Let me recall to you the programme which I indicated to you at our
last meeting. After agreeing not to consider materialism in any shape,
but to place ourselves straightway upon a more spiritualistic platform,
I pointed out three kinds of spiritual philosophy between which we are
asked to choose. The first way was that of the older dualistic theism,
with ourselves represented as a secondary order of substances created
by God. We found that this allowed of a degree of intimacy with the
creative principle inferior to that implied in the pantheistic belief
that we are substantially one with it, and that the divine is therefore
the most intimate of all our possessions, heart of our heart, in fact.
But we saw that this pantheistic belief could be held in two forms, a
monistic form which I called philosophy of the absolute, and a
pluralistic form which I called radical empiricism, the former
conceiving that the divine exists authentically only when the world is
experienced all at once in its absolute totality, whereas radical
empiricism allows that the absolute sum-total of things may never be
actually experienced or realized in that shape at all, and that a
disseminated, distributed, or incompletely unified appearance is the
only form that reality may yet have achieved.
I may contrast the monistic and pluralistic forms in question as the
'all-form' and the 'each-form.' At the end of the last hour I
animadverted on the fact that the all-form is so radically different
from the each-form, which is our human form of experiencing the world,
that the philosophy of the absolute, so far as insight and
understanding go, leaves us almost as much outside of the divine being
as dualistic theism does. I believe that radical empiricism, on the
contrary, holding to the each-form, and making of God only one of the
caches, affords the higher degree of intimacy. The general thesis of
these lectures I said would be a defence of the pluralistic against the
monistic view. Think of the universe as existing solely in the
each-form, and you will have on the whole a more reasonable and
satisfactory idea of it than if you insist on the all-form being
necessary. The rest of my lectures will do little more than make this
thesis more concrete, and I hope more persuasive.
It is curious how little countenance radical pluralism has ever had
from philosophers. Whether materialistically or spiritualistically
minded, philosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter with
which the world apparently is filled. They have substituted economical
and orderly conceptions for the first sensible tangle; and whether
these were morally elevated or only intellectually neat they were at
any rate always aesthetically pure and definite, and aimed at ascribing
to the world something clean and intellectual in the way of inner
structure. As compared with all these rationalizing pictures, the
pluralistic empiricism which I profess offers but a sorry appearance.
It is a turbid, muddled, gothic sort of an affair, without a sweeping
outline and with little pictorial nobility. Those of you who are
accustomed to the classical constructions of reality may be excused if
your first reaction upon it be absolute contempt—a shrug of the
shoulders as if such ideas were unworthy of explicit refutation. But
one must have lived some time with a system to appreciate its merits.
Perhaps a little more familiarity may mitigate your first surprise at
such a programme as I offer.
First, one word more than what I said last time about the relative
foreignness of the divine principle in the philosophy of the absolute.
Those of you who have read the last two chapters of Mr. Bradley's
wonderful book, 'Appearance and reality,' will remember what an
elaborately foreign aspect his absolute is finally made to
assume. It is neither intelligence nor will, neither a self nor a
collection of selves, neither truthful, good, nor beautiful, as we
understand these terms. It is, in short, a metaphysical monster, all
that we are permitted 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
eulogistic adjectives 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 its own as-suchness is of another denomination
altogether.
Spinoza was the first great absolutist, and the impossibility of
being intimate with his God is universally recognized.
Quatenus infinitus est 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 the vital part in all
philosophies; and in contemporary idealism the words 'as' and 'qua'
bear the burden of reconciling metaphysical unity with phenomenal
diversity. Qua absolute the world is one and perfect, qua relative it
is many and faulty, yet it is identically the self-same world—instead
of talking of it as many facts, we call it one fact in many aspects.
