I

THE PRELIMINARY QUESTION

The living problems of any science arise out of two sources: (1) out of what men may think of it, in view of its nature and claims, and (2) the problems that at any period are vital to it, and in the solution of which it realizes the purpose of its existence. Now if we distinguish the body of the sciences which deal with aspects of the world's phenomena—and here I would include both the psychic and the physical—from metaphysics, which professes to go behind the phenomenon and determine the world in terms of its inner, and, therefore, ultimate reality, it may be truly said of the body of the sciences that they are in a position to disregard in a great measure questions that arise out of the first source, inasmuch as the data from which they make their departure are obvious to common observation. Our world is all around us, and its phenomena either press upon us or are patent to our observation. Lying thus within the field of observation, it does not occur to the average mind to question either the legitimacy or the possibility of that effort of reflection which is devoted to their investigation and interpretation. Metaphysics, however, enjoys no such immunity as this, but its claims are liable to be met with skepticism or denial at the outset, and this is due partly to the nature of its initial claims, and partly to the fact that its real data are less open to observation than are those of the sciences. I say partly to the nature of the initial claims of metaphysics, for it is characteristic of metaphysics that it refuses to regard the distinction between phenomena and ground or inner nature, on which the sciences rest, as final, and is committed from the outset to the claim that the real is in its inner nature one and to be interpreted in the light of, or in terms of, its inner unity; whereas, science has so indoctrinated the modern mind with the supposition that only the outer movements of things are open to knowledge, while their inner and real nature must forever remain inaccessible to our powers; I say that the modern mind has been so imbued with this pretension as to have almost completely forgotten the fact that the distinction of phenomenon and ground is one of science's own making. Neither the plain man nor the cultured man, if he happens not to be tinctured with science, finds his world a duality. The things he deals with are the realities, and it is only when his naïve realism begins to break down before the complex demands of his growing life, that the thought occurs to him that his world may be more complex than he has dreamed. It is clear, then, that the distinction of our world into phenomena and ground, on which science so largely rests, is a first product of reflection, and not a fact of observation at all.

If this be the case, it may be possible and even necessary for reflection at some stage to transcend this distinction. At least, there can be no reason except an arbitrary one for taking this first step of reflection to be a finality. And there would be the same justification for a second step that would transcend this dualism, as for the initial step out of which the distinction arose; provided, it should be found that the initial distinction does not supply an adequate basis for a rational interpretation of the world that can be taken as final. Now, it is precisely because the dualistic distinction of the sciences does fail in this regard, that a further demand for a reflective transformation of the data arises. Let us bear in mind that the data of the sciences are not the simple facts of observation, but rather those facts transformed by an act of reflection by virtue of which they become phenomena distinguished from a more fundamental nature on which they depend and which itself is not open to observation. The real data of science are found only when the world of observation has been thus transformed by an act of reflection. If then at some stage in our effort to interpret our world it should become clear that the sciences of phenomena, whatever value their results may possess, are not giving us an interpretation in terms that can be taken as final, and that in order to ground such an interpretation a further transformation of our data becomes necessary, I do not see why any of the sciences should feel that they have cause to demur. In truth, it is out of just such a situation as this that the metaphysical interpretation arises (as I propose very briefly here to show), a situation that supplies a genuine demand in the light of which the effort of metaphysics to understand its world seems to possess as high a claim to legitimacy as that of the sciences of phenomena. Let us take our stand with the plain man or the child, within the world of unmodified observation. The things of observation, in this world, are the realities, and at first we may suppose have undergone little reflective transformation. The first reflective effort to change this world in any way will, no doubt, be an effort to number or count the things that present themselves to observation, and out of this effort will arise the transformation of the world that results from considering it under the concepts and categories of number. In short, to mathematical reflection of this simple sort, the things of observation will resolve themselves into a plurality of countable things, which the numbering reflection becoming explicit in its ordinal and cardinal moments will translate into a system that will be regarded as a whole made up of the sum of its parts. The very first step, then, in the reflective transformation of things resolves them into a dual system, the world conceived as a cardinal whole that is made up of its ordinal parts, and exactly equal to them. This mathematical conception is moreover purely quantitative; involving the exact and stable equivalence of its parts or units and that of the sum of the parts with the whole. Now it is with this purely quantitative transformation that mathematics and the mathematical sciences begin. We may ask, then, why should there be any other than mathematical science,^[1] and what ground can non-mathematical science point to as substantiating its claims? I confess I can see no other final reason than this, that mathematical science does not meet the whole demand we feel obliged to make on our world. If mathematics were asked to vindicate itself, it no doubt would do so by claiming that things present quantitative aspects on which it founds its procedure. In like manner non-mathematical, or, as we may call it, physical or natural science, will seek to substantiate its claims by pointing to certain ultra-quantitative or qualitative aspects of things. It is true that, so far as things are merely numerable, they are purely quantitative; but mathematics abstracts from the content and character of its units and aggregates, which may and do change, so that a relation of stable equivalence is not maintained among them. In fact, the basis of these sciences is found in the tendency of things to be always changing and becoming different from what they were before. The problem of these sciences is how to ground a rational scheme of knowledge in connection with a fickle world like that of qualitative change. It is here that reflection finds its problem, and noticing that the tendency of this world of change is for a to pass into b and thus to lose its own identity, the act of reflection that rationalizes the situation is one that connects a and b by relating them to a common ground x of which they stand as successive manifestations or symbols. X thus supplies the thread of identity that binds the two changes a and b into a relation to which the name causation may be applied. And just as quantitative equivalence is the principle of relationship among the parts of the simple mathematical world, so here in the world of the dynamic or natural sciences, the principle of relation is natural causation.^[2] We find, then, that the non-mathematical sciences rest on a basis that is constituted by a second act of reflection; one that translates our world into a system of phenomena causally inter-related and connected with their underlying grounds.

