CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY, 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 GOLDWIN SMITH 
 HALL 
 
 PROM THE FUND GIVEN BY 
 
 GOLDWIN SMITH 
 
 1909 
 
 R. M. Ogden 
 
BD i„_Hg^^"«''""'™««l"-ibrary 
 
 Studies in contemporary metaphysics, 
 
 3 1924 014 630 416 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924014630416 
 
STUDIES IN 
 
 CONTEMPORARY 
 
 METAPHYSICS 
 
 BY 
 
 R. F. ALFRED HOERNLE 
 
 HARVARD UNIVERSITY 
 
 M 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE 
 
 1920 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC. 
 
 THE QUINN a BODEN COMPANY 
 RAHWAV, N. J. 
 
TO THE MEMORY OF 
 MY FATHER 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The Studies contained in this volume may be described as 
 chips from a metaphysician's workshop, or perhaps I should 
 rather say blocks hewn out experimentally in the effort after 
 a systematic synthesis; not unlike the painter's sketches, or 
 the sculptor's rough modellings in clay, which precede the 
 finished work. The day for systems, we are constantly told, 
 is passed, but not, let us hope, the day for philosophers to 
 continue the effort to think systematically. Much scorn has 
 been poured on the philosophical systems which sprang into 
 being so abundantly a hundred years ago, fit heralds of a 
 century which has been well called, in retrospect, " the 
 Century of Hope ". We children of an age of disillusion- 
 ment need to recapture something of the confidence, the 
 speculative daring, of the great thinkers of the past. On 
 the printed page their " systems " are apt to appear as vain 
 attempts to imprison the rich and varied life of the world in 
 a rigid pattern of conceptual pigeon-holes. But of their 
 spirit, their endeavour after wholeness, their effort to think 
 systematically, we cannot have enough. We certainly need 
 more than we have. At any rate, the following Studies are 
 inspired by the conviction — itself not an a priori assump- 
 tion, but a conclusion slowly gathered from the business of 
 philosophising — that experience, taken as a whole, gives us 
 clues which, rightly interpreted, lead to the perception of 
 order in the universe, a graded order of varied appearances. 
 The concepts of the " order of the universe " and — in the 
 Platonic phrase — of the " saving of the appearances " de- 
 fine, between them, the ideal which I have had before me. 
 The saving of appearances calls for a theory which enables 
 
 V 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 us to appreciate each appearance for what it really is, and 
 which exhibits each in its place among other appearances in 
 the universe. I should be false to this conviction if I did 
 not add that it does not seem to me alien to the practical 
 task of meeting the varied incidents of human life with 
 steadfast wisdom. 
 
 The student surveying the multifarious tendencies and 
 movements of contemporary thought, may well feel as if he 
 stood at the parting of many ways, presented as alternatives 
 for his choice. On the one side he will find himself itold 
 that the philosophic spirit is in essence subjective and senti- 
 mental, that it allows moods and desires to colour its view of 
 the world, that it rebels against the inevitable limits of 
 human knowledge. He will be advised to turn his back on 
 the chaos of the actual world and seek comfort amidst the 
 eternal verities of pure reason. He will hear it said that 
 only those subjects are fit for the philosopher's attention, 
 in the study of which he can be ethically neutral. He may 
 meet with the view that it has never yet been proved that 
 the universe is not a grand, and in parts rather cruel, joke 
 and that he who enters into the joke and plays with it, is 
 more likely to get real insight than he who takes the uni- 
 verse seriously and stakes reason and happiness on its 
 orderliness and goodness. On the other hand, he will meet 
 with a continuous tradition in philosophy, supported by the 
 greatest thinkers of the past, and vigorous at the present 
 day, not from mere subservience to their authority, but be- 
 cause fresh generations of philosophers find the insight of 
 their predecessors verified by their own thinking. This 
 tradition stands for the " rationality " of the universe, not 
 merely in the formal sense of every detail in it being sub- 
 ject to the law of sufficient reason, but even more in the 
 profounder sense of its being the home of the values which 
 we commonly call spiritual. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 vn- 
 