As absolute, then, or sub specie eternitatis, or
quatenus infinitus est, the world repels our sympathy because it
has no history. As such, the absolute neither acts nor suffers,
nor loves nor hates; it has no needs, desires, or aspirations, no
failures or successes, friends or enemies, victories or defeats. All
such things pertain to the world qua relative, in which our finite
experiences lie, and whose vicissitudes alone have power to arouse our
interest. What boots it to tell me that the absolute way is the true
way, and to exhort me, as Emerson says, to lift mine eye up to its
style, and manners of the sky, if the feat is impossible by definition?
I am finite once for all, and all the categories of my sympathy are
knit up with the finite world as such, and with things that have
a history. 'Aus dieser erde quellen meine freuden, und ihre sonne
scheinet meinen leiden.' I have neither eyes nor ears nor heart nor
mind for anything of an opposite description, and the stagnant felicity
of the absolute's own perfection moves me as little as I move it. If we
were readers only of the cosmic novel, things would be
different: we should then share the author's point of view and
recognize villains to be as essential as heroes in the plot. But we are
not the readers but the very personages of the world-drama. In your own
eyes each of you here is its hero, and the villains are your respective
friends or enemies. The tale which the absolute reader finds so
perfect, we spoil for one another through our several vital
identifications with the destinies of the particular personages
involved.
The doctrine on which the absolutists lay most stress is the
absolute's 'timeless' character. For pluralists, on the other hand,
time remains as real as anything, and nothing in the universe is great
or static or eternal enough not to have some history. But the world
that each of us feels most intimately at home with is that of beings
with histories that play into our history, whom we can help in their
vicissitudes even as they help us in ours. This satisfaction the
absolute denies us; we can neither help nor hinder it, for it stands
outside of history. It surely is a merit in a philosophy to make the
very life we lead seem real and earnest. Pluralism, in exorcising the
absolute, exorcises the great de-realizer of the only life we are at
home in, and thus redeems the nature of reality from essential
foreignness. Every end, reason, motive, object of desire or aversion,
ground of sorrow or joy that we feel is in the world of finite
multifariousness, 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,
for so much of the history of the finite is as formidably foreign to us
as the static absolute can possibly be—in fact that entity derives its
own foreignness largely from the bad character of the finite which it
simultaneously is—that this sentimental reason for preferring the
pluralistic view seems small.[1] I shall return to the subject in my
final lecture, and meanwhile, with your permission, I will say no more
about this objection. The more so as the necessary foreignness of the
absolute 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 american
philosopher, 'is humanity's hold on totality,' and there is no doubt
that most of us find that the bare notion of an absolute all-one is
inspiring. 'I yielded myself to the perfect whole,' writes Emerson; and
where can you find a more mind-dilating object? A certain loyalty is
called forth by the idea; even if not proved actual, it must be
believed in somehow. Only an enemy of philosophy can speak lightly of
it. Rationalism starts from the idea of such a whole and builds
downward. Movement and change are absorbed into its immutability as
forms of mere appearance. When you accept this beatific vision of what
is, in contrast with what goes on, you feel as if you had
fulfilled an intellectual duty. 'Reality is not in its truest nature a
process,' Mr. McTaggart tells us, 'but a stable and timeless state.'[2]
'The true knowledge of God begins,' Hegel writes, 'when we know that
things as they immediately are have no truth.'[3] 'The consummation of
the infinite aim,' he says elsewhere, 'consists merely in removing the
illusion which makes it seem yet unaccomplished. Good and 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 course
of its process the Idea makes itself that illusion, by setting an
antithesis to confront it, and its action consists in getting rid of
the illusion which it has created.'[4]
But abstract emotional appeals of any kind sound amateurish in the
business that concerns us. Impressionistic philosophizing, like
impressionistic watchmaking or land-surveying, is intolerable to
experts. Serious discussion of the alternative before us forces me,
therefore, to become more technical. The great claim of the
philosophy of the absolute is that the absolute is no hypothesis, but a
presupposition implicated in all thinking, and needing only a little
effort of analysis to be seen as a logical necessity. I will therefore
take it in this more rigorous character and see whether its claim is in
effect so coercive.