We have now reached a point where it will be possible in a few sentences to indicate the rise of the metaphysical reflection and the ground on which it rests. If we consider both the mathematical and the physical ways of looking at things, we will find that they possess this feature in common,—they are purely external, having nothing to say respecting the inner and, therefore, real nature of the things with which they deal. Or, if we concede the latest claims of some of the physical speculators and agree that the aim of physics is an ultimate physical explanation of reality, it will still be true that the whole standpoint of this explanation will be external. Let me explain briefly what I mean substantially by the term external as I use it here. Every interpretation of a world is a function of some knowing consciousness, and consequently of some knowing self. This is too obvious to need proof. A system will be external to such a knower just to the extent that the knower finds it dominated and determined by categories that are different from those of its own determination. A world physically interpreted is one that is brought completely under the rubrics of physics and mathematics; whose movements yield themselves completely, therefore, to a mechanical calculus that gives rise to purely descriptive formulæ; or to the control of a dynamic principle; that of natural causation, by virtue of which everything is determined without thought of its own, by the impulse of another, which impulse itself is not directly traceable to any thought or purpose. Now, the occasion for the metaphysical reflection arises when this situation that brings us face to face, with, nay, makes us part and parcel of, an alien system of things, becomes intolerable, and the knower begins to demand a closer kinship with his world. The knower finds the categories of his own central and characteristic activity in experience. Here he is conscious of being an agent going out in forms of activity for the realization of his world. The determining categories of the activity he is most fully conscious of, are interest, idea, prevision, purpose, and that selective activity which goes to its termination in some achieved end. The metaphysical interpretation arises out of the demand that the world shall be brought into bonds of kinship with the knower. And this is effected by generalizing the categories of consciousness and applying them as principles of interpretation to the world. The act of reflection on which the metaphysical interpretation proceeds is one, then, in which the world of science is further transformed by bringing the inner nature of things out of its isolation and translating the world-movements into process the terms of which are no longer phenomena and hidden ground, but rather inception and realization, or, more specifically, Idea and Reality. And the point to be noted here is the fact that these metaphysical categories are led up to positivity by an act of reflection that has for its guiding aim an interpretation of the world that will be more ultimately satisfactory to the knower than that of the physical or natural sciences; while negatively, it is led up to by the refusal of the knowing consciousness to rest in a world alien to its own nature and in which it is subordinated to the physical and made a mere epiphenomenon.