 Such, briefly, are the alternatives before the student. His 
 choice cannot be settled by tossing. It cannot, like the 
 choice of Buridan's ass, be unmotived. And though it be 
 temperamental, it will not, therefore, be irrational or arbi- 
 trary. For the factors which determine a thinker's choice in 
 fundamental matters such as these are " objective " — drawn 
 from his nature which is conditioned by the universe of 
 which he is a part; drawn from his experience which is a 
 function of the age in which he lives, the education he has 
 received and continues receiving, the incidents and acci- 
 dents of his checkered existence, all he has done and left 
 imdone, all he has felt and thought. It is, once more, the 
 universe which communicates itself to him in these miscel- 
 laneous ways. From these, and with these, materials he 
 must gather his philosophic vision. He has no other ma- 
 terials to work with. In them he must find his clues, learn- 
 ing to discriminate the thoughts which are superficial from 
 those which yield the deeper knowledge. Having done this 
 honestly, he must stand by the result. It is truth for him, 
 and he has done his part. 
 
 From this confession of my philosophical faith, I turn 
 gratefully to record my countless obligations to others. 
 These obligations are not to be judged merely by the quota- 
 tions in the text or the references in footnotes. The selec- 
 tion of the former is due often to no more than the caprice 
 of memory, or the chance of recent reading. The latter are 
 given mainly where the argument is polemical, or a particu- 
 lar allegation stood in need of support. I know that I owe 
 more than I can in detail set down to discussions with, and 
 to the books of, many friends and colleagues, at Harvard 
 and elsewhere. Like every teacher I know, too, how much 
 my students have helped me to clearer thought and ex- 
 pression. It is a sincere pleasure to record here my grati- 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 tude to all who were, in that I learned from them, my 
 teachers, willing or unwilling, nameable or nameless. 
 
 But there are two specific obligations which I cannbt 
 forbear to single out. One is to the training which I re- 
 ceived at Oxford — a training the method and spirit , of 
 which still seem to me beyond praise, in that it combined 
 sound historical foundations with keen attention to every 
 living movement of the present day. From the example and 
 practice of my teachers I learned to read the great thinkers 
 of the past as if they were contemporaries — as indeed they 
 are in that realm of speculation where great thoughts do 
 not age — and to feel how, across centuries and generations, 
 the sense of fellowship in the quest of truth and wisdom 
 may bind men together. 
 
 And the other obligation is to Dr. Bernard Bosanquet in 
 whose philosophical life-work I find the most vital, and in 
 the best sense empirical, statement of " idealism " or 
 " speculative philosophy " in modern philosophical litera- 
 ture. So far as I can judge, I owe to him, more than to 
 any other single writer, the essential frame-work of my own 
 philosophical thinking. 
 
 It is my hope shortly to continue the present series of 
 Studies in a second volume which will be devoted especially 
 to problems bearing On the controversy between idealism 
 and realism. It will also give me an opportunity to expand 
 and defend the positions taken up, or implied, in the present 
 volume on such topics as universals, theory of knowledge, 
 and truth. 
 
 It remains to add that the sixth essay originally appeared 
 in the PhilosopMcal Review, and that a few passages in 
 the second essay formed part of an article in the Chronicle. 
 My thanks are due to liie editors for their permission to 
 reprint. R. F. A. H. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. Prologue: The Philosopher's Quest ... 3 
 
 II. The Idol of Scientific Method in Philosophy . 24 
 
 III. Philosophy of Nature at the Cross-Roads . 50 
 
 IV. On " Doubting the Reality of the World of 
 
 Sense " 70 
 
 V. " Saving the Appearances " in the Physical 
 
 World 99 
 
 Note on John Locke's Distinction of Primary and 
 
 Secondary Qualities 139 
 
 VI. Mechanism and Vitalism: A Study in the 
 
 Order of Nature 141 
 
 VII. Mechanism and Vitalism: Further Problems . 163 
 
 Note on Bergson and The Origin of Life . . 196 
 
 VIII. Theories of Mind 203 
 
 Note on The Theory of Knowledge . . . 244 
 
 IX. The Self in Self-Consciousness . . . .250 
 
 X. Epilogue: Religion and Philosophy of Re- 
 ligion 294 
 
STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 prologue: the philosopher's quest 
 
