A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation inPhilosophy

BY WILLIAM JAMES

1909

CONTENTS

LECTURE I

THE TYPES OF PHILOSOPHIC THINKING 1

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

LECTURE II

MONISTIC IDEALISM 41

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

LECTURE III

HEGEL AND HIS METHOD 83

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

LECTURE IV

CONCERNING FECHNER 131

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

LECTURE V

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

LECTURE VI

BERGSON AND HIS CRITIQUE OF INTELLECTUALISM 223

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

LECTURE VII

THE CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE 275

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

LECTURE VIII

CONCLUSIONS 301

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

NOTES 333

APPENDICES

 A. THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS 847

 B. THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY 870

 C. ON THE NOTION OF REALITY AS CHANGING 895

INDEX 401

LECTURE I

THE TYPES OF PHILOSOPHIC THINKING

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

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

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

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

The torch of learning passes from land to land as the spirit bloweththe flame. The deepening of philosophic consciousness came to usenglish folk from Germany, as it will probably pass back ere long. Ferrier, J. H. Stirling, and, most of all, T. H. Green are to bethanked. If asked to tell in broad strokes what the main doctrinalchange has been, I should call it a change from the crudity of theolder english thinking, its ultra-simplicity of mind, both when it wasreligious and when it was anti-religious, toward a rationalismderived in the first instance from Germany, but relieved from germantechnicality and shrillness, and content to suggest, and to remainvague, and to be, in, the english fashion, devout. 

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

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

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

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

What do the terms empiricism and rationalism mean? Reduced to theirmost pregnant difference, _empiricism means the habit of explainingwholes by parts, and rationalism means the habit of explaining partsby wholes_. Rationalism thus preserves affinities with monism, sincewholeness goes with union, while empiricism inclines to pluralisticviews. No philosophy can ever be anything but a summary sketch, apicture of the world in abridgment, a foreshortened bird's-eye view ofthe perspective of events. And the first thing to notice is this, thatthe only material we have at our disposal for making a picture of thewhole world is supplied by the various portions of that world ofwhich we have already had experience. We can invent no new forms ofconception, applicable to the whole exclusively, and not suggestedoriginally by the parts. All philosophers, accordingly, have conceivedof the whole world after the analogy of some particular feature of itwhich has particularly captivated their attention. Thus, the theiststake their cue from manufacture, the pantheists from growth. For oneman, the world is like a thought or a grammatical sentence in which athought is expressed. For such a philosopher, the whole must logicallybe prior to the parts; for letters would never have been inventedwithout syllables to spell, or syllables without words to utter. 

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

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

For another, again, there is no really inherent order, but it is wewho project order into the world by selecting objects and tracingrelations so as to gratify our intellectual interests. We _carve out_order by leaving the disorderly parts out; and the world is conceivedthus after the analogy of a forest or a block of marble from whichparks or statues may be produced by eliminating irrelevant trees orchips of stone. 

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

All follow one analogy or another; and all the analogies are with someone or other of the universe's subdivisions. Every one is neverthelessprone to claim that his conclusions are the only logical ones, thatthey are necessities of universal reason, they being all the while, atbottom, accidents more or less of personal vision which had far betterbe avowed as such; for one man's vision may be much more valuable thananother's, and our visions are usually not only our most interestingbut our most respectable contributions to the world in which we playour part. What was reason given to men for, said some eighteenthcentury writer, except to enable them to find reasons for what theywant to think and do?--and I think the history of philosophy largelybears him out, 'The aim of knowledge, ' says Hegel, [2] 'is to divestthe objective world of its strangeness, and to make us more at homein it. ' Different men find their minds more at home in very differentfragments of the world. 

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

I shall myself have use for the diminutive epithets of empiricism. Butif you look behind the words at the spirit, I am sure you will notfind it matricidal. I am as good a son as any rationalist among you toour common mother. What troubles me more than this misapprehension isthe genuine abstruseness of many of the matters I shall be obligedto talk about, and the difficulty of making them intelligible at onehearing. But there two pieces, 'zwei stücke, ' as Kant would have said, in every philosophy--the final outlook, belief, or attitude to whichit brings us, and the reasonings by which that attitude is reached andmediated. A philosophy, as James Ferrier used to tell us, must indeedbe true, but that is the least of its requirements. One may be truewithout being a philosopher, true by guesswork or by revelation. What distinguishes a philosopher's truth is that it is _reasoned_. Argument, not supposition, must have put it in his possession. Commonmen find themselves inheriting their beliefs, they know not how. Theyjump into them with both feet, and stand there. Philosophers mustdo more; they must first get reason's license for them; and to theprofessional philosophic mind the operation of procuring the licenseis usually a thing of much more pith and moment than any particularbeliefs to which the license may give the rights of access. Suppose, for example, that a philosopher believes in what is called free-will. That a common man alongside of him should also share that belief, possessing it by a sort of inborn intuition, does not endear the manto the philosopher at all--he may even be ashamed to be associatedwith such a man. What interests the philosopher is the particularpremises on which the free-will he believes in is established, thesense in which it is taken, the objections it eludes, the difficultiesit takes account of, in short the whole form and temper and mannerand technical apparatus that goes with the belief in question. A philosopher across the way who should use the same technicalapparatus, making the same distinctions, etc. , but drawing oppositeconclusions and denying free-will entirely, would fascinate the firstphilosopher far more than would the _naïf_ co-believer. Their commontechnical interests would unite them more than their oppositeconclusions separate them. Each would feel an essential consanguinityin the other, would think of him, write _at_ him, care for his goodopinion. The simple-minded believer in free-will would be disregardedby either. Neither as ally nor as opponent would his vote be counted. 

In a measure this is doubtless as it should be, but like allprofessionalism it can go to abusive extremes. The end is after allmore than the way, in most things human, and forms and methods mayeasily frustrate their own purpose. The abuse of technicality isseen in the infrequency with which, in philosophical literature, metaphysical questions are discussed directly and on their own merits. Almost always they are handled as if through a heavy woolen curtain, the veil of previous philosophers' opinions. Alternatives are wrappedin proper names, as if it were indecent for a truth to go naked. Thelate Professor John Grote of Cambridge has some good remarks aboutthis. 'Thought, ' he says, 'is not a professional matter, not somethingfor so-called philosophers only or for professed thinkers. The bestphilosopher is the man who can think most _simply_. . . . I wish thatpeople would consider that thought--and philosophy is no more thangood and methodical thought--is a matter _intimate_ to them, a portionof their real selves . . . That they would _value_ what they think, andbe interested in it. . . . In my own opinion, ' he goes on, 'there issomething depressing in this weight of learning, with nothing that cancome into one's mind but one is told, Oh, that is the opinion of suchand such a person long ago. . . . I can conceive of nothing more noxiousfor students than to get into the habit of saying to themselves abouttheir ordinary philosophic thought, Oh, somebody must have thought itall before. '[3] Yet this is the habit most encouraged at our seats oflearning. You must tie your opinion to Aristotle's or Spinoza's; youmust define it by its distance from Kant's; you must refute yourrival's view by identifying it with Protagoras's. Thus does allspontaneity of thought, all freshness of conception, get destroyed. Everything you touch is shopworn. The over-technicality and consequentdreariness of the younger disciples at our american universities isappalling. It comes from too much following of german models andmanners. Let me fervently express the hope that in this country youwill hark back to the more humane english tradition. American studentshave to regain direct relations with our subject by painful individualeffort in later life. Some of us have done so. Some of the youngerones, I fear, never will, so strong are the professional shop-habitsalready. 

In a subject like philosophy it is really fatal to lose connexion withthe open air of human nature, and to think in terms of shop-traditiononly. In Germany the forms are so professionalized that anybody whohas gained a teaching chair and written a book, however distorted andeccentric, has the legal right to figure forever in the history of thesubject like a fly in amber. All later comers have the duty of quotinghim and measuring their opinions with his opinion. Such are the rulesof the professorial game--they think and write from each other and foreach other and at each other exclusively. With this exclusion of theopen air all true perspective gets lost, extremes and oddities countas much as sanities, and command the same attention; and if by chanceany one writes popularly and about results only, with his minddirectly focussed on the subject, it is reckoned _oberflächlicheszeug_ and _ganz unwissenschaftlich_. Professor Paulsen has recentlywritten some feeling lines about this over-professionalism, fromthe reign of which in Germany his own writings, which sin by being'literary, ' have suffered loss of credit. Philosophy, he says, haslong assumed in Germany the character of being an esoteric andoccult science. There is a genuine fear of popularity. Simplicity ofstatement is deemed synonymous with hollowness and shallowness. Herecalls an old professor saying to him once: 'Yes, we philosophers, whenever we wish, can go so far that in a couple of sentences we canput ourselves where nobody can follow us. ' The professor said thiswith conscious pride, but he ought to have been ashamed of it. Greatas technique is, results are greater. To teach philosophy so that thepupils' interest in technique exceeds that in results is surely avicious aberration. It is bad form, not good form, in a disciplineof such universal human interest. Moreover, technique for technique, doesn't David Hume's technique set, after all, the kind of patternmost difficult to follow? Isn't it the most admirable? The englishmind, thank heaven, and the french mind, are still kept, by theiraversion to crude technique and barbarism, closer to truth's naturalprobabilities. Their literatures show fewer obvious falsities andmonstrosities than that of Germany. Think of the german literature ofaesthetics, with the preposterousness of such an unaesthetic personageas Immanuel Kant enthroned in its centre! Think of german books on_religions-philosophie_, with the heart's battles translated intoconceptual jargon and made dialectic. The most persistent setter ofquestions, feeler of objections, insister on satisfactions, is thereligious life. Yet all its troubles can be treated with absurdlylittle technicality. The wonder is that, with their way of workingphilosophy, individual Germans should preserve any spontaneity ofmind at all. That they still manifest freshness and originality in soeminent a degree, proves the indestructible richness of the germancerebral endowment. 

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

If we take the whole history of philosophy, the systems reducethemselves to a few main types which, under all the technical verbiagein which the ingenious intellect of man envelops them, are just somany visions, modes of feeling the whole push, and seeing the wholedrift of life, forced on one by one's total character and experience, and on the whole _preferred_--there is no other truthful word--asone's best working attitude. Cynical characters take one generalattitude, sympathetic characters another. But no general attitudeis possible towards the world as a whole, until the intellect hasdeveloped considerable generalizing power and learned to take pleasurein synthetic formulas. The thought of very primitive men has hardlyany tincture of philosophy. Nature can have little unity for savages. It is a Walpurgis-nacht procession, a checkered play of light andshadow, a medley of impish and elfish friendly and inimicalpowers. 'Close to nature' though they live, they are anything butWordsworthians. If a bit of cosmic emotion ever thrills them, it islikely to be at midnight, when the camp smoke rises straight to thewicked full moon in the zenith, and the forest is all whispering withwitchery and danger. The eeriness of the world, the mischief and themanyness, the littleness of the forces, the magical surprises, theunaccountability of every agent, these surely are the characters mostimpressive at that stage of culture, these communicate the thrillsof curiosity and the earliest intellectual stirrings. Tempests andconflagrations, pestilences and earthquakes, reveal supramundanepowers, and instigate religious terror rather than philosophy. Nature, more demonic than divine, is above all things _multifarious_. So manycreatures that feed or threaten, that help or crush, so many beingsto hate or love, to understand or start at--which is on top and whichsubordinate? Who can tell? They are co-ordinate, rather, and to adaptourselves to them singly, to 'square' the dangerous powers and keepthe others friendly, regardless of consistency or unity, is the chiefproblem. The symbol of nature at this stage, as Paulsen well says, is the sphinx, under whose nourishing breasts the tearing claws arevisible. 

But in due course of time the intellect awoke, with its passion forgeneralizing, simplifying, and subordinating, and then began thosedivergences of conception which all later experience seems ratherto have deepened than to have effaced, because objective nature hascontributed to both sides impartially, and has let the thinkersemphasize different parts of her, and pile up opposite imaginarysupplements. 

Perhaps the most interesting opposition is that which results from theclash between what I lately called the sympathetic and the cynicaltemper. Materialistic and spiritualistic philosophies are the rivaltypes that result: the former defining the world so as to leave man'ssoul upon it as a soil of outside passenger or alien, while the latterinsists that the intimate and human must surround and underlie thebrutal. This latter is the spiritual way of thinking. 

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

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

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

The theistic conception, picturing God and his creation as entitiesdistinct from each other, still leaves the human subject outside ofthe deepest reality in the universe. God is from eternity complete, itsays, and sufficient unto himself; he throws off the world by a freeact and as an extraneous substance, and he throws off man as a thirdsubstance, extraneous to both the world and himself. Between them, Godsays 'one, ' the world says 'two, ' and man says 'three, '--that is theorthodox theistic view. And orthodox theism has been so jealous ofGod's glory that it has taken pains to exaggerate everything in thenotion of him that could make for isolation and separateness. Pageupon page in scholastic books go to prove that God is in no senseimplicated by his creative act, or involved in his creation. That hisrelation to the creatures he has made should make any difference tohim, carry any consequence, or qualify his being, is repudiated as apantheistic slur upon his self-sufficingness. I said a moment ago thattheism treats us and God as of the same species, but from the orthodoxpoint of view that was a slip of language. God and his creaturesare _toto genere_ distinct in the scholastic theology, they haveabsolutely _nothing_ in common; nay, it degrades God to attribute tohim any generic nature whatever; he can be classed with nothing. Thereis a sense, then, in which philosophic theism makes us outsiders andkeeps us foreigners in relation to God, in which, at any rate, hisconnexion with us appears as unilateral and not reciprocal. His actioncan affect us, but he can never be affected by our reaction. Ourrelation, in short, is not a strictly social relation. Of course incommon men's religion the relation is believed to be social, but thatis only one of the many differences between religion and theology. 

This essential dualism of the theistic view has all sorts ofcollateral consequences. Man being an outsider and a mere subject toGod, not his intimate partner, a character of externality invades thefield. God is not heart of our heart and reason of our reason, but ourmagistrate, rather; and mechanically to obey his commands, howeverstrange they may be, remains our only moral duty. Conceptions ofcriminal law have in fact played a great part in defining ourrelations with him. Our relations with speculative truth show thesame externality. One of our duties is to know truth, and rationalistthinkers have always assumed it to be our sovereign duty. But inscholastic theism we find truth already instituted and establishedwithout our help, complete apart from our knowing; and the most wecan do is to acknowledge it passively and adhere to it, altho suchadhesion as ours can make no jot of difference to what is adhered to. The situation here again is radically dualistic. It is not as if theworld came to know itself, or God came to know himself, partly throughus, as pantheistic idealists have maintained, but truth exists _perse_ and absolutely, by God's grace and decree, no matter who of usknows it or is ignorant, and it would continue to exist unaltered, even though we finite knowers were all annihilated. 

It has to be confessed that this dualism and lack of intimacy hasalways operated as a drag and handicap on Christian thought. Orthodoxtheology has had to wage a steady fight within the schools against thevarious forms of pantheistic heresy which the mystical experiencesof religious persons, on the one hand, and the formal or aestheticsuperiorities of monism to dualism, on the other, kept producing. Godas intimate soul and reason of the universe has always seemed to somepeople a more worthy conception than God as external creator. Soconceived, he appeared to unify the world more perfectly, he madeit less finite and mechanical, and in comparison with such a God anexternal creator seemed more like the product of a childish fancy. Ihave been told by Hindoos that the great obstacle to the spreadof Christianity in their country is the puerility of our dogmaof creation. It has not sweep and infinity enough to meet therequirements of even the illiterate natives of India. 

Assuredly most members of this audience are ready to side withHinduism in this matter. Those of us who are sexagenarians havewitnessed in our own persons one of those gradual mutations ofintellectual climate, due to innumerable influences, that make thethought of a past generation seem as foreign to its successor as ifit were the expression of a different race of men. The theologicalmachinery that spoke so livingly to our ancestors, with its finite ageof the world, its creation out of nothing, its juridical morality andeschatology, its relish for rewards and punishments, its treatment ofGod as an external contriver, an 'intelligent and moral governor, 'sounds as odd to most of us as if it were some outlandish savagereligion. The vaster vistas which scientific evolutionism has opened, and the rising tide of social democratic ideals, have changed the typeof our imagination, and the older monarchical theism is obsolete orobsolescent. The place of the divine in the world must be more organicand intimate. An external creator and his institutions may still beverbally confessed at Church in formulas that linger by their mereinertia, but the life is out of them, we avoid dwelling on them, thesincere heart of us is elsewhere. I shall leave cynical materialismentirely out of our discussion as not calling for treatment beforethis present audience, and I shall ignore old-fashioned dualistictheism for the same reason. Our contemporary mind having once for allgrasped the possibility of a more intimate _Weltanschauung_, the onlyopinions quite worthy of arresting our attention will fall within thegeneral scope of what may roughly be called the pantheistic field ofvision, the vision of God as the indwelling divine rather than theexternal creator, and of human life as part and parcel of that deepreality. 

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

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

The contrast is rough enough, and can be cut across by all sortsof other divisions, drawn from other points of view than that offoreignness and intimacy. We have so many different businesses withnature that no one of them yields us an all-embracing clasp. Thephilosophic attempt to define nature so that no one's business is leftout, so that no one lies outside the door saying 'Where do _I_ comein?' is sure in advance to fail. The most a philosophy can hope for isnot to lock out any interest forever. No matter what doors it closes, it must leave other doors open for the interests which it neglects. I have begun by shutting ourselves up to intimacy and foreignnessbecause that makes so generally interesting a contrast, and because itwill conveniently introduce a farther contrast to which I wish thishour to lead. 

The majority of men are sympathetic. Comparatively few are cynicsbecause they like cynicism, and most of our existing materialists aresuch because they think the evidence of facts impels them, or becausethey find the idealists they are in contact with too private andtender-minded; so, rather than join their company, they fly to theopposite extreme. I therefore propose to you to disregard materialistsaltogether for the present, and to consider the sympathetic partyalone. 

It is normal, I say, to be sympathetic in the sense in which I use theterm. Not to demand intimate relations with the universe, and not towish them satisfactory, should be accounted signs of something wrong. Accordingly when minds of this type reach the philosophic level, andseek some unification of their vision, they find themselves compelledto correct that aboriginal appearance of things by which savages arenot troubled. That sphinx-like presence, with its breasts and claws, that first bald multifariousness, is too discrepant an object forphilosophic contemplation. The intimacy and the foreignness cannot bewritten down as simply coexisting. An order must be made; and in thatorder the higher side of things must dominate. The philosophy of theabsolute agrees with the pluralistic philosophy which I am goingto contrast with it in these lectures, in that both identify humansubstance with the divine substance. But whereas absolutism thinksthat the said substance becomes fully divine only in the form oftotality, and is not its real self in any form but the _all_-form, thepluralistic view which I prefer to adopt is willing to believe thatthere may ultimately never be an all-form at all, that the substanceof reality may never get totally collected, that some of it mayremain outside of the largest combination of it ever made, and thata distributive form of reality, the _each_-form, is logically asacceptable and empirically as probable as the all-form commonlyacquiesced in as so obviously the self-evident thing. The contrastbetween these two forms of a reality which we will agree to supposesubstantially spiritual is practically the topic of this course oflectures. You see now what I mean by pantheism's two subspecies. Ifwe give to the monistic subspecies the name of philosophy of theabsolute, we may give that of radical empiricism to its pluralisticrival, and it may be well to distinguish them occasionally later bythese names. 

As a convenient way of entering into the study of their differences, I may refer to a recent article by Professor Jacks of ManchesterCollege. Professor Jacks, in some brilliant pages in the 'HibbertJournal' for last October, studies the relation between the universeand the philosopher who describes and defines it for us. You mayassume two cases, he says. Either what the philosopher tells us isextraneous to the universe he is accounting for, an indifferentparasitic outgrowth, so to speak; or the fact of his philosophizingis itself one of the things taken account of in the philosophy, andself-included in the description. In the former case the philosophermeans by the universe everything _except_ what his own presencebrings; in the latter case his philosophy is itself an intimatepart of the universe, and may be a part momentous enough to give adifferent turn to what the other parts signify. It may be asupreme reaction of the universe upon itself by which it rises toself-comprehension. It may handle itself differently in consequence ofthis event. 

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

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

The absolute and the world are one fact, I said, when materiallyconsidered. Our philosophy, for example, is not numerically distinctfrom the absolute's own knowledge of itself, not a duplicate and copyof it, it is part of that very knowledge, is numerically identicalwith as much of it as our thought covers. The absolute just _is_ ourphilosophy, along with everything else that is known, in an act ofknowing which (to use the words of my gifted absolutist colleagueRoyce) forms in its wholeness one luminously transparent consciousmoment. 

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

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

With this radical discrepancy between the absolute and the relativepoints of view, it seems to me that almost as great a bar to intimacybetween the divine and the human breaks out in pantheism as that whichwe found in monarchical theism, and hoped that pantheism might notshow. We humans are incurably rooted in the temporal point of view. The eternal's ways are utterly unlike our ways. 'Let us imitate theAll, ' said the original prospectus of that admirable Chicago quarterlycalled the 'Monist. ' As if we could, either in thought or conduct!We are invincibly parts, let us talk as we will, and must alwaysapprehend the absolute as if it were a foreign being. If what I meanby this is not wholly clear to you at this point, it ought to growclearer as my lectures proceed. 

LECTURE II

MONISTIC IDEALISM

Let me recall to you the programme which I indicated to you at ourlast meeting. After agreeing not to consider materialism in anyshape, but to place ourselves straightway upon a more spiritualisticplatform, I pointed out three kinds of spiritual philosophy betweenwhich we are asked to choose. The first way was that of the olderdualistic theism, with ourselves represented as a secondary order ofsubstances created by God. We found that this allowed of a degree ofintimacy with the creative principle inferior to that implied in thepantheistic belief that we are substantially one with it, and that thedivine is therefore the most intimate of all our possessions, heart ofour heart, in fact. But we saw that this pantheistic belief could beheld in two forms, a monistic form which I called philosophy of theabsolute, and a pluralistic form which I called radical empiricism, the former conceiving that the divine exists authentically only whenthe world is experienced all at once in its absolute totality, whereasradical empiricism allows that the absolute sum-total of things maynever be actually experienced or realized in that shape at all, andthat a disseminated, distributed, or incompletely unified appearanceis the only form that reality may yet have achieved. 

I may contrast the monistic and pluralistic forms in question asthe 'all-form' and the 'each-form. ' At the end of the last hour Ianimadverted on the fact that the all-form is so radically differentfrom the each-form, which is our human form of experiencing theworld, that the philosophy of the absolute, so far as insight andunderstanding go, leaves us almost as much outside of the divine beingas dualistic theism does. I believe that radical empiricism, on thecontrary, holding to the each-form, and making of God only one of thecaches, affords the higher degree of intimacy. The general thesis ofthese lectures I said would be a defence of the pluralistic againstthe monistic view. Think of the universe as existing solely in theeach-form, and you will have on the whole a more reasonable andsatisfactory idea of it than if you insist on the all-form beingnecessary. The rest of my lectures will do little more than make thisthesis more concrete, and I hope more persuasive. 

It is curious how little countenance radical pluralism has ever hadfrom philosophers. Whether materialistically or spiritualisticallyminded, philosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter withwhich the world apparently is filled. They have substituted economicaland orderly conceptions for the first sensible tangle; and whetherthese were morally elevated or only intellectually neat they wereat any rate always aesthetically pure and definite, and aimed atascribing to the world something clean and intellectual in the way ofinner structure. As compared with all these rationalizing pictures, the pluralistic empiricism which I profess offers but a sorryappearance. It is a turbid, muddled, gothic sort of an affair, withouta sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility. Those of youwho are accustomed to the classical constructions of reality may beexcused if your first reaction upon it be absolute contempt--ashrug of the shoulders as if such ideas were unworthy of explicitrefutation. But one must have lived some time with a system toappreciate its merits. Perhaps a little more familiarity may mitigateyour first surprise at such a programme as I offer. 

First, one word more than what I said last time about the relativeforeignness of the divine principle in the philosophy of the absolute. Those of you who have read the last two chapters of Mr. Bradley'swonderful book, 'Appearance and reality, ' will remember what anelaborately foreign aspect _his_ absolute is finally made to assume. It is neither intelligence nor will, neither a self nor a collectionof selves, neither truthful, good, nor beautiful, as we understandthese terms. It is, in short, a metaphysical monster, all that we arepermitted to say of it being that whatever it is, it is at any rate_worth_ more (worth more to itself, that is) than if any eulogisticadjectives of ours applied to it. It is us, and all other appearances, but none of us _as such_, for in it we are all 'transmuted, ' and itsown as-suchness is of another denomination altogether. 

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

_As_ absolute, then, or _sub specie eternitatis_, or _quatenusinfinitus est_, the world repels our sympathy because it has nohistory. _As such_, the absolute neither acts nor suffers, nor lovesnor hates; it has no needs, desires, or aspirations, no failures orsuccesses, friends or enemies, victories or defeats. All such thingspertain to the world quâ relative, in which our finite experienceslie, and whose vicissitudes alone have power to arouse our interest. What boots it to tell me that the absolute way is the true way, andto exhort me, as Emerson says, to lift mine eye up to its style, andmanners of the sky, if the feat is impossible by definition? I amfinite once for all, and all the categories of my sympathy are knit upwith the finite world _as such_, and with things that have a history. 'Aus dieser erde quellen meine freuden, und ihre sonne scheinet meinenleiden. ' I have neither eyes nor ears nor heart nor mind for anythingof an opposite description, and the stagnant felicity of theabsolute's own perfection moves me as little as I move it. If we were_readers_ only of the cosmic novel, things would be different: weshould then share the author's point of view and recognize villains tobe as essential as heroes in the plot. But we are not the readers butthe very personages of the world-drama. In your own eyes each of youhere is its hero, and the villains are your respective friends orenemies. The tale which the absolute reader finds so perfect, we spoilfor one another through our several vital identifications with thedestinies of the particular personages involved. 

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

In one sense this is a far-fetched and rather childish objection, forso much of the history of the finite is as formidably foreign to us asthe static absolute can possibly be--in fact that entity derives itsown foreignness largely from the bad character of the finite which itsimultaneously is--that this sentimental reason for preferring thepluralistic view seems small. [1] I shall return to the subject in myfinal lecture, and meanwhile, with your permission, I will say no moreabout this objection. The more so as the necessary foreignness of theabsolute is cancelled emotionally by its attribute of _totality_, which is universally considered to carry the further attribute of_perfection_ in its train. 'Philosophy, ' says a recent americanphilosopher, 'is humanity's hold on totality, ' and there is no doubtthat most of us find that the bare notion of an absolute all-one isinspiring. 'I yielded myself to the perfect whole, ' writes Emerson;and where can you find a more mind-dilating object? A certain loyaltyis called forth by the idea; even if not proved actual, it must bebelieved in somehow. Only an enemy of philosophy can speak lightlyof it. Rationalism starts from the idea of such a whole and buildsdownward. Movement and change are absorbed into its immutability asforms of mere appearance. When you accept this beatific vision ofwhat _is_, in contrast with what _goes on_, you feel as if you hadfulfilled an intellectual duty. 'Reality is not in its truest naturea process, ' Mr. McTaggart tells us, 'but a stable and timelessstate. '[2] 'The true knowledge of God begins, ' Hegel writes, 'whenwe know that things as they immediately are have no truth. '[3] 'Theconsummation of the infinite aim, ' he says elsewhere, 'consists merelyin removing the illusion which makes it seem yet unaccomplished. Goodand absolute goodness is eternally accomplishing itself in the world:and the result is that it needs not wait upon _us_, but is already . . . Accomplished. It is an illusion under which we live. . . . In the courseof its process the Idea makes itself that illusion, by setting anantithesis to confront it, and its action consists in getting rid ofthe illusion which it has created. '[4]

But abstract emotional appeals of any kind sound amateurish in thebusiness that concerns us. Impressionistic philosophizing, likeimpressionistic watchmaking or land-surveying, is intolerable toexperts. Serious discussion of the alternative before us forcesme, therefore, to become more technical. The great _claim_ of thephilosophy of the absolute is that the absolute is no hypothesis, buta presupposition implicated in all thinking, and needing only a littleeffort of analysis to be seen as a logical necessity. I will thereforetake it in this more rigorous character and see whether its claim isin effect so coercive. 

