Metaphysics, or Metaphysic (from Gr. µeTa, after, 4'uvctca, things of nature, couaLs, i.e. the natural universe), the accepted name of one of the four great departments of philosophy. The term was first applied to one of the treatises of Aristotle on the basis of the arrangement of the Aristotelian canon made by Andronicus of Rhodes, in which it was placed " after the physical treatises" with the description ra. µeTa Ta 4 iu6etc6. The term was used not in the modern sense of above or transcending nature (a sense which µeTa cannot bear), but simply to convey the idea that the treatise so-called comes " after " the physical treatises.' It is therefore nothing more than a literary accident that the term has been applied to that department or discipline of philosophy which deals with first principles. Aristotle himself described the subject matter of the treatise as " First 1 On the true order of the Aristotelian treatises see Aristotle.
After C. Claus, Untersuch. zur Erforschung Crustaceen-Systems. FIG. 7. - Pupa of Lepas pectinata in optical section.
(I) first antenna; (6) tergum; (2) compound (7) biramous eye; feet; (3) liver; (8) carina; (4) simple eye; (9) cement (5) scutum; gland.
of Lepas (After J. Miiller.) FIG. 8. - A ventral view of a bipinnaria carrying the body of the young star-fish.
Philosophy " or " Theology," which deals with being as being (Meta ph. P. i., iiriv ir tar ] 11] OfCJpeZ 6v fi ov Kai Ta W inrapxovra Ka6' avr6). From this phrase is derived the later term " Ontology " (q.v.). The misapprehension of the significance of µera led to various mistaken uses of the term " metaphysics," e.g. for that which is concerned with the supernatural, not only by the schoolmen but even as late as 17th-century English writers, and within narrower limits the term has been dangerously ambiguous even in the hands of modern philosophers (see below). In the widest sense it may include both the " first philosophy " of Aristotle, and the theory of knowledge (in what sense can there be true knowledge?), i.e. both ontology and epistemology, and this is perhaps the most convenient use of the term; Kant, on the other hand, would represent metaphysics as being " nothing more than the inventory of all that is given us by pure reason, systematically arranged " (i.e. epistemology). The earliest "metaphysicians " concerned themselves with the nature of being (ontology), seeking for the unity which they postulated behind the multiplicity of phenomena (see Ionian School Of Philosophy and articles on the separate thinkers); later thinkers tended to inquire rather into the nature of knowledge as the necessary pre-requisite of ontological investigation. The extent to which these two attitudes have been combined or separated is discussed in the ensuing article which deals with the various schools of modern metaphysics in relation to the principles of the Aristotelian " first philosophy." l (X) I. - THE Science Of Being Side by side with psychology, the science of mind, and with logic, the science of reasoning, metaphysics is tending gradually to reassert its ancient Aristotelian position as the science of being in general. Not long ago, in England at all events, metaphysics was merged in psychology. But with the decline of dogmatic belief and the spread of religious doubt - as the special sciences also grow more general, and the natural sciences become more speculative about matter and force, evolution and teleology - men begin to wonder again about the nature and origin of things, just as it was the decay of polytheism in Greek religion and his own discoveries in natural science which impelled Aristotle to metaphysical questions. There is, however, a certain difference in the way of approaching things. Aristotle emphasized being as being, without always sufficiently asking whether the things whose existence he asserted are really knowable. We, on the contrary, mainly through the influence of Descartes, rather ask what are the things we know, and therefore, some more and some less, come to connect ontology with epistemology, and in consequence come to treat metaphysics in relation to psychology and logic, from which epistemology is an offshoot.
To this pressing question then - What is the world as we know it? - three kinds of definite answers are returned: those of materialism, idealism and realism, according to the emphasis laid by metaphysicians on body, on mind, or on both. Metaphysical materialism is the view that everything known is body or matter; but while according to ancient materialists soul is only another body, according to modern materialists mind without soul is only an attribute or function of body. Metaphysical idealism is the view that everything known is mind, or some mental state or other, which some idealists suppose to require a substantial soul, others not; while all agree that body has no different being apart from mind. Metaphysical realism is the intermediate view that everything known is either body or soul, neither of which alone exhausts the universe of being. Aristotle, the founder of metaphysics as a distinct science, was also the founder of metaphysical realism, and still remains its main authority. His view was that all things are substances, in the sense of distinct individuals, each of which has a being of its 1 The article is supplemented b y e.g. Idealism; Pragmatism; Relativity Of Knowledge, while separate discussions of ancient and medieval philosophers will be found in biographical articles and articles on the chief philosophical schools, e.g. Scholasticism; Neoplatonism.
own different from any other, whereas an attribute has only the being of its substance (Met. Z I-3; Post. An. i. 4); that bodies in nature are obviously natural substances, and as obviously not the only kind of substance; and that there is supernatural substance, e.g. God, who is an eternal, perfect, living being, thinking, but without matter, and therefore not a body.
At the present day realism is despised on the ground that its differentiation of body and soul, natural and supernatural, ignores the unity of being. Indeed, in order to oppose this unity of being to the realistic duality, both materialists and idealists describe themselves as monists, and call realists dualists by way of disparagement. But we cannot classify metaphysics by the antithesis of monism and dualism without making confusion worse confounded. Not to mention that it has led to another variety, calling itself pluralism, it confuses materialism and idealism. Extremes meet; and those who believe only in body and those who believe only in mind, have an equal right to the equivocal term " monist." Moreover, there is no real opposition between monism and dualism, for there can very well be one kind of being, without being all body or all soul; and as a matter of fact, Aristotelian realism is both a monism of substance and a dualism of body and soul.
It is in any case unfair to decide questions by disparaging terms, and to argue as if the whole choice were between materialistic or idealistic monism, leaving realism out of court. In this case it would also hide the truth of things, which requires two different kinds of substance, body and soul. The strength of materialism consists in recognizing nature without explaining it away, its weakness in its utter inability to explain consciousness either in its nature or in its origin. On the other hand, it is the virtue of idealism to emphasize the fact of consciousness, but its vice to exaggerate it, with the consequence of resorting to every kind of paradox to deny the obvious and get rid of bodies. There are in reality two species of substances, or entirely distinct things, those which are impenetrably resisting, and those which are conscious substances; and it is impossible to reduce bodies and souls to one another, because resistance is incompatible with the attributes of spirit, and consciousness inexplicable by the attributes of body. So far true metaphysics is a dualism of body and soul. But this very dualism is also monism: both bodies and souls are substances, as Aristotle said; and we can go farther than Aristotle. Men are apt to dwell too much on the co-existence and too little on the inclusiveness of substances. The fact is that many substances are often in one; e.g. many bodies in the one body, and both body and soul in the one substance, of man. So far true metaphysics is a monism of substance, in the sense that all things are substances and that all substances, however different, are members of one substance, the whole universe of body and spirit. In this case metaphysics generally will have to recognize three monisms, a materialistic monism of body, an idealistic monism of soul, and a realistic monism of substance, which is also a dualism of substances. But a term so equivocal, leading to an antithesis so misleading as that between monism and dualism, can never represent the real difference between metaphysical schools. We shall return, then, to the clearer and more authoritative division, and proceed to discuss materialism, idealism and realism in their order.
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Materialism I. Materialism Proper. - Materialism in its modern sense is the view that all we know is body, of which mind is an attribute or function. Several causes, beginning towards the end of the 18th century, gradually led up to the materialism of Moleschott, Vogt and Buchner, which flourished in the middle of the 19th century. The first cause was the rapid progress of natural science, e.g. the chemistry of Lavoisier, the zoology of Lamarck, the astronomy of Laplace and the geology of Lyell. These advances in natural science, which pointed to a unity and gradual evolution in nature, were accompanied by a growth in commerce, manufactures and industrialism; the same kind of spirit showed itself in the revolutionary upheaval of 1848, and in the materialistic publications which immediately followed, while these XVIII. 8 publications have reacted on the industrial socialism of our own time. Meanwhile, philosophic forces to counteract materialism were weak. Realism was at a low ebb. Idealism was receding for the moment. Hegelianism had made itself unpopular, and its confusion of God, nature and man had led to differences within the school itself (see Hegel).
These causes, scientific, industrial and philosophical, led to the domination of materialism in the middle of the 19th century in Germany, or rather to its revival; for in its main position, that matter and motion are everything and eternal, it was a repetition of the materialism of the i 8th century in France. Thus Karl Christoph Vogt repeated the saying of the French physician Cabanis, " The brain is determined to thought as the stomach is to digestion, or the liver to the secretion of bile," in the form, " Thought stands in the same relation to the brain as the bile to the liver or the urine to the kidneys." But the new materialism was not mere repetition. J. Moleschott (1822-1893) made a diligent use of the science of his day in his Kreislauf des Lebens (1852). Starting from Lavoisier's discoveries, he held that life is metabolism, a perpetual circulation. of matter from the inorganic to the organic world, moleschott and back again, and he urged this metabolism against the hypothesis of vital force. Aristotle had imputed to all living beings a soul, though to plants only in the sense of a vegetative, not a sensitive, activity, and in Moleschott's time many scientific men still accepted some sort of vital principle, not exactly soul, yet over and above bodily forces in organisms. Moleschott, like Lotze, not only resisted the whole hypothesis of a vital principle, but also, on the basis of Lavoisier's discovery that respiration is combustion, argued that the heat so produced is the only force developed in the organism, and that matter therefore rules man. He put the whole materialistic view of the world into the following form: Without matter no force, without force no matter. L. Buchner (q.v.) himself said that he owed to Moleschott the first impulse to composing his important Buchner. work Kraft and Stoff (1855), which became a kind of B textbook of materialism. Passing from Moleschott to Lyell's view of the evolution of the earth's crust and later to Darwin's theory of natural selection and environment, he reached the general inference that, not God but evolution of matter, is the cause of the order of the world; that life is a combination of matter which in favourable circumstances is spontaneously generated; that there is no vital principle, because all forces, non-vital and vital, are movements; that movement and evolution proceed from life to consciousness; that it is foolish for man to believe that the earth was made for him, in the face of the difficulties he encounters in inhabiting it; that there is no God, no final cause, no immortality, no freedom, no substance of the soul; and that mind, like light or heat, electricity or magnetism, or any other physical fact, is a movement of matter. Sometimes he spoke of mind as an effect of matter; but, though his expressions may be careless, nothing is to be made of the difference, for he called it movement and effect indifferently in the same context. His definitely expressed view was that psychical activity is " nothing but a radiation through the cells of the grey substance of the brain of a motion set up by external stimuli." E. Haeckel belongs to a slightly later time than the materialists hitherto mentioned. His book Die Weltriithsel (Eng. trans.
J. M`Cabe, The Riddle of the Universe) identifies tfaecdcel. substance with body. Starting like his predecessors with the indestructibility of matter, Haeckel makes more than they do of the conservation of energy, and merges the persistence of matter and energy in one universal law of substance, which, on the ground that body is subject to eternal transformation, is also' the universal law of evolution. His strong point consists in inferring the fact of evolution of some sort from the consideration of the evidence of comparative anatomy, palaeontology and embryology. On the strength of the consilience of arguments for evolution in the organic world, he carries back the process in the whole world, until he comes to a cosmology which recalls the rash hypotheses of the Presocratics.
He supposes that all organisms have developed from the simple cell, and that this has its origin by spontaneous generation, to explain which he propounds the " carbon-theory," that protoplasm comes from inorganic carbonates. He not only agrees with Laplace and Lyell about the evolution of the solar system, but also supposes that the affinities, pointed out by Lothar Meyer and Mendeleeff, between groups of chemical elements prove an evolution of these elements from a primitive matter (prothyl) consisting of homogeneous atoms. These, however, are not ultimate enough for him; he thinks that everything, ponderable and imponderable or ether, is evolved from a primitive substance, which condenses first into centres of condensation (pyknatoms), and then into masses, which when they exceed the mean consistency become ponderables, and when they fall below it become imponderables. Here he stops; according to him substance is eternal and eternally subject to the law of substance; and God is the eternal force or energy of substance. What, then, is the origin of mind or soul? Haeckel answers that it has no origin, because sensation is an inherent property of all substance. He supposes that aesthesis and tropesis, as rudimentary sensation and will, are the very causes of condensation; that they belong to pyknatoms, to ponderables and imponderables, to chemical atoms and molecules. Hence, when he returns to organisms, it does not surprise us that he assigns to ova and spermatozoa cell-souls, to the impregnated ovum germ-soul, to plants tissue-souls, to animals nerve-souls; or that he regards man's body and soul as born together in the impregnated ovum, and gradually evolved from the bodies and souls of lower animals. It appears to his imagination that the affinity of two atoms of hydrogen to one of oxygen, the attraction of the spermatozoon to the ovum, and the elective affinity of d pair of lovers are all alike due to sensation and will.
But has Haeckel solved the problems of mind ? When he applies sensation and will to nature, and through plants to the lowest animals, he considers their sensation and will to be rudimentary and unconscious. Consciousness, according to his own admission, is not found even in all animals, although it. is present not only in the highest vertebrates - men, mammals,. birds - but also in ants, spiders, the higher crabs and molluscs. He holds indeed that, in accordance with the law of substance, consciousness must be evolved from unconsciousness with the development of sense organs and a central nervous organ. At the same time he admits, firstly, that to mark the barrier between unconscious and conscious is difficult; secondly, that it is impossible to trace the first beginning of consciousness in the lower animals; and, thirdly, that " however certain we are of the fact of this natural evolution of consciousness, we are, unfortunately, not yet in a position to enter more deeply into the question " (Riddle of the Universe, 191). Thus in presence of the problem which is the crux of materialism, the origin of consciousness, he first propounds a gratuitous hypothesis that everything has mind, and then gives up the origin of conscious mind after all. He is certain, however, that the law of substance somehow proves that conscious soul is a mere function of brain, that soul is a function of all substances, and that God is the force or energy, or soul or spirit, of nature. He, in fact, returns to ancient hylozoism, which has tended to revive from time to time in the history of thought. He believes that mind and soul are inherent attributes of all bodies. Curiously enough, he supposes that by making mind a universal attribute of matter he has made his philosophy not materialism, but monism. It is really both: monistic, because it reduces substance to one kind; materialistic, because it identifies that one kind of substance with body or matter, and reduces mindto an attribute of matter. It makes no difference to attribute mind to all matter, so long as it is attributed as an attribute. It is at least as materialistic to say that unconscious mind is an attribute of nature as to say that conscious mind is an attribute of brain; and this is the position of Haeckel. Materialists seem to dread the word " materialism." Buchner also entreats us " to abandon the word ` materialism,' to which (it is not clear why) a. certain scientific odium attaches, and substitute ` monism ' for it " (Last Words on Materialism, 273). His reason, however, is different: it is that a philosophy, not of matter as such, but of the unity of force and matter, is not materialism. But if a philosophy makes force an attribute of matter only, as his does, it will recognize nothing but matter possessing force, and will therefore be materialism as well as monism, and in short materialistic monism. The point is that neither Buchner nor Haeckel could on their assumptions recognize any force but force of body, or any mind but mind of body, or any distinct thing or substance except body. This is materialism.
2. Materialistic Tendencies. - Besides these direct instances of materialism, there are philosophers to whom the scientific tendencies of the age have given a materialistic tendency. In Germany, for example, Eugen Diihring (q.v.) was a realist, whose intention is to prove against Kant a knowledge of the thing in itself by attributing time, space and categories generally to the real world. But, under the influence of Trendelenburg's attempt to reconcile thought and being by assigning motion to both, his Wirklichkeitsphilosophie, in a similar effort after a unity of being, lands him in the contention that matter is absolute being, the support of all reality underlying all bodily and mental states. So Avenarius (q.v.) was no materialist, but only an empiricist anxious to reclaim man's natural view of the world from philosophic incrustations; yet when his Empiriokriticismus ends in nothing but environment, nervous system, and statements dependent on them, without soul, though within experience, he comes near to materialism, as Wundt has remarked. In France, again, positivism is not materialism, but rather the refusal to frame a metaphysical theory. Comte tells us that man first gets over theology, then over metaphysics, and finally rests in positivism. Yet in getting over theology he ceases to believe in God, and in getting over metaphysics he ceases to believe in soul. As Paul Janet truly remarked, positivism contains an unconscious metaphysics in rejecting final causes and an immaterial soul. Now, when in surrendering theology and metaphysics we have also to surrender God and the soul, we are not free from materialism. Positivism, however, shelters itself behind the vague word " phenomena." Lastly, in England we have not only an influence of positivism, but also, what is more important, the synthetic philosophy of Herbert Spencer. The point of this philosophy is not materialism, but realism. The author himself says that it is transfigured realism - which is realism in asserting objective existence as separate from subjective existence, but anti-realism in denying that objective existence is to be known. In his Principles of Psychology he twice quotes his point that " what we are conscious of as properties of matter, even down to its weight and resistance, are but subjective affections produced by objective agencies which are unknown and unknowable." This then is his transfigured realism, which, as far as what is known goes, is idealism, but as far as what exists goes, realism - of a sort. His First Principles, his book on metaphysics, is founded on this same point, that what we know is phenomena produced by an unknown noumenal power. He himself identifies phenomenon, appearance, effect or impression produced on consciousness through any of the senses. He divides phenomena into impressions and ideas, vivid and faint, object and subject, non-ego and ego, outer and inner, physical and psychical, matter and spirit; all of which are expressions of the same antithesis among phenomena. He holds that all the time, space, motion, matter known to us are phenomena; and that force, the ultimate of ultimates, is, as known to us, a phenomenon, " an affection of consciousness." If so, then all we know is these phenomena, affections of consciousness, subjective affections, but produced by an unknown power. So far as this main point of transfigured realism is steadily maintained, it is a compound of idealism and realism, but not materialism. But it is not maintained, on the side either of phenomena or of noumena; and hence its tendency to materialism.
In the first place, the term " phenomenon " is ambiguous, sometimes meaning a conscious affection and sometimes any fact whatever. Spencer sets himself to find the laws of all phenomena. He finds that throughout the universe there is an unceasing redistribution of matter and motion, and that this redistribution constitutes evolution when there is a predominant integration of matter and dissipation of motion, and constitutes dissolution where there is a predominant absorption of motion and disintegration of matter. He supposes that evolution is primarily integration, from the incoherent to the coherent, exemplified in the solar nebula evolving into the solar system; secondly differentiation, from the more homogeneous to the more heterogeneous, exemplified by the solar system evolving into different bodies; thirdly determination, from the indefinite to the definite, exemplified by the solar system with different bodies evolving into an order. He supposes that this evolution does not remain cosmic, but becomes organic. In accordance with Lamarck's hypothesis, he supposes an evolution of organisms by hereditary adaptation to the environment (which he considers necessary to natural selection), and even the possibility of an evolution of life, which, according to him, is the continuous adjustment of internal to external relations. Next, he supposes that mind obeys the same law of evolution, and exemplifies integration by generalization, differentiation by the development of the five senses, and determination by the development of the order of consciousness. He holds that we pass without break from the phenomena of bodily life to the phenomena of mental life, that consciousness arises in the course of the living being's adaptation to its environment, and that there is a continuous evolution from reflex action through instinct and memory up to reason. He throws out the brilliant suggestion that the experience of the race is in a sense inherited by the individual; which is true in the sense that animal organisms become hereditarily better adapted to perform mental operations, though no proof that any elements of knowledge become a priori.
Now, Spencer has clearly, though unconsciously, changed the meaning of the term " phenomenon " from subjective affection of consciousness to any fact of nature, in regarding all this evolution, cosmic, organic, mental, social and ethical, as an evolution of phenomena. The greater part of the process is a change in the facts of nature before consciousness; and in all that part, at all events, the phenomena evolved must mean physical facts which are not conscious affections, but, as they develop, are causes which gradually produce life and consciousness. Moreover, evolution is defined. universally as an " integration of matter and dissipation of motion," and yet mental, social and moral developments are also called evolution, so that, in accordance with the definition, they are also integrations of matter and dissipations of motion. It is true that the author did not see that he was passing from transfigured realism into materialism. He thinks that he is always speaking of phenomena in the sense of subjective affections; and in spite of his definition, he half unconsciously changes the meaning of evolution from a change in matter and motion, first into a change in states of consciousness, then to a change in social institutions, and finally into a change in moral motives. He also admits himself that mental evolution exemplifies integration of matter and dissipation of motion only indirectly. But here he becomes hopelessly inconsistent, because he had already said, in defining it, that " evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion " (First Principles, § 145). However, with all the author's disclaimers, the general effect left on the reader's mind is that throughout the universe there is an unceasing change of matter and motion, that evolution is always such a change, that it begins with phenomena in the sense of physical facts, gradually issues in life and consciousness, and ends with phenomena in the sense of subjective affections of consciousness.
In the second place, having declared the noumenal power, which causes phenomena, or conscious affections, to be unknowable, and having left anybody who pleased to make it a god and an object of religion, he proceeds to describe it as if it were known force, and known in two respects as persistent and as resistant force. He supposes that the law of evolution is deducible from the law of persistent force, and includes in force what is now called energy. Then having discussed force as something thoroughly material, and laying special emphasis on resistance, he tells us that " the force of which we assert persistence is that Absolute Force of which we are indefinitely conscious as the necessary correlate of the force we know " (First Principles, § 62). Similarly, both in First Principles and in the Principles of Psychology, he assigns to us, in addition to our definite consciousness of our subjective affections, an indefinite consciousness of something out of consciousness, of something which resists, of objective existence. Thus it turns out that the objective agency, the noumenal power, the absolute force, declared unknown and unknowable, is known after all to exist, persist, resist and cause our subjective affections or phenomena, yet not to think or to will. Such a noumenon looks very like body or matter. Lastly, when a theory of the world supposes a noumenal power, a resistent and persistent force, which results in an evolution, defined as an integration of matter and a dissipation of motion, which having resulted in inorganic nature and organic nature, further results without break in consciousness, reason, society and morals, then such a theory will be construed as materialistically as that of Haeckel by the reader, whatever the intention of the author.
It may be urged in reply that the synthetic philosophy could be made consistent by transferring the knowable resistance and persistence of the unknowable noumenon to knowable phenomena on the one hand, and on the other hand by maintaining that all phenomena from the original nebula to the rise of consciousness are only ` 0 impressions produced on consciousness through any of the senses," after all. But in that case what will become of Spencer's theory of evolution? It will have asserted the evolution of man and his consciousness out of the phenomena of his consciousness. The truth is that his theory of evolution can be carried through the whole process without a break, only by giving the synthetic philosophy a materialistic interpretation, and by adhering consistently to [[[Metaphysical Idealism]] Spencer's own materialistic definition of evolution; otherwise there will be a break at least between life and mind. If everything knowable is an example of evolution, and evolution is by definition a transformation of matter and motion, then everything knowable is an example of a transformation of matter and motion. As an exponent of universal evolution Haeckel is more consistent than Spencer.
Huxley (1825-1895) developed views very like those of Spencer, and similarly materialistic without being materialism, because inconsistent. He regarded everything known as evolved from matter, and reduced consciousness to a mere collateral product (` ` epiphenomenon ") of cerebral operations without any power of influencing them. Matter, according to him, impresses the afferent nervous system, this the brain, this the efferent nervous system, while consciousness remains a mere spectator. " In man, as in brutes," said he, " there is no proof that any state of consciousness is the cause of change in the nature of the matter of the organism "; so that " we are conscious automata." But, in spite of these materialistic tendencies, he followed Hume in reducing matter and everything knowable to phenomena of consciousness; and, supposing that nothing is knowable beyond phenomena, concluded that we can neither affirm nor deny that anything exists beyond, but ought to take up an attitude which the ancient sceptics called Aphasia, but he dubbed by the new name of Agnosticism. Thus Huxley first reduced consciousness to a product of matter, and then matter to a phenomenon of consciousness. By combining materialism with idealism he made consciousness a product of itself. Tyndall (5820- Tyndall . 1893), again, came still nearer to materialism, and yet avoided it. In his Belfast address (1874), while admitting that matter as understood by Democritus is insufficient, because atoms without sensation cannot be imagined to produce sensation, he contended, nevertheless, that matter properly understood is " the promise and potency of all terrestrial life." In thus endowing all matter with sensation like Haeckel he was not avoiding materialism. But in the very same address, as well as on other occasions, he did not identify mind with matter, but regarded them as concomitant.
All these materialistic tendencies seem to have one explanation. They emanate from scientific writers who rightly try to rise from science to metaphysics, but, as Bacon says, build a universal philosophy on a few experiments. The study of evolution, without considering how many conditions are required for " the integration of matter and the dissipation of motion " to begin, and the undoubted discoveries which have resulted from the study of inorganic and organic evolution, have led men to expect too much from this one law of Nature. This tendency especially prevails in biology, which is so far off the general principles of natural philosophy that its votaries are often ignorant of the real nature of body as matter and force. The close dependency of all mental operations on brain also tempts them to the conclusion that brain is not only an organ, but the whole organ of conscious mind.' It appears also that Darwin, having extended his theory of evolution as far as the rational and moral nature of man, in the Descent of Man, ended in his Autobiography by declaring his attitude to first and final causes to be that of an agnostic. Not that he was a materialist, and shortly before his death, in a conversation with Buchner, he maintained his agnosticism against his opponent's atheism. Still, his agnosticism meant that, though he did not assert that there is no God, he did assert that we cannot know whether there is or is not. To the evolutionary biologist brain is apt to appear to be the crowning object of knowledge. On the other hand, scientific men, such as Herschel, Maxwell and Stokes, who approach nature from mathematics and mechanics, and therefore from the universal laws of motion, have the opposite tendency, because they perceive that nature is not its own explanation. In order to exert force, or at all events that force of reciprocal pressure which we best understand, and on which, in impact, the third law of motion was founded, there are always at least two bodies, enduring, triply extended, mobile, each inert, mutually impenetrable or resistent, different yet similar; and in order to have produced any effect but equilibrium, some bodies must at some time have differed either in mass or in velocity, otherwise forces would only have neutralized one another. Why do bodies exist, with all these conditions, so similar yet different - that is, in so harmonious an order? Natural science has no answer: natural theology has an answer. This essence of bodies, this resemblance in difference, this prevailing ' Cf. H. Maudesley, Lessons of Materialism (1879).
order of Nature, is the deepest proof of God; and it cannot be the result of evolution, because it is the condition of natural force, and therefore of natural evolution. A second argument for God is the prevailing goodness or adaptation of Nature to the ends of conscious beings, which might conceivably be explained by Lamarckian evolution, but has not yet been so explained, and if it were, would not be inconsistent with a divine design in evolution. Further, the very existence of conscious beings is the best proof of the distinct or substantial being of the soul, existing in man with body, in God as pure spirit. It seems hopeless to expect that natural science, even with the aid of evolution, can explain by mere body the origin and nature of this fact of consciousness. If so, materialism is not the whole truth of metaphysics.