II

QUESTIONS OF POINT OF VIEW, PRINCIPLE AND METHOD OF METAPHYSICS

It is clear from what has been said that the metaphysical interpretation proceeds on a presupposition radically different from that of mathematical and physical science. The presumption of these sciences is that the world is physical, that the physical categories supply the norms of reality, and that consciousness and the psychic, in general, are subordinate and phenomenal to the physical. On the contrary, metaphysics arises out of a revolt from these presumptions toward the opposite presumption, namely, that consciousness itself is the great reality, and that the norms of an ultimate interpretation of things are to be sought in its categories. This is the great transformation that conditions the possibility and value of all metaphysics. It is the Copernican revolution which the mind must pass through, a revolution in which matter and the physical world yields the primacy to mind; a revolution in which consciousness becomes central, its categories and analogies supplying the principles of final world-interpretation. Let us consider then, in the light of this great Copernican revolution, the questions of the point of view, principle, and method of metaphysics. And here the utmost brevity must be observed. If consciousness be the great reality, then its own central activity, that effort by which it realizes its world, will determine for us the point of view or departure of which we are in quest. This will be inner rather than outer; it will be motived by interest, will shape itself into interest-directed effort. This effort will be cognitive; dominated by an idea which will be an anticipation of the goal of the effort. It will, therefore, become directive, selective, and will stand as the end or aim of the completed effort. The whole movement will thus take the form, genetically, of a developing purpose informed by an idea, or teleologically, of a purpose going on to its fulfillment in some aim which is also its motive. Now, metaphysics determines its point of view in the following reasoning: if in consciousness we find the type of the inner nature of things, then the point of view for the interpretation of this inner nature will be to seek by generalizing the standpoint of consciously determined effort and asserting that this is the true point of view from which the meaning of the world is to be sought.

Having determined the metaphysical point of view, the next question of vital importance is that of its principle. And we may cut matters short here by saying at once that the principle we are seeking is that of sufficient reason, and we may say that a reason will be sufficient when it adequately expresses the world-view or concept under which an investigation is being prosecuted. Let us suppose that this world-view is that of simple mathematics, the principle of sufficient reason here will be that of quantitative equivalence of parts; or, from the standpoint of the whole, that of infinite divisibility. Whereas, if we take the world of the ultra-mathematical science, which is determined by the notion of phenomena depending on underlying ground, we will find that the sufficient reason in this sphere takes the form of adequate cause or condition. The determining condition or causes of any physical phenomenon supply, from that point of view, the ratio sufficiens of its existence. We have seen that the sufficiency of a reason in the above cases has been determined in view of that notion which defines the kind of world the investigation is dealing with. Let us apply this insight to the problem of the principle of metaphysics, and we will soon conclude that no reason can be metaphysically sufficient that does not satisfy the requirements of a world conceived under the notion of inception and realization; or, more specifically, idea and reality. In short, the reason of metaphysics will refuse to regard its world as a mechanism that is devoid of thought and intention; that lacks, in short, the motives of internal determination and movement, and will in all cases insist that an explanation or interpretation can be metaphysically adequate only when its ultimate reference is to an idea that is in the process of purposive fulfillment. Such an explanation we call teleological or rational, rather than merely mechanical, and such a principle is alone adequate to embody the ratio sufficiens of metaphysics.