It has seemed coercive to an enormous number of contemporaneousthinkers. Professor Henry Jones thus describes the range and influenceof it upon the social and political life of the present time:[5] 'Formany years adherents of this way of thought have deeply interested thebritish public by their writings. Almost more important than theirwritings is the fact that they have occupied philosophical chairs inalmost every university in the kingdom. Even the professional criticsof idealism are for the most part idealists--after a fashion. And whenthey are not, they are as a rule more occupied with the refutation ofidealism than with the construction of a better theory. It followsfrom their position of academic authority, were it from nothing else, that idealism exercises an influence not easily measured upon theyouth of the nation--upon those, that is, who from the educationalopportunities they enjoy may naturally be expected to become theleaders of the nation's thought and practice. . . . Difficult as it isto measure the forces . . . It is hardly to be denied that the powerexercised by Bentham and the utilitarian school has, for better orfor worse, passed into the hands of the idealists. . . . "The Rhine hasflowed into the Thames" is the warning note rung out by Mr. Hobhouse. Carlyle introduced it, bringing it as far as Chelsea. Then Jowettand Thomas Hill Green, and William Wallace and Lewis Nettleship, andArnold Toynbee and David Eitchie--to mention only those teachers whosevoices now are silent--guided the waters into those upper reachesknown locally as the Isis. John and Edward Caird brought them up theClyde, Hutchison Stirling up the Firth of Forth. They have passed upthe Mersey and up the Severn and Dee and Don. They pollute the bay ofSt. Andrews and swell the waters of the Cam, and have somehow creptoverland into Birmingham. The stream of german idealism has beendiffused over the academical world of Great Britain. The disaster isuniversal. '

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

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

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

What is it to act? Is it not to exert an influence? Does the influencedetach itself from _a_ and find _b_? If so, it is a third fact, andthe problem is not how _a_ acts, but how its 'influence' acts on _b_. By another influence perhaps? And how in the end does the chain ofinfluences find _b_ rather than _c_ unless _b_ is somehow prefiguredin them already? And when they have found _b_, how do they make _b_respond, if _b_ has nothing in common with them? Why don't they goright through _b_? The change in _b_ is a _response_, due to _b_'scapacity for taking account of _a_'s influence, and that again seemsto prove that _b_'s nature is somehow fitted to _a_'s nature inadvance. _A_ and _b_, in short, are not really as distinct as we atfirst supposed them, not separated by a void. Were this so they wouldbe mutually impenetrable, or at least mutually irrelevant. They wouldform two universes each living by itself, making no difference to eachother, taking no account of each other, much as the universe of yourday dreams takes no account of mine. They must therefore belongtogether beforehand, be co-implicated already, their natures must havean inborn mutual reference each to each. 

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

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

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

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

But I ask you whether giving the name of 'one' to the former 'many'makes us really understand the modus operandi of interaction anybetter. We have now given verbal permission to the many to change alltogether, if they can; we have removed a verbal impossibilityand substituted a verbal possibility, but the new name, with thepossibility it suggests, tells us nothing of the actual process bywhich real things that are one can and do change at all. In pointof fact abstract oneness as such _doesn't_ change, neither has itparts--any more than abstract independence as such interacts. But thenneither abstract oneness nor abstract independence _exists_; onlyconcrete real things exist, which add to these properties the otherproperties which they possess, to make up what we call their totalnature. To construe any one of their abstract names as _making theirtotal nature impossible_ is a misuse of the function of naming. Thereal way of rescue from the abstract consequences of one name is notto fly to an opposite name, equally abstract, but rather to correctthe first name by qualifying adjectives that restore some concretenessto the case. Don't take your 'independence' _simpliciter_, as Lotzedoes, take it _secundum quid_. Only when we know what the process ofinteraction literally and concretely _consists_ in can we tell whetherbeings independent _in definite respects_, distinct, for example, inorigin, separate in place, different in kind, etc. , can or cannotinteract. 

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

I almost feel as if I should apologize for criticising such subtlearguments in rapid lectures of this kind. The criticisms have to be asabstract as the arguments, and in exposing their unreality, takeon such an unreal sound themselves that a hearer not nursed in theintellectualist atmosphere knows not which of them to accuse. But_le vin est versé, il faut le boire_, and I must cite a couple moreinstances before I stop. 

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

Take, for instance, the proverb 'a cat may look at a king' and adoptthe realistic view that the king's being is independent of the cat'switnessing. This assumption, which amounts to saying that it need makeno essential difference to the royal object whether the feline subjectcognizes him or not, that the cat may look away from him or may evenbe annihilated, and the king remain unchanged, --this assumption, Isay, is considered by my ingenious colleague to lead to the absurdpractical consequence that the two beings _can_ never later acquireany possible linkages or connexions, but must remain eternally as ifin different worlds. For suppose any connexion whatever to ensue, thisconnexion would simply be a third being additional to the cat and theking, which would itself have to be linked to both by additional linksbefore it could connect them, and so on _ad infinitum_, the argument, you see, being the same as Lotze's about how _a_'s influence does itsinfluencing when it influences _b_. 

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

To escape this preposterous state of things we must accordingly revokethe original hypothesis. The king and the cat are not indifferent toeach other in the way supposed. But if not in that way, then in noway, for connexion in that way carries connexion in other ways; sothat, pursuing the reverse line of reasoning, we end with theabsolute itself as the smallest fact that can exist. Cat and king areco-involved, they are a single fact in two names, they can never havebeen absent from each other, and they are both equally co-implicatedwith all the other facts of which the universe consists. 

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

First, to know the king, the cat must intend _that_ king, must somehowpass over and lay hold of him individually and specifically. The cat'sidea, in short, must transcend the cat's own separate mind and somehowinclude the king, for were the king utterly outside and independent ofthe cat, the cat's pure other, the beast's mind could touch the kingin no wise. This makes the cat much less distinct from the king thanwe had at first naïvely supposed. There must be some prior continuitybetween them, which continuity Royce interprets idealistically asmeaning a higher mind that owns them both as objects, and owning themcan also own any relation, such as the supposed witnessing, that mayobtain between them. Taken purely pluralistically, neither of them canown any part of a _between_, because, so taken, each is supposed shutup to itself: the fact of a _between_ thus commits us to a higherknower. 

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

The reasoning is pleasing from its ingenuity, and it is almost a pitythat so straight a bridge from abstract logic to concrete fact shouldnot bear our weight. To have the alternative forced upon us ofadmitting either finite things each cut off from all relation withits environment, or else of accepting the integral absolute with noenvironment and all relations packed within itself, would be toodelicious a simplification. But the purely verbal character of theoperation is undisguised. Because the _names_ of finite things andtheir relations are disjoined, it doesn't follow that the realitiesnamed need a _deus ex machina_ from on high to conjoin them. The samethings disjoined in one respect _appear_ as conjoined in another. Naming the disjunction doesn't debar us from also naming theconjunction in a later modifying statement, for the two are absolutelyco-ordinate elements in the finite tissue of experience. When atAthens it was found self-contradictory that a boy could be both talland short (tall namely in respect of a child, short in respect of aman), the absolute had not yet been thought of, but it might just aswell have been invoked by Socrates as by Lotze or Royce, as a relieffrom his peculiar intellectualistic difficulty. 

Everywhere we find rationalists using the same kind of reasoning. Theprimal whole which is their vision must be there not only as afact but as a logical necessity. It must be the minimum that canexist--either that absolute whole is there, or there is absolutelynothing. The logical proof alleged of the irrationality of supposingotherwise, is that you can deny the whole only in words thatimplicitly assert it. If you say 'parts, ' of _what_ are they parts? Ifyou call them a 'many, ' that very word unifies them. If you supposethem unrelated in any particular respect, that 'respect' connectsthem; and so on. In short you fall into hopeless contradiction. Youmust stay either at one extreme or the other. [8] 'Partly this andpartly that, ' partly rational, for instance, and partly irrational, is no admissible description of the world. If rationality be in it atall, it must be in it throughout; if irrationality be in it anywhere, that also must pervade it throughout. It must be wholly rational orwholly irrational, pure universe or pure multiverse or nulliverse; andreduced to this violent alternative, no one's choice ought long toremain doubtful. The individual absolute, with its parts co-implicatedthrough and through, so that there is nothing in any part by whichany other part can remain inwardly unaffected, is the only rationalsupposition. Connexions of an external sort, by which the many becamemerely continuous instead of being consubstantial, would be anirrational supposition. 

Mr. Bradley is the pattern champion of this philosophy _in extremis_, as one might call it, for he shows an intolerance to pluralism soextreme that I fancy few of his readers have been able fully to shareit. His reasoning exemplifies everywhere what I call the vice ofintellectualism, for abstract terms are used by him as positivelyexcluding all that their definition fails to include. Some Greeksophists could deny that we may say that man is good, for man, theysaid, means only man, and good means only good, and the word _is_can't be construed to identify such disparate meanings. Mr. Bradleyrevels in the same type of argument. No adjective can rationallyqualify a substantive, he thinks, for if distinct from thesubstantive, it can't be united with it; and if not distinct, there isonly one thing there, and nothing left to unite. Our whole pluralisticprocedure in using subjects and predicates as we do is fundamentallyirrational, an example of the desperation of our finite intellectualestate, infected and undermined as that is by the separatistdiscursive forms which are our only categories, but which absolutereality must somehow absorb into its unity and overcome. 

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

Since a _regressus ad infinitum_ is deemed absurd, the notion thatrelations come 'between' their terms must be given up. No mereexternal go-between can logically connect. What occurs must be moreintimate. The hooking must be a penetration, a possession. Therelation must _involve_ the terms, each term must involve _it_, andmerging thus their being in it, they must somehow merge their being ineach other, tho, as they seem still phenomenally so separate, we cannever conceive exactly how it is that they are inwardly one. Theabsolute, however, must be supposed able to perform the unifying featin his own inscrutable fashion. 

In old times, whenever a philosopher was assailed for someparticularly tough absurdity in his system, he was wont to parry theattack by the argument from the divine omnipotence. 'Do you mean tolimit God's power?' he would reply: 'do you mean to say that God couldnot, if he would, do this or that?' This retort was supposed to closethe mouths of all objectors of properly decorous mind. The functionsof the bradleian absolute are in this particular identical with thoseof the theistic God. Suppositions treated as too absurd to pass musterin the finite world which we inhabit, the absolute must be able tomake good 'somehow' in his ineffable way. First we hear Mr. Bradleyconvicting things of absurdity; next, calling on the absolute to vouchfor them _quand même_. Invoked for no other duty, that duty it mustand shall perform. 

The strangest discontinuity of our world of appearance with thesupposed world of absolute reality is asserted both by Bradley andby Royce; and both writers, the latter with great ingenuity, seek tosoften the violence of the jolt. But it remains violent all the same, and is felt to be so by most readers. Whoever feels the violencestrongly sees as on a diagram in just what the peculiarity of all thisphilosophy of the absolute consists. First, there is a healthy faiththat the world must be rational and self-consistent. 'All science, allreal knowledge, all experience presuppose, ' as Mr. Ritchie writes, 'acoherent universe. ' Next, we find a loyal clinging to the rationalistbelief that sense-data and their associations are incoherent, and thatonly in substituting a conceptual order for their order can truthbe found. Third, the substituted conceptions are treatedintellectualistically, that is as mutually exclusive anddiscontinuous, so that the first innocent continuity of the flow ofsense-experience is shattered for us without any higher conceptualcontinuity taking its place. Finally, since this broken state ofthings is intolerable, the absolute _deus ex machina_ is called on tomend it in his own way, since we cannot mend it in ours. 

Any other picture than this of post-kantian absolutism I am unableto frame. I see the intellectualistic criticism destroying theimmediately given coherence of the phenomenal world, but unable tomake its own conceptual substitutes cohere, and I see the resort tothe absolute for a coherence of a higher type. The situation hasdramatic liveliness, but it is inwardly incoherent throughout, and thequestion inevitably comes up whether a mistake may not somewhere havecrept in in the process that has brought it about. May not the remedylie rather in revising the intellectualist criticism than in firstadopting it and then trying to undo its consequences by an arbitraryact of faith in an unintelligible agent. May not the flux of sensibleexperience itself contain a rationality that has been overlooked, so that the real remedy would consist in harking back to it moreintelligently, and not in advancing in the opposite direction awayfrom it and even away beyond the intellectualist criticism thatdisintegrates it, to the pseudo-rationality of the supposed absolutepoint of view. I myself believe that this is the real way to keeprationality in the world, and that the traditional rationalism hasalways been facing in the wrong direction. I hope in the end to makeyou share, or at any rate respect, this belief, but there is much totalk of before we get to that point. 

I employed the word 'violent' just now in describing the dramaticsituation in which it pleases the philosophy of the absolute to makeits camp. I don't see how any one can help being struck in absolutistwritings by that curious tendency to fly to violent extremes of whichI have already said a word. The universe must be rational; welland good; but _how_ rational? in what sense of that eulogistic butambiguous word?--this would seem to be the next point to bring up. There are surely degrees in rationality that might be discriminatedand described. Things can be consistent or coherent in very diverseways. But no more in its conception of rationality than in itsconception of relations can the monistic mind suffer the notion ofmore or less. Rationality is one and indivisible: if not rationalthus indivisibly, the universe must be completely irrational, and noshadings or mixtures or compromises can obtain. Mr. McTaggart writes, in discussing the notion of a mixture: 'The two principles, ofrationality and irrationality, to which the universe is then referred, will have to be absolutely separate and independent. For if there wereany common unity to which they should be referred, it would be thatunity and not its two manifestations which would be the ultimateexplanation . . . And the theory, having thus become monistic, '[9] wouldresolve itself into the same alternative once more: is the singleprinciple rational through and through or not?

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

Professor Taylor is so _naïf_ in this habit of thinking only inextremes that he charges the pluralists with cutting the ground fromunder their own feet in not consistently following it themselves. Whatpluralists say is that a universe really connected loosely, after thepattern of our daily experience, is possible, and that for certainreasons it is the hypothesis to be preferred. What Professor Taylorthinks they naturally must or should say is that any other sort ofuniverse is logically impossible, and that a totality of thingsinterrelated like the world of the monists is not an hypothesis thatcan be seriously thought out at all. [11]

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

If chance is spoken of as an ingredient of the universe, absolutistsinterpret it to mean that double sevens are as likely to be thrown outof a dice box as double sixes are. If free-will is spoken of, thatmust mean that an english general is as likely to eat his prisonersto-day as a Maori chief was a hundred years ago. It is as likely--I amusing Mr. McTaggart's examples--that a majority of Londoners willburn themselves alive to-morrow as that they will partake of food, aslikely that I shall be hanged for brushing my hair as for committinga murder, [12] and so forth, through various suppositions that noindeterminist ever sees real reason to make. 

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

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

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

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

All the said systematizers who have written since Hegel have owedtheir inspiration largely to him. Even when they have found no usefor his particular triadic dialectic, they have drawn confidenceand courage from his authoritative and conquering tone. I have saidnothing about Hegel in this lecture, so I must repair the omission inthe next. 

LECTURE III

HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

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

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

Any author is easy if you can catch the centre of his vision. Fromthe centre in Hegel come those towering sentences of his that arecomparable only to Luther's, as where, speaking of the ontologicalproof of God's existence from the concept of him as the _ensperfectissimum_ to which no attribute can be lacking, he says: 'Itwould be strange if the Notion, the very heart of the mind, or, ina word, the concrete totality we call God, were not rich enoughto embrace so poor a category as Being, the very poorest and mostabstract of all--for nothing can be more insignificant than Being. 'But if Hegel's central thought is easy to catch, his abominable habitsof speech make his application of it to details exceedingly difficultto follow. His passion for the slipshod in the way of sentences, his unprincipled playing fast and loose with terms; his dreadfulvocabulary, calling what completes a thing its 'negation, ' forexample; his systematic refusal to let you know whether he is talkinglogic or physics or psychology, his whole deliberately adopted policyof ambiguity and vagueness, in short: all these things make hispresent-day readers wish to tear their hair--or his--out indesperation. Like Byron's corsair, he has left a name 'to other times, linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes. '

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

The impression that any _naïf_ person gets who plants himselfinnocently in the flux of things is that things are off their balance. Whatever equilibriums our finite experiences attain to are butprovisional. Martinique volcanoes shatter our wordsworthianequilibrium with nature. Accidents, either moral, mental, or physical, break up the slowly built-up equilibriums men reach in family lifeand in their civic and professional relations. Intellectual enigmasfrustrate our scientific systems, and the ultimate cruelty of theuniverse upsets our religious attitudes and outlooks. Of no specialsystem of good attained does the universe recognize the value assacred. Down it tumbles, over it goes, to feed the ravenous appetitefor destruction, of the larger system of history in which it stoodfor a moment as a landing-place and stepping-stone. This dogging ofeverything by its negative, its fate, its undoing, this perpetualmoving on to something future which shall supersede the present, this is the hegelian intuition of the essential provisionality, andconsequent unreality, of everything empirical and finite. Take anyconcrete finite thing and try to hold it fast. You cannot, for soheld, it proves not to be concrete at all, but an arbitrary extract orabstract which you have made from the remainder of empirical reality. The rest of things invades and overflows both it and you together, and defeats your rash attempt. Any partial view whatever of the worldtears the part out of its relations, leaves out some truth concerningit, is untrue of it, falsifies it. The full truth about anythinginvolves more than that thing. In the end nothing less than the wholeof everything can be the truth of anything at all. 

Taken so far, and taken in the rough, Hegel is not only harmless, butaccurate. There is a dialectic movement in things, if such it pleaseyou to call it, one that the whole constitution of concrete lifeestablishes; but it is one that can be described and accounted for interms of the pluralistic vision of things far more naturally than inthe monistic terms to which Hegel finally reduced it. Pluralisticempiricism knows that everything is in an environment, a surroundingworld of other things, and that if you leave it to work there it willinevitably meet with friction and opposition from its neighbors. Itsrivals and enemies will destroy it unless it can buy them off bycompromising some part of its original pretensions. 

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

This view of concepts is Hegel's revolutionary performance; but sostudiously vague and ambiguous are all his expressions of it that onecan hardly tell whether it is the concepts as such, or the sensibleexperiences and elements conceived, that Hegel really means to workwith. The only thing that is certain is that whatever you may say ofhis procedure, some one will accuse you of misunderstanding it. I makeno claim to understanding it, I treat it merely impressionistically. 

So treating it, I regret that he should have called it by the name oflogic. Clinging as he did to the vision of a really living world, andrefusing to be content with a chopped-up intellectualist pictureof it, it is a pity that he should have adopted the very word thatintellectualism had already pre-empted. But he clung fast to the oldrationalist contempt for the immediately given world of sense and allits squalid particulars, and never tolerated the notion that the formof philosophy might be empirical only. His own system had to be aproduct of eternal reason, so the word 'logic, ' with its suggestionsof coercive necessity, was the only word he could find natural. Hepretended therefore to be using the _a priori_ method, and to beworking by a scanty equipment of ancient logical terms--position, negation, reflection, universal, particular, individual, and the like. But what he really worked by was his own empirical perceptions, whichexceeded and overflowed his miserably insufficient logical categoriesin every instance of their use. 

What he did with the category of negation was his most originalstroke. The orthodox opinion is that you can advance logically throughthe field of concepts only by going from the same to the same. Hegelfelt deeply the sterility of this law of conceptual thought; hesaw that in a fashion negation also relates things; and he had thebrilliant idea of transcending the ordinary logic by treating advancefrom the different to the different as if it were also a necessity ofthought. 'The so-called maxim of identity, ' he wrote, 'is supposed tobe accepted by the consciousness of every one. But the language whichsuch a law demands, "a planet is a planet, magnetism is magnetism, mind is mind, " deserves to be called silliness. No mind either speaksor thinks or forms conceptions in accordance with this law, and noexistence of any kind whatever conforms to it. We must never viewidentity as abstract identity, to the exclusion of all difference. That is the touchstone for distinguishing all bad philosophy from whatalone deserves the name of philosophy. If thinking were no more thanregistering abstract identities, it would be a most superfluousperformance. Things and concepts are identical with themselves only inso far as at the same time they involve distinction. '[1]

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

Once catch well the knack of this scheme of thought and you are luckyif you ever get away from it. It is all you can see. Let any onepronounce anything, and your feeling of a contradiction being impliedbecomes a habit, almost a motor habit in some persons who symbolize bya stereotyped gesture the position, sublation, and final reinstatementinvolved. If you say 'two' or 'many, ' your speech betrayeth you, forthe very name collects them into one. If you express doubt, yourexpression contradicts its content, for the doubt itself is notdoubted but affirmed. If you say 'disorder, ' what is that but acertain bad kind of order? if you say 'indetermination, ' you aredetermining just _that_. If you say 'nothing but the unexpectedhappens, ' the unexpected becomes what you expect. If you say 'allthings are relative, ' to what is the all of them itself relative? Ifyou say 'no more, ' you have said more already, by implying a regionin which no more is found; to know a limit as such is consequentlyalready to have got beyond it; And so forth, throughout as manyexamples as one cares to cite. 

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

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

Empirical instances of the way in which higher unities reconcilecontradictions are innumerable, so here again Hegel's vision, takenmerely impressionistically, agrees with countless facts. Somehow lifedoes, out of its total resources, find ways of satisfying oppositesat once. This is precisely the paradoxical aspect which much of ourcivilization presents. Peace we secure by armaments, liberty by lawsand constitutions; simplicity and naturalness are the consummateresult of artificial breeding and training; health, strength, andwealth are increased only by lavish use, expense, and wear. Ourmistrust of mistrust engenders our commercial system of credit; ourtolerance of anarchistic and revolutionary utterances is the only wayof lessening their danger; our charity has to say no to beggars inorder not to defeat its own desires; the true epicurean has to observegreat sobriety; the way to certainty lies through radical doubt;virtue signifies not innocence but the knowledge of sin and itsovercoming; by obeying nature, we command her, etc. The ethical andthe religious life are full of such contradictions held in solution. You hate your enemy?--well, forgive him, and thereby heap coals offire on his head; to realize yourself, renounce yourself; to save yoursoul, first lose it; in short, die to live. 

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

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

Now Hegel found that his idea of an immanent movement throughthe field of concepts by way of 'dialectic' negation played mostbeautifully into the hands of this rationalistic demand for somethingabsolute and _inconcussum_ in the way of truth. It is easy to see how. If you affirm anything, for example that A is, and simply leave thematter thus, you leave it at the mercy of any one who may superveneand say 'not A, but B is. ' If he does say so, your statement doesn'trefute him, it simply contradicts him, just as his contradicts you. The only way of making your affirmation about A _self-securing_ is bygetting it into a form which will by implication negate all possiblenegations in advance. The mere absence of negation is not enough; itmust be present, but present with its fangs drawn. What you posit as Amust already have cancelled the alternative or made it innocuous, byhaving negated it in advance. Double negation is the only form ofaffirmation that fully plays into the hands of the dogmatic ideal. Simply and innocently affirmative statements are good enough forempiricists, but unfit for rationalist use, lying open as they do toevery accidental contradictor, and exposed to every puff of doubt. The _final_ truth must be something to which there is no imaginablealternative, because it contains all its possible alternatives insideof itself as moments already taken account of and overcome. Whateverinvolves its own alternatives as elements of itself is, in a phraseoften repeated, its 'own other, ' made so by the _methode der absolutennegativität_. 

Formally, this scheme of an organism of truth that has already fed asit were on its own liability to death, so that, death once deadfor it, there's no more dying then, is the very fulfilment of therationalistic aspiration. That one and only whole, with all itsparts involved in it, negating and making one another impossible ifabstracted and taken singly, but necessitating and holding one anotherin place if the whole of them be taken integrally, is the literalideal sought after; it is the very diagram and picture of that notionof _the_ truth with no outlying alternative, to which nothing can beadded, nor from it anything withdrawn, and all variations from whichare absurd, which so dominates the human imagination. Once we havetaken in the features of this diagram that so successfully solvesthe world-old problem, the older ways of proving the necessity ofjudgments cease to give us satisfaction. Hegel's way we think mustbe the right way. The true must be essentially the self-reflectingself-contained recurrent, that which secures itself by including itsown other and negating it; that makes a spherical system with no looseends hanging out for foreignness to get a hold upon; that is foreverrounded in and closed, not strung along rectilinearly and open at itsends like that universe of simply collective or additive form whichHegel calls the world of the bad infinite, and which is all thatempiricism, starting with simply posited single parts and elements, isever able to attain to. 

No one can possibly deny the sublimity of this hegelian conception. It is surely in the grand style, if there be such a thing as a grandstyle in philosophy. For us, however, it remains, so far, a merelyformal and diagrammatic conception; for with the actual contentof absolute truth, as Hegel materially tries to set it forth, fewdisciples have been satisfied, and I do not propose to refer at all tothe concreter parts of his philosophy. The main thing now is to graspthe generalized vision, and feel the authority of the abstract schemeof a statement self-secured by involving double negation. Absolutistswho make no use of Hegel's own technique are really working by hismethod. You remember the proofs of the absolute which I instanced inmy last lecture, Lotze's and Royce's proofs by _reductio ad absurdum_, to the effect that any smallest connexion rashly supposed in thingswill logically work out into absolute union, and any minimaldisconnexion into absolute disunion, --these are really argumentsframed on the hegelian pattern. The truth is that which you implicitlyaffirm in the very attempt to deny it; it is that from which everyvariation refutes itself by proving self-contradictory. This is thesupreme insight of rationalism, and to-day the best _must-be's_ ofrationalist argumentation are but so many attempts to communicate itto the hearer. 

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

Rationalism in general thinks it gets the fulness of truth by turningaway from sensation to conception, conception obviously giving themore universal and immutable picture. Intellectualism in the vicioussense I have already defined as the habit of assuming that a concept_ex_cludes from any reality conceived by its means everything notincluded in the concept's definition. I called such intellectualismillegitimate as I found it used in Lotze's, Royce's, and Bradley'sproofs of the absolute (which absolute I consequently held to benon-proven by their arguments), and I left off by asserting my ownbelief that a pluralistic and incompletely integrated universe, describable only by the free use of the word 'some, ' is a legitimatehypothesis. 

Now Hegel himself, in building up his method of double negation, offers the vividest possible example of this vice of intellectualism. Every idea of a finite thing is of course a concept of _that_ thingand not a concept of anything else. But Hegel treats this not being aconcept of anything else as if it were _equivalent to the concept ofanything else not being_, or in other words as if it were a denialor negation of everything else. Then, as the other things, thusimplicitly contradicted by the thing first conceived, also by the samelaw contradict _it_, the pulse of dialectic commences to beat and thefamous triads begin to grind out the cosmos. If any one findsthe process here to be a luminous one, he must be left to theillumination, he must remain an undisturbed hegelian. What others feelas the intolerable ambiguity, verbosity, and unscrupulousness of themaster's way of deducing things, he will probably ascribe--sincedivine oracles are notoriously hard to interpret--to the 'difficulty'that habitually accompanies profundity. For my own part, there seemssomething grotesque and _saugrenu_ in the pretension of a style sodisobedient to the first rules of sound communication between minds, to be the authentic mother-tongue of reason, and to keep step moreaccurately than any other style does with the absolute's own waysof thinking. I do not therefore take Hegel's technical apparatusseriously at all. I regard him rather as one of those numerousoriginal seers who can never learn how to articulate. His would-becoercive logic counts for nothing in my eyes; but that does not inthe least impugn the philosophic importance of his conception of theabsolute, if we take it merely hypothetically as one of the greattypes of cosmic vision. 