 What is Philosophy? Once again this has become a burn- 
 ing question for philosophers. For behind all the current 
 self-criticism of philosophers, behind all the argument about 
 method, subject-matter, function, value; about the alleged 
 lack of progress; about the desirability of greater agree- 
 ment and the best way of achieving it, there lies the uneasy 
 suspicion that all is not well with philosophy. Philosophy, 
 we are told, especially in its academic form, nay because 
 of its academic form, has become barren; it has lost touch 
 with the vital problems and perplexities of our age. 
 
 True, to a kindly eye there are evidences in plenty of 
 vigorous philosophical life. Speculative interest and activity 
 have been of recent years increasingly varied and enterpris- 
 ing. There has been no lack of originality. There has 
 been an abundance of new methods, new insights, new 
 movements, if not new systems. The opening of the cen- 
 tury found idealism widely estabUshed as the dominant 
 doctrine. Since then the trumpets of pragmatism have 
 blared for the fall of the walls of the idealistic Jericho, 
 and realisms of all sorts, " new " or " critical ", have sought 
 to shake its foundations by many novel forms of intellec- 
 tual battering-rams. But the defenders have rallied and are 
 rallying, and between the vigorous resistance of old, and 
 the heralding of new, idealisms, the battle is far from hav- 
 ing been won by the assailants. In some detachment from 
 the main struggle, vitalism in several forms, from Driesch to 
 Bergson, has attempted philosophical constructions and 
 
 3 
 
4 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. I 
 
 reconstructions. And there are minor movements and cur- 
 rents too numerous to mention. 
 
 To a student content to enter heart and soul into this 
 conflict of theories, the present situation may well seem full 
 of interest and promise. And yet the very variety and in- 
 geniousness of these modern philosophies may beget a dis- 
 heartening doubt. Is anything, after all, being achieved by 
 all this brilliant thinking and vigorous arguing? Does 
 novelty guarantee progress or truth? Does any question 
 get settled? Is there any gain in insight and wisdom? Is 
 the whole enterprise of philosophy at bottom really worth 
 while? 
 
 The mood from which such questions spring is especially 
 prevalent at the present day. Nor is it hard to see why 
 this should be so, why the familiar criticisms and self- 
 criticisms of philosophy should come home to its students 
 just now with peculiar poignancy, and be the source of a 
 singular ferment and unrest. The broad contact of philos- 
 ophy with all sides of hiunan life and experience has always 
 exposed it to certain criticisms, but these have received fresh 
 point and force alike from the tragic sufferings which hu- 
 manity has undergone in the recent war and from the rapid 
 changes in the economic, social, and political order which 
 we are now witnessing. Philosophy is being weighed by 
 practical men and by social reformers, by scientists and 
 by theologians. Why is the verdict so frequently, " Foimd 
 Wanting "? 
 
 In the average man's life the pressure of practical needs 
 is constant. In manual labour and in business, at work 
 or at play, there are always things to be done, and done 
 immediately. There is at best little leisure for sustained 
 thought on "first and last things," and even less inclina- 
 tion, for such thinking is at first unsettling, always ardu- 
 
Ch. I] THE PHILOSOPHER'S QUEST 5 
 
 ous, and not always crowned by the attainment of cer- 
 tainty. So far as the plain man has a working faith to live 
 by, he has not got it from philosophy. So far as he feels 
 the need of one, it is not through philosophy that he will 
 seek it. For that way is long and difficult, and he wants 
 a short-cut to certainty. Moreover, many philosophical 
 problems do not seem to bear on his troubles and per- 
 plexities, his hopes and fears, at all. Hence he is impatient 
 of such speculations, and has little tolerance for enquiries 
 which promise no solution for his pressing difficulties; 
 which cannot be translated forthwith into a plan of action; 
 which have no direct bearing on his comfort, prosperity, 
 happiness. Indeed, inasmuch as philosophy requires leisure, 
 it may seem to him even an improper luxury, a form of 
 pretentious but improductive idleness. 
 