Having determined the point of view and principle of metaphysics, the question of metaphysical method will be divested of some of its greatest difficulties. It will be clear to any one who reflects that the very first problem in regard to the method of metaphysics will be that of its starting-point and the kind of results it is to look for. And little can be accomplished here until it has been settled that consciousness is to have the primacy, and that its prerogative is to supply both standpoint and principle of the investigation. We have gone a long way toward mastering our method when we have settled these points: (1) that the metaphysical world is a world of consciousness; (2) that the conscious form of effort rather than the mechanical is the species of activity or movement with which we have to deal; and, (3) that the world it is seeking to interpret is ultimately one of idea and reality in which the processes take the purposive form. In view of this, the important steps of method (and we use the term method here in the most fundamental sense) will be (1) the question of the form of metaphysical activity or agency as contrasted with that of the physical sciences. This may be brought out in the contrast of the two terms finality and mere efficiency, in which by mere efficiency is meant an agency that is presumed to be thoughtless and purposeless, and consequently without foresight. All this is embodied in the term force or physical energy, and less explicitly in that of natural causation. Contrasted with this, finality is a term that involves the forward impulse of idea, prevision, and purpose. Anything that is capable of any sort of foretaste has in it a principle of prevision, selection, choice, and purpose. The impulse that motives and runs it, that also stands out as the end of its fulfillment, is a foretaste, an Ahnung, an anticipation, and the whole process or movement, as well as every part of it, will take on this character. (2) The second question of method will be that of the nature of this category of which finality is the form. What is its content, pure idea or pure will, or a synthesis that includes both? We have here the three alternatives of pure rationalism, voluntarism, and a doctrine hard to characterize in a single word; that rests on a synthesis of the norms of both rationalism and voluntarism. Without debating these alternatives, I propose here briefly to characterize the synthetic concept as supplying what I conceive to be the most satisfactory doctrine. The principle of pure rationalism is one of insight but is lacking in practical energy, whereas, that of voluntarism supplies practical energy, but is lacking in insight. Pure voluntarism is blind, while pure rationalism is powerless. But the synthesis of idea and will, provided we go a step further (as I think we must) and presuppose also a germ of feeling as interest, supplies both insight and energy. So that the spring out of which our world is to arise may be described as either the idea informed with purposive energy, or purpose or will informed and guided by the idea. It makes no difference which form of conception we use. In either case if we include feeling as interest we are able to conceive movements originating in some species of apprehension, taking the dynamic form of purpose, and motived and selected, so to speak, by interest; and in describing such activity we are simply describing these normal movements of consciousness with which our experience makes us most familiar. (3) The third question of method involves the relation or correlation of the metaphysical interpretation with that of the natural or physical science. Two points are fundamental here. In the first place, it must be borne in mind that it is the same world with which the plain man, the man of science, and the metaphysician are concerned. We cannot partition off the external world to the plain man, the atoms and ethers to the man of science, leaving the metaphysician in exclusive and solitary possession of the world of consciousness. It is the same world for all. The metaphysician cannot shift the physical world, with its oceans and icebergs, its vast planetary systems and milky ways, on to the shoulders of the physicist. This is the metaphysician's own recalcitrant world, which will doubtless task all his resources to explain. In the second place, though it is the same world that is clamoring for interpretation, it is a world that passes through successive transformations, in order to adapt itself to progressive modes of interpretation. The plain man is called to pass through a species of Copernican revolution that subordinates the phenomenon to its ground, before he can become a man of science. In turn, the man of science must go through the Copernican process, and learn to subordinate his atoms and ethers to consciousness before he can become a metaphysician. And it is this transformation that marks one of the most fundamental steps in the method of metaphysics. The world must experience this transformation, and it must become habitual to the thinker to subordinate the physical to the mental before the metaphysical point of view can be other than foreign to him. If, then, it be the same content with which the sciences and metaphysics are called on to deal, it is clear that we have on our hands another problem on the answer to which the fate of metaphysics vitally depends; the question of the correlation of its method with that of the sciences so that it may stand vindicated as the final interpretation of things.

III

QUESTION OF THE CORRELATION OF METAPHYSICS WITH THE SCIENCES

We have reached two conclusions that are vital here: (1) that the metaphysical way of looking at the world involves a transformation of the world of physical science; (2) that it is the same world that lies open to both science and metaphysics. Out of this arises the problem of the correlation of the two views; the two interpretations of the world. If science be right in conceiving the world under such categories as quantity and natural causation; if science be right in seeking a mechanical explanation of phenomena (that is, one that excludes prevision, purpose, and aim); and if metaphysics be right in refusing to accept this explanation as final and in insisting that the principle of ultimate interpretation is teleological, that it falls under the categories of prevision, purpose, and aim; then it is clear that the problem of correlation is on our hands. In dealing with this problem, it will be convenient to separate it into two questions: (1) that of the fact; (2) that of its rationale. The fact of the correlation is a thing of common experience. We have but to consider the way in which this Congress of Science has been brought about in order to have an exhibition of the method of correlation. Originating first in the sphere of thought and purpose, the design has been actualized through the operation of mechanical agencies which it has somehow contributed to liberate. On the scale of individual experience we have the classic instance of the arm moving through space in obedience to a hidden will. There can be no question as to the fact and the great difficulty of metaphysics does not arise in the task of generalizing the fact and conceiving the world as a system of thought-purposes working out into forms of the actual through mechanical agencies. This generalization somehow lies at the foundation of all metaphysical faith, and, this being the case, the real task here, aside from the profounder question of the rationale, is that of exhibiting the actual points of correlation; those points in the various stages of the sciences from physics to ethics and religion, at which the last category or result of science is found to hold as its immediate implication some first term of the more ultimate construction of metaphysics. The working out of this task is of the utmost importance, inasmuch as it makes clear to both the man of science and the metaphysician the intrinsic necessity of the correlation. It is a task analogous to the Kantian deduction of the categories.