It has seemed coercive to an enormous number of contemporaneous
thinkers. Professor Henry Jones thus describes the range and influence
of it upon the social and political life of the present time:[5] 'For
many years adherents of this way of thought have deeply interested the
british public by their writings. Almost more important than their
writings is the fact that they have occupied philosophical chairs in
almost every university in the kingdom. Even the professional critics
of idealism are for the most part idealists—after a fashion. And when
they are not, they are as a rule more occupied with the refutation of
idealism than with the construction of a better theory. It follows from
their position of academic authority, were it from nothing else, that
idealism exercises an influence not easily measured upon the youth of
the nation—upon those, that is, who from the educational opportunities
they enjoy may naturally be expected to become the leaders of the
nation's thought and practice.... Difficult as it is to measure the
forces ... it is hardly to be denied that the power exercised by
Bentham and the utilitarian school has, for better or for worse, passed
into the hands of the idealists.... “The Rhine has flowed into the
Thames” is the warning note rung out by Mr. Hobhouse. Carlyle
introduced it, bringing it as far as Chelsea. Then Jowett and Thomas
Hill Green, and William Wallace and Lewis Nettleship, and Arnold
Toynbee and David Eitchie—to mention only those teachers whose voices
now are silent—guided the waters into those upper reaches known
locally as the Isis. John and Edward Caird brought them up the Clyde,
Hutchison Stirling up the Firth of Forth. They have passed up the
Mersey and up the Severn and Dee and Don. They pollute the bay of St.
Andrews and swell the waters of the Cam, and have somehow crept
overland into Birmingham. The stream of german idealism has been
diffused over the academical world of Great Britain. The disaster is
universal.'
Evidently if weight of authority were all, the truth of absolutism
would be thus decided. But let us first pass in review the general
style of argumentation of that philosophy.
As I read it, its favorite way of meeting pluralism and empiricism
is by a reductio ad absurdum framed somewhat as follows: You
contend, it says to the pluralist, that things, though in some respects
connected, are in other respects independent, so that they are not
members of one all-inclusive individual fact. Well, your position is
absurd on either point. For admit in fact the slightest modicum of
independence, and you find (if you will only think accurately) that you
have to admit more and more of it, until at last nothing but an
absolute chaos, or the proved impossibility of any connexion whatever
between the parts of the universe, remains upon your hands. Admit, on
the other hand, the most incipient minimum of relation between any two
things, and again you can't stop until you see that the absolute unity
of all things is implied.
If we take the latter reductio ad absurdum first, we find a
good example of it in Lotze's well-known proof of monism from the fact
of interaction between finite things. Suppose, Lotze says in effect,
and for simplicity's sake I have to paraphrase him, for his own words
are too long to quote—many distinct beings a, b, c, etc., to
exist independently 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
influence detach itself from a and find b? If so, it is a
third fact, and the 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 of influences find b rather than c
unless b is somehow prefigured in 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 go right through b?
The change in b is a response, due to b's capacity
for taking account of a's influence, and that again seems to
prove that b's nature is somehow fitted to a's nature in
advance. A and b, in short, are not really as distinct as
we at first supposed them, not separated by a void. Were this so they
would be mutually impenetrable, or at least mutually irrelevant. They
would form two universes each living by itself, making no difference to
each other, taking no account of each other, much as the universe of
your day dreams takes no account of mine. They must therefore belong
together beforehand, be co-implicated already, their natures must have
an inborn mutual reference each to each.
Lotze's own solution runs as follows: The multiple independent
things supposed cannot be real in that shape, but all of them, if
reciprocal action is to be possible between them, must be regarded as
parts of a single real being, M. The pluralism with which our view
began has to give place to a monism; and the 'transeunt' interaction,
being unintelligible as such, is to be understood as an immanent
operation.[6]
The words 'immanent operation' seem here to mean that the single
real being M, of which a and b are members, is the only
thing that changes, and that when it changes, it changes inwardly and
all over at once. When part a in it changes, consequently, part
b must also change, 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 be the only property of your a and b
(and it is the only property your words imply), then of course, since
you can't deduce their mutual influence from it, you can find no
ground of its occurring between them. Your bare word 'separate,'
contradicting your bare word 'joined,' seems to exclude connexion.
