations, but
nothing more; or they might also gravitate; or
132
THE ONE AND THE MANY
exchange heat; or know, or love one another,
etc.)
Such is the cash-value of the world's unity,
empirically realized. Its total unity is the sum
of all the partial unities. It consists of them
and follows upon them. Such an idea, however,,
outrages rationalistic minds, which habitually
despise all this practical small-change. Such
minds insist on a deeper, more through-and-
through union of all things in the absolute,
'each in all and all in each,' as the prior con
dition of these empirically ascertained connec
tions. But this may be only a case of the usual
worship of abstractions, like calling 'bad
weather' the cause of to-day's rain, etc., or
accounting for a man's features by his 'face,'
when really the rain is the bad weather, is
what you mean by 'bad weather,' just as the
features are what you mean by the face.
To sum up, the world is 'one' in some re
spects, and 'many' in others. But the respects
must be distinctly specified, if either statement
is to be more than the emptiest abstraction.
Once we are committed to this soberer view,
133
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
the question of the One or the Many may well
cease to appear important. The amount either
of unity or of plurality is in short only a matter
for observation to ascertain and write down,
in statements which will have to be compli
cated, in spite of every effort to be concise.
CHAPTER VIII1
THE ONE AND THE MANY (continued) —
VALUES AND DEFECTS
might dismiss the subject with the pre
ceding chapter2 were it not for the fact that
further consequences follow from the rival
hypotheses, and make of the alternative of
monism or pluralism what I called it on page
114, the most 'pregnant' of all the dilemmas
of metaphysics.
To begin with, the attribute 'one5 seems
for many persons to confer a value, an ineffable
The illustriousness and dignity upon the
monistic
theory world, with which the conception of
it as an irreducible 'many' is believed to clash.
Secondly, a through - and - through noetic
connection of everything with absolutely ev
erything else is in some quarters held to be
indispensable to the world's rationality. Only
then might we believe that all things really do
1 [This chapter was not indicated as a separate chapter in the manu
script. ED.]
2 For an amplification of what precedes, the lecture on 'The One
and the Many ' in W. James: Pragmatism (1907), may be referred to.
135
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
belong together, instead of being connected by
the bare conjunctions 'with' or 'and.' The
notion that this latter pluralistic arrangement
may obtain is deemed 'irrational'; and of
course it does make the world partly alogical
or non-rational from a purely intellectual point
of view.
Monism thus holds the oneness to be the
more vital and essential element. The entire
The value cosmos must be a consolidated unit,
hite cme- within which each member is deter-
ness mined by the whole to be just that,
and from which the slightest incipiency of in
dependence anywhere is ruled out. With Spin
oza, monism likes to believe that all things
follow from the essence of God as necessarily
as from the nature of a triangle it follows that
the angles are equal to two right angles. The
whole is what yields the parts, not the parts the
whole. The universe is tight, monism claims,
not loose; and you must take the irreducible
whole of it just as it is offered, or have no
part or lot in it at all. The only alternative
allowed by monistic writers is to confess the
136
THE ONE AND THE MANY
world's non-rationality — and no philosopher
can permit himself to do that. The form of
monism regnant at the present day in phi
losophic circles is absolute idealism. For this
way of thinking, the world exists no otherwise
than as the object of one infinitely knowing
mind. The analogy that suggests the hypothe
sis here is that of our own finite fields of con
sciousness, which at every moment envisage
a much-at-once composed of parts related va
riously, and in which both the conjunctions
and the disjunctions that appear are there only
in so far as we are there as their witnesses, so
that they are both 'noetically' and monisti-
cally based.
We may well admit the sublimity of this
noetic monism and of its vague vision of an
underlying connection among all phenomena
without exception.1 It shows itself also able to
confer religious stability and peace, and it in
vokes the authority of mysticism in its favor.
Yet, on the other hand, like many another con-
1 In its essential features, Spinoza was its first prophet, Fichte and
Hegel were its middle exponents, and Josiah Royce is its best contem
porary representative.
137
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
cept unconditionally carried out, it introduces
its defects Jnto philosophy puzzles peculiar to
itself, as follows : —
1. It does not account for our finite con
sciousness. If nothing exists but as the Abso
lute Mind knows it, how can anything exist
otherwise than as that Mind knows it? That
Mind knows each thing in one act of know
ledge, along with every other thing. Finite
minds knowT things without other things, and
this ignorance is the source of most of their
wroes. We are thus not simply objects to an all-
knowing subject: we are subjects on our own
account and know differently from its knowing.
2. It creates a problem of evil. Evil, for plu
ralism, presents only the practical problem of
how to get rid of it. For monism the puzzle is
theoretical: How — if Perfection be the source,
should there be Imperfection? If the world
as known to the Absolute be perfect, why
should it be known otherwise, in myriads of
inferior finite editions also? The perfect edi
tion surely was enough. How do the breakage
and dispersion and ignorance get in?
138
THE ONE AND THE MANY
***
3. It contradicts the character of reality as
perceptually experienced. Of our world, change
seems an essential ingredient. There is history.
There are novelties, struggles, losses, gains.
But the world of the Absolute is represented
as unchanging, eternal, or 'out of time,' and is
foreign to our powers either of apprehension
or of appreciation. Monism usually treats the
sense-world as a mirage or illusion.
4. It is fatalistic. Possibility, as distin
guished from necessity on the one hand and
from impossibility on the other, is an essential
category of human thinking. For monism, it is
a pure illusion; for whatever is is necessary,
and aught else is impossible, if the world be
such a unit of fact as monists pretend.
Our sense of 'freedom' supposes that some
things at least are decided here and now, that
the passing moment may contain some nov
elty, be an original starting-point of events,
and not merely transmit a push from elsewhere.
We imagine that in some respects at least the
future may not be co-implicated with the past,
but may be really addable to it, and indeed
139
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
addable in one shape or another, so that the
next turn in events can at any given moment
genuinely be ambiguous, i. e., possibly this,
but also possibly that.
Monism rules out this whole conception of
possibles, so native to our common-sense. The
future and the past are linked, she is obliged
to say; there can be no genuine novelty any
where, for to suppose that the universe has a
constitution simply additive, with nothing to
link things together save what the words
'plus,' 'with/ or 'and' stand for, is repugnant
to our reason.
Pluralism, on the other hand, taking per
ceptual experience at its face-value, is free from
all these difficulties. It protests against work
ing our ideas in a vacuum made of conceptual
abstractions. Some parts of our world, it ad
mits, cannot exist out of their wholes; but
The piu- others, it says, can. To some extent
ralistic
theory the world seems genuinely additive:
it may really be so. We cannot explain con
ceptually how genuine novelties can come; but
if one did come we could experience that it came.
140
THE ONE AND THE MANY
i
We do, in fact, experience perceptual novelties
all the while. Our perceptual experience over
laps our conceptual reason : the that transcends
the why. So the common-sense view of life, as
something really dramatic, with work done,
and things decided here and now, is acceptable
to pluralism. 'Free will' means nothing but
real novelty; so pluralism accepts the notion
of free will.
But pluralism, accepting a universe unfin
ished, with doors and windows open to possi
bilities uncontrollable in advance, gives us less
religious certainty than monism, with its abso
lutely closed-in world. It is true that monism's
religious certainty is not rationally based, but
is only a faith that 'sees the All-Good in the
All-Real.' In point of fact, however, monism
is usually willing to exert this optimistic faith :
its world is certain to be saved, yes, is saved
already, unconditionally and from eternity,
in spite of all the phenomenal appearances of
risk.1
1 For an eloquent expression of the monistic position, from the re
ligious point of view, read J. Royce: The World and the Individual, vol.
ii, lectures 8, 9, 10.
141
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
A world working out an uncertain destiny,
its de- as the phenomenal world appears
to be doing, is an intolerable idea
to the rationalistic mind.
Pluralism, on the other hand, is neither
optimistic nor pessimistic, but melioristic,
rather. The world, it thinks, may be saved,
on condition that its parts shall do their best.
But shipwreck in detail, or even on the whole,
is among the open possibilities.
There is thus a practical lack of balance
about pluralism, which contrasts with mon
ism's peace of mind. The one is a more moral,
the other a more religious view; and different
men usually let this sort of consideration deter
mine their belief.1
So far I have sought only to show the respect
ive implications of the rival doctrines without
Its ad- dogmatically deciding which is the
vantages more true. It is obvious that plural
ism has three great advantages: —
1. It is more * scientific,' in that it insists
1 See, as to this religious difference, the closing lecture in W. James's
Pragmatism.
142
THE ONE AND THE MANY
that when oneness is predicated, it shall mean
definitely ascertainable conjunctive forms.
With these the disjunctions ascertainable
among things are exactly on a par. The two
are co-ordinate aspects of reality. To make
the conjunctions more vital and primordial
than the separations, monism has to abandon
verifiable experience and proclaim a unity that
is indescribable.
2. It agrees more with the moral and dra
matic expressiveness of life.
3. It is not obliged to stand for any particu
lar amount of plurality, for it triumphs over
monism if the smallest morsel of disconnected
ness is once found undeniably to exist. 'Ever
not quite' is all it says to monism; while mon
ism is obliged to prove that what pluralism
asserts can in no amount whatever possibly be
true — an infinitely harder task.
The advantages of monism, in turn, are its
natural affinity with a certain kind of reli
gious faith, and the peculiar emotional value
of the conception that the world is a unitary
fact.
143
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
So far has our use of the pragmatic rule
brought us towards understanding this di
lemma. The reader will by this time feel for
himself the essential practical difference which
it involves. The word 'absence' seems to in
dicate it. The monistic principle implies that
nothing that is can in any way whatever be
absent from anything else that is. The plural
istic principle, on the other hand, is quite com
patible with some things being absent from
operations in which other things find them
selves singly or collectively engaged. Which
things are absent from which other things, and
when, -- these of course are questions which a
pluralistic philosophy can settle only by an
exact study of details. The past, the present,
and the future in perception, for example, are
absent from one another, while in imagination
they are present or absent as the case may be.
If the time-content of the world be not one
monistic block of being, if some part, at least,
of the future, is added to the past without be
ing virtually one therewith, or implicitly con
tained therein, then it is absent really as well
144
THE ONE AND THE MANY
as phenomenally and may be called an abso
lute novelty in the world's history in so far
forth.
Towards this issue, of the reality or unreal
ity of the novelty that appears, the pragmatic
Monism, difference between monism and plu-
and nov™' ra^sm seems to converge. That we
elty ourselves may be authors of genuine
novelty is the thesis of the doctrine of free-will.
That genuine novelties can occur means that
from the point of view of what is already given,
what comes may have to be treated as a matter
of chance. We are led thus to ask the question:
In what manner does new being come? Is it
through and through the consequence of older
being or is it matter of chance so far as older
being goes? — which is the same thing as
asking: Is it original, in the strict sense of
the word?
We connect again here with what was said
at the end of Chapter III. We there agreed
that being is a datum or gift and has to be
begged by the philosopher; but we left the
question open as to whether he must beg it all
145
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
at once or beg it bit by bit or in instalments.
The latter is the more consistently empiricist
view, and I shall begin to defend it in the chap
ter that follows.
CHAPTER IX
THE PROBLEM OF NOVELTY
THE impotence to explain being which we
have attributed to all philosophers is, it will
be recollected, a conceptual impotence. It is
when thinking abstractly of the whole of being
at once, as it confronts us ready-made, that
we feel our powerlessness so acutely. Possibly,
if we followed the empiricist method, consider
ing the parts rather than the whole, and im
agining ourselves inside of them perceptually,
the subject might defy us less provokingly.
We are thus brought back to the problem with
which Chapter VII left off. When perceptible
amounts of new phenomenal being come to
birth, must we hold them to be in all points
predetermined and necessary outgrowths of
the being already there, or shall we rather
admit the possibility that originality may thus
instil itself into reality?
If we take concrete perceptual experience,
the question can be answered in only one way.
'The same returns not, save to bring the dif-
147
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
ferent.' Time keeps budding into new mo
ments, every one of which presents a content
Percept- which in its individuality never was
ual nov
elty before and will never be again. Of
no concrete bit of experience was an exact du
plicate ever framed. 'My youth/ writes Del-
boeuf, 'has it not taken flight, carrying away
with it love, illusion, poetry, and freedom from
care, and leaving with me instead science, aus
tere always, often sad and morose, which some
times I would willingly forget, which repeats to
me hour by hour its grave lessons, or chills me
by its threats? Will time, which untiringly piles
deaths on births, and births on deaths, ever re
make an Aristotle or an Archimedes, a Newton
or a Descartes ? Can our earth ever cover itself
again with those gigantic ferns, those immense
equisetaceans, in the midst of which the same
antediluvian monsters will crawl and wallow
as they did of yore? . . . No, what has been
will not, cannot, be again. Time moves on
with an unfaltering tread, and never strikes
twice an identical hour. The instants of which
the existence of the world is composed are all
148
THE PROBLEM OF NOVELTY
dissimilar, — and whatever may be done, some
thing remains that can never be reversed.'1
The everlasting coming of concrete novelty
into being is so obvious that the rationalizing
intellect, bent ever on explaining what is by
what was, and having no logical principle but
identity to explain by, treats the perceptual
flux as a phenomenal illusion, resulting from the
unceasing re-combination in new forms of mix
ture, of unalterable elements, coeval with the
Science world. These elements are supposed
and
novelty to be the only real beings; and, for
the intellect once grasped by the vision of them,
there can be nothing genuinely new under the
sun. The world's history, according to molecu
lar science, signifies only the 'redistribution'
of the unchanged atoms of the primal firemist,
parting and meeting so as to appear to us spec
tators in the infinitely diversified configura
tions which we name as processes and things.2
' J J. Delbceuf: Revue Philosophique, vol. ix, p. 138 (1880). On the
infinite variety of reality, compare also W. T. Marvin: An Introduction
to Systematic Philosophy, New York, 1903, pp. 22-30.