 In an even more formidable form this accusation of 
 uselessness has recently been levelled against much of cur- 
 rent philosophy by philosophers and others whose first in- 
 terest is in social and educational reform. Philosophy, these 
 critics complain, has either lost contact with the urgent 
 problems of present-day society, or else maintains this con- 
 tact in an imfruitful way. " There is no force so explosive 
 as the force of ideas " — ^but present-day philosophers have 
 ceased to produce ideas that move the world as ferments of 
 reform. In the past, philosophical theories have more than 
 once shaken the social order to its foundations: to-day the 
 philosopher's tendency is to look upon social phenomena 
 simply as facts to be observed and understood. Divorcing 
 theory from practice, he becomes a mere recording spec- 
 tator even of social ills, of economic injustice, political 
 tyranny, educational stupidity. His interest even in move- 
 ments towards reform and revolution, and in the ideals by 
 which these, and the resistance to these, are inspired, is 
 restricted to that of the aloof, dispassionate onlooker. Yet 
 
6 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. I 
 
 is he not a citizen as well as a philosopher, and should he 
 not put his. philosophy in the service of his citizenship? 
 Does not a completer conception of his function demand 
 of him that he be both observer and leader? Especially 
 to-day, when the war has thrown the old order into the 
 melting-pot; when the traditional relationships between 
 classes and nations, and the beliefs by which these relation- 
 ships were sustained and approved, are rapidly being dis- 
 solved; when vast changes are in process the drift of which 
 no man can foresee and none claim to be able to guide 
 assuredly to a wise and happy issue — is it not pre-eminently 
 a time for taking thought, and devoting trained intelligence 
 to the great task of making this a better world for men 
 and women to live in? If the " lover of wisdom " have any 
 wisdom, here surely is his opportunity. To refuse this 
 service to the common weal would be for him the great 
 refusal, the great betrayal. In this spirit many hard things 
 have recently been said about "otiose speculation" and 
 "parasitic professors," about the sheltered irresponsibility 
 of the academic scholar, who either ignores these problems, 
 or else is tempted to defend the established order of which 
 he is one of the beneficiaries, or at best propounds theories 
 which he never submits to the searching test of practical 
 application. And apart from the special need for thought 
 on social and political reform, these critics lay down the 
 principle that the only kind of thinking which is worth 
 while is the thinking which is instrumental to action, and 
 that the only way of determining the truth of a theory is to 
 experiment with it by putting it into practice. 
 
 When we turn to the contact of philosophy with science, 
 we pass into a calmer air. Not philosophy's bearing on 
 conduct, but its methods and achievements as pure theory 
 are now the subject of challenge. In part this challenge is 
 still inspired by the old suspicion against " metaphysics " 
 
Ch.I] THE PHILOSOPHER'S QUEST 7 
 
 which we have inherited from Comte's positivism in France 
 and from the reaction against post-Kantian idealism in Ger- 
 many. The philosopher is still supposed to want to settle, 
 in a high-handed a priori way, empirical problems which 
 science unravels by patient observation and ingenious ex- 
 perimentation. Or else he is regarded as indulging in fanci- 
 ful guesses concerning the " unknowable " reality which lies 
 behind phenomena — guesses which must remain forever 
 unverifiable seeing that their object is beyond the reach of 
 experience. Where these criticisms have gone out of 
 fashion, they have frequently been replaced by a more 
 formidable, because more plausible, challenge based on the 
 proverbial lack of agreement among philosophers: They 
 are invited to note how complete, by comparison, is the con- 
 sensus of scientific experts; how steady and cumulative the 
 progress of scientific theory. On the one side a perpetual 
 clash of individual opinions and inconclusive arguments, on 
 the other a solid accumulation of well-observed facts and 
 experimentally verified theories by the cooperative re- 
 searches of successive generations — this is how the com- 
 parison is apt to appear to a scientist. Nay, he may push 
 his challenge deeper still. Is philosophy really entitled to 
 rank above science in the system of knowledge? Does it 
 deserve the name of " knowledge " in the scientific sense 
 at all? Is it not rather to be classed with faith and belief, 
 or again with poetry and imagination? How can its multi- 
 farious guesses be valued above the certainties of science? 
 This, clearly, is to call in question the traditional claim of 
 philosophy to offer a profounder and more comprehensive 
 insight into the nature of the universe than any other mode 
 of thought. No other indictment has found so ready an 
 echo in the ranks of philosophers as this. Not for the first 
 time at the present day is the comparison with science being 
 used by philosophers themselves to point a moral for philos- 
 