Taken thus hypothetically, I wish to discuss it briefly. But beforedoing so I must call your attention to an odd peculiarity in thehegelian procedure. The peculiarity is one which will come before usagain for a final judgment in my seventh lecture, so at present I onlynote it in passing. Hegel, you remember, considers that the immediatefinite data of experience are 'untrue' because they are not their ownothers. They are negated by what is external to them. The absoluteis true because it and it only has no external environment, and hasattained to being its own other. (These words sound queer enough, butthose of you who know something of Hegel's text will follow them. )Granting his premise that to be true a thing must in some sort be itsown other, everything hinges on whether he is right in holding thatthe several pieces of finite experience themselves cannot be saidto be in any wise _their_ own others. When conceptually orintellectualistically treated, they of course cannot be their ownothers. Every abstract concept as such excludes what it doesn'tinclude, and if such concepts are adequate substitutes forreality's concrete pulses, the latter must square themselves withintellectualistic logic, and no one of them in any sense can claim tobe its own other. If, however, the conceptual treatment of the flow ofreality should prove for any good reason to be inadequate and to havea practical rather than a theoretical or speculative value, then anindependent empirical look into the constitution of reality's pulsesmight possibly show that some of them _are_ their own others, andindeed are so in the self-same sense in which the absolute ismaintained to be so by Hegel. When we come to my sixth lecture, on Professor Bergson, I shall in effect defend this very view, strengthening my thesis by his authority. I am unwilling to sayanything more about the point at this time, and what I have just saidof it is only a sort of surveyor's note of where our present positionlies in the general framework of these lectures. 

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

But first of all I must parenthetically ask you to distinguish thenotion of the absolute carefully from that of another object withwhich it is liable to become heedlessly entangled. That other objectis the 'God' of common people in their religion, and the creator-Godof orthodox christian theology. Only thoroughgoing monists orpantheists believe in the absolute. The God of our popularChristianity is but one member of a pluralistic system. He and westand outside of each other, just as the devil, the saints, and theangels stand outside of both of us. I can hardly conceive of anythingmore different from the absolute than the God, say, of David or ofIsaiah. _That_ God is an essentially finite being _in_ the cosmos, not with the cosmos in him, and indeed he has a very local habitationthere, and very one-sided local and personal attachments. If it shouldprove probable that the absolute does not exist, it will not follow inthe slightest degree that a God like that of David, Isaiah, or Jesusmay not exist, or may not be the most important existence in theuniverse for us to acknowledge. I pray you, then, not to confound thetwo ideas as you listen to the criticisms I shall have to proffer. I hold to the finite God, for reasons which I shall touch on in theseventh of these lectures; but I hold that his rival and competitor--Ifeel almost tempted to say his enemy--the absolute, is not only notforced on us by logic, but that it is an improbable hypothesis. 

The great claim made for the absolute is that by supposing it we makethe world appear more rational. Any hypothesis that does that willalways be accepted as more probably true than an hypothesis that makesthe world appear irrational. Men are once for all so made that theyprefer a rational world to believe in and to live in. But rationalityhas at least four dimensions, intellectual, aesthetical, moral, andpractical; and to find a world rational to the maximal degree _in allthese respects simultaneously_ is no easy matter. Intellectually, theworld of mechanical materialism is the most rational, for we subjectits events to mathematical calculation. But the mechanical worldis ugly, as arithmetic is ugly, and it is non-moral. Morally, the theistic world is rational enough, but full of intellectualfrustrations. The practical world of affairs, in its turn, sosupremely rational to the politician, the military man, or the man ofconquering business-faculty that he never would vote to change thetype of it, is irrational to moral and artistic temperaments; so thatwhatever demand for rationality we find satisfied by a philosophichypothesis, we are liable to find some other demand for rationalityunsatisfied by the same hypothesis. The rationality we gain in onecoin we thus pay for in another; and the problem accordingly seems atfirst sight to resolve itself into that of getting a conception whichwill yield the largest _balance_ of rationality rather than one whichwill yield perfect rationality of every description. In general, itmay be said that if a man's conception of the world lets loose anyaction in him that is easy, or any faculty which he is fond ofexercising, he will deem it rational in so far forth, be the facultythat of computing, fighting, lecturing, classifying, framing schematictabulations, getting the better end of a bargain, patiently waitingand enduring, preaching, joke-making, or what you like. Albeit theabsolute is defined as being necessarily an embodiment of objectivelyperfect rationality, it is fair to its english advocates to say thatthose who have espoused the hypothesis most concretely and seriouslyhave usually avowed the irrationality to their own minds of certainelements in it. 

Probably the weightiest contribution to our feeling of the rationalityof the universe which the notion of the absolute brings is theassurance that however disturbed the surface may be, at bottom all iswell with the cosmos--central peace abiding at the heart of endlessagitation. This conception is rational in many ways, beautifulaesthetically, beautiful intellectually (could we only follow it intodetail), and beautiful morally, if the enjoyment of security can beaccounted moral. Practically it is less beautiful; for, as we saw inour last lecture, in representing the deepest reality of the world asstatic and without a history, it loosens the world's hold upon oursympathies and leaves the soul of it foreign. Nevertheless it doesgive _peace_, and that kind of rationality is so paramountly demandedby men that to the end of time there will be absolutists, men whochoose belief in a static eternal, rather than admit that the finiteworld of change and striving, even with a God as one of the strivers, is itself eternal. For such minds Professor Royce's words will alwaysbe the truest: 'The very presence of ill in the temporal order is thecondition of the perfection of the eternal order. . . . We long for theabsolute only in so far as in us the absolute also longs, and seeksthrough our very temporal striving, the peace that is nowhere in time, but only, and yet absolutely, in eternity. Were there no longing intime there would be no peace in eternity. . . . God [_i. E. _ the absolute]who here in me aims at what I now temporally miss, not only possessesin the eternal world the goal after which I strive, but comes topossess it even through and because of my sorrow. Through this mytribulation the absolute triumph then is won. . . . In the absolute I amfulfilled. Yet my very fulfilment demands and therefore can transcendthis sorrow. '[7] Royce is particularly felicitous in his ability tocite parts of finite experience to which he finds his picture of thisabsolute experience analogous. But it is hard to portray the absoluteat all without rising into what might be called the 'inspired' styleof language--I use the word not ironically, but prosaically anddescriptively, to designate the only literary form that goes with thekind of emotion that the absolute arouses. One can follow the pathwayof reasoning soberly enough, [8] but the picture itself has to beeffulgent. This admirable faculty of transcending, whilst inwardlypreserving, every contrariety, is the absolute's characteristic formof rationality. We are but syllables in the mouth of the Lord; if thewhole sentence is divine, each syllable is absolutely what it shouldbe, in spite of all appearances. In making up the balance for oragainst absolutism, this emotional value weights heavily the creditside of the account. 

The trouble is that we are able to see so little into the positivedetail of it, and that if once admitted not to be coercively provenby the intellectualist arguments, it remains only a hypotheticpossibility. 

On the debit side of the account the absolute, taken seriously, andnot as a mere name for our right occasionally to drop the strenuousmood and take a moral holiday, introduces all those tremendousirrationalities into the universe which a frankly pluralistic theismescapes, but which have been flung as a reproach at every form ofmonistic theism or pantheism. It introduces a speculative 'problemof evil' namely, and leaves us wondering why the perfection of theabsolute should require just such particular hideous forms of life asdarken the day for our human imaginations. If they were forced on itby something alien, and to 'overcome' them the absolute had still tokeep hold of them, we could understand its feeling of triumph, thoughwe, so far as we were ourselves among the elements overcome, couldacquiesce but sullenly in the resultant situation, and would neverjust have chosen it as the most rational one conceivable. But theabsolute is represented as a being without environment, upon whichnothing alien can be forced, and which has spontaneously chosen fromwithin to give itself the spectacle of all that evil rather than aspectacle with less evil in it. [9] Its perfection is represented asthe source of things, and yet the first effect of that perfection isthe tremendous imperfection of all finite experience. In whateversense the word 'rationality' may be taken, it is vain to contend thatthe impression made on our finite minds by such a way of representingthings is altogether rational. Theologians have felt its irrationalityacutely, and the 'fall, ' the predestination, and the election whichthe situation involves have given them more trouble than anything elsein their attempt to pantheize Christianity. The whole business remainsa puzzle, both intellectually and morally. 

Grant that the spectacle or world-romance offered to itself by theabsolute is in the absolute's eyes perfect. Why would not the world bemore perfect by having the affair remain in just those terms, andby not having any finite spectators to come in and add to what wasperfect already their innumerable imperfect manners of seeing the samespectacle? Suppose the entire universe to consist of one superb copyof a book, fit for the ideal reader. Is that universe improved ordeteriorated by having myriads of garbled and misprinted separateleaves and chapters also created, giving false impressions of the bookto whoever looks at them? To say the least, the balance of rationalityis not obviously in favor of such added mutilations. So this questionbecomes urgent: Why, the absolute's own total vision of thingsbeing so rational, was it necessary to comminute it into all thesecoexisting inferior fragmentary visions?

Leibnitz in his theodicy represents God as limited by an antecedentreason in things which makes certain combinations logicallyincompatible, certain goods impossible. He surveys in advance all theuniverses he might create, and by an act of what Leibnitz calls hisantecedent will he chooses our actual world as the one in which theevil, unhappily necessary anyhow, is at its minimum. It is the best ofall the worlds that are possible, therefore, but by no means the mostabstractly desirable world. Having made this mental choice, God nextproceeds to what Leibnitz calls his act of consequent or decretorywill: he says '_Fiat_' and the world selected springs into objectivebeing, with all the finite creatures in it to suffer from itsimperfections without sharing in its creator's atoning vision. 

Lotze has made some penetrating remarks on this conception ofLeibnitz's, and they exactly fall in with what I say of the absolutistconception. The world projected out of the creative mind by the_fiat_, and existing in detachment from its author, is a sphere ofbeing where the parts realize themselves only singly. If the divinevalue of them is evident only when they are collectively looked at, then, Lotze rightly says, the world surely becomes poorer and notricher for God's utterance of the _fiat_. He might much better haveremained contented with his merely antecedent choice of the scheme, without following it up by a creative decree. The scheme _as such_ wasadmirable; it could only lose by being translated into reality. [10]Why, I similarly ask, should the absolute ever have lapsed from theperfection of its own integral experience of things, and refracteditself into all our finite experiences?

It is but fair to recent english absolutists to say that many of themhave confessed the imperfect rationality of the absolute from thispoint of view. Mr. McTaggart, for example, writes: 'Does not our veryfailure to perceive the perfection of the universe destroy it? . . . Inso far as we do not see the perfection of the universe, we are notperfect ourselves. And as we are parts of the universe, that cannot beperfect. '[11]

And Mr. Joachim finds just the same difficulty. Calling the hypothesisof the absolute by the name of the 'coherence theory of truth, ' hecalls the problem of understanding how the complete coherence of allthings in the absolute should involve as a necessary moment inits self-maintenance the self-assertion of the finite minds, aself-assertion which in its extreme form is error, --he calls thisproblem, I say, an insoluble puzzle. If truth be the universal _fonset origo_, how does error slip in? 'The coherence theory of truth, ' heconcludes, 'may thus be said to suffer shipwreck at the veryentrance of the harbor. '[12] Yet in spite of this rather bad formof irrationality, Mr. Joachim stoutly asserts his 'immediatecertainty'[13] of the theory shipwrecked, the correctness of whichhe says he has 'never doubted. ' This candid confession of a fixedattitude of faith in the absolute, which even one's own criticisms andperplexities fail to disturb, seems to me very significant. Not onlyempiricists, but absolutists also, would all, if they were as candidas this author, confess that the prime thing in their philosophyis their vision of a truth possible, which they then employ theirreasoning to convert, as best it can, into a certainty or probability. 

I can imagine a believer in the absolute retorting at this point that_he_ at any rate is not dealing with mere probabilities, but thatthe nature of things logically requires the multitudinous erroneouscopies, and that therefore the universe cannot be the absolute's bookalone. For, he will ask, is not the absolute defined as the totalconsciousness of everything that is? Must not its field of viewconsist of parts? And what can the parts of a total consciousness beunless they be fractional consciousnesses? Our finite minds _must_therefore coexist with the absolute mind. We are its constituents, andit cannot live without us. --But if any one of you feels tempted toretort in this wise, let me remind you that you are frankly employingpluralistic weapons, and thereby giving up the absolutist cause. Thenotion that the absolute is made of constituents on which its beingdepends is the rankest empiricism. The absolute as such has _objects_, not constituents, and if the objects develop selfhoods upon their ownseveral accounts, those selfhoods must be set down as facts additionalto the absolute consciousness, and not as elements implicated in itsdefinition. The absolute is a rationalist conception. Rationalismgoes from wholes to parts, and always assumes wholes to beself-sufficing. [14]

My conclusion, so far, then, is this, that altho the hypothesis of theabsolute, in yielding a certain kind of religious peace, performsa most important rationalizing function, it nevertheless, fromthe intellectual point of view, remains decidedly irrational. The_ideally_ perfect whole is certainly that whole of which the _partsalso are perfect_--if we can depend on logic for anything, we candepend on it for that definition. The absolute is defined as theideally perfect whole, yet most of its parts, if not all, areadmittedly imperfect. Evidently the conception lacks internalconsistency, and yields us a problem rather than a solution. Itcreates a speculative puzzle, the so-called mystery of evil and oferror, from which a pluralistic metaphysic is entirely free. 

In any pluralistic metaphysic, the problems that evil presents arepractical, not speculative. Not why evil should exist at all, but howwe can lessen the actual amount of it, is the sole question we needthere consider. 'God, ' in the religious life of ordinary men, is thename not of the whole of things, heaven forbid, but only of the idealtendency in things, believed in as a superhuman person who calls us toco-operate in his purposes, and who furthers ours if they are worthy. He works in an external environment, has limits, and has enemies. WhenJohn Mill said that the notion of God's omnipotence must be given up, if God is to be kept as a religious object, he was surely accuratelyright; yet so prevalent is the lazy monism that idly haunts the regionof God's name, that so simple and truthful a saying was generallytreated as a paradox: God, it was said, _could_ not be finite. Ibelieve that the only God worthy of the name _must_ be finite, and Ishall return to this point in a later lecture. If the absolute existin addition--and the hypothesis must, in spite of its irrationalfeatures, still be left open--then the absolute is only the widercosmic whole of which our God is but the most ideal portion, and whichin the more usual human sense is hardly to be termed a religioushypothesis at all. 'Cosmic emotion' is the better name for thereaction it may awaken. 

Observe that all the irrationalities and puzzles which the absolutegives rise to, and from which the finite God remains free, are due tothe fact that the absolute has nothing, absolutely nothing, outside ofitself. The finite God whom I contrast with it may conceivably have_almost_ nothing outside of himself; he may already have triumphedover and absorbed all but the minutest fraction of the universe; butthat fraction, however small, reduces him to the status of arelative being, and in principle the universe is saved from all theirrationalities incidental to absolutism. The only irrationality leftwould be the irrationality of which pluralism as such is accused, andof this I hope to say a word more later. 

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

First, then, let me remind you that _the absolute is useless fordeductive purposes_. It gives us absolute safety if you will, butit is compatible with every relative danger. You cannot enter thephenomenal world with the notion of it in your grasp, and namebeforehand any detail which you are likely to meet there. Whatever thedetails of experience may prove to be, _after the fact of them_the absolute will adopt them. It is an hypothesis that functionsretrospectively only, not prospectively. _That_, whatever it may be, will have been in point of fact the sort of world which the absolutewas pleased to offer to itself as a spectacle. 

Again, the absolute is always represented idealistically, as theall-knower. Thinking this view consistently out leads one to framean almost ridiculous conception of the absolute mind, owing to theenormous mass of unprofitable information which it would then seemobliged to carry. One of the many _reductiones ad absurdum_ ofpluralism by which idealism thinks it proves the absolute One is asfollows: Let there be many facts; but since on idealist principlesfacts exist only by being known, the many facts will therefore meanmany knowers. But that there are so many knowers is itself a fact, which in turn requires _its_ knower, so the one absolute knower haseventually to be brought in. _All_ facts lead to him. If it be a factthat this table is not a chair, not a rhinoceros, not a logarithm, nota mile away from the door, not worth five hundred pounds sterling, nota thousand centuries old, the absolute must even now be articulatelyaware of all these negations. Along with what everything is it mustalso be conscious of everything which it is not. This infiniteatmosphere of explicit negativity--observe that it has to beexplicit--around everything seems to us so useless an encumbrance asto make the absolute still more foreign to our sympathy. Furthermore, if it be a fact that certain ideas are silly, the absolute has to havealready thought the silly ideas to establish them in silliness. Therubbish in its mind would thus appear easily to outweigh in amount themore desirable material. One would expect it fairly to burst with suchan obesity, plethora, and superfoetation of useless information. [15]

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

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

LECTURE IV

CONCERNING FECHNER

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

But if we drop the absolute out of the world, must we then concludethat the world contains nothing better in the way of consciousnessthan our consciousness? Is our whole instinctive belief in higherpresences, our persistent inner turning towards divine companionship, to count for nothing? Is it but the pathetic illusion of beings withincorrigibly social and imaginative minds?

Such a negative conclusion would, I believe, be desperately hasty, a sort of pouring out of the child with the bath. Logically it ispossible to believe in superhuman beings without identifying them withthe absolute at all. The treaty of offensive and defensive alliancewhich certain groups of the Christian clergy have recently made withour transcendentalist philosophers seems to me to be based on awell-meaning but baleful mistake. Neither the Jehovah of the oldtestament nor the heavenly father of the new has anything in commonwith the absolute except that they are all three greater than man;and if you say that the notion of the absolute is what the gods ofAbraham, of David, and of Jesus, after first developing into eachother, were inevitably destined to develop into in more reflectiveand modern minds, I reply that although in certain specificallyphilosophical minds this may have been the case, in minds moreproperly to be termed religious the development has followed quiteanother path. The whole history of evangelical Christianity is thereto prove it. I propose in these lectures to plead for that other lineof development. To set the doctrine of the absolute in its properframework, so that it shall not fill the whole welkin and exclude allalternative possibilities of higher thought--as it seems to do formany students who approach it with a limited previous acquaintancewith philosophy--I will contrast it with a system which, abstractlyconsidered, seems at first to have much in common with absolutism, butwhich, when taken concretely and temperamentally, really stands at theopposite pole. I refer to the philosophy of Gustav Theodor Fechner, awriter but little known as yet to English readers, but destined, I ampersuaded, to wield more and more influence as time goes on. 

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

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

Hegel tried, as we saw, to make the system concreter by making therelations between things 'dialectic, ' but if we turn to those who usehis name most worshipfully, we find them giving up all the particularsof his attempt, and simply praising his intention--much as in ourmanner we have praised it ourselves. Mr. Haldane, for example, in hiswonderfully clever Gifford lectures, praises Hegel to the skies, butwhat he tells of him amounts to little more than this, that 'thecategories in which the mind arranges its experiences, and givesmeaning to them, the universals in which the particulars are graspedin the individual, are a logical chain, in which the first presupposesthe last, and the last is its presupposition and its truth. ' He hardlytries at all to thicken this thin logical scheme. He says indeedthat absolute mind in itself, and absolute mind in its hetereity orotherness, under the distinction which it sets up of itself fromitself, have as their real _prius_ absolute mind in synthesis; and, this being absolute mind's true nature, its dialectic character mustshow itself in such concrete forms as Goethe's and Wordsworth'spoetry, as well as in religious forms. 'The nature of God, the natureof absolute mind, is to exhibit the triple movement of dialectic, andso the nature of God as presented in religion must be a triplicity, a trinity. ' But beyond thus naming Goethe and Wordsworth andestablishing the trinity, Mr. Haldane's Hegelianism carries us hardlyan inch into the concrete detail of the world we actually inhabit. 

Equally thin is Mr. Taylor, both in his principles and in theirresults. Following Mr. Bradley, he starts by assuring us that realitycannot be self-contradictory, but to be related to anything reallyoutside of one's self is to be self-contradictory, so the ultimatereality must be a single all-inclusive systematic whole. Yet all hecan say of this whole at the end of his excellently written book isthat the notion of it 'can make no addition to our information and canof itself supply no motives for practical endeavor. '

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

Here again, no detail whatever, only the abstract certainty thatwhatever the detail may prove to be, it will be good. Commonnon-dialectical men have already this certainty as a result of thegenerous vital enthusiasm about the universe with which they are born. The peculiarity of transcendental philosophy is its sovereign contemptfor merely vital functions like enthusiasm, and its pretension to turnour simple and immediate trusts and faiths into the form of logicallymediated certainties, to question which would be absurd. But the wholebasis on which Mr. McTaggart's own certainty so solidly rests, settlesdown into the one nutshell of an assertion into which he puts Hegel'sgospel, namely, that in every bit of experience and thought, howeverfinite, the whole of reality (the absolute idea, as Hegel calls it) is'implicitly present. '

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

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

That vital comprehension we have already seen. It is that there is asense in which real things are not merely their own bare selves, butmay vaguely be treated as also their own others, and that ordinarylogic, since it denies this, must be overcome. Ordinary logic deniesthis because it substitutes concepts for real things, and concepts_are_ their own bare selves and nothing else. What Royce calls Hegel's'system' was Hegel's attempt to make us believe that he was workingby concepts and grinding out a higher style of logic, when in realitysensible experiences, hypotheses, and passion furnished him with allhis results. 

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

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

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

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

But overwork, poverty, and an eye-trouble produced by his observationson after-images in the retina (also a classic piece of investigation)produced in Fechner, then about thirty-eight years old, a terrificattack of nervous prostration with painful hyperaesthesia of all thefunctions, from which he suffered three years, cut off entirely fromactive life. Present-day medicine would have classed poor Fechner'smalady quickly enough, as partly a habit-neurosis, but itsseverity was such that in his day it was treated as a visitationincomprehensible in its malignity; and when he suddenly began to getwell, both Fechner and others treated the recovery as a sort of divinemiracle. This illness, bringing Fechner face to face with innerdesperation, made a great crisis in his life. 'Had I not then clung tothe faith, ' he writes, 'that clinging to faith would somehow or otherwork its reward, _so hätte ich jene zeit nicht ausgehalten_. ' Hisreligious and cosmological faiths saved him--thenceforward one greataim with him was to work out and communicate these faiths to theworld. He did so on the largest scale; but he did many other thingstoo ere he died. 

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

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

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

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

Fechner's great instrument for vivifying the daylight view isanalogy; not a rationalistic argument is to be found in all hismany pages--only reasonings like those which men continually use inpractical life. For example: My house is built by some one, the worldtoo is built by some one. The world is greater than my house, itmust be a greater some one who built the world. My body moves by theinfluence of my feeling and will; the sun, moon, sea, and wind, beingthemselves more powerful, move by the influence of some more powerfulfeeling and will. I live now, and change from one day to another; Ishall live hereafter, and change still more, etc. 

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

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

Speculatively Fechner is thus a monist in his theology; but there isroom in his universe for every grade of spiritual being between manand the final all-inclusive God; and in suggesting what the positivecontent of all this super-humanity may be, he hardly lets hisimagination fly beyond simple spirits of the planetary order. Theearth-soul he passionately believes in; he treats the earth as ourspecial human guardian angel; we can pray to the earth as men pray totheir saints; but I think that in his system, as in so many of theactual historic theologies, the supreme God marks only a sort of limitof enclosure of the worlds above man. He is left thin and abstract inhis majesty, men preferring to carry on their personal transactionswith the many less remote and abstract messengers and mediators whomthe divine order provides. 

I shall ask later whether the abstractly monistic turn which Fechner'sspeculations took was necessitated by logic. I believe it not to havebeen required. Meanwhile let me lead you a little more into thedetail of his thought. Inevitably one does him miserable injusticeby summarizing and abridging him. For altho the type of reasoning heemploys is almost childlike for simplicity, and his bare conclusionscan be written on a single page, the _power_ of the man is duealtogether to the profuseness of his concrete imagination, to themultitude of the points which he considers successively, to thecumulative effect of his learning, of his thoroughness, and of theingenuity of his detail, to his admirably homely style, to thesincerity with which his pages glow, and finally to the impression hegives of a man who doesn't live at second-hand, but who _sees_, who infact speaks as one having authority, and not as if he were one of thecommon herd of professorial philosophic scribes. 

Abstractly set down, his most important conclusion for my purpose inthese lectures is that the constitution of the world is identicalthroughout. In ourselves, visual consciousness goes with our eyes, tactile consciousness with our skin. But altho neither skin nor eyeknows aught of the sensations of the other, they come together andfigure in some sort of relation and combination in the more inclusiveconsciousness which each of us names his _self_. Quite similarly, then, says Fechner, we must suppose that my consciousness of myselfand yours of yourself, altho in their immediacy they keep separateand know nothing of each other, are yet known and used together in ahigher consciousness, that of the human race, say, into which theyenter as constituent parts. Similarly, the whole human and animalkingdoms come together as conditions of a consciousness of still widerscope. This combines in the soul of the earth with the consciousnessof the vegetable kingdom, which in turn contributes its share ofexperience to that of the whole solar system, and so on from synthesisto synthesis and height to height, till an absolutely universalconsciousness is reached. 

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

The supposition of an earth-consciousness meets a strong instinctiveprejudice which Fechner ingeniously tries to overcome. Man's mind isthe highest consciousness upon the earth, we think--the earth itselfbeing in all ways man's inferior. How should its consciousness, if ithave one, be superior to his?

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

One of them of course is independence of other external beings. External to the earth are only the other heavenly bodies. All thethings on which we externally depend for life--air, water, plant andanimal food, fellow men, etc. --are included in her as her constituentparts. She is self-sufficing in a million respects in which we are notso. We depend on her for almost everything, she on us for but a smallportion of her history. She swings us in her orbit from winter tosummer and revolves us from day into night and from night into day. 

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

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

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

Long ago the earth was called an animal; but a planet is a higherclass of being than either man or animal; not only quantitativelygreater, like a vaster and more awkward whale or elephant, but a beingwhose enormous size requires an altogether different plan of life. Ouranimal organization comes from our inferiority. Our need of moving toand fro, of stretching our limbs and bending our bodies, shows onlyour defect. What are our legs but crutches, by means of which, withrestless efforts, we go hunting after the things we have not insideof ourselves. But the earth is no such cripple; why should she whoalready possesses within herself the things we so painfully pursue, have limbs analogous to ours? Shall she mimic a small part of herself?What need has she of arms, with nothing to reach for? of a neck, withno head to carry? of eyes or nose when she finds her way through spacewithout either, and has the millions of eyes of all her animals toguide their movements on her surface, and all their noses to smell theflowers that grow? For, as we are ourselves a part of the earth, soour organs are her organs. She is, as it were, eye and ear over herwhole extent--all that we see and hear in separation she sees andhears at once. She brings forth living beings of countless kinds uponher surface, and their multitudinous conscious relations with eachother she takes up into her higher and more general conscious life. 

Most of us, considering the theory that the whole terrestrial mass isanimated as our bodies are, make the mistake of working the analogytoo literally, and allowing for no differences. If the earth be asentient organism, we say, where are her brain and nerves? Whatcorresponds to her heart and lungs? In other words, we expectfunctions which she already performs through us, to be performedoutside of us again, and in just the same way. But we see perfectlywell how the earth performs some of these functions in a way unlikeour way. If you speak of circulation, what need has she of a heartwhen the sun keeps all the showers of rain that fall upon her and allthe springs and brooks and rivers that irrigate her, going? What needhas she of internal lungs, when her whole sensitive surface is inliving commerce with the atmosphere that clings to it?