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THE Rise Of Metaphysical Idealism I. Descartes to Leibnitz. - Metaphysical arises from psychological idealism, and always retains more or less of an epistemological character. Psychological idealism assumes without proof that we perceive nothing but mental objects, and metaphysical idealism draws the logical but hypothetical conclusion that all we can know from these mental objects of sense is mental objects of knowledge. But at first this logical conclusion was not drawn. Descartes, the founder of psychological idealism, having proceeded from the conscious fact, cogito ergo sum, to the non sequitur that I am a soul, and all a soul can perceive is its ideas, nevertheless went on to the further illogical conclusion that from these mental ideas I can (by the grace of God) infer things which are extended substances or bodies, as well as thinking substances or souls. He was a psychological idealist and a metaphysical realist. This illogicality could not last. Even the Cartesian school, as it came more and more to feel the difficulty of explaining the interaction of body and mind, and, indeed, any efficient causation whatever, gradually tended to the hypothesis that the real cause is God, who, on the occasion of changes in body, causes corresponding changes in mind, and vice versa. This occasionalism is not idealism, but its emphasis on the will of God gave it an idealistic tendency. Thereupon Spinoza advanced a pantheism which supposed that bodies and souls are not, as Descartes thought, different substances, but merely attributes - the one the extension and the other the thought of one substance, Nature or God. Taking the Aristotelian theory that a substance is a thing in Spinoza. itself, not in Aristotle's sense of any individual existing differently from anything else, but in the novel meaning of something existing alone, he concluded, logically enough from this mere misunderstanding, that there can be only one substance, and that, as no finite body or soul can exist alone, everything finite is merely a mode of one of the attributes of the one infinite substance which alone can exist by itself. Spinozism, however, though it tramples down the barrier between body and soul, is not yet metaphysical idealism, because it does not reduce extension to thought, but only says that the same substance is at once extended and thinking - a position more akin to materialism. At the same time Spinoza maintained a parallelism between extension and thinking so close as to say that the order of ideas is the same as the order of things, so that any mode of extension and the idea of it are the same thing expressed in two ways, under the attribute of extension and under the attribute of thought (see H. H. Joachim's Study of the Ethics of Spinoza, 1901, p. 72). It remained, however, for Schelling to convert this parallelism into identity by identifying motion with the intelligence of God, and so to transform the pantheism of Spinoza into pantheistic idealism. Leibnitz, again, having become equally dissatisfied with Cartesianism, Spinozism and the Epicurean realism of Gassendi, in the latter part of his life came still nearer than Spinoza to metaphysical idealism in his monadology, or half-Pythagorean,half-Brunistic analysis of bodies into monads, or units, or simple substances, indivisible and unextended, but endowed with perception and appetite.
He gradually fell under the dominion of two false assumptions. On the one hand, essentially a mathematician, he supposed that ] unity is indivisibility, whereas everything known to be one is merely undivided or individual, and that there must be simple because there are compound substances, although composition only requires simpler or relatively simple elements. On the other hand, under the influence of the mechanics of his day, which had hardly distinguished between inertia, or the inability of a body to change itself, and resistance or the ability of bodies to oppose one another, he concluded that, as inertia is passive, so is resistance, and refused to recognize that in collision the mutual resistance of moving bodies is a force, or active power, of changing their movements in opposite directions. From these two arbitrary hypotheses about corporeal motion, that it requires indivisibly simple elements, and that it offers only passive resistance, he concluded that behind bodies there must be units, or monads, which would be at once substantial, simple, indivisible and active. He further supposed that the monads are " incorporeal automata," not interacting like bodies, but each perceiving what was passing in the other, and acting in consequence by appetite, or self-acting. Such mentally endowed substances might be called souls; but, as he distinguished between perception and apperception or consciousness, and considered that perceptions are often unconscious, he preferred to divide monads into unconscious entelechies of inorganic bodies, sentient souls of animals, and rational souls, or spirits, of men; while he further concluded that all these are derivative monads created by God, the monad of monads. All derivative monads, he allowed, are accompanied by bodies, which, however, are composed of other monads dominated by a central monad. Further, he explained the old Cartesian difficulty of the relation of body and mind by transforming the Spinozistic parallelism of extension and thought into a parallelism between the motions of bodies and the perceptions of their monads; motions always proceeding from motions, and perceptions from perceptions; bodies acting according to efficient causes, and souls according to final causes by appetition, and as if one influenced the other without actually doing so. Finally, he explained the concomitance of these two series, as well as that between the perceptions of different monads, by supposing a pre-established harmony ordained by the primitive monad, God.
Up to this point, then, Leibnitz opened one of the chief avenues to metaphysical idealism, the resolution of the material into the immaterial, the analysis of bodies into mental elements. His theory of bodies involved an idealistic analysis neither into bodily atoms nor into mathematical units, but into mentally endowed simple substances. There remained, however, his theory of the nature of bodies; and here he hesitated between two alternatives. According to one alternative, which consistently flowed from the psychological idealism of Descartes, as well as from his own monadism, he suggested that bodies are real phenomena; phenomena, because they are aggregates of monads, which derive their unity only from appearing together to our perceptions; real phenomena well founded, because they result from real monads. In support of this view, he said that bodies are not substances, though substantiata; that their apparent motion and resistance are results of the passions of their monads; that their primary matter is nothing but passive power of their monads; that the series of efficient causes between them is merely phenomenal. According to this alternative, then, there is nothing but mental monads and mental phenomena; and Leibnitz is a metaphysical idealist. According to the other alternative, however, he suggested that at least organic bodies are compound or corporeal substances, which are not phenomena; but something realizing or rather substantializing phenomena, and not mere aggregates of monads, but something substantial beyond their monads, because an organic body, though composed of monads, has a real unity (unio realis). From this point of view he believed that the real unity of a body is a vinculum substantiale, which gives it its real continuity and is the principle of its actions; that its primary matter is its own principle of resistance; and that it has not only this passive, but also an active, power of its own. He suggested that this theory of the substantial unity of a body might explain transubstantiation, by supposing that, while the monads and phenomena of bread remain, the vinculum substantiale of the body of Christ is substituted. He feared also whether we can explain the mystery of the Incarnation, and other things, unless real bonds or unions are added to monads and phenomena. According to this alternative, these organic bodies are compound or corporeal substances, between monads and phenomena; and Leibnitz is a metaphysical realist. He was held to this belief in the substantiality of bodies by his Christianity, by the influence of Aristotle, of scholasticism and of Cartesianism, as well as by his own mechanics. But the strange thing is that at the very end of his life and at the very same time, in 1714-1716, he was writing the idealistic alternative to Remond de Montmort and Dangicourt, and the realistic alternative to Father des Bosses. He must have died in doubt. We cannot, therefore, agree with many recent idealists who regard Leibnitz as one of themselves, though it is true that, when stripped of its realism, his metaphysics easily passed into the metaphysical idealisms of Lotze and of Fechner. It is true, also, that on its idealistic side the philosophy of Leibnitz is the source of many current views of panpsychism, of psychophysical parallelism as well as of the. phenomenalism of bodies, and of the analysis of bodies into mental elements.
2. Locke to Hume. - Meanwhile in England, Locke, though differing from Descartes about the origin of ideas, followed him in the illogical combination of psychological idealism with metaphysical realism. He thought that we perceive nothing but ideas both of primary and of secondary qualities, and yet that somehow we are able to infer that, while our ideas of secondary qualities are not, those of primary qualities are, like the real qualities of external things. Berkeley saw the inconsistency of this position, and, in asserting that all we perceive and all we know is nothing but ideas in " mind, spirit, soul, or myself," has the merit of having made, as Paulsen remarks, " epistemological idealism the basis of metaphysical idealism." According to him, a body such as the sun is my idea, your idea, ideas of other minds, and always an idea of God's mind; and when we have sensible ideas of the sun, what causes them to arise in our different minds is no single physical substance, the sun, but the will of God's spirit. Hume saw that in making all the objects of perception ideas Berkeley had given as little reason for inferring substantial souls as substantial bodies. He therefore concluded that all we know from the data of psychological idealism is impressions or sensations, ideas, and associations of ideas, making us believe without proof in substances and causes, together with " a certain unknown, inexplicable something as the cause of our preceptions." We have here, in this sceptical idealism, the source of the characteristically English form of idealism still to be read in the writings of Mill and Spencer, and still the starting-point of more recent works, such as Pearson's Grammar of Science and James's Principles of Psychology. 3. Kant and Fichte. - Lastly, in Germany, partly influenced by Leibnitz and partly roused by Hume, Kant elaborated his transcendental or critical idealism, which if not, as he thought, the prolegomena to all future metaphysics, is still the starting-point of most metaphysical idealists. Kantism consists of four main positions, which it will be well to lay out, as follows: a. As to the origin of knowledge, Kant's position is that sense, outer and inner, affected by things in themselves, receives mere sensations or sensible ideas (Vorstellungen) as the matter which sense itself places in the a priori forms of space and time; that thereupon understanding, by means of the synthetic unity of apperception, " I think " - an act of spontaneity beyond sense, in all consciousness one and the same, and combining all my ideas as mine in one universal consciousness - and under a priori categories, or fundamental notions, such as substance and attribute, cause and effect, &c., unites groups of sensations or sensible ideas into objects and events, e.g. a house, one ball moving another; and that, accordingly, perception and experience, requiring both sense and understanding, are partly a posteriori and partly a priori, and constitute a knowledge of objects which, being sensations combined by synthetic unity under a priori forms, are more than mere sensations, but less than things in themselves. This first position is psychological idealism in a new form and supported by new reasons; for, if experience derives its matter from mental sensations and its form from mental synthesis of sensations, it can apprehend nothing but mental objects of sense, which, according to Kant, are sensible ideas having no existence outside our thought, not things in themselves; or phenomena, not noumena. b. As to the known world, Kant's position was the logical deduction that from such phenomena of experience all we can know by logical reason is similar phenomena of actual or possible experience; and therefore that the known world, whether bodily or mental, is not a Cartesian world of bodies and souls, nor a Spinozistic world of one substance, nor a Leibnitzian world of monadic substances [[[Metaphysical Idealism]] created by God, but a world of sensations, such as Hume supposed, only combined, not by association, but by synthetic understanding into phenomenal objects of experience, which are phenomenal substances and causes - a world of phenomena not noumena. This second position is a new form of metaphysical idealism, containing the supposition, which lies at the foundation of later German philosophy, that since understanding shapes the objects out of sensations, and since nature, as we know it, consists of such objects, " understanding, though it does not make, shapes nature," as well as our knowledge. Known nature is a mental construction in part, according to Kant.
c. As to existence, Kant's position is the wholly illogical one that, though all known things are phenomena, there are things in themselves, or noumena; things which are said to cause sensations of outer sense and to receive sensations of inner sense, though they are beyond the category of causality which is defined as one of the notions uniting phenomena; and things which are assumed to exist and have these causal attributes, though declared unknowable by any logical use of reason, because logical reason is limited by the mental matter and form of experience to phenomena; and all this according to Kant himself. This third position isarelic of ancient metaphysical realism; although it must be remembered that Kant does not go to the length of Descartes and Locke, who supposed that from mere ideas we could know bodies and souls, but suggests that beneath the phenomena of outer and inner sense the thing in itself may not be heterogeneous (ungleichartig). In this form we shall find the thing in itself revived by A. Riehl.
d. As to the use of reason beyond knowledge, Kant's position is that, in spite of its logical inability to transcend phenomena, reason in its pure, or a priori use, contains necessary a priori " ideals " (Ideen), and practical reason, in order to account for moral responsibility, frames postulates of the existence of things in themselves, or noumena, corresponding to these " ideals "; postulates of a real free-will to practise morality, of a real immortality of soul to perfect it, and of a real God to crown it with happiness.
The fourth position is the coping-stone of Kant's metaphysics. It is quite inconsistent with its foundation and structure. Kant first deduced that from the experience of mental phenomena all logical use of reason is limited to mental phenomena, and then maintained that to explain moral responsibility practical reason postulates the existence of real noumena. But what is a postulate of practical reason to explain moral responsibility except a logical use of reason ? Nevertheless, in his own mind Kant's whole speculative and practical philosophy was meant to form one system. In the preface to the second edition of the Kritik he says that it was necessary to limit speculative reason to a knowledge of phenomena, in order to allow practical reason to proceed from morality to the assumption of God, freedom, and immortality, existing beyond phenomena: " Ich musste also das Wissen aufheben, urn zum Glauben Platz zu machen." He forgot that he had also limited all logical use of reason, and therefore of practical reason, to phenomena, and thereby undermined the rationality not only of knowledge, but also of faith.
Fichte now set himself in the Wissenschaftslehre (1794) to make transcendental idealism into a system of metaphysical idealism without Kant's inconsistencies and relics of realism.
F His point was that there are no things in themselves different from minds or acting on them; that man is no product of things; nor does his thinking arise from passive sensations caused by things; nor is the end of his existence attainable in a world of things; but that he is the absolute free activity constructing his own world, which is only his own determination, his self-imposed limit, and means to his duty which allies him with God. In order to prove this novel conclusion he started afresh from the Cartesian " I think " in the Kantian form of the synthetic unity of apperception acting by a priori categories; but instead of allowing, with all previous metaphysicians, that the Ego passively receives sensations from something different, and not contenting himself with Kant's view that the Ego, by synthetically combining the matter of sensations with a priori forms, partially constructs objects, and therefore Nature as we know it, he boldly asserted that the Ego, in its synthetic unity, entirely constructs things; that its act of spontaneity is not mere synthesis of passive sensations, but construction of sensations into an object within itself; and that therefore understanding makes as well as shapes Nature.
This construction, or self-determination, is what Fichte called positing (setzen). According to him, the Ego posits first itself (thesis); secondly, the non-Ego, the other, opposite to itself (antithesis); and, thirdly, this non-Ego within itself (synthesis), so that all reality is in consciousness. But, he added, as the Ego is not conscious of this self-determining activity, but forgets itself, the non-Ego seems to be something independent, a foreign limit, a thing in itself, or per se. Hence it is the office of the theory of knowledge to show that the Ego posits the thing per se as only existing for itself, a noumenon in the sense of a product of its own thinking. Further, according to Fichte, on the one hand the Ego posits itself as determined through the non-Ego - no object, no subject; this is the principal fact about theoretical reason; on the other hand, the Ego posits itself as determining the non-Ego - no subject, no object; this is the principal fact about practical reason. Hence he united theoretical and practical reason, which Kant had separated, and both with will, which Kant had distinguished; for he held that the Ego, in positing the non-Ego, posits both its own limit and its own means to the end, duty, by its activity of thinking which requires will. The conclusion of his epistemology is that we start with ourselves positing subjective sensations - e.g. sweet, red - and refer them as accidents to matter in space, which, though mental, is objective, because its production is grounded on a law of all reason. The metaphysics resulting from this epistemology is that the socalled thing in itself is not a cause of our sensations, but a product of one's own thinking, a determination of the Ego, a thing known to the Ego which constructs it. Fichte thus transformed the transcendental idealism of Kant by identifying the thing with the object, and by interpreting noumenon, not in Kant's sense of something which speculative reason conceives and practical reason postulates to exist in accordance with the idea, but in the new meaning of a thought, a product of reason. This change led to another. Kant had said that the synthetic unity " I think " is in all consciousness one and the same, meaning that I am always present to all my ideas. Fichte transformed this unity of the conscious self into a unity of all conscious selves, or a common consciousness; and this change enabled him to explain the unity of anything produced by the Ego by contending that it is not the different objects of different thinkers, but the one object of a pure Ego or consciousness common to them all. According to Kant, the ob j ective is valid for all consciousnesses; according to Fichte it is valid for one consciousness. Here he was for the first time grappling with a fundamental difficulty in metaphysical idealism which is absent from realism, namely, the difficulty of explaining the identity of a thing, e.g. the sun. As long as even the meagre realism of the Kantian thing in itself is maintained, the account of there being one sun is simply that one thing causes different phenomena in different minds. But as soon as the thing in itself is converted into something mental, metaphysical idealists must either say that there are as many suns as minds, or that there is one mind and therefore one sun. The former was the alternative of Berkeley, the latter of Fichte.
Thus the complete metaphysical idealism of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre formed out of the incomplete metaphysical idealism of Kant's Kritik, is the theor y on its epistemological side that the Ego posits the non-Ego as a thing in itself, and yet as only a thing existing for it as its own noumenon, and on its metaphysical side that in consequence all reality is the Ego and its own determinations, which are objective, or valid for all, as determinations, not of you or of me, but of the consciousness common to all of us, the pure or absolute Ego. Lastly, Fichte called this system realism, in so far as it posits the thing in itself as another thing; idealism, in so far as it posits it as a noumenon which is a product of its own thinking; and on the whole real idealism or ideal realism.
God does not seem to find much place in the Wissenschaftslehre, where mankind is the absolute and nature mankind's product, and where God neither could be an absolute Ego which posits objects in the non-Ego to infinity without ever completing the process, nor could be even known to exist apart from the moral order which is man's destination. Hence in his Philosophical Journal in 1798 Fichte prefaced a sceptical essay of Forberg by an essay of his own, in which he used the famous words, " The living moral order is God; we need no other God, and can comprehend no other." Having, however, in consequence, lost his professorship at Jena, he gradually altered his views, until at length he decided that God is not mere moral order, but also reason and will, yet without consciousness and personality; that not mankind but God is the absolute; that we are only its direct manifestations, free but finite spirits destined by God to posit in ourselves Nature as the material of duty, but blessed when we relapse into the absolute; that Nature, therefore, is the direct manifestation of man, and only the indirect manifestation of God; and, finally, that being is the divine idea or life, which is the reality behind appearances. In this extension of metaphysical idealism he was influenced by his disciple, Schelling. Nevertheless, he refused to go as far as Schelling, and could not bring himself to identify either man or nature with Absolute God. He wanted to believe in the absolute without sacrificing personality and freedom. God determines man, and man determines Nature: this is the final outcome of Fichte's pure idealism.
NOUIMIENAL IDEALISM] |
Fichte completed the process from psychological and epistemological to metaphysical idealism, which it has been necessary to recall from its beginnings in France, England and Germany, in order to understand modern idealism. The assertion of absolute substance by Spinoza incited Schelling and Hegel. The analysis of bodies into immaterial elements by Leibnitz incited Lotze. The Spinozistic parallelism of extension and thought, and the Leibnitzian parallelism of bodily motion and mental action, incited Schelling and Fechner. Berkeley and Hume produced the English idealism of Mill and Spencer, with their successors, and occasioned the German idealism of Kant. Kant's a priori synthesis of sensations into experience lies at the root of all German idealism. But Fichte was the most fertile of all. He carried metaphysical idealism to its height, by not only resolving the bodily into the mental, but also elevating the action of mind into absolute mental construction; not inferring things in themselves beyond, but originating things from within, mind itself. By changing the meaning of "noumenon " from the thing apprehended (voouµevov) to the thought (vOnya), and in the hypothesis of a common consciousness, he started the view that a thing is not yours or my thought, but a common thought of all mankind, and led to the wider view of Schelling and Hegel that the world is an absolute thought of infinite mind. In making the essence of mind activity and construction, in destroying the separation of theoretical and practical reason, in asserting that mind thinks things as means to ends of the will, he prepared the way for Schopenhauer and other voluntarists. In making the essence of the Absolute not mere reason, but will, action and life, he anticipated Lotze. In reducing the thing in itself to a thought he projected the neo-Kantism of Lange and Cohen. In the doctrine - no object, no subject - no subject, no object - that is, in the utter identification of things with objects of subjects, he anticipated not only Schelling and Hegel, but also Schuppe and Wundt with their congeners. In expanding Kant's act of synthesis till it absorbed the inner sense and the innermost soul, he started the modern paradox that soul is not substance, but subject or activity, a paradox which has been gradually handed down from Schelling and Hegel to Fechner, and from Fechner to Paulsen and Wundt. Meanwhile, through holding with Kant that man is not God, but a free spirit, whose destiny it is to use his intelligence as a means to his duty, he is still the resort of many who vindicate man's independence, freedom, conscience, and power of using nature for his moral purposes, e.g. of Eucken and Miinsterberg (qq.v.). Kant and Fichte together became the most potent philosophic influences on European thought in the 19th century, because their emphasis was on man. They made man believe in himself and his mission. They fostered liberty and reform, and even radicalism. They almost avenged man on the astronomers, who had shown that the world is not made for earth, and therefore not for man. Kant half asserted, and Fichte wholly, that Nature is man's own construction. The Kritik and the Wissenschaftslehre belonged to the revolutionary epoch of the " Rights of Man," and produced as great a revolution in thought as the French Revolution did in fact. Instead of the old belief that God made the world for man, philosophers began to fall into the pleasing dream, I am everything, and everything is I - and even I am God.
4. - Noumenal Idealism In Germany Noumenal idealism is the metaphysics of those who suppose that all known things are indeed mental, but not all are phenomenal in the Kantian sense, because a noumenon is knowable so long as by a noumenon we mean some mental being or other which we somehow can discover beyond phenomena. The noumenal idealists of Germany assumed, like all psychological idealists, the unproved hypothesis that there is no sense of body, but there is a sense of sensations; and they usually accepted Kant's point, that to get from such sensations to knowledge there is a synthesis contributing mental elements beyond the mental data of sense. They saw also the logic of Kant's deduction, that all we can know from such mental data and mental categories must also be mental. This was the starting-point of their metaphysical idealism. But they disagreed with Kant, and agreed with Fichte about things in themselves or noumena, and contended that the mental things we know are not mere phenomena of sense, but noumena, precisely because noumena are as mental as phenomena, and therefore can be known from similar data: this was the central point of their noumenal idealism. They rightly revolted against the inconsistencies of Kant's third and fourth positions about the existence of unknown but postulated things in themselves, hidden from theoretical, but revealed to practical, reason. In a way they returned to the wider opinions of Aristotle, which had come down to Descartes and Locke, that reason in going beyond sense knows more things than phenomena; yet they would not hear of external bodies, or of bodies at all. No realists, they came nearer to Spinozistic pantheism and to Leibnitzian monadism, but only on their idealistic side; for they would not allow that extension and body are different from thinking and mind. Their real founder was Fichte, on account of his definite reduction of the noumenal to a mental world. This was indeed the very point - the knowability of a noumenal mental world. At the same time it soon appeared that they could not agree among themselves when they came to ask what it is, but in attempting to define it seem to have gone through the whole gamut of mind. Schelling and Hegel thought it was infinite reason; Schopenhauer, unconscious will; Hartmann, unconscious intelligence and will; Lotze, the activity or life of the divine spirit; Fechner, followed by Paulsen, a world of spiritual actualities comprised in the one spiritual actuality, God, in whom we live and move and have our being.
1. Of these noumenal idealisms the earliest in time and the nearest to Fichte's philosophy was the panlogism, begun by Schelling (1775-18J4), completed by his disciple Hegel (1770-1831), and then modified by the master himself. Starting from Fichte's " Wissenschaftslehre," Schelling accepted the whole process of mental construction, and the deduction that noumena are knowable products of universal reason, the Absolute Ego. But from the first he was bolder than Fichte, and had no doubt that the Absolute is God. God, as he thought, is universal reason, and Nature a product of universal reason, a direct manifestation, not of man, but of God. How is this Absolute known? According to Schelling it is known by intellectual intuition. Kant had attributed to God, in distinction from man's understanding, an intellectual intuition of things. Fichte had attributed to man an intellectual intuition of himself as the Absolute Ego. Schelling attributes to man an intellectual intuition of the Absolute God; and as there is, according to him, but one universal reason, the common intelligence of God and man, this intellectual intuition at once gives man an immediate knowledge of God, and identifies man with God himself.
On Schelling's idealistic pantheism, or the hypothesis that there is nothing but one absolute reason identifying the opposites of subjectivity and objectivity, Hegel based his panlogism. But, while he fully recognized his indebtedness to his master, he differed from him profoundly in one fundamental respect. He rightly objected that the system was wanting in logical proof. He rightly, therefore, rejected the supposed intellectual intuition of the Absolute. He rightly contended that, if we are to know anything beyond sense, we must know it by a process of logical reason. But, unfortunately, he did not mean the logical inferences described in the Organon and the Novum organum. He meant a new " speculative " method, dialectic, founded on an assumption which he had already learnt from Schelling, namely, that things which are different but similar can have the same attribute, and therefore be also the same. With this powerful instrument of dialectic in hand, he attempted to show how absolute reason differentiates itself into subjective and objective, ideal and real, and yet is the identity of both - an identity of opposites, as Schelling had said. By the same dialectic Hegel was able to justify the gradual transformation of transcendental into noumenal idealism by Fichte and Schelling. If things different but similar have the same attributes, and are thereby the same, then in the first place the Kantian categories, though thoughts of mental origin and therefore confined to mind, are nevertheless applicable to things, because things, though different from, are the same as, thoughts, and have the categories of thoughts; in the second place, the Fichtian Ego of mankind is not the Absolute Reason of God, and yet is the same Absolute Reason; in the third place, the Schellingian Nature is the "other " of Spirit, and yet, being a mere reflex of the Idea of Nature, is identical with Spirit; and as this Spirit is everywhere the same in God and men, Nature is also identical with our Spirit, or rather with the Infinite Spirit, or Absolute Reason, which alone exists. The crux of all metaphysical idealism is the difficulty of reconciling the unity of the object with the plurality of subjects. Hegel's assumption of identity in difference at once enabled him to deal with the whole difficulty by holding that different subjects are yet one subject, and any one object, e.g. the sun, is at once different from, and identical with, the one subject which is also many. By the rough magic of this modern Prospero the universe of being is not, and yet is, thought, idea, spirit, reason, God. So elastic a solution established a dominant Hegelian school, which is now practically extinct, in Germany, and from Germany spread Hegelianism to France, England, America, and, in fact, diffused it over the civilized world to such an extent that it is still a widespread fashion outside Germany to believe that the world of being is a world of thought.
The plain answer is to contest the whole assumption. Different things, however similar, have only similar attributes, and therefore are never the same. God created man in His own Criticism of image, and the world in the image of the Divine Idea; Panlogism. b ut I am not God, and the transitory sun is not the same as God's eternal idea of it. The creatures, however like, are not the same as the Creator and His thoughts. Each is a distinct thing, as Aristotle said. Reality is not Reason. It is strange that the underlying assumption of panlogism was not at once contested in this plain way. Nevertheless, objection was soon taken to the unsatisfactoriness of the system reared upon it. Schelling himself, as soon as he saw his own formulae exposed in the logic or rather dialectic of his disciple, began to reconsider his philosophy of identity, and brought some powerful objections against both the conclusions and the method of Hegel. Schelling perceived that Hegel, in reducing everything to infinite mind, absorbed man's free but finite personality in God, and, in declaring that everything real is rational, failed to explain evil and sin: indeed, the English reader of T. H. Green's Prolegomena to Ethics can see how awkward is the Hegelian transition from " one spiritual principle" to different men's individual freedom of choice between good and evil. Again, Schelling urged that besides the rational element there must be something else; that there is in nature, as natures naturans, a blind impulse, a will without intelligence, which belongs to the existent; and that even God Himself as the Absolute cannot be pure thought, because in order to think He must have an existence which cannot be merely His thought of it, and therefore pure being is the prior condition of thought and spirit. Hence Schelling objected to the Hegelian dialectic on the ground that, although reason by itself can apprehend notions or essences, and even that of God, it cannot deduce a priori the existence either of God or of Nature, for the apprehension of which experience is required. He now distinguished two philosophies: negative philosophy starting from notions, and positive philosophy starting from being; the former a philosophy of conditions, the latter of causes, i.e. of existence. Hegel, he said, had only supplied the logic of negative philosophy; and it must be confessed that the most which could be extracted from the Hegelian dialectic would be some connexion of thoughts without proving any existence of corresponding things. Schelling was right; but he had too much affinity with Hegelian assumptions, e.g. the panlogistic confusion of the essences of things with the notions of reason, to construct a positive philosophy without falling into fresh mysticism, which failed to exorcise the effect of his earlier philosophy of identity in the growing materialism of the age.