2 The Atomistic philosophy, which has proved so potent a scientific
instrument of explanation, was first formulated by Democritus, who
149
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
So far as physical nature goes few of us ex
perience any temptation to postulate real
novelty. The notion of eternal elements and
their mixture serves us in so many ways, that
we adopt unhesitatingly the theory that pri
mordial being is inalterable in its attributes as
well as in its quantity, and that the laws by
which we describe its habits are uniform in the
strictest mathematical sense. These are the
absolute conceptual foundations, we think,
died 370 B. c. His life overlapped that of Aristotle, who took what on
the whole may be called a biological view of the world, and for whom
'forms ' were as real as elements. The conflict of the two modes of ex
planation has lasted to our day, for some chemists still defend the
Aristotelian tradition which the authority of Descartes had inter
rupted for so long, and deny our right to say that ' water ' is not a
simple entity, or that oxygen and hydrogen atoms persist in it un
changed. Compare W. Ostwald: Die Ueberwindung des wissenschaft-
lichen Materialismus (1893), p. 12: 'The atomistic view assumes that
when in iron-oxide, for example, all the sensible properties both of
iron and oxygen have vanished, iron and oxygen are nevertheless
there but now manifest other properties. We are so used to this as
sumption that it is hard for us to feel its oddity, nay, even its ab
surdity. When, however, we reflect that all we know of a given kind
of matter is its properties, we realize that the assertion that the matter
is still there, but without any of those properties, is not far removed
from nonsense.' Compare the same author's Principles of Inorganic
Chemistry, English translation, 2d ed. (1904), p. 149 f. Also P.
Duhem: 'La Notion de Mixte,' in the Revue de Philosophic, vol. i, p.
452 ff. (1901). —The whole notion of the eternal fixity of elements
is melting away before the new discoveries about radiant matter. See
for radical statements G. Le Bon: L' Evolution de la Matiere.
150
THE PROBLEM OF NOVELTY
\
spread beneath the surface of perceptual vari
ety. It is when we come to human lives, that
Personal our point of view changes. It is hard
experience • • ,1 n ?
an^ to imagine that really our own
novelty subjective experiences are only mo
lecular arrangements, even though the mole
cules be conceived as beings of a psychic kind.
A material fact may indeed be different from
what we feel it to be, but what sense is there in
saying that a feeling, which has no other na
ture than to be felt, is not as it is felt? Psycho
logically considered, our experiences resist con
ceptual reduction, and our fields of conscious
ness, taken simply as such, remain just what
they appear, even though facts of a molecular
order should prove to be the signals of the
appearance. Biography is the concrete form
in which all that is is immediately given; the
perceptual flux is the authentic stuff of each of
our biographies, and yields a perfect efferves
cence of novelty all the time. New men and
women, books, accidents, events, inventions,
enterprises, burst unceasingly upon the world.
It is vain to resolve these into ancient ele-
151
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
fr-a
ments, or to say that they belong to ancient
kinds, so long as no one of them in its full indi
viduality ever was here before or will ever come
again. Men of science and philosophy, the
moment they forget their theoretic abstrac
tions, live in their biographies as much as any
one else, and believe as naively that fact even
now is making, and that they themselves, by
doing c original work,' help to determine what
the future shall become.
I have already compared the live or percept
ual order with the conceptual order from this
point of view. Conception knows no way of
explaining save by deducing the identical from
the identical, so if the world is to be concept
ually rationalized no novelty can really come.
This is one of the traits in that general bank
ruptcy of conceptualism, which I enumerated
in Chapter V — conceptualism can name
change and growth, but can translate them
into no terms of its own, and is forced to con
tradict the indestructible sense of life within
us by denying that reality grows.
It may seem to the youthful student a rather
THE PROBLEM OF NOVELTY
'far cry' from the question of the possibility
of novelty to the 'problem of the infinite,' but
in the history of speculation, the two problems
have been connected. Novelty seems to vio
late continuity; continuity seems to involve
Novelty 'infinitely' shaded gradation; infin-
and the
infinite ity connects with number; and num
ber with fact in general — for facts have to
be numbered. It has thus come to pass that
the nonexistence of an infinite number has
been held to necessitate the finite character
of the constitution of fact ; and along with this
its discontinuous genesis, or, in other words,
its coming into being by discrete increments
of novelty however small.
Thus we find the problem of the infinite
already lying across our path. It will be better
at this point to interrupt our discussion of the
more enveloping question of novelty at large,
and to get the minor problem out of our way
first. I turn then to the problem of the infinite.
CHAPTER X
NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE — THE
CONCEPTUAL VIEW1
THE problem is as to which is the more rational
supposition, that of continuous or that of dis
continuous additions to whatever amount or
kind of reality already exists.
On the discontinuity-theory, time, change,
etc., would grow by finite buds or drops, either
nothing coming at all, or certain units of
Thedis- amount bursting into being 'at a
continuity-
theory stroke.' Every feature of the uni
verse would on this view have a finite numer
ical constitution. Just as atoms, not half- or
quarter-atoms are the minimum of matter that
can be, and every finite amount of matter con
tains a finite number of atoms, so any amounts
of time, space, change, etc., which we might
assume would be composed of a finite number
of minimal amounts of time, space, and change.
I Such a discrete composition is what actually
1 [In the author's manuscript this chapter and the succeeding chap
ters were labelled 'sub-problems,' and this chapter was entitled 'The
Continuum and the Infinite.' ED.]
154
NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE
obtains in our perceptual experience. We
either perceive nothing, or something already
there in sensible amount. This fact is what
in psychology is known as the law of the
'threshold.' Either your experience is of no
content, of no change, or it is of a perceptible
amount of content or change. Your acquaint
ance with reality grows literally by buds or
drops of perception. Intellectually and on re
flection you can divide these into components,
but as immediately given, they come totally
or not at all.
If, however, we take time and space as con
cepts, not as perceptual data, we don't well
see how they can have this atomistic constitu
tion. For if the drops or atoms are themselves
without duration or extension it is inconceiv
able that by adding any number of them to-
The con- gether times or spaces should accrue.
tinuity
theory If, on the other hand, they are mi
nute durations or extensions, it is impossible
to treat them as real minima. Each temporal
drop must have a later and an earlier half, each
spatial unit a right and a left half, and these
155
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
halves must themselves, have halves, and so on
ad infinitum, so that with the notion that the
constitution of things is continuous and not
discrete, that of a divisibility ad infinitum is
inseparably bound up. This infinite divisibil
ity of some facts, coupled with the infinite
.expansibility of others (space, time, and num
ber) has given rise to one of the most obstinate
,of philosophy's dialectic problems. Let me
take up, in as simple a way as I am able to, the
problem of the infinite.
There is a pseudo-problem, 'How can the
finite know the infinite?' which has troubled
some English heads.1 But one might as well
make a problem of ' How can the fat know the
lean?' When we come to treat of knowledge,
such problems will vanish. The real problem
of the infinite began with the famous argu
ments against motion, of Zeno the Eleatic.
The school of Pythagoras was pluralistic.
'Things are numbers/ the master had said,
meaning apparently that reality was made of
1 In H. Calderwood's Philosophy of the Infinite one will find the
subordinate difficulties discussed, with almost no consciousness shown
of the important ones.
156
NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE
points which one might number.1 Zeno's argu
ments were meant to show, not that motion
could not really take place, but that it could
not truly be conceived as taking place by the
successive occupancy of points. If a flying
Zeno's arrow occupies at each point of time
paradoxes a determinate point of space, its
motion becomes nothing but a sum of rests, for
it exists not, out of any point ; and in the point
it does n't move. Motion cannot truly occur
as thus discretely constituted.
Still better known than the 'arrow' is the
* Achilles' paradox. Suppose Achilles to race
with a tortoise, and to move twice as fast as
his rival, to whom he gives an inch of head-
start. By the time he has completed that inch,
or in other words advanced to the tortoise's
starting point, the tortoise is half an inch
ahead of him. While Achilles is traversing
that half inch, the tortoise is traversing a
quarter of an inch, etc. So that the successive
points occupied by the runners simultane-
1 I follow here J. Burnet: Early Greek Philosophers (the chapter on
the Pythagoreans), and Paul Tannery: 'Le concept scientifique du
continu ' in the Revue Philosophique, xx, 385.
157
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
ously form a convergent series of distances
from the starting point of Achilles. Measured
in inches, these distances would run as follows:
l + J+i + i+iV • • • • +5 • • • • «
Zeno now assumes that space must be infinitely
divisible. But if so, then the number of points
to be occupied cannot all be enumerated in
succession, for the series begun above is inter
minable. Each time that Achilles gets to the
tortoise's last point it is but to find that the
tortoise has already moved to a further point;
and although the interval between the points
quickly grows infinitesimal, it is mathematic
ally impossible that the two racers should
reach any one point at the same moment. If
Achilles could overtake the tortoise, it would
be at the end of two inches; and if his speed
were two inches a second, it would be at the
end of the first second;1 but the argument
shows that he simply cannot overtake the ani
mal. To do so would oblige him to exhaust,
1 This shows how shallow is that common ' exposure ' of Zeno's
'sophism,' which charges it with trying to prove that to overtake the
tortoise, Achilles would require an infinitely long time.
158
NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE
• -M
by traversing one by one, the whole of them,
a series of points which the law of their forma
tion obliges to come never to an end.
Zeno's various arguments were meant to
establish the 'Eleatic' doctrine of real being,
which was monistic. The 'minima sensibilia'
of which space, time, motion^ and change con
sist for our perception are not real 'beings,'
for they subdivide themselves ad infinitum.
The nature of real being is to be entire or con
tinuous. Our perception, being of a hopeless
'many,' thus is false.
Our own mathematicians have meanwhile
constructed what they regard as an adequate
continuum, composed of points or numbers.
When I speak again of that I shall have occa
sion to return to the Achilles-fallacy, so called.
At present I will pass without transition to the
next great historic attack upon the problem
of the infinite, which is the section on the 'An
tinomies' in Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason.'
Kant's views need a few points of prepara
tion, as follows:' —
1. That real or objective existence must be
159
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
determinate existence may be regarded as an
axiom in ontology. We may be dim as to just
Kant's now many stars we see in the Pleiades,
antino
mies or doubtful whose count to believe
regarding them; but seeing and belief are
subjective affections, and the stars by them
selves, we are sure, exist in definite numbers.
'Even the hairs of our head are numbered,' we
feel certain, though no man shall ever count
them.1 Any existent reality, taken in itself,
must therefore be countable, and to any group
of such realities some definite number must be
applicable.
2. Kant defines infinity as 'that which can
never be completely measured by the succes
sive addition of units ' — in other words, as
that which defies complete enumeration.
3. Kant lays it down as axiomatic that if
anything is 'given,' as an existent reality, the
whole sum of the 'conditions' required to ac
count for it must similarly be given, or have
been given. Thus if a cubic yard of space be
1 Of the origin in our experience of this singularly solid postulate, I
will say nothing here.
160
'NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE
'given,' all its parts must equally be given. If
a certain date in past time be real, then the
previous dates must also have been real. If an
effect be given, the whole series of its causes
must have been given, etc., etc.
But the 'conditions' in these cases defy
enumeration: the parts of space are less and
less ad infinitum, times and causes form series
that are infinitely regressive for our counting,
and of no such infinite series can a 'whole' be
formed. Any such series has a variable value,
for the number of its terms is indefinite; where
as the conditions under consideration ought,
if the 'whole sum of them' be really given, to
exist (by the principle, 1, above) in fixed numer
ical amount.1
1 The contradiction between the infinity in the form of the condi
tions, and the numerical determinateness implied in the fact of them,
was ascribed by Kant to the ' antinomic ' form of our experience. His
solution of the puzzle was by the way of 'idealism,' and is one of the
prettiest strokes in his philosophy. Since the conditions cannot exist
in the shape of a totalized amount, it must be, he says, that they do
not exist independently or an sich, but only as phenomena, or for us.
Indefiniteness of amount is not incompatible with merely phenomenal
existence. Actual phenomena, whether conditioned or conditioning,
are there for us only in finite amount, as given to perception at any
given moment; and the infinite form of them means only that we can
go on perceiving, conceiving or imagining more and more about them,
161
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
Such was the form of the puzzle of the in
finite, as Kant propounded it. The reader will
observe a bad ambiguity in the statement.
When he speaks of the * absolute totality of the
synthesis ' of the conditions, the words suggest
that a completed collection of them must exist
or have existed. When we hear that 'the whole
sum of them must be given,' we interpret it to
mean that they must be given in the form of a
whole sum, whereas all that the logical situa
tion requires is that no one of them should be
lacking, an entirely different demand, and one
that can be gratified as well in an infinitely
growing as in a terminated series. The same
Ambigu- things can always be taken either
Kant's collectively or distributively, can be
±alked of either as 'all'? or as 'eacn>'
problem or as "any.* Either statement can be
applied equally well to what exists in finite
world without end. It does not mean that what we go on thus to re
present shall have been there already by itself, apart from our acts of
representation. Experience, for idealism, thus falls into two parts, a
phenomenal given part which is finite, and a conditioning infinite part
which is not given, but only possible to experience hereafter. Kant
distinguishes this second part, as only aufgegeben (or set to us as a
task)., from .the first part as gegeben (or already extant).