IV

QUESTIONS OF THE ULTIMATE NATURE OF REALITY

We come, then, to the question of the rationale of this correlation, and it is clear here that we are dealing with a phase of the problem of the ultimate nature of reality. For the question of the correlation now is how it is possible that our thoughts should affect things so that they move in response; how mind influences body or the reverse, how, when we will, the arm moves through space. And without going into details of discussion here, let us say at once, that whatever the situation may be for any science,—and it may be that some form of dualism is a necessary presupposition of science,—for metaphysics it is clear that no dualism of substances or orders can be regarded as final. The life of metaphysics depends on finding the one for the many; the one that when found will also ground the many. If, then, the phenomenon of mind and body presents the appearance of a correspondence of two different and, so far as can be determined, mutually exclusive agencies, the problem of metaphysics is the reduction of these agencies to one species. Here we come upon the issue between materialism and immaterialism. But inasmuch as the notion of metaphysics itself seems to exclude materialism, the vital alternative is that of immaterialism. Again, if psycho-physics presents as its basal category a parallelism between two orders of phenomena, psychic and physical, it is the business of metaphysics to seek the explanation of this dualism in some more ultimate and unitary conception. Now, since the very notion of metaphysics again excludes the physical alternative from the category of finality, we are left with the psychic term as the one that, by virtue of the fact that it embodies a form of conscious activity, promises to be most fruitful for metaphysics. From one point of view, then, we have reduced our world to immaterialism; from another, to some form or analogue of the psychic. Now it is not necessary here to carry the inquiry further in this direction. For what metaphysics is interested in, specially, is the fact that the world must be reduced to one kind of being and one type of agency. If this be done, it is clear that the dualism of body and mind and the parallel orders of psycho-physics cannot be regarded as final, but must take their places as phenomena that are relative and reducible to a more fundamental unity. The metaphysician will say that the arm moves through space in response to the will, and that everywhere the correlation between mechanical and teleological agency takes place because in the last analysis there is only one type of agency; an agency that finds its initiative in interest, thought, purpose, design, and thus works out its results in the fields of space and mechanical activities.

Furthermore, on the question to which these considerations lead up; that of the ultimate interpretation we are to put on the reality of the world, the issue is not so indeterminate as it might seem from some points of view. Taking it that the very notion of metaphysics excludes the material and the physical as ultimate types of the real, we are left with the notions of the immaterial and the psychic; and while the former is indefinite, it is a fact that in the psychic and especially in the form of it which man realizes in his own experience, he finds an intelligible type and the only one that is available to him for the definition of the immaterial. He has his choice, then, either to regard the world as absolutely opaque, showing nothing but its phenomenal dress which ceases to have any meaning; or to apply to the world's inner nature the intelligible types and analogies of his own form of being. That this is the alternative that is embodied in the existence of metaphysics is clearly demonstrated by the fact that the metaphysical interpretation embodies itself in the categories of reason, design, purpose, and aim. Whatever difficulties we may encounter, then, in the use and application of the psychic analogy in determining the nature of the real, it is clear that its employment is inevitable and indispensable. Let us, then, employ the term rational to that characterization of the nature of things which to metaphysics is thus inevitable and indispensable. The world must in the last analysis be rational in its constitution, and its agencies and forms of being must be construed as rational in their type.