2. Meanwhile, by the side of panlogism arose the panthelism of Schopenhauer (1788-1860). This new noumenal idealism began, like the preceding, by combining psycho l0 ical idealism with the transcendentalism of Kant and Fichte. In Die Welt als Wille and Vorstellung Schopenhauer accepted Kant's position that the world as phenomenal is idea (Vorstellung); but he added that the world as noumenal is will (Wille). He got the hint of a noumenal will from Kant; but in regarding the noumenal as knowable, because mental, as well as in the emphasis he laid on the activity of will, he resembled Fichte. His theory of the nature of will was his own, and arrived at from a voluntaristic psychology leading to a voluntaristic metaphysics of his own. His psychological starting-point was the unproved assumption that the only force of which we are immediately aware is will; his metaphysical goal was the consistent conclusion that in that case the only force we can know, as the noumenal essence of which all else is phenomenal appearance, is will. But by this noumenal will he did not mean a divine will similar to our rational desire, a will in which an inference and desire of a desirable end and means produces our rational action. He meant an unintelligent, unconscious, restless, endless will. In considering the force of instinct in animals he was obliged to divest will of reason. When he found himself confronted with the blind forces of Nature he was obliged to divest irrational will of feeling. As he resolved one force after another into lower and lower grades of will he was obliged to divest will of all consciousness. In short, his metaphysics was founded on a misnomer, and simply consisted in calling unconscious force by the name of unconscious will (Unbewusster Wille). This abuse of language brought him back to Leibnitz. But, whereas Leibnitz imputed unconscious perception as well as unconscious appetition to monads, Schopenhauer supposed unconscious will to arise without perception, without feeling, without ideas, and to be the cause of ideas only in us. Hence he rejected the infinite intelligence supposed by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel against whom he urged that blind will produces intelligence, and only becomes conscious in us by using intelligence as a means to ends. He also rejected the optimism of Leibnitz and Hegel, and placed the most irrational of wills at the base of the worst possible of worlds (see further Schopenhauer). This pessimistic panthelism gradually won its way, and procured exponents such as J. Frauenstadt, J. Bahnsen, and, more recently, P. Deussen. The accident of its pessimism attracted F. W. Nietzsche, who afterwards, passing from the philosophy of will to the theory of evolution, ended by imagining that the struggle of the will to live produces the survival of the fittest, that is, the right of the strongest and the will to exercise power, which by means of selection may hereafter issue in a new species of superior man - the Uebermensch. Finally, Schopenhauer's voluntarism has had a profound effect on psychology inside and outside Germany, and to a less degree produced attempts to deduce from voluntaristic psychology new systems of voluntaristic metaphysics, such as those of Paulsen and Wundt.
3. The first to modify the pure voluntarism of Schopenhauer was E. von Hartmann, who (Die Philosophie des Unbewussten, 1869, 1st ed.), advanced the view that the world as noumenal is both unconscious intelligence and unconscious will, thus founding a panpneumatism which forms a sort of reconciliation of the panlogism of Hegel and the panthelism of Schopenhauer. In his tract entitled Schelling's positive Philosophie als Einheit von Hegel and Schopenhauer (1869) he further showed that, in his later philosophy, Schelling had already combined reason and will in the Absolute. Indeed, Fichte had previously characterized the life of the Absolute by reason and will without consciousness; and, before Fichte, Leibnitz had asserted that the elements of Nature are monads with unconscious perception and appetition. Hartmann has an affinity with all these predecessors, and with Spinoza, with whom he agrees that there is but one substance unaltered by the plurality of individuals which are only its modifications. Following, however, in the footsteps of Schelling, he idealizes the one extended and thinking substance into one mental being; but he thinks that its essence consists in unconscious intelligence and will, of which all individual intelligent wills are only activities. The merit of this fresh noumenal idealism consists in its correction of the one-sidedness of Schopenhauer: intelligence is necessary to will. But Hartmann's criticism does not go far enough. He ends by outdoing the paradox of Schopenhauer, concluding that Nature in itself is intelligent will, but unconscious, a sort of immanent unconscious God.
As with his master, his reasons for this view are derived, not from a direct proof that unconscious Nature has the mental attributes supposed, but from human psychology and epistemology. Like Leibnitz, he proceeds from the fact that our perceptions are sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious, to the inconsequent conclusion, that there are beings with nothing but unconscious perceptions; and by a similar non sequitur, because there is the idea of an end in will, he argues that there must be an unconscious idea of an end in instinctive, in reflex, in all action. Again, in his Grundproblem der Erkenntnisstheorie (1889) he uses without proof the hypothesis of psychological idealism, that we perceive psychical effects, to infer with merely hypothetical consistency the conclusion of noumenal metaphysical idealism that all we can thereby know is psychical causes, or something transcendent, beyond phenomena indeed, yet not beyond mind. But, according to him, this transcendent is the unconscious (Kraftvolles unbewusst ideales Geschehen). He calls this epistemology " transcendent realism "; it is really " transcendent idealism." On these foundations he builds the details of his idealistic metaphysics. (a) He identifies matter with mind by identifying atomic force with the striving of unconscious will after objects conceived by unconscious intelligence, and by defining causality as logical necessity receiving actuality through will. (b) He contends that, when matter ascends to the evolution of organic life, the unconscious has a power, over and above its atomic volitions, of introducing a new element, and that in consequence the facts of variation, selection and inheritance, pointed out by Darwin, are merely means which the unconscious uses for its own ends in morphological development. (c) He explains the rise of consciousness by supposing that, while it requires brain as a condition, it consists in the emancipation of intelligence from will at the moment when in sensation the individual mind finds itself with an idea without will. Here follows his pessimism, like to, but differing from, that of his master. In his view consciousness begins with want, and pain preponderates over pleasure in every individual life, with no hope for the future, while the final end is not consciousness, but the painlessness of the unconscious (see PEss1M1sM). But why exaggerate? The truth of Nature is force; the truth of will is rational desire; the truth of life is neither the optimism of Leibnitz and Hegel, nor the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, but the moderatism of Aristotle. Life is sweet, and most men have more pleasures than pains in their lives.
4. Lotze (1817-1881) elaborated a very different noumenal idealism, which perhaps we may express by the name " Pan. teleologism," to express its conclusion that the known Lotze world beyond phenomena is neither absolute thought nor unconscious will, nor the unconscious at all, but the activity of God; causing in us the system of phenomenal appearances, which we call Nature, or bodies moving in time and space; but being in itself the system of the universal reciprocal actions of God's infinite spirit, animated by the design of the supreme good. The Metaphysik of Lotze in its latest form (1879) begins with a great truth: metaphysics must be the foundation of psychology. He saw that the theories of the origin of knowledge in idealistic epistemology are unsound. Like Aristotle, then, he proposed anew the question, What is being? Nevertheless he was too much a child of his age to keep things known steadily before him; having asked the metaphysical question he proceeded to find a psychological answer in a theory of sensation, which asserted the mere hypothesis that the being which we ascribe to things on the evidence of sensation consists in their being felt. He really accepted, like Kant, the hypothesis of a sense of sensations which led to the Kantian conclusion that the Nature we know in time and space is mere sensible appearances in us. Further, from an early period in his Medicinische Psychologie (1852) he reinforced the transcendental idealism of Kant by a general hypothesis of " local signs," containing the subordinate hypotheses, that we cannot directly perceive extension either within ourselves or without; that spatial bodies outside could not cause in us spatial images either in sight or in touch; but that besides the obvious data of sense, e.g. pressure, heat and colour, there must be other qualitative different excitations of different nerve-fibres, by means of which, as non-local signs of localities, the soul constructs in itself an image of extended space containing different places. This hypothesis of an acquired perception of a space mentally constructed by " local signs " supplied Lotze and many succeeding idealists, including Wundt, with a new argument for metaphysical idealism. Lotze concluded that we have no more reason for supposing an external space like space constructed out of our perceptions, than we have for supposing an external colour like perceived colour. Agreeing, then, with Kant that primary qualities are as mental as secondary, he agreed also with Kant that all the Nature we know as a system of bodies moving in time and space is sensible phenomena. But while he was in fundamental agreement with the first two positions of Kant, he differed from the third; he did not believe that the causes of sensible phenomena can be unknown things in themselves. What then are they? In answering this question Lotze regarded Leibnitz as his guide. He accepted the Leibnitzian fallacy that unity is indivisibility, which led to the Leibnitzian analysis of material bodies into immaterial monads, indivisible and therefore unextended, and to the theory of monadic souls and entelechies. Indeed, from the time of Leibnitz such attempts either to analyse or to construct matter had become a fashion. Lotze agreed with Leibnitz that the things which cause phenomena are immaterial elements, but added that they are not simple substances, self-acting, as Leibnitz thought, or preserving themselves against disturbance, as Herbart thought, but are interacting modifications of the one substance of God.
In the first place, he resolved the doubt of Leibnitz about bodies by deciding entirely against his realistic alternative that an organic body is a substantia realizans phaenomena, and for his idealistic alternative that every body is a phenomenon and not a substance at all. Secondly, he accepted the Leibnitzian hypothesis of immaterial elements without accepting their self-action. He believed in reciprocal action; and the very essence of his metaphysics consists in sublimating the interaction of bodies into the interaction of immaterial elements, which produce effects on one another and on the soul as one of them. According to the mechanics of Newton, when two bodies collide each body makes the other move equally and oppositely; but it has become a convenient habit to express this concrete fact in abstract language by calling it the conservation of momentum, by talking of one body communicating its motion to the other; as if bodies exchanged motion as men do money. Now Lotze took this abstract language literally, and had no difficulty in showing that, as an attribute is not separated from its substance, this supposed communication of motion does not really take place: nothing passes. But instead of returning to the concrete fact of the equivalence of momentum, by which each body moving makes the other move oppositely, he denied that bodies do reciprocally act on one another, and even that bodies as mutually resisting substances press one another apart in collision. Having thus rejected all bodily mechanism, he had to suppose that reciprocal action somehow takes place between immaterial elements. This brought him to another difference from Leibnitz as well as from Newton. According to Leibnitz, while each immaterial element is a monadic substance and self-acting secondary cause, God is the primary cause of all. According to Lotze, the connexion required by reciprocity requires also that the whole of every reciprocal action should take place within one substance; the immaterial elements act on one another merely, as the modifications of that substance interacting within itself; and that one substance is God, who thus becomes not merely the primary but the sole cause, in scholastic language a causa immanens, or agent of acts remaining within the agent's being. At this point, having rejected both the Newtonian mechanism of bodily substances and the Leibnitzian automatism of monadic substances, he flew to the Spinozistic unity of substance; except that, according to him, the one substance, God, is not extended at all, and is not merely thinking, but is a thinking, willing and acting spirit.
Lotze's metaphysics is thus distinguished from the theism of Newton and Leibnitz by its pantheism, and from the pantheism of Spinoza by its idealism. It is an idealistic pantheism, which is a denial of all bodily mechanism, a reduction of everything bodily to phenomena, and an assertion that all real action is the activity of God. At the same time it is a curious attempt to restore mechanism and reconcile it with teleology by using the word " mechanism " in a new meaning, according to which God performs His own reciprocal actions within Himself by uniform laws, which are also means to divine ends. It is also an attempt to reconcile this divine mechanism with freedom. In his Metaphysik (1879), as in his earlier Mikrokosmus (1856-1864), Lotze vindicated the contingency of freedom by assigning to God a miraculous power of unconditional commencement, whereby not only at the very beginning but in the course of nature there may be new beginnings, which are not effects of previous causes, though once started they produce effects according to law. Thus his pantheistic is also a teleological idealism, which in its emphasis on free activity and moral order recalls Leibnitz and Fichte, but in its emphasis on the infinity of God has more affinity to Spinoza, Schelling and Hegel. Hence his philosophy, like the Hegelian, continually torments one with the difficulty that its sacrifice of the distinct being of xvili. 8 a all individual substances to the universality of God entails the sacrifice of the individual personality of men. Our bodies were reduced by Lotze to the general ruck of phenomenal appearances. Our souls he tried his best to endow with a quasiexistence, arguing that the unity of consciousness requires an indivisible subject, which is distinct from the plurality of the body but interacting with it, is in a way a centre of independent activities, and is so far a substance, or rather able to produce the appearance of a substance. But at the end of his Metaphysik, from the conclusion that everything beyond phenomena is divine interaction, he drew the consistent corollary that individual souls are simply actions of the one genuine being. His final view was that certain actions of the divine substance are during consciousness gifted with knowledge of themselves as active centres, but during unconsciousness are non-existent. If so, we are not persons with a permanent being of our own distinct from that of God. But in a philosophy which reduces everything to phenomenal appearance except the self-interacting substance of God, there is no room for either the bodies or the souls of finite substances or human persons.
5. Fechner (1801-1887) affords a conspicuous instance of the idealistic tendency to mysterize nature in his Panpsychism, or that form of noumenal idealism which holds that the universe is a vast communion of spirits, souls of men, of animals, of plants, of earth and other planets, of the sun, all embraced as different members in the soul of the world, the highest spirit - God, in whom we live and move and have our being; that the bodily and the spiritual, or the physical and the psychical, are everywhere parallel processes which never meet to interact; but that the difference between them is only a difference between the outer and inner aspects of one identical psychophysical process; and yet that both sides are not equally real, because while psychical and physical are identical, the psychical is what a thing really is as seen from within, the physical is what it appears to be to a spectator outside; or spirit is the self-appearance of matter, matter the appearance of one spirit to another. Fechner's panpsychism has a certain affinity both to Stahl's animism and to the hylozoism of materialists such as Haeckel. But, while it differs from both in denying the reality of body, it differs from the former in extending conscious soul not only to plants, as Stahl did, but to all Nature; and it differs from the latter in the different consequences drawn by materialism and idealism from this universal animism. According to Haeckel, matter is the universal substance, spirit its universal attribute. According to Fechner, spirit is the universal reality, matter the universal appearance of spirit to spirit; and they are identical because spirit is the reality which appears. Hence Fechner describes himself as a twig fallen from Schelling's stem. Schelling's adherent Oken by his Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie conveyed to his mind the life-long impression that God is the universe and Nature God's appearance. At the same time, while accepting the Schellingian parallelistic identity of all things in God, Fechner was restrained by his accurate knowledge of physics from the extravagant construction of Nature, which had failed in the hands of Schelling and Hegel. Besides, he was deeply impressed by the fact of man's personality and by the problem of his personal immortality, which brought him back through Schelling to Leibnitz, whose Monadologie throughout maintains the plurality of monadic souls and the omnipresence of perception, sketches in a few sections (§§ 23, 78-81) a panpsychic parallelism, though without identity, between bodily motions and psychic perceptions, and, what is most remarkable, already uses the conservation of energy to argue that physical energy pursues its course in bodies without interacting with souls ., and that motions produce motions, perceptions produce perceptions. Leibnitz thus influenced Fechner, as in other ways he influenced Lotze. Both, however, used this influence freely; and, whereas Lotze used the Leibnitzian argument from indivisibility to deduce indivisible elements and souls, Fechner used the Leibnitzian hypotheses of universal perception and parallelism of motions and perceptions, in the light of the .Schellingian identification of physical and psychical, to evolve a world-view (Weltansicht) containing something which was neither Leibnitz nor Schelling.
Fechner's first point was his panpsychism. Emphasizing the many real analogies between physical and mental agency, but underrating the much stronger evidences that all the mental operations of men and animals require a nervous system, he flew to the paradox that soul is not limited to men and animals, but extends to plants, to the earth and other planets, to the sun, to the world itself, of which, according to him, God P y is the world-soul. In this doctrine of universal animation he was like Leibnitz, yet very different. Whereas Leibnitz confined a large area of the world to wholly unconscious perceptions, and therefore preferred to call the souls of inorganic beings " Entelechies," Fechner extended consciousness to the whole world; and accordingly, whereas Leibnitz believed in a supramundane Creator, " au dessus du Monde " and " dans le Monde," Fechner, in the spirit of Schelling, identified God with the soul of the world. Fechner's second point was that, throughout the animated universe, physical processes accompany psychical processes without interaction. In this panpsychistic parallelism he was again like Leibnitz, and he developed his predecessor's view, that the conservation of energy prevents interaction, into the supposition that alongside the physical there is a parallel psychical conservation of energy. Here, again, he went much further than Leibnitz, but along with Schelling, in identifying the physical and the psychical as outer and inner sides of the same process, in which the inner is the real and the outer the apparent. Fechner's third point carried him beyond all his predecessors, containing as it does the true originality of his " world-view." He advanced the ingenious suggestion that, as body is in body and all ultimately in the world-body, so soul is in soul and all ultimately in the world-soul. By this means he explained immortality and vindicated personality. His fourth point was connected with this inclusion of personal spirits in higher spirits and in the highest. It is his so-called "synechological view " of the soul. Herbart and Lotze, both deeply affected by the Leibnitzian hypothesis of indivisible monads, supposed that man's soul is seated at a central point in the brain; and Lotze supposed that this supposition is necessary to explain the unity of consciousness. Fechner's supposition was that the unity of consciousness belongs to the unity of the whole body; that the seat of the soul is the living body; that the soul changes its place as in different parts a process rises above the " threshold of consciousness "; and that soul is not substance but the single psychical life which has its physical manifestation in the single bodily life. Applying this " synechological view " to the supposed inclusion of soul in soul, he deduced the conclusion that, as here the nature of one's soul is to unite one's little body, so hereafter its essence will be to unite a greater body, while God's spirit unites the whole world by His omnipresence; and he pertinently asked, in opposition to the " punctual " view, whether God's soul is centred in a point. Lastly, the whole of this " world-view " was developed by Fechner in early life, under the influence of his religious training, and out of a pious desire to understand those main truths of Christianity which teach us that we are children of God, that this natural body will become a spiritual body, and that, though we are different individual members, we live and move and are in God: " in Deo vivimus, movemus, et sumus." It is important to notice that Fechner maintained this " world-view " in a little book, Das Biichlein vom Leben nach dem Tode, which he originally published in 1836 under the pseudonym of Dr Mises, but which he afterwards republished in his own name in 1866, and again in 1887, as a sketch of his Weltansicht. Afterwards in Nanna (1848) he discussed the supposed souls of plants, and in Zendavesta (1851) the supposed souls of the earth and the rest of the world. Then in 1855 he published his Atomenlehre, partly founded on his physics, but mainly on his metaphysics. Under the influence of Leibnitz, Boscovich, Kant and Herbart, he supposed that bodies are divisible into punctual atoms, which are not bodies, but centres of forces of attraction and repulsion; that impenetrability is a result of repulsive force; and that force itself is only law - taking as an instance that Newtonian force of attraction whose process we do not understand, and neglecting that Newtonian force of pressure and impact whose process we do understand from the collision of bodies already extended and resisting. But, in thus adapting to his own purposes the Leibnitzian analysis of material into immaterial, he drew his own conclusions according to his own metaphysics, which required that the supposed centres of force are not Leibnitzian " monads," nor Herbartian " reals," nor divine modifications such as Lotze afterwards supposed, but are elements of a system which in outer aspect is bodily and in inner aspect is spiritual, and obeying laws of spirit. At the same time his synechological view prevented him from saying that every atom has a soul, because according to him a soul always corresponds to a unity of a physical manifold. Thus his metaphysics is Leibnitzian, like that of Lotze, and yet is opposed to the most characteristic feature of monadology - the percipient indivisible monad.
In 1860 appeared Fechner's Elemente der Psychophysik, a work which deeply affected subsequent psychology, and almost revolutionized metaphysics of body and soul, and of physical and psychical relations generally. It becomes necessary, therefore, to determine how far Fechner derived his psychophysics from experience, how far from fallacies of inference, from his romantic imagination and from his theosophic metaphysics, which indeed coloured his whole book on psychophysics. At the very outset he started with his previous metaphysical hypothesis of parallelistic identity without interaction. He now compared the spiritual and bodily sides of a man to the concave and convex sides of a circle, as inner and outer sides of the same process, which is psychical as viewed from within and physical as viewed from without. He also maintained throughout the book that physical and psychical energy do not interfere, but that the psychical is, like a mathematical quantity, a function of the physical, depending upon it, and vice versa, only in the sense that a constant relation according to law exists, such that we may conclude from one to the other, but without one ever being cause of the other. By his psychophysics he meant the exact doctrine of the relations of dependency between physical and psychical. The name was new, but not the doctrine. From antiquity men had applied themselves to determine the relations between the physical stimuli and the socalled " quality " of sensations. But what was new was the application of this doctrine to the relations between the stimuli and the socalled " intensity " of sensations. He generalized Weber's law in the form that sensation generally increases in intensity as the stimulus increases by a constant function of the previous stimulus; or increases in an arithmetical progression as the stimulus increases in a geometrical ratio; or increases by addition of the same amount as the stimulus increases by the same multiple; or increases as the logarithm of the stimulus. There are then, at least within the limits of moderate sensations, concomitant variations between stimuli and sensations, not only in " quality," as in the intervals of sounds, which were understood long ago, but also in " intensity "; and the discovery of the latter is the importance of Weber's and Fechner's law. By the rules of induction from concomitant variations, we are logically bound to infer the realistic conclusion that outer physical stimuli cause inner sensations of sensible effects. But, unfortunately for Fechner, the very opposite conclusion followed from the presuppositions of his parallelistic metaphysics, and from the Leibnitzian view of the conservation of energy, which he was the first in our time to use in order to argue that a physical cause cannot produce a psychical effect, on the ground that physical energy must be exactly replaced by physical energy.
Having satisfied himself in what he called " outer psychophysics," that the stimulus causes only the nervous process and not sensation, he passed to what he called " inner psychophysics," or the theory of the relation between nervous and psychical processes. He rightly argued against the old theory that the continuity of nervous processes in the brain is interrupted by mental processes of thought and will: there is a nervous process for every mental process. But two questions then arose. What is the relation between nervous process and sensation? What causes sensation? The first question he answered from his imagination by supposing that, while the external world is stimulus of the nervous process, the nervous process is the immediate stimulus of the sensation, and that the sensation increases by a constant fraction of the previous stimulus in the nervous system, when Weber's law proves only that it increases by a constant fraction of the previous stimulus in the external world. The second question he answered from his parallelistic metaphysics by deducing that even within the organism there is only a constant dependency of sensation on nervous process without causation, because the nervous process is physical but the sensation psychical. This answer supposed that the whole physical process from the action of the external stimulus on the nervous system to the reaction of the organism on the external world is one series, while the conscious process beginning with sensation is only parallel and as it were left high and dry. What then is the cause of the sensation ? Huxley, it will be remembered, in similar circumstances, answered this question by degrading consciousness to an epiphenomenon, or bye-product of the physical process. Fechner was saved from this absurdity, but only to fall into the greater absurdity of his own panpsychism. Having long assumed that the whole world is animated throughout, and that there are always two parallel series, physical and psychical, he concluded that, while a physical stimulus is causing a physical nervous process, a psychical accompaniment of the stimulus is causing the sensation, which, according to him, is the psychical accompaniment of the nervous process; and that, as the whole physical and the whole psychical series are the same, differing only as outer and inner, this identity holds both of stimulus and its psychical accompaniment and of nervous process and its accompanying sensation. Accordingly, he calls these and all other processes " psychophysical "; and as he recognized two parallel energies, physical and psychical, differing only as outer and inner aspects of the same energy, he called this " psychophysical energy." In such a philosophy all reality is " psychophysical." At the same time Fechner would not have us suppose that the two sides are equal; according to him, the psychical, being the psychophysical as viewed from within, is real, the physical, being the psychophysical viewed from without, is apparent; so in oneself, though nervous process and psychical process are the same, it is the psychical which is the reality of which the nervous is mere appearance; and so everywhere, spirit is the reality, body the appearance of spirit to spirit. Finally, he supposed that one spirit is in another, and all in the highest spirit, God. By this means also he explained unconsciousness. In point of fact, many stimuli are beneath the " threshold " of a man's consciousness. Leibnitz, in the Nouveaux Essais, ii. 1 1, had also said that we have many " petites perceptions," of which we are unconscious, and had further suggested that a perception of which we are, is composed of a quantity of " petites perceptions " of which we are not, conscious. Proceeding on this suggestion, and misled by the mathematical expression which he had given to Weber's law, Fechner held that a conscious sensation, like its stimulus, consists of units, or elements, by summation and increments of which conscious sensations and their differences are produced; so that consciousness, according to this unnecessary assumption, emerges from an integration of unconscious shocks or tremors. But by the hypothesis of the inclusion of spirit in spirit, he was further able to hold that what is unconscious in one spirit is conscious in a higher spirit, while everything whatever is in the consciousness of the highest spirit of God, who is the whole of reality of which the spirits are parts, while the so-called physical world is merely outer appearance of one spirit to another.
Fechner first confused physics and metaphysics in psychophysics, and next proceeded to confuse them again in his work on evolution (Einige Ideen zur SchOpfungs and Entwicklungs-geschichte der Organismen, 1873). He perceived that Darwinism attributed too much to accident, and was also powerless to explain the origin of life and of consciousness. But his substitute was his own hypothesis of panpsychism, from which he deduced a "cosmorganic " evolution from a " cosmorganic " or original condition of the world as a living organism into the inorganic, by the principle of tendency to stability. The world, as he thought, on its physical side, always was a living body; and on its psychical side God always was its conscious spirit; and, so far from life arising from the lifeless, and consciousness from unconsciousness, the life and consciousness of the whole world are the origin of the lifeless and the unconscious in parts of it, by a kind of secondary automatism, while we ourselves are developed from our own mother-earth by differentiation. By thus supposing a psychical basis to evolution, Fechner, anticipating Wundt, substituted a psychical development of organs for Darwinian accidental variation. The difficulty of such speculations is to prove that things apparently dead and mindless are living souls. Their interest to the metaphysician is their opposition to physics on the one hand and to theism on the other. Shall we resign our traditional belief that the greater part of the world is mere body, but that its general adaptability to conscious organisms proves its creation and government by God, and take to the new hypothesis, which, by a transfer of design from God to Nature, supposes that everything physical is alive, and conducts its life by psychical impulses of its own? Fechner himself went even further, and together with design transferred God Himself to Nature. This is the subject of his last metaphysical work, Die Tagesansicht gegeniiber der Nachtansicht (1879). The " day-view " (Fechner's) is the view that God is the psychophysical all-embracing being, the law and consciousness of the world. It resembles the views of Hegel and Lotze in its pantheistic tendency. But it does not, like theirs, sacrifice our personality; because, according to Fechner, the one divine consciousness includes us as a larger circle includes smaller circles. By this ingenious suggestion of the membership of one spirit in another, Fechner's " day-view " also puts Nature in a different position; neither with Hegel sublimating it to the thought of God's mind, nor with Lotze degrading it to the phenomena of our human minds, but identifying it with the outer appearance of one spirit to another spirit in the highest of spirits.