Lotze's remedy for the impossibility thus verbally found is to
change the first word. If, instead of calling a and b
independent, we now call them 'interdependent,' 'united,' or 'one,' he
says, these words do 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 course must 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 any
better. We have now given verbal permission to the many to change all
together, if they can; we have removed a verbal impossibility and
substituted a verbal possibility, but the new name, with the
possibility it suggests, tells us nothing of the actual process by
which real things that are one can and do change at all. In point of
fact abstract oneness as such doesn't change, neither has it
parts—any more than abstract independence as such interacts. But then
neither abstract oneness nor abstract independence exists; only
concrete real things exist, which add to these properties the other
properties which they possess, to make up what we call their total
nature. To construe any one of their abstract names as making their
total nature impossible is a misuse of the function of naming. The
real way of rescue from the abstract consequences of one name is not to
fly to an opposite name, equally abstract, but rather to correct the
first name by qualifying adjectives that restore some concreteness to
the case. Don't take your 'independence' simpliciter, as Lotze
does, take it secundum quid. Only when we know what the process
of interaction literally and concretely consists in can we tell
whether beings independent in definite respects, distinct, for
example, in origin, separate in place, different in kind, etc., can or
cannot interact.
The treating of a name as excluding from the fact named what the
name's definition fails positively to include, is what I call 'vicious
intellectualism.' Later I shall have more to say about this
intellectualism, but that Lotze's argument is tainted by it I hardly
think we can deny. As well might you contend (to use an instance from
Sigwart) that a person whom you have once called an 'equestrian' is
thereby forever made unable to walk on his own feet.
I almost feel as if I should apologize for criticising such subtle
arguments in rapid lectures of this kind. The criticisms have to be as
abstract as the arguments, and in exposing their unreality, take on
such an unreal sound themselves that a hearer not nursed in the
intellectualist atmosphere knows not which of them to accuse. But le
vin est verse, il faut le boire, and I must cite a couple more
instances before I stop.
If we are empiricists and go from parts to wholes, we believe that
beings may first exist and feed so to speak on their own existence, and
then secondarily become known to one another. But philosophers of the
absolute tell us that such independence of being from being known
would, if once admitted, disintegrate the universe beyond all hope of
mending. The argument is one of Professor Royce's proofs that the only
alternative we have is to choose the complete disunion of all things or
their complete union in the absolute One.
Take, for instance, the proverb 'a cat may look at a king' and adopt
the realistic view that the king's being is independent of the cat's
witnessing. This assumption, which amounts to saying that it need make
no essential difference to the royal object whether the feline subject
cognizes him or not, that the cat may look away from him or may even be
annihilated, and the king remain unchanged,—this assumption, I say, is
considered by my ingenious colleague to lead to the absurd practical
consequence that the two beings can never later acquire any
possible linkages or connexions, but must remain eternally as if in
different worlds. For suppose any connexion whatever to ensue, this
connexion would simply be a third being additional to the cat and the
king, which would itself have to be linked to both by additional links
before 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 its influencing 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 true
relations; they are separated, each from the other, by absolutely
impassable chasms. They can never come to get either ties or community
of nature; they are not in the same space, nor in the same time, nor in
the same natural or spiritual order.'[7] They form in short two
unrelated universes,—which is the reductio ad absurdum
required.
To escape this preposterous state of things we must accordingly
revoke the original hypothesis. The king and the cat are not
indifferent to each other in the way supposed. But if not in that way,
then in no way, for connexion in that way carries connexion in other
ways; so that, pursuing the reverse line of reasoning, we end with the
absolute itself as the smallest fact that can exist. Cat and king are
co-involved, they are a single fact in two names, they can never have
been absent from each other, and they are both equally co-implicated
with all the other facts of which the universe consists.