162
NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE
number; and 'all that is there' will be covered
both times. But things which appear under
the form of endless series can be talked of only
distributively, if we wish to leave none of them
out. When we say that ' any/ ' each,' or ' every '
one of Kant's conditions must be fulfilled, we
are therefore on impeccable ground, even
though the conditions should form a series as
endless as that of the whole numbers, to which
we are forever able to add one. But if we say
that 'all' must be fulfilled, and imagine 'all'
to signify a sum harvested and gathered-in,
and represented by a number, we not only
make a requirement utterly uncalled for by the
logic of the situation, but we create puzzles and
incomprehensibilities that otherwise would not
exist, and that may require, to get rid of them
again, hypotheses as violent as Kant's ideal-
ism.
In the works of Charles Renouvier, the
strongest philosopher of France during the
second half of the nineteenth century, the
problem of the infinite again played a pivotal
part. Starting from the principle of the nu~
163
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
4
merical determinateness of reality (supra, page
160) --the 'principe du nombre,9 as he called
it — and recognizing that the series of num
bers 1, 2, 3, 4, ... etc., leads to no final 'in
finite' number, he concluded that such reali-
Renou- ties as present beings, past events
vier's
solution and causes, steps of change and parts
of matter, must needs exist in limited amount.
This made of him a radical pluralist. Better,
he said, admit that being gives itself to us ab
ruptly, that there are first beginnings, abso
lute numbers, and definite cessations, however
intellectually opaque to us they may seem to
be, than try to rationalize all this arbitrariness
of fact by working-in explanatory conditions
which would involve in every case the self-
contradiction of things being paid-in and com
pleted, although they are infinite in formal
composition.
With these principles, Renouvier could be
lieve in absolute novelties, unmeditated be-
His solu- ginnings, gifts, chance, freedom, and
tion favors
novelty acts of faith. Fact, for him, over
lapped; conceptual explanation fell short; real-
164
NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE
ity must in the end be begged piecemeal, not
everlastingly deduced from other reality. This,
the empiricist, as distinguished from the ra
tionalist view, is the hypothesis set forth at the
end of our last chapter.1
1 I think that Renouvier made mistakes, and I find his whole philo
sophic manner and apparatus too scholastic. But he was one of the
greatest of philosophic characters, and but for the decisive impression'
made on me in the seventies by his masterly advocacy of pluralism; I
might never have got free from the monistic superstition under which.
I had grown up. The present volume, in short, might never have been,
written. This is why, feeling endlessly thankful as I do, I dedicate this
text-book to the great Renouvier's memory. Renouvier's works make
a very long list. The fundamental one is the Essais de Critique Generate
(first edition, 1854-1864, is in four, second edition, 1875, in six vol
umes). Of his latest opinions Le Personnalisme (1903) gives perhaps
the most manageable account; while the last chapter of his Esquisse
(Tune Classification des Sysiemes (entitled 'Comment je suis arrive a
ces conclusions') is an autobiographic sketch of his dealings with the
problem of the infinite. Derniers entretiens, dictated while dying, at
the age of eighty-eight, is a most impressive document, coming as if;
from a man out of Plutarch.
CHAPTER XI
NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE — THE
PERCEPTUAL VIEW
KANT'S and Renouvier's dealings with the in
finite are fine examples of the way in which
philosophers have always been wont to infer
matters of fact from conceptual considerations.
Real novelty would be a matter of fact; and so
would be the idealistic constitution of experi
ence;2 but Kant and Renouvier deduce these
facts from the purely logical impossibility of
an infinite number of conditions getting com
pleted. It seems a very short cut to truth; but
if the logic holds firm, it may be a fair cut,3
and the possibility obliges us to scrutinize the
situation with increasing care. Proceeding so
1 [This chapter was not indicated as a separate chapter in the manu
script. ED.]
2 For an account of idealism the reader is referred to chapter below.
[Never written. ED.]
3 Let me now say that we shall ourselves conclude that change
completed by steps infinite in number is inadmissible. This is hardly
inferring fact from conceptual considerations, it is only concluding that
a certain conceptual hypothesis regarding the fact of change will not
work satisfactorily. The field is thus open for any other hypothesis;
and the one which we shall adopt is simply that which the face of per
ceptual experience suggests.
166
NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE
to do, we immediately find that in the class of
infinitely conditioned things, we must distin
guish two sub-classes, as follows : —
1. Things conceived as standing, like space,
past time, existing beings.
2. Things conceived as growing, like motion,
change, activity.
In the standing class there seems to be no
valid objection to admitting both real exist-
The stand- ence, and a numerical copiousness de
finite manding infinity for its description.
If, for instance, we consider the stars, and
assume the number of them to be infinite, we
need only suppose that to each several term of
the endless series 1, 2, 3, 4, . . . n . . . , there cor
responds one star. The numbers, growing end
lessly, would then never exceed the stars stand
ing there to receive them. Each number would
find its own star waiting from eternity to be
numbered; and this in infinitum, some star
that ever was, matching each number that shall
be used. As there is no 'all' to the numbers so
there need be none to the stars. One cannot
well see how the existence of each star should
167
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
j
oblige the whole class 'star' to be of one num
ber rather than of another, or require it to be
of any terminated number. What I say here
of stars applies to the component parts of
space and matter, and to those of past time.1
So long as we keep taking such facts piece
meal, and talk of them distributively as 'any'
itsprag- or 'each/ the existence of them in
matic
definition infinite form offers no logical diffi
culty. But there is a psychological tendency to
slip from the distributive to the collective way
of talking, and this produces a sort of mental
flicker and dazzle out of which the dialectic
difficulties emerge. 'If each condition be there,'
— we say, 'then all are there, for there cannot
1 Past time may offer difficulty to the student as it has to better
men! It has terminated in the present moment, paid itself out and
made an 'amount.' But this amount can be counted in both directions;
and in both, one may think it ought to give the same result. If, when
counted forward, it came to an end in the present, then when counted
backward, it must, we are told, come to a like end in the past. It must
have had a beginning, therefore, and its amount must be finite. The
sophism here is gross, and amounts to saying that wrhat has one bound
must have two. The ' end ' of the forward counting is the ' beginning '
of the backward counting, and is the only beginning logically implied.
The ending of a series in no way prejudices the question whether it
were beginningless or not; and this applies as well to tracts of time as
to the abstract regression which ' negative ' numbers form.
168
NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE
be caches that do not make an all/ Rightly
taken, the phrase 'all are there/ means only
that 'not one is absent/ But in the mouths of
most people, it surreptitiously foists in the
wholly irrelevant notion of a bounded total.
There are other similar confusions. 'How/
it may be asked, in Locke's words, can a
'growing measure' fail to overtake a 'standing
bulk ' ? And standing existence must some time
be overtaken by a growing number-series,
must be finished or finite in its numerical
determination. But this again foists in the
notion of a bound. What is given as 'standing'
in the cases under review is not a 'bulk/ but
each star, atom, past date or what not; and to
call these caches a 'bulk/ is to beg the very
point at issue. But probably the real reason
why we object to a standing infinity is the
reason that made Hegel speak of it as the
'false' infinite. It is that the vertiginous chase
after ever more space, ever more past time,
ever more subdivision, seems endlessly stupid.
What need is there, what use is there, for so
much? Not that any amount of anything is
169
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
absolutely too big to be; but that some amounts
are too big for our imagination to wish to ca
ress them. So we fall back with a feeling of
relief on some form or other of the finitist hy
pothesis.1
If now we turn from static to growing forms
of being, we find ourselves confronted by much
more serious difficulties. Zeno's and Kant's
dialectic holds good wherever, before an end
The grow- can be reached, a succession of terms,
ing in
finite endless by definition, must needs have
been successively counted out. This is the
case with every process of change, however
small; with every event which we conceive as
unrolling itself continuously. What is contin
uous must be divisible ad infinitum ; and from
division to division here you cannot proceed
by addition (or by what Kant calls the succes-
1 The reader will note how emphatically in all this discussion, I am
insisting on the distributive or piecemeal point of view. The distrib
utive is identical with the pluralistic, as the collective is with the
monistic conception. We shall, I think, perceive more and more clearly
as this book proceeds, that 'piecemeal existence is independent of complete
collectibility, and that some facts, at any rate, exist only distributively,
or in form of a set of caches which (even if in infinite number) need not
in any intelligible sense either experience themselves, or get experi
enced by anything else, as members of an All.
170
NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE
sive synthesis of units) and touch a farther
limit. You can indeed define what the limit
ought to be, but you cannot reach it by this
process. That Achilles should occupy in suc
cession 'all' the points in a single continuous
inch of space, is as inadmissible a conception
as that he should count the series of whole num
bers 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., to infinity and reach an end.
The terms are not 'enumerable' in that order;
and the order it is that makes the whole diffi
culty. An infinite 'regression' like the rear
ward perspective of time offers no such con
tradiction, for it comes not in that order. Its
'end' is what we start with; and each succes
sive note ' more ' which our imagination has to
add, ad infinitum, is thought of as already hav
ing been paid in and not as having yet to be
paid before the end can be attained. Starting
with our end, we have to wait for nothing. The
infinity here is of the 'standing' variety. It is,
in the word of Kant's pun, gegeben, not auf-
gegeben: in the other case, of a continuous pro
cess to be traversed, it is on the contrary auf-
gegeben: it is a task — not only for our philo-
171
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
sophic imagination, but for any real agent who
might try physically to compass the entire
performance. Such an agent is bound by logic
to find always a remainder, something ever
yet to be paid, like the balance due on a debt
\vith even the interest of which we do not
catch up.
'Infinitum in actu pertransiri nequit,9 said
scholasticism; and every continuous quantum
The grow- to ^e gradually traversed is conceived
ing infin- as ^ an jnfinjte. The quickest way
ite must
be treated to avoid the contradiction would
as dis-
continu- seem to be to give up that concep
tion, and to treat real processes of
change no longer as being continuous, but as
taking place by finite not infinitesimal steps,
like the successive drops by which a cask of
water is filled, when whole drops fall into it at
once or nothing. This is the radically pluralist,
empiricist, or perceptualist position, which I
characterized in speaking of Renouvier (above,
pages 164-165). We shall have to end by adopt
ing it in principle ourselves, qualifying it so as
to fit it closely to perceptual experience.
172
NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE
Meanwhile we are challenged by a certain
school of critics who think that what in mathe-
Objec- matics is called 'the new infinite'
has quashed the old antinomies, and
who treat anyone whom the notion of a com
pleted infinite in any form still bothers, as a
very naif person. Naif though I am in mathe
matics, I must, notwithstanding the dryness of
the subject, add a word in rebuttal of these
criticisms, some of which, as repeated by nov
ices, tend decidedly towards mystification.
The 'new infinite' and the 'number-con
tinuum' are outgrowths of a general attempt
(i) The to accomplish what has been called
number-
continuum the ' arithmetization ' (apiOpos mean
ing number) of all quantity. Certain quanta
(grades of intensity or other difference, amounts
of space) have until recently been supposed to
be immediate data of perceptive sensibility or
'intuition'; but philosophical mathematicians
have now succeeded in getting a conceptual
equivalent for them in the shape of collections
of numbers created by interpolation between
one another indefinitely. We can halve any
173
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
line in space, and halve its halves and so on.
But between the cuts thus made and numbered,
room is left for infinite others created by using
3 as a divisor, for infinite others still by using
5, 7, etc., until all possible 'rational' divisions
of the line shall have been made. Between
these it is now shown that interpolation of cuts
numbered 'irrationally' is still possible ad
infinitum, and that with these the line at last
gets filled full, its continuity now being wholly
translated into these numbered cuts, and their
number being infinite. 'Of the celebrated for
mula that continuity means " unity in multi
plicity," the multiplicity alone subsists, the
unity disappears,'1 -- as indeed it does in all
conceptual translations — and the original in
tuition of the line's extent gets treated, from
the mathematical point of view, as a 'mass of
uncriticized prejudice' by Russell, or sneered
at by Cantor as a 'kind of religious dogma.'2
So much for the number-continuum. As for
'the new infinite': that means only a new defi-
1 H. Poincare: La science el Vhypothese, p. 30.
1 B. Russell: The Philosophy of Mathematics, i, 260, 287.
174
NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE
nition of infinity. If we compare the indefi
nitely-growing number-series, 1, 2, 3, 4, n,
- - - in its entirety, with any component part of
(2) The it, like ' even ' numbers * prime ' num-
* new
infinite1 bers, or 'square' numbers, we are
confronted with a paradox. No one of the parts,
thus named, of the number-series, is equal to
the whole collectively taken; yet any one of
them is 6 similar ' to the whole, in the sense that
you can set up a one-to-one relation between
each of its elements and each element of the
whole, so that part and whole prove to be of
what logicians call the same 'class,' numeri
cally. Thus, in spite of the fact that even num
bers, prime numbers, and square numbers are
much fewer and rarer than numbers in general,
and only form a part of numbers iiberhaupt
they appear to be equally copious for purposes
of counting. The terms of each such partial
series can be numbered by using the natural
integers in succession. There is, for instance, a
first prime, a second prime, etc., ad infinitum;
and queerer-sounding still, since every integer,
odd or even, can be doubled, it would seem that
175
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
the even numbers thus produced cannot in the
nature of things be less multitudinous than
that series of both odd and even numbers of
which the whole natural series consists.
These paradoxical consequences result, as
one sees immediately, from the fact that the
The new infinity of the number-series is of the
infinite . , . f ,
paradoxi- growing variety (above, page 170).