We have dwelt on this curious metaphysics of Fechner because it contains the master-key to the philosophy of the present moment. When the later reaction to Kant arose against both Hegelianism and materialism, the nearly contemporary appearance of Fechner's Psychophysics began to attract experimental psychologists by its real as well as its apparent exactness, and both psychologists and metaphysicians by its novel way of putting the relations between the physical and the psychical in man and in the world. Fechner saw psychology deriving advantage from the methods, as well as the results, of his experiments, and in 1879 the first psychological laboratory was erected by Wundt at Leipzig. But he had also to endure countless objections to his mathematical statement of Weber's law, to his unnecessary assumption of units of sensation, and to his unjustifiable transfer of the law from physical to physiological stimuli of sensations, involving in his opinion his parallelistic view of body and mind. Among psychologists Helmholtz, Mach, Brentano, Hering, Delboeuf, were all more or less against him. Sigwart in his Logic has also opposed the parallelistic view itself; and James has criticized it from the point of view that the soul selects out of the possibilities of the brain means to its own ends. Nevertheless, largely under the influence of the exaggeration of the conservation of energy, many psychologists - Wundt, Paulsen, Riehl, Jodl, Ebbinghaus, Miinsterberg, and in England Lewes, Clifford, Romanes, Stout - have accepted Fechner's psychophysical parallelism, as far at least as men and animals are concerned. Most stop here, but some go with Fechner to the full length of his metaphysical parallelism of the physical and psychical, as psychophysical, throughout the whole world. This influence extended from Germany to Denmark, where it was embraced by Hoff ding, and to England, where it was accepted by Romanes, and in a more qualified manner as " a working hypothesis " by Stout. But the most thorough and most eloquent of Fechner's metaphysical disciples was F. Paulsen q.v.), who spread panpsychism far and wide in his Einleitung in die Philosophie. Here reappear all the characteristic points of Fechner's " worldview " - the panpsychism, the universal parallelism with the identi. fication of physical and psychical, the inclusion of spirit i n sp i r i t, the synechological view of spirit, and the final " day-view " that all reality is spirit, and body the appearance of spirit to spirit. But Paulsen tries to supply something wanting in Fechner. The originality of Paulsen consists in trying to supply an epistemological ecplanation of the metaphysics of Fechner, by reconciling him with Kant and Schopenhauer. He borrows from Kant's "rationalism " the hypothesis of a spontaneous activity of the subject with the deduction that knowledge begins from sense, but arises from understanding; and he accepts from Kant's metaphysical idealism the consequence that everything we perceive, experience and know about physical nature, and the bodies of which it consists, is phenomena, and not bodily things in themselves. But he has a different theory of human nature and soul, and so does not accept the Kantian conclusion that things in themselves, in the sense of things beyond phenomena, are all unknowable. On the contrary, his contention is that of Fechner - that all knowable things are inner psychical realities beneath outer physical appearances - the invisible symbolized by the visible. Kant, however, had no epistemology for such a contention, because according to him both outer and inner senses give mere appearance, from which we could not know either body in itself, or soul in itself. Parting, then, from Kant, Paulsen resorts to a paradox which he shares with Fechner and Wundt. He admits, indeed, Kant's hypothesis that by inner sense we are conscious only of mental states, but he contends that this very consciousness is a knowledge of a thing in itself. He agrees with Fechner and Wundt that there is no substantial soul, and that soul is nothing but the mental states, or rather their unity--thus identifying it with Kant's synthetic unity. On this assumption he deduces that in being conscious of our mental states we are conscious of soul not merely as it appears, but as it is in itself, and therefore can infer similar souls, other psychical unities, which are also things in themselves.
But what is the essence of this psychical reality which we thus immediately and mediately know? Here he appeals to Schopenhauer's doctrine that will of some sort is the fundamental fact of mental life. Taking, then, will to be the essential thing in itself of which we are conscious, he deduces that we can infer that the psychical things in themselves beyond ourselves are also essentially " wills." Combining with this the central dogma of Fechner that spirit extends throughout the world of bodily appearance, he concludes that the realities of the world are " wills," that bodies are mere appearances of " wills," and that there is one universal and all-embracing spirit which is " will." His ultimate metaphysics, then, is this: Everything is spirit, and spirit is " will." Lastly, by " ` will " he does not mean " rational desire," which is its proper meaning, but inapplicable to Nature; nor unconscious irrational will, which is Schopenhauer's forced meaning; nor unconscious intelligent will, which is Hartmann's more correct meaning, though inapplicable to Nature. His " will " is instinct, impulsive feeling, a " will to live," not indeed unconscious, but often subconscious, without idea, without reasoning about ends and means, yet pursuing ends - in short, what he calls, after K. E. von Baer, Zielstrebigkeit. How persistent is ancient animism! Empedocles, Plato and Aristotle; Telesio, Bruno and Campanella; Leibnitz; the idealists, Schopenhauer and Hartmann, Fechner and Paulsen; and the materialist, Haeckel - all have agreed in according some sort of appetition to Nature. So prone are men to exaggerate adaptation into aim! So prone are they to transfer to Nature the part played by the providence of God ! (see Bacon, De augmentis, iii. 4, sub fin.). Noumenal idealism is not dead in Germany. It died down for a time in the decline of Hegelianism and the rise of materialism. It has since revived. The pure idealism of Fichte is at the bottom of it all. The panlogism of Schelling and Hegel survives in its influence. So still more does the pantheism of Schopenhauer. The three most vital idealisms of this kind at the moment are the panpneumatism of Hartmann, combining Hegel with Schopenhauer; the panteleologism of Lotze, reviving Leibnitz; and the panpsychism of Paulsen, continuing Fechner, but with the addition of an epistemology combining Kant with Schopenhauer. All these systems of metaphysics, differ as they may, agree that things are known to exist beyond sensible phenomena, but yet are mental realities of some kind. Meanwhile, the natural substances of Aristotelian realism are regarded with common aversion.
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Phenomenal Idealism In Germany Phenomenal idealism is the metaphysics which deduces that, as we begin by perceiving nothing but mental phenomena of sense, so all we know at last from these data is also phenomena of sense, actual or possible. So far it is in general agreement not only with Hume, but also with Kant in his first two positions. But it follows Fichte in his revolt against the unknown thing in itself. On the other hand, as the speculative systems of noumenal idealism, starting from Fichte, succeeded one another, like ghosts who " come like shadows, so depart," without producing. conviction, and often in flagrant opposition to the truths of natural science, and when, in consequence, a wave of materialism threatened to submerge mind altogether by reducing it to a function of matter, many philosophers began to despair of the ambitious attempts which had been made to prove that there is a whole world of mind beyond phenomena, as the noumenalists had supposed. Thus they were thrown back on the limits of human knowledge prescribed by Kant, but purged of the unknown thing in itself by Fichte. Phenomenal idealism is the Kantian contention that Nature, as known to science, is phenomena of experience. Unfortunately, the word " phenomenon " is equivocal (see Mind, xiv. 309). Sometimes it is used for any positive fact, as distinguished from its cause. But sometimes also it means what appears, or can appear, to the senses, as distinguished from what does not appear, but can be inferred to exist. Now, Kant and his followers start from this second and narrower meaning, and usually narrow it still more by assuming that what appears to the senses is as mental as the sensation, being undistinguishable from it or from the idea of it, and that an appearance is a mental idea(Vorstellung) of sense; and then they conclude that we can know by inference nothing but such mental appearances, actual and possible, and therefore nothing beyond sensory experience. When, on the other hand, the objects of science are properly described as phenomena, what is meant is not this pittance of sensible appearances, but positive facts of all kinds, whether perceptible or imperceptible, whether capable of being experienced or of being inferred from, but beyond, experience, e.g. the farther side of the moon, which is known to exist only by inference. Hence the doctrine of Kant, that Nature as known to science is phenomena, means one thing in Kantism and another thing in science. In the former it means that Nature is .mental phenomena, actual and possible, of sensory experience; in the latter it means that Nature is positive facts, either experienced or inferred. It is most important also to notice that Kantism denies, but science asserts, the logical power of reason to infer actual things beyond experience. But the phenomenal idealists have not, any more than Kant, noticed the ambiguity of the term " phenomenon "; they fancy that, in saying that all we know is phenomena in the Kantian sense of mental appearances, they are describing all the positive facts that science knows; and they follow Kant in supposing that there is no logical inference of actual things beyond experience.
1. The Reaction to Kant. - The reaction to Kant (" Zuriick zu Kant! ") was begun by O. Liebmann in Kant and die Epigonen (1865). Immediately afterwards, in 1866, appeared Lange's Geschichte des Materialismus. In 1870 J. B. Meyer published his Kants Psychologie, and in 1871 H. Cohen his more important Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, which led Lange to modify his interpretation of Kant in the second edition of his own book. Lange (q.v.) by his History of Materialism has exercised a profound influence, which is due partly to its apparent success in answering materialism by Kantian arguments, and partly to its ingenious attempt to give. to Kantism itself a consistency, which, however, has only succeeded in producing a new. philosophy of Neo-Kantism, differing from Kantism in modifying the a priori and rejecting the thing in itself. Lange to some extent modified the transcendentalism of Kant's theory of the origin of knowledge. A priori forms, according to Kant, are contributions of the mental powers of sense, understanding, and reason; but, according to Lange, they are rooted in " the physico-psychical organization." This modification was the beginning of a gradual lessening of the antithesis of a priori to a posteriori, until at last the a priori forms of Kant have been transmuted into " auxiliary conceptions," or " postulates of experience." But this modification made no difference to the Kantian and Neo-Kantian deduction from the epistemological to the metaphysical. Lange entirely agreed with Kant that a priori forms can have no validity beyond experience when he says: " Kant is at any rate so far justified as the principle of intuition in space and time a priori is in us, and it was a service to all time that he should in this first great example, show that what we possess a priori, just because it arises out of the disposition of our mind, beyond our experience has no longer any claim to validity " (Hist. of Materialism, trans. E. C. Thomas, ii. 203). Hence he deduced that whatever we know from sensations arranged in such a priori forms are objects of our own experience and mental phenomena. Hence also his answer to materialism. Science, says the materialist, proves that all known things are material phenomena. Yes, rejoins Lange, but Kant has proved that material are merely mental phenomena; so that the more the materialist proves his case the more surely he is playing into the hands of the idealist - an answer which would be complete if it did not turn on the equivocation of the word " phenomenon," which in science means any positive fact, and not a mere appearance, much less a mental appearance, to sense and sensory experience. Having, however, made a deduction, which is at all events consistent, that on Kantian assumptions all we know is mental phenomena, Lange proceeded to reduce the rest of Kantism to consistency. But his ardent love of consistency led him far away from Kant in the end; for he proceeded consistently from the assumption, that whatever we think beyond mental phenomena is ideal, to the logical conclusion that in practical matters our moral responsibility cannot prove the reality of a noumenal freedom, because, as on Kant's assumption we know ourselves from inner sense only as phenomena, we can prove only our phenomenal freedom. Lange thus transmuted inconsistent Kantism into a consistent Neo-Kantism, consisting of these reformed positions: (1) we start with sensations in a priori forms; (2) all things known from these data are mental phenomena of experience; (3) everything beyond is idea, without any corresponding reality being knowable. " The intelligible world," he concluded, " is a world of poetry." Our reflection is that there is a great difference between the essence and the consistency of Kant's philosophy. Its essence, as stated by Kant, was to reduce the logical use of reason to mental phenomena of experience in speculation, in order to extend the practical use of reason to the real noumena, or things in themselves, required for morality. Its consistency, as deduced by Lange, was to reduce all use of reason, speculative and practical, to its logical use of proceeding from the assumed mental data of outer and inner sense, arranged a priori, to mental phenomena of experience, beyond which we can conceive ideas but postulate nothing. As H. Vaihinger, himself a profound Kantian of the new school, says: " Critical scepticism is the proper result of the Kantian theory of knowledge." There is only one Neo-Kantian way out of this dilemma, but it is to alter the original assumptions of Kant's psychological idealism.
This is the alternative of A. Riehl, who in Der philosophische Kriti .cis- mus (1876, &c.) proposes the non-Kantian hypothesis that, though things in themselves are unknowable through reason alone, they are knowable by empirical intuition, and therefore also by empirical thought starting from intuition. Like all true followers of Kant, Riehl prefers epistemology to metaphysics; yet in reality he founds a metaphysics on epistemology, which he calls " critical realism," so far as it asserts a knowledge of things beyond phenomena, and " critical monism," so far as it holds that these things are unlike both physical and psychical phenomena, but are nevertheless the common basis of both. He accepts the Kantian positions that unity of consciousness combines sensations by a priori synthesis, and that therefore all that natural science knows about matter moving in space is merely phenomena of outer sense; and he agrees with Kant that from these data we could not infer things in themselves by reason. But his point is that the very sensation of phenomena or appearances implies the things which appear. " Sensory knowledge," he says, " is the knowledge of the relations of things through the relations of the sensations of things." Further, holding that, " like every other perception, the perception of a human body immediately involves the existence of that body," and, like Fichte, believing in a " common consciousness," he concludes that the evidence of sense is verined by " common consciousness " of the external world as objective in the Kantian sense of universally valid. He interprets the external world to be the common basis of physical and psychical phenomena. He rightly relies on the numerous passages, neglected by Lange, in which Kant regards things in themselves as neither phenomena nor ideas, but things existing beyond both. But his main reliance is on the passage in the Kritik, where Kant, speaking of the Cartesian difficulty of communication between body and soul, suggests that, however body and soul appear to be different in the phenomena of outer and inner sense, what lies as thing in itself at the basis of the phenomena of both may perhaps be not so heterogeneous (ungleichartig) after all. Riehl elaborates this bare suggestion into the metaphysical theory that the single basis of physical and psychical phenomena is neither bodily nor mental, nor yet space and motion. In order to establish this paradox of " critical monism," he accepts to a certain extent the psychophysical philosophy of Fechner. He agrees with Fechner that physical process of nerve and psychical process of mind are really the same psychophysical process as appearing on the one hand to an observer and on the other hand to one's own consciousness; and that physical phenomena only produce physical phenomena, so that those materialists and realists are wrong who say that physical stimuli produce sensations. But whereas Fechner and Paulsen hold that all physical processes are universally accompanied by psychical processes which are the real causes of psychical sensations, Riehl rejects this paradox of universal parallelism in order to fall into the equally paradoxical hypothesis that something or other, which is neither physical not psychical, causes both the physical phenomena of matter moving in space and the psychical phenomena of mind to arise in us as its common effects. In supposing a direct perception of such a nondescript thing, he shows to what straits idealists are driven in the endeavour to supplement Kant's limitation of knowledge to phenomena by some sort of knowledge of things.
2. The Reaction to Hume. - When the Neo-Kantians, led by Lange, had modified Kant's hypothesis of a priori forms, and retracted Kant's admission and postulation of things in themselves beyond phenomena and ideas, and that too without proceeding further in the direction of Fichte and the noumenal idealists, there was not enough left of Kant to distinguish him essentially from Hume. For what does it matter to metaphysics whether by association sensations suggest ideas, and so give rise to ideas of substance and causation a posteriori, or synthetic unity of consciousness combines sensations by a priori notions of substance and causation into objects which are merely mental phenomena of experience, when it is at once allowed by the followers of Hume and Kant alike that reason in any logical use has no power of inferring things beyond the experience of the reasoner? In either case, the effective power of inference, which makes us rational beings, is gone. Naturally then the reaction to Kant was followed by a second reaction to Hume, partly under the name of " Positivism," which has attracted a number of adherents, such as C. Goring (1841-1879), author of an incomplete System der Kritischen Philosophie (1874-1875) and E. Laas (q.v.), and partly under the name of the " physical phenomenology" of E. Mach.
Ernst Mach is a conspicuous instance of a confusion of physics and psychology ending in a scepticism like that of Hume. He tells us how from his youth he pursued physical and psychological studies, how at the age of fifteen he read Kant's Prolegomena, and later rejected the thing in itself, and came to the conclusion that the world with his ego is one mass of sensations. For a time, under the influence of Fechner's Psychophysics, he thought that Nature has two sides, a physical and a psychological, and added that all atoms have feeling. But in the progress of his physical work, which taught him, as he thought, to distinguish between what we see and what we mentally supply, he soon passed from this noumenalism to a " universal physical phenomenology." It retains some relics of Fechner's influence; first, the theory of identity, according to which the difference between the physical and psychical is not a dualism, but everything is at once both; and secondly, the substitution of mathematical dependence for physical causality, except that, whereas Fechner only denied causality between physical and psychical, Mach rejects the entire distinction between causality and dependence, on the ground that " the law of causality simply asserts that the phenomena of Nature are dependent on one another." He comes near to Hume's substitution of succession of phenomena for real causality. He holds, like Hume, that nothing is real except our sensations and complexes of sensory elements; that the ego is not a definite, unalterable, sharply bounded unity, but its continuity alone is important; and that we know no real causes at all, much less real causes of our sensations; or, as he expresses it, bodies do not produce sensations, but complexes of sensations form bodies. If he has any originality, it consists in substituting for the association of ideas the " economy of thinking," by which he means that all theoretical conceptions of physics, such as atoms, molecules, energy, &c., are mere helps to facilitate our consideration of things. But he limits this power of mind beyond sensations to mere ideas, and like Hume, and also like Lange, holds at last that, though we may form ideas beyond sensations or phenomena, we cannot know things. If we ask how Mach arrived at this scepticism, which is contained in his well-known scientific work Die ill echanik in ihrer Entwickelung (1883; ed. 1908) as well as in his psychological work on the Analysis of Sensations (Beitrage zur Analyse der Empfindungen, 1886), we find two main causes, both psychological and epistemological; namely, his views on sense and on inference. In the first place, he displays in its most naked form the common but unproved idealistic paradox of a sense of sensations, according to which touch apprehends not pressure but a sensation of pressure, sight apprehends not colour but a sensation of colour, and there is no difference between the sensory operation and the sensible object apprehended by any sense, even within the sentient organism. Hence, according to him, sensations are not apprehensions of sensible objects (e.g. pressures felt) from which we infer similar objects beyond sense (e.g. similar pressures of outside things), but are the actual elements out of which everything known is made; as if sensations were like chemical elements. Within the limits of these supposed sensory elements he accords more than many psychologists do to sense; because, following the nativists, Johannes Muller and Hering, he includes sensations of time and space, which, however, are not to be regarded as " pure intuitions " in the style of Kant. But here again he identifies time and space with the sensations of them (Zeitempfindungen and Raumempfindungen). On the assumption, then, that time and space are not objects, but systems, of sensations, he concludes that a body in time and space is " a relatively constant sum of touch-and-light-sensations, joined to the same time-and-space-sensations," that each man's own body is included in his sensations, and that to explain sensations by motions would only be to explain one set of sensations from another. In short, sensations are elements and bodies complexes of these elements. Secondly, his theory of inference contains the admission that we infer beyond sensations: he remarks that the space of the geometer is beyond space-sensations, and the time of the physicist does not coincide with time-sensations, because it uses measurements such as the rotation of the earth and the vibrations of the pendulum. But by inference beyond sense he does not mean a process of concluding from sensible things to similar things, e.g. from tangible pressures to other similar pressures in the external world. Inference, according to him, is merely mental completion of sensations; and this mental completion has two characteristics: it only forms ideas, and it proceeds by an " economy of thought." In the course of his learned studies on the history of mechanics he became deeply impressed with Galileo's appeals to simplicity as a test of truth, and converted what is at best only one characteristic of thinking into its essence. According to him, whatever inferences we make, certain or uncertain, are mere economies of thought, adapting ideas to sensations, and filling out the gaps of experience by ideas; whatever we infer, whether bodies, or molecules, or atoms, or space of more than three dimensions, are all without distinction equally provisional conceptions, things of thought; and " bodies or things are compendious mental symbols for groups of sensations - symbols which do not exist outside thought." Moreover, he applies the same scepticism to cause and effect. " In Nature," says he, " there is no cause and no effect. " He thinks that repetitions of similar conjunctions occur in Nature, the connexion of cause and effect only in abstraction. He refers to Hume as recognizing no causality but only a customary and habitual succession, but adds that Kant rightly recognizes that mere observation cannot teach the necessity of the conjunction. But in reality his theory is neither Hume's theory of association nor Kant's of an a priori notion of understanding under which a given case is subsumed. He thinks that there is a notion of understanding (Verstandesbegrif), under which every new experience is subsumed, but that it has been developed by former experience, instinctively, and by the development of the race, as part of the economy of thinking. " Cause and effect are therefore," he concludes, " thought-things of economical function (Gedankendinge von äkonomischer Function)." His philosophy, therefore, is that all known things are sensations and complexes of sensory elements, supplemented by an economy of thinking which cannot carry us beyond ideas to real things, or beyond relations of dependency to real causes.
It is important to understand that Mach had developed this economical view of thought in 1872, more than ten years before the appearance of his work on the history of mechanics as he tells us in the preface, where he adds that at a later date similar views were expressed by Kirchhoff in his V orlesungen fiber mathematische Physik (1874). Kirchhoff asserted that the whole object of mechanics is " to describe the motions occurring in Nature completely in the simplest manner." This view involves the denial of force as a cause, and the assertion that all we know about force is that the acceleration of one mass depends on that of another, as in mathematics a function depends on a variable; and that even Newton's third law of motion is merely a description of the fact that two material points determine in one another, without reciprocally causing, opposite accelerations. It is evident that Kirchhoff's descriptive is the same as Mach's economical view. " When I say," says Mach, " that a body A exerts a force on a body B, I mean that B, on coming into contraposition with A, is immediately affected by a certain acceleration with respect to A." In a word, Mach and Kirchhoff agree that force is not a cause, convert Newtonian reciprocal action into mere interdependency, and, in old terminology, reduce mechanics from a natural philosophy of causes to a natural history of mere facts. Now, Mach applies these preconceived opinions to " mechanics in its development," with the result that, though he shows much skill in mathematical mechanics, he misrepresents its development precisely at the critical point of the discovery of Newton's third law of motion.
The true order of discovery, however, was as follows: (a) Sir Christo p her Wren made many experiments before the Royal Society, which were afterwards repeated in a corrected form by Sir Isaac Newton in the Principia, experimentally proving that bodies of ascertained comparative weights, when suspended and impelled against one another, forced one another back by impressing on one another opposite changes of velocity inversely as their weights and therefore masses; that is, by impressing on one another equal and opposite changes of momentum.
(b) Wallis showed that such bodies reduce one another to a joint mass with a common velocity equal to their joint momentum divided by their joint weights or masses. This result is easily deducible also from Wren's discovery. If m and m' are the masses, v and v' their initial velocities, and V the common velocity, then m(v - V) = m'(V - v'), therefore m + m')V, and hence (m y + m'v')f(m m') = V.
(c) Wren and Huygens further proved that the law of equal action and reaction, already experimentally established by the former, is deducible from the conservation of the velocity of the common centre of gravity, which is the same as the common velocity of the bodies, that is, deducible from the fact that their common centre of gravity does not change its state of motion or rest by the actions of the bodies between themselves; and they further extended the law to bodies, qua elastic.
(d) Hence, first inductively and then deductively, the third law was originally discovered only as a law of collision or impact between bodies of ascertained weights and therefore masses, impressing on one another equal and opposite changes of momentum, and always reducing one another to a joint mass with a common velocity to begin with, apart from the subsequent effects of elasticity.
(e) Newton in the Principia, repeating and correcting Wren's experiments on collision, and adding further instances from attractive forces of magnetism and gravity, induced the third law of motion as a general law of all forces.
This order of discovery shows that the third law was generalized. from the experiments of Wren on bodies of ascertained comparative weights or masses, which are not material points or mass-points. It shows that the bodies impress on one another opposite changes of velocity inversely as their weights or masses; and that in doing so they always begin by reducing one another to a joint mass with a common velocity, whatever they may do afterwards in consequence of their elasticities. The two bodies therefore do not penetrate one another, but begin by acting on one another with a force precisely sufficient, instead of penetrating one another, to cause them to form a joint mass with a common velocity. Bodies then are triply extended substances, each occupying enough space to prevent mutual penetration, and by this force of mutual impenetrability or interresistance cause one another to form a joint mass with a common velocity whenever they collide. Withdraw this foundation of bodies as inter-resisting forces causing one another in collision to form a joint mass with a common velocity but without penetration, and the evidence of the third law disappears; for in the case of attractive forces we know nothing of their modus operandi except by the analogy of the collision of inter-resisting bodies, which makes us believe that something similar, we know not what, takes place in gravity, magnetism, electricity, &c. Now, Mach, though he occasionally drops hints that the discovery of the law of collision comes first, yet never explains the process of development from it to the third law of motion. On the contrary, he treats the law of collision with other laws as an application of the third law of motion, because it is now unfortunately so taught in books of mechanics. He has therefore lost sight of the truths that bodies are triply extended, mutually impenetrable substances, and by this force causes which reduce one another to a joint mass with a common velocity on collision, as for instance in the ballistic pendulum; that these forces are the ones we best understand; and that they are reciprocal causes of the common velocity of their joint mass, whatever happens afterwards. In the case of this one force we know far more than the interdependence supposed by Mach and Kirchhoff; we know bodies with impenetrable force causing one another to keep apart. It might have been expected that scepticism on this subject would not have had much effect. But the idealists are only too glad to get any excuse for denying bodily substances and causes; and, while Leibnitz supplied them with the fancied analysis of material into immaterial elements, and Hume with the reduction of bodies to assemblages of sensations, Mach adds the additional argument that bodily forces are not causes at all. In Great Britain Mach's scepticism was welcomed by Karl Pearson to support an idealistic phenomenalism derived from Hume, and by Ward to support a noumenal idealism derived from Lotze. No real advance in metaphysics can take place, and natural science itself is in some danger, until the true history of the evidences of the laws of mechanical force is restored; and then it will soon appear that in the force of collision what we know is not material points determining one another's opposite accelerations, but bodies by force of impenetrable pressure causing one another to keep apart. Mechanics is a natural philosophy of causes.
3. Dualism within Experience. - Besides those philosophies which are reactions to Kant or to Hume, there are a number of other modern systems which start with the common hypothesis that knowledge is experience. The consequence is that whatever is true of experience they transfer to all knowledge. One of the characteristics of actual experience is that its object is, or has been, present to an experiencing subject; and of possible experience that it can be present. As a matter of fact, this characteristic differentiates experience from inference. By inference we know that things, such as the farther side of the moon, which neither are, nor have been, nor can be, present to an experiencing subject on the earth, nevertheless exist. But, on the hypothesis that knowledge contains no inferences beyond experience, it follows that all the objects of knowledge, being objects of experience, are, or have been, or can be, present to an experiencing subject. Hence it is common nowadays to hold that there is indeed a difference between knower and known, ego and non-ego, subject and object, but that they are inseparable; or that all known things are objects and subjects inseparably connected in 239 experience. This view, however, is held in different forms; and two opposite forms have arisen in Germany, " immanent philosophy " and " empirio-criticism," the former nearer to Kant, the latter to Hume.