8 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.I 
 
 ophy and press home a demand for a fresh start by the 
 application of " scientific method." 
 
 Lastly, there is the contact of philosophy with religion, 
 of which philosophy appears, now as the rival, now as the 
 critic, now as the sympathetic interpreter and defender. 
 In each role, it lays itself open to challenge. It is being 
 criticised either as too religious or as not religious enough. 
 To those who care, above all, for the stability of religious 
 faith, and are accustomed to rest that stability upon author- 
 ity, most modern philosophy seems little better than the 
 presumptuous emancipation of the individual's reason from 
 the assured truth which church and revelation provide. To 
 others — and they are many — ^who turn to philosophy in the 
 hope of finding there a ready means of dispelling religious 
 doubts and rebuilding a shattered faith, it seems but too 
 often to bring nothing but deeper doubt and greater per- 
 plexity of spirit. Yet when a philosopher defends, not 
 perhaps the details of dogma, but at least the legitimacy 
 of religious faith, or when he characterises reality as God, 
 there are always critics ready to accuse him of disingenu- 
 ousness, or, at least, of self-deception; of cloaking unortho- 
 dox doctrine in orthodox-sounding language; and delaying 
 the inevitable death of a creed outworn. Yet, for all this, 
 no other problem stirs the philosophical thought of the age 
 so profoundly as this problem of religion. For religious 
 need and religious experience are facts too universal to be 
 ignored, and whether he adjust his religion to his theory of 
 the universe, or his theory of the universe to his religion, 
 no philosopher who deals with fundamentals, or tries to 
 get beyond piecemeal problems to an understanding of the 
 whole, can avoid dealing with religion as one of the central 
 experiences. 
 
 These criticisms, grave at all times, have recently cut 
 with a sharper edge wherever philosophers have found 
 
Ch.I] THE PHILOSOPHER'S QUEST 9 
 
 themselves citizens of countries at war. At a time when all 
 were eager to put their best at the service of their nation, 
 what had they to offer? Other workers in theoretical fields 
 did not lack opportunity to apply their knowledge. There 
 was an obvious call and use for the trained skill and special 
 information of almost every kind of scientist. Chemist 
 and physicist, engineer and geologist, doctor and psycholo- 
 gist — every one had specific contributions to make to the 
 effort of a nation at war. Philosophers, no doubt, on both 
 sides did something to maintain their nations' morale, ex- 
 pounding their ideals, exhibiting the falsity of the enemy's 
 philosophies. But, in the main, a philosopher capable of 
 bearing arms, seemed able to serve only with his body, not 
 with his mind. Whatever the value of philosophy in days 
 of peace, much of it was inapplicable in the emergencies of 
 war. The nations at war could make little, if any, use of 
 their philosophers except as propagandists, and propaganda 
 too often proved demoralising to philosophy. 
 
 This experience, added to the instability of the existing 
 order, the uncertainty of the future, the perplexing practical 
 problems which beset mankind on every side, has given a 
 sting to that call for self-criticism to which philosophers at 
 no time have been wholly deaf. 
 