They were long treated as a reductio
ad absurdum of the notion that such a variable
series spells infinity in act, or can ever be
translated into standing or collective form.1
But contemporary mathematicians have taken
the bull by the horns. Instead of treating such
paradoxical properties of indefinitely growing
series as reductiones ad absurdum, they have
turned them into the proper definition of in
finite classes of things. Any class is now called
1 The fact that, taken distributively, or paired each to each, the
terms in one endlessly growing series should be made a match for those
in another (or 'similar' to them) is quite compatible with the two
series being collectively of vastly unequal amounts. You need only
make the steps of difference, or distances, between the terms much
longer in one series than in the other, to get numerically similar multi
tudes, with greatly unequal magnitudes of content. Moreover the
moment either series should stop growing, the 'similarity ' would cease
to exist.
176
NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE
infinite if its parts are numerically similar to
itself. If its parts are numerically dissimilar, it
is finite. This definition now separates the
conception of the class of finite from that of
infinite objects.
Next, certain concepts, called 'transfinite
numbers,' are now created by definition. They
« Trans- are decreed to belong to the infinite
finite
numbers* class, and yet not to be formed by
adding one to one ad infinitum, but rather to
be postulated outright as coming after each and
all of the numbers formed by such addition.1
Cantor gives the name of 'Omega' to the low
est of these possible transfinite numbers. It
would, for instance, be the number of the point
at which Achilles overtakes the tortoise — if
he does overtake him — by exhausting all the
intervening points successively. Or it would
be the number of the stars, in case their count-
1 The class of all numbers that ' come before the first transfinite ' is a
definitely limited conception, provided we take the numbers as caches
or anys, for then any one and every of them will have by definition to
come before the transfinite number comes — even though they form no
whole and there be no last one of them, and though the transfinite have
no immediate predecessor. The transfinite is, in a word, not an ordinal
conception, at least it does not continue the order of entire numbers.
177
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
ing could not terminate. Or again it would be
the number of miles away at which parallel lines
meet — if they do meet. It is, in short, a
6 limit ' to the whole class of numbers that grow
one by one, and like other limits, it proves a
useful conceptual bridge for passing us from
one range of facts to another.
The first sort of fact we pass to with its
help is the number of the number-continuum
Their uses or point-continuum described above
and de-
fects (page 173) as generated by infinitely
repeated subdivision. The making of the subdi
visions is an infinitely growing process ; but the
number of subdivisions that can be made has
for its limit the transfinite number Omega just
imagined and defined; thus is a growing assimi
lated to a standing multitude; thus is a number
that is variable practically equated (by the
process of passing to the limit) with one that
is fixed; thus do we circumvent the law of in
definite addition, or division which previously
was the only way in which infinity was con-
structable, and reach a constant infinite at a
bound. This infinite number may now be sub-
178
NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE
stituted for any continuous finite quantum,
however small the latter may perceptually ap
pear to be.
When I spoke of my 'mystification,' just
now, I had partly in mind the contemptuous
way in which some enthusiasts for the 'new
infinite ' treat those who still cling to the super
stition that 'the whole is greater than the
part.' Because any point whatever in an im
aginary inch is now conceivable as being
matched by some point in a quarter-inch or
half-inch, this numerical 'similarity' of the
different quanta, taken point-wise, is treated as
if it signified that half-inches, quarter-inches,
and inches are mathematically identical things
anyhow, and that their differences are facts
which we may scientifically neglect. I may
misunderstand the newest expounders of
Zeno's famous 'sophism/ but what they say
seems to me virtually to be equivalent to this.
Mr. Bertrand Russell (whom I do not accuse
of mystification, for Heaven knows he tries to
make things clear!) treats the Achilles-puzzle
as if the difficulty lay only in seeing how the
179
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
paths traversed by the two runners (measured
after the race is run, and assumed then to con-
Russeil's sist of nothing but points of position
solution . j . , .
of Zeno's coincident with points upon a com-
paradox mon gcaje Qf tjme) snOuId have the
by their
means same time-measure if they be not
themselves of the same length. But the two
paths are of different lengths; for owing to the
tortoise's head-start, the tortoise's path is only
a part of the path of Achilles. How, then, if
time-points are to be the medium of measure
ment, can the longer path not take the longer
time?
The remedy, for Mr. Russell, if I rightly
understand him, lies in noting that the sets of
points in question are conceived as being in
finitely numerous in both paths, and that
where infinite multitudes are in question, to
say that the whole is greater than the part is
false. For each and every point traversed by
the tortoise there is one point traversed by
Achilles, at the corresponding point of time;
and the exact correspondence, point by point,
of either one of the three sets of points with
180
NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE
both the others, makes of them similar and
equally copious sets from the numerical point
of view. There is thus no recurrent 'remainder '
of the tortoise's head-start with which Achilles
cannot catch up, which he can reduce indefin
itely, but cannot annul. The books balance to
the end. The last point in Achilles's path, the
last point in the tortoise's, and the last time-
instant in the race are terms which mathe
matically coincide. With this, which seems to
be Mr. Russell's way of analyzing the situa
tion, the puzzle is supposed to disappear.1
It seems to me however that Mr. Russell's
statements dodge the real difficulty, which
The so- concerns the 'growing' variety of
lution
criticized infinity exclusively, and not the
'standing* variety, which is all that he envis
ages when he assumes the race already to have
been run and thinks that the only problem
that remains is that of numerically equating
the paths. The real difficulty may almost be
1 Mr. Russell's own statements of the puzzle as well as of the remedy
are too technical to be followed verbatim in a book like this. As he
finds it necessary to paraphrase the puzzle, so I find it convenient to
paraphrase him, sincerely hoping that no injustice has been done.
181
ft
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
called physical, for it attends the process of
formation of the paths. Moreover, two paths
are not needed — that of either runner alone,
or even the lapse of empty time, involves the
difficulty, which is that of touching a goal
when an interval needing to be traversed first
keeps permanently reproducing itself and get
ting in your way. Of course the same quantum
can be produced in various manners. This page
which I am now painfully writing, letter after
letter, will be printed at a single stroke. God,
as the orthodox believe, created the space-
continuum, with its infinite parts already
standing in it, by an instantaneous fiat. Past
time now stands in infinite perspective, and
may conceivably have been created so, as
Kant imagined, for our retrospection only, and
all at once. ' Omega ' was created by a single
decree, a single act of definition in Prof. Can
tor's mind. But whoso actually traverses a con
tinuum, can do so by no process continuous in
the mathematical sense. Be it short or long,
each point must be occupied in its due order of
succession; and if the points are necessarily
182
NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE
infinite, their end cannot be reached, for the
'remainder,' in this kind of process, is just
what one cannot 'neglect.' 'Enumeration' is,
in short, the sole possible method of occupa
tion of the series of positions implied in the
famous race; and when Mr. Russell solves the
puzzle by saying as he does, that 'the defini
tion of whole and part without enumeration is
the key to the whole mystery,'1 he seems to me
deliberately to throw away his case.2
1 The Philosophy of Mathematics, i, 361. — Mr. Russell gives a
Tristram Shandy paradox as a counterpart to the Achilles. Since it
took T. S. (according to Sterne) two years to write the history of the
first two days of his life, common sense would conclude that at that rate
the life never could be written. But Mr. Russell proves the contrary;
for, as days and years have no last term, and the nth day is written in
the nth year, any assigned day will be written about, and no part of the
life remain unwritten. But Mr. Russell's proof cannot be applied to
the real world without the physical hypothesis which he expresses by
saying: 'If Tristram Shandy lives forever, and does not weary of his
task . ' In all real cases of continuous change a similarly absurd hypothe
sis must be made: the agent of the change must live forever, in the
sense of outliving an endless set of points of time, and 'not wearying '
of his impossible task.
2 Being almost blind mathematically and logically, I feel considera
ble shyness in differing from such superior minds, yet what can one do
but follow one's own dim light? The literature of the new infinite is so
technical that it is impossible to cite details of it in a non-mathemati
cal work like this. Students who are interested should consult the
tables of contents of B. Russell's Philosophy of Mathematics, of L.
Couturat's Injini Mathematique, or his Principes des Mathematiques.
183
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
After this disagreeable polemic, I conclude
that the new infinite need no longer block the
Conciu- way to tne empiricist opinion which
we reached provisionally on page
172. Irrelevant though they be to facts the
'conditions' of which are of the 'standing'
sort, the criticisms of Leibnitz, Kant, Cauchy,
Renouvier, Evellin and others, apply legiti
mately to all cases of supposedly continuous
growth or change. The 'conditions ' here have
to be fulfilled seriatim; and if the series which
they form were endless, its limit, if 'successive
synthesis ' were the only way of reaching it,
could simply not be reached. Either we must
A still more rigorous exposition may be found in E. V. Huntington,
The Continuum as a Type of Order, in the Annals of Mathematics, vols.
vi and vii (reprint for sale at publication-office, Harvard University).
Compare also C. S. Peirce's paper in the Monist, ii, 537-546, as well as
the presidential address of E. W. Hobson in the Proceedings of the Lon
don Mathematical Society, vol. xxxv. For more popular discussions see
J. Royce, The World and the Individual, vol. i, Supplementary Essay;
Keyser: Journal of Philosophy, etc., i, 29, and Hibbert Journal, vii, 380-
390; S. Waterton in Aristotelian Soc. Proceedings, 1910; Leighton:
Philosophical Review, xiii, 497; and finally the tables of contents of H.
Poincare's three recent little books, La science et Vhypothese, Paris ;
The Value of Science (authorized translation by G. B. Halsted), New
York, 1907 ; Science et Methode, Paris, 1908. The liveliest short at
tack which I know upon infinites completed by successive synthesis,
is that in G. M. Fullerton's System of Metaphysics, chapter xi.
184
NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE
stomach logical contradiction, therefore, in these
cases ; or we must admit that the limit is reached
in these successive cases by finite and perceptible
units of approach — drops, buds, steps, or what
ever we please to term them, of change, coming
wholly when they do come, or coming not at all.
Such seems to be the nature of concrete experi
ence, which changes always by sensible amounts,
or stays unchanged. The infinite character we
find in it is woven into it by our later concept
tion indefinitely repeating the act of subdividing
any given amount supposed. The facts do not
resist the subsequent conceptual treatment ; but
we need not believe that the treatment necessa
rily reproduces the operation by which they
were originally brought into existence.
The antinomy of mathematically continuous
i. Con- growth is thus but one more of those
ceptual
transform- many ways in which our conceptual
percept- transformation of perceptual experi-
encetarns ence makes it less comprehensible
the infinite tnan ever> That being should im-
into a
problem mediately and by finite quantities
add itself to being, may indeed be something
185
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
which an onlooking intellect fails to under
stand; but that being should be identified
with the consummation of an endless chain
of units (such as 'points'), no one of which
contains any amount whatever of the being
(such as 'space') expected to result, this is
something which our intellect not only fails
to understand, but which it finds absurd. The
substitution of ' arithmetization ' for intuition
thus seems, if taken as a description of reality,
to be only a partial success. Better accept,
as Renouvier says, the opaquely given data of
perception, than concepts inwardly absurd.1
1 The point-continuum illustrates beautifully my complaint that
the intellectualist method turns the flowing into the static and discrete.
The buds or steps of process which perception accepts as primal gifts
of being, correspond logically to the ' infinitesimals ' (minutest quanta
of notion, change or what not) of which the latest mathematics is sup
posed to have got rid. Mr. Russell accordingly finds himself obliged,
just like Zeno, to treat motion as an unreality: ' Weierstrass,' he says,
'by strictly banishing all infinitesimals has at last shown that we live
in an unchanging world, and that the arrow, at every moment of its
flight, is truly at rest ' (op. cit., p. 347). 'We must entirely reject the
notion of a state of motion,' he says elsewhere; 'motion consists
merely in the occupation of different places at different times. . . .
There is no transition from place to place, no consecutive moment,
or consecutive position, no such thing as velocity except in the sense
of a real number which is the limit of a certain set of quotients' (p.
473). The mathematical 'continuum,' so called, becomes thus an
absolute discontinuum in any physical or experiential sense. Ex-
186
NOVELTY AND THE INFINITE
So much for the * problem of the infinite,'
and for the interpretation of continuous change
by the new definition of infinity. We find that
the picture of a reality changing by steps finite
in number and discrete, remains quite as ac
ceptable to our understanding and as congenial
to our imagination as before; so, after these
dry and barren chapters, we take up our main
topic of inquiry just where we had laid it down.
Does reality grow by abrupt increments of
it leaves novelty> or n°t? The contrast be-
thepro- tween discontinuity and continuity
blem of
novelty now confronts us in another form.
The mathematical definition of con
tinuous quantity as 'that between any two
elements or terms of which there is another
term ' is directly opposed to the more empirical
or perceptual notion that anything is continu
ous when its parts appear as immediate next
neighbors, with absolutely nothing between.
tremes meet; and although Russell and Zeno agree in denying per
ceptual motion, for the one a pure unity, for the other a pure multi
plicity takes its place. It is probable that Russell's denial of change,
etc. is meant to apply only to the mathematical world. It would
be unfair to charge him with writing metaphysics in these passages,
although he gives no warning that this may not be the case.
187
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
Our business lies hereafter with the perceptual
account, but before we settle definitively to its
discussion, another classic problem of philoso
phy had better be got out of the way. This is
the 'problem of causation.'
CHAPTER XII1
NOVELTY AND CAUSATION — THE
CONCEPTUAL VIEW
IF reality changes by finite sensible steps, the
question whether the bits of it that come are
radically new, remains unsettled still. Remem
ber our situation at the end of Chapter III. Be
ing iiberhaupt or at large, we there found to be
undeduceable. For our intellect it remains a
casual and contingent quantum that is simply
found or begged. May it be begged bit by bit,
as it adds itself? Or must we beg it only once,
by assuming it either to be eternal or to have
come in an instant that co-implicated all the
The'pnn- rest of time? Did or did not 'the
ciple of
causality » first morning of creation write what
the last dawn of reckoning shall read'? With
these questions monism and pluralism stand
face to face again. The classic obstacle to plu
ralism has always been what is known as the
' principle of causality.' This principle has been
1 [In the author's manuscript this chapter bore the heading —
1 Second Sub-problem — Cause and Effect.' ED.]
189
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
taken to mean that the effect in some way al
ready exists in the cause. If this be so, the
effect cannot be absolutely novel, and in no
radical sense can pluralism be true.