Immanent Philosophy is the hypothesis that the world is not transcendent, but immanent in consciousness. Among the upholders of this view are Anton von Leclair, who expresses it in the formula - " Denken eines Seins = gedachtes Sein," and R. von Schubert-Soldern, who says that y. every fragment of the pretended transcendent world belongs to the immanent. But the best known representative of Immanent Philosophy is W. Schuppe, who, in his Erkenntnistheoretische Logik (1878), and in his shorter Grundriss der Erkenntnistheorie and Logik (1894), gives the view a wider scope by the contention that the real world is the common content or object of common consciousness, which, according to him, as according to Fichte, is one and the same in all individual men. Different individual consciousnesses plainly differ in having each its own content, in which Schuppe includes each individual's body as well as the rest of the things which come within the consciousness of each; but they also as plainly agree, e.g. in all admitting one sun. Now, the point of Schuppe is that, so far as they agree, individual consciousnesses are not merely similar, but the same in essence; and this supposed one and the same essence of consciousness in different individuals is what he calls consciousness in general (Bewusstsein iiberhaupt). While in this identification he follows Fichte, in other respects he is more like Kant. He supposes that the conscious content is partly a posteriori, or consisting of given data of sense, and partly a priori, or consisting of categories of understanding, which, being valid for all objects, are contributed by the common consciousness. He differs, however, from Kant, not only because he will not allow that the given data are received from things in themselves, but also because, like Mach, he agrees with the nativists that the data already contain a spatial determinacy and a temporal determinacy, which he regards as a posteriori elements of the given, not like Kant, as a priori forms of sense. He allows, in fact, no a priori forms except categories of the understanding, and these he reduces, considering that the most important are identity with difference and causality, which in his view are necessary to the judgments that the various data which make up a total impression (Gesammteindruck, Totaleindruck) are each different from the others, together identical with the total impression, and causally connected in relations of necessary sequence and coexistence. At the same time, true: to the hypothesis of " immanence," he rigidly confines these categories to the given data, and altogether avoids the inconsistent tendency of Kant to transfer causality from a necessary relation between phenomena to a neces-' sary relation between phenomena and things in themselves as their causes. Hence he strictly confines true judgment and knowledge to the consciousness of the identity or difference, and the causal relations of the given content of the common consciousness. From this epistemology he derives the metaphysical conclusion that the things we know are indeed independent of my consciousness and of yours, taken individually, or, to use a new phrase, are " transsubjective "; but, so far from being independent of the common consciousness, one and the same in all of us, they are simply its contents in the inseparable relation of subject and object. To the objection that there are objects, e.g. atoms, which are never given to any consciousness, he returns the familiar Kantian answer that, though unperceived, they are perceptible. The whole known world, then according to him, is the perceived and the perceptible content of common consciousness.
The " empirio-criticism " of R. Avenarius (q.v.) is the hypothesis of the inseparability of subject and object, or, to use his own phraseology, of ego and environment, in purely empirical, or a posteriori form. It is like " immanent philosophy," in opposing experience to the transcendent; but it also opposes experience to the transcendental, or a priori. It opposes " pure experience " to " pure reason," while it agrees with Kant's limitation of knowledge to experience. Avenarius held a view of knowledge very like that of Mach's view of the economy of thinking. In his first philosophical treatise, Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemdss dem Princip des kleinsten Kraftmaasses, Prolegomena zu einer Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (1876), he based his views on the principle of least action, contending that, as in Nature the force which produces a change is the least that can be, so in mind belief tends in the easiest direction. In illustration of this tendency, he pointed out that mind tends to assimilate a new impression to a previous content, and by generalization to bring as many impressions under as few general conceptions as possible, and succeeds so far as it generalizes from pure experience of the given. Nor is there any objection to this economical view of thought, as long as we remember what Avenarius and Mach forget, that the essence of thought is the least action neither more nor less than necessary to the point, which is the reality of things. Afterwards, in his Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (1888-1890), Avenarius aimed at giving a description of pure experience which he identified with the natural view of the world held by all unprejudiced persons. What, then, is this pure experience? " Every human individual," says he, originally accepts over against him an environment with manifold parts, other individuals making manifold statements, and what is stated in some way dependent upon the environment." Statements dependent upon the environment are what he means by pure experience. At first this starting-point looks like dualistic realism, but in reality the author only meant dualism within experience. By the environment he meant not a thing existing in itself, but only a counterpart (Gegenglied) of ourselves as central part (Centralglied). " We cannot," he adds, " think ourselves as central part away." He went so far as to assert that, where one assumes that at some time there was no living being in the world, all one means is that there was besides oneself no other central part to whom one's counterparts might also be counterparts. The consequence is that all the world admitted into his philosophy is what he called the " empirio-critical essential co-ordination " (empirio-kritische Prinzipialkoordination), an inseparable correlation of central part and counterpart, of ego and environment. Within this essential co-ordination he distinguished three values: R-values of the environment as stimulus; C-values of the central nervous system; and E-values of human statements - the latter being characterized by that which at the time of its existence for the individual admits of being named, and including what we call sensations, &c., which depend indirectly on the environment and directly on the central nervous system, but are not, as the materialist supposes, in any way reducible to possessions of the brain or any other part of that system. This division of values brings us to the second point in his philosophy, his theory of what he called " vital series," by which he assayed to explain all life, action and thought. A vital series he supposed to be always a reaction of C against disturbance by R, consisting in first a vital difference, or diminution by R of the maintenance-value of C, and then the recovery by C of its maintenance-value, in accordance with the principle of least action. He further supposed that, while this independent vital series of C is sometimes of this simple kind, at other times it is complicated by the addition of a dependent vital series in E, by which, in his fondness for too general and farfetched explanations, he endeavoured to explain conscious action and thought. (Thus, if a pain is an E-value directly dependent on a disturbance in C, and a pleasure another E-value directly dependent on a recovery of C, it will follow that a transition from pain to pleasure will be a vital series in E directly dependent on an independent vital series in C, recovering from a vital difference to its maintenance-maximum.) Lastly, supposing that all human processes can in this way be reduced to vital series in an essential co-ordination of oneself and environment, Avenarius held that this empirio-critical supposition, which according to him is also the natural view of pure experiences, contains no opposition of physical and psychical, of an outer physical and an inner psychical world - an opposition which seemed to him to be a division of the inseparable. He considered that the whole hypothesis that an outer physical thing causes a change in one's central nervous system, which again causes another change in one's inner psychical system or soul, is a departure from the natural view of the universe, and is due to what he called " introjection," or the hypothesis which encloses soul and its faculties in the body, and then, having created a false antithesis between outer and inner, gets into the difficulty of explaining how an outer physical stimulus can impart something into an inner psychical soul. He concluded therefore that, having disposed of this fallacy of introjection, we ought to return to the view of reality as an essential co-ordination of ego and environment, of central part and counterpart, with R-values, C-values and E-values.
It is curious that Avenarius should have brought forward this artificial hypothesis as the natural view of the world, without reflecting that on the one hand the majority of mankind believes that the environment (R) exists, has existed, and will exist, without being a counterpart of any living being as central part (C); and that on the other hand it is so far from being natural to man to believe that sensation and thought (E) are different from, and merely dependent on, his body (C), that throughout the Homeric poems, though soul is required for other purposes, all thinking as well as sensation is regarded as a purely bodily operation. It is indeed difficult to assign any rational place to the empirio-criticism of Avenarius. It is materialistic without being materialism; it is realistic without being realism. Its rejection of the whole relation of physical and psychical makes it almost too indefinite to classify among philosophical systems. But its main point is the essential co-ordination of ego and environment, as central part and counterpart, in experience. It is therefore nearly connected with " immanent philosophy." Schuppe, indeed, wrote an article in the Vierteljahrsschrift of Avenarius to prove their essential agreement. At the same time Schuppe's hypothesis of one common consciousness uniting the given by a priori categories could hardly be accepted by Avenarius as pure experience, or as a natural view of the world. His " empiriocriticism " is idealistic dualism within experience in an a posteriori form, but with a tendency towards materialism.
4. Voluntaristic Phenomenalism of Wundt. - Wundt's metaphysics will form an appropriate conclusion of this sketch of German idealism, because his patient industry and eclectic spirit have fitted him to assimilate many of the views of his predecessors. Wundt proves that all idealisms are in a way one. He starts as a phenomenalist from the hypothesis, which we have just described, that knowledge is ex Wundt. perience containing subject and object in inseparable connexion, and has something in common with the premature attempt of Avenarius to develop the hypothesis of dualism in experience into a scientific philosophy comprehending the universe in the simplest possible manner. Again he agrees with the reaction both to Hume and to Kant in limiting knowledge to mental phenomena, and has affinities with Mach as well as with Lange. His main sympathies are with the Neo-Kantians, and especially with Lange in modifying the a priori, and in extending the power of reason beyond phenomena to an ideal world; and yet the cry of his phenomenalism is not " back to Kant," but " beyond Kant." Though no noumenalist, in many details he is with noumenalists; with Fechner in psychophysics, in psychophysical parallelism, in the independence of the physical and the psychical chains of causality, in reducing physical and psychical to a difference of aspects, in substituting impulse for accident in organic evolution, and in wishing to recognize a gradation of individual spiritual beings; with Schopenhauer and Hartmann in voluntarism; and even with Schelling and Hegel in their endeavour, albeit on an artificial method, to bring experience under notions, and to unite subject and object in one concrete reality. He has a special relation to Fichte in developing the Kantian activity of consciousness into will and substituting activity for substantiality as the essence of soul, as well as in breaking down the antithesis between phenomena and things in themselves. At the same time, in spite of his sympathy with the whole development of idealism since Kant, which leads him to reject the thing in itself, to modify a priorism, and to stop at transcendent " ideals," without postulates of practical reason, he nevertheless has so much sympathy with Kant's Kritik as on its theories of sense and understanding to build up a system of phenomenalism, according to which knowledge begins and ends with ideas, and finally on its theory of pure reason to accord to reason a power of logically forming an " ideal " of God as ground of the moral " ideal " of humanity - though without any power of logically inferring any corresponding reality. He constructs his system on the Kantian order - sense, understanding, reason - and exhibits most clearly the necessary consequence from psychological to metaphysical idealism. His philosophy is the best exposition of the method and argument of modern idealism - that we perceive the mental and, therefore, all we know and conceive is the mental.
Wundt founds his whole philosophy on four psychological positions: his phenomenalistic theory of unitary experience, his voluntarism, his actualistic theory of soul, and his psychological theory of parallelism. They are positions also which deeply affect, not only the psychological, but also the metaphysical idealisms of our time, in Germany, and in the whole civilized world.
i. His first position is his phenomenalistic theory of unitary experience. According to him, we begin with an experience of ideas, in which object and idea are originally identical (V orstellungsobject); we divide this unitary experience into its subjective and objective factors; and especially in natural science we so far abstract the objects as to believe them at last to be independent things; but it is the office of psychology to warn us against this popular dualism, and to teach us that there is only a duality of psychical and physical, which are divisible, not separable, factors of one and the same content of our immediate experience; and experience is our whole knowledge. His metaphysical deduction from this psychological view is that all we know is mental phenomena, " the whole outer world exists for us only in our ideas," and all that our reason can logically do beyond these phenomena is to frame transcendent " ideals." ii. His second position is his voluntarism. He agrees with Schopenhauer that will is the fundamental form of the spiritual. He does not mean that will is the only mental operation; for he recognizes idea derived from sensation, and feeling, as well as will. Moreover, he contends that we can neither have idea without feeling and will, nor will without idea and feeling; that idea alone wants activity, and will alone wants content; that will is ideating and activity (vorstellende Thatigkeit), which always includes motives and ends and consequently ideas. He is therefore a follower of Schopenhauer as corrected by Hartmann. Like these predecessors, and like his younger contemporary Paulsen, in calling will fundamental he includes impulse (Trieb). Accordingly he divides will into two species: on the one hand, simple volition, or impulse, which in his view requires as motive a feeling directed to an end, and therefore an idea, e.g. the impulse of a beast arising from hunger and sight of prey; on the other hand, complex volition issuing in a voluntary act requiring decision (Entscheidung) or conscious adoption of a motive, with or without choice. Like other German voluntarists, he imputes " impulsive will " to the whole organic world. He follows Fechner closely in his answer to Darwin. If he is to be believed, at the bottom of all organic evolution organic impulses becoming habits produce structural changes, which are transmitted by heredity; and as an impulse thus gradually becomes secondarily automatic, the will passes to higher activities, which in their turn become secondarily automatic, and so on. As now he supposes feeling even in " impulsive will " to be directed to an end, he deduces the conclusion that in organic evolution the pursuit of final causes precedes and is the origin of mechanism. But at what a cost ! He has endowed all the plants in the world with motives, feelings directed to an end, and ideas, all of which, according to him, are required for impulse ! He apparently forgets that mere feelings often produce actions, as when one writhes with pain. But even so, have plants even those lowest impulses from feelings of pain or pleasure ? Wundt, however, having gone so far, there stops. It is not necessary for him to follow Schopenhauer, Hartmann and Fechner in endowing the material universe with will or any other mental operation, because his phenomenalism already reduces inorganic nature to mere objects of experiencing subjects. Wundt's voluntarism takes a new departure, in which, however, he was anticipated by the paradox of Descartes: that will is required to give assent to anything perceived (Principia philosophiae, i. 34). Wundt supposes not only that all organisms have outer will, the will to act, but also that all thinking is inner will - the will to think. Now there is a will to think, and Aristotle pointed out that thinking is in our power whenever one pleases, whereas sense depends on an external stimulus (De anima, ii. 5). There is also an impulse to think, e.g. from toothache. But it does not follow that thought is will, or even that there is no thinking without either impulse or will proper. The real source of thinking is evidence. Wundt, however, having supposed that all thinking consists of ideas, next supposes that all thinking is willing. What is the source of this paradox? It is a confusion of impulse with will, and activity with both. He supposes that all agency, and therefore the agency of thinking, is will. In detail, to express this supposed inner will of thinking, he borrows from Leibnitz and Kant the term " apperception," but in a sense of his own. Leibnitz, by way of distinction from unconscious perception, gave the name " apperception " to consciousness. Kant further insisted that this apperception, " I think," is an act of spontaneity, distinct from sense, necessary to regarding all my ideas as mine, and to combining them in a synthetic unity of apperception; which act Fichte afterwards developed into an active construction of all knowledge, requiring will directed to the end of duty. Wundt, in consequence, thinking with Kant that apperception is a spontaneous activity, and with Fichte that this activity requires will, and indeed that all activity is will, infers that apperception is inner will. Further, on his own account, he identifies apperception with the process of attention, and regards it as an act necessary to the general formation of compound ideas, to all association of ideas, to all imagination and understanding. According to him, then, attention, even involuntary attention, requires inner will; and all the functions imputed by Hume to association, as well as those imputed to understanding by Kant, require apperception, and therefore inner will. At the same time he does not suppose that they all require the same kind of will. In accordance with his previous division of outer will into impulsive and decisive, he divides the inner will of apperception into passive apperception and active apperception. Apperception in general thus becomes activity of inner will, constituting the process of attention, passive in the form of impulsive will required for association, and active in the form of decisive will required for understanding and judgment. Now, beneath these confusing phrases the point to be regarded is that, in Wundt's opinion, though we can receive sensations, we cannot think at all beyond sense, without some will. This exaggeration of the real fact of the will to think ignores throughout the position of little man in the great world and at the mercy of things which drive him perforce to sense and from sense to thought. It is a substitution of will for evidence as ground of assent, and a neglect of our consciousness that we often believe against our will (e.g. that we must die), often without even an impulse to believe, often without taking any interest, or when taking interest in something else of no importance. " The Dean is dead (Pray, what is trumps ?)." Yet many psychologists accept the universality of this will to believe, and among them James, who says that " it is far too little recognized how entirely the intellect is built up of practical interests." We should rather say " far too much." Wundt, however, goes still farther. According to him, that which acts in all organisms, that which acts in all thinking, that which divides unitary experience into subject and object, the source of self-consciousness, the unity of our mental life, " the most proper being of the individual subject is will." In short, his whole voluntarism means that, while the inorganic world is mere object, all organization is congealed will, and all thinking is apperceptive will. But it must be remembered that these conclusions are arrived at by confusing action, reaction, life, excitability, impulse, and rational desire, all under the one word " will," as well as by omitting the involuntary action of intelligence under the pressure of evidence. It may well be that impulsive feeling is the beginning of mind; but then the order of mind is feeling, sense, inference, will, which instead of first is last, and implies the others. To proceed, however, with voluntarism, Wundt, as we have seen, makes personality turn on will. He does not accept the universal voluntarism of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, but believes in individual wills, and a gradation of wills, in the organic world. Similarly, he supposes our personal individual will is a collective will containing simpler will-unities, and he thinks that this conclusion is proved by the continuance of actions in animals after parts of the brain have been removed. In a similar way he supposes our wills are included in the collective will of society. He does not, however, think with Schuppe that there is one common consciousness, but only that there is a collective consciousness and a collective will; not perceiving that then the sun - in his view a mere object in the experience of every member of the collection - would be only a collective sun. Lastly, he believes that reason forms the " ideal " of God as worldwill, though without proof of existence. On the whole, his voluntarism, though like that of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, is not the same; not Schopenhauer's, because the ideating will of Wundt's philosophy is not a universal irrational will; and not Hartmann's, because, although ideating will, according to Wundt's phenomenalism, is supposed to extend through the world of organisms, the whole inorganic world remains a mere object of unitary experience.
iii. His third position is his actualistic theory of soul, which he shares with Fichte, Hegel, Fechner and Paulsen. When Fichte had rejected the Kantian Soul in itself and developed the Kantian activity of apperception, he considered that soul consists in constructive activity. Fechner added that the soul is the whole unitary spiritual process manifested in the whole unitary bodily process without being a substance. Wundt accepts Fichte's theory of the actuality, and Fechner's synechological view, of the soul. Taking substance entirely in the sense of substrate, he argues that there is no evidence of a substantial substrate beneath mental operations; that there is nothing except unitary experience consisting of ideas, feelings, volitions, and their unity of will; and that soul in short is not substantia, but actus. He does not see that this unity is only apparent, for men think not always, and will not always. Nor does he see that a man is conscious not of idea, feeling, will, experience, but of something conceiving, feeling, willing and experiencing, which he gradually learns to call himself, and that he is never conscious of doing all this " minding " without his body. If, then, these mental operations were merely actuality, they would be actuality of a man's bodily substance. In truth there is no sound answer to Materialism, except that, besides bodily substance, psychical substance is also necessary to explain how man performs mental actualities consciously (see case Physical Realism, ch. v.). Wundt, however, has satisfied himself, like Fechner, that there is no real opposition of body and soul, and concludes, in accordance with his own phenomenalism, that his body is only an object abstracted from his unitary experience, which is all that really is of him.
iv. Hence his fourth point is his psychological theory of parallelism of physical and psychical reduced to identity in unitary experience. Here his philosophy is Fechnerism phenomenalized. He accepts Fechner's extension of Weber's law of the external stimuli of sense, while judiciously remarking that " the physiological interpretation is entirely hypothetical." He accepts psychophysical parallelism in the sense that every psychical process has a physical accompaniment, every physiological function has a psychical meaning, but neither external stimulus nor physiological stimulus is cause of a psychical process, nor vice versa. Precisely like Fechner, he holds that there is a physical causality and energy and there is a psychical causality and energy, parallels which never meet. He uses this psychical causality to carry out his voluntarism into detail, regarding it as an agency of will directed to ends, causing association and understanding, and further acting on a principle which he calls the heterogony of ends; remarking very truly that each particular will is directed to particular ends, but that beyond these ends effects follow as unexpected consequences, and that this heterogony produces social effects which we call custom. But while thus sharply distinguishing the physical and the psychical in appearance, he follows Fechner in identifying them in reality; except that Fechner's identification is noumenal, Wundt's phenomenal. Wundt does not allow that we know beyond experience any souls of earth, or any other inorganic being. He does not, therefore, allow that there is a universal series of physical and psychical parallels. According to his phenomenalism, the external stimulus and the physiological stimulus are both parallels of the same psychical process; the external body, as well as my body, is merely an object abstracted from an idea of my experience; and what is really known in every case is a unitary experience; divisible, but not separable, into body and soul, physical and psychical factors of one and the same unitary experience. Wundt is confined by his starting-point to his deduction that what we know is mental phenomena, ideas regarded as objects and subjects of experience.
With these four positions in hand, Wundt's philosophy consecutively follows, beginning with his psychology. He begins with psychical elements, sensations and feelings, but he asserts that these always exist in a psychical compound, from which they can be discovered only by analysis and abstraction; and his paradox that a pure sensation is an abstraction is repeated by W. James. Further, Wundt declares that the psychical compound of sensations, with which, according to him, we actually start, is not a complex sensation, but a compound idea; so that I am expected to believe that, when I hear the chord of D, I am not conscious of single sensations of D, F, A, and have only a compound idea of the chord - as if the hearing of music were merely a series of ideas! Wundt, however, has a reason for substituting compound idea for sensation: he accepts Lotze's hypothesis of local signs, and adds a hypothesis of temporal signs. He supposes that we have no sensations of space and time, as the nativists suppose, but that, while local signs give us spatial ideas, feelings of expectation are temporal signs giving us temporal ideas, and that these ideas enter into the psychical compound, which is our actual starting-point. It follows that every psychical compound into which temporal and spatial ideas enter must itself be an idea; and, as time at any rate accompanies all our sensations, it follows that every psychical compound of sensations, containing as it does, always temporal, if not also spatial, ideas, must be a compound idea, and not, as nativists suppose, Schuppe for instance, a compound sensation. The next question is, how compounded? Wundt's answer is that inner impulsive will, in the form of passive apperception, forms compound ideas by association; so that all these operations are necessary to the starting-point. He prefixes to the ordinary associations, which descend from Hume, an association which he calls fusion (Verschmelzung), and supposes that it is a fundamental process of fusing sensations with spatial and temporal ideas into a compound idea. But he also recognizes association by similarity, or assimilation, or " apperception " in Herbart's more confined sense of the word, and association by contiguity, or complication. Recognizing, then, three kinds of association in all, he supposes that they are the first processes, by which inner will, in the form of passive apperception, generates ideas from sense. So far his psychology is a further development of Hume's. But he does not agree with Hume that mind is nothing but sensations, ideas, and associations, but with Kant, that there are higher combinations. According to him, inner decisive will, rising to active apperception, proceeds to what he calls " apperceptive combinations " (A pperceptionverbindungen); first to simple combinations of relating and comparing, and then to complex combinations of synthesis and analysis in imagination and understanding; in consequence of which synthesis issues in an aggregate idea (Gesammtvorstellung), and then at last analysis, by dividing an aggregate idea into subject and predicate, forms a judgment (see further Logic). The main point of this theory is that, if it were true, we should be for ever confined to a jumble of ideas. Wundt, indeed, is aware of the consequences. If judgment is an analysis of an aggregate idea into subject and predicate, it follows, as he says, that " as judgment is an immediate, so is inference a mediate, reference of the members of any aggregate of ideas to one another " (System der Philosophie, 66, first ed.). He cannot allow any inference of things beyond ideas. His psychology poisons his logic.