The organ that gives us most trouble is the brain. All theconsciousness we directly know seems tied to brains. --Can there beconsciousness, we ask, where there is no brain? But our brain, whichprimarily serves to correlate our muscular reactions with the externalobjects on which we depend, performs a function which the earthperforms in an entirely different way. She has no proper muscles orlimbs of her own, and the only objects external to her are the otherstars. To these her whole mass reacts by most exquisite alterations inits total gait, and by still more exquisite vibratory responses inits substance. Her ocean reflects the lights of heaven as in a mightymirror, her atmosphere refracts them like a monstrous lens, theclouds and snow-fields combine them into white, the woods and flowersdisperse them into colors. Polarization, interference, absorption, awaken sensibilities in matter of which our senses are too coarse totake any note. 

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

Fechner's imagination, insisting on the differences as well as on theresemblances, thus tries to make our picture of the whole earth's lifemore concrete. He revels in the thought of its perfections. To carryher precious freight through the hours and seasons what form could bemore excellent than hers--being as it is horse, wheels, and wagon allin one. Think of her beauty--a shining ball, sky-blue and sun-lit overone half, the other bathed in starry night, reflecting the heavensfrom all her waters, myriads of lights and shadows in the folds of hermountains and windings of her valleys, she would be a spectacle ofrainbow glory, could one only see her from afar as we see parts of herfrom her own mountain-tops. Every quality of landscape that has aname would then be visible in her at once--all that is delicate orgraceful, all that is quiet, or wild, or romantic, or desolate, orcheerful, or luxuriant, or fresh. That landscape is her face--apeopled landscape, too, for men's eyes would appear in it likediamonds among the dew-drops. Green would be the dominant color, butthe blue atmosphere and the clouds would enfold her as a bride isshrouded in her veil--a veil the vapory transparent folds of whichthe earth, through her ministers the winds, never tires of laying andfolding about herself anew. 

Every element has its own living denizens. Can the celestial ocean ofether, whose waves are light, in which the earth herself floats, nothave hers, higher by as much as their element is higher, swimmingwithout fins, flying without wings, moving, immense and tranquil, asby a half-spiritual force through the half-spiritual sea which theyinhabit, rejoicing in the exchange of luminous influence with oneanother, following the slightest pull of one another's attraction, andharboring, each of them, an inexhaustible inward wealth?

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

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

'On a certain spring morning I went out to walk. The fields weregreen, the birds sang, the dew glistened, the smoke was rising, hereand there a man appeared; a light as of transfiguration lay on allthings. It was only a little bit of the earth; it was only one momentof her existence; and yet as my look embraced her more and more itseemed to me not only so beautiful an idea, but so true and cleara fact, that she is an angel, an angel so rich and fresh andflower-like, and yet going her round in the skies so firmly and soat one with herself, turning her whole living face to Heaven, andcarrying me along with her into that Heaven, that I asked myself howthe opinions of men could ever have so spun themselves away from lifeso far as to deem the earth only a dry clod, and to seek for angelsabove it or about it in the emptiness of the sky, --only to find themnowhere. . . . But such an experience as this passes for fantastic. Theearth is a globular body, and what more she may be, one can find inmineralogical cabinets. '[2]

Where there is no vision the people perish. Few professorialphilosophers have any vision. Fechner had vision, and that is why onecan read him over and over again, and each time bring away a freshsense of reality. 

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

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

I have probably by this time said enough to acquaint those of you whohave never seen these metaphysical writings of Fechner with their moregeneral characteristics, and I hope that some of you may now feel likereading them yourselves. [3] The special thought of Fechner's withwhich in these lectures I have most practical concern, is hisbelief that the more inclusive forms of consciousness are in part_constituted_ by the more limited forms. Not that they are the meresum of the more limited forms. As our mind is not the bare sum ofour sights plus our sounds plus our pains, but in adding these termstogether also finds relations among them and weaves them into schemesand forms and objects of which no one sense in its separate estateknows anything, so the earth-soul traces relations between thecontents of my mind and the contents of yours of which neither ofour separate minds is conscious. It has schemes, forms, and objectsproportionate to its wider field, which our mental fields are far toonarrow to cognize. By ourselves we are simply out of relation witheach other, for it we are both of us there, and _different_ from eachother, which is a positive relation. What we are without knowing, itknows that we are. We are closed against its world, but that world isnot closed against us. It is as if the total universe of inner lifehad a sort of grain or direction, a sort of valvular structure, permitting knowledge to flow in one way only, so that the wider mightalways have the narrower under observation, but never the narrower thewider. 

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

Fechner likens our individual persons on the earth unto so manysense-organs of the earth's soul. We add to its perceptive life solong as our own life lasts. It absorbs our perceptions, just as theyoccur, into its larger sphere of knowledge, and combines them with theother data there. When one of us dies, it is as if an eye of the worldwere closed, for all _perceptive_ contributions from that particularquarter cease. But the memories and conceptual relations that havespun themselves round the perceptions of that person remain in thelarger earth-life as distinct as ever, and form new relations and growand develop throughout all the future, in the same way in which ourown distinct objects of thought, once stored in memory, form newrelations and develop throughout our whole finite life. This isFechner's theory of immortality, first published in the little'Büchlein des lebens nach dem tode, ' in 1836, and re-edited in greatlyimproved shape in the last volume of his 'Zend-avesta. '

We rise upon the earth as wavelets rise upon the ocean. We grow out ofher soil as leaves grow from a tree. The wavelets catch the sunbeamsseparately, the leaves stir when the branches do not move. Theyrealize their own events apart, just as in our own consciousness, whenanything becomes emphatic, the background fades from observation. Yetthe event works back upon the background, as the wavelet works uponthe waves, or as the leaf's movements work upon the sap inside thebranch. The whole sea and the whole tree are registers of what hashappened, and are different for the wave's and the leaf's actionhaving occurred. A grafted twig may modify its stock to the roots:--soour outlived private experiences, impressed on the whole earth-mind asmemories, lead the immortal life of ideas there, and become parts ofthe great system, fully distinguished from one another, just as weourselves when alive were distinct, realizing themselves no longerisolatedly, but along with one another as so many partial systems, entering thus into new combinations, being affected by the perceptiveexperiences of those living then, and affecting the living in theirturn--altho they are so seldom recognized by living men to do so. 

If you imagine that this entrance after the death of the body into acommon life of higher type means a merging and loss of our distinctpersonality, Fechner asks you whether a visual sensation of our ownexists in any sense _less for itself_ or _less distinctly_, whenit enters into our higher relational consciousness and is theredistinguished and defined. 

--But here I must stop my reporting and send you to his volumes. Thusis the universe alive, according to this philosopher! I think youwill admit that he makes it more _thickly_ alive than do the otherphilosophers who, following rationalistic methods solely, gain thesame results, but only in the thinnest outlines. Both Fechner andProfessor Royce, for example, believe ultimately in one all-inclusivemind. Both believe that we, just as we stand here, are constituentparts of that mind. No other _content_ has it than us, with all theother creatures like or unlike us, and the relations which it findsbetween us. Our eaches, collected into one, are substantivelyidentical with its all, tho the all is perfect while no each isperfect, so that we have to admit that new qualities as well asunperceived relations accrue from the collective form. It is thussuperior to the distributive form. But having reached this result, Royce (tho his treatment of the subject on its moral side seems tome infinitely richer and thicker than that of any other contemporaryidealistic philosopher) leaves us very much to our own devices. Fechner, on the contrary, tries to trace the superiorities due to themore collective form in as much detail as he can. He marks the variousintermediary stages and halting places of collectivity, --as we are toour separate senses, so is the earth to us, so is the solar systemto the earth, etc. , --and if, in order to escape an infinitely longsummation, he posits a complete God as the all-container and leaveshim about as indefinite in feature as the idealists leave theirabsolute, he yet provides us with a very definite gate of approach tohim in the shape of the earth-soul, through which in the nature ofthings we must first make connexion with all the more envelopingsuperhuman realms, and with which our more immediate religiouscommerce at any rate has to be carried on. 

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

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

But I have also a much deeper reason for making Fechner a part of mytext. His _assumption that conscious experiences freely compound andseparate themselves_, the same assumption by which absolutism explainsthe relation of our minds to the eternal mind, and the same bywhich empiricism explains the composition of the human mind out ofsubordinate mental elements, is not one which we ought to let passwithout scrutiny. I shall scrutinize it in the next lecture. 

LECTURE V

THE COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

In my last lecture I gave a miserably scanty outline of the wayof thinking of a philosopher remarkable for the almost unexampledrichness of his imagination of details. I owe to Fechner's shade anapology for presenting him in a manner so unfair to the most essentialquality of his genius; but the time allotted is too short to say moreabout the particulars of his work, so I proceed to the programmeI suggested at the end of our last hour. I wish to discuss theassumption that states of consciousness, so-called, can separate andcombine themselves freely, and keep their own identity unchanged whileforming parts of simultaneous fields of experience of wider scope. 

Let me first explain just what I mean by this. While you listen tomy voice, for example, you are perhaps inattentive to some bodilysensation due to your clothing or your posture. Yet that sensationwould seem probably to be there, for in an instant, by a change ofattention, you can have it in one field of consciousness with thevoice. It seems as if it existed first in a separate form, and then asif, without itself changing, it combined with your other co-existentsensations. It is after this analogy that pantheistic idealism thinksthat we exist in the absolute. The absolute, it thinks, makes theworld by knowing the whole of it at once in one undivided eternalact. [1] To 'be, ' _really_ to be, is to be as it knows us to be, alongwith everything else, namely, and clothed with the fulness of ourmeaning. Meanwhile we _are_ at the same time not only really and as itknows us, but also apparently, for to our separate single selves weappear _without_ most other things and unable to declare withany fulness what our own meaning is. Now the classic doctrine ofpantheistic idealism, from the Upanishads down to Josiah Royce, isthat the finite knowers, in spite of their apparent ignorance, are onewith the knower of the all. In the most limited moments of our privateexperience, the absolute idea, as Dr. McTaggart told us, is implicitlycontained. The moments, as Royce says, exist only in relation to it. They are true or erroneous only through its overshadowing presence. Ofthe larger self that alone eternally is, they are the organic parts. They _are_, only inasmuch as they are implicated in its being. 

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

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

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

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

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

Superficially looked at, this seems just like the combination of H_2and O into water, but looked at more closely, the analogy halts badly. When a chemist tells us that two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygencombine themselves of their own accord into the new compound substance'water, ' he knows (if he believes in the mechanical view of nature)that this is only an elliptical statement for a more complex fact. That fact is that when H_2 and O, instead of keeping far apart, getinto closer quarters, say into the position H-O-H, they _affectsurrounding bodies differently_: they now wet our skin, dissolvesugar, put out fire, etc. , which they didn't in their formerpositions. 'Water' is but _our name_ for what acts thus peculiarly. But if the skin, sugar, and fire were absent, no witness would speakof water at all. He would still talk of the H and O distributively, merely noting that they acted now in the new position H-O-H. 

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

I found myself obliged, in discussing the mind-dust theory, to urgethis last alternative view. The so-called mental compounds are simplepsychic reactions of a higher type. The form itself of them, I said, is something new. We can't say that awareness of the alphabet assuch is nothing more than twenty-six awarenesses, each of a separateletter; for those are twenty-six distinct awarenesses, of singleletters _without_ others, while their so-called sum is one awareness, of every letter _with_ its comrades. There is thus something new inthe collective consciousness. It knows the same letters, indeed, butit knows them in this novel way. It is safer, I said (for I fought shyof admitting a self or soul or other agent of combination), to treatthe consciousness of the alphabet as a twenty-seventh fact, thesubstitute and not the sum of the twenty-six simpler consciousnesses, and to say that while under certain physiological conditions theyalone are produced, other more complex physiological conditions resultin its production instead. Do not talk, therefore, I said, of thehigher states _consisting_ of the simpler, or _being_ the same withthem; talk rather of their _knowing the same things_. They aredifferent mental facts, but they apprehend, each in its own peculiarway, the same objective A, B, C, and D. 

The theory of combination, I was forced to conclude, is thusuntenable, being both logically nonsensical and practicallyunnecessary. Say what you will, twelve thoughts, each of a singleword, are not the self-same mental thing as one thought of the wholesentence. The higher thoughts, I insisted, are psychic units, notcompounds; but for all that, they may know together as a collectivemultitude the very same objects which under other conditions are knownseparately by as many simple thoughts. 

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

The metaphor is so beautiful, and applies, moreover, so literally tosuch a multitude of the minor wholes of experience, that by merelyhearing it most of us are convinced that it must apply universally. We see that no smallest raindrop can come into being without a wholeshower, no single feather without a whole bird, neck and crop, beakand tail, coming into being simultaneously: so we unhesitatingly laydown the law that no part of anything can be except so far as thewhole also is. And then, since everything whatever is part of thewhole universe, and since (if we are idealists) nothing, whether partor whole, exists except for a witness, we proceed to the conclusionthat the unmitigated absolute as witness of the whole is the one soleground of being of every partial fact, the fact of our own existenceincluded. We think of ourselves as being only a few of the feathers, so to speak, which help to constitute that absolute bird. Extendingthe analogy of certain wholes, of which we have familiar experience, to the whole of wholes, we easily become absolute idealists. 

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

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

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

In the mental world, on the contrary, wholes do in point of factrealize themselves _per se_. The meaning of the whole sentence isjust as much a real experience as the feeling of each word is; theabsolute's experience _is_ for itself, as much as yours is foryourself or mine for myself. So the feather-and-bird analogy won'twork unless you make the absolute into a distinct sort of mental agentwith a vision produced in it _by_ our several minds analogous to the'bird'-vision which the feathers, beak, etc. , produce _in_ those sameminds. The 'whole, ' which is _its_ experience, would then be itsunifying reaction on our experiences, and not those very experiencesself-combined. Such a view as this would go with theism, for thetheistic God is a separate being; but it would not go with pantheisticidealism, the very essence of which is to insist that we are literally_parts_ of God, and he only ourselves in our totality--the word'ourselves' here standing of course for all the universe's finitefacts. 

I am dragging you into depths unsuitable, I fear, for a rapid lecture. Such difficulties as these have to be teased out with a needle, so tospeak, and lecturers should take only bird's-eye views. The practicalupshot of the matter, however, so far as I am concerned, is this, thatif I had been lecturing on the absolute a very few years ago, I shouldunhesitatingly have urged these difficulties, and developed them atstill greater length, to show that the hypothesis of the absolutewas not only non-coercive from the logical point of view, butself-contradictory as well, its notion that parts and whole are onlytwo names for the same thing not bearing critical scrutiny. If youstick to purely physical terms like stars, there is no whole. If youcall the whole mental, then the so-called whole, instead of being onefact with the parts, appears rather as the integral reaction on thoseparts of an independent higher witness, such as the theistic God issupposed to be. 

So long as this was the state of my own mind, I could accept thenotion of self-compounding in the supernal spheres of experience nomore easily than in that chapter on mind-dust I had accepted it inthe lower spheres. I found myself compelled, therefore, to callthe absolute impossible; and the untrammelled freedom with whichpantheistic or monistic idealists stepped over the logical barrierswhich Lotze and others had set down long before I had--I had donelittle more than quote these previous critics in my chapter--surprisedme not a little, and made me, I have to confess, both resentful andenvious. Envious because in the bottom of my heart I wanted the samefreedom myself, for motives which I shall develop later; and resentfulbecause my absolutist friends seemed to me to be stealing theprivilege of blowing both hot and cold. To establish their absolutethey used an intellectualist type of logic which they disregarded whenemployed against it. It seemed to me that they ought at least to havementioned the objections that had stopped me so completely. I hadyielded to them against my 'will to believe, ' out of pure logicalscrupulosity. They, professing to loathe the will to believe and tofollow purest rationality, had simply ignored them. The method waseasy, but hardly to be called candid. Fechner indeed was candidenough, for he had never thought of the objections, but later writers, like Royce, who should presumably have heard them, had passed them byin silence. I felt as if these philosophers were granting their willto believe in monism too easy a license. My own conscience wouldpermit me no such license. 

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

The fundamental difficulty I have found is the number ofcontradictions which idealistic monists seem to disregard. In thefirst place they attribute to all existence a mental or experientialcharacter, but I find their simultaneous belief that the higher andthe lower in the universe are entitatively identical, incompatiblewith this character. Incompatible in consequence of the generallyaccepted doctrine that, whether Berkeley were right or not in sayingof material existence that its _esse_ is _sentiri_, it is undoubtedlyright to say of _mental_ existence that its _esse_ is _sentiri_ or_experiri_. If I feel pain, it is just pain that I feel, however Imay have come by the feeling. No one pretends that pain as such onlyappears like pain, but in itself is different, for to be as a mentalexperience _is_ only to appear to some one. 

The idealists in question ought then to do one of two things, but theydo neither. They ought either to refute the notion that as mentalstates appear, so they are; or, still keeping that notion, theyought to admit a distinct agent of unification to do the work ofthe all-knower, just as our respective souls or selves in popularphilosophy do the work of partial knowers. Otherwise it is like ajoint-stock company all shareholders and no treasurer or director. Ifour finite minds formed a billion facts, then its mind, knowing ourbillion, would make a universe composed of a billion and one facts. But transcendental idealism is quite as unfriendly to activeprinciples called souls as physiological psychology is, Kant having, as it thinks, definitively demolished them. And altho some disciplesspeak of the transcendental ego of apperception (which they celebrateas Kant's most precious legacy to posterity) as if it were a combiningagent, the drift of monistic authority is certainly in the directionof treating it as only an all-witness, whose field of vision we finitewitnesses do not cause, but constitute rather. We are the letters, itis the alphabet; we are the features, it is the face; not indeed as ifeither alphabet or face were something additional to the letters orthe features, but rather as if it were only another name for the veryletters or features themselves. The all-form assuredly differs fromthe each-form, but the _matter_ is the same in both, and the each-formonly an unaccountable appearance. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To clear the path, I beg you first to note one point. What has sotroubled my logical conscience is not so much the absolute by itselfas the whole class of suppositions of which it is the supremeexample, collective experiences namely, claiming identity with theirconstituent parts, yet experiencing things quite differently fromthese latter. If _any_ such collective experience can be, then ofcourse, so far as the mere logic of the case goes, the absolute maybe. In a previous lecture I have talked against the absolute fromother points of view. In this lecture I have meant merely to take itas the example most prominent at Oxford of the thing which has givenme such logical perplexity. I don't logically see how a collectiveexperience of any grade whatever can be treated as logically identicalwith a lot of distributive experiences. They form two differentconcepts. The absolute happens to be the only collective experienceconcerning which Oxford idealists have urged the identity, so I tookit as my prerogative instance. But Fechner's earth-soul, or any stageof being below or above that, would have served my purpose justas well: the same logical objection applies to these collectiveexperiences as to the absolute. 

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

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

But if we realize the whole philosophic situation thus produced, we see that it is almost intolerable. Loyal to the logical kind ofrationality, it is disloyal to every other kind. It makes the universediscontinuous. These fields of experience that replace each otherso punctually, each knowing the same matter, but in ever-wideningcontexts, from simplest feeling up to absolute knowledge, _can_they have no _being_ in common when their cognitive function is somanifestly common? The regular succession of them is on such terms anunintelligible miracle. If you reply that their common _object_ isof itself enough to make the many witnesses continuous, the sameimplacable logic follows you--how _can_ one and the same object appearso variously? Its diverse appearances break it into a plurality; andour world of objects then falls into discontinuous pieces quite asmuch as did our world of subjects. The resultant irrationality isreally intolerable. 

I said awhile ago that I was envious of Fechner and the otherpantheists because I myself wanted the same freedom that I saw themunscrupulously enjoying, of letting mental fields compound themselvesand so make the universe more continuous, but that my conscience heldme prisoner. In my heart of hearts, however, I knew that my situationwas absurd and could be only provisional. That secret of a continuouslife which the universe knows by heart and acts on every instantcannot be a contradiction incarnate. If logic says it is one, somuch the worse for logic. Logic being the lesser thing, the staticincomplete abstraction, must succumb to reality, not reality to logic. Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in itschrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with theuniverse that engendered it. Fechner, Royce, and Hegel seem on thetruer path. Fechner has never heard of logic's veto, Royce hears thevoice but cannily ignores the utterances, Hegel hears them but tospurn them--and all go on their way rejoicing. Shall we alone obey theveto?

Sincerely, and patiently as I could, I struggled with the problem foryears, covering hundreds of sheets of paper with notes and memorandaand discussions with myself over the difficulty. How can manyconsciousnesses be at the same time one consciousness? How can one andthe same identical fact experience itself so diversely? The strugglewas vain; I found myself in an _impasse_. I saw that I must eitherforswear that 'psychology without a soul' to which my wholepsychological and kantian education had committed me, --I must, inshort, bring back distinct spiritual agents to know the mental states, now singly and now in combination, in a word bring back scholasticismand common sense--or else I must squarely confess the solution ofthe problem impossible, and then either give up my intellectualisticlogic, the logic of identity, and adopt some higher (or lower) formof rationality, or, finally, face the fact that life is logicallyirrational. 

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

This solution is obvious and I know that many of you will adopt it. Itis comfortable, and all our habits of speech support it. Yet it is notfor idle or fantastical reasons that the notion of the substantialsoul, so freely used by common men and the more popular philosophies, has fallen upon such evil days, and has no prestige in the eyes ofcritical thinkers. It only shares the fate of other unrepresentablesubstances and principles. They are without exception all so barrenthat to sincere inquirers they appear as little more than namesmasquerading--Wo die begriffe fehlen da stellt ein wort zur rechtenzeit sich ein. You see no deeper into the fact that a hundredsensations get compounded or known together by thinking that a 'soul'does the compounding than you see into a man's living eighty years bythinking of him as an octogenarian, or into our having five fingers bycalling us pentadactyls. Souls have worn out both themselves andtheir welcome, that is the plain truth. Philosophy ought to get themanifolds of experience unified on principles less empty. Like theword 'cause, ' the word 'soul' is but a theoretic stop-gap--it marks aplace and claims it for a future explanation to occupy. 

This being our post-humian and post-kantian state of mind, I will askyour permission to leave the soul wholly out of the present discussionand to consider only the residual dilemma. Some day, indeed, souls mayget their innings again in philosophy--I am quite ready to admit thatpossibility--they form a category of thought too natural to the humanmind to expire without prolonged resistance. But if the belief in thesoul ever does come to life after the many funeral-discourses whichhumian and kantian criticism have preached over it, I am sure it willbe only when some one has found in the term a pragmatic significancethat has hitherto eluded observation. When that champion speaks, ashe well may speak some day, it will be time to consider souls moreseriously. 

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

Few philosophers have had the frankness fairly to admit the necessityof choosing between the 'horns' offered. Reality must be rational, they have said, and since the ordinary intellectualist logic isthe only usual test of rationality, reality and logic must agree'somehow. ' Hegel was the first non-mystical writer to face thedilemma squarely and throw away the ordinary logic, saving apseudo-rationality for the universe by inventing the higher logic ofthe 'dialectic process. ' Bradley holds to the intellectualist logic, and by dint of it convicts the human universe of being irrationalityincarnate. But what must be and can be, is, he says; there must andcan be relief from _that_ irrationality; and the absolute must alreadyhave got the relief in secret ways of its own, impossible for us toguess at. _We_ of course get no relief, so Bradley's is a ratherascetic doctrine. Royce and Taylor accept similar solutions, only theyemphasize the irrationality of our finite universe less than Bradleydoes; and Royce in particular, being unusually 'thick' for anidealist, tries to bring the absolute's secret forms of relief moresympathetically home to our imagination. 

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

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

I told you that I had long and sincerely wrestled with the dilemma. Ihave now to confess (and this will probably re-animate your interest)that I should not now be emancipated, not now subordinate logic withso very light a heart, or throw it out of the deeper regions ofphilosophy to take its rightful and respectable place in the world ofsimple human practice, if I had not been influenced by a comparativelyyoung and very original french writer, Professor Henri Bergson. Reading his works is what has made me bold. If I had not readBergson, I should probably still be blackening endless pages of paperprivately, in the hope of making ends meet that were never meant tomeet, and trying to discover some mode of conceiving the behavior ofreality which should leave no discrepancy between it and the acceptedlaws of the logic of identity. It is certain, at any rate, thatwithout the confidence which being able to lean on Bergson's authoritygives me I should never have ventured to urge these particular viewsof mine upon this ultra-critical audience. 

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

In recent controversies some participants have shown resentmentat being classed as intellectualists. I mean to use the worddisparagingly, but shall be sorry if it works offence. Intellectualismhas its source in the faculty which gives us our chief superiority tothe brutes, our power, namely, of translating the crude flux of ourmerely feeling-experience into a conceptual order. An immediateexperience, as yet unnamed or classed, is a mere _that_ that weundergo, a thing that asks, '_What_ am I?' When we name and class it, we say for the first time what it is, and all these whats are abstractnames or concepts. Each concept means a particular _kind_ of thing, and as things seem once for all to have been created in kinds, a farmore efficient handling of a given bit of experience begins as soon aswe have classed the various parts of it. Once classed, a thing can betreated by the law of its class, and the advantages are endless. Boththeoretically and practically this power of framing abstract conceptsis one of the sublimest of our human prerogatives. We come backinto the concrete from our journey into these abstractions, with anincrease both of vision and of power. It is no wonder that earlierthinkers, forgetting that concepts are only man-made extracts from thetemporal flux, should have ended by treating them as a superior typeof being, bright, changeless, true, divine, and utterly opposed innature to the turbid, restless lower world. The latter then appears asbut their corruption and falsification. 

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

So far no harm is done. The misuse of concepts begins with the habitof employing them privatively as well as positively, using them notmerely to assign properties to things, but to deny the very propertieswith which the things sensibly present themselves. Logic can extractall its possible consequences from any definition, and the logicianwho is _unerbittlich consequent_ is often tempted, when he cannotextract a certain property from a definition, to deny that theconcrete object to which the definition applies can possibly possessthat property. The definition that fails to yield it must exclude ornegate it. This is Hegel's regular method of establishing his system. 

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

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

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

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

LECTURE VI

BERGSON AND HIS CRITIQUE OF INTELLECTUALISM

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

Professor Henri Bergson is a young man, comparatively, as influentialphilosophers go, having been born at Paris in 1859. His career hasbeen the perfectly routine one of a successful french professor. Entering the école normale supérieure at the age of twenty-two, hespent the next seventeen years teaching at _lycées_, provincial orparisian, until his fortieth year, when he was made professor at thesaid école normale. Since 1900 he has been professor at the College deFrance, and member of the Institute since 1900. So far as the outwardfacts go, Bergson's career has then been commonplace to the utmost. Neither one of Taine's famous principles of explanation of greatmen, _the race, the environment, or the moment_, no, nor all threetogether, will explain that peculiar way of looking at things thatconstitutes his mental individuality. Originality in men dates fromnothing previous, other things date from it, rather. I have to confessthat Bergson's originality is so profuse that many of his ideas baffleme entirely. I doubt whether any one understands him all over, so tospeak; and I am sure that he would himself be the first to see thatthis must be, and to confess that things which he himself has not yetthought out clearly, had yet to be mentioned and have a tentativeplace assigned them in his philosophy. Many of us are profuselyoriginal, in that no man can understand us--violently peculiar waysof looking at things are no great rarity. The rarity is when greatpeculiarity of vision is allied with great lucidity and unusualcommand of all the classic expository apparatus. Bergson's resourcesin the way of erudition are remarkable, and in the way of expressionthey are simply phenomenal. This is why in France, where _l'art debien dire_ counts for so much and is so sure of appreciation, he hasimmediately taken so eminent a place in public esteem. Old-fashionedprofessors, whom his ideas quite fail to satisfy, nevertheless speakof his talent almost with bated breath, while the youngsters flock tohim as to a master. 

If anything can make hard things easy to follow, it is a style likeBergson's. A 'straightforward' style, an american reviewer latelycalled it; failing to see that such straightforwardness means aflexibility of verbal resource that follows the thought without acrease or wrinkle, as elastic silk underclothing follows the movementsof one's body. The lucidity of Bergson's way of putting things is whatall readers are first struck by. It seduces you and bribes you inadvance to become his disciple. It is a miracle, and he a realmagician. 