Professor Royce's proof that whoso admits the cat's witnessing the
king at all must thereupon admit the integral absolute, may be briefly
put as follows:—
First, to know the king, the cat must intend that king, must
somehow pass over and lay hold of him individually and specifically.
The cat's idea, in short, must transcend the cat's own separate mind
and somehow include the king, for were the king utterly outside and
independent of the cat, the cat's pure other, the beast's mind could
touch the king in no wise. This makes the cat much less distinct from
the king than we had at first naively supposed. There must be some
prior continuity between them, which continuity Royce interprets
idealistically as meaning a higher mind that owns them both as objects,
and owning them can also own any relation, such as the supposed
witnessing, that may obtain between them. Taken purely pluralistically,
neither of them can own any part of a between, because, so
taken, each is supposed shut up to itself: the fact of a between
thus commits us to a higher knower.
But the higher knower that knows the two beings we start with proves
to be the same knower that knows everything else. For assume any third
being, the queen, say, and as the cat knew the king, so let the king
know his queen, and let this second knowledge, by the same reasoning,
require a higher knower as its presupposition. That knower of the
king's knowing must, it is now contended, be the same higher knower
that was required for the cat's knowing; for if you suppose otherwise,
you have no longer the same king. This may not seem immediately
obvious, but if you follow the intellectualistic logic employed in all
these reasonings, I don't see how you can escape the admission. If it
be true that the independent or indifferent cannot be related, for the
abstract words 'independent' or 'indifferent' as such imply no
relation, then it is just as true that the king known by the cat cannot
be the king that knows the queen, for taken merely 'as such,' the
abstract term 'what the cat knows' and the abstract term 'what knows
the queen' are logically distinct. The king thus logically breaks into
two kings, with nothing to connect them, until a higher knower is
introduced to recognize them as the self-same king concerned in any
previous acts of knowledge which he may have brought about. This he can
do because he possesses all the terms as his own objects and can treat
them as he will. Add any fourth or fifth term, and you get 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 by irrefutable logic, and all pluralism
appears as absurd.
The reasoning is pleasing from its ingenuity, and it is almost a
pity that so straight a bridge from abstract logic to concrete fact
should not bear our weight. To have the alternative forced upon us of
admitting either finite things each cut off from all relation with its
environment, or else of accepting the integral absolute with no
environment and all relations packed within itself, would be too
delicious a simplification. But the purely verbal character of the
operation is undisguised. Because the names of finite things and
their relations are disjoined, it doesn't follow that the realities
named need a deus ex machina from on high to conjoin them. The
same things disjoined in one respect appear as conjoined in
another. Naming the disjunction doesn't debar us from also naming the
conjunction in a later modifying statement, for the two are absolutely
co-ordinate elements in the finite tissue of experience. When at Athens
it was found self-contradictory that a boy could be both tall and short
(tall namely in respect of a child, short in respect of a man), the
absolute had not yet been thought of, but it might just as well have
been invoked by Socrates as by Lotze or Royce, as a relief from his
peculiar intellectualistic difficulty.
Everywhere we find rationalists using the same kind of reasoning.
The primal whole which is their vision must be there not only as a fact
but as a logical necessity. It must be the minimum that can
exist—either that absolute whole is there, or there is absolutely
nothing. The logical proof alleged of the irrationality of supposing
otherwise, is that you can deny the whole only in words that implicitly
assert it. If you say 'parts,' of what are they parts? If you
call them a 'many,' that very word unifies them. If you suppose them
unrelated in any particular respect, that 'respect' connects them; and
so on. In short you fall into hopeless contradiction. You must stay
either at one extreme or the other.[8] 'Partly this and partly that,'
partly rational, for instance, and partly irrational, is no admissible
description of the world. If rationality be in it at all, it must be in
it throughout; if irrationality be in it anywhere, that also must
pervade it throughout. It must be wholly rational or wholly irrational,
pure universe or pure multiverse or nulliverse; and reduced to this
violent alternative, no one's choice ought long to remain doubtful. The
individual absolute, with its parts co-implicated through and through,
so that there is nothing in any part by which any other part can remain
inwardly unaffected, is the only rational supposition. Connexions of an
external sort, by which the many became merely continuous instead of
being consubstantial, would be an irrational supposition.