In his logic, and especially in his epistemology, Wundt appears as a mediator between Hume and Kant, but with more leaning to the latter. While he regards association as lying at the basis of all knowledge, he does not think it sufficient, and objects to Hume that he does not account for necessity, nor for substance and causation as known in the sciences. He accepts on the whole the system of synthetic understanding which Kant superimposed on mere association. Yet he will not proceed to the length of Kant's transcendentalism. Between Hume's a posteriori and Kant's a priori hypothesis he proposes a logical theory of the origin of notions beyond experience. He explains that the arrangement of facts requires " general supplementary notions' (Hiilfsbegrife), which are not contained in experience itself, but are gained by a process of logical treatment of this experience." Of these supplementary notions he holds that the most general is that of causality, coming from the necessity of thought that all our experiences shall be arranged according to ground and consequent. That sense only gives to experience coexistences and sequences of appearances, as Hume said and Kant allowed, is also Wundt's startingpoint. How then do we arrive at causality? Not, says Wundt, by association, as Hume said, but by thinking; not, however, by a priori thinking, as Kant said, but by logical thinking, by applying the logical principle of ground and consequent (which Leibnitz had called the principle of sufficient reason) as a causal law to empirical appearances. Now, Wundt is aware that this is not always possible, for he holds that the logical principle of ground belongs generally to the connexion of thoughts, the causal law to the combination of empirical appearances. Nevertheless he believes that, when we can apply measures to the combination of empirical appearances, then we can apply the logical principle as causal law to this combination, and say that one appearance is the cause of another, thus adding a notion of causality not contained in the actual observations, but specializing the general notion of causality. He quotes as an instance that Newton in this way added to the planetary appearances contained in Kepler's laws the gravitation of the planets to the sun, as a notion of causality not contained in the appearances, and thus discovered that gravitation is the cause of the appearances. But Newton had already discovered beforehand in the mechanics of terrestrial bodies that gravitation constantly causes similar facts on the earth, and did not derive that cause from any logical ground beyond experience, any more than he did the third law of motion. Wundt does not realize that, though we can often use a cause or real ground (principium essendi) as a logical ground (principium cognoscendi) for deducing effects, we can do so only when we have previously inferred from experience that that kind of cause does produce that kind of effect (see LoGrc). Otherwise, logical ground remains logical ground, as in any noncausal syllogism, such as the familiar one from " All men are mortal," which causes me to know that I shall die, without telling me the cause of death. Wundt, however, having satisfied himself of the power of mere logical thought beyond experience, goes on to further apply his hypothesis, and supposes that, in dealing with the physical world, logical thinking having added to experience the " supplementary notion " of causality as the connexion of appearances which vary together, adds also the " supplementary notion " of substance as substratum of the connected appearances. But, using substance as he does always in the Kantian sense of permanent substratum beneath changing phenomena, and never in the Aristotelian sense of any distinct thing, he proceeds to make distinctions between the applications of causality and of substance. Even in the physical, he confines substance to matter, or what Aristotle would call material causes, thus makes its power to be merely passive, and limits substantial causality to potential energy, while he supposes that actual causality is a relation not of substances but of events. On this false abstraction Sigwart has made an excellent criticism in an appendix at the end of his Logic, where he remarks that we cannot isolate events from the substances of which they are attributes. Motions do not cause motions; one body moving causes another body to move: what we know is causal substances. Secondly, when Wundt comes to the psychical, he naturally infers from his narrow Kantian definition of substance that there is no proof of a substrate over and above all mental operations, and falsely thinks that he has proved that there is no substance mentally operating in the Aristotelian sense. Thirdly, on the grounds that logical thinking adds the notion of substance, as substrate, to experience of the physical, but not of the psychical, and that the most proper being of mind is will, he concludes that wills are not active substances, but substance-generating activities (" nicht thatige Substanzen sondern substanzerzeugende Thdtigkeiten," System, 429)What kind of metaphysics, then, follows from this compound of psychology and epistemology? As with Kant against Hume, so with Wundt against Mach and Avenarius, the world we know will contain something more than mere complexes of sensations, more than pure experience: with Wundt it will be a world of real causes and some substances, constituted partly by experience and partly by logical thinking, or active inner will. But as with Kant, so with Wundt, this world will be only the richer, not the wider, for these notions of understanding; because they are only contributed to the original experience, and, being mentally contributed, only the more surely confine knowledge to experience of mental phenomena. Hence, according to Wundt, the world we know is still unitary experience, distinguished, not separated, into subject and object, aggregates of ideas analysed by judgment and combined by inference, an object of idea elaborated into causes and substances by logical thinking, at most a world of our ideas composed out of our sensations, and arranged under our categories of our understanding by our inner wills, or a world of our ideating wills; but nothing else. It is Wundt's own statement of his solution of the epistemological problem " that on the one hand the whole outer world exists for us only in our ideas, and that on the other hand a consciousness without objects of idea is an empty abstraction which possesses no actuality " (System, 212 -213). There remains his theory of reason. His pupil, Oswald Kiilpe (1862), who bases his Grundriss der Psychologie on the hypothesis of unitary experience, says in his Einleitung in die Philosophie (1895; 4th ed. 1907) that Wundt in his System derives the right of metaphysics to transcend experience from similar procedure within the limits of the special sciences. Thi is Wundt's view, but only in the sense that reason passes from ideas to `'ideals," whether in the special sciences or in metaphysics. Reason, as in most modern psychologies and idealisms, is introduced by Wundt, after all sorts of operations, too late; and, when at length introduced, it is described as going beyond ideas and notions to " ideals " (Ideen), as an ideall continuation of series of thoughts beyond given experience - nothing more. Reason, according to Wundt, is like pure reason according to Kant; except that Wundt, receiving Kantism through NeoKantism, thinks that reason arrives at " ideals " not a priori, but by the logical process of ground and consequent, and, having abolished the thing in itself, will not follow Kant in his inconsequent passage from pure to practical reason in order to postulate a reality corresponding to " ideals " beyond experience. Wundt, in fact, agrees with Lange: that reason transcends experience of phenomena only to conceive " ideals." This being so, he finds in mathematics two kinds of transcendence - real, where the transcendent, though not actual in experience, can become partly so, e.g. the divisibility of magnitudes; imaginary, where it cannot, e.g. n-dimensions. He supposes in metaphysics the same transcendence in forming cosmological, psychological, and ontological " ideals." He supposes real as well as imaginary transcendence in cosmological " ideals "; the former as to the forms of space and time, the latter as to content, e.g. atoms. But he limits psychological and ontological " ideals " entirely to imaginary transcendence, The result is that he confines metaphysical transcendence to " a process into the imaginary " as regards the substantial and causal content of cosmological " ideals," and altogether as regards psychological and ontological " ideals." Thus, according to him, in the first place reason forms a cosmological " ideal " of a multitude of simple units related; secondly, it forms a psychological " ideal " of a multitude of wills, or substance-generating activities, which communicate with one another by ideas so that will causes ideas in will, while together they constitute a collective will, and it goes on to form the moral ideal of humanity (das sittliche Menschheitsideal); and, thirdly, it forms an ontological " ideal " of God as ground of this moral " ideal," and therewith of all being as means to this end, and an " ideal " of God as world-will, of which the world is development, and in which individual wills participate each in its sphere. " Herein," says Wundt, " consists the imperishable truth of the Kantian proposition that the moral order of the world is the single real proof of the existence of God " (System, 405; cf. 439)" Only," he adds, " the expression proof is here not admissible. Rational ` ideals ' are in general not provable." As the same limit is applied by him to all transcendent rational " ideals," and especially to those which refer to the content of the notion of the world, and, like all psychological and ontological "ideals," belong to the imaginary transcendent, his conclusion is that reason, in transcending experience, logically conceives " ideals," but never logically infers corresponding realities.
The conclusion that reason in transcending experience can show no more than the necessity of " ideals " is the only conclusion which could follow from Wundt's phenomenalism in psychology, logic, and epistemology. If knowledge is experience of ideas distinguished by inner will of apperception into subject and object in inseparable connexion, if the starting-point is ideas, if judgment is analysis of an aggregate idea, if inference is a mediate reference of the members of an aggregate of ideas to one another, then, as Wundt says, all we can know, and all reason can logically infer from such data, is in our ideas, and consciousness without an object of idea is an abstraction; so that reason, in transcending experience, can show the necessity of ideas and " ideals," but infer no corresponding reality beyond, whether in nature, or in Man, or in God. Wundt, starting from a psychology of unitary experience, deduces a consistent metaphysics of no inference of things transcending experience throughout - or rather until he came to the very last sentence of his System der Philosophie (1889), where he suddenly passes from a necessity of " ideals " (Ideen), to a necessity of " faith " (Glauben), without " knowledge " (Wissen). He forgets apparently that faith is a belief in things beyond ideas and ideals, which is impossible in his psychology of judgment and logic of inference. The fact is that his System may easily seem to prove more than it does. He describes it as idealism in the form of ideal realism, because it recognizes an ideating will requiring substance as substratum or matter for outer relations of phenomena. But when we look for the evidence of any such will beyond ourselves and our experience, we find Wundt offering nothing but an ontological " ideal " of reason, and a moral " ideal " requiring a religious " ideal," but without any power of inferring a corresponding reality. The System then ends with the necessity of an " ideal " of God as world-will, but provides no ground for the necessity of any belief whatever in the being of God, or indeed in any being at all beyond our own unitary experience.
Wundt, however, afterwards wrote an Einleitung in die Philosophic (1901; 4th ed., 1906), in which he speaks of realism in the form of ideal realism as the philosophy of the future. It is not to be idealism which resolves everything into spirit, but realism which gives the spiritual and the material each its own place in harmony with scientific consciousness. It is not to be dualistic but monistic realism, because matter is not separate from spirit. It is not to be materialistic but ideal realism, because the physical and the psychical are inseparable parallels inexplicable by one another. It is to be monistic ideal realism, like that of Fichte and Hegel; not, however, like theirs idealistic in method, a Phantastisches Begrifsgebaude, but realistic in method, a Wissenschaftliche Philosophie. It is to be ideal realism, as in the System. It is not to be a species of idealism, as in the System - but of realism. How are we to understand this change of front ? We can only explain it by supposing that Wundt wishes to believe that, beyond the " ideal," there really is proof of a transcendent, ideating, substance-generating will of God; and that he is approaching the noumenal voluntarism of his younger contemporary Paulsen. But to make such a conversion from phenomenalism plausible, it is necessary to be silent about his whole psychology, logic, and epistemology, and the consequent limitation of knowledge to experience, and of reason to ideas and " ideals," without any power of inferring corresponding things.
What a pity it is that Wundt had committed himself by his psychology to phenomenalism, to unitary experience, and to the limitation of judgment and reason to ideas and ideals! For his phenomenalism prevents him from consistently saying the truth inferred by reason - that there is a world beyond experience, a world of Nature, and a will of God, real as well as ideal. To understand Wundt is to discover what a mess modern psychology has made to metaphysics. To understand phenomenal idealism in Germany is to discover what a narrow world is to be known from the transcendental idealism of Kant shorn of Kant's inconsistencies. To understand noumenal idealism in Germany and the rise of metaphysical idealism in modern times is to discover that psychological is the origin of all metaphysical idealism. If we perceive only what is mental, all that we know is only mental. But who has proved that psychological starting-point? Who has proved that, when I scent an odour in my nostrils, I apprehend not odour but a sensation of odour; and so for the other senses? Sensation, as Aristotle said, is not of itself: it is the apprehension of a sensible object in the organism. I perceive pressure, heat, colour, sound, flavour, odour, in my five senses. Having felt reciprocal pressures in touch, I infer similar pressures between myself and the external world.
6
English Idealism 1. The Followers of Hume's Phenomenalism. - Compared with the great systems of the Germans, English idealism in the 10th century shows but little originality. It has been largely borrowed either from previous English or from later German idealism, and what originality it has possessed has been mainly shown in that spirit of eclectic compromise which is so dear to the English mind. The predominant influence, on the whole, has been the phenomenalism of Hume, with its slender store of sensations, ideas and associations, and its conclusion that all we know is sensations without any known thinkers or any other known things. This phenomenalism was developed by James Mill (1773-1836) and J. S. Mill (1806-1873), and has since been continued by A. Bain. It also became the basis of the philosophies of Huxley and of Spencer on their phenomenalistic side. It is true that Spencer's " transfigured realism" contains much that was not dreamt of by Hume. Spencer widens the empirical theory of the origin of knowledge by his brilliant hypothesis of inherited organized tendencies, which has influenced all later psychology and epistemology, and tends to a kind of compromise between Hume and Kant. He describes his belief in an unknowable absolute as " carrying a step farther the doctrine put into shape by Hamilton and Mansel." He develops this belief in an absolute in connexion with his own theory of evolution into something different both from the idealism of Hume and the realism of Hamilton, and rather falling under the head of materialism. Nevertheless, as he believes all the time that everything knowable throughout the whole world of evolution is phenomena in the sense of subjective affections of consciousness, and as he applies Hume's distinction of impressions and ideas as a distinction of vivid and faint states of consciousness to the distinction of ego and non-ego, spirit and matter, inner and outer phenomena, his philosophy of the world as knowable remains within the limits of phenomenalism. Nothing could be more like Hume than his final statement that what we are conscious of is subjective affections produced by objective agencies unknown and unknowable. The " antirealism," which takes the lion's share in " transfigured realism," is simply a development of the phenomenalism of Hume. Hume was also at the bottom of the philosophies of G. H. Lewes, who held that there is nothing but feelings, and of W. K. Clifford. Nor is Hume yet dethroned, as we see from the works of Karl Pearson and of William James, who, though an American, has exercised a considerable influence on English thought. The most flourishing time of phenomenalism, however, was during the lifetime of J. S. Mill. It was counteracted to some extent by the study at the universities of the deductive logic of Aristotle and the inductive logic of Bacon, by parts of Mill's own logic, and by the natural realism of Reid, Stewart, and Hamilton, which met Hume's scepticism by asserting a direct perception of the external world. But natural realism, as finally interpreted by Hamilton, was too dogmatic, too unsystematic, and too confused with elements derived from Kantian idealism to withstand the brilliant criticism of Mill's Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865), a work which for a time almost persuaded us that Nature as we know it from sensations is nothing but permanent possibilities of sensation, and oneself only a series of states of consciousness.
ENGLISH IDEALISM] |
2. The Influence of Kant and Hegel. - Nevertheless, there have never been wanting more soaring spirits who, shocked at the narrowness of the popular phenomenalism of Hume, have tried to find a wider idealism. They have, as a rule, sought it in Germany. Before the beginning of the 19th century, Kant had made his way to England in a translation of some of his works, and in an account of the Elements of the Critical Philosophy by A. F. M. Willich, both published in 1798. After a period of struggle, the influence of Kant gradually extended, and, as we see in the writings of Coleridge and Carlyle, of Hamilton and Mansel, of Green and Caird, of Laurie, Martineau and others, has secured an authority over English thought almost equal to that of Hume (see Idealism). Both philosophers appeal to the English love of experience, and Kant had these advantages over Hume: that within the narrow circle of sensible phenomena his theory of understanding gave to experience a fuller content, and that beyond phenomena, however inconsistently, his theory of reason postulated the reality of God, freedom and immortality. Other and wider German philosophies gradually followed that of Kant to England. Coleridge (1772-1834) not only called attention to Kant's distinction between understanding and reason, but also introduced his countrymen to the noumenal idealism of Schelling. In the Biographia Literaria (1817) he says that in Schelling's Naturphilosophie and System des transcendentalen Idealismus he first found a general coincidence with much that he had toiled out for himself, and he repeated some of the main tenets of Schelling. Carlyle (1795-1881) laid more emphasis on Fichte. At the height of his career, when between 1840 and 1850 many of Fichte's works were being translated in the Catholic Series, he called attention to Fichte's later view that all earthly things are but as a vesture or appearance under which the Divine idea of the world is the reality. Extravagant as this noumenalism is, it was a healthy fantidote to the phenomenalism of the day. Among other followers of German idealism were J. F. Ferrier (q.v.), who adopted the hypothesis of Schelling and Hegel that there is one absolute intelligence (see his Lectures and Philosophical Remains, 1866, i. 1-33; ii. 545-568), and J. Hutchison Stirling. About the same time Benjamin Jowett had been studying the philosophy of Hegel; but, being a man endowed with much love of truth but with little belief in first principles, he was too wise to take for a principle Hegel's assumption that different things are the same. He had, however, sown seeds in the minds of two distinguished pupils, T. H. Green and E. Caird (q.v.). Both proceeded to take Hegelianism seriously, and between them spread a kind of Hegelian orthodoxy in metaphysics and in theology throughout Great Britain. Green (Prolegomena to Ethics, 1883) T N Green. tried to effect a harmony of Kant and Hegel by proceeding from the epistemology of the former to the metaphysics of the latter. Taken for granted the Kantian hypothesis of a sense of sensations requiring synthesis by understanding, and the Kantian conclusion that Nature as known consists of phenomena united by categories as objects of experience, Green argued, in accordance with Kant's first position, that knowledge, in order to unite the manifold of sensations by relations into related phenomena, requires unifying intelligence, or what Kant called synthetic unity of apperception, which cannot itself be sensation, because it arranges sensations; and he argued, in accordance with Kant's second position, that therefore Nature itself as known requires unifying intelligence to constitute the relations of its phenomena, and to make it a connected world of experience. When Green said that " Nature is the system of related appearances, and related appearances are impossible apart from the action of an intelligence," he was speaking as a pure Kantian, who could be answered only by the Aristotelian position that Nature consists of related bodies beyond appearances, and by the realistic supposition that there ,, h is a tactical sense of related bodies, of the inter-resisting members of the organism, from which reason infers similar related bodies beyond sense. But now, whatever opinion we may have about Nature, at all events, as Green saw, it does not come into existence in the process by which this person or that begins to think. Nature is not my nature, nor your nature, but one. From this fact of unity of Nature and of everything in Nature, combined with the two previous positions accepted, not from Nature, but from Kant, Green proceeded to argue, altogether beyond Kant, that Nature, being one, and also requiring unifying intelligence, requires one intelligence, an eternal intelligence, a single spiritual principle, prior to, and the condition of, our individual knowledge. According to him, therefore, Nature is one system of phenomena united by relations as objects of experience, one system of related appearances, one system of one eternal intelligence which reproduces itself in us. The " true account " of the world in his own words is " that the concrete whole, which may be described indifferently as an eternal intelligence realized in the related facts of the world, or as a system of related facts rendered possible by such an intelligence, partially and gradually reproduces itself in us, communicating piecemeal, but in inseparable correlation, understanding and the facts understood, experience and the experienced world." Nobody can mistake the Schellingian and Hegelian nature of this conclusion. It is the Hegelian view that the world is a system of absolute reason. But it is not a Kantian view; and it is necessary to correct two confusions of Kant and Hegel, which have been iYnported with Hegelianism by Green and Caird. Ferrier was aware that in Kant's system " there is no common nature in all intelligence " (Lectures, ii. 568). Green, on the other hand, in deducing his own conclusion that the world is, or is a system of, one eternal intelligence, incautiously put it forward as " what may be called broadly the Kantian view " (Prolegomena, § 36), and added that he follows Kant " in maintaining that a single active conscious principle, by whatever name it be called, is necessary to constitute such a world, as the condition under which alone phenomena, i.e. appearances to consciousness, can be related to each other in a single universe" (§ 38). He admitted, however, that Kant also asserted, beyond this single universe of a single principle, a world of unknowable things in themselves, which is a Kantian not a Hegelian world. But Caird endeavoured to break down even E. Caird. this second barrier between Kant and Hegel. Accord ing to Caird, Kant " reduces the inaccessible thing in itself (which he at first speaks of as affecting our sensibility) to a noumenon which is projected by reason itself " (Essays, ii. 405); and in the Transcendental Dialectic, which forms the last part of Kant's Kritik, the noumenon becomes the object of an intuitive understanding " whose thought," says Caird, " is one with the existence of the objects it knows" (ibid. 412, 413). Kant, then, as interpreted by English Hegelians, already believed, before Hegel, that there is one intelligence common to all individuals, and that a noumenon is a thought of this common intelligence, " an ideal of reason "; so that Kant was trying to be a Hegelian, holding that the world has no being beyond the thoughts of one intelligence. But history repeats itself; and these same two interpretations of Kant had already been made in the lifetime of Kant by Fichte, in the two Introductions to the " Wissenschaftslehre," which he published in his Philosophical Journal in 1797. Now, the curious fact is, that Kant himself wrote a most indignant letter, dated 7th August 1 799 (Kant's Werke, ed. Hartenstein, viii. 600-601), on purpose to repudiate all connexion with Fichte. Fichte's " Wissenschaftslehre," he said, is a completely untenable system, and a metaphysics of fruitless apices, in which he disclaimed any participation; his own Kritik he refused to regard as a propaedeutic to be construed by the Fichtian or any other standpoint, declaring that it is to be understood according to the letter; and he went so far as to assert that his own critical philosophy is so satisfactory to the reason, theoretical and practical, as to be incapable of improvement, and for all future ages indispensable for the highest ends of humanity. After this letter it cannot be doubted that Kant not only differed wholly from Fichte, both about the synthetic unity of apperception and about the thing in itself, but also is to be construed literally throughout. When he said that the act of consciousness " I think," is in allem Bewusstsein ein and dasselbe, he meant, as the whole context shows, not that it is one in all thinkers, but only that it accompanies all my other ideas and is one and the same in all my consciousness, while it is different in different thinkers. Though again in the Transcendental Dialect he spoke of pure reason conceiving " ideals " of noumena, he did not mean that a noumenon is nothing but a thought arising only through thinking, or projected by reason, but meant that pure reason can only conceive the " ideal " while, over and above the " ideal " of pure reason, a noumenon is a real thing, a thing in itself, which is not indeed known, but whose existence is postulated by practical reason in the three instances of God, freedom, and immortality. Consequently, Kant's explanation of the unity of a thing is that there is always one thing in itself causing in us many phenomena, which as understood by us are objectively valid for all our consciousnesses. What Kant never said and what his whole philosophy prevented his saying, was that a single thing is a single thought of a single consciousness; either of men, as in Fichte's philosophy, or of God and man, as in Hegel's. The passage from Kant to Hegel attempted by Green, and the harmony of Kant and Hegel attempted by Green and Caird, are unhistorical, and have caused much confusion of thought. The success, therefore, of the works of Green and Caird must stand or fall by their Hegelianism, which has indeed secured many adherents, partly metaphysical and partly theological. Among the former we may mention W. Wallace, the translator of most of Hegel's Encyklopadie, who had previously learnt Hegelianism from Ferrier; W. H. Fairbrother, who has written a faithful account of The Philosophy of Thomas Hill Green (1896); R. L. Nettleship, D. G. Ritchie, J. H. Muirhead, J. S. Mackenzie, and J. M. E. M ` Taggart, who closes his acute Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (rigor) with " the possibility of finding, above all knowledge and volition, one all-embracing unity, which is only not true, only not good, because all truth and all goodness are but distorted shadows of its absolute perfection- ` das Unbegreifliche, weil es der Begriff selbst ist.' " There are still to be mentioned two English Hegelians, who have not confused Kant and Hegel as Green did: namely, Simon Somerville Laurie (1829-1909) and F. H. Bradley (b. 1846), fellow of Merton College, Oxford.
Laurie wrote Metaphysica, nova et vetusta, a Return to Dualism, by Scotus Novanticus (1884; 2nd ed., enlarged, 1889). His attitude to Green is expressed towards the end of his book, where Laurie. he says: " The more recent argument for God which resolves itself into the necessity of a self-distinguishing one basis to which nature as a mere system of relations must be referred, is simply the old argument of the necessity for a First Cause dressed up in new clothes. Not by any means an argument to be despised, but stopping short of the truth through an inadequate analytic of knowledge." His aim is to remedy this defect by psychology, under the conviction that a true metaphysics is at bottom psychology, and a true psychology fundamentally metaphysics. His psychology is founded on a proposed distinction between " attuition " and reason. His theory of "attuition," by which he supposes that we become conscious of objects outside ourselves, is his " return to dualism," and is indeed so like natural realism as to suggest that, like Ferrier, he starts from Hamilton to end in Hegel. As, however, he does not suppose that we have a direct perception of something resisting the organism, such as Hamilton maintained, it becomes necessary to state exactly what he means by " attuition." It is, according to him, something more than sensation, but less than perception; it is common to us with lower animals such as dogs; its operation consists in co-ordinating sensations into an aggregate which the subject throws back into space, and thereby has a consciousness of a total object outside itself, e.g. a stone or a stick, a man or a moon. He carries its operation beforereason still farther, supposing that " attuition " makes particular inferences about outside objects, and that a man, or a dog, through association " attuites " sequence and invariableness of succession, and, in fact, gets as far in the direction of causation as Hume thought it possible to go at all. Laurie's view is that a dog who has no higher faculty than " attuition," can go no farther; but that a man goes farther by reason. He thinks that " attuition " gives us consciousness of an object, but without knowledge, and that knowledge begins with reason. His theory of reason brings him into contact with the German idealists: he accepts from Kant the hypothesis of synthesis and a priori categories, from Fichte the hypothesis that will is necessary to reason, from Schelling and Hegel the hypothesis of universal reason, and of an identity between the cosmic reason and the reason of man, in which he agrees also with Green and Caird. But he has a peculiar view of the powers of reason; that (1) under the law of excluded middle it states alternatives, A or B or C or D; (2) under the law of contradiction it negates B, C, D; (3) under the law of sufficient reason it says " therefore "; and (4) under the law of identity it concludes, A is A. In working out this process he supposes that reason throws into consciousness a priori categories, synthetic predicates a priori, or, as he also calls them, " dialectic percepts." Of these the most important is cause, of which his theory, in short, is that by this a priori category and the process of reason we go on from sequence to consequence; first stating that an effect may be caused by several alternatives, then negating all but one, next concluding that this one as sufficient reason is cause, and finally attaining the necessity of the causal nexus by converting causality into identity, e.g. instead of " Fire burns wood," putting " Fire is comburent, wood is combustible." Lastly, while he agrees with Kant about a priori categories, he differs about the knowledge to be got out of them. Kant, applying them only to sensations, concluded that we can know nothing beyond by their means. But Laurie, applying them to " attuitions " of objects outside, considers that, though they are " reason-born," yet they make us know the objects outside to which they are applied. This is the farthest point of his dualism, which suggests a realistic theory of knowledge, different in process from Hamilton's, but with the same result. Not so: Laurie is a Hegelian, using Kant's categories, as Hegel did, to argue that they are true not only of thoughts but of things; and for the same reason, that things and thoughts are the same. At first in his psychology he speaks of the " attuition " and the rational perception of an outside object. But in his metaphysics founded thereon he interprets the outside object to mean an object outside you and me, but not self-subsistent; not outside universal reason, but only " Bent reason." He quotes with approval Schelling's phrase, " Nature is visible Intelligence and Intelligence visible Nature." He agrees with Hegel that there are two fundamental identities, the identity of all reason, and the identity of all reason and all being. Hence he explains, what is a duality for us is only a " quasi-duality " from a universal standpoint. In fact, his dualism is not realism, but merely the distinction of subject and object within idealism. Laurie's metaphysics is an attempt to supply a psychological propaedeutic to Hegelian metaphysics.
Bradley's Appearance and Reality (1893) is a more original performance. It proceeds on the opposite method of making Bradley. metaphysics independent of psychology. " Meta physics," says he, " has no direct interest in the origin of ideas " (254), and " we have nothing to do here with the psychological origin of the perception " (35). This metaphysical method, which we have already seen attempted by Lotze, is the true method, for we know more about things than about the beginnings of our knowledge. Bradley is right to go straight to reality, and right also to inquire for the absolute, in order to take care that his metaphysical view is comprehensive enough to be true of the world as a whole. He is unconsciously returning to the metaphysics of Aristotle in spirit; yet he differs from toto coelo in the letter. His starting-point is the view that things as ordinarily understood, and (we may add) as Aristotle understood them (though with important qualifications) are self-contradictory, and are therefore not reality but appearances. If they were really contradictory they would be non-existent. However, he illustrates their supposed contradictoriness by examples, such as one substance with many attributes, and motion from place to place in one time. But he fails to show that a substance is one and many in the same respect, and that motion requires a body to be in two places at the same moment of one time. There is no contradiction (as Aristotle said) between a man being determined by many attributes, as rational, six-foot-high, white, and a father, and yet being one whole substance distinct from any other, including his own son; nor is there any contradiction between his body being in bed at 8.15 and at breakfast at 8.45 within the same hour. Bradley's supposed contradictions are really mere differences. So far he reminds one of Herbart, who founded his " realistic " metaphysics on similar misunderstandings; except that, while Herbart concluded that the world consists of a number of simple " reals," each with a simple quality but unknown, Bradley concludes that reality is one absolute experience which harmonizes the supposed contradictions in an unknown manner. If his starting-point recalls Herbart his method of arriving at the absolute recalls Spinoza. In his Table of Contents, ch. xiii., on the General Nature of Reality, he says, in true Spinozistic vein, " The Real is one substantially. Plurality of Reals is not possible." In the text he explains that, if there were a plurality of reals, they would have to be beings independent of each other, and yet, as a plurality related to each other - and this again seems to him to be a contradiction. Throughout the rest of the work he often repeats that a thing which is related cannot be an independent thing. Now, if " independent " means " existing alone " and unrelated the same thing could not be at once related and independent; and, taking substance as independent in that sense, Spinoza concluded that there could only be one substance. But this is not the sense in which a plurality of things would have to be independent in order to exist, or to be substances in the Aristotelian sense. " Independent " (xcwptcrrov), or "self-subsistent" (Ka@' a)TO) means " existing apart," i.e. existing differently: it does not mean " existing alone," solitary, unrelated. This existing apart is the only sense in which a plurality of things need be independent in order to be real, or in order to be substances; and it is a sense in which they can all be related to each other, as I am not you, but I am addressing you. There is no contradiction, then, though Bradley supposes one, between a thing being an individual, independent, self-subsistent substance, existing apart as a distinct thing, and being also related to other things. Accordingly, the many things of this world are not self-discrepant, as Bradley says, but are distinct and relative substances, as. Aristotle said. The argument, therefore, for one substance in Spinoza's Ethics, and for one absolute, the Real, which is one substantially, in Bradley's Appearance and Reality, breaks down, so far as it is designed to prove that there is only one substance, or only one Real. Bradley, however, having satisfied himself, like Spinoza, by an abuse of the word " independent," that " the finite is self-discrepant," goes on to ask what the one Real, the absolute, is; and, as he passed from Herbart to Spinoza, so now he passes from Spinoza to Kant. Spinoza answered realistically that the one substance is both extended and thinking. Bradley answers idealistically that the one Real is one absolute experience, because all we know is experience. "This absolute," says he, "is experience, because that is really what we mean when we predicate or speak of anything." But in order to identify the absolute with experience he is obliged, as he before abused the words " contradictory " and " independent," so now to abuse the word " experience." " Experience," says he, " may mean experience only direct, or indirect also. Direct experience I understand to be confined to the given simply, to the merely felt or presented. But indirect experience includes all fact that is constructed from the basis of the ` this ' and the ` mine.' It is all that is taken to exist beyond the bare moment " (248). This is to substitute " indirect experience " for all inference, and to maintain that when, starting from any " direct experience," I infer the back of the moon, which is always turned away from me, I nevertheless have experience of it; nay, that it is experience. Having thus confused contradiction and difference, independence and solitariness, experience and inference, Bradley is able to deduce finally that reality is not different substances, experienced and inferred, as Aristotle thought it, but is one absolute super-personal experience, to which the socalled plurality of things, including all bodies, all souls, and even a personal God, is appearance - an appearance, as ordinarily understood, self-contradictory, but, as appearing to one spiritual reality, somehow reconciled. But how ?
