In my Principles of Psychology (vol. ii, p. 646) I gave the
name of the 'axiom of skipped intermediaries and transferred relations'
to a serial principle of which the foundation of logic, the dictum
de omni et nullo (or, as I expressed it, the rule that what is of a
kind is of that kind's kind), is the most familiar instance. More than
the more is more than the less, equals of equals are equal, sames of
the same are the same, the cause of a cause is the cause of its
effects, are other examples of this serial law. Altho it applies
infallibly and without restriction throughout certain abstract series,
where the 'sames,' 'causes,' etc., spoken of, are 'pure,' and have no
properties save their sameness, causality, etc., it cannot be applied
offhand to concrete objects with numerous properties and relations, for
it is hard to trace a straight line of sameness, causation, or whatever
it may be, through a series of such objects without swerving into some
'respect' where the relation, as pursued originally, no longer holds:
the objects have so many 'aspects' that we are constantly deflected
from our original direction, and find, we know not why, that we are
following something different from what we started with. Thus a cat is
in a sense the same as a mouse-trap, and a mouse-trap the same as a
bird-cage; but in no valuable or easily intelligible sense is a cat the
same as a bird-cage. Commodore Perry was in a sense the cause of the
new regime in Japan, and the new regime was the cause of the russian
Douma; but it would hardly profit us to insist on holding to Perry as
the cause of the Douma: the terms have grown too remote to have any
real or practical relation to each other. In every series of real
terms, not only do the terms themselves and their associates and
environments change, but we change, and their meaning for us
changes, so that new kinds of sameness and types of causation
continually come into view and appeal to our interest. Our earlier
lines, having grown irrelevant, are then dropped. The old terms can no
longer be substituted nor the relations 'transferred,' because of so
many new dimensions into which experience has opened. Instead of a
straight line, it now follows a zigzag; and to keep it straight, one
must do violence to its spontaneous development. Not that one might not
possibly, by careful seeking (tho I doubt it), find some line in
nature along which terms literally the same, or causes causal in the
same way, might be serially strung without limit, if one's interest lay
in such finding. Within such lines our axioms might hold, causes might
cause their effect's effects, etc.; but such lines themselves would, if
found, only be partial members of a vast natural network, within the
other lines of which you could not say, in any sense that a wise man or
a sane man would ever think of, in any sense that would not be
concretely silly, that the principle of skipt intermediaries
still held good. In the practical world, the world whose
significances we follow, sames of the same are certainly not sames of
one another; and things constantly cause other things without being
held responsible for everything of which those other things are causes.
Professor Bergson, believing as he does in a heraclitean 'devenir
reel,' ought, if I rightly understand him, positively to deny that in
the actual world the logical axioms hold good without qualification.
Not only, according to him, do terms change, so that after a certain
time the very elements of things are no longer what they were, but
relations also change, so as no longer to obtain in the same identical
way between the new things that have succeeded upon the old ones. If
this were really so, then however indefinitely sames might still be
substituted for sames in the logical world of nothing but pure
sameness, in the world of real operations every line of sameness
actually started and followed up would eventually give out, and cease
to be traceable any farther. Sames of the same, in such a world, will
not always (or rather, in a strict sense will never) be the same as one
another, for in such a world there is no literal or ideal
sameness among numerical differents. Nor in such a world will it be
true that the cause of the cause is unreservedly the cause of the
effect; for if we follow lines of real causation, instead of contenting
ourselves with Hume's and Kant's eviscerated schematism, we find that
remoter effects are seldom aimed at by causal intentions,[1] that no
one kind of causal activity continues indefinitely, and that the
principle of skipt intermediaries can be talked of only in abstracto.[2]
Volumes i, ii, and iii of the Monist (1890-1893) contain a
number of articles by Mr. Charles S. Peirce, articles the originality
of which has apparently prevented their making an immediate impression,
but which, if I mistake not, will prove a gold-mine of ideas for
thinkers of the coming generation. Mr. Peirce's views, tho reached so
differently, are altogether congruous with Bergson's. Both philosophers
believe that the appearance of novelty in things is genuine. To an
observer standing outside of its generating causes, novelty can appear
only as so much 'chance'; to one who stands inside it is the expression
of 'free creative activity.' Peirce's 'tychism' is thus practically
synonymous with Bergson's 'devenir reel.' The common objection to
admitting novelties is that by jumping abruptly in, ex nihilo,
they shatter the world's rational continuity. Peirce meets this
objection by combining his tychism
[Footnote 1: Compare the douma with what Perry aimed at.]
[Footnote 2: Compare Appendix B, as to what I mean here by 'real'
casual activity.]
with an express doctrine of 'synechism' or continuity, the two
doctrines merging into the higher synthesis on which he bestows the
name of 'agapasticism (loc. cit., iii, 188), which means exactly
the same thing as Bergson's 'evolution creatrice.' Novelty, as
empirically found, doesn't arrive by jumps and jolts, it leaks in
insensibly, for adjacents in experience are always interfused, the
smallest real datum being both a coming and a going, and even numerical
distinctness being realized effectively only after a concrete interval
has passed. The intervals also deflect us from the original paths of
direction, and all the old identities at last give out, for the fatally
continuous infiltration of otherness warps things out of every original
rut. Just so, in a curve, the same direction is never followed,
and the conception of it as a myriad-sided polygon falsifies it by
supposing it to do so for however short a time. Peirce speaks of an
'infinitesimal' tendency to diversification. The mathematical notion of
an infinitesimal contains, in truth, the whole paradox of the same and
yet the nascent other, of an identity that won't keep except so
far as it keeps failing, that won't transfer, any more
than the serial relations in question transfer, when you apply them to
reality instead of applying them to concepts alone.
A friend of mine has an idea, which illustrates on such a magnified
scale the impossibility of tracing the same line through reality, that
I will mention it here. He thinks that nothing more is needed to make
history 'scientific' than to get the content of any two epochs (say the
end of the thirteenth and the end of the nineteenth century) accurately
defined, then accurately to define the direction of the change that led
from the one epoch into the other, and finally to prolong the line of
that direction into the future. So prolonging the line, he thinks, we
ought to be able to define the actual state of things at any future
date we please. We all feel the essential unreality of such a
conception of 'history' as this; but if such a synechistic pluralism as
Peirce, Bergson, and I believe in, be what really exists, every
phenomenon of development, even the simplest, would prove equally
rebellious to our science should the latter pretend to give us
literally accurate instead of approximate, or statistically
generalized, pictures of the development of reality.
I can give no further account of Mr. Peirce's ideas in this note,
but I earnestly advise all students of Bergson to compare them with
those of the french philosopher.