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

But this criticism misses Zeno's point entirely. Zeno would have beenperfectly willing to grant that if the tortoise can be overtaken atall, he can be overtaken in (say) twenty seconds, but he would stillhave insisted that he can't be overtaken at all. Leave Achilles andthe tortoise out of the account altogether, he would have said--theycomplicate the case unnecessarily. Take any single process of changewhatever, take the twenty seconds themselves elapsing. If time beinfinitely divisible, and it must be so on intellectualist principles, they simply cannot elapse, their end cannot be reached; for no matterhow much of them has already elapsed, before the remainder, howeverminute, can have wholly elapsed, the earlier half of it must firsthave elapsed. And this ever re-arising need of making the earlier halfelapse _first_ leaves time with always something to do _before_ thelast thing is done, so that the last thing never gets done. Expressedin bare numbers, it is like the convergent series 1/2 plus 1/4 plus1/8. . . , of which the limit is one. But this limit, simply because itis a limit, stands outside the series, the value of which approachesit indefinitely but never touches it. If in the natural world therewere no other way of getting things save by such successive additionof their logically involved fractions, no complete units or wholethings would ever come into being, for the fractions' sum would alwaysleave a remainder. But in point of fact nature doesn't make eggs bymaking first half an egg, then a quarter, then an eighth, etc. , andadding them together. She either makes a whole egg at once or noneat all, and so of all her other units. It is only in the sphere ofchange, then, where one phase of a thing must needs come into beingbefore another phase can come that Zeno's paradox gives trouble. 

And it gives trouble then only if the succession of steps of changebe infinitely divisible. If a bottle had to be emptied by an infinitenumber of successive decrements, it is mathematically impossible thatthe emptying should ever positively terminate. In point of fact, however, bottles and coffee-pots empty themselves by a finite numberof decrements, each of definite amount. Either a whole drop emerges ornothing emerges from the spout. If all change went thus drop-wise, so to speak, if real time sprouted or grew by units of duration ofdeterminate amount, just as our perceptions of it grow by pulses, there would be no zenonian paradoxes or kantian antinomies to troubleus. All our sensible experiences, as we get them immediately, do thuschange by discrete pulses of perception, each of which keeps us saying'more, more, more, ' or 'less, less, less, ' as the definite incrementsor diminutions make themselves felt. The discreteness is still moreobvious when, instead of old things changing, they cease, or whenaltogether new things come. Fechner's term of the 'threshold, ' whichhas played such a part in the psychology of perception, is only oneway of naming the quantitative discreteness in the change of all oursensible experiences. They come to us in drops. Time itself comes indrops. 

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

Motion, to take a good example, is originally a turbid sensation, ofwhich the native shape is perhaps best preserved in the phenomenon ofvertigo. In vertigo we feel that movement _is_, and is more or lessviolent or rapid, more or less in this direction or that, more or lessalarming or sickening. But a man subject to vertigo may graduallylearn to co-ordinate his felt motion with his real position and thatof other things, and intellectualize it enough to succeed at last inwalking without staggering. The mathematical mind similarly organizesmotion in its way, putting it into a logical definition: motion is nowconceived as 'the occupancy of serially successive points of spaceat serially successive instants of time. ' With such a definition weescape wholly from the turbid privacy of sense. But do we not alsoescape from sense-reality altogether? Whatever motion really may be, it surely is not static; but the definition we have gained is of theabsolutely static. It gives a set of one-to-one relations betweenspace-points and time-points, which relations themselves are as fixedas the points are. It gives _positions_ assignable ad infinitum, buthow the body gets from one position to another it omits to mention. The body gets there by moving, of course; but the conceived positions, however numerously multiplied, contain no element of movement, soZeno, using nothing but them in his discussion, has no alternativebut to say that our intellect repudiates motion as a non-reality. Intellectualism here does what I said it does--it makes experienceless instead of more intelligible. 

We of course need a stable scheme of concepts, stably related withone another, to lay hold of our experiences and to co-ordinate themwithal. When an experience comes with sufficient saliency to standout, we keep the thought of it for future use, and store it in ourconceptual system. What does not of itself stand out, we learn to_cut_ out; so the system grows completer, and new reality, as itcomes, gets named after and conceptually strung upon this or thatelement of it which we have already established. The immutabilityof such an abstract system is its great practical merit; the sameidentical terms and relations in it can always be recovered andreferred to--change itself is just such an unalterable concept. Butall these abstract concepts are but as flowers gathered, they are onlymoments dipped out from the stream of time, snap-shots taken, as bya kinetoscopic camera, at a life that in its original coming iscontinuous. Useful as they are as samples of the garden, or tore-enter the stream with, or to insert in our revolving lantern, theyhave no value but these practical values. You cannot explain by themwhat makes any single phenomenon be or go--you merely dot out the pathof appearances which it traverses. For you cannot make continuousbeing out of discontinuities, and your concepts are discontinuous. Thestages into which you analyze a change are _states_, the change itselfgoes on between them. It lies along their intervals, inhabits whatyour definition fails to gather up, and thus eludes conceptualexplanation altogether. 

'When the mathematician, ' Bergson writes, 'calculates the state ofa system at the end of a time _t_, nothing need prevent him fromsupposing that betweenwhiles the universe vanishes, in order suddenlyto appear again at the due moment in the new configuration. It isonly the _t_-th moment that counts--that which flows throughout theintervals, namely real time, plays no part in his calculation. . . . Inshort, the world on which the mathematician operates is a world whichdies and is born anew at every instant, like the world which Descartesthought of when he spoke of a continued creation. ' To know adequatelywhat really _happens_ we ought, Bergson insists, to see into theintervals, but the mathematician sees only their extremities. Hefixes only a few results, he dots a curve and then interpolates, hesubstitutes a tracing for a reality. 

This being so undeniably the case, the history of the way in whichphilosophy has dealt with it is curious. The ruling tradition inphilosophy has always been the platonic and aristotelian belief thatfixity is a nobler and worthier thing than change. Reality must be oneand unalterable. Concepts, being themselves fixities, agree best withthis fixed nature of truth, so that for any knowledge of ours to bequite true it must be knowledge by universal concepts rather thanby particular experiences, for these notoriously are mutable andcorruptible. This is the tradition known as rationalism in philosophy, and what I have called intellectualism is only the extreme applicationof it. In spite of sceptics and empiricists, in spite of Protagoras, Hume, and James Mill, rationalism has never been seriously questioned, for its sharpest critics have always had a tender place in theirhearts for it, and have obeyed some of its mandates. They have notbeen consistent; they have played fast and loose with the enemy; andBergson alone has been radical. 

To show what I mean by this, let me contrast his procedure with thatof some of the transcendentalist philosophers whom I have latelymentioned. Coming after Kant, these pique themselves on being'critical, ' on building in fact upon Kant's 'critique' of pure reason. What that critique professed to establish was this, that concepts donot apprehend reality, but only such appearances as our sensesfeed out to them. They give immutable intellectual forms to theseappearances, it is true, but the reality _an sich_ from which inultimate resort the sense-appearances have to come remains foreverunintelligible to our intellect. Take motion, for example. Sensibly, motion comes in drops, waves, or pulses; either some actual amount ofit, or none, being apprehended. This amount is the datum or _gabe_which reality feeds out to our intellectual faculty; but our intellectmakes of it a task or _aufgabe_--this pun is one of the most memorableof Kant's formulas--and insists that in every pulse of it an infinitenumber of successive minor pulses shall be ascertainable. These minorpulses _we_ can indeed _go on_ to ascertain or to compute indefinitelyif we have patience; but it would contradict the definition of aninfinite number to suppose the endless series of them to have actuallycounted _themselves_ out piecemeal. Zeno made this manifest; so theinfinity which our intellect requires of the sense-datum is thusa future and potential rather than a past and actual infinity ofstructure. The datum after it has made itself must be decompos_able_ad infinitum by our conception, but of the steps by which thatstructure actually got composed we know nothing. Our intellect casts, in short, no ray of light on the processes by which experiences _getmade_. 

Kant's monistic successors have in general found the data of immediateexperience even more self-contradictory, when intellectually treated, than Kant did. Not only the character of infinity involved in therelation of various empirical data to their 'conditions, ' but the verynotion that empirical things should be related to one another at all, has seemed to them, when the intellectualistic fit was upon them, fullof paradox and contradiction. We saw in a former lecture numerousinstances of this from Hegel, Bradley, Royce, and others. We saw alsowhere the solution of such an intolerable state of things was soughtfor by these authors. Whereas Kant had placed it outside of and_before_ our experience, in the _dinge an sich_ which are the causesof the latter, his monistic successors all look for it either _after_experience, as its absolute completion, or else consider it to be evennow implicit within experience as its ideal signification. Kant andhis successors look, in short, in diametrically opposite directions. Do not be misled by Kant's admission of theism into his system. His God is the ordinary dualistic God of Christianity, to whom hisphilosophy simply opens the door; he has nothing whatsoever in commonwith the 'absolute spirit' set up by his successors. So far as thisabsolute spirit is logically derived from Kant, it is not from hisGod, but from entirely different elements of his philosophy. Firstfrom his notion that an unconditioned totality of the conditions ofany experience must be assignable; and then from his other notion thatthe presence of some witness, or ego of apperception, is the mostuniversal of all the conditions in question. The post-kantians makeof the witness-condition what is called a concrete universal, anindividualized all-witness or world-self, which shall imply in itsrational constitution each and all of the other conditions puttogether, and therefore necessitate each and all of the conditionedexperiences. 

Abridgments like this of other men's opinions are very unsatisfactory, they always work injustice; but in this case those of you who arefamiliar with the literature will see immediately what I have in mind;and to the others, if there be any here, it will suffice to say thatwhat I am trying so pedantically to point out is only the fact thatmonistic idealists after Kant have invariably sought relief from thesupposed contradictions of our world of sense by looking forwardtoward an _ens rationis_ conceived as its integration or logicalcompletion, while he looked backward toward non-rational _dinge ansich_ conceived as its cause. Pluralistic empiricists, on the otherhand, have remained in the world of sense, either naïvely and becausethey overlooked the intellectualistic contradictions, or because, notable to ignore them, they thought they could refute them by a superioruse of the same intellectualistic logic. Thus it is that John Millpretends to refute the Achilles-tortoise fallacy. 

The important point to notice here is the intellectualist logic. Bothsides treat it as authoritative, but they do so capriciously: theabsolutists smashing the world of sense by its means, the empiricistssmashing the absolute--for the absolute, they say, is the quintessenceof all logical contradictions. Neither side attains consistency. The Hegelians have to invoke a higher logic to supersede the purelydestructive efforts of their first logic. The empiricists use theirlogic against the absolute, but refuse to use it against finiteexperience. Each party uses it or drops it to suit the vision it hasfaith in, but neither impugns in principle its general theoreticauthority. 

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

In the first place, logic, giving primarily the relations betweenconcepts as such, and the relations between natural facts onlysecondarily or so far as the facts have been already identified withconcepts and defined by them, must of course stand or fall with theconceptual method. But the conceptual method is a transformation whichthe flux of life undergoes at our hands in the interests of practiceessentially and only subordinately in the interests of theory. Welive forward, we understand backward, said a danish writer; and tounderstand life by concepts is to arrest its movement, cutting it upinto bits as if with scissors, and immobilizing these in our logicalherbarium where, comparing them as dried specimens, we can ascertainwhich of them statically includes or excludes which other. Thistreatment supposes life to have already accomplished itself, for theconcepts, being so many views taken after the fact, are retrospectiveand post mortem. Nevertheless we can draw conclusions from them andproject them into the future. We cannot learn from them how life madeitself go, or how it will make itself go; but, on the supposition thatits ways of making itself go are unchanging, we can calculate whatpositions of imagined arrest it will exhibit hereafter under givenconditions. We can compute, for instance, at what point Achilleswill be, and where the tortoise will be, at the end of the twentiethminute. Achilles may then be at a point far ahead; but the full detailof how he will have managed practically to get there our logic nevergives us--we have seen, indeed, that it finds that its resultscontradict the facts of nature. The computations which the othersciences make differ in no respect from those of mathematics. Theconcepts used are all of them dots through which, by interpolation orextrapolation, curves are drawn, while along the curves other dots arefound as consequences. The latest refinements of logic dispensewith the curves altogether, and deal solely with the dots and theircorrespondences each to each in various series. The authors of theserecent improvements tell us expressly that their aim is to abolish thelast vestiges of intuition, _videlicet_ of concrete reality, from thefield of reasoning, which then will operate literally on mental dotsor bare abstract units of discourse, and on the ways in which they maybe strung in naked series. 

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

Of the 'absolute' reality which reason proposes to substitute forsensible reality I shall have more to say presently. Meanwhile you seewhat Professor Bergson means by insisting that the function of theintellect is practical rather than theoretical. Sensible reality istoo concrete to be entirely manageable--look at the narrow range of itwhich is all that any animal, living in it exclusively as he does, isable to compass. To get from one point in it to another we have toplough or wade through the whole intolerable interval. No detail isspared us; it is as bad as the barbed-wire complications at PortArthur, and we grow old and die in the process. But with our facultyof abstracting and fixing concepts we are there in a second, almost asif we controlled a fourth dimension, skipping the intermediaries asby a divine winged power, and getting at the exact point we requirewithout entanglement with any context. What we do in fact is to_harness up_ reality in our conceptual systems in order to drive itthe better. This process is practical because all the termini to whichwe drive are _particular_ termini, even when they are facts of themental order. But the sciences in which the conceptual method chieflycelebrates its triumphs are those of space and matter, where thetransformations of external things are dealt with. To deal with moralfacts conceptually, we have first to transform them, substitutebrain-diagrams or physical metaphors, treat ideas as atoms, interestsas mechanical forces, our conscious 'selves' as 'streams, ' and thelike. Paradoxical effect! as Bergson well remarks, if our intellectuallife were not practical but destined to reveal the inner natures. One would then suppose that it would find itself most at home in thedomain of its own intellectual realities. But it is precisely therethat it finds itself at the end of its tether. We know the innermovements of our spirit only perceptually. We feel them live in us, but can give no distinct account of their elements, nor definitelypredict their future; while things that lie along the world of space, things of the sort that we literally _handle_, are what our intellectscope with most successfully. Does not this confirm us in the view thatthe original and still surviving function of our intellectual lifeis to guide us in the practical adaptation of our expectancies andactivities?

One can easily get into a verbal mess at this point, and my ownexperience with pragmatism' makes me shrink from the dangers that liein the word 'practical, ' and far rather than stand out against you forthat word, I am quite willing to part company with Professor Bergson, and to ascribe a primarily theoretical function to our intellect, provided you on your part then agree to discriminate 'theoretic' orscientific knowledge from the deeper 'speculative' knowledge aspiredto by most philosophers, and concede that theoretic knowledge, which is knowledge _about_ things, as distinguished from living orsympathetic acquaintance with them, touches only the outer surface ofreality. The surface which theoretic knowledge taken in this sensecovers may indeed be enormous in extent; it may dot the whole diameterof space and time with its conceptual creations; but it does notpenetrate a millimeter into the solid dimension. That inner dimensionof reality is occupied by the _activities_ that keep it going, but theintellect, speaking through Hume, Kant & Co. , finds itself obliged todeny, and persists in denying, that activities have any intelligibleexistence. What exists for _thought_, we are told, is at most theresults that we illusorily ascribe to such activities, strung alongthe surfaces of space and time by _regeln der verknüpfung_, laws ofnature which state only coexistences and successions. [1]

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

The only way in which to apprehend reality's thickness is either toexperience it directly by being a part of reality one's self, or toevoke it in imagination by sympathetically divining some one else'sinner life. But what we thus immediately experience or concretelydivine is very limited in duration, whereas abstractly we are able toconceive eternities. Could we feel a million years concretely as wenow feel a passing minute, we should have very little employment forour conceptual faculty. We should know the whole period fully at everymoment of its passage, whereas we must now construct it laboriously bymeans of concepts which we project. Direct acquaintance and conceptualknowledge are thus complementary of each other; each remedies theother's defects. If what we care most about be the synoptic treatmentof phenomena, the vision of the far and the gathering of the scatteredlike, we must follow the conceptual method. But if, as metaphysicians, we are more curious about the inner nature of reality or about whatreally makes it go, we must turn our backs upon our winged conceptsaltogether, and bury ourselves in the thickness of those passingmoments over the surface of which they fly, and on particular pointsof which they occasionally rest and perch. 

Professor Bergson thus inverts the traditional platonic doctrineabsolutely. Instead of intellectual knowledge being the profounder, he calls it the more superficial. Instead of being the only adequateknowledge, it is grossly inadequate, and its only superiority is thepractical one of enabling us to make short cuts through experienceand thereby to save time. The one thing it cannot do is to reveal thenature of things--which last remark, if not clear already, will becomeclearer as I proceed. Dive back into the flux itself, then, Bergsontells us, if you wish to _know_ reality, that flux which Platonism, inits strange belief that only the immutable is excellent, has alwaysspurned; turn your face toward sensation, that flesh-bound thing whichrationalism has always loaded with abuse. --This, you see, is exactlythe opposite remedy from that of looking forward into the absolute, which our idealistic contemporaries prescribe. It violates our mentalhabits, being a kind of passive and receptive listening quite contraryto that effort to react noisily and verbally on everything, which isour usual intellectual pose. 

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

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

When we conceptualize, we cut out and fix, and exclude everythingbut what we have fixed. A concept means a _that-and-no-other_. Conceptually, time excludes space; motion and rest exclude each other;approach excludes contact; presence excludes absence; unity excludesplurality; independence excludes relativity; 'mine' excludes 'yours';this connexion excludes that connexion--and so on indefinitely;whereas in the real concrete sensible flux of life experiencescompenetrate each other so that it is not easy to know just what isexcluded and what not. Past and future, for example, conceptuallyseparated by the cut to which we give the name of present, and definedas being the opposite sides of that cut, are to some extent, howeverbrief, co-present with each other throughout experience. The literallypresent moment is a purely verbal supposition, not a position; theonly present ever realized concretely being the 'passing moment' inwhich the dying rearward of time and its dawning future forever mixtheir lights. Say 'now' and it _was_ even while you say it. 

It is just intellectualism's attempt to substitute static cutsfor units of experienced duration that makes real motion sounintelligible. The conception of the first half of the intervalbetween Achilles and the tortoise excludes that of the last half, andthe mathematical necessity of traversing it separately before the lasthalf is traversed stands permanently in the way of the last half everbeing traversed. Meanwhile the living Achilles (who, for the purposesof this discussion, is only the abstract name of one phenomenon ofimpetus, just as the tortoise is of another) asks no leave of logic. The velocity of his acts is an indivisible nature in them like theexpansive tension in a spring compressed. We define it conceptually as[_s/t_], but the _s_ and _t_ are only artificial cuts made after thefact, and indeed most artificial when we treat them in both runnersas the same tracts of 'objective' space and time, for the experiencedspaces and times in which the tortoise inwardly lives are probablyas different as his velocity from the same things in Achilles. Theimpetus of Achilles is one concrete fact, and carries space, time, andconquest over the inferior creature's motion indivisibly in it. Heperceives nothing, while running, of the mathematician's homogeneoustime and space, of the infinitely numerous succession of cuts in both, or of their order. End and beginning come for him in the one onrush, and all that he actually experiences is that, in the midst of acertain intense effort of his own, the rival is in point of factoutstripped. 

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

What makes you call real life confusion is that it presents, asif they were dissolved in one another, a lot of differents whichconception breaks life's flow by keeping apart. But _are_ notdifferents actually dissolved in one another? Hasn't every bit ofexperience its quality, its duration, its extension, its intensity, its urgency, its clearness, and many aspects besides, no one of whichcan exist in the isolation in which our verbalized logic keeps it?They exist only _durcheinander_. Reality always is, in M. Bergson'sphrase, an endosmosis or conflux of the same with the different: theycompenetrate and telescope. For conceptual logic, the same is nothingbut the same, and all sames with a third thing are the same with eachother. Not so in concrete experience. Two spots on our skin, each ofwhich feels the same as a third spot when touched along with it, arefelt as different from each other. Two tones, neither distinguishablefrom a third tone, are perfectly distinct from each other. The wholeprocess of life is due to life's violation of our logical axioms. Take its continuity as an example. Terms like A and C appear to beconnected by intermediaries, by B for example. Intellectualism callsthis absurd, for 'B-connected-with-A' is, 'as such, ' a different termfrom 'B-connected-with-C. ' But real life laughs at logic's veto. Imagine a heavy log which takes two men to carry it. First A and Btake it. Then C takes hold and A drops off; then D takes hold and Bdrops off, so that C and D now bear it; and so on. The log meanwhilenever drops, and keeps its sameness throughout the journey. Even soit is with all our experiences. Their changes are not completeannihilations followed by complete creations of something absolutelynovel. There is partial decay and partial growth, and all the while anucleus of relative constancy from which what decays drops off, andwhich takes into itself whatever is grafted on, until at lengthsomething wholly different has taken its place. In such a process weare as sure, in spite of intellectualist logic with its 'as suches, 'that it _is_ the same nucleus which is able now to make connexion withwhat goes and again with what comes, as we are sure that the samepoint can lie on diverse lines that intersect there. Without being onethroughout, such a universe is continuous. Its members interdigitatewith their next neighbors in manifold directions, and there are noclean cuts between them anywhere. 

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

The conflict of the two ways of knowing is best summed up in theintellectualist doctrine that 'the same cannot exist in manyrelations. ' This follows of course from the concepts of the tworelations being so distinct that 'what-is-in-the-one' means 'as such'something distinct from what 'what-is-in-the-other' means. It is likeMill's ironical saying, that we should not think of Newton as both anEnglishman and a mathematician, because an Englishman as such is nota mathematician and a mathematician as such is not an Englishman. Butthe real Newton was somehow both things at once; and throughout thewhole finite universe each real thing proves to be many differentswithout undergoing the necessity of breaking into disconnectededitions of itself. 

These few indications will perhaps suffice to put you at thebergsonian point of view. The immediate experience of life solves theproblems which so baffle our conceptual intelligence: How can what ismanifold be one? how can things get out of themselves? how be theirown others? how be both distinct and connected? how can they act onone another? how be for others and yet for themselves? how be absentand present at once? The intellect asks these questions much as wemight ask how anything can both separate and unite things, or howsounds can grow more alike by continuing to grow more different. Ifyou already know space sensibly, you can answer the former question bypointing to any interval in it, long or short; if you know the musicalscale, you can answer the latter by sounding an octave; but then youmust first have the sensible knowledge of these realities. SimilarlyBergson answers the intellectualist conundrums by pointing back to ourvarious finite sensational experiences and saying, 'Lo, even thus;even so are these other problems solved livingly. '

When you have broken the reality into concepts you never canreconstruct it in its wholeness. Out of no amount of discretenesscan you manufacture the concrete. But place yourself at a bound, or_d'emblée_, as M. Bergson says, inside of the living, moving, activethickness of the real, and all the abstractions and distinctionsare given into your hand: you can now make the intellectualistsubstitutions to your heart's content. Install yourself in phenomenalmovement, for example, and velocity, succession, dates, positions, andinnumerable other things are given you in the bargain. But with onlyan abstract succession of dates and positions you can never patch upmovement itself. It slips through their intervals and is lost. 

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

Place yourself similarly at the centre of a man's philosophic visionand you understand at once all the different things it makes him writeor say. But keep outside, use your post-mortem method, try to buildthe philosophy up out of the single phrases, taking first one and thenanother and seeking to make them fit, and of course you fail. Youcrawl over the thing like a myopic ant over a building, tumblinginto every microscopic crack or fissure, finding nothing butinconsistencies, and never suspecting that a centre exists. I hopethat some of the philosophers in this audience may occasionally havehad something different from this intellectualist type of criticismapplied to their own works!

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

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

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

This, scant as it is, is all I have to say about Bergson on thisoccasion--I hope it may send some of you to his original text. I mustnow turn back to the point where I found it advisable to appeal to hisideas. You remember my own intellectualist difficulties in the lastlecture, about how a lot of separate consciousnesses can at the sametime be one collective thing. How, I asked, can one and the sameidentical content of experience, of which on idealist principles the_esse_ is to be felt, be felt so diversely if itself be the onlyfeeler? The usual way of escape by 'quatenus' or 'as such' won'thelp us here if we are radical intellectualists, I said, forappearance-together is as such _not_ appearance-apart, the world _quâ_many is not the world _quâ_ one, as absolutism claims. If we hold toHume's maxim, which later intellectualism uses so well, that whateverthings are distinguished are as separate as if there were no manner ofconnexion between them, there seemed no way out of the difficulty saveby stepping outside of experience altogether and invoking differentspiritual agents, selves or souls, to realize the diversity required. But this rescue by 'scholastic entities' I was unwilling to accept anymore than pantheistic idealists accept it. 

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

The absurdity charged is that the self-same should function sodifferently, now with and now without something else. But this itsensibly seems to do. This very desk which I strike with my handstrikes in turn your eyes. It functions at once as a physical objectin the outer world and as a mental object in our sundry mental worlds. The very body of mine that _my_ thought actuates is the body whosegestures are _your_ visual object and to which you give my name. Thevery log which John helped to carry is the log now borne by James. Thevery girl you love is simultaneously entangled elsewhere. The veryplace behind me is in front of you. Look where you will, you gatheronly examples of the same amid the different, and of differentrelations existing as it were in solution in the same thing. _Quâ_this an experience is not the same as it is _quâ_ that, truly enough;but the _quâs_ are conceptual shots of ours at its post-mortemremains, and in its sensational immediacy everything is all at oncewhatever different things it is at once at all. It is before C andafter A, far from you and near to me, without this associate and withthat one, active and passive, physical and mental, a whole ofparts and part of a higher whole, all simultaneously and withoutinterference or need of doubling-up its being, so long as we keep towhat I call the 'immediate' point of view, the point of view in whichwe follow our sensational life's continuity, and to which all livinglanguage conforms. It is only when you try--to continue using thehegelian vocabulary--to 'mediate' the immediate, or to substituteconcepts for sensational life, that intellectualism celebratesits triumph and the immanent-self-contradictoriness of all thissmooth-running finite experience gets proved. 

Of the oddity of inventing as a remedy for the inconveniencesresulting from this situation a supernumerary conceptual objectcalled an absolute, into which you pack the self-same contradictionsunreduced, I will say something in the next lecture. The absolute issaid to perform its feats by taking up its other into itself. Butthat is exactly what is done when every individual morsel of thesensational stream takes up the adjacent morsels by coalescing withthem. This is just what we mean by the stream's sensible continuity. No element _there_ cuts itself off from any other element, as conceptscut themselves from concepts. No part _there_ is so small as not to bea place of conflux. No part there is not really _next_ its neighbors;which means that there is literally nothing between; which meansagain that no part goes exactly so far and no farther; that no partabsolutely excludes another, but that they compenetrate and arecohesive; that if you tear out one, its roots bring out more withthem; that whatever is real is telescoped and diffused into otherreals; that, in short, every minutest thing is already its hegelian'own other, ' in the fullest sense of the term. 