3. Other German Influences. - Brief reference only can be made to four other English idealists who have quarried in the rich mines of German idealism: G. H. Lewes, W. K. Clifford, G. Romanes and Karl Pearson. Lewes (q.v.), starting from the phenomenalism of Hume, fell under the spell of Kant and his successors, and produced a compromise between G.H.Lewes. Hume and Kant which recalls some of the later German phenomenalisms which have been described (see his Problems of Life and Mind). Rejecting everything in the Kritik which savoured of the " metempirical," he yet sympathized so far with Hegel's noumenalism as to accept the identification of cause and effect, though he interpreted the hypothesis phenomenalistically by saying that cause and effect are two aspects of the same phenomenon. But his main sympathy was with Fechner, the gist of whose " inner psychophysics " he adopted, without, however, the hypothesis that what is conscious in us is conscious in the all-embracing spirit of God. His phenomenalism also compelled him to give a more modified adhesion to Fechner's " outer psychophysics." It will be remembered that Fechner regarded every composite body as the appearance of a spirit; so that when, for example, molecular motion of air is said to cause a sensation of sound in me, it is really a spirit appearing as air which causes the sensation in my spirit. This noumenalism would not do for Lewes, who says that air is a group of qualities, and qualities are feelings, and motion is a mode of feeling. What, then, could he make of the external stimulus ? He was obliged by his phenomenalism to say that it is only one feeling causing another in me. He ingeniously suggested that the external agent is one feeling regarded objectively, and the internal effect another feeling regarded subjectively; " and therefore," to quote his own words, " to say that it is a molecular movement which produces a sensation of sound, is equivalent to saying that a sensation of sight produces a sensation of hearing." Accordingly, his final conclusion is that " existence - the absolute - is known to us in feeling," and " the external changes are symbolized as motion, because that is the mode of feeling into which all others are translated when objectively considered: objective consideration being the attitude of looking at the phenomena, whereas subjective consideration is the attitude of any other sensible response." He does not say what happens when we use vision alone and still infer that an external stimulus causes the internal sensation. But his metaphysics is an interesting example of a phenomenalist, sympathizing with noumenalists so different as Hegel and Fechner, and yet maintaining his phenomenalism. In this feature the phenomenalism of Lewes is the English parallel to the German phenomenalism of Wundt. At the same time, and under the derivative influence of Wundt, rather than the more original inspiration of Fechner, W. K. Clifford (q.v.) was working out the hypothesis of psychophysical parallelism to a conclusion different from that of Lewes, and more allied to that of Leibnitz, the prime originator of all these hypotheses. Clifford W. K. advanced the hypothesis that the supposed un Clifford. conscious units of feeling, or psychical atoms, are the " mind-stuff " out of which everything physical and psychical is composed, and are also things in themselves, such as Kant supposed when he threw out the hint that after all " the Ding-ansich might be of the nature of mind " (see Mind, 1878, p. 67). As a matter of fact, this " mind-stuff " of Clifford is far more like the " petites perceptions " of Leibnitz, from which it is indirectly derived. This hypothesis Clifford connected with the hypothesis of psychophysical parallelism. He maintained that the physical and the psychical are two orders which are parallel without interference; that the physical or objective order is merely phenomena, or groups of feelings, or " objects," while the psychical or subjective order is both a stream of feelings of which we are conscious in ourselves, and similar streams which we infer beyond ourselves, or, as he came to call them, " ejects "; that, if we accept the doctrine of evolution at all, we must carry these ejective streams of feelings through the whole organic world and beyond it to the inorganic world, as a " quasimental fact "; that at bottom both orders, the physical phenomena and the psychical streams, are reducible to feelings; and that therefore there is no reason against supposing that they are made out of the same " mind-stuff," which is the thing-in-itself. The resemblance of this noumenal idealism to that of Fechner is unmistakable. The difference is that Clifford considers " mind-stuff " to be unconscious, and denies that there is any evidence of consciousness apart from a nervous system. He agrees with du Bois-Reymond in refusing to regard the universe as a vast brain animated by conscious mind. He disagrees with Fechner's hypothesis of a world-soul, the highest spirit, God, who embraces all psychophysical processes. Curiously enough, his follower G. J. Romanes (q.v.) took the one step needed to bring Cliffordism completely back to Fechnerism. In his Rede Lecture on Mind and Motion (1885), he said that Clifford's deduction, that the G..1. universe, although entirely composed of " mind-stuff," Romanes. is itself mindless, did not follow from his premisses. Afterwards, when the lecture was published in Mind and Motion and Monism (1895), this work also contained a chapter on " The World as an Eject," in which Romanes again contended against Clifford that the world does admit of being regarded as an eject, that is, as a mind beyond one's own. At the same time, he refused to regard this " world-eject " as personal, because personality implies limitation. He concludes that the integrating principle of the whole - the Spirit, as it were, of the Universe - must be something akin to, but immeasurably superior to, the " psychism " of man. Nothing can be more curious than the way in which a school of English philosophers, which originally started from Hume, the most sceptical of phenomenalists, thus gradually passed over to Leibnitz and Fechner, the originators of panpsychistic noumenalism. The Spirit of the Universe contemplated by Romanes is identical with the World-soul contemplated by Fechner.
Karl Pearson (The Grammar of Science, 1892, 2nd enlarged ed., 1900), starting from Hume's phenomenal idealism, has developed views closely allied to Mach's universal physical phenomenology. What Hume called repeated sequence Pearson calls " routine " of perceptions, and, like his master, holds that cause is an antecedent stage in a routine of perceptions; while he also acknowledges that his account of matter leads him very near to John Stuart Mill's definition of matter as " a permanent possibility of sensations." His views, in his chapter on the Laws of Motion, that the physicist forms a conceptional model of the universe by aid of corpuscles, that these corpuscles are only symbols for the component parts of perceptual bodies, and that force is a measure of motion, and not its cause, are the views of Mach. At the end of this chapter he says that the only published work from the perusal of which he received any help in working out his views in 1882 and 1884, was Mach's Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung (1883). Mach had begun to put them forward in 1872, and Kirchhoff in 1874. But they may very well have been developed independently in Germany and in England from their common source in Hume. Their point is to stretch Hume's phenomenalism so as to embrace all science, by contending that mechanism is not at the bottom of phenomena, but is only the conceptual shorthand by aid of which men of 'science can briefly describe phenomena, and that all science is description and not explanation. These are the views of Mach and of Pearson, as we read them in the latter's Preface. Nor can we find any difference, except the minute shade that Pearson takes up a position of agnosticism between Clifford's assertion of " mind-stuff " and Mach's denial of things in themselves.
James Ward, in Naturalism and Agnosticism (1899), starts from the same phenomenalistic views of Mach and Kirchhoff about mechanics; he proceeds to the hypothesis of duality within experience, which we have traced in James Ward. the phenomenalisms of Schuppe, Avenarius and Wundt, and to the hypothesis of one consciousness, which appears variously in the German idealisms, not of Kant, as Ward thinks, but of Fichte, Hegel and Schuppe; and somehow he manages to end with the noumenalistic conclusion that Nature is God's Spirit. Though this work evinces a thoroughly English love of compromise, yet it is not merely eclectic, but is animated throughout by the inspiration of his " old teacher, Lotze." Lotze, as we saw, rejected bodily mechanism, reduced known bodies to phenomena, and concluded that reality is the life of God. Ward on the whole follows this triple scheme, but modifies it by new arguments founded on later German phenomenalism.
Under the first head he attacks mechanics precisely as Mach had done (see above); if this attack had been consistently carried out it would have carried him no further than Mach. Under the second head, according to Ward, as according to Wundt, knowledge is experience; we must start with the duality of subject and object, or perpetual reality, phenomenon, in the unity of experience, and not believe, as realists do, that either subject or object is distinct from this unity; moreover, experience requires " conation," because it is to interesting objects that the subject attends; conation is required for all synthesis, associative and intellective; thinking is doing; presentation, feeling, conation are one inseparable whole; and the unity of the subject is due to activity and not to a substratum. But, in opposition to Wundt and in common with Schuppe, he believes that experience is (1) experience of the individual, and (2) experience of the race, which is but an extension of individual experience, and is variously called, in the course of the discussion, universal, collective, conceptual, rational experience, consciousness in general, absolute consciousness, intelligence, and even, after Caird, " a perfect intelligence." He regards this universal experience as the result entirely of intersubjective intercourse, and concludes that its subject is not numerically distinct from the subject of individual experience, but is one and continuous with it, and that its conceptions depend on the perceptions of individual experience. He infers the corollary that universal experience contains the same duality of subjective and objective factors without dualism. He thinks that it is the origin of the categories of causality, which he refers to " conation," and substance, which he attributes to the interaction of active subjects with their environment and to their intercourse with each other. He applies universal experience, as Schuppe does, to explain the unity of the object, and its independence of individual but not of universal experience, holding that the one sun, and the whole world of intersubjective intercourse, or the " trans-subjective " world, though " independent of the individual percipient as such," is " not independent of the universal experience, but the object of that experience " (ii. 196-197). He applies universal experience to explain how we come, falsely in his opinion, to believe that the object of experience is an independent thing; and he uses three arguments, which are respectively those of Schuppe, Avenarius and Wundt. He supposes first, that we falsely conclude from the sun being independent of each to being independent of all; secondly, that by " introjection " we falsely conclude that another's experience is in him and therefore one's own in oneself, while the sun remains outside; and thirdly, that by " reification " of abstractions, natural science having abstracted the object and psychology the subject, each falsely believes that its own abstract, the sun or the subject, is an independent thing. What, then, could we know from this " duality in experience" ? He hardly has a formal theory of inference, but implies throughout that it only transcends perceptions, and perceptual realities or phenomena, in order to conclude with ideas, not facts. When we combine his view of Nature under the first head that whatever is inferred in the natural sciences is ideas, with his view of knowledge under the second head that knowledge is experience, and experience, individual or universal, is of duality of subject and object in the unity of experience, it follows that all we could know from the data would be one experience of the race, one subject consisting of individual subjects, and in Nature single objects in the unity of this universal experience; and beyond we should be able to form conceptions dependent on the perceptions of individual experience in the unity of universal experience: that is all. There can be no doubt that Mach, Schuppe and Wundt drew the right phenomenalistic conclusions from such phenomenalistic data. Not so Ward, who proceeds to a Natural Theology, on the ground that " from a world of spirits to a Supreme Spirit is a possible step." He had definitely confined universal experience to the one experience of the race. But perhaps Caird's phrase " a perfect intelligence " has beguiled him into thinking that the one subject of universal experience is not mere mankind, but God Himself. Under the third head, however, his guide is Lotze. The argument may be shortly put as follows: As the Nature which is the object of mechanics and all natural sciences is not natural substances, but phenomena and ideas; as mass is not substance, and force is not cause; as activity is not in the physical but in the psychical world; as the laws of Nature are not facts but teleological conceptions, and Nature is teleological, as well as not mechanical but kinematical; as the category of causality is to be referred to " conation "; as, in short, " mind is active and matter inert," what then? One subject of universal experience, one with the subjects of individual experience, you would suppose, and that Nature as a whole is its one object. Not so, according to Ward; but " God as the living unity of all," and " no longer things, but the connecting conserving acts of the one Supreme." What, then, is the relation of God to the one universal experience, the experience of the race, which was under the second head the unity in duality of all knowledge ? He does not say. But instead of any longer identifying the experience of the race and universal experience, he concludes his book by saying " our reason is confronted and determined by universal reason." This is his way of destroying Naturalism and Agnosticism.
4. Personal Idealism. - The various forms of idealism which have been described naturally led in England, even among idealists themselves, to a reaction against all systems which involve the denial of personality. English moral philosophy cannot long tolerate a metaphysics which by merging all minds in one would destroy personality, personal causation and moral responsibility, as James Martineau well said. A new school, therefore, arose of which the protagonist was Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison (b. 1856; professor of logic and metaphysics at Edinburgh University from 1880) in his Scottish Philosophy (1885), and Hegelianism and Personality (1887).
" Each of us is a self," he says, and in another passage, " The real self is one and indivisible, and is unique in each individual. This is the unequivocal testimony of consciousness." What makes his vindication of conscious personality all the more interesting is that he has so much in common with the Hegelians; agreeing as he does with Hegel that self-consciousness is the highest fact, the ultimate category of thought through which alone the universe is intelligible, and an adequate account of the great fact of existence. He agrees also that there is no object without subject. It is difficult to see exactly where he begins to differ from Hegel; but at any rate he believes in different self-conscious persons; he does not accept the dialectical method, but believes in beginning from the personal experience of one's own self-consciousness; and, though he is not very clear on the subject, he would have to admit that a thing, such as the sun, is a different object in each person's consciousness. He is not a systematic thinker, but is too much affected by the eclectic notion of reconciling all philosophies. F. C. S. Schiller (b. 1864, fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford), in Riddles of the Sphinx (1891), is a more systematic thinker. He rejects the difference between matter and spirit. He agrees with Leibnitz in the analysis of the material into the immaterial, but with Lotze in holding that the many immaterial elements coexist and interact. At the same time he differs from Lotze's conclusion that their union requires one absolute substance. Again, he thinks that substance is activity; differing from both Leibnitz and Lotze herein, and still more in not allowing the existence of the many beyond experience. Hence his personal or pluralistic idealism is the view that the world is a plurality of many coexisting and interacting centres of experience, while will is the most fundamental form of experience.' In connexion with these views reference should be made to a work entitled Personal Idealism, Philosophical Essays by Eight Members of the University of Oxford (1902), edited by H. Sturt, and numbering Schiller, as well as G. F. Stout, H. Rashdall and others among its contributors (cf. also H. Sturt, Idola theatri, 1908). They do not all agree with one another, or perhaps even with the title. Nevertheless, there is a common tendency in them, and in the university of Oxford, towards the belief that, to use the words of the editor, " We are free moral agents in a sense which cannot apply to what is merely natural." There is indeed much more activity of thought at Oxford than the world suspects. Mansel and Jowett, Green and Caird, Bradley and Bosanquet arose in quick succession, the predecessors of a generation which aims at a new metaphysics. The same sort of antithesis between the one and the many has appeared in the United States. Josiah Royce (b. 1855, professor of philosophy, Harvard) believes in the absolute like Green and Bradley, in " the unity of a single self-consciousness, which includes both our own and all finite conscious meanings in one final eternally present insight," as he says in The World and the Individual (1900; see also later works). G. T. Ladd (q.v.) also believes in " a larger all-inclusive self," and goes so far as the paradox that perfect personality is only reconcilable with one infinite being. While Royce is Hegelian, Ladd prefers Lotze, but both believe in one mind. William James (q.v.), on the other hand, in his psychological works shows that the tendency of recent psychology is to personality, interpreted idealistically; though without a very clear appreciation of what a person is, and personality means. By a curious coincidence, almost at the time of the appearance of the Essays on Personal Idealism, an American writer, G. H. Howison, published The Limits of Evolution, and other Essays illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Idealism (1901). In fact there has been an increase of philosophical intercourse between English and American universities, which is a hopeful sign of progress.
The advent of personal idealism is a welcome protest against the confusion of God and man in one mind, and against the confusion of one man's mind with another's. The school undoubtedly tends towards realism. I am conscious only of myself as a person, and of my bodily signs. I know the existence of other human persons and minds only through their giving similar bodily signs. If the personal idealist consistently denies other bodies, then the bodily signs become, according to him, only part of his experience, which can prove only the existence of himself. To infer another mind he must infer another body, and the bodily environment including his and other bodies. Again, in being conscious of myself, I am not conscious of my mind in the abstract without my body. I cannot separate touching from my tactile organs, seeing from my eyes, or hearing from my ears. I cannot think my body away. Moreover, I am not conscious of my whole personal life at all. How do I know that I was born, though I cannot remember it, and that I shall die, though I am not now conscious of death ? How do I know that I am the same person from birth to death ? Not by my consciousness, but by knowing the bodies of others - of babies on the one hand, and of old men on the other hand. It is usual to say that the body has not enough unity to be part of the person: the objection is much more true of conscious mind. The truth is that not the unity of consciousness but the fact of its existence is the important point. The existence of my consciousness is my evidence for my soul. But it does not prove that I am nothing but soul. As a human person, I am body and soul; and the idealistic identification of the Ego with soul or mind, involving the corollary that my body belongs to the non-Ego and is no part of myself, is the reductio ad absurdum of idealism. Lastly, though the personal idealists are right in rejecting the hypothesis of one mind, they are too hasty in supposing that the hypothesis is useless for idealistic purposes. No idealism can explain how we all know one sun, except by supposing that we all have one mind. The difficulty of personal idealism, on the other hand, is to reconcile the unity of the thing with the plurality of thinkers. The unity oaf the sun can only be explained either idealistically 1 For Dr Schiller's views, see further Pragmatism.
by supposing it to be one object of one mind, or realistically by supposing it to be one thing distinct from the many minds which think about it. The former alternative is false, the latter true. Personal idealism, therefore, must end in personal realism.
7
Realism r. Metaphysical and Psychological Realism. - Realism is the view that some known things are bodily, and some are mental. At its best, it is the Aristotelian view that both are substances. The modern misunderstanding of " substance " has been a main cause of the confusion of modern thought. Aristotle meant by it any distinct thing; e.g. I, you, an animal, a plant, the earth, the moon, the sun, God. He calls each of these, as existing apart, a thing per se'(Ka6' aur6). It is true that, having divided a natural substance into form and matter, he called each element " substance." But these are not primary meanings; and matter, or supposed substratum, in particular, he says, is not actually substance (Met. Z 3 ) or is only potentially substance (Met. H 1-2). In modern times, Spinoza, by a mere mistake, changed the meaning of " substance " from " existing apart " to " existing alone," and consistently concluded that there is only one. Locke mistook it to mean " substratum," or support of qualities, and naturally concluded that it is unknown. Kant, taking it in the mistaken meaning of Locke, converted it into the a priori category of the permanent substrate beneath the changes of phenomena, and even went so far as to separate it from the thing in itself, as substantia phenomenon from noumenon. When it had thus lost every vestige of its true meaning, Kant's successors naturally began to speak of things as being distinct without being substances. Fichte began this by saying that ego is activity, and being is life. Hegel said that spirit is not substance but subject, which to Aristotle would have meant that it is not a distinct thing, yet is a distinct thing. Fechner, Wundt and Paulsen have fixed the conclusion in psychology that soul is not substance but unity of mental life; and Wundt concludes from the modern history of the term that substance or " substrate " is only a secondary conception to that of causality, and that, while there is a physical causality distinct from that of substance, psychical causality requires no substance at all.
The result of this confusion is that the moderns have no name at all for a distinct thing, and, being mere slaves of abstract terms, constantly speak of mere attributes, such as activity, life, will, actuality, unity of mental operations, as if they were distinct things. But an attribute, though real, is not a distinct reality, but only a determinant of a substance, and has no being of its own apart from the substance so determined; whereas a substance, determined by all its attributes, is different from everything else in the world. Though, for simplicity and universality of thought, even in science, we must use the abstraction of attributes, and, by the necessity and weakness of language, must signify what are not substances by nouns substantive, we must guard against the over-abstraction of believing that a thing exists as we abstract it. The point of true realism is Aristotle's point that the world consists of such distinct, though related, things, and therefore of substances, natural and supernatural. Again, the method of true realism is that of Aristotle, and consists in recognizing the independence of metaphysics. The contrary method is psychological metaphysics, which makes metaphysics dependent on psychology, on the ground that the origin of knowledge determines its limits. This is the method which, as we have seen, has led from psychological to metaphysical idealism, by the argument that what we begin by perceiving is mental, and, therefore, what we end by knowing is mental. Now, there is no principle of method superior to that of Aristotle - we must begin with what is known to us. The things best known to man are the things which he now kiaows as a man. About these known things there is some agreement: about the beginnings of knowledge there is nothing but controversy. We do not know enough about the origin of knowledge to determine its limits. Hence, to proceed from psychology to metaphysics is to proceed from the less to the more known; and the paradoxes of psychological have caused those of metaphysical idealism.
The realist, then, ought to begin with metaphysics without psychological prejudices. He must ask what are known things, and especially what has been discovered in the sciences; in mechanics, in order to find the essence of bodies which is neglected by idealism; in mental science, in order to understand consciousness which is neglected by materialism. With the conviction that the only fair way of describing metaphysics has been to avoid putting forward one system, and even to pay most attention to the dominant idealism, we have nevertheless been driven occasionally to test opinions by this independent metaphysical method. The chief results we have found against idealism are that bodies have not been successfully analysed except into bodies, as real matter; and that bodies are known to exert reciprocal pressure in reducing one another to a joint mass with a common velocity by being mutually impenetrable, as real forces. The chief results we have found against materialism are that bodies evolving account neither for the origin of themselves, their nature, and their fundamental order of resemblance and difference, nor for the nature and origin of consciousness, nor even as yet for their becoming good for conscious beings. Hence' we come to the realistic conclusions that among known substances some are bodies, others are souls; that man is body and soul; and that God is a pure soul or spirit. At the same time, while the independence of metaphysics leads us to metaphysical realism, this is not to deny the value of psychology, still less of logic. Besides the duty of determining what we know, there is the duty of determining how we know it. But in order to discharge it, a reform of psychology as well as of metaphysics is required. Two psychological errors, among many others, constantly meet us in the history of idealism - the arbitrary hypothesis of a sense of sensations, or of ideas, and the intolerable neglect of logical inference. Logical inference from sense is a process from sensible to insensible existence. The former error needs something deeper than a Kantian critique of reason, or an Avenarian criticism of experience; it needs a criticism of the senses. We want an answer to this question - What must we know by the senses in order to enable us to know what we infer by reason in the sciences? Without here aiming at exhaustiveness, we may bring forward against the dominant idealism a psychological theory of sense and reason. By touch I perceive one bodily member reciprocally pressing another in myself, e.g. lip pressing lip; by touch again I perceive one bodily member similarly pressing but not another member in myself, e.g. only one lip pressing; by inference from touch I infer that it is reciprocally pressing another body similar to my other bodily member, i.e. another body similar to my other lip. On this theory, then, founded on the conscious facts of double and single pressure in touch, and on the logic of inference, we have at once a reason for our knowledge of external bodies, and an explanation of the early appearance of that knowledge. The child has only to have its mother's nipple in its mouth in order to infer something very like the mutually pressing parts of its own mouth. Having thus begun by touch and tactile inference, we confirm and extend our inferences of bodies in Nature by using the rest of the senses. This is not to forget that the five senses are not our whole stock or to confine inference to body. We have also the inner sense of consciousness which is inexplicable by body alone. By combining, moreover, our knowledge of Nature with our consciousness of our own works, we can infer that Nature is a work of God. Next, finding that He gives signs of bodily works, but no signs of bodily organs, we can infer that God is a Spirit. Finally, returning to ourselves, we can conclude that, while the conscious in God is Spirit without Body, in us it is spirit with body. This final distinction between bodily and spiritual substances we owe to Descartes.
2. The Undercurrent of Modern Realism. - Coming after the long domination of Aristotelian realism, Descartes and Locke, though psychological idealists, were metaphysical realists. Their position was so illogical that it was easily turned into metaphysical idealism. But their psychological method and idealism produced another mistake - the tendency to a modicum of realism, as much as seemed to this or that author to follow from psychological idealism. In Germany, since the victory of Kant over Wolff, realism has always been in difficulties, which we can appreciate when we reflect that the Germans by preference apply the term " realism " to the paradoxes of Herbart (1776-1841), who, in order to avoid supposed contradictions, supposed that bodies are not substances, but show (Schein), while " reals" are simple substances, each with a simple quality, and all preserving themselves against disturbance by one another, whether physically or psychologically, but not known to be either material or spiritual because we do not know the simple quality in which the nature of the real consists. There have indeed been other realisms in Germany. Trendelenburg (1802-1872), a formidable opponent of Hegel, tried to surmount Kant's transcendental idealism by supposing that motion, and therefore time, space and the categories, though a priori, are common to thought and being. Diihring, with a similar object, makes matter a common basis. While these realisms come dangerously near to materialism, that of the Roman Catholic A. Gunther (1783-1863), " Cartesius correctus," erected too mystical an edifice on the psychological basis of Descartes to sustain a satisfactory realism. Yet Giintherism has produced a school, of which the most distinguished representative is the Old Catholic bishop in Bonn, Th. Weber, whose Metaphysik, completed in 1891, starting from the ego and the analysis of consciousness, aims at arriving at the distinction between spirit and nature, and at rising to the spirit of God the Creator. Other realistic systems are those of J. H. von Kirchmann (1802-1884), author, among other works, of Die Philosophie des Wissens (1864) and Ueber die Principien des Realismus (1875); Goswin Uphues (b. 1841; professor of philosophy at Halle), directed against the scepticism of Shute's Discourse on Truth; and Hermann Schwarz (born 1864), who completes the psychological view of Uphues that we can know objects as they are, by the metaphysical view that they can be as we know them. But German realism lacks critical power, and is little better than a weed overshadowed by the luxuriant forest of German idealism.