Mr. Bradley is the pattern champion of this philosophy in
extremis, as one might call it, for he shows an intolerance to
pluralism so extreme that I fancy few of his readers have been able
fully to share it. His reasoning exemplifies everywhere what I call the
vice of intellectualism, for abstract terms are used by him as
positively excluding all that their definition fails to include. Some
Greek sophists could deny that we may say that man is good, for man,
they said, means only man, and good means only good, and the word is
can't be construed to identify such disparate meanings. Mr. Bradley
revels in the same type of argument. No adjective can rationally
qualify a substantive, he thinks, for if distinct from the substantive,
it can't be united with it; and if not distinct, there is only one
thing there, and nothing left to unite. Our whole pluralistic procedure
in using subjects and predicates as we do is fundamentally irrational,
an example of the desperation of our finite intellectual estate,
infected and undermined as that is by the separatist discursive forms
which are our only categories, but which absolute reality must somehow
absorb into its unity and overcome.
Readers of 'Appearance and reality' will remember how Mr. Bradley
suffers from a difficulty identical with that to which Lotze and Royce
fall a prey—how shall an influence influence? how shall a relation
relate? 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
one original chasm, it can only create two smaller chasms, each to be
freshly bridged. Instead of hooking a to b, it needs
itself to be hooked by a fresh relation r' to a and by
another r” to b. These new relations are but two more
entities which themselves require to be hitched in turn by four still
newer relations—so behold the vertiginous regressus ad infinitum
in full career.
Since a regressus ad infinitum is deemed absurd, the notion
that relations come 'between' their terms must be given up. No mere
external go-between can logically connect. What occurs must be more
intimate. The hooking must be a penetration, a possession. The relation
must involve the terms, each term must involve it, and
merging thus their being in it, they must somehow merge their being in
each other, tho, as they seem still phenomenally so separate, we can
never conceive exactly how it is that they are inwardly one. The
absolute, however, must be supposed able to perform the unifying feat
in his own inscrutable fashion.
In old times, whenever a philosopher was assailed for some
particularly tough absurdity in his system, he was wont to parry the
attack by the argument from the divine omnipotence. 'Do you mean to
limit God's power?' he would reply: 'do you mean to say that God could
not, if he would, do this or that?' This retort was supposed to close
the mouths of all objectors of properly decorous mind. The functions of
the bradleian absolute are in this particular identical with those of
the theistic God. Suppositions treated as too absurd to pass muster in
the finite world which we inhabit, the absolute must be able to make
good 'somehow' in his ineffable way. First we hear Mr. Bradley
convicting things of absurdity; next, calling on the absolute to vouch
for them quand meme. Invoked for no other duty, that duty it
must and shall perform.
The strangest discontinuity of our world of appearance with the
supposed world of absolute reality is asserted both by Bradley and by
Royce; and both writers, the latter with great ingenuity, seek to
soften the violence of the jolt. But it remains violent all the same,
and is felt to be so by most readers. Whoever feels the violence
strongly sees as on a diagram in just what the peculiarity of all this
philosophy of the absolute consists. First, there is a healthy faith
that the world must be rational and self-consistent. 'All science, all
real knowledge, all experience presuppose,' as Mr. Ritchie writes, 'a
coherent universe.' Next, we find a loyal clinging to the rationalist
belief that sense-data and their associations are incoherent, and that
only in substituting a conceptual order for their order can truth be
found. Third, the substituted conceptions are treated
intellectualistically, that is as mutually exclusive and discontinuous,
so that the first innocent continuity of the flow of sense-experience
is shattered for us without any higher conceptual continuity taking its
place. Finally, since this broken state of things is intolerable, the
absolute deus ex machina is called on to mend it in his own way,
since we cannot mend it in ours.