We must therefore review the facts of causa
tion. I take them in conceptual translation
before considering them in perceptual form. The
first definite inquiry into causes was made by
Aristotle.1
The 'why' of anything, he said, is furnished
by four principles : the material cause of it (as
Aristotle when bronze makes a statue); the
on causa
tion formal cause (as when the ratio of
two to one makes an octave); the efficient
cause (as when a father makes a child) and the
final cause (as when one exercises for the sake
of health). Christian philosophy adopted the
four causes; but what one generally means by
the cause of anything is its 'efficient' cause,
and in what immediately follows I shall speak
of that alone.
An efficient cause is scholastically defined as
1 Book 2, or book 5, chap, ii of his Metaphysics, or chap, iii of his
Physics, give what is essential in his views.
100
NOVELTY AND CAUSATION
'that which produces something else by a real
activity proceeding from itself.' This is unques-
Scholasti- tionably the view of common sense;
efficient anc^ scholasticism is only common
cause sense grown quite articulate. Passing
over the many classes of efficient cause which
scholastic philosophy specifies, I will enumer
ate three important sub-principles it is sup
posed to follow from the above definition.
Thus: 1. No effect can come into being with
out a cause. This may be verbally taken; but
if, avoiding the word effect, it be taken in
the sense that nothing can happen without a
cause, it is the famous 'principle of causality'
which, when combined with the next two prin
ciples, is supposed to establish the block-uni
verse, and to render the pluralistic hypothesis
absurd.
2. The effect is always proportionate to the
cause, and the cause to the effect.
3. Whatever is in the effect must in some
way, whether formally, virtually, or eminently,
have been also in the cause. (* Formally* here
means that the cause resembles the effect, as
191
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
when one motion causes another motion; vir
tually means that the cause somehow involves
that effect, without resembling it, as when an
artist causes a statue but possesses not himself
its beauty; 'eminently' means that the cause,
though unlike the effect, is superior to it in
perfection, as when a man overcomes a lion's
strength by greater cunning.)
Nemo dat quod non habet is the real principle
from which the causal philosophy flows; and
the proposition causa cequat effectum practi
cally sums up the whole of it.1
It is plain that each moment of the universe
must contain all the causes of which the next
moment contains effects, or to put it with ex
treme concision, it is plain that each moment
in its totality causes the next moment.2 But
1 Read for a concise statement of the school-doctrine of causation
the account in J. Rickaby: General Metaphysics, book 2, chap. iii. I
omit from my text various subordinate maxims which have played a
great part in causal philosophy, as 'The cause of a cause is the cause
of its effects '; 'The same causes produce the same effects '; 'Causes
act only when present '; 'A cause must exist before it can act,' etc.
2 This notion follows also from the consideration of conditioning cir
cumstances being at bottom as indispensable as causes for producing
effects. 'The cause, philosophically speaking, is the sum total of the
conditions positive and negative,' says J. S. Mill (Logic, 8th edition, i,
192
NOVELTY AND CAUSATION
if the maxim holds firm that quidquid est in
effectu debet esse prius aliquo modo in causa, it
follows that the next moment can contain
nothing genuinely original, and that the nov
elty that appears to leak into our lives so un
remittingly, must be an illusion, ascribable to
the shallowness of the perceptual point of view.
Scholasticism always respected common
sense, and in this case escaped the frank denial
of all genuine novelty by the vague qualifica
tion 'aliquo modo.' This allowed the effect
also to differ, aliquo modo, from its cause. But
conceptual necessities have ruled the situation
and have ended, as usual, by driving nature
and perception to the wall. A cause and its
effect are two numerically discrete concepts,
and yet in some inscrutable way the former
must 'produce' the latter. How can it intel
ligibly do so, save by already hiding the latter
in itself? Numerically two, cause and effect
383). This is equivalent to the entire state of the universe at the mo
ment that precedes the effect. But neither is the 'effect ' in that case
the one fragmentary event which our attention first abstracted under
that name. It is that fragment, along with all its concomitants — or
in other words it is the entire state of the universe at the second mo
ment desired.
193
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
must be generically one, in spite of the per
ceptual appearances; and causation changes
thus from a concretely experienced relation
between differents into one between similars
abstractly thought of as more real.1
The overthrow of perception by conception
took a long time to complete itself in this field.
Occasion- Tie first step was the theory of 'oc
casionalism/ to which Descartes led
the way by his doctrine that mental and phys
ical substance, the one consisting purely of
thought, the other purely of extension, were
absolutely dissimilar. If this were so, any such
causal intercourse as we instinctively perceive
between mind and body ceased to be rational.
1 Sir William Hamilton expresses this very compactly: 'What is the
law of Causality? Simply this, — that when an object is presented
phenomenally as commencing, we cannot but suppose that the com
plement (i. e. the amount) of existence, which it now contains, has
previously been ; — in other words, that all that we at present know as
an effect must previously have existed in its causes; though what these
causes are we may perhaps be altogether unable to surmise.' (End of
Lecture 39 of the Metaphysics.} The cause becomes a reason, the effect
a consequence; and since logical consequence follows only from the
same to the same, the older vaguer causation-philosophy develops into
the sharp rationalistic dogma that cause and effect are two names for
one persistent being, and that if the successive moments of the uni
verse be causally connected, no genuine novelty leaks in.
194
NOVELTY AND CAUSATION
For thinkers of that age, 'God' was the great
solvent of absurdities. He could get over
every contradiction. Consequently Descartes'
disciples Regis and Cordemoy, and especially
Geulincx, denied the fact of psychological in
teraction altogether. God, according to them,
immediately caused the changes in our mind
of which events in our body, and those in our
body of which events in our mind, appear to be
the causes, but of which they are in reality only
the signals or occasions.
Leibnitz took the next step forward in
quenching the claim to truth of our percep-
Leibnitz tions. He freed God from the duty
of lending all this hourly assistance, by sup
posing Him to have decreed on the day of crea
tion that the changes in our several minds
should coincide with those in our several bodies,
after the manner in which clocks, wound up
on the same day, thereafter keep time with one
another. With this 'pre-established harmony'
so-called, the conceptual translation of the
immediate given, with its never failing result
of negating both activity and continuity, is
195
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
complete. Instead of the dramatic flux of per
sonal life, a bare 'one to one correspondence'
between the terms of two causally uncon
nected series is set up. God is the sole cause of
anything, and the cause of everything at once.
The theory is as monistic as the rationalist
heart can desire, and of course novelty would
be impossible if it were true.
David Hume made the next step in discredit
ing common-sense causation. In the chapters
on 'the idea of necessary connection' both in
his 'Treatise on Human Nature,' and in his
'Essays,' he sought for a positive picture of
the 'efficacy of the power' which causes are
Hume assumed to exert, and failed to find
it. He shows that neither in the physical nor
in the mental world can we abstract or isolate
the 'energy' transmitted from causes to effects.
This is as true of perception as it is of imagina
tion. 'All ideas are derived from and represent
impressions. We never have any impression
that contains any power or efficacy. We never
therefore have any idea of power.' 'We never
can by our utmost scrutiny discover anything
196
NOVELTY AND CAUSATION
but one event following another; without being
able to comprehend any force or power, by
which the cause operates, or any connection
between it and its supposed effect. . . . The
necessary conclusion seems to be that we have
no idea of connection or power at all, and that
these words are absolutely without any mean
ing, when employed either in philosophical
reasonings or in common life.' 'Nothing is
more evident than that the mind cannot form
such an idea of two objects as to conceive any
connection between them, or comprehend dis
tinctly that power or efficacy by which they
are united/
The pseudo-idea of a connection which we
have, Hume then goes on to show, is nothing
but the misinterpretation of a mental custom.
When we have often experienced the same
sequence of events, 'we are carried by habit,
upon the appearance of the first one, to expect
its usual attendant, and to believe that it will
exist. . . . This customary transition of the
imagination is the sentiment or impression
from which we form the idea of power or neces-
197
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
sary connection. Nothing farther is in the case.'
' A cause is an object precedent and contiguous
to another, and so united with it that the idea
of the one determines the idea of the other.'
Nothing could be more essentially plural
istic than the elements of Hume's philosophy.
He makes events rattle against their neighbors
as drily as if they were dice in a box. He might
with perfect consistency have believed in real
novelties, and upheld freewill. But I said
awhile ago that most empiricists had been half
hearted; and Hume was perhaps the most
half-hearted of the lot. In his essay 'on liberty
and necessity,' he insists that the sequences
which we experience, though between events
absolutely disconnected, are yet absolutely
uniform, and that nothing genuinely new can
flower out of our lives.
The reader will recognize in Hume's famous
pages a fresh example of the way in which con-
criticism ceptual translations always maltreat
fact. Perceptually or concretely (as
we shall notice in more detail later) causation
names the manner in which some fields of con-
198
NOVELTY AND CAUSATION
sciousness introduce other fields. It is but one
of the forms in which experience appears as a
continuous flow. Our names show how suc
cessfully we can discriminate within the flow.
But the conceptualist rule is to suppose that
where there is a separate name there ought to
be a fact as separate ; and Hume, following this
rule, and finding no such fact corresponding to
the word 'power/ concludes that the word is
meaningless. By this rule every conjunction
and preposition in human speech is meaning
less — in, on, of, with, but, and, if, are as
meaningless as for, and because. The truth is
that neither the elements of fact nor the mean
ings of our words are separable as the words
are. The original form in which fact comes is
the perceptual durcheinander, holding terms as
well as relations in solution, or interfused and
cemented. Our reflective mind abstracts divers
aspects in the muchness, as a man by looking
through a tube may limit his attention to one
part after another of a landscape. But abstrac
tion is not insulation; and it no more breaks
reality than the tube breaks the landscape.
199
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
Concepts are notes, views taken on reality,1
not pieces of it, as bricks are of a house. Causal
activity, in short, may play its part in growing
fact, even though no substantive 'impression'
of it should stand out by itself. Hume's as
sumption that any factor of reality must be
separable, leads to his preposterous view, that
no relation can be real. * All events,' he writes,
'seem entirely loose and separate. One event
follows another, but we never can observe any
tie between them. They seem conjoined, but
never connected.' Nothing, in short, belongs
with anything else. Thus does the intellectual-
ist method pulverize perception and triumph
over life. Kant and his successors all espoused
Hume's opinion that the immediately given is
a disconnected 'manifold.' But unwilling sim
ply to accept the manifold, as Hume did, they
invoked a superior agent in the shape of what
Kant called the 'transcendental ego of apper
ception ' to patch its bits together by synthetic
'categories.' Among these categories Kant in
scribes that of 'causality,' and in many quar-
1 These expressions are Bergson's.
200
NOVELTY AND CAUSATION
ters he passes for a repairer of the havoc that
Hume made.
! His chapter on Cause1 is the most confusedly
written part of his famous Critique, and its
meaning is often hard to catch. As I under
stand his text, he leaves things just where
Hume did, save that where Hume says 'habit'
Kant he says 'rule.' They both cancel the
notion that phenomena called causal ever ex
ert 'power,' or that a single case would ever
have suggested cause and effect. In other
words Kant contradicts common sense as much
as Hume does and, like Hume, translates caus
ation into mere time-succession; only, whereas
the order in time was essentially 'loose' for
Hume and only subjectively uniform, Kant
calls its uniformity * objective as obtaining in
conformity to a law, which our Sinnlichkeit
receives from our Ver stand.' Non-causal se
quences can be reversed; causal ones follow in
conformity to rule.2
1 Entitled 'The Second Analogy of Experience,' it begins on page
232 of the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason.
2 Kant's whole notion of a ' rule ' is inconstruable by me. What or
whom does the rule bind? If it binds the phenomenon that follows
201
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
The word Verstand in Kant's account must
not be taken as if the rule it is supposed to set
to sensation made us understand things any
better. It is a brute rule of sequence which
reveals no 'tie.' The non-rationality of such a
'category' leaves it worthless for purposes of
insight. It removes dynamic causation and
substitutes no other explanation for the se
quences found. It yields external descriptions
only, and assimilates all cases to those where
we discover no reason for the law ascertained.
Our 'laws of nature' do indeed in large part
enumerate bare coexistences and successions.
Yellowness and malleability coexist in gold;
redness succeeds on boiling in lobsters; coagu-
(the 'effect') we fall back into the popular dynamic view, and any
single case would exhibit causal action, even were there no other cases
in the world. — Or does it bind the observer of the single case? But
his own sensations of sequence are what bind him. Be a sequence
causal or non-causal, if it is sensible, he cannot turn it backwards as he
can his ideas. Or does the rule bind future sequences and determine
them to follow in the same order which the first sequence observed?
Since it obviously does not do this when the observer judges wrongly
that the first sequence is causal, all we can say is that it is a rule where
by his expectations of uniformity follow his causal judgments, be these
latter true or false. But wherein would this differ from the humean po
sition? Kant, in short, flounders, and in no truthful sense can one keep
repeating that he has 'refuted Hume.'
202
NOVELTY AND CAUSATION
lation in eggs; and to him who asks for the Why
of these uniformities, science only replies:
Positivism 'Not yet'! Meanwhile the laws are
potent for prediction, and many writers on
science tell us that this is all we can demand.