And here we come upon the last question in this field, that of the ultimate being of the world. We have already concluded that the real is in the last analysis rational. But we have not answered the question whether there shall be one rational or many. Now it has become clear that with metaphysics unity is a cardinal interest; that, therefore, the world must be one in thought, purpose, aim. And it is on this insight that the metaphysical doctrine of the absolute rests. There must be one being whose thought and purpose are all-inclusive, in order that the world may be one and that it may have meaning as a whole. But the world presents itself as a plurality of finite existents which our metaphysics requires us to reduce in the last analysis to the psychic type. What of this plurality of psychic existents? It is on this basis that metaphysics constructs its doctrine of individuality. Allowing for latitude of opinion here, the trend of metaphysical reflection sets strongly toward a doctrine of reality that grounds the world in an Absolute whose all-comprehending thought and purpose utters or realizes itself in the plurality of finite individuals that constitutes the world; the degree of reality that shall be ascribed to the plurality of individuals being a point in debate, giving rise to the contemporary form of the issue between idealism and realism. Allowing for minor differences, however, there is among metaphysicians a fair degree of assent to the doctrine that in order to be completely rational the world of individual plurality must be regarded as implying an Absolute, which, whether it is to be conceived as an individual or not, is the author and bearer of the thought and design of the world as a whole.

V

QUESTIONS OF METAPHYSICAL KNOWLEDGE AND ULTIMATE CRITERIA OF TRUTH

We have only time to speak very briefly, in conclusion, of two vital problems in metaphysics: (1) that of the nature and limits of metaphysical knowledge; (2) that of the ultimate criteria of truth. In regard to the question of knowledge, we may either identify thought with reality, or we may regard thought as wholly inadequate to represent the real; in one case we will be gnostic, in the other agnostic. Now whatever may be urged in favor of the gnostic alternative, it remains true that our thought, in order to follow along intelligible lines, must be guided by the categories and analogies of our own experience. This fixes a limit, so that the thought of man is never in a position to grasp the real completely. Again, whatever may be urged in behalf of the agnostic alternative, it is to be borne in mind that our experience does supply us with intelligible types and categories; and that under the impulse of the infinite and absolute, or the transcendent, to which our thought responds (to put it no stronger), a dialectical activity arises; on the one hand, the application of the experience-analogies to determine the real; on the other, the incessant removal of limits by the impulse of transcendence (as we may call it). Thus arises a movement of approximation which while it never completely compasses its goal, yet proceeds along intelligent lines; constitutes the mind's effort to know; and results in an approximating series of intelligible and relatively adequate conceptions. Metaphysically, we are ever approximating to ultimate knowledge; though it can never be said that we have attained it. The type of metaphysical knowledge cannot be characterized, therefore, as either gnostic or agnostic.

As to the question of ultimate criteria, it is clear that we are here touching one of the living issues of our present-day thought. Shall the judgment of truth, on which certitude must found, exclude practical considerations of value, or shall the consideration of value have weight in the balance of certitude? On this issue we have at the opposite extremes (1) the pure rationalist who insists on the rigid exclusion from the epistemological scale of every consideration except that of pure logic. The truth of a thing, he urges, is always a purely logical consideration. On the other hand, we have (2) the pure pragmatist, who insists on the "will to believe" as a legitimate datum or factor in the determination of certitude. The pragmatic platform has two planks: (1) the ontological—we select our world that we call real at the behest of our interests; (2) the ethical—in such a world practical interest has the right of way in determining what we are to accept as true as well as what we are to choose as good. It is my purpose in thus outlining the extremes of doctrine to close with a suggestion or two toward less ultra-conclusions. It is a sufficient criticism on the pure rationalist's position to point out the fact that his separation of practical and theoretic interests is a pure fiction that is never realized anywhere. The motives of science and the motives of practice are so blended that interest in the conclusion always enters as a factor in the process. A conclusion reached by the pure rationalist's method would be one that would only interest the pure rationalist in so far as he could divest himself of all motives except the bare love of fact for its own sake. The pure pragmatist is, I think, still more vulnerable. He must, to start with, be a pure subjective idealist, otherwise he would find his world at many points recalcitrant to his ontology. Furthermore, the mere will to believe is arbitrary and involves the suppression of reason. In order that the will to believe may work real conviction, the point believed must at least amount to a postulate of the practical reason; it must become somehow evident that the refusal to believe would create a situation that would be theoretically unsound or irrational; as, for instance, if we assume that the immortality of the soul is a real postulate of practical reason, it must be so because the negative of it would involve the irrationality of our world; and therefore a degree of theoretic imperfection or confusion. Personally I believe the lines here converge in such a way that the ideal of truth will always be found to have practical value; and conversely, as to practical ideals, that a sound practical postulate will have weight in the theoretic scales. And it is doubtless true, as Professor Royce urges in his presidential address on The Eternal and The Practical, that all judgments must find their final warrant at the Court of the Eternal where, so far as we can see, the theoretical and practical coalesce into one.