Any other picture than this of post-kantian absolutism I am unable
to frame. I see the intellectualistic criticism destroying the
immediately given coherence of the phenomenal world, but unable to make
its own conceptual substitutes cohere, and I see the resort to the
absolute for a coherence of a higher type. The situation has dramatic
liveliness, but it is inwardly incoherent throughout, and the question
inevitably comes up whether a mistake may not somewhere have crept in
in the process that has brought it about. May not the remedy lie rather
in revising the intellectualist criticism than in first adopting it and
then trying to undo its consequences by an arbitrary act of faith in an
unintelligible agent. May not the flux of sensible experience itself
contain a rationality that has been overlooked, so that the real remedy
would consist in harking back to it more intelligently, and not in
advancing in the opposite direction away from it and even away beyond
the intellectualist criticism that disintegrates it, to the
pseudo-rationality of the supposed absolute point of view. I myself
believe that this is the real way to keep rationality in the world, and
that the traditional rationalism has always been facing in the wrong
direction. I hope in the end to make you share, or at any rate respect,
this belief, but there is much to talk of before we get to that point.
I employed the word 'violent' just now in describing the dramatic
situation in which it pleases the philosophy of the absolute to make
its camp. I don't see how any one can help being struck in absolutist
writings by that curious tendency to fly to violent extremes of which I
have already said a word. The universe must be rational; well and good;
but how rational? in what sense of that eulogistic but ambiguous
word?—this would seem to be the next point to bring up. There are
surely degrees in rationality that might be discriminated and
described. Things can be consistent or coherent in very diverse ways.
But no more in its conception of rationality than in its conception of
relations can the monistic mind suffer the notion of more or less.
Rationality is one and indivisible: if not rational thus indivisibly,
the universe must be completely irrational, and no shadings or mixtures
or compromises can obtain. Mr. McTaggart writes, in discussing the
notion of a mixture: 'The two principles, of rationality and
irrationality, to which the universe is then referred, will have to be
absolutely separate and independent. For if there were any common unity
to which they should be referred, it would be that unity and not its
two manifestations which would be the ultimate explanation ... and the
theory, having thus become monistic,'[9] would resolve itself into the
same alternative once more: is the single principle 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
dependent on each other, and this independence their plurality would
contradict. For to be 'many' is to be related, the word having no
meaning unless the units are somehow taken together, and it is
impossible to take them in a sort of unreal void, so they must belong
to a larger reality, and so carry the essence of the units beyond their
proper selves, 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 only conclusion allowable is that, in Ritchie's words, 'every
single event is ultimately related to every other, and determined by
the whole to which it belongs.' The whole complete block-universe
through-and-through, therefore, or no universe at all!
Professor Taylor is so naif in this habit of thinking only in
extremes that he charges the pluralists with cutting the ground from
under their own feet in not consistently following it themselves. What
pluralists say is that a universe really connected loosely, after the
pattern of our daily experience, is possible, and that for certain
reasons it is the hypothesis to be preferred. What Professor Taylor
thinks they naturally must or should say is that any other sort of
universe is logically impossible, and that a totality of things
interrelated like the world of the monists is not an hypothesis that
can be seriously thought out at all.[11]
Meanwhile no sensible pluralist ever flies or wants to fly to this
dogmatic extreme.