To explain, according to the way of thinking
called positivistic, is only to substitute wider
or more familiar, for narrower or less familiar
laws, and the laws at their widest only express
uniformities empirically found. Why does the
pump suck up water? Because the air keeps
pressing it into the tube. Why does the air
press in? Because the earth attracts it. Why
does the earth attract it? Because it attracts
everything — such attraction being in the end
only a more universal sort of fact. Laws, ac
cording to their view, only generalize facts,
they do not connect them in any intimate
sense.1
Against this purely inductive way of treat
ing causal sequences, a more deductive inter-
1 For expressions of this view the student may consult J. S. Mill's
Logic, book 3, chap, xii; W. S. Jevons's Principles of Science, book
6; J. Venn's Empirical Logic, chap, xxi, and K. Pearson's Grammar
of Science, chap. iii.
203
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
pretation has recently been urged. If the later
member of a succession could be deduced
Deductive by ]Ogic frOm the earlier member,
theories of
causation in the particular sequence the 'tie'
would be unmistakable. But logical ties carry
us only from sames to sanies ; so this last phase
of scientific method is at bottom only the
scholastic principle of Causa cequat efectum,
ibrought into sharper focus and illustrated
:more concretely. It is thoroughly monistic in
its aims, and if it could be worked out in detail
it would turn the real world into the procession
of an eternal identity, with the appearances,
of which we are perceptually conscious, oc
curring as a sort of by-product to which no
'scientific' importance should be attached.1
In any case no real growth and no real novelty
could effect an entrance into life.2
1 'Consciousness,' writes M. Couturat, to cite a handy expression of
this mode of thought, 'is properly speaking, the realm of the unreal. . . .
What remains in our subjective consciousness, after all objective facts
have been projected and located in space and time, is the rubbish and
residuum of the construction of the universe, the formless mass of
images that were unable to enter into the system of nature and put on
the garment of reality ' (Revue de Metaphysique, etc., v, 244).
2 I avoid amplifying this conception of cause and effect. An immense
number of causal facts can indeed be explained satisfactorily by as-
204
NOVELTY AND CAUSATION
This negation of real novelty seems to be
the upshot of the conceptualist philosophy of
causation. This is why I called it on page 189
Summary the classic obstacle to the acceptance
and con
clusion of pluralism's additive world. The
principle of causality begins as a hybrid be
tween common sense and intellectualism : —
what actively produces an effect, it says, must
'in some way ' contain the 'power ' of it already.
suming that the effect is only a later position of the cause; and for the
remainder we can fall back on the aliquo modo which gave such com
fort in the past. Such an interpretation of nature would, of course,
relegate variety, activity, and novelty to the limbo of illusions, as fast
as it succeeded in making its static concepts cancel living facts. It is
hard to be sincere, however, in following the conceptual method ruth
lessly ; and of the writers who think that in science causality must
mean identity, some willingly allow that all such scientific explanation
is more or less artificial, that identical ' molecules ' and ' atoms ' are like
identical 'pounds ' and 'yards,' only pegs in a conceptual arrangement
for hanging percepts on in 'one to one relations,' so as to predict facts
in 'elegant' or expeditious ways. This is the view of the conceptual
universe which our own discussion has insisted on; and, taking scientific
logic in this way, no harm is done. Almost no one is radical in using
scientific logic metaphysically. Readers wishing for more discussion of
the monistic view of cause, may consult G. H. Lewes: Problems of Life
and Mind, problem 5, chap, iii; A. Riehl: Der pkilosophische Kriticismus
(1879), 2ter Absn., Kap 2 ; G. Heymans: Die Gesetze u. Elemente d,
wissenschaftlichen Denkens, par. 83-85. Compare also B. P. Bowne:
Metaphysics, revised edition, part i, chap. iv. Perhaps the most instruc
tive general discussion of causation is that in C. Sigwart: Logic, 2d
edition, par. 73. Chap, v of book 3 in J. S. Mill's Logic may be called
classical.
205
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
But as nothing corresponding to the concept
of power can be insulated, the activity-feature
of the sequence erelong gets suppressed, and
the vague latency, supposed to exist aliquo
modo in the causal phenomenon, of the effect
about to be produced, is developed into a sta
tic relation of identity between two concepts
which the mind substitutes for the percepts
between which the causal tie originally was
found.1
The resultant state of 'enlightened opinion*
about cause, is, as I have called it before, con
fused and unsatisfactory. Few philosophers
hold radically to the identity view. The view
of the logicians of science is easier to believe
1 I omit saying anything in my text about 'energetics.' Popular
writers often appear to think that ' science' has demonstrated a monis
tic principle called 'energy,' which they connect with activity on the
one hand and with quantity on the other. So far as I understand this
difficult subject, ' energy ' is not a principle at all, still less an active
one. It is only a collective name for certain amounts of immediate
perceptual reality, when such reality is measured in definite ways that
allow its changes to be written so as to get constant sums. It is not an
ontological theory at all, but a magnificent economic schematic device
for keeping account of the functional variations of the surface phe
nomena. It is evidently a case of 'nonfingo hypotheses, 'and since it
tolerates perceptual reality, it ought to be regarded as neutral in our
causal debate.
206
NOVELTY AND CAUSATION
but not easier to believe metaphysically, for it
violates instinct almost as strongly. Mathema
ticians make use, to connect the various inter-
dependencies of quantities, of the general con
cept of function. That A is a function of B (A
equals B) means that with every alteration in
the value of A, an alteration in that of B is
always connected. If we generalize so as also
to include qualitative dependencies, we can
conceive the universe as consisting of nothing
but elements with functional relations between
them ; and science has then for its sole task the
listing of the elements and the describing in
the simplest possible terms the functional 're
lations.' J Changes, in short, occur, and ring
throughout phenomena, but neither reasons,
nor activities in the sense of agencies, have
any place in this world of scientific logic,
which compared with the world of common
sense, is so abstract as to be quite spectral,
and merits the appellation (so often quoted
from Mr. Bradley) of 'an unearthly ballet
of bloodless categories.'
1 W. Jerusalem: Einleitung in die Philosophic, 4te Aufl., 145.
CHAPTER XIII
NOVELTY AND CAUSATION — THE
PERCEPTUAL VIEW
MOST persons remain quite incredulous when
they are told that the rational principle of
causality has exploded our native belief in naif
activity as something real, and our assumption
that genuinely new fact can be created by
work done. 'Le sens de la vie qui s'indigne de
tant de discours,' awakens in them and snaps
its fingers at the 'critical' view. The present
writer has also just called the critical view an
incomplete abstraction. But its 'functional
laws' and schematisms are splendid^ useful,
and its negations are true oftener than is com
monly supposed. We feel as if our 'will' im
mediately moved our members, and we ignore
the brain-cells whose activity that will must
first arouse; we think we cause the bell-ring,
but we only close a contact and the battery in
the cellar rings the bell; we think a certain
star's light is the cause of our now seeing it,
but ether-waves are the causes, and the star
208
NOVELTY AND CAUS>TION
may have been extinguished long ago. We call
the 'draft,' the cause of our 'cold'; but without
co-operant microbes the draft could do no harm.
Defects of ^^ Sa^S ^at causes HlUSt be Un-
the percept- conditional antecedents, and Venn
ual view do
not warrant that they must be 'close' ones. In
scepticism
nature s numerous successions so
many links are hidden, that we seldom know
exactly which antecedent is unconditional or
which is close. Often the cause which we name
only fits some other cause for producing the
phenomenon; and things, as Mill says, are fre
quently then most active when we assume
them to be acted upon.
This vast amount of error in our instinctive
perceptions of causal activity encourages the
conceptualist view. A step farther, and we sus
pect that to suppose causal activity anywhere
may be a blunder, and that only consecutions
and juxtapositions can be real. Such sweep
ing scepticism is, however, quite uncalled for.
Other parts of experience expose us to error,
yet we do not say that in them is no truth. We
see trains moving at stations, when they are
209
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
really standing still, or falsely we feel ourselves
to be moving, when we are giddy, without such
errors leading us to deny that motion anywhere
exists. It exists elsewhere; and the problem is
to place it rightly. It is the same with all other
illusions of sense.
There is doubtless somewhere an original
perceptual experience of the kind of thing we
mean by causation, and that kind of thing
we locate in various other places, rightly or
wrongly as the case may be. Where now is the
typical experience originally got?
Evidently it is got in our own personal activ
ity-situations. In all of these what we feel is
that a previous field of 'consciousness' con
taining (in the midst of its complexity) the
«. idea of a result, develops gradually
jine per~
ceptual into another field in which that re-
experience
of causa- suit either appears as accomplished,
or else is prevented by obstacles
against which we still feel ourselves to press.
As I now write, I am in one of these activity
situations. I ' strive ' after words, which I only
half prefigure, but which, when they shall have
210
NOVELTY AND CAUSATION
come, must satisfactorily complete the nascent
sense I have of what they ought to be. The
words are to run out of my pen, which I find
that my hand actuates so obediently to desire
that I am hardly conscious either of resistance
or of effort. Some of the words come wrong,
and then I do feel a resistance, not muscular
but mental, which instigates a new instalment
of my activity, accompanied by more or less
feeling of exertion. If the resistance were to
my muscles, the exertion would contain an ele
ment of strain or squeeze which is less present
where the resistance is only mental. If it proves
considerable in either kind I may leave off try-
ing to overcome it; or, on the other hand, I may
sustain my effort till I have succeeded in my
aim.
It seems to me that in such a continuously
developing experiential series our concrete
perception of causality is found in operation.
If the word have any meaning at all it must
mean what there we live through. What 'effi
cacy' and 'activity' are known-as is what
these appear.
211
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
The experiencer of such a situation feels the
push, the obstacle, the will, the strain, the
triumph, or the passive giving up, just as he
feels the time, the space, the swiftness of intens
ity, the movement, the weight and color, the
pain and pleasure, the complexity, or what
ever remaining characters the situation may
involve. He goes through all that can ever
be imagined where activity is supposed. The
word 'activity5 has no content save these
experiences of process, obstruction, striving,
strain, or release, ultimate qualia as they are of
the life given us to be known. No matter what
in it 'efficacies' there may really be in
* final ' . ,. ...
and * ef- ^nis extraordinary universe it is im-
Possible to conceive of any one of
coincide 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 anyone who has lived through
the experience, but to no one else; just as
'loud,' 'red,' 'sweet,' mean something only to
NOVELTY AND CAUSATION
beings with ears, eyes, and tongues. The per-
dpi 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 causal agency, but should get itself an
other name.
The way in which we feel that our successive
fields continue each other in these cases k evi
dently what the orthodox doctrine means when
it vaguely says that 'in some way' the cause
'contains' the effect. It contains it by propos
ing it as the end pursued. Since the desire of
that end is the efficient cause, we see that in
the total fact of personal activity final and
efficient causes coalesce. Yet the effect is often-
est contained aliquo modo only, and seldom
explicitly foreseen. The activity sets up more
effects than it proposes literally. The end is
defined beforehand in most cases only as a
And novel- general direction, along which all
sorts of novelties and surprises lie in
wait. These words I write even now surprise
me ; yet I adopt them as effects of my scripto-
rial causality. Their being 'contained' means
213
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
only their harmony and continuity with my
general aim. They 'fill the bill' and I accept
them, but the exact shape of them seems deter
mined by something outside of my explicit will.
If we look at the general mass of things in
the midst of which the life of men is passed,
and ask 'How came they here?' the only broad
answer is that man's desires preceded and pro
duced them. If not all-sufficient causes, desire
and will were at any rate what John Mill calls
unconditional causes, indispensable causes
namely, without which the effects could not
have come at all. Human causal activity is the
only known unconditional antecedent of the
wrorks of civilization; so we find, as Edward
Carpenter says,1 something like a law of na
ture, the law that a movement from feeling to
thought and thence to action, from the world
of dreams to the world of things, is everywhere
going on. Since at each phase cf this move
ment novelties turn up, we may fairly ask, with
Carpenter, whether we are not here witnessing
in our own personal experience what is really
1 The Art of Creation, 1894, chap. i.
214
NOVELTY AND CAUSATION
the essential process of creation. Is not the
world really growing in these activities of ours?
And where we predicate activities elsewhere,
have we a right to suppose aught different in
kind from this?
To some such vague vision are we brought
by taking our perceptual experience of action
at its face-value, and following the analogies
which it suggests.
I say vague vision, for even if our desires be
an unconditional causal factor in the only part
Perceptual of the universe where we are inti-
causation , , • , i -.1 .1
sets a mately acquainted with the way
problem creative work is done, desire is any
thing but a close factor, even there. The part
of the world to which our desires lie closest is,
by the consent of physiologists, the cortex of
the brain. If they act causally, their first effect
is there, and only through innumerable neural,
muscular, and instrumental intermediaries is
that last effect which they consciously aimed
at brought to birth. Our trust in the face-value
of perception was apparently misleading.
There is no such continuity between cause-and-
215
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
effect as in our activity-experiences was made
to appear. There is disruption rather; and
what we naively assume to be continuous is
separated by causal successions of which per
ception is wholly unaware.
The logical conclusion would seem to be that
even if the kind of thing that causation is, were
revealed to us in our own activity, we should
be mistaken on the very threshold if wre sup
posed that the fact of it is there. In other
words we seem in this line of experience to start
with an illusion of place. It is as if a baby were
born at a kinetoscope-show and his first experi
ences were of the illusions of movement that
reigned in the place. The nature of movement
would indeed be revealed to him, but the real
facts of movement he would have to seek out
side. Even so our will-acts may reveal the na
ture of causation, but just where the facts of
causation are located may be a further pro
blem.1 With this further problem, philosophy
l With this cause-and-effect are in what is called a transitive rela
tion: as 'more than more is more than less,' so 'cause of cause is cause
of effect.' In a chain of causes, intermediaries can drop out. and (logi
cally at least) the relation still hold between the extreme terms, the
216
NOVELTY AND CAUSATION
leaves off comparing conceptual with percept
ual experience, and begins enquiring into
physical and psychological facts.