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

LECTURE VII

THE CONTINUITY OF EXPERIENCE

I fear that few of you will have been able to obey Bergson's call uponyou to look towards the sensational life for the fuller knowledge ofreality, or to sympathize with his attempt to limit the divine rightof concepts to rule our mind absolutely. It is too much like lookingdownward and not up. Philosophy, you will say, doesn't lie flat on itsbelly in the middle of experience, in the very thick of its sand andgravel, as this Bergsonism does, never getting a peep at anything fromabove. Philosophy is essentially the vision of things from above. It doesn't simply feel the detail of things, it comprehends theirintelligible plan, sees their forms and principles, their categoriesand rules, their order and necessity. It takes the superior point ofview of the architect. Is it conceivable that it should ever forsakethat point of view and abandon itself to a slovenly life of immediatefeeling? To say nothing of your traditional Oxford devotion toAristotle and Plato, the leaven of T. H. Green probably works stilltoo strongly here for his anti-sensationalism to be outgrown quickly. Green more than any one realized that knowledge _about_ things wasknowledge of their relations; but nothing could persuade him that oursensational life could contain any relational element. He followedthe strict intellectualist method with sensations. What they were notexpressly defined as including, they must exclude. Sensations are notdefined as relations, so in the end Green thought that they couldget related together only by the action on them from above of a'self-distinguishing' absolute and eternal mind, present to that whichis related, but not related itself. 'A relation, ' he said, 'is notcontingent with the contingency of feeling. It is permanent withthe permanence of the combining and comparing thought which aloneconstitutes it. '[1] In other words, relations are purely conceptualobjects, and the sensational life as such cannot relate itselftogether. Sensation in itself, Green wrote, is fleeting, momentary, unnameable (because, while we name it, it has become another), and forthe same reason unknowable, the very negation of knowability. Werethere no permanent objects of conception for our sensations to be'referred to, ' there would be no significant names, but only noises, and a consistent sensationalism must be speechless. [2] Green'sintellectualism was so earnest that it produced a natural and aninevitable effect. But the atomistic and unrelated sensations which hehad in mind were purely fictitious products of his rationalist fancy. The psychology of our own day disavows them utterly, [3] and Green'slaborious belaboring of poor old Locke for not having first seen thathis ideas of sensation were just that impracticable sort of thing, andthen fled to transcendental idealism as a remedy, --his belaboring ofpoor old Locke for this, I say, is pathetic. Every examiner of thesensible life _in concreto_ must see that relations of every sort, oftime, space, difference, likeness, change, rate, cause, or what not, are just as integral members of the sensational flux as terms are, andthat conjunctive relations are just as true members of the flux asdisjunctive relations are. [4] This is what in some recent writings ofmine I have called the 'radically empiricist' doctrine (in distinctionfrom the doctrine of mental atoms which the name empiricism sooften suggests). Intellectualistic critics of sensation insist thatsensations are _disjoined_ only. Radical empiricism insiststhat conjunctions between them are just as immediately given asdisjunctions are, and that relations, whether disjunctive orconjunctive, are in their original sensible givenness just as fleetingand momentary (in Green's words), and just as 'particular, ' as termsare. Later, both terms and relations get universalized by beingconceptualized and named. [5] But all the thickness, concreteness, andindividuality of experience exists in the immediate and relativelyunnamed stages of it, to the richness of which, and to the standinginadequacy of our conceptions to match it, Professor Bergson soemphatically calls our attention. And now I am happy to say that wecan begin to gather together some of the separate threads of ourargument, and see a little better the general kind of conclusiontoward which we are tending. Pray go back with me to the lecturebefore the last, and recall what I said about the difficulty of seeinghow states of consciousness can compound themselves. The difficultyseemed to be the same, you remember, whether we took it in psychologyas the composition of finite states of mind out of simpler finitestates, or in metaphysics as the composition of the absolute mind outof finite minds in general. It is the general conceptualist difficultyof any one thing being the same with many things, either at once orin succession, for the abstract concepts of oneness and manyness mustneeds exclude each other. In the particular instance that we havedwelt on so long, the one thing is the all-form of experience, themany things are the each-forms of experience in you and me. To callthem the same we must treat them as if each were simultaneouslyits own other, a feat on conceptualist principles impossible ofperformance. 

On the principle of going behind the conceptual function altogether, however, and looking to the more primitive flux of the sensationallife for reality's true shape, a way is open to us, as I tried in mylast lecture to show. Not only the absolute is its own other, but thesimplest bits of immediate experience are their own others, if thathegelian phrase be once for all allowed. The concrete pulses ofexperience appear pent in by no such definite limits as our conceptualsubstitutes for them are confined by. They run into one anothercontinuously and seem to interpenetrate. What in them is relation andwhat is matter related is hard to discern. You feel no one of them asinwardly simple, and no two as wholly without confluence where theytouch. There is no datum so small as not to show this mystery, ifmystery it be. The tiniest feeling that we can possibly have comeswith an earlier and a later part and with a sense of their continuousprocession. Mr. Shadworth Hodgson showed long ago that there isliterally no such object as the present moment except as an unrealpostulate of abstract thought. [6] The 'passing' moment is, as Ialready have reminded you, the minimal fact, with the 'apparition ofdifference' inside of it as well as outside. If we do not feel bothpast and present in one field of feeling, we feel them not at all. Wehave the same many-in-one in the matter that fills the passing time. The rush of our thought forward through its fringes is the everlastingpeculiarity of its life. We realize this life as something always offits balance, something in transition, something that shoots out of adarkness through a dawn into a brightness that we feel to be the dawnfulfilled. In the very midst of the continuity our experience comes asan alteration. 'Yes, ' we say at the full brightness, '_this_ is what Ijust meant. ' 'No, ' we feel at the dawning, 'this is not yet the fullmeaning, there is more to come. ' In every crescendo of sensation, inevery effort to recall, in every progress towards the satisfactionof desire, this succession of an emptiness and fulness that havereference to each other and are one flesh is the essence of thephenomenon. In every hindrance of desire the sense of an idealpresence which is absent in fact, of an absent, in a word, which theonly function of the present is to _mean_, is even more notoriouslythere. And in the movement of pure thought we have the samephenomenon. When I say _Socrates is mortal_, the moment _Socrates_ isincomplete; it falls forward through the _is_ which is pure movement, into the _mortal_ which is indeed bare mortal on the tongue, butfor the mind is _that mortal_, the _mortal Socrates_, at lastsatisfactorily disposed of and told off. [7]

Here, then, inside of the minimal pulses of experience, is realizedthat very inner complexity which the transcendentalists say only theabsolute can genuinely possess. The gist of the matter is always thesame--something ever goes indissolubly with something else. You cannotseparate the same from its other, except by abandoning the realaltogether and taking to the conceptual system. What is immediatelygiven in the single and particular instance is always something pooledand mutual, something with no dark spot, no point of ignorance. No oneelementary bit of reality is eclipsed from the next bit's point ofview, if only we take reality sensibly and in small enough pulses--andby us it has to be taken pulse-wise, for our span of consciousness istoo short to grasp the larger collectivity of things except nominallyand abstractly. No more of reality collected together at once isextant anywhere, perhaps, than in my experience of reading this page, or in yours of listening; yet within those bits of experience asthey come to pass we get a fulness of content that no conceptualdescription can equal. Sensational experiences _are_ their 'ownothers, ' then, both internally and externally. Inwardly they are onewith their parts, and outwardly they pass continuously into their nextneighbors, so that events separated by years of time in a man's lifehang together unbrokenly by the intermediary events. Their _names_, to be sure, cut them into separate conceptual entities, but no cutsexisted in the continuum in which they originally came. 

If, with all this in our mind, we turn to our own particularpredicament, we see that our old objection to the self-compounding ofstates of consciousness, our accusation that it was impossible forpurely logical reasons, is unfounded in principle. Every smalleststate of consciousness, concretely taken, overflows its owndefinition. Only concepts are self-identical; only 'reason' deals withclosed equations; nature is but a name for excess; every point inher opens out and runs into the more; and the only question, withreference to any point we may be considering, is how far into therest of nature we may have to go in order to get entirely beyond itsoverflow. In the pulse of inner life immediately present now in eachof us is a little past, a little future, a little awareness of our ownbody, of each other's persons, of these sublimities we are trying totalk about, of the earth's geography and the direction of history, of truth and error, of good and bad, and of who knows how much more?Feeling, however dimly and subconsciously, all these things, yourpulse of inner life is continuous with them, belongs to them and theyto it. You can't identify it with either one of them rather than withthe others, for if you let it develop into no matter which of thosedirections, what it develops into will look back on it and say, 'Thatwas the original germ of me. '

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

What is true here of successive states must also be true ofsimultaneous characters. They also overlap each other with theirbeing. My present field of consciousness is a centre surrounded by afringe that shades insensibly into a subconscious more. I use threeseparate terms here to describe, this fact; but I might as well usethree hundred, for the fact is all shades and no boundaries. Whichpart of it properly is in my consciousness, which out? If I name whatis out, it already has come in. The centre works in one way while themargins work in another, and presently overpower the centre and arecentral themselves. What we conceptually identify ourselves with andsay we are thinking of at any time is the centre; but our _full_ selfis the whole field, with all those indefinitely radiating subconsciouspossibilities of increase that we can only feel without conceiving, and can hardly begin to analyze. The collective and the distributiveways of being coexist here, for each part functions distinctly, makesconnexion with its own peculiar region in the still wider rest ofexperience and tends to draw us into that line, and yet the whole issomehow felt as one pulse of our life, --not conceived so, but felt so. 

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

I am tiring myself and you, I know, by vainly seeking to describeby concepts and words what I say at the same time exceeds eitherconceptualization or verbalization. As long as one continues_talking_, intellectualism remains in undisturbed possession of thefield. The return to life can't come about by talking. It is an _act_;to make you return to life, I must set an example for your imitation, I must deafen you to talk, or to the importance of talk, by showingyou, as Bergson does, that the concepts we talk with are made forpurposes of _practice_ and not for purposes of insight. Or I must_point_, point to the mere _that_ of life, and you by inner sympathymust fill out the _what_ for yourselves. The minds of some of you, I know, will absolutely refuse to do so, refuse to think innon-conceptualized terms. I myself absolutely refused to do sofor years together, even after I knew that the denial ofmanyness-in-oneness by intellectualism must be false, for the samereality does perform the most various functions at once. But I hopedever for a revised intellectualist way round the difficulty, and itwas only after reading Bergson that I saw that to continue using theintellectualist method was itself the fault. I saw that philosophy hadbeen on a false scent ever since the days of Socrates and Plato, thatan _intellectual_ answer to the intellectualist's difficulties willnever come, and that the real way out of them, far from consisting inthe discovery of such an answer, consists in simply closing one's earsto the question. When conceptualism summons life to justify itselfin conceptual terms, it is like a challenge addressed in a foreignlanguage to some one who is absorbed in his own business; it isirrelevant to him altogether--he may let it lie unnoticed. I went thusthrough the 'inner catastrophe' of which I spoke in the last lecture;I had literally come to the end of my conceptual stock-in-trade, I wasbankrupt intellectualistically, and had to change my base. No wordsof mine will probably convert you, for words can be the names only ofconcepts. But if any of you try sincerely and pertinaciously on yourown separate accounts to intellectualize reality, you may be similarlydriven to a change of front. I say no more: I must leave life to teachthe lesson. 

We have now reached a point of view from which the self-compounding ofmind in its smaller and more accessible portions seems a certainfact, and in which the speculative assumption of a similar but widercompounding in remoter regions must be reckoned with as a legitimatehypothesis. The absolute is not the impossible being I once thoughtit. Mental facts do function both singly and together, at once, and wefinite minds may simultaneously be co-conscious with one another in asuperhuman intelligence. It is only the extravagant claims of coercivenecessity on the absolute's part that have to be denied by _a priori_logic. As an hypothesis trying to make itself probable on analogicaland inductive grounds, the absolute is entitled to a patient hearing. Which is as much as to say that our serious business from now onwardlies with Fechner and his method, rather than with Hegel, Royce, orBradley. Fechner treats the superhuman consciousness he so ferventlybelieves in as an hypothesis only, which he then recommends by all theresources of induction and persuasion. 

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

Fechner was in fact too little of a metaphysician to care for perfectformal consistency in these abstract regions. He believed in God inthe pluralistic manner, but partly from convention and partly fromwhat I should call intellectual laziness, if laziness of any kindcould be imputed to a Fechner, he let the usual monistic talk abouthim pass unchallenged. I propose to you that we should discuss thequestion of God without entangling ourselves in advance in themonistic assumption. Is it probable that there is any superhumanconsciousness at all, in the first place? When that is settled, thefurther question whether its form be monistic or pluralistic is inorder. 

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

In a former lecture I went over some of the fechnerian reasons fortheir plausibility, or reasons that at least replied to our moreobvious grounds of doubt concerning them. The numerous facts ofdivided or split human personality which the genius of certain medicalmen, as Janet, Freud, Prince, Sidis, and others, have unearthed wereunknown in Fechner's time, and neither the phenomena of automaticwriting and speech, nor of mediumship and 'possession' generally, hadbeen recognized or studied as we now study them, so Fechner's stock ofanalogies is scant compared with our present one. He did the best withwhat he had, however. For my own part I find in some of these abnormalor supernormal facts the strongest suggestions in favor of a superiorco-consciousness being possible. I doubt whether we shall everunderstand some of them without using the very letter of Fechner'sconception of a great reservoir in which the memories of earth'sinhabitants are pooled and preserved, and from which, when thethreshold lowers or the valve opens, information ordinarily shut outleaks into the mind of exceptional individuals among us. But thoseregions of inquiry are perhaps too spook-haunted to interest anacademic audience, and the only evidence I feel it now decorous tobring to the support of Fechner is drawn from ordinary religiousexperience. I think it may be asserted that there _are_ religiousexperiences of a specific nature, not deducible by analogy orpsychological reasoning from our other sorts of experience. I thinkthat they point with reasonable probability to the continuity ofour consciousness with a wider spiritual environment from whichthe ordinary prudential man (who is the only man that scientificpsychology, so called, takes cognizance of) is shut off. I shall beginmy final lecture by referring to them again briefly. 

LECTURE VIII

CONCLUSIONS

At the close of my last lecture I referred to the existence ofreligious experiences of a specific nature. I must now explain justwhat I mean by such a claim. Briefly, the facts I have in mind mayall be described as experiences of an unexpected life succeeding upondeath. By this I don't mean immortality, or the death of the body. Imean the deathlike termination of certain mental processes within theindividual's experience, processes that run to failure, and in someindividuals, at least, eventuate in despair. Just as romantic loveseems a comparatively recent literary invention, so these experiencesof a life that supervenes upon despair seem to have played no greatpart in official theology till Luther's time; and possibly the bestway to indicate their character will be to point to a certain contrastbetween the inner life of ourselves and of the ancient Greeks andRomans. 

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

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

Reason, operating on our other experiences, even our psychologicalexperiences, would never have inferred these specifically religiousexperiences in advance of their actual coming. She could not suspecttheir existence, for they are discontinuous with the 'natural'experiences they succeed upon and invert their values. But as theyactually come and are given, creation widens to the view of theirrecipients. They suggest that our natural experience, our strictlymoralistic and prudential experience, may be only a fragment of realhuman experience. They soften nature's outlines and open out thestrangest possibilities and perspectives. 

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

The sort of belief that religious experience of this type naturallyengenders in those who have it is fully in accord with Fechner'stheories. To quote words which I have used elsewhere, the believerfinds that the tenderer parts of his personal life are continuouswith a _more_ of the same quality which is operative in the universeoutside of him and which he can keep in working touch with, and in afashion get on board of and save himself, when all his lower being hasgone to pieces in the wreck. In a word, the believer is continuous, to his own consciousness, at any rate, with a wider self from whichsaving experiences flow in. Those who have such experiences distinctlyenough and often enough to live in the light of them remain quiteunmoved by criticism, from whatever quarter it may come, be itacademic or scientific, or be it merely the voice of logicalcommon sense. They have had their vision and they _know_--that isenough--that we inhabit an invisible spiritual environment from whichhelp comes, our soul being mysteriously one with a larger soul whoseinstruments we are. 

One may therefore plead, I think, that Fechner's ideas are not withoutdirect empirical verification. There is at any rate one side of lifewhich would be easily explicable if those ideas were true, but ofwhich there appears no clear explanation so long as we assume eitherwith naturalism that human consciousness is the highest consciousnessthere is, or with dualistic theism that there is a higher mind in thecosmos, but that it is discontinuous with our own. It has always beena matter of surprise with me that philosophers of the absolute shouldhave shown so little interest in this department of life, and soseldom put its phenomena in evidence, even when it seemed obvious thatpersonal experience of some kind must have made their confidence intheir own vision so strong. The logician's bias has always been toomuch with them. They have preferred the thinner to the thicker method, dialectical abstraction being so much more dignified and academic thanthe confused and unwholesome facts of personal biography. 

In spite of rationalism's disdain for the particular, the personal, and the unwholesome, the drift of all the evidence we have seems tome to sweep us very strongly towards the belief in some formof superhuman life with which we may, unknown to ourselves, beco-conscious. We may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in ourlibraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but havingno inkling of the meaning of it all. The intellectualist objectionsto this fall away when the authority of intellectualist logic isundermined by criticism, and then the positive empirical evidenceremains. The analogies with ordinary psychology and with the facts ofpathology, with those of psychical research, so called, and with thoseof religious experience, establish, when taken together, a decidedly_formidable_ probability in favor of a general view of the worldalmost identical with Fechner's. The outlines of the superhumanconsciousness thus made probable must remain, however, very vague, andthe number of functionally distinct 'selves' it comports and carrieshas to be left entirely problematic. It may be polytheistically orit may be monotheistically conceived of. Fechner, with his distinctearth-soul functioning as our guardian angel, seems to me clearlypolytheistic; but the word 'polytheism' usually gives offence, soperhaps it is better not to use it. Only one thing is certain, andthat is the result of our criticism of the absolute: the only wayto escape from the paradoxes and perplexities that a consistentlythought-out monistic universe suffers from as from a species ofauto-intoxication--the mystery of the 'fall' namely, of realitylapsing into appearance, truth into error, perfection intoimperfection; of evil, in short; the mystery of universal determinism, of the block-universe eternal and without a history, etc. ;--the onlyway of escape, I say, from all this is to be frankly pluralistic andassume that the superhuman consciousness, however vast it may be, hasitself an external environment, and consequently is finite. Presentday monism carefully repudiates complicity with spinozistic monism. Inthat, it explains, the many get dissolved in the one and lost, whereasin the improved idealistic form they get preserved in all theirmanyness as the one's eternal object. The absolute itself is thusrepresented by absolutists as having a pluralistic object. But if eventhe absolute has to have a pluralistic vision, why should we ourselveshesitate to be pluralists on our own sole account? Why should weenvelop our many with the 'one' that brings so much poison in itstrain?

The line of least resistance, then, as it seems to me, both intheology and in philosophy, is to accept, along with the superhumanconsciousness, the notion that it is not all-embracing, the notion, in other words, that there is a God, but that he is finite, either inpower or in knowledge, or in both at once. These, I need hardly tellyou, are the terms in which common men have usually carried on theiractive commerce with God; and the monistic perfections that make thenotion of him so paradoxical practically and morally are the colderaddition of remote professorial minds operating _in distans_ uponconceptual substitutes for him alone. 

Why cannot 'experience' and 'reason' meet on this common ground? Whycannot they compromise? May not the godlessness usually but needlesslyassociated with the philosophy of immediate experience give way to atheism now seen to follow directly from that experience more widelytaken? and may not rationalism, satisfied with seeing her _a priori_proofs of God so effectively replaced by empirical evidence, abatesomething of her absolutist claims? Let God but have the leastinfinitesimal _other_ of any kind beside him, and empiricism andrationalism might strike hands in a lasting treaty of peace. Bothmight then leave abstract thinness behind them, and seek together, asscientific men seek, by using all the analogies and data within reach, to build up the most probable approximate idea of what the divineconsciousness concretely may be like. I venture to beg the youngerOxford idealists to consider seriously this alternative. Few men areas qualified by their intellectual gifts to reap the harvests thatseem certain to any one who, like Fechner and Bergson, will leave thethinner for the thicker path. 

Compromise and mediation are inseparable from the pluralisticphilosophy. Only monistic dogmatism can say of any of its hypotheses, 'It is either that or nothing; take it or leave it just as it stands. 'The type of monism prevalent at Oxford has kept this steep and brittleattitude, partly through the proverbial academic preference for thinand elegant logical solutions, partly from a mistaken notion that theonly solidly grounded basis for religion was along those lines. IfOxford men could be ignorant of anything, it might almost seem thatthey had remained ignorant of the great empirical movement towardsa pluralistic panpsychic view of the universe, into which our owngeneration has been drawn, and which threatens to short-circuit theirmethods entirely and become their religious rival unless they arewilling to make themselves its allies. Yet, wedded as they seem tobe to the logical machinery and technical apparatus of absolutism, I cannot but believe that their fidelity to the religious ideal ingeneral is deeper still. Especially do I find it hard to believe thatthe more clerical adherents of the school would hold so fast to itsparticular machinery if only they could be made to think that religioncould be secured in some other way. Let empiricism once becomeassociated with religion, as hitherto, through some strangemisunderstanding, it has been associated with irreligion, and Ibelieve that a new era of religion as well as of philosophy will beready to begin. That great awakening of a new popular interest inphilosophy, which is so striking a phenomenon at the present day inall countries, is undoubtedly due in part to religious demands. Asthe authority of past tradition tends more and more to crumble, mennaturally turn a wistful ear to the authority of reason or to theevidence of present fact. They will assuredly not be disappointed ifthey open their minds to what the thicker and more radical empiricismhas to say. I fully believe that such an empiricism is a more naturalally than dialectics ever were, or can be, of the religious life. Itis true that superstitions and wild-growing over-beliefs of allsorts will undoubtedly begin to abound if the notion of higherconsciousnesses enveloping ours, of fechnerian earth-souls and thelike, grows orthodox and fashionable; still more will they superaboundif science ever puts her approving stamp on the phenomena of whichFrederic Myers so earnestly advocated the scientific recognition, thephenomena of psychic research so-called--and I myself firmly believethat most of these phenomena are rooted in reality. But ought oneseriously to allow such a timid consideration as that to deter onefrom following the evident path of greatest religious promise? Sincewhen, in this mixed world, was any good thing given us in purestoutline and isolation? One of the chief characteristics of life islife's redundancy. The sole condition of our having anything, nomatter what, is that we should have so much of it, that we arefortunate if we do not grow sick of the sight and sound of italtogether. Everything is smothered in the litter that is fated toaccompany it. Without too much you cannot have enough, of anything. Lots of inferior books, lots of bad statues, lots of dull speeches, oftenth-rate men and women, as a condition of the few precious specimensin either kind being realized! The gold-dust comes to birth with thequartz-sand all around it, and this is as much a condition of religionas of any other excellent possession. There must be extrication; theremust be competition for survival; but the clay matrix and the noblegem must first come into being unsifted. Once extricated, the gem canbe examined separately, conceptualized, defined, and insulated. Butthis process of extrication cannot be short-circuited--or if it is, you get the thin inferior abstractions which we have seen, eitherthe hollow unreal god of scholastic theology, or the unintelligiblepantheistic monster, instead of the more living divine reality withwhich it appears certain that empirical methods tend to connect men inimagination. 

Arrived at this point, I ask you to go back to my first lecture andremember, if you can, what I quoted there from your own ProfessorJacks--what he said about the philosopher himself being taken up intothe universe which he is accounting for. This is the fechnerian aswell as the hegelian view, and thus our end rejoins harmoniously ourbeginning. Philosophies are intimate parts of the universe, theyexpress something of its own thought of itself. A philosophy mayindeed be a most momentous reaction of the universe upon itself. Itmay, as I said, possess and handle itself differently in consequenceof us philosophers, with our theories, being here; it may trust itselfor mistrust itself the more, and, by doing the one or the other, deserve more the trust or the mistrust. What mistrusts itself deservesmistrust. 

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

Thus does foreignness get banished from our world, and far more sowhen we take the system of it pluralistically than when we take itmonistically. We are indeed internal parts of God and not externalcreations, on any possible reading of the panpsychic system. Yetbecause God is not the absolute, but is himself a part when the systemis conceived pluralistically, his functions can be taken as not whollydissimilar to those of the other smaller parts, --as similar to ourfunctions consequently. 

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

Remember that one of our troubles with that was its essentialforeignness and monstrosity--there really is no other word for it thanthat. Its having the all-inclusive form gave to it an essentiallyheterogeneous _nature_ from ourselves. And this great differencebetween absolutism and pluralism demands no difference in theuniverse's material content--it follows from a difference in the formalone. The all-form or monistic form makes the foreignness result, theeach-form or pluralistic form leaves the intimacy undisturbed. 

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

It would be a pity if the word 'rationality' were allowed to give ustrouble here. It is one of those eulogistic words that both sidesclaim--for almost no one is willing to advertise his philosophy as asystem of irrationality. But like most of the words which people usedeulogistically, the word 'rational' carries too many meanings. Themost objective one is that of the older logic--the connexion betweentwo things is rational when you can infer one from the other, mortalfrom Socrates, _e. G. ;_ and you can do that only when they have aquality in common. But this kind of rationality is just that logicof identity which all disciples of Hegel find insufficient. Theysupersede it by the higher rationality of negation and contradictionand make the notion vague again. Then you get the aesthetic orteleologic kinds of rationality, saying that whatever fits in any way, whatever is beautiful or good, whatever is purposive or gratifiesdesire, is rational in so far forth. Then again, according to Hegel, whatever is 'real' is rational. I myself said awhile ago that whateverlets loose any action which we are fond of exerting seems rational. Itwould be better to give up the word 'rational' altogether than to getinto a merely verbal fight about who has the best right to keep it. 

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

Pragmatically interpreted, pluralism or the doctrine that it ismany means only that the sundry parts of reality _may be externallyrelated_. Everything you can think of, however vast or inclusive, hason the pluralistic view a genuinely 'external' environment of somesort or amount. Things are 'with' one another in many ways, butnothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. The word'and' trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes. 'Ever not quite' has to be said of the best attempts made anywhere inthe universe at attaining all-inclusiveness. The pluralistic world isthus more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom. However much may be collected, however much may report itself aspresent at any effective centre of consciousness or action, somethingelse is self-governed and absent and unreduced to unity. 

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

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

For monism, on the contrary, everything, whether we realize it or not, drags the whole universe along with itself and drops nothing. The logstarts and arrives with all its carriers supporting it. If a thingwere once disconnected, it could never be connected again, accordingto monism. The pragmatic difference between the two systems is thus adefinite one. It is just thus, that if _a_ is once out of sight of _b_or out of touch with it, or, more briefly, 'out' of it at all, then, according to monism, it must always remain so, they can never gettogether; whereas pluralism admits that on another occasion they maywork together, or in some way be connected again. Monism allows forno such things as 'other occasions' in reality--in _real_ or absolutereality, that is. 

The difference I try to describe amounts, you see, to nothing morethan the difference between what I formerly called the each-form andthe all-form of reality. Pluralism lets things really exist in theeach-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form orcollective-unit form is the only form that is rational. The all-formallows of no taking up and dropping of connexions, for in the all theparts are essentially and eternally co-implicated. In the each-form, on the contrary, a thing may be connected by intermediary things, witha thing with which it has no immediate or essential connexion. Itis thus at all times in many possible connexions which are notnecessarily actualized at the moment. They depend on which actual pathof intermediation it may functionally strike into: the word 'or' namesa genuine reality. Thus, as I speak here, I may look ahead _or_ to theright _or_ to the left, and in either case the intervening space andair and ether enable me to see the faces of a different portion ofthis audience. My being here is independent of any one set of thesefaces. 

If the each-form be the eternal form of reality no less than it is theform of temporal appearance, we still have a coherent world, and notan incarnate incoherence, as is charged by so many absolutists. Our'multiverse' still makes a 'universe'; for every part, tho it may notbe in actual or immediate connexion, is nevertheless in some possibleor mediated connexion, with every other part however remote, throughthe fact that each part hangs together with its very next neighbors ininextricable interfusion. The type of union, it is true, is differenthere from the monistic type of _all-einheit_. It is not a universalco-implication, or integration of all things _durcheinander_. It iswhat I call the strung-along type, the type of continuity, contiguity, or concatenation. If you prefer greek words, you may call it thesynechistic type. At all events, you see that it forms a definitelyconceivable alternative to the through-and-through unity of all thingsat once, which is the type opposed to it by monism. You see also thatit stands or falls with the notion I have taken such pains to defend, of the through-and-through union of adjacent minima of experience, ofthe confluence of every passing moment of concretely felt experiencewith its immediately next neighbors. The recognition of this fact ofcoalescence of next with next in concrete experience, so that allthe insulating cuts we make there are artificial products of theconceptualizing faculty, is what distinguishes the empiricism whichI call 'radical, ' from the bugaboo empiricism of the traditionalrationalist critics, which (rightly or wrongly) is accused of choppingup experience into atomistic sensations, incapable of union with oneanother until a purely intellectual principle has swooped down uponthem from on high and folded them in its own conjunctive categories. 