In France, the home of Cartesian realism, after the vicissitudes of sensationalism and materialism, which became connected in French the French mind with the Revolution, the spirit of Descartes revived in the 19th century in the spiritualistic realism of Victor Cousin. But Cousin's psychological method of proceeding from consciousness outwards, and the emphasis laid by him on spirit in comparison with body, prevented a real revival of realism. He essayed to answer Locke by Kant, and Kant by Reid, Maine de Biran and Schelling. From Reid he adopted the belief in an external world beyond sensation, from Biran the explanation of personality by will, from Schelling the identification of all reason in what he called " impersonal reason," which he supposed to be identical in God and man, to be subjective and objective, psychological and ontological. We start, according to him, from a psychological triplicity in consciousness, consisting of sensation, personal will and impersonal reason, which by a priori laws of causality and substance carries us to the ontological triplicity of oneself as ego willing, the non-ego as cause of sensation, and God as the absolute cause beneath these relative causes. So far this ontological triplicity is realism. But when we examine his theory of the non-ego, and find that it resolves matter into active force and this into animated activity, identifies law with reason, and calls God absolute substance, we see at once that this spiritual realism is not very far from idealism. About 1840, owing largely to the teaching of E. Saisset in the spiritualistic school, the influence of Descartes began to give way to that of Leibnitz. Leibnitz has been used both realistically and idealistically in France. He was taken literally by spiritual realists, e.g. by Paul Janet (q.v.). Janet accepted the traditional ontological triplicity - God, souls and bodies - and, in answer to Ravaisson, who called this realism " demi-spiritualisme," rejoined that he was content to accept the title. At the same time, like Cousin, his works show a tendency to underrate body, tending as they do to the Leibnitzian analysis of the material into the immaterial, and to the supposition that the unity of the body is only given by the soul. His emphasis is on spirit, and he goes so far as to admit that " no spiritualist is engaged to defend the existence of matter." The strength of Janet's position is his perception that the argument from final causes is in favour of an omnipresent rational will making matter a means to ends, and not in favour of an immanent mind of Nature working out her own ends.
The psychological metaphysics of Cousin and of Janet was, however, too flimsy a realism to withstand its passage into this very idealism of matter which has become the dominant French metaphysics. Etienne Vacherot deserted Descartes for Hegel. He accepted from Hegel " the real is rational " without the Hegelian method, for which he substituted conscious experience as a revelation of the divine. Matter he held to be mind at the minimum of its action, and evolution the " expansion de l'activite incessante de la cause finale." God, according to his latest view, is the absolute being as first cause and final end. " Let us leave," says he in deference to Janet, " the category of the ideal, which applies to nothing real or living." But the most noticeable passage in Le Nouveau spiritualisme (1884) is its contrast between the old and the new; where he says that the old spiritualism opposed spirit to matter, God to Nature, the new spiritualism places matter in spirit, Nature in God (p. 377). F. Ravaisson (see Ravaisson-Mollien), by his Rapport (prepared for the Exhibition of 1867) on philosophy in France, gave a fresh impulse to the transition from spiritual realism to idealism, by developing the Aristotelian g okecn s of matter and the Leibnitzian appetition of monads into " l'amour " as the very being of things. Jules Lachelier (born 1832) agreed with Ravaisson that beauty is the last word of things, but, under the influence of Kant and his successors, put his idealism rather in the form that all is thought. A. Fouillee (q.v.) rightly objects that we must not thus impute thought and intention to Nature, and yet does not scruple to impute to it life, sensation and want. Starting from consciousness, he argues that all known things are phenomena of consciousness. Then, agreeing with evolutionism, that things are necessarily determined by forces, but with Leibnitz that body is merely passive,. he infers that force, being active, is psychical - a force, which he describes as " idee-force," and as " vouloir-vivre." In connexion with the " idees directrices et organisatrices," supposed by the French physiologist Claude Bernard, and the universal will supposed by German voluntarists, Fouillee concludes that the world is a society of wills. Meanwhile, more under the influence of Kant, C. B. Renouvier (q.v.)has worked out an idealism which he calls "Neo-criticisme," rejecting the thing-in-itself, while limiting knowledge to phenomena constituted by a priori categories. Phenomena he identifies with " representations representatives et representees." But he takes the usual advantage of this most ambiguous of terms when he extends it to embrace God, freedom, and immortality required by the moral law. In his later work, La Nouvelle monadologie (1899), he maintains that each monad is a simple substance, endowed with representation, which is consciousness in form, phenomenon in matter as represented. In order to explain free will, he supposes, contrarily to Fouillee, that the laws of phenomena are indeterminate, contingent and liable to exceptions. Here we trace the influence of Leibnitz and Lotze, which is still more marked in La Contingence des lois de la nature (1874), by E. Boutroux. Fouillee meets the mechanics of evolution by the argument that will to live determines. its necessary laws, Boutroux by denying the necessity. His point. is, that the world only appears to be phenomena governed by necessary laws, and is really a spontaneity which makes new beginnings, such as life and consciousness, tending to good. These examples are enough to show that the psychological metaphysics of spiritual realism has not been able to withstand the rise and progress of spiritual idealism in France.
In England, the land of Bacon and Locke, the realistic tendency has been more active, and is exhibited in Bacon's Novum organum and De Augmentis scientiarum, as well as to a less degree in the Fourth Book of Locke's Essay. After the metaphysical idealism, begun by Berkeley, had eventuated in Hume's reduction of the objects of knowledge to sensations, ideas and associations, the Scottish school, applying the Baconian method to the study of mind, began to inquire once more for the evidences of our knowledge, and produced the natural or intuitive realism of T. Reid, Dugald Stewart and Sir William Hamilton, who, having been followed by H. L. Mansel, as well as by J. Veitch, H. Calderwood and J. M'Cosh, prolonged the existence of the school, in which we .may venture to place L. T. Hobhouse and F. W. Bain, author of The Realization of the Possible (1899), down to our own time.
Its main tenet, that we have an immediate perception of the external world, is roughly expressed in the following words of Reid: " I do perceive matter objectively - that is, something which is extended and solid, which may be measured and weighed,. is the immediate object of my touch and sight. And this object I take to be matter, and not an idea. And, though I have been taught by philosophers that what I immediately touch is an idea, and not matter, yet I have never been able to discover this by the most accurate attention to my own perceptions." No opposition to idealism could be more distinct. Reid, however, did not always express himself so distinctly. Moreover, he and his successors mixed up so many accidents with the essence of their realism that the whole system broke down under its own weight. Their psychology contained valuable points. It also contained much that was doubtful, and much that was ill-adapted to the metaphysics of realism. Yet they thought it the only avenue to metaphysics. It is full of appeals to common sense, and of principles of common sense, which Reid also called intuitive first principles, and self-evident truths. It is spoilt by Locke's hypothesis that we do not perceive things but qualities implying things. While it asserted a realism of individuals, it admitted a conceptualism of universals. Stewart also said that our knowledge of matter and mind is merely relative. Hamilton went still further; he tried to combine the oil of Reid with the water of Kant; and converting. the intuitive into the a priori, he found a further reason for the relativity of knowledge. Our knowledge is relative," said he, " first, because existence is not cognizable absolutely and in itself, but only in special modes; second, because these modes thus relative to our faculties are presented to and known by the mind, only under modification, determined by these faculties themselves." Not only so, but in his review of Cousin (" Philosophy of the Unconditioned," in Discussions, pp. 12-15), he made conception the test of knowledge, argued that " the mind can conceive, and consequently can know, only the limited, and the conditionally limited," that " to think is to condition," that all we know either of mind or matter is " the phenomenal," that " we can never in our highest generalizations rise above the finite," and concluded that we cannot conceive or know the unconditioned, yet must believe in its existence. Nevertheless, in spite of all this Kantism, he adhered to his natural realism. He vacillated a great deal about our mode of perceiving the external world; but his final view (edition of Reid's works, note D*) consisted in supposing that (1) sensation is an apprehension of secondary qualities purely as affections of the organism viewed as ego; (2) perception in general is an apprehension of primary qualities as relations of sensations in the organism viewed as non-ego; while (3) a special perception of a so-called " secundo-primary " quality consists in " the consciousness of a resisting something external to our organism." Hamilton's views both on the absolute and on perception affected Mansel and Spencer. They were not, however, received without question even by his followers. H. Calderwood, in his Philosophy of the Infinite (1854), made the pertinent objection that, though thought, conception and knowledge are finite, the object of thought may be infinite. Hamilton, in fact, made the double mistake of limiting knowledge to what we can conceive, and confusing the determinate with the finite or limited. We never know anything except as determined by its attributes; but that would not prevent us from inferring something determined as unconditioned, whether infinite or absolute. J. M'Cosh again, in The Prevailing Types of Philosophy: Can they logically reach reality? (1891), rightly protests against Hamilton's combination of Scottish and German schools which will not coalesce, and exhorts the former " to M throw away its crutches of impressions, instincts, suggestions, and common sense, and give the mind a power of seeing things directly." He has the merit of presenting natural or intuitive realism in its purity.
The common tenet of the whole school is that without inference we immediately perceive the external world, at all events as a resisting something external to our organism. But is it true ? There are three reasons against it, and for the view that we perceive a sensible object within, and infer an external object without, the organism. In the first place, there are great differences between the sensible and the external object; they differ in secondary qualities in the case of all the senses; ' and even in the case of touch, heat felt within is different from the vibrating heat outside. Secondly, there are so-called " subjective sensations," without any external object as stimulus, most commonly in vision, but also in touch, which is liable to formication, or the feeling of creeping in the skin, and to horripilation, or the feeling of bristling in the hair; yet, even in " subjective sensations," we perceive something sensible, which, however, must be within, and not outside, the organism. Thirdly, the external world and the senses always act on one another by cause and effect and by pressure, although we only feel pressure by touch. 'Now, when the thing with which touch is in a state of reciprocal pressure is external, e.g. a table, we feel our organism pressed and pressing; we do not feel the table pressing and pressed, but infer it. The Scottish School never realized that every sensation of the five senses is a perception of a sensible object in the bodily organism; and that touch is a perception, not only of single sensible pressure, but also of double sensible pressure, a perception of our bodily members sensibly pressing and pressed by one another, from which, on the recurrence of a single sensible pressure, we infer the pressure of an external thing for the first time. Intuitive Realism is to be replaced by Physical Realism.
3. Reaction to Hypothetical Realism
The three evidences, which are fatal to intuitive realism, do not prove hypothetical realism, or the hypothesis that we perceive something mental, but infer something bodily. This illogical hypothesis, which consists of incautiously passing from the truth that the sensible object perceived is not external but within the organism to the non-sequitur that therefore it is within the mind, derived what little plausibility it ever possessed from three prejudices: the first, the scholastic dogma that the sensible object is a species sensibilis, or immaterial sensible form received from the external thing; the second, the Cartesian a priori argument that the soul as thinking thing can perceive nothing but its own ideas; the third, the common assumption of a sense of sensations. But notwithstanding its illogicality, its tendency to underrate Nature as inferred from such idealistic premises, and its certain transition into a consistent idealism, hypothetical realism has, with little excuse, revived among us in the writings of Shadworth Hodgson, James Martineau and A. J. Balfour. The cause Of this anachronism has been the failure of intuitive realism and the domination of idealism, which makes short-sighted men suppose that at all events they must begin with the psychology and the psychological idealism of the day, in the false hope that on the sands of psychological idealism they may build a house of metaphysical realism.
Shadworth Holloway Hodgson (born 1832; hon. fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford), whose chief work is The Metaphysic of Experience (4 vols., 1898), believing that philosophy is an analysis of the contents of consciousness, or experience, and that this is metaphysics, begins, like Kant, with an analysis of experience. Like Kant, he supposes that experience is concerned with sensations, distinguishes matter and form in sense, identifies time and space, eternal time and infinite space, with the formal element, and substitutes 'synthesis of sensations of touch and sight for association and inference, as the origin of our knowing such a solid material object as a bell. Although he does not agree with Kant that either the formal element in sense or the synthesis of sensations is a priori, yet in very Kantian fashion, through not distinguishing between operation and object, he holds that, in synthetically combining sensations of touch and sight, we not only have a complex perception of a solid body, but also know this " object thought of " as itself the complex of these sensations objectified. Hence he concludes that " matter is the name for the sensation-elements derived from both senses, abstracting in thought, so far as possible, from the extension-elements of both " (i. 296).
Here you would expect him to stop, as the German Neo-Kantism of Lange stops, with the consistent conclusion that all we know of Nature from such data is these complexes of sensation-elements, or phenomena in the Kantian meaning. Not so; like Kant himself, Hodgson supposes something beyond; not, however, an unknown thing in itself causing sensations, but a condition, or sine qua non, of their existence, without being a cause of their nature. In order to make this leap he supposes that we have beyond perceptions a conception of condition. His account of the origin of this conception is puzzling. (i. 380). Whatever its origin may be, it could not, any more than a Kantian category of cause, justify us in concluding anything more than a relation of perceptions as conditions of one another, seeing that they were supposed to be the whole data, and matter itself to be " sensation-elements." But what he proceeds to suppose is that, having the conception, and finding that the complex of perceptions needs accounting for, we infer a real condition, e.g. the solid interior of a bell. What we know, however, of this condition, according to him, has two limits: on the one hand, it is the condition only of the existence of our perceptions; on the other hand, all we know of its nature is our perceptions. Matter thus, which had at first been defined as a complex of perceptions objectified, now turns out to be a condition without which perceptions would not exist, but whose nature is known only as a complex of perceptions. Finally, according to him, having inferred matter as the condition of our perceptions, we are entitled to infer that the condition of the existence of matter is God, whose nature, however, can be inferred only by practical reason from conscience. He avers that this " metaphysic of experience " is not idealism, or the tenet that consciousness is the only reality. It is realism - but inconsequent and inadequate realism, something like that of Spencer; according, indeed, more knowledge of the distinction between Nature as condition of sensations and God as condition of Nature; but very like in holding that all we know of natural forces is our perceptions. We know more, however, about a body, such as a bell, than either Spencer or Hodgson allows. We know, from the concomitant variations between its vibrations and our perceptions, that its vibrations are not mere conditions but real causes of our perceptions; and that those vibrations are not our perceptions, because we cannot perceive them, but are real attributes of the bell. It will be objected that they are merely possible perceptions. But as they really produce our real perceptions, they are themselves not merely possible, but real or actual. A possible cause could not actually produce an actual effect.
James Martineau (q.v.) in A Study of Religion (1888), like Shadworth Hodgson, started from Kant, and tried to found on Martineau. transcendental idealism "a return to dualism." If ?li there is one thing certain in the Kantian philosophy, it is its author's perception that what is contributed by mind must not be extended to things beyond mind. Hegel only extended a priori forms to things by resolving things into thoughts. Mill also protested " against adducing, as evidence of the truth of a fact in external nature, the disposition, however strong or however general, of the human mind to believe it." Yet Martineau adopted, as his view of the limits of human intelligence, that Kant was right in making space and time a priori forms of sense, but wrong in limiting them to sensations. But in order to make space a form of external things, Martineau had to take the external in space, by which Kant meant one sensation out of another, in the very different meaning of the self here and the not-self there. He facilitated this awkward transition by adding to Kant's a priori forms of space and time an " a priori form of alternative causality," or, as he also called it, " an intuition of causality involved in the elementary exercise of perception," which is the key to his whole philosophy. He supposed that this intuition of causality arises when will is resisted, and, further supposing that causality requires decision between alternatives, concluded that the intuition of will resisted is an intuition of will against will, mine against other (i. 65). To pass over its confusion of a priori and intuitive, there are two fatal objections to this view. In the first place, the intuition of causality does not require will at all, because we often perceive one bodily member pressing another involuntarily; a man suffering from lockjaw neither wills nor can avoid feeling the pressure of his upper and lower jaws against one another. Secondly, though causality requires alternatives in the material cause, e.g. wax may or may not be melted, the determination between them is not always a decision of will, but in physical causation depends on the efficient cause, e.g. the fire: as Aristotle says, when the active and passive powers approach, the one must act and the other suffer, and it is only in rational powers that will decides (Met. O 5) .
A. J. Balfour, in The Foundations of Belief, being Notes Introductory to the Study of Theology (1895), begins by maintaining A. J. that the evidence of the senses is not a foundation of belief, and then expects us to believe in Nature and in God. He revives the " Acatalepsia " of the New Academy. In Part II., ch i., he makes three assumptions about the senses, and, without stopping to prove them, or even to make them consistent, deduces from them his thesis that the evidence of the senses is not a foundation of belief in Nature. He first assumes an immediate experience of a body, e.g. a green tree; and then deduces that the evidence of the senses proves now and then to be fallacious, because we may have an experience indistinguishable from that of a tree but incorrect; and further, that our perceptions are habitually mendacious, because all visual experiences are erroneous, as colour is a sensation while the thing consists of uncoloured particles. This argument from a pure assumption is a confusion of sense and inference. In no case is the evidence of the senses fallacious or mendacious; the fallacy is in the inference.
He next assumes that we have no immediate experience of independent things - that sense perceives sensations, feelings, or ideas; while all else, e.g. a tree, is a matter of inference. On this quite new assumption of a sense of sensations he deduces that, from a perception of these mental facts, we could not infer material facts, e.g. a tree; so that again the evidence of the senses does not afford trustworthy knowledge of the material universe. His deduction is logical; but he has forgotten to prove the assumption, and now confuses sensory operation with sensible object. Vision does not perceive a sensation of colour; it perceives a visible picture, e.g. green, which is in the organism, but has never been proved to be a mental fact, or not to be a material fact. So touch perceives not a sensation of pressure, but a pressure which is a material fact in the organism. From a material pressure within we logically infer a material pressure outside. He thirdly assumes an appendix to the second assumption: he assumes that sense perceives mental sensations with succession but without causality, because no kind of cause is open to observation. On this assumption of a sense of sensations, but not of causality, he deduces that we could not from such data infer any particular kind of cause, or a bodily cause, e.g. a tree, or indeed any cause at all, or any event beyond perception, without assuming the principle of causation that Nature is uniform in cause and effect over great intervals of time and space. Nevertheless he gives absolutely no proof of the assumption that there is no sense of causality. There is none in the subsidiary senses, because none of them perceives the pressures exerted on them. But the primary sense of touch perceives one bodily member causing pressure on another, reciprocally, within the organism, from which we infer similar particular pressures caused between the organism and the external world; but without needing the supposed stupendous belief and assumption of the uniformity of Nature, which is altogether ignored in the inferences of the ordinary man. Finally, as touch perceives reciprocal pressure within, and tactile inference infers it without, touch is the primary evidence of the senses which is the foundation and logical ground of our belief in Nature as a system of pressing bodies. Balfour, however, having from unproved assumptions denied the evidence of the senses, and the rational power of using them to infer things beyond oneself, has to look out for other, and non-rational, foundations of belief. He finds them in the needs of man. According to him, we believe in Nature because it satisfies our material needs, and in God because he satisfies our spiritual needs. But bare need, e.g. a pang of hunger, is no cause of belief beyond itself; and desire, or need of something prospective, e.g. a desire of food, is effect, not cause, of a previous belief that there is such a thing, and of a present inference that it may again be realized. Moreover, when the belief pr inference is uncertain, need even in the shape of desire is not in itself a foundation of belief in the thing desired: to need a dinner is not to believe in getting it; and, as Aristotle said, " there is a wish for impossibilities." It is fair, however, to add that Balfour has a further foundation for the belief in Nature, the survival of the fittest, by which those only would survive who possessed and could transmit the belief. But here he fails exactly as Darwin himself failed. Darwin said, given that organisms are fit, they will tend to survive; but he failed to show how they become fit. Balfour says, given that men believe in Nature, they will survive; but he fails to show how they come to believe in it. Inference from sense is the one condition of all belief in anything beyond oneself, whether it be Nature, or Authority, or God; and it is the one condition of all needs, which are not mere feelings, but desires of things. The result of undermining this sure foundation emerges in Balfour's attitude to the beliefs themselves. He holds that space, time, matter, motion, force, are all full of the insoluble contradictions supposed by Spencer; and that all our beliefs, in Nature and in God, stand on the same footing of approximations. Hence his really valuable arguments from Nature to God sink to the problematic form - there may be Nature; if so, there is God.
Such is the modern " Acatalepsia," which arises from denying the evidence of the senses, and from citing the transfigured realism of Spencer instead of the original realism of Aristotle, about whom Balfour speaks as follows: " It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to sum up our debts to Aristotle. But assuredly they do not include a tenable theory of the universe." 4. The Past and Future of Metaphysics. - Aristotelian realism is the strong point of Roman Catholic philosophy. As interpreted by Thomas Aquinas, it is now in danger of becoming a dogma. In 1879 Pope Leo XIII. addressed to the bishops the Encyclica aeterni patris, which contained the words, " Sancti Thomae sapientiam restituatis et quam latissime propagetis." From the Roman Catholic point of view this reaction to " Thomism " was a timely protest against modern metaphysics. It was founded upon a feeling of uneasiness at a growing tendency among Roman Catholic writers not only to treat theology freely, but to corrupt it by paradoxes. One cannot but feel regret at seeing the Reformed Churches blown about by every wind of doctrine, and catching at straws now from Kant, now from Hegel, and now from Lotze, or at home from Green, Caird, Martineau, Balfour and Ward in succession, without ever having considered the basis of their faith; while the Roman Catholics are making every effort to ground a Universal Church on a sane system of metaphysics. However this may be, the power of the movement is visible enough from the spread of Thomism over the civilized world, and in England from the difference between the freer treatment of metaphysics by some Roman Catholic writers and that which has arisen under the immediate influence of Thomism. J. H. Newman (1801-1890), maintaining the authority of conscience and the probabilism of the understanding, concluded to the necessity of a higher authority in the primitive church. W. G. Ward was a philosophical critic of Mill. St George Mivart, in The Ground-work of Science (1898), maintained the reality of an active causative power underlying Nature, and the dignity of human reason, from an independent point of view. On the other hand, more under the influence of the Thomist reaction, Thomas Harper published The Metaphysics of the School (1879, &c.), describing scholasticism, as it appears in the works of Aquinas; and The Manuals of Catholic Philosophy, edited by R. F. Clarke, include General Metaphysics (1890), by John Rickaby, who effectively criticizes Hegel by precise distinctions, which, though scholastic, did not deserve to be forgotten.
The Thomist reaction has had a good effect in the way of encouraging the study of Aristotelian philosophy in itself, and as modified by Aquinas. Nevertheless, the world cannot afford to surrender itself to Aristotle, or to Aquinas. Aristotle could not know enough, physically, about Nature to understand its matter, or its motions, or its forces; and consequently he fell into the error of supposing a primary matter with four contrary primary qualities, hot and cold, dry and moist, forming by their combinations four simple bodies, earth, water, air and fire, with natural rectilineal motions to or from the centre of the earth; to which he added a quintessence of ether composing the stars, with a natural circular motion round the earth. Metaphysically, he did not, indeed, as is often supposed, think the nature of substance to be matter and form, because in his view God is a substance, yet with no matter; but he did think that every natural substance or body is a concrete whole, composed of matter and form different from matter. He thought that besides proximate matter, or one body as matter of another, there is a primary formless matter beneath all bodies, capable of becoming all in turn, but itself potentially, not actually, substance. He thought not only that a form, or essence, is something different from, and at most conjoined with, matter in a concrete body, but also that in all the bodies of one kind, e.g. in all men, there is one undivided form or essence, e.g. rational animal, communicated from one member to another member of the kind, e.g. from father to son, by what we still call, though without any meaning, the propagation of the species. He thought, in consequence, that the principium individuationis, which differentiates two members of the kind, e.g. Socrates and Callias, is their one form or essence only as conjoined with different matters, e.g. different bones and flesh. He thought, moreover, that the one form of !a kind is an original essence (TO Ti which is uncreate; and, in order to avoid the " separate forms " supposed by Plato, he concluded that the world of Nature must be eternal, in order that each original essence may from eternity always be in some individual or another of its kind. On this assumption of the eternity of the world, God could not be a Creator. Aristotle thought that God is only prime mover, and that too only as the good for the sake of which Nature moves; so that God moves as motive. Psychologically, Aristotle applied his dualism of matter and form to explain the antithesis of body and soul, so that the soul is the form, or entelechy, of an organic body, and he applied the same dualism to explain sensation, which he supposed to be reception of the sensible form or essence, without the matter, of a body, e.g. of the form of white, without the matter, of a white stone. He thought that in the soul there is a productive intellect and a passive intellect, and that, when we rise from sense by induction, the productive causes the passive intellect to receive the universal form or essence, e.g. of all white things; and he thought that this productive intellect is our immortal faculty. Lastly, he thought that, while other operations have, intellect (vas) has not, a bodily organ; and hence he became responsible for the fancy that there is a break in bodily continuity between sense and will, while intellect is working out a purely immaterial operation of soul, resulting from the former and tending to the latter. It is evident that a philosophy containing so many questionable opinions is not fit to be made into an authoritative orthodoxy in metaphysics.
Now these, on the whole, are the very opinions of Aquinas, except so far as they were clearly inconsistent with the Christian faith. Aquinas thought, as an article of faith, that the world began, and that God is its Creator. This involved a change of detail in the theory of essences and of universals generally. Aquinas thought that before the creation the one eternal essence of any kind was an abstract form, an idea in the intellect of God, like the form of a house in the mind of a builder, ante rem; that after the creation of any kind it is in re, as Aristotle supposed; and that, as we men think of it, it is post rem, as Aristotle also supposed. Of this view the part which was not Aristotle's, the state of " universalia ante rem," was due to the Neoplatonists, who interpreted the " separate forms " of Plato to be ideas in intellect, and handed down their interpretation through St Augustine to the medieval Realists like Aquinas, who thus combined Neoplatonism with Aristotelianism. Hence too Aquinas opposed essence to existence much more than Aristotle did. Lastly, as a Christian, he supposed the whole soul to be immortal, and to form for itself a new body after death. But, with these modifications he accepted the general physics of Aristotle, the metaphysical dualism of matter and form, and the psychology founded upon it. The Thomism, therefore, of our day is wrong, from a metaphysical point of view, so far as it elevates Aristotelianism, as seriously modified but not fundamentally corrected by Aquinas, into an authoritative orthodoxy in metaphysics.
Centuries elapsed after Aquinas before Galileo and his successors reformed natural science, and before Bacon destroyed the metaphysical dualism of matter and form by showing that a form in Nature is only a law of the action of matter, and that, as the action of a body is as individual as the body, the form is eternal only in thought (ratione). The psychology of Aristotle and Aquinas thus became impossible; for, if the form of a body is only a mode of matter, to call one's soul the form of one's body is to reduce it to only a mode of matter, and fall into materialism. Hence Descartes began the reform of psychology not only by the appeal to consciousness, " I think," but also by opposing body and soul, no longer as matter and form, but as different substances. These great improvements, due to the genius of Galileo, of Bacon, of Descartes, are the fresh beginnings of modern thought, from which we dare not turn back without falling into obscurantism. What, then, is the future of metaphysics? We must return not to the authority but to the study of Aristotle. The independence of metaphysics as the science of being, the principles of contradiction and excluded middle with their qualifications, the distinction without separation between substance and attributes, the definition of substance as a distinct individual thing, the discovery that the world consists of substances existing apart but related to one another, the distinction between material and efficient causes or matter and force, the recognition both of the natural and of the supernatural - all these and many other half-forgotten truths are the reasons why we must always begin with the study of Aristotle's Metaphysics. But their incompleteness shows that we must go forward from Aristotle to Bacon and modern science, and even pass through the anarchy of modern metaphysics, in the hope that in the future we may discover as complete an answer as possible to these two questions: 1. What is the world of things we know?
2. How do we know it?
For authorities see the works quoted above, and the references in the articles on philosophers and philosophical subjects. (T. CA.)