Perception has given us a positive idea of
causal agency but it remains to be ascertained
whether what first appears as such,
This is the
problem of is really such; whether aught else is
the relation
of mind to really such ; or finally, whether no
thing really such exists. Since with
this we are led immediately into the mind-
brain relation, and since that is such a compli
cated topic, we had better interrupt our study
of causation provisionally at the present point,
meaning to complete it when the problem of
the mind's relation to the body comes up for
review.
Our outcome so far seems therefore to be
only this, that the attempt to treat 'cause,'
Conclusion for conceptual purposes, as a sepa
rable link, has failed historically, and has led
to the denial of efficient causation, and to the
wider causal span enveloping, without altering the ' closer ' one. This
consideration may provisionally mitigate the impression of falsehood
which psychophysical criticism finds in our consciousness of activity.
The subject will come up later in more detail.
217
SOME PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
substitution for it of the bare descriptive no
tion of uniform sequence among events. Thus
intellectualist philosophy once more has had
to butcher our perceptual life in order to make
it 'comprehensible.' Meanwhile the concrete
perceptual flux, taken just as it comes, offers
in our own activity-situations perfectly com
prehensible instances of causal agency. The
transitive causation in them does not, it is
true, stick out as a separate piece of fact for
conception to fix upon. Rather does a whole
subsequent field grow continuously out of a
whole antecedent field because it seems to yield
new being of the nature called for, while the
feeling of causality-at-work flavors the entire
concrete sequence as salt flavors the water in
which it is dissolved.
If we took these experiences as the type of
what actual causation is, we should have to as
cribe to cases of causation outside of our own
life, to physical cases also, an inwardly experi
ential nature. In other words we should have to
espouse a so-called 'pan -psychic5 philosophy.
This complication, and the fact that hidden
218
NOVELTY AND CAUSATION
brain-events appear to be 'closer' effects than
those which consciousness directly aims at, lead
us to interrupt the subject here provisionally.
Our main result, up to this point, has been the
contrast between the perceptual and the intel-
lectualist treatment of it.1
1 Almost no philosopher has admitted that perception can give us
relations immediately. Relations have invariably been called the work
of ' thought,' so cause must be a 'category.' The result is well shown
in such a treatment of the subject as Mr. Shadworth Hodgson's, in his
elaborate work the Metaphysic of Experience. ' What we call conscious
activity is not a consciousness of activity in the sense of an immediate
perception of it. Try to perceive activity or effort immediately, and
you will fail; you will find nothing there to perceive ' ( i, 180). As
there is nothing there to conceive either, in the discrete manner
which Mr. Hodgson desiderates, he has to conclude that 'Causality
per se (why need it be per se ?) has no scientific or philosophic justifica
tion. . . . All cases of common-sense causality resolve themselves, on
analysis, into cases of post hoc, cum illo, evenit istud. Hence we say that
the search for causes is given up in science and philosophy, and re
placed by the search for real conditions (i. e., phenomenal antecedents
merely) and the laws of real conditioning.' It must also be recognized
that realities answering to the terms cause and causality per se are
impossible and non-existent' (ii, 374-378).
The author whose discussion most resembles my own (apart from
Bergson's, of which more later) is Prof. James Ward in his Naturalism
and Agnosticism (see the words 'activity' and 'causality' in the in
dex). Consult also the chapter on 'Mental Activity ' in G. F. Stout's
Analytic Psychology, vol. i. W. James's Pluralistic Universe, Appendix
B, may also be consulted. Some authors seem to think that we do have
an ideal conception of genuine activity which none of our experiences,
least of all personal ones, match. Hence, and not because activity is a
spurious idea altogether, are all the activities we imagine false. Mr. F.
H. Bradley seems to occupy some such position, but I am not sure.
APPENDIX
FAITH AND THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE1
'INTELLECTUALISM' is the belief that our mind
comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the
duty of ascertaining its contents; but has no power
of re-determining its character, for that is already
given.
Among intellectualists two parties may be dis
tinguished. Rationalizing intellectualists lay stress
on deductive and 'dialectic' arguments, making
large use of abstract concepts and pure logic (Hegel,
Bradley, Taylor, Royce). Empiricist intellectual
ists are more * scientific,' and think that the char
acter of the world must be sought in our sensible
experiences, and found in hypotheses based exclu
sively thereon (Clifford, Pearson).
Both sides insist that in our conclusions personal
preferences should play no part, and that no argu
ment from what ought to be to what is, is valid.
'Faith,' being the greeting of our whole nature to
a kind of world conceived as well adapted to that
nature, is forbidden, until purely intellectual evi-
1 [The following pages, part of a syllabus printed for the use of
students in an introductory course in philosophy, were found with
the MS. of this book, with the words, 'To be printed as part of the In
troduction to Philosophy,' noted thereon in the author's handwrit
ing. ED.]
APPENDIX
dence that such is the actual world has come in.
Even if evidence should eventually prove a faith
true, the truth, says Clifford, would have been
'stolen/ if assumed and acted on too soon.
Refusal to believe anything concerning which
'evidence' has not yet come in, would thus be the
rule of intellectualism. Obviously it postulates cer
tain conditions, which for aught we can see need
not necessarily apply to all the dealings of our
minds with the Universe to which they belong.
1. It postulates that to escape error is our para
mount duty. Faith may grasp truth; but also it
may not. By resisting it always, we are sure of
escaping error; and if by the same act we renounce
our chance at truth, that loss is the lesser evil, and
should be incurred.
2. It postulates that in every respect the uni
verse is finished in advance of our dealings with it;
That the knowledge of what it thus is, is best
gained by a passively receptive mind, with no
native sense of probability, or good-will towards
any special result;
That 'evidence' not only needs no good- will for
its reception; but is able, if patiently waited for, to
neutralize ill-will;
Finally, that our beliefs and our acts based there
upon, although they are parts of the world, and
222
APPENDIX
although the world without them is unfinished, are
yet such mere externalities as not to alter in any
way the significance of the rest of the world when
they are added to it.
In our dealings with many details of fact these
postulates work well. Such details exist in advance
of our opinion ; truth concerning them is often of no
pressing importance; and by believing nothing, we
escape error while we wait. But even here we often
cannot wait but must act, somehow; so we act on
the most probable hypothesis, trusting that the
event may prove us wise. Moreover, not to act on
one belief, is often equivalent to acting as if the
opposite belief were true, so inaction would not
always be as 'passive* as the intellectualists as
sume. It is one attitude of will.
Again, Philosophy and Religion have to interpret
the total character of the world, and it is by no
means clear that here the intellectualist postulates
obtain. It may be true all the while (even though
the evidence be still imperfect) that, as Paulsen
says, 'the natural order is at bottom a moral order.'
It may be true that work is still doing in the world-
process, and that in that work we are called to bear
our share. The character of the world's results may
in part depend upon our acts. Our acts may depend
on our religion, — on our not-resisting our faith-
223
APPENDIX
b*
tendencies, or on our sustaining them in spite of
'evidence' being incomplete. These faith- tenden
cies in turn are but expressions of our good-will
towards certain forms of result.
Such faith-tendencies are extremely active psy
chological forces, constantly outstripping evidence.
The following steps may be called the * faith-ladder ' :
1 . There is nothing absurd in a certain view of the
world being true, nothing self -contradictory;
2. It might have been true under certain condi
tions;
3. It may be true, even now;
4. It is fit to be true;
5. It ought to be true;
6. It must be true;
7. It shall be true, at any rate true for me.
Obviously this is no intellectual chain of infer
ences, like the sorites of the logic-books. Yet it is
a slope of good- will on which in the larger questions
of life men habitually live.
Intellectualism's proclamation that our'good-will,
our 'will to believe,' is a pure disturber of truth, is
itself an act of faith of the most arbitrary kind. It
implies the will to insist on a universe of intellectu-
alist constitution, and the willingness to stand in
the way of a pluralistic universe's success, such
success requiring the good-will and active faith,
APPENDIX
theoretical as well as practical, of all concerned, to
make it 'come true.'
Intellectualism thus contradicts itself. It is a
sufficient objection to it, that if a 'pluralistically*
organized, or 'co-operative' universe or the 'melio-
ristic' universe above, were really here, the veto
of intellectualism on letting our good- will ever have
any vote would debar us from ever admitting that
universe to be true.
Faith thus remains as one of the inalienable birth
rights of our mind. Of course it must remain a
practical, and not a dogmatic attitude. It must go
with toleration of other faiths, with the search for
the most probable, and with the full consciousness
of responsibilities and risks.
It may be regarded as a formative factor in the
universe, if we be integral parts thereof and co-
determinants, by our behavior, of what its total
character may be.
How WE ACT ON PROBABILITIES
In most emergencies we have to act on probabil
ity, and incur the risk of error.
'Probability' and 'possibility' are terms ap
plied to things of the conditions of whose coming
we are (to some degree at least) ignorant.
If we are entirely ignorant of the conditions that
225
APPENDIX
make a thing come, we call it a 'bare' possibility.
If we know that some of the conditions already
exist, it is for us in so far forth a 'grounded* pos
sibility. It is in that case probable just in propor
tion as the said conditions are numerous, and few
hindering conditions are in sight.
When the conditions are so numerous and con
fused that we can hardly follow them, we treat a
thing as probable in proportion to the frequency
with which things of that kind occur. Such fre
quency being a fraction, the probability is expressed
by a fraction. Thus, if one death in 10,000 is by
suicide, the antecedent probability of my death
being a suicide is l-10,000th. If one house in 5000
burns down annually, the probability that my house
will burn is l-5000th, etc.
Statistics show that in most kinds of thing the
frequency is pretty regular. Insurance companies
bank on this regularity, undertaking to pay (say)
5000 dollars to each man whose house burns, pro
vided he and the other house-owners each pay
enough to give the company that sum, plus some
thing more for profits and expenses.
The company, hedging on the large number of
cases it deals with, and working by the long run,
need run no risk of loss by the single fires.
The individual householder deals with his own
228
APPENDIX
single case exclusively. The probability of his house
burning is only 1-5000, but if that lot befall he
will lose everything. He has no 'long run' to go by,
if his house takes fire, and he can't hedge as the
company does, by taxing his more fortunate neigh
bors. But in this particular kind of risk, the com
pany helps him out. It translates his one chance in
5000 of a big loss, into a certain loss 5000 times
smaller, and the bargain is a fair one on both sides.
It is clearly better for the man to lose certainly, but
fractionally, than to trust to his 4999 chances of no
loss, and then have the improbable chance befall.
But for most of our emergencies there is no insur
ance company at hand, and fractional solutions are
impossible. Seldom can we act fractionally. If the
probability that a friend is waiting for you in Bos-
tion is 1-2, how should you act on that probability?
By going as far as the bridge? Better stay at home !
Or if the probability is 1-2 that your partner is a
villain, how should you act on that probability?
By treating him as a villain one day, and confiding
your money and your secrets to him the next?
That would be the worst of all solutions. In all such
cases we must act wholly for one or the other horn of
the dilemma. We must go in for the more probable
alternative as if the other one did not exist, and
suffer the full penalty if the event belie our faith.
227
APPENDIX
Now the metaphysical and religious alternatives
are largely of this kind. We have but this one life
in which to take up our attitude towards them, no
insurance company is there to cover us, and if we
are wrong, our error, even though it be not as great
as the old hell-fire theology pretended, may yet be
momentous. In such questions as that of the char
acter of the world, of life being moral in its essential
meaning, of our playing a vital part therein, etc.,
it would seem as if a certain wholeness in our faith
were necessary. To calculate the probabilities and
act fractionally, and treat life one day as a farce,
and another day as a very serious business, would
be to make the worst possible mess of it. Inaction
also often counts as action. In many issues the
inertia of one member will impede the success of
the whole as much as his opposition will. To refuse,
e. g.9 to testify against villainy, is practically to
help it to prevail.1
THE PLURALISTIC OR MELIORISTIC UNIVERSE
Finally, if the 'melioristic' universe were really
here, it would require the active good-will of all of
us, in the way of belief as well as of our other ac
tivities, to bring it to a prosperous issue.
The melioristic universe is conceived after a
1 Cf. Wm. James: The Will to Believe, etc., pp. 1-31, and 90-110.
228
APPENDIX
social analogy, as a pluralism of independent pow
ers. It will succeed just in proportion as more of
these work for its success. If none work, it will fail.
If each does his best, it will not fail. Its destiny
thus hangs on an if, or on a lot of ifs — which
amounts to saying (in the technical language of
logic) that, the world being as yet unfinished, its
total character can be expressed only by hypotheti
cal and not by categorical propositions.
(Empiricism, believing in possibilities, is willing
to formulate its universe in hypothetical proposi
tions . Rationalism, believing only in impossibili
ties and necessities, insists on the contrary on their
being categorical.)
As individual members of a pluralistic universe,
we must recognize that, even though we do our best,
the other factors also will have a voice in the result.
If they refuse to conspire, our good-will and labor
may be thrown away. No insurance company can
here cover us or save us from the risks we run in
being part of such a world.
We must take one of four attitudes in regard to
the other powers : either
1. Follow intellectualist advice: wait for evi
dence; and while waiting, do nothing; or
2. Mistrust the other powers and, sure that the
universe will fail, let it fail; or
229
APPENDIX
3. Trust them; and at any rate do our best, in
spite of the if; or, finally,
4. Flounder, spending one day in one attitude,
another day in another.
This 4th way is no systematic solution. The 2d
way spells faith in failure. The 1st way may in
practice be indistinguishable from the 2d way.