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

The alternative is definite. It seems to me, moreover, that the twohorns of it make pragmatically different ethical appeals--at leastthey _may_ do so, to certain individuals. But if you consider thepluralistic horn to be intrinsically irrational, self-contradictory, and absurd, I can now say no more in its defence. Having done whatI could in my earlier lectures to break the edge of theintellectualistic _reductiones ad absurdum_, I must leave the issuein your hands. Whatever I may say, each of you will be sure to takepluralism or leave it, just as your own sense of rationality moves andinclines. The only thing I emphatically insist upon is that it is afully co-ordinate hypothesis with monism. This world _may_, in thelast resort, be a block-universe; but on the other hand it _may_ be auniverse only strung-along, not rounded in and closed. Reality _may_exist distributively just as it sensibly seems to, after all. On thatpossibility I do insist. 

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

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

It _might_ be true somewhere, you say, for it is notself-contradictory. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have now finished these poor lectures, and as you look back on them, they doubtless seem rambling and inconclusive enough. My only hope isthat they may possibly have proved suggestive; and if indeed they havebeen suggestive of one point of method, I am almost willing to letall other suggestions go. That point is that _it is high time for thebasis of discussion in these questions to be broadened and thickenedup_. It is for that that I have brought in Fechner and Bergson, anddescriptive psychology and religious experiences, and have venturedeven to hint at psychical research and other wild beasts of thephilosophic desert. Owing possibly to the fact that Plato andAristotle, with their intellectualism, are the basis of philosophicstudy here, the Oxford brand of transcendentalism seems to me to haveconfined itself too exclusively to thin logical considerations, thatwould hold good in all conceivable worlds, worlds of an empiricalconstitution entirely different from ours. It is as if the actualpeculiarities of the world that is were entirely irrelevant to thecontent of truth. But they cannot be irrelevant; and the philosophyof the future must imitate the sciences in taking them more and moreelaborately into account. I urge some of the younger members ofthis learned audience to lay this hint to heart. If you can do soeffectively, making still more concrete advances upon the path whichFechner and Bergson have so enticingly opened up, if you can gatherphilosophic conclusions of any kind, monistic or pluralistic, fromthe _particulars of life_, I will say, as I now do say, with thecheerfullest of hearts, 'Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, butring the fuller minstrel in. '

NOTES

LECTURE I

Note 1, page 5. --Bailey: _op. Cit. _, First Series, p. 52. 

Note 2, page 11. --_Smaller Logic_, § 194. 

Note 3, page 16. --_Exploratio philosophica_, Part I, 1865, pp. Xxxviii, 130. 

Note 4, page 20. --Hinneberg: _Die Kultur der Gegenwart: SystematischePhilosophie_. Leipzig: Teubner, 1907. 

LECTURE II

Note 1, page 50. --The difference is that the bad parts of this finiteare eternal and essential for absolutists, whereas pluralists may hopethat they will eventually get sloughed off and become as if they hadnot been. 

Note 2, page 51. --Quoted by W. Wallace: _Lectures and Essays_, Oxford, 1898, p. 560. 

Note 3, page 51. --_Logic_, tr. Wallace, 1874, p. 181. 

Note 4, page 52. --_Ibid. _, p. 304. 

Note 5, page 53. --_Contemporary Review_, December, 1907, vol. 92, p. 618. 

Note 6, page 57. --_Metaphysic_, sec. 69 ff. 

Note 7, page 62. --_The World and the Individual_, vol. I, pp. 131-132. 

Note 8, page 67. --A good illustration of this is to be found in acontroversy between Mr. Bradley and the present writer, in _Mind_for 1893, Mr. Bradley contending (if I understood him rightly) that'resemblance' is an illegitimate category, because it admits ofdegrees, and that the only real relations in comparison are absoluteidentity and absolute non-comparability. 

Note 9, page 75. --_Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic_, p. 184. 

Note 10, page 75. --_Appearance and Reality_, 1893, pp. 141-142. 

Note 11, page 76. --Cf. _Elements of Metaphysics_, p. 88. 

Note 12, page 77. --_Some Dogmas of Religion_, p. 184. 

Note 13, page 80. --For a more detailed criticism of Mr. Bradley'sintellectualism, see Appendix A. 

LECTURE III

Note 1, page 94. --Hegel, _Smaller Logic_, pp. 184-185. 

Note 2, page 95. --Cf. Hegel's fine vindication of this function ofcontradiction in his _Wissenschaft der Logik_, Bk. Ii, sec. 1, chap, ii, C, Anmerkung 3. 

Note 3, page 95--_Hegel_, in _Blackwood's Philosophical Classics_, p. 162. 

Note 4, page 95--_Wissenschaft der Logik_, Bk. I, sec. 1, chap, ii, B, a. 

Note 5, page 96--Wallace's translation of the _Smaller Logic_, p. 128. 

Note 6, page 101--Joachim, _The Nature of Truth_, Oxford, 1906, pp. 22, 178. The argument in case the belief should be doubted would bethe higher synthetic idea: if two truths were possible, the duality ofthat possibility would itself be the one truth that would unite them. 

Note 7, page 115. --_The World and the Individual_, vol. Ii, pp. 385, 386, 409. 

Note 8, page 116. --The best _un_inspired argument (again notironical!) which I know is that in Miss M. W. Calkins's excellent book, _The Persistent Problems of Philosophy_, Macmillan, 1902. 

Note 9, page 117. --Cf. Dr. Fuller's excellent article, ' Ethical monismand the problem of evil, ' in the _Harvard Journal of Theology_, vol. I, No. 2, April, 1908. 

Note 10, page 120. --_Metaphysic_, sec. 79. 

Note 11, page 121. --_Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic_, secs. 150, 153. 

Note 12, page 121. --_The Nature of Truth_, 1906, pp. 170-171. 

Note 13, page 121. --_Ibid. _, p. 179. 

Note 14, page 123. --The psychological analogy that certain finitetracts of consciousness are composed of isolable parts added together, cannot be used by absolutists as proof that such parts are essentialelements of all consciousness. Other finite fields of consciousnessseem in point of fact not to be similarly resolvable into isolableparts. 

Note 15, page 128. --Judging by the analogy of the relation which ourcentral consciousness seems to bear to that of our spinal cord, lowerganglia, etc. , it would seem natural to suppose that in whateversuperhuman mental synthesis there may be, the neglect and eliminationof certain contents of which we are conscious on the human level mightbe as characteristic a feature as is the combination and interweavingof other human contents. 

LECTURE IV

Note 1, page 143. --_The Spirit of Modern Philosophy_, p. 227. 

Note 2, page 165. --Fechner: _Über die Seelenfrage_, 1861, p. 170. 

Note 3, page 168. --Fechner's latest summarizing of his views, _DieTagesansicht gegenüber der Nachtansicht_, Leipzig, 1879, is now, Iunderstand, in process of translation. His _Little Book of Life afterDeath_ exists already in two American versions, one published byLittle, Brown & Co. , Boston, the other by the Open Court Co. , Chicago. 

Note 4, page 176. --Mr. Bradley ought to be to some degree exemptedfrom my attack in these last pages. Compare especially what he says ofnon-human consciousness in his _Appearance and Reality_, pp. 269-272. 

LECTURE V

Note 1, page 182. --Royce: _The Spirit of Modern Philosophy_, p. 379. 

Note 2, page 184. --_The World and the Individual_, vol. Ii, pp. 58-62. 

Note 3, page 190. --I hold to it still as the best description ofan enormous number of our higher fields of consciousness. Theydemonstrably do not _contain_ the lower states that know the sameobjects. Of other fields, however this is not so true; so, in the_Psychological Review_ for 1895, vol. Ii, p. 105 (see especially pp. 119-120), I frankly withdrew, in principle, my former objection totalking of fields of consciousness being made of simpler 'parts, 'leaving the facts to decide the question in each special case. 

Note 4, page 194. --I abstract from the consciousness attached to thewhole itself, if such consciousness be there. 

LECTURE VI

Note 1, page 250. --For a more explicit vindication of the notion ofactivity, see Appendix B, where I try to defend its recognition asa definite form of immediate experience against its rationalisticcritics. 

I subjoin here a few remarks destined to disarm some possible criticsof Professor Bergson, who, to defend himself against misunderstandingsof his meaning, ought to amplify and more fully explain his statementthat concepts have a practical but not a theoretical use. Understoodin one way, the thesis sounds indefensible, for by concepts wecertainly increase our knowledge about things, and that seems atheoretical achievement, whatever practical achievements may follow inits train. Indeed, M. Bergson might seem to be easily refutable out ofhis own mouth. His philosophy pretends, if anything, to give a betterinsight into truth than rationalistic philosophies give: yet what isit in itself if not a conceptual system? Does its author not reason byconcepts exclusively in his very attempt to show that they can give noinsight?

To this particular objection, at any rate, it is easy to reply. In using concepts of his own to discredit the theoretic claims ofconcepts generally, Bergson does not contradict, but on the contraryemphatically illustrates his own view of their practical role, forthey serve in his hands only to 'orient' us, to show us to whatquarter we must _practically turn_ if we wish to gain that completerinsight into reality which he denies that they can give. He directsour hopes away from them and towards the despised sensible flux. _Whathe reaches by their means is thus only a new practical attitude_. Hebut restores, against the vetoes of intellectualist philosophy, ournaturally cordial relations with sensible experience and common sense. This service is surely only practical; but it is a service for whichwe may be almost immeasurably grateful. To trust our senses again witha good philosophic conscience!--who ever conferred on us so valuable afreedom before?

By making certain distinctions and additions it seems easy to meet theother counts of the indictment. Concepts are realities of a new order, with particular relations between them. These relations are just asmuch directly perceived, when we compare our various concepts, as thedistance between two sense-objects is perceived when we look at it. Conception is an operation which gives us material for new acts ofperception, then; and when the results of these are written down, we get those bodies of 'mental truth' (as Locke called it) known asmathematics, logic, and _a priori_ metaphysics. To know all this truthis a theoretic achievement, indeed, but it is a narrow one; for therelations between conceptual objects as such are only the staticones of bare comparison, as difference or sameness, congruity orcontradiction, inclusion or exclusion. Nothing _happens_ in the realmof concepts; relations there are 'eternal' only. The theoretic gainfails so far, therefore, to touch even the outer hem of the realworld, the world of causal and dynamic relations, of activity andhistory. To gain insight into all that moving life, Bergson is rightin turning us away from conception and towards perception. 

By combining concepts with percepts, _we can draw maps of thedistribution_ of other percepts in distant space and time. To knowthis distribution is of course a theoretic achievement, but theachievement is extremely limited, it cannot be effected withoutpercepts, and even then what it yields is only static relations. Frommaps we learn positions only, and the position of a thing is but theslightest kind of truth about it; but, being indispensable for formingour plans of action, the conceptual map-making has the enormouspractical importance on which Bergson so rightly insists. 

But concepts, it will be said, do not only give us eternal truthsof comparison and maps of the positions of things, they bring new_values_ into life. In their mapping function they stand to perceptionin general in the same relation in which sight and hearing stand totouch--Spencer calls these higher senses only organs of anticipatorytouch. But our eyes and ears also open to us worlds of independentglory: music and decorative art result, and an incredible enhancementof life's value follows. Even so does the conceptual world bring newranges of value and of motivation to our life. Its maps not only serveus practically, but the mere mental possession of such vast picturesis of itself an inspiring good. New interests and incitements, andfeelings of power, sublimity, and admiration are aroused. 

Abstractness _per se_ seems to have a touch of ideality. ROYCE'S'loyalty to loyalty' is an excellent example. 'Causes, ' asanti-slavery, democracy, liberty, etc. , dwindle when realized in theirsordid particulars. The veritable 'cash-value' of the idea seems tocleave to it only in the abstract status. Truth at large, as ROYCEcontends, in his _Philosophy of Loyalty_, appears another thingaltogether from the true particulars in which it is best to believe. It transcends in value all those 'expediencies, ' and is something tolive for, whether expedient or inexpedient. Truth with a big T is a'momentous issue'; truths in detail are 'poor scraps, ' mere 'crumblingsuccesses. ' (_Op. Cit. _, Lecture VII, especially § v. )

Is, now, such bringing into existence of a new _value_ to be regardedas a theoretic achievement? The question is a nice one, for altho avalue is in one sense an objective quality perceived, the essence ofthat quality is its relation to the will, and consists in its beinga dynamogenic spur that makes our action different. So far as theirvalue-creating function goes, it would thus appear that conceptsconnect themselves more with our active than with our theoretic life, so here again Bergson's formulation seems unobjectionable. Persons whohave certain concepts are animated otherwise, pursue their ownvital careers differently. It doesn't necessarily follow that theyunderstand other vital careers more intimately. 

Again it may be said that we combine old concepts into new ones, conceiving thus such realities as the ether, God, souls, or what not, of which our sensible life alone would leave us altogether ignorant. This surely is an increase of our knowledge, and may well be calleda theoretical achievement. Yet here again Bergson's criticisms holdgood. Much as conception may tell us _about_ such invisible objects, it sheds no ray of light into their interior. The completer, indeed, our definitions of ether-waves, atoms, Gods, or souls become, the lessinstead of the more intelligible do they appear to us. The learnedin such things are consequently beginning more and more to ascribe asolely instrumental value to our concepts of them. Ether and moleculesmay be like co-ordinates and averages, only so many crutches by thehelp of which we practically perform the operation of getting aboutamong our sensible experiences. 

We see from these considerations how easily the question of whetherthe function of concepts is theoretical or practical may grow intoa logomachy. It may be better from this point of view to refuse torecognize the alternative as a sharp one. The sole thing that iscertain in the midst of it all is that Bergson is absolutely rightin contending that the whole life of activity and change is inwardlyimpenetrable to conceptual treatment, and that it opens itself only tosympathetic apprehension at the hands of immediate feeling. All the_whats_ as well as the _thats_ of reality, relational as well asterminal, are in the end contents of immediate concrete perception. Yet the remoter unperceived _arrangements_, temporal, spatial, andlogical, of these contents, are also something that we need to know aswell for the pleasure of the knowing as for the practical help. We maycall this need of arrangement a theoretic need or a practical need, according as we choose to lay the emphasis; but Bergson is accuratelyright when he limits conceptual knowledge to arrangement, and when heinsists that arrangement is the mere skirt and skin of the whole ofwhat we ought to know. 

Note 2, page 266. --Gaston Rageot, _Revue Philosophique_, vol. Lxiv, p. 85 (July, 1907). 

Note 3, page 268. --I have myself talked in other ways as plausiblyas I could, in my _Psychology_, and talked truly (as I believe) incertain selected cases; but for other cases the natural way invinciblycomes back. 

LECTURE VII

Note 1, page 278. --_Introduction to Hume_, 1874, p. 151. 

Note 2, page 279. --_Ibid. _, pp. 16, 21, 36, _et passim_. 

Note 3, page 279. --See, _inter alia_, the chapter on the 'Stream ofThought' in my own Psychologies; H. Cornelius, _Psychologie_, 1897, chaps, i and iii; G. H. Luquet, _Idées Générales de Psychologie_, 1906, _passim_. 

Note 4, page 280. --Compare, as to all this, an article by the presentwriter, entitled 'A world of pure experience, ' in the _Journal ofPhilosophy_, New York, vol. I, pp. 533, 561 (1905). 

Note 5, page 280. --Green's attempt to discredit sensations byreminding us of their 'dumbness, ' in that they do not come already_named_, as concepts may be said to do, only shows how intellectualismis dominated by verbality. The unnamed appears in Green as synonymouswith the unreal. 

Note 6, page 283. --_Philosophy of Reflection_, i, 248 ff. 

Note 7, page 284. --Most of this paragraph is extracted from an addressof mine before the American Psychological Association, printed in the_Psychological Review_, vol. Ii, p. 105. I take pleasure in thefact that already in 1895 I was so far advanced towards my presentbergsonian position. 

Note 8, page 289. --The conscious self of the moment, the central self, is probably determined to this privileged position by its functionalconnexion with the body's imminent or present acts. It is the present_acting_ self. Tho the more that surrounds it may be 'subconscious'to us, yet if in its 'collective capacity' it also exerts an activefunction, it may be conscious in a wider way, conscious, as it were, over our heads. 

On the relations of consciousness to action see Bergson's _Matièreet Mémoire, passim_, especially chap. I. Compare also the hints inMünsterberg's _Grundzüge der Psychologie_, chap, xv; those in my own_Principles of Psychology_, vol. Ii, pp. 581-592; and those in W. McDougall's _Physiological Psychology_, chap. Vii. 

Note 9, page 295. --Compare _Zend-Avesta_, 2d edition, vol. I, pp. 165ff. , 181, 206, 244 ff. , etc. ; _Die Tagesansicht_, etc. , chap, v, § 6;and chap. Xv. 

LECTURE VIII

Note 1, page 330. --Blondel: _Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne_, June, 1906, p. 241. 

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A

THE THING AND ITS RELATIONS[1]

Experience in its immediacy seems perfectly fluent. The activesense of living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters ourinstinctive world for us, is self-luminous and suggests no paradoxes. Its difficulties are disappointments and uncertainties. They are notintellectual contradictions. 

When the reflective intellect gets at work, however, it discoversincomprehensibilities in the flowing process. Distinguishing itselements and parts, it gives them separate names, and what it thusdisjoins it cannot easily put together. Pyrrhonism accepts theirrationality and revels in its dialectic elaboration. Otherphilosophies try, some by ignoring, some by resisting, and some byturning the dialectic procedure against itself, negating its firstnegations, to restore the fluent sense of life again, and letredemption take the place of innocence. The perfection with which anyphilosophy may do this is the measure of its human success and of itsimportance in philosophic history. In an article entitled 'A world ofpure experience, [2] I tried my own hand sketchily at

[Footnote 1: Reprinted from the _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods_, vol. Ii, New York, 1905, with slight verbalrevision. ]

[Footnote 2: _Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and ScientificMethods_, vol. I, No. 20, p. 566. ]

the problem, resisting certain first steps of dialectics by insistingin a general way that the immediately experienced conjunctiverelations are as real as anything else. If my sketch is not to appeartoo _näif_, I must come closer to details, and in the present essay Ipropose to do so. 

I

'Pure experience' is the name which I gave to the immediate flux oflife which furnishes the material to our later reflection with itsconceptual categories. Only new-born babes, or men in semi-comafrom sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have anexperience pure in the literal sense of a _that_ which is not yet anydefinite _what_, tho ready to be all sorts of whats; full both ofoneness and of manyness, but in respects that don't appear; changingthroughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and nopoints, either of distinction or of identity, can be caught. Pureexperience in this state is but another name for feeling or sensation. But the flux of it no sooner comes than it tends to fill itself withemphases, and these salient parts become identified and fixed andabstracted; so that experience now flows as if shot through withadjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity isonly a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of unverbalizedsensation which it still embodies. 

Far back as we go, the flux, both as a whole and in its parts, is thatof things conjunct and separated. The great continua of time, space, and the self envelop everything, betwixt them, and flow togetherwithout interfering. The things that they envelop come as separate insome ways and as continuous in others. Some sensations coalesce withsome ideas, and others are irreconcilable. Qualities compenetrate onespace, or exclude each other from it. They cling together persistentlyin groups that move as units, or else they separate. Their changes areabrupt or discontinuous; and their kinds resemble or differ; and, asthey do so, they fall into either even or irregular series. 

In all this the continuities and the discontinuities are absolutelyco-ordinate matters of immediate feeling. The conjunctions areas primordial elements of 'fact' as are the distinctions anddisjunctions. In the same act by which I feel that this passing minuteis a new pulse of my life, I feel that the old life continues into it, and the feeling of continuance in no wise jars upon the simultaneousfeeling of a novelty. They, too, compenetrate harmoniously. Prepositions, copulas, and conjunctions, 'is, ' 'isn't, ' 'then, ''before, ' 'in, ' 'on, ' 'beside, ' 'between, ' 'next, ' 'like, ' 'unlike, ''as, ' 'but, ' flower out of the stream of pure experience, the streamof concretes or the sensational stream, as naturally as nouns andadjectives do, and they melt into it again as fluidly when we applythem to a new portion of the stream. 

II

If now we ask why we must translate experience from a more concreteor pure into a more intellectualized form, filling it with ever moreabounding conceptual distinctions, rationalism and naturalism givedifferent replies. 

The rationalistic answer is that the theoretic life is absolute andits interests imperative; that to understand is simply the duty ofman; and that who questions this need not be argued with, for by thefact of arguing he gives away his case. 

The naturalist answer is that the environment kills as well assustains us, and that the tendency of raw experience to extinguish theexperient himself is lessened just in the degree in which the elementsin it that have a practical bearing upon life are analyzed out of thecontinuum and verbally fixed and coupled together, so that we may knowwhat is in the wind for us and get ready to react in time. Had pureexperience, the naturalist says, been always perfectly healthy, therewould never have arisen the necessity of isolating or verbalizingany of its terms. We should just have experienced inarticulately andunintellectually enjoyed. This leaning on 'reaction' in the naturalistaccount implies that, whenever we intellectualize a relatively pureexperience, we ought to do so for the sake of redescending to thepurer or more concrete level again; and that if an intellect staysaloft among its abstract terms and generalized relations, and does notreinsert itself with its conclusions into some particular point ofthe immediate stream of life, it fails to finish out its function andleaves its normal race unrun. 

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

If the contrasted tendencies which I thus designate as naturalisticand rationalistic are not recognized by the reader, perhaps an examplewill make them more concrete. Mr. Bradley, for instance, is anultra-rationalist. He admits that our intellect is primarilypractical, but says that, for philosophers, the practical need issimply Truth. [1] Truth, moreover, must be assumed 'consistent. 'Immediate experience has to be broken into subjects and qualities, terms and relations, to be understood as truth at all. Yet whenso broken it is less consistent than ever. Taken raw, it is allundistinguished. Intellectualized, it is all distinction withoutoneness. 'Such an arrangement may _work_, but the theoretic problem isnot solved' (p. 23). The question is, '_How_ the diversity can existin harmony with the oneness' (p. 118). To go back to pure experienceis unavailing. 'Mere feeling gives no answer to our riddle' (p. 104). Even if your intuition is a fact, it is not an _understanding_. 'It isa mere experience, and furnishes no consistent view' (pp. 108-109). The experiences offered as facts or truths 'I find that my intellectrejects because they contradict themselves. They offer a complex ofdiversities conjoined in a way which it feels is not its way and whichit cannot repeat as its own. . . . For to be satisfied, my intellect mustunderstand, and it cannot understand by taking a congeries inthe lump' (p. 570). So Mr. Bradley, in the sole interests of'understanding' (as he conceives that function), turns his back onfinite

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

experience forever. Truth must lie in the opposite direction, the direction of the absolute; and this kind of rationalism andnaturalism, or (as I will now call it) pragmatism, walk thenceforwardupon opposite paths. For the one, those intellectual products are mosttrue which, turning their face towards the absolute, come nearest tosymbolizing its ways of uniting the many and the one. For the other, those are most true which most successfully dip back into the finitestream of feeling and grow most easily confluent with some particularwave or wavelet. Such confluence not only proves the intellectualoperation to have been true (as an addition may 'prove' that asubtraction is already rightly performed), but it constitutes, according to pragmatism, all that we mean by calling it true. Only inso far as they lead us, successfully or unsuccessfully, into sensibleexperience again, are our abstracts and universals true or false atall. 

III

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

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

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

In arguing this dialectic thesis, one must avoid slipping from thelogical into the physical point of view. It would be easy, in takinga concrete example to fix one's ideas by, to choose one in which theletter _M_ should stand for a collective noun of some sort, whichnoun, being related to _L_ by one of its parts and to _N_ by another, would inwardly be two things when it stood outwardly in bothrelations. Thus, one might say: 'David Hume, who weighed so many stoneby his body, influences posterity by his doctrine. ' The body and thedoctrine are two things, between which our finite minds can discoverno real sameness, though the same name covers both of them. And then, one might continue: 'Only an absolute is capable of uniting such anon-identity. ' We must, I say, avoid this sort of example; for thedialectic insight, if true at all, must apply to terms and relationsuniversally. It must be true of abstract units as well as of nounscollective; and if we prove it by concrete examples, we must take thesimplest, so as to avoid irrelevant material suggestions. 

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

Candidly, I can think of no other reason than this for the dialecticconclusion![1] for, if we think, not of our words, but of any simpleconcrete matter which they may be held to signify, the experienceitself belies the paradox asserted. We use indeed two separateconcepts in analyzing our object, but we know them all the while to bebut substitutional, and that the _M_ in _L--M_ and the _M_ in _M--N__mean_ (_i. E. _, are capable of leading to and terminating in) oneself-same piece, _M_, of sensible experience. This persistent identityof certain units, or emphases, or points, or objects, or members--callthem what you will--of the experience-continuum, is just one ofthose conjunctive features of it, on which I am obliged to insist soemphatically. For samenesses are parts of experience's indefeasiblestructure. When I hear a bell-stroke and, as life flows on, itsafter-image dies away, I still hark back to it as 'that same

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

bell-stroke. ' When I see a thing _M_, with _L_ to the left of it and_N_ to the right of it, I see it _as_ one _M_; and if you tell me Ihave had to 'take' it twice, I reply that if I 'took' it a thousandtimes, I should still _see_ it as a unit. [1] Its unity is aboriginal, just as the multiplicity of my successive takings is aboriginal. Itcomes unbroken as _that M_, as a singular which I encounter; they comebroken, as _those_ takings, as my plurality of operations. The unityand the separateness are strictly co-ordinate. I do not easily fathomwhy my opponents should find the separateness so much more easilyunderstandable that they must needs infect the whole of finiteexperience with it, and relegate the unity (now taken as a barepostulate and no longer as a thing positively perceivable) to theregion of the absolute's mysteries. I do not easily fathom this, Isay, for the said opponents are above mere verbal quibbling; yet allthat I can catch in their talk is the substitution of what is true ofcertain words for what is true of what they signify. They stay withthe words, --not returning to the stream of life whence all the meaningof them came, and which is always ready to reabsorb them. 