If chance is spoken of as an ingredient of the universe, absolutists
interpret it to mean that double sevens are as likely to be thrown out
of a dice box as double sixes are. If free-will is spoken of, that must
mean that an english general is as likely to eat his prisoners to-day
as a Maori chief was a hundred years ago. It is as likely—I am using
Mr. McTaggart's examples—that a majority of Londoners will burn
themselves alive to-morrow as that they will partake of food, as likely
that I shall be hanged for brushing my hair as for committing a
murder,[12] and so forth, through various suppositions that no
indeterminist ever sees real reason to make.
This habit of thinking only in the most violent extremes reminds me
of what Mr. Wells says of the current objections to socialism, in his
wonderful little book, 'New worlds for old.' The commonest vice of the
human mind is its disposition to see everything as yes or no, as black
or white, its incapacity for discrimination of intermediate shades. So
the critics agree to some hard and fast impossible definition of
socialism, and extract absurdities from it as a conjurer gets rabbits
from a hat. Socialism abolishes property, abolishes the family, and the
rest. The method, Mr. Wells continues, is always the same: It is to
assume that whatever the socialist postulates as desirable is wanted
without limit of qualification,—for socialist read pluralist and the
parallel holds good,—it is to imagine that whatever proposal is made
by him is to be carried out by uncontrolled monomaniacs, and so to make
a picture of the socialist dream which can be presented to the
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 the
logical necessity of the absolute, of flying to the opposite extreme:
'But surely, SURELY there must be some connexion among things!'
As if I must necessarily be an uncontrolled monomanic insanely denying
any connexion whatever. The whole question revolves in very truth about
the word 'some.' Radical empiricism and pluralism stand out for the
legitimacy of the notion of some: each part of the world is in
some ways connected, in some other ways not connected with its other
parts, and the ways can be discriminated, for many of them are obvious,
and their differences are obvious to view. Absolutism, on its side,
seems to hold that 'some' is a category ruinously infected with
self-contradictoriness, and that the only categories inwardly
consistent 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 us
abundantly familiar—the question, namely, whether all the relations
with other things, possible to a being, are pre-included in its
intrinsic nature and enter into its essence, or whether, in respect to
some of these relations, it can be without reference to them,
and, if it ever does enter into them, do so adventitiously and as it
were by an after-thought. This is the great question as to whether
'external' relations can exist. They seem to, undoubtedly. My
manuscript, for example, is 'on' the desk. The relation of being 'on'
doesn't seem to implicate or involve in any way the inner meaning of
the manuscript or the inner structure of the desk—these objects engage
in it only by their outsides, it seems only a temporary accident in
their respective histories. Moreover, the 'on' fails to appear to our
senses as one of those unintelligible 'betweens' that have to be
separately hooked on the terms they pretend to connect. All this
innocent sense-appearance, however, we are told, cannot pass muster in
the eyes of reason. It is a tissue of self-contradiction which only the
complete absorption of the desk and the manuscript into the higher
unity of a more absolute reality can overcome.
The reasoning by which this conclusion is supported is too subtle
and complicated to be properly dealt with in a public lecture, and you
will thank me for not inviting you to consider it at all.[13] I feel
the more free to pass it by now as I think that the cursory account of
the absolutistic attitude which I have already given is sufficient for
our present purpose, and that my own verdict on the philosophy of the
absolute as 'not proven'—please observe that I go no farther now—need
not be backed by argument at every special point. Flanking operations
are less costly and in some ways more effective than frontal attacks.
Possibly you will yourselves think after hearing my remaining lectures
that the alternative of an universe absolutely rational or absolutely
irrational is forced and strained, and that a via media exists
which some of you may agree with me is to be preferred. Some
rationality certainly does characterize our universe; and, weighing one
kind with another, we may deem that the incomplete kinds that appear
are on the whole as acceptable as the through-and-through sort of
rationality on which the monistic systematizers insist.
All the said systematizers who have written since Hegel have owed
their inspiration largely to him. Even when they have found no use for
his particular triadic dialectic, they have drawn confidence and
courage from his authoritative and conquering tone. I have said nothing
about Hegel in this lecture, so I must repair the omission in the next.