The 3d way seems the only wise way.
' // we do our best, and the other powers do their
best, the world will be perfected ' - - this proposi
tion expresses no actual fact, but only the com
plexion of a fact thought of as eventually possible.
As it stands, no conclusion can be positively de
duced from it. A conclusion would require another
premise of fact, which only we can supply. The origi
nal proposition per se has no pragmatic value whatso
ever, apart from its power to challenge our will to
produce the premise of fact required. Then indeed
the perfected world emerges as a logical conclusion,
We can create the conclusion, then. We can and
we may, as it were, jump with both feet off the
ground into or towards a world of which we trust
the other parts to meet our jump — and only so
can the making of a perfected world of the pluralis
tic pattern ever take place. Only through our pre-
cursive trust in it can it come into being.
There is no inconsistency anywhere in this, and
230
APPENDIX
no * vicious circle' unless a circle of poles holding
themselves upright by leaning on one another, or a
circle of dancers revolving by holding each other's
hands, be 'vicious.'
The faith circle is so congruous with human
nature that the only explanation of the veto that
intellectualists pass upon it must be sought in the
offensive character to them of the faiths of certain
concrete persons.
Such possibilities of offense have, however, to be
put up with on empiricist principles. The long run
of experience may weed out the more foolish faiths.
Those who held them will then have failed: but
without the wiser faiths of the others the world
could never be perfected.
(Compare G. Lowes Dickinson: "Religion, a
Criticism and a Forecast," N. Y. 1905, Introduc
tion; and chaps, iii, iv.)
INDEX
Absolute idealism, 137; defects of,
138.
Activity, intellectually incompre
hensible, 85.
Alembert, d', 114.
Al-Ghazzali, 117 note.
Anaxagoras, 11.
Anselm, St., 43 note.
Antinomies, Kant's, 160.
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 11, 12, 43.
Archimedes, 148.
Aristotle, 7, 11, 12, 24, 34, 36, 38,
53, 55 note, 65, 148, 150 note,
190.
Bakewell, C. M., 54 note, 116 note.
Baldwin, J. M., 6 note.
Bax, Belfort, 101 note.
Being, problem of, 38; various
treatments of problem of, 40;
rationalist and empiricist treat
ments, 42 ; Hegel's mediation
of with non-being, 44 ; same
amount of must be begged by
all, 45; conservation vs. crea
tion of, 45.
Bergson, 37, 91, 92, 93, 96, 97 note,
200 note, 219 note.
Berkeley, 37, 121, 122.
Bossuet, 54 note.
Bouillier, F., 116 note.
Bowne, B. P., 124 note, 205 note.
Boyle, 20, 21.
Bradley, 84, 91, 92, 93, 94, 107
note, 207, 219 note, 221.
Burnet, J., 157 note.
Cairds, the, 85.
Calderwood, H., 156 note.
Cantor, 174, 177, 182.
Carpenter, E., 214.
Cauchy, 184.
Causation, 85; Aristotle on, 190;
scholasticism on efficient, 191;
occasionalistic theory of, 194;
Leibaitzon, 195; Humeon,196;
criticism of Hume on, 198; Kant
on, 200; positivism on, 203; de
ductive theories of, 204; con
ceptual view of negates novelty,
205; defects of perceptual view
of do not warrant scepticism,
209; nature of perceptual expe
rience of, 210; ' final ' and
' efficient ' mingle in perceptual
experience, 212; perceptual,
sets a problem, 215.
Change, conceptually impossible,
87.
Clerk-Maxwell, 66.
Clifford, 221, 222.
Coleridge, 34.
Comte, A., 16.
Concatenation, unity by, 129.
Conception, a secondary process,
79; and novelty, 154.
Concepts, distinguished from per
cept, 48; discreteness of, 48; in
terpenetrate with percepts, 52;
dignity of knowledge of, 54; con
tent and function of, 58; origin
ate in utility, 63; theoretic use
of, 65; in the a priori sciences,
67; in physics, 70; bring new
values, 71 ; role of in human life,
73; secondary formations, 79;
inadequate, 81; static, 85; Brad
ley on, 92; self -sameness of , 102;
£33
INDEX
consubstantial with percepts,
107 ; designative only, 111.
Conceptual knowledge, rational
ist view of, 55; empiricist view
of, 57.
Conceptual order, the, 50; unlim
ited, 52; a topographic system,
66.
Conceptual systems, distinct
realms of reality, 101.
Conceptual translation, defects of,
78; examples of puzzles intro
duced by, 85.
Conservation vs. creation, 45.
Continuity theory, the, 155.
Cordemoy, 195.
Couturat, L., 183 note, 204 note.
Creed, the intellectualist, 75.
Cudworth, R., 54 note, 57 note.
Dalton, 20.
Delbceuf, 148, 149 note.
Democritus, 11, 34, 35, 149 note.
Descartes, 13, 20, 21, 22, 24, 36,
43 note, 148, 150 note, 194,
195.
Dewey, J., 6, 37.
Dickinson, G. Lowes, 231.
Direction, concept of, impossible
till process completed, 88.
Discontinuity theory, the, 154.
Dresser, II. W., 92 note.
Duhem, 91 note, 150 note.
Emerson, 56, 70, 72 note.
Empedocles, 11.
Empiricism, confirmed by de
fects of concepts, 98; willing to
use hypothetical, 229.
Empiricists, contrasted with ra
tionalists, 35.
Energetics, 206 note.
Evellin, 184.
Evil, problem of, 138.
Faith, vs. evidence, 221 ; — ten
dencies, 224; a practical atti
tude, 225.
Fawcett, E. D., 101 note.
Fichte, 137 note.
Frazer, J. G., 18 note.
Freedom, 139; opposed by mon
ism, 140.
Fullerton, G. M., 184 note.
Galileo, 20, 21, 22.
Green, 85.
Geulincx, 195.
Habits of thought, origins of, 16.
Hamilton, Sir W., 50 note, 194
note.
Harper, T. J., 12 note.
Harvey, 20.
Hegel, 36, 43, 48 note, 57, 91, 92,
137 note, 169, 223.
Helvetius, 55 note.
Heracleitus, 11.
Hey mans, G., 205 note.
Hibben, 81 note, 82 note.
Hobson, E. W., 184 note.
Hodgson, S. H., 51 note, 219
note.
Hume, 14, 37, 85, 121, 123, 124,
196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201,
202 note.
Huntington, E. V., 184 note.
Huygens, 20.
Huxley, 20.
Infinite, the standing, 167; prag
matic definition of, 168; the
growing, 170; must be treated
as discontinuous,17£; 'the new,'
234
INDEX
174, 175; is paradoxical, 176;
is turned into problem by con
ceptual transformation of per
ceptual experience, 185.
Infinity, 33; Kant's definition of,
160; ambiguity of his statement
of problem of, 162; Renouvier's
solution of, 164.
'Insuperability of sensation,' 79.
Intellectualism, origin of, 83; in
adequacy of, 84; rule of, 222;
self-contradictory, 225.
James, W., 37 note, 50 note, 60
note, 63 note, 96 note, 97 note,
107 note, 111 note, 112 note, 118
note, 135 note, 142 note, 219 note,
228 note.
Janet, P., 34 note.
Jastrow, J., 18 note.
Jerusalem, W., 207 note.
Jevons, F. B., 18 note.
Kant, 14, 31, 36, 37, 43 note, 51
note, 84, 85, 124, 128, 159, 161
no/6. 162, 163, 166, 170, 171,
182, 184, 200, 201, 202.
Kepler, 20.
Keyser, J. C., 184 note.
Knowledge, impossible on intel-
lectualistic basis, 86.
Laas, E., 54 note.
Lange, T. A., 37.
Laromiguiere, 50 note.
Le Bon, G., 150 nofe.
Leibnitz, 14, 36, 184, 195.
LeRoy, 91 note.
Lewes, G. H., 16 note, 19 note, 68
note, 205 note.
Liberatore, P. M., 119 note.
Locke, 13, 37, 55 note, 121, 169.
Lotze, 37, 86.
Lovejoy, A. O., 18 note.
MacDonald, D. B., 118 note.
Mach, 90 note.
Malebranche, 76 note.
Mana, 17.
Mansel, H. L., 50 note.
Mariotte, 70.
Marett, R. R., 18 note.
Marvin, 149 note.
Melioristicmmiverse, the, 228.
Metaphysical problems, exam
ples of, 27; nature of, 32.
Metaphysics, defined, 31; ration
alism and empiricism in, 34.
Michelet, 57 note.
Milhaud, 91 note.
Mill, 37, 107 note, 124 note, 192
note, 203 note, 205 note, 209,
214.
Mill, James, 55 note, 102, 107 note.
Miller, J. E., 63 note.
Monism, vs. pluralism, 113; mean
ing of, 115; kinds of,116; mysti
cal, 116; of substance, 119; as
absolute idealism, 137; defects
of, 138; advantage of, 143; and
novelty, 145.
Motion, conceptually impossible,
87.
Mulford, Prentice, 18 note.
Novelty, possibility of, 98 ; monisn i
and pluralism and, 145; pro
blem of , 147 ; perceptual, 148 ; and
science, 149; and personal expe
rience, 151; and conception,
152; and the infinite, 153; fa
vored by Renouvier's solution
of problem of infinite, 164;
problem of unaffected by new
235
INDEX
definitions of infinite, 187; and
causation, 189; negated by con
ceptual view of causation, 205;
arises in perceptual experience
of causation, 213.
Number-continuum, the, 173.
Objection, an, replied to, 109.
Occasionalism, 194.
' Omega,' 177; its value, 178.
Oneness, pragmatic analysis of,
124; kinds of, 126; coacatenated,
129; value of absolute, 136.
Ostwald, W., 71 note, 90 note, 150
note.
Paradoxes, Zeno's, 157; Russell's
solution of, 180; criticism of
Russell's solution of, 181.
Parmenides, 11, 41.
Pascal, 20, 21.
Paulsen, F., 15 note, 223.
Pearson, 90 note, 203 note, 221.
Peirce, C. S., 184 note.
Percepts, distinguished from con
cept, 48; complexity of, 49; in
terpenetrate with concepts, 52;
Bradley on, 92; consubstantial
with concepts, 107.
Personal identity, conceptually
impossible, 87.
Philosophers, attitude of, to dia
lectical difficulties, 91.
Philosophy, defined, 4, 5 ; its value,
6; its enemies, 8; first objection
to.. 9; as man thinking, 15; ' posi
tive,' 16; as sympathetic magic,
17; and science, 21; as residuum
of unanswered scientific pro
blems, 23; second objection to,
24; third, 26; as metaphysics,
27.
Plato, 7, 11,35, 36,54 note, 76, 77.
Plotinus, 118.
Pluralism, vs. monism, 113: mean
ing of, 114, 140; defects of, 142;
advantages of, 142; and novel
ty, 145.
Plutarch, 77.
Poincare, H., 91 note, 174 note,
184 note.
Porphyry, 118.
Positivism, 203.
Pragmatic Rule, the, 60; examples
of application of, 62; used in
critique of substance, 121.
'Principe du nombre,' 164.
'Principle of Causality,' the, 189,
191.
Principles, meaning of, 31.
Probabilities, how acted on, 225.
Protagoras, 34, 35.
Pyrrho, 92 note.
Pythagoras, 11, 156.
Rationalists, contrasted with em
piricists, 35.
Reality, 78; conceptual systems
distinct realms of, 101.
Regis, 197.
Relations, multiplicity of, of real
things, 89; unreality of appear
ance of, 89; of subject and predi
cate, unintelligible.. 70.
Renouvier, C., 163; solution of
problem of infinite by, 164,
165 note, 166, 172, 184, 186.
Resemblance, an illusion, 88.
Rickaby, J., 12, 119 note, 192
note.
Riehl, A., 205 note.
Romanes, J. G., 50 note.
Royce, 37, 72 note, 85, 137 note,
141 note, 184 note, 221.
236
INDEX
Russell, B., 174, 179, 180, 181,
183, 186 note.
Ruyssen, Th., 50 note.
' Same,' meaning of, 103.
Santayana, G., 54 note.
Sceptics, pyrrhonian, 91.
Schiller, F. C. S., 37, 109 note.
Schopenhauer, 26; on the origin
of the problem of being, 38, 50
note.
Science, history of, 20; as special
ized philosophy, 21; and nov
elty, 149.
Self-sameness of ideal objects, 102.
Sigwart, C., 205 note.
Silberstein, S. J., 120 note.
Socrates, 37.
Spencer, Herbert, 13, 27, 33, 42,
65 note.
Spinoza, 36, 42, 120 note, 121,
136, 137 note.
Stallo, J. B., 90 note.
Stevenson, 39.
Stewart, Prof. A. J., 55 note.
Stockl, A., 119 note.
Stout. G. F., 219 note.
Suarez, 12.
Substance, monism of, 119; cri
tique of, 121.
Sympathetic magic, the primitive
philosophy, 17.
Taine, H., 59 note.
Tannery, Paul, 157 note.
Taylor, A. E., 101 note, 223.
Thales, 11.
Thomson, J. C., 117 note.
Torricelli, 20.
'Transfinite numbers/ 177.
Unity, by concatenation, 129; of
purpose, 131; of origin, 132;
cash value of, 133; value of,
136
Values, of philosophy, 6; new,
brought by concepts, 71.
Voltaire, 20, 26.
Wallace, W., 57 note, 75 note.
Ward, J., 24 note, 219 note.
Waterton, S., 184 note.
Whewell, W., 19.
Wilbois, 91 note.
Wolff, C., 14, 31.
Zeno, 41, 88, 156, 157, 158, 159,
170, 179, 186 note.
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Some problems of philosophy
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