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

IV

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

Of course, if true, this cuts off radical empiricism without even ashilling. Radical empiricism takes conjunctive relations at theirface-value, holding them to be as real as the terms united by them. The world it represents as a collection, some parts of which areconjunctively and others disjunctively related. Two parts, themselvesdisjoined, may nevertheless hang together by intermediaries with whichthey are severally connected, and the whole world eventually may hangtogether similarly, inasmuch as _some_ path of conjunctive transitionby which to pass from one of its parts to another may always bediscernible. Such determinately various hanging-together may be called_concatenated_ union, to distinguish it from the 'through-and-through'type of union, 'each in all and all in each' (union of _totalconflux_, as one might call it), which monistic systems hold to obtainwhen things are taken in their absolute reality. In a concatenatedworld a partial conflux often is experienced. Our concepts and oursensations are confluent; successive states of the same ego, andfeelings of the same body are confluent. Where the experience is notof conflux, it may be of conterminousness (things with but one thingbetween); or of contiguousness (nothing between); or of likeness; orof nearness; or of simultaneousness; or of in-ness; or of on-ness; orof for-ness; or of simple with-ness; or even of mere and-ness, whichlast relation would make of however disjointed a world otherwise, atany rate for that occasion a universe 'of discourse. ' Now Mr. Bradleytells us that none of these relations, as we actually experience them, can possibly be real. [1] My next duty, accordingly, must be to rescueradical empiricism from Mr. Bradley. Fortunately, as it seems to me, his general contention, that the very notion of relation is

[Footnote 1: Here again the reader must beware of slipping fromlogical into phenomenal considerations. It may well be that we_attribute_ a certain relation falsely, because the circumstances ofthe case, being complex, have deceived us. At a railway station wemay take our own train, and not the one that fills our window, to bemoving. We here put motion in the wrong place in the world, but in itsoriginal place the motion is a part of reality. What Mr. Bradleymeans is nothing like this, but rather that such things as motionare nowhere real, and that, even in their aboriginal and empiricallyincorrigible seats, relations are impossible of comprehension. ]

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

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

V

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

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

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

Mr. Bradley now affirms that such external relations as thespace-relations which we here talk of must hold of entirely differentsubjects from those of which the absence of such relations mighta moment previously have been plausibly asserted. Not only is the_situation_ different when the book is on the table, but the _bookitself_ is different as a book, from what it was when it was off thetable. He admits that 'such external relations

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

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

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

are altered; for the relations, it is said, are but external. But Ireply that, if so, I cannot _understand_ the leaving by the terms ofone set of relations and their adoption of another fresh set. Theprocess and its result to the terms, if they contribute nothing to it[_surely they contribute to it all there is 'of' it!_] seem irrationalthroughout. [_If 'irrational' here means simply 'non-rational, 'or non-deducible from the essence of either term singly, it is noreproach; if it means 'contradicting' such essence, Mr. Bradley shouldshow wherein and how_. ] But, if they contribute anything, they mustsurely be affected internally. [_Why so, if they contribute only theirsurface? In such relations as 'on, ' 'a foot away, ' 'between, ' 'next, 'etc. , only surfaces are in question_. ] . . . If the terms contributeanything whatever, then the terms are affected [_inwardly altered?_]by the arrangement. . . . That for working purposes we treat, and do wellto treat, some relations as external merely, I do not deny, and thatof course is not the question at issue here. That question is . . . Whether in the end and in principle a mere external relation [_i. E. , a relation which can change without forcing its terms to change theirnature simultaneously_] is possible and forced on us by the facts. '[1]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI

Mr. Bradley's understanding shows the most extraordinary power ofperceiving separations and the most extraordinary impotence incomprehending conjunctions. One would naturally say 'neither or both, 'but not so Mr. Bradley. When a common man analyzes certain _whats_from out the stream of experience, he understands their distinctness_as thus isolated_. But this does not prevent him from equally wellunderstanding their combination with each other as _originallyexperienced in the concrete_, or their confluence with new sensibleexperiences in which they recur as 'the same. ' Returning into thestream of sensible presentation, nouns and adjectives, and _thats_ andabstract _whats_, grow confluent again, and the word 'is' namesall these experiences of conjunction. Mr. Bradley understands theisolation of the abstracts, but to understand the combination is tohim impossible. [1] 'To understand a complex _AB_, ' he

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

says, 'I must begin with _A_ or _B_. And beginning, say with _A_, ifI then merely find _B_, I have either lost _A_, or I have got beside_A_, [_the word 'beside' seems here vital, as meaning a conjunction'external' and therefore unintelligible_] something else, and inneither case have I understood. [1] For my intellect cannot simplyunite a diversity, nor has it in itself any form or way oftogetherness, and you gain nothing if, beside _A_ and _B_, you offerme their conjunction in fact. For to my intellect that is no morethan another external element. And "facts, " once for all, are for myintellect not true unless they satisfy it. . . . The intellect has in itsnature no principle of mere togetherness' (pp. 570, 572). 

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

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

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

Yet he never explains what the intellectual transitions would be likein case we had them. He only defines them negatively--they are notspatial, temporal, predicative, or causal; or qualitatively orotherwise serial; or in any way relational as we naïvely tracerelations, for relations _separate_ terms, and need themselves to behooked on _ad infinitum_. The nearest approach he makes to describinga truly intellectual transition is where he speaks of _A_ and _B_as being 'united, each from its own nature, in a whole which is thenature of both alike' (p. 570). But this (which, _pace_ Mr. Bradley, seems exquisitely analogous to 'taking a congeries in a lump, ' ifnot to 'swamping') suggests nothing but that _conflux_ which pureexperience so abundantly offers, as when 'space, ' 'white, ' and 'sweet'are confluent in a 'lump of sugar, ' or kinesthetic, dermal, andoptical sensations confluent in 'my hand. '[1] All that I can verifyin the transitions which Mr. Bradley's intellect desiderates asits _proprius motus_ is a reminiscence of these and other sensibleconjunctions (especially space-conjunctions), [Footnote 1: How meaningless is the contention that in such wholes(or in 'book-on-table, ' 'watch-in-pocket, ' etc. ) the relation is anadditional entity _between_ the terms, needing itself to be relatedagain to each! Both Bradley (_Appearance and Reality_, pp. 32-33) andRoyce (_The World and the Individual_, i, 128) lovingly repeat thispiece of profundity. ]

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

Polemic writing like this is odious; but with absolutism in possessionin so many quarters, omission to defend my radical empiricism againstits best known champion would count as either superficiality orinability. I have to conclude that its dialectic has not invalidatedin the least degree the usual conjunctions by which the world, asexperienced, hangs so variously together. In particular it leaves anempirical theory of knowledge intact, and lets us continue to believewith common sense that one object _may_ be known, if we have anyground for thinking that it _is_ known, to many knowers. 

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

APPENDIX B

THE EXPERIENCE OF ACTIVITY[1]

. . . Mr. Bradley calls the question of activity a scandal tophilosophy, and if one turns to the current literature of thesubject--his own writings included--one easily gathers what he means. The opponents cannot even understand one another. Mr. Bradley says toMr. Ward: 'I do not care what your oracle is, and your preposterouspsychology may here be gospel if you please; . . . But if the revelationdoes contain a meaning, I will commit myself to this: either theoracle is so confused that its signification is not discoverable, or, upon the other hand, if it can be pinned down to any definitestatement, then that statement will be false. '[2] Mr. Ward in turnsays of Mr. Bradley: 'I cannot even imagine the state of mind to whichhis description applies. . . . It reads like an unintentional travesty ofHerbartian Psychology by one who has tried to improve upon it withoutbeing at the pains to master it. ' Münsterberg excludes a view opposedto his own by saying that with any one who holds it a _verständigung_with him is '_grundsätzlich ausgeschlossen_'; and Royce, [Footnote 1: President's Address before the American PsychologicalAssociation, December, 1904. Reprinted from the _PsychologicalReview_, vol. Xii, 1905, with slight verbal revision. ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now it is obvious that we are tempted to affirm activity whereverwe find anything _going on_. Taken in the broadest sense, anyapprehension of something _doing_, is an experience of activity. Wereour world describable only by the words 'nothing happening, ' 'nothingchanging, ' 'nothing doing, ' we should unquestionably call it an'inactive' world. Bare activity, then, as we may call it, means thebare fact of event or change. 'Change taking place' is a uniquecontent of experience, one of those 'conjunctive' objects whichradical empiricism seeks so earnestly to rehabilitate and preserve. The sense of activity is thus in the broadest and vaguest waysynonymous with the sense of 'life. ' We should feel our own subjectivelife at least, even in noticing and proclaiming an otherwise inactiveworld. Our own reaction on its monotony would be the one thingexperienced there in the form of something coming to pass. 

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

[Footnote 1: _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, vol. Ii, p. 245. One thinksnaturally of the peripatetic _actus primus_ and _actus secundus_here. ]

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

Bare activity would thus be predicable, though there were no definitedirection, no actor, and no aim. Mere restless zigzag movement, or awild _ideenflucht_, or _rhapsodie der wahrnehmungen_, as Kant wouldsay, would constitute an active as distinguished from an inactiveworld. 

But in this actual world of ours, as it is given, a part at least ofthe activity comes with definite direction; it comes with desireand sense of goal; it comes complicated with resistances which itovercomes or succumbs to, and with the efforts which the feeling ofresistance so often provokes; and it is in complex experiences likethese that the notions of distinct agents, and of passivity as opposedto activity arise. Here also the notion of causal efficacy comesto birth. Perhaps the most elaborate work ever done in descriptivepsychology has been the analysis by various recent writers of the morecomplex activity-situations. In their descriptions, exquisitely subtlesome of them, [1] the activity appears as the _gestalt-qualität_

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

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

All the descriptions have to trace familiar outlines, and to usefamiliar terms. The activity is, for example, [Footnote 1: I ought myself to cry _peccavi_, having been a voluminoussinner in my own chapter on the will. ]

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

Whosoever describes an experience in such terms as these, describes anexperience _of_ activity. If the word have any meaning, it must denotewhat there is found. _There_ is complete activity in its original andfirst intention. What it is 'known-as' is what there appears. Theexperiencer of such a situation possesses all that the idea contains. He feels the tendency, the obstacle, the will, the strain, thetriumph, or the passive giving up, just as he feels the time, thespace, the swiftness or intensity, the movement, the weight andcolor, the pain and pleasure, the complexity, or whatever remainingcharacters the situation may involve. He goes through all that evercan be imagined where activity is supposed. If we suppose activitiesto go on outside of our experience, it is in forms like these that wemust suppose them, or else give them some other name; for the word'activity' has no imaginable content whatever save these experiencesof process, obstruction, striving, strain, or release, ultimate_qualia_ as they are of the life given us to be known. 

Were this the end of the matter, one might think that whenever we hadsuccessfully lived through an activity-situation we should have to bepermitted, without provoking contradiction, to say that we hadbeen really active, that we had met real resistance and had reallyprevailed. Lotze somewhere says that to be an entity all that isnecessary is to _gelten_ as an entity, to operate, or be felt, experienced, recognized, or in any way realized, as such. In ouractivity-experiences the activity assuredly fulfils Lotze's demand. It makes itself _gelten_. It is witnessed at its work. No matter whatactivities there may really be in this extraordinary universe of ours, it is impossible for us to conceive of any one of them being eitherlived through or authentically known otherwise than in this dramaticshape of something sustaining a felt purpose against felt obstaclesand overcoming or being overcome. What 'sustaining' means here isclear to any one who has lived through the experience, but to no oneelse; just as 'loud, ' 'red, ' 'sweet, ' mean something only to beingswith ears, eyes, and tongues. The _percipi_ in these originals ofexperience is the _esse_; the curtain is the picture. If there isanything hiding in the background, it ought not to be called activity, but should get itself another name. 

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

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

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

mere descriptive analysis of any one of our activity-experiences isnot the whole story, that there is something still to tell _about_them that has led such able writers to conceive of a _Simon-pure_activity, of an activity _an sich_, that does, and doesn't merelyappear to us to do, and compared with whose real doing all thisphenomenal activity is but a specious sham. 

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

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

We must not forget, namely, in talking of the ultimate character ofour activity-experiences, that each of them is but a portion of awider world, one link in the vast chain of processes of experienceout of which history is made. Each partial process, to him who livesthrough it, defines itself by its origin and its goal; but to anobserver with a wider mind-span who should live outside of it, that goal would appear but as a provisional halting-place, and thesubjectively felt activity would be seen to continue into objectiveactivities that led far beyond. We thus acquire a habit, in discussingactivity-experiences, of defining them by their relation to somethingmore. If an experience be one of narrow span, it will be mistaken asto what activity it is and whose. You think that _you_ are actingwhile you are only obeying some one's push. You think you are doing_this_, but you are doing something of which you do not dream. Forinstance, you think you are but drinking this glass; but you arereally creating the liver-cirrhosis that will end your days. You thinkyou are just driving this bargain, but, as Stevenson says somewhere, you are laying down a link in the policy of mankind. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The like is true if nerve-cells be the agents. The activity of anerve-cell must be conceived of as a tendency of exceedingly shortreach, an 'impulse' barely spanning the way to the next cell--forsurely that amount of actual 'process' must be 'experienced' by thecells if what happens between them is to deserve the name of activityat all. But here again the gross resultant, as _I_ perceive it, isindifferent to the agents, and neither wished or willed or foreseen. Their being agents now congruous with my will gives me no guaranteethat like results will recur again from their activity. In point offact, all sorts of other results do occur. My mistakes, impotencies, perversions, mental obstructions, and frustrations generally, are alsoresults of the activity of cells. Altho these are letting me lecturenow, on other occasions they make me do things that I would willinglynot do. 

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

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

Naïvely we believe, and humanly and dramatically we like to believe, that activities both of wider and of narrower span are at work in lifetogether, that both are real, and that the long-span tendencies yokethe others in their service, encouraging them in the right direction, and damping them when they tend in other ways. But how to representclearly the _modus operandi_ of such steering of small tendenciesby large ones is a problem which metaphysical thinkers will have toruminate upon for many years to come. Even if such control shouldeventually grow clearly picturable, the question how far it issuccessfully exerted in this actual world can be answered only byinvestigating the details of fact. No philosophic knowledge of thegeneral nature and constitution of tendencies, or of the relationof larger to smaller ones, can help us to predict which of all thevarious competing tendencies that interest us in this universe arelikeliest to prevail. We know as an empirical fact that far-seeingtendencies often carry out their purpose, but we know also that theyare often defeated by the failure of some contemptibly small processon which success depends. A little thrombus in a statesman's meningealartery will throw an empire out of gear. Therefore I cannot even hintat any solution of the pragmatic issue. I have only wished to show youthat that issue is what gives the real interest to all inquiries intowhat kinds of activity may be real. Are the forces that really act inthe world more foreseeing or more blind? As between 'our' activitiesas 'we' experience them, and those of our ideas, or of ourbrain-cells, the issue is well defined. 

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

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

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

If there _be_ real creative activities in being, radical empiricismmust say, somewhere they must be immediately lived. Somewhere the_that_ of efficacious causing and the _what_ of it must be experiencedin one, just as the what and the that of 'cold' are experienced in onewhenever a man has the sensation of cold here and now. It boots not tosay that our sensations are fallible. They are indeed; but to see thethermometer contradict us when we say 'it is cold' does not abolishcold as a specific nature from the universe. Cold is in the arcticcircle if not here. Even so, to feel that our train is moving when thetrain beside our window moves, to see the moon through a telescopecome twice as near, or to see two pictures as one solid when we lookthrough a stereoscope at them, leaves motion, nearness, and soliditystill in being--if not here, yet each in its proper seat elsewhere. And wherever the seat of real causality _is_, as ultimately known 'fortrue' (in nerve-processes, if you will, that cause our feelings ofactivity as well as the movements which these seem to prompt), aphilosophy of pure experience can consider the real causation as noother _nature_ of thing than that which even in our most erroneousexperiences appears to be at work. Exactly what appears there is whatwe _mean_ by working, tho we may later come to learn that working wasnot exactly _there_. Sustaining, persevering, striving, paying witheffort as we go, hanging on, and finally achieving our intention--this_is_ action, this _is_ effectuation in the only shape in which, bya pure experience-philosophy, the whereabouts of it anywhere can bediscussed. Here is creation in its first intention, here is causalityat work. [1] To treat this offhand as the bare illusory

[Footnote 1: Let me not be told that this contradicts a former articleof mine, 'Does consciousness exist?' in the _Journal of Philosophy_for September 1, 1904 (see especially page 489), in which it was saidthat while 'thoughts' and 'things' have the same natures, the natureswork 'energetically' on each other in the things (fire burns, waterwets, etc. ), but not in the thoughts. Mental activity-trains arecomposed of thoughts, yet their members do work on each other: theycheck, sustain, and introduce. They do so when the activity is merelyassociational as well as when effort is there. But, and this is myreply, they do so by other parts of their nature than those thatenergize physically. One thought in every developed activity-series isa desire or thought of purpose, and all the other thoughts acquire afeeling tone from their relation of harmony or oppugnancy to this. The interplay of these secondary tones (among which 'interest, ''difficulty, ' and 'effort' figure) runs the drama in the mentalseries. In what we term the physical drama these qualities playabsolutely no part. The subject needs careful working out; but I cansee no inconsistency. ]

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

[Footnote 1: I have found myself more than once accused in print ofbeing the assertor of a metaphysical principle of activity. Sinceliterary misunderstandings retard the settlement of problems, I shouldlike to say that such an interpretation of the pages I have publishedon effort and on will is absolutely foreign to what I meant toexpress. I owe all my doctrines on this subject to Renouvier; andRenouvier, as I understand him, is (or at any rate then was) an outand out phenomenist, a denier of 'forces' in the most strenuoussense. Single clauses in my writing, or sentences read out of theirconnexion, may possibly have been compatible with a transphenomenalprinciple of energy; but I defy any one to show a single sentencewhich, taken with its context, should be naturally held to advocatethat view. The misinterpretation probably arose at first from myhaving defended (after Renouvier) the indeterminism of our efforts. 'Free will' was supposed by my critics to involve a supernaturalagent. As a matter of plain history, the only 'free will' I haveever thought of defending is the character of novelty in freshactivity-situations. If an activity-process is the form of a whole'field of consciousness, ' and if each field of consciousness is notonly in its totality unique (as is now commonly admitted), but hasits elements unique (since in that situation they are all dyed inthe total), then novelty is perpetually entering the world and whathappens there is not pure _repetition_, as the dogma of the literaluniformity of nature requires. Activity-situations come, in short, each with an original touch. A 'principle' of free will, if there wereone, would doubtless manifest itself in such phenomena, but I neversaw, nor do I now see, what the principle could do except rehearse thephenomenon beforehand, or why it ever should be invoked. ]

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

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

My colleague and master, Josiah Royce, in a page of his review ofStout's _Analytic Psychology_, in _Mind_ for 1897, has some fine wordson this point with which I cordially agree. I cannot agree with hisseparating the notion of efficacy from that of activity altogether(this I understand to be one contention of his), for activities areefficacious whenever they are real activities at all. But the innernature both of efficacy and of activity are superficial problems, Iunderstand Royce to say; and the only point for us in solving themwould be their possible use in helping us to solve the far deeperproblem of the course and meaning of the world of life. Life, saysour colleague, is full of significance, of meaning, of success and ofdefeat, of hoping and of striving, of longing, of desire, and of innervalue. It is a total presence that embodies worth. To live our ownlives better in this presence is the true reason why we wish to knowthe elements of things; so even we psychologists must end on thispragmatic note. 

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

APPENDIX C

ON THE NOTION OF REALITY AS CHANGING

In my _Principles of Psychology_ (vol. Ii, p. 646) I gave the name ofthe 'axiom of skipped intermediaries and transferred relations' to aserial principle of which the foundation of logic, the _dictum de omniet nullo_ (or, as I expressed it, the rule that what is of a kind isof that kind's kind), is the most familiar instance. More than themore is more than the less, equals of equals are equal, sames of thesame are the same, the cause of a cause is the cause of its effects, are other examples of this serial law. Altho it applies infalliblyand without restriction throughout certain abstract series, where the'sames, ' 'causes, ' etc. , spoken of, are 'pure, ' and have no propertiessave their sameness, causality, etc. , it cannot be applied offhand toconcrete objects with numerous properties and relations, for it ishard to trace a straight line of sameness, causation, or whatever itmay be, through a series of such objects without swerving into some'respect' where the relation, as pursued originally, no longer holds:the objects have so many 'aspects' that we are constantly deflectedfrom our original direction, and find, we know not why, that we arefollowing something different from what we started with. Thus a cat isin a sense the same as a mouse-trap, and a mouse-trap the same as abird-cage; but in no valuable or easily intelligible sense is a catthe same as a bird-cage. Commodore Perry was in a sense the causeof the new régime in Japan, and the new régime was the cause of therussian Douma; but it would hardly profit us to insist on holding toPerry as the cause of the Douma: the terms have grown too remote tohave any real or practical relation to each other. In every series ofreal terms, not only do the terms themselves and their associatesand environments change, but we change, and their _meaning_ forus changes, so that new kinds of sameness and types of causationcontinually come into view and appeal to our interest. Our earlierlines, having grown irrelevant, are then dropped. The old terms can nolonger be substituted nor the relations 'transferred, ' because of somany new dimensions into which experience has opened. Instead of astraight line, it now follows a zigzag; and to keep it straight, onemust do violence to its spontaneous development. Not that one mightnot possibly, by careful seeking (tho I doubt it), _find_ some line innature along which terms literally the same, or causes causal in thesame way, might be serially strung without limit, if one's interestlay in such finding. Within such lines our axioms might hold, causesmight cause their effect's effects, etc. ; but such lines themselveswould, if found, only be partial members of a vast natural network, within the other lines of which you could not say, in any sense thata wise man or a sane man would ever think of, in any sense that wouldnot be concretely _silly_, that the principle of skipt intermediariesstill held good. In the _practical_ world, the world whosesignificances we follow, sames of the same are certainly not sames ofone another; and things constantly cause other things without beingheld responsible for everything of which those other things arecauses. 

Professor Bergson, believing as he does in a heraclitean 'devenirréel, ' ought, if I rightly understand him, positively to deny that inthe actual world the logical axioms hold good without qualification. Not only, according to him, do terms change, so that after a certaintime the very elements of things are no longer what they were, butrelations also change, so as no longer to obtain in the same identicalway between the new things that have succeeded upon the old ones. Ifthis were really so, then however indefinitely sames might stillbe substituted for sames in the logical world of nothing but puresameness, in the world of real operations every line of samenessactually started and followed up would eventually give out, and ceaseto be traceable any farther. Sames of the same, in such a world, willnot always (or rather, in a strict sense will never) be the sameas one another, for in such a world there _is_ no literal or idealsameness among numerical differents. Nor in such a world will it betrue that the cause of the cause is unreservedly the cause ofthe effect; for if we follow lines of real causation, instead ofcontenting ourselves with Hume's and Kant's eviscerated schematism, wefind that remoter effects are seldom aimed at by causal intentions, [1]that no one kind of causal activity continues indefinitely, and thatthe principle of skipt intermediaries can be talked of only _inabstracto_. [2]

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

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

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

with an express doctrine of 'synechism' or continuity, the twodoctrines merging into the higher synthesis on which he bestows thename of 'agapasticism (_loc. Cit. _, iii, 188), which means exactly thesame thing as Bergson's 'évolution créatrice. ' Novelty, as empiricallyfound, doesn't arrive by jumps and jolts, it leaks in insensibly, foradjacents in experience are always interfused, the smallest real datumbeing both a coming and a going, and even numerical distinctness beingrealized effectively only after a concrete interval has passed. Theintervals also deflect us from the original paths of direction, andall the old identities at last give out, for the fatally continuousinfiltration of otherness warps things out of every original rut. Just so, in a curve, the same direction is _never_ followed, and theconception of it as a myriad-sided polygon falsifies it bysupposing it to do so for however short a time. Peirce speaks of an'infinitesimal' tendency to diversification. The mathematical notionof an infinitesimal contains, in truth, the whole paradox of the sameand yet the nascent other, of an identity that won't _keep_ except sofar as it keeps _failing_, that won't _transfer_, any more than theserial relations in question transfer, when you apply them to realityinstead of applying them to concepts alone. 

A friend of mine has an idea, which illustrates on such a magnifiedscale the impossibility of tracing the same line through reality, thatI will mention it here. He thinks that nothing more is needed to makehistory 'scientific' than to get the content of any two epochs (saythe end of the thirteenth and the end of the nineteenth century)accurately defined, then accurately to define the direction of thechange that led from the one epoch into the other, and finally toprolong the line of that direction into the future. So prolonging theline, he thinks, we ought to be able to define the actual stateof things at any future date we please. We all feel the essentialunreality of such a conception of 'history' as this; but if such asynechistic pluralism as Peirce, Bergson, and I believe in, be whatreally exists, every phenomenon of development, even the simplest, would prove equally rebellious to our science should the latterpretend to give us literally accurate instead of approximate, orstatistically generalized, pictures of the development of reality. 

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

INDEX

INDEX TO THE LECTURES

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

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

 Achilles and tortoise, 228, 255. 

 All-form, the, 34, 324. 

 Analogy, 8, 151 f. 

 Angels, 164. 

 Antinomies, 231, 239. 

 ARISTIDES, 304. 

 BAILEY, S. , 5. 

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

 'Between, ' 70. 

 Block-universe, 310, 328. 

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

 Brain, 160. 

 CAIRD, E. , 89, 95, 137. 

 CATO, 304. 

 Causation, 258. See Influence. 

 Change, 231, 253. 

 CHESTERTON, 203, 303. 

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

 Concepts, 217, 234 f. 

 Conceptual method, 243 f. , 246, 253. 

 Concrete reality, 283, 286. 

 Confluence, 326. 

 Conflux, 257. 

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

 Continuity, 256 f. , 325. 

 Contradiction, in Hegel, 89 f. 

 Creation, 29, 119. 

 Death, 303. 

 Degrees, 74. 

 Dialectic method, 89. 

 Difference, 257 f. 

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

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

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

 Earth-soul, 152 f. 

 Elan vital, 262. 

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

 Endosmosis, 257. 

 Epithets. See Diminutive. 

 Evil, 310. 

 Experience, 312; religious, 307. 

 Extremes, 67, 74. 

 'Faith-ladder, ' 328. 

 'Fall, ' the, 119, 310. 

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

 FERRIER, Jas. , 13. 

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

 Finiteness, of God, 111, 124, 294. 

 Foreignness, 31. 

 German manner of philosophizing, 17. 

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

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

 HALDANE, R. B. , 138. 

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

 HODGSON, S. H. , 282. 

 Horse, 265. 

 HUME, 19, 267. 

 Idealism, 36. See Absolutism. 

 Identity, 93. 

 Immortality, Fechner's view of, 171. 

 'Independent' beings, 55, 58. 

 Indeterminism, 77. 

 Infinity, 229. 

 Influence, 258, 561. 

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

 Intellectualism, vicious, 60, 218. 

 Intellectualist logic, 216, 259, 261. 

 Intellectualist method, 291. 

 Interaction, 56. 

 Intimacy, 31. 

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

 JACKS, L. P. , 35. 

 JOACHIM, H. , 121, 141. 

 JONES, H. , 52. 

 KANT, 19, 199, 238, 240. 

 LEIBNITZ, 119. 

 Life, 523. 

 Log, 323. 

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

 LOTZE, 55, 120. 

 LUTHER, 304. 

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

 Manyness in oneness, 322. See Compounding. 

 Mental chemistry, 185. 

 MILL, J. S. , 242, 260. 

 Mind, dust theory, 189. 

 Mind, the eternal, 137. See Absolute. 

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

 Monomaniacs, 78. 

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

 MYERS, F. W. H. , 315. 

 Nature, 21, 286. 

 Negation, 93 f. ; double, 102. 

 Newton, 260. 

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

 Oxford, _3_, 313, 331. 

 Pantheism, 24, 28. 

 PAULSEN, 18, 22. 

 Personality, divided, 298. 

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

 Philosophies, their types, 23, 31. 

 PHOCION, 304. 

 Plant-soul, 165 f. 

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

 Polytheism, 310. 

 Practical reason, 329. 

 Psychic synthesis, 185. See Compounding. 

 Psychical research, 299. 

 'Quâ, ' 39, 47, 267, 270. 

 'Quatenus, ' 47, 267. 

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

 Rationality, 81, 112 f. , 319 f. 

 Reality, 262 f. , 264, 283 f. 

 Reason, 286, 312. 

 Relating, 7. 

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

 Religious experiences, 305 f. 

 RITCHIE, 72. 

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

 Same, 269, 281. 

 Savage philosophy, 21. 

 Science, 145. 

 Sensations, 279. 

 Socialism, 78. 

 SOCRATES, 284. 

 Soul, 199, 209. 

 'Some, ' 79. 

 Sphinx, 22. 

 SPINOZA, 47. 

 Spiritualistic philosophy, 23. 

 Sugar, 220, 232. 

 Synthesis, psychic. See Compounding. 

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

 Theism, 24. 

 Thick, the, 136. 

 'Thickness' of Fechner's philosophy, 144. 

 Thin, the, 136. 

 Thinness of the current transcendentalism, 144, 174 f. 

 Time, 232. 

 Units of reality, 287. 

 Vision, in philosophy, 20. 

 WELLS, H. G. , 78. 

 Will to believe, 328. 

 Witnesses, as implied in experience, 200. 

 WUNDT, W. , 185. 

 ZENO, 228.