[1] I do not raise the question of qualitative mathematics at all. It is clear that the first mathematical reflection will be quantitative.

[2] By natural causation I mean such a relationship between a and b in a phenomenal system as enables a through its connection with its ground to determine b.

At the close of the work of this Section and upon the invitation of Dr. Armstrong, a number of distinguished members in attendance joined freely in the discussion, to the great pleasure of the many specialists who were present. Among those participating were Professor Boltzmann of Vienna, Professor Hoeffding of Copenhagen, Professor Calkins of Wellesley, and Professor French of the University of Nebraska, to whom replies were made by the principal speakers, Messrs. Taylor and Ormond.

SHORT PAPERS

A short paper was contributed to the work of the Section by Professor W. P. Montague of Columbia University, on the "Physical Reality of Secondary Qualities." The speaker said that from the beginning of modern philosophy there has existed a strong tendency among all schools of thought—monists of the idealistic or materialistic types, as well as outspoken dualists—to treat the distinction between primary and secondary qualities as coincident, so far as it goes, with the distinction between physical and psychical. Colors, sounds, odors, etc., are regarded as purely subjective or mental in their nature, and as having no true membership in the physical order; while correlatively all special forms and relations have been in their turn extruded from the field of the psychical. Let it be noted that introspection offers little or nothing in support of this view. There is nothing, for example, about the color red that would make it appear more distinctively psychical or subjective than a figure or a motion. The perception of a square or a triangle is not a square or triangular perception; but neither is the perception of red or blue a red or blue perception. Now with the affective or emotional contents of experience the case is quite different.

A feeling of pain is a painful feeling, a consciousness of anger is an angry consciousness. Pains are more and less painful, according as we are more and less aware of them. With feelings and volitions esse is indeed percipi. Colors and other secondary qualities, however, do not seem thus to increase or diminish in their reality concomitantly with our perceptions of them. Red is red, neither more nor less, regardless of the amount to which we attend to it. And yet it remains true that, notwithstanding this seeming objectivity, the secondary qualities have long been contrasted with the primary, and classed along with the affective and volitional states as purely subjective facts. It has always seemed curious that a view so important as this in its consequences, and so radically at variance, not only with Pre-Cartesian philosophy, but also with our instinctive beliefs, should have won its way to the position of an accepted dogma; and the purpose of this paper was first to examine the grounds upon which this belief rests, and second to show that the problem of the independent reality of the physical world and the problem of the relation of physical and psychical appear in a clearer and more hopeful light when disentangled from the quite different problem of the relation of primary and secondary qualities.

There were two reasons why the older or Pre-Cartesian view of this question should give place to the modern doctrine. First, because of the rediscovery of the idea of mechanism, without which predictive science had been virtually impossible. The second reason for reducing the secondary qualities to a merely subjective status lay in the fact that they are much more dependent than the primary qualities upon the bodily organism of the one who perceives them. In closing Professor Montague said:—

"I wish in closing to point out two consequences of the view which I have been opposing. First, the present paradoxical status of the eternal world; second, the equally paradoxical status of the relation of that world to the world of mind. Berkeley was the first thinker clearly to perceive the unsubstantial nature of a world made up solely of primary qualities. Indeed, in the last analysis, a world of primary qualities, and nothing else, is a world of relations without terms, a geometrical fiction, the objective (or, for that matter, the subjective) existence of which the idealist would be right in denying. In Biology we have abandoned obscurantist methods, and no longer attribute the distinctive vital functions of growth and reproduction to a vital force or vital substance, but solely to the peculiar configuration of the material elements of a cell. Why may we not in psychology with equal propriety attribute the distinctively psychical functions of subjectivity or consciousness, not to the action of a hyper-psychical soul-substance, nor to the presence of a transcendental ego, but simply to that peculiar configuration of sensory elements which constitutes a what we call psychosis?"

SECTION B—PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

SECTION B
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

(Hall 1, September 21, 3 p. m.)

THE RELATION OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION TO THE OTHER SCIENCES