 Many influences are thus converging upon putting 
 philosophers out of humour with philosophy. What can a 
 philosopher who, in this mood, faces the question of the 
 nature and value of philosophy do to reassure himself? 
 There is, it would seem, only one way. He must recall to 
 himself, he must try to communicate to others, what 
 philosophy is like as an experience dominating his life, as 
 an absorbing occupation, as a concentration in intense 
 activity of his whole being. What is wanted is not some 
 definition of philosophy, not some catalogue of problems, or 
 
10 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. I 
 
 drawing of boundary-lines around its subject-matter, not 
 comparisons with science, religion, poetry. These touch 
 the fringes, not the heart of the matter. Instead of asking, 
 What is philosophy? we should ask. What is it to philoso- 
 phise? Call philosophy an enterprise, an experience, an 
 attitude, as you will: — the spirit of philosophy as it is ex- 
 perienced by the thinkers engaged in philosophising is what 
 we have to imderstand. To render this spirit, we must not 
 set down a philosophical system, or any special doctrines, 
 which have been gained as the results of philosophising. 
 Let systems and results be as different as they may: there 
 is an acknowledged kinship of philosophers in the spirit 
 of their enterprise. This spirit is open to recognition in 
 the writings of philosophers: it forms the common ground 
 in all philosophical discussions. It introduces the indi- 
 vidual thinker into a fellowship, a company, a communion 
 of men engaged in the same endeavour though they may 
 disagree about its very scope and method. " Think for 
 yourself " — " Go straight to the facts." These are, indeed, 
 the elementary rules for learning to stand intellectually on 
 one's own feet and not to philosophise with second-hand 
 material. But they would be dangerous fallacies if they 
 were interpreted to mean that the individual has nothing 
 to learn from others, or that his experiences and thoughts do^ 
 not need to be checked by comparison with those of others. 
 Thinking is always social; its typical form is that of debate, 
 and even the single thinker in his solitary meditations is 
 debating with himself. This is why philosophers so largely 
 argue at and for each other, and why the theories of the 
 great thinkers of the past retain their living interest for 
 later generations. Eschewing a priori assumptions about 
 what philosophy ought to be, can we not reflect on what the 
 spirit of philosophising as a spontaneous activity in ourselves 
 and others actually is? 
 
Ch.I] THE PHILOSOPHER'S QUEST ii 
 
 That spirit is the spirit of wholeness. To philosophise is 
 to seek an attitude towards the universe as a whole, or, in 
 so far as the search at all succeeds, to have such an attitude. 
 What does this mean? It cannot mean obviously, that the 
 whole of the universe in any quantitative sense is present to 
 the thinker. Quantitatively, no finite mind can exhaust the 
 universe. No accumulation of experiences would bring us 
 appreciably nearer exhausting the inexhaustible. There is 
 always the future of which no man knows what it may 
 bring. There is always the past of which in the main but 
 a few sketchy, shadowy outlines are revealed even to our 
 most patient and detailed research. There is, in short, the 
 whole immensity of space and time to bring home to the 
 individual thinker the limitations of his range, to make him 
 realise that what he effectively grasps of the universe by de- 
 tailed exploration is but a fragment, a sample, a cross- 
 section. Wholeness, thus, is not to be understood quanti- 
 tatively, but qualitatively. It consists, at the very least, in 
 that quality of organisation in virtue of which alone we 
 can say that we experience a " universe " or live in a 
 " world." Order, correlation of differences, system, are 
 aspects of it, or forms of it. Without it, belief and conduct, 
 our judgments and our actions, would be equally chaotic, 
 contradictory, mutually destructive. In some degree it is 
 characteristic of the life of every mind. In a greater degree 
 it belongs to the cooperative achievements, like science, or 
 society, in which many minds share. The explicit effort to 
 achieve the maximum possible of such wholeness is philoso- 
 phising. It is, thus, a continuation, at the level of reflective 
 thought, of a principle the working of which can be traced 
 at every level of experience, in feeling and perceiving, in 
 reasoning and in willing. It rests on the fundamental fact 
 which everyone can verify for himself, that experiences are 
 not isolated and disconnected but expand and modify each 
 
12 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. I 
 
 other. Each illuminates others, gives meaning to them, de- 
 rives meaning from them. 
 
 This fafct is so familiar and so universal that, for this 
 very reason, its presence tends to pass unnoticed, its im- 
 portance to remain unappreciated. It is hard to discriminate 
 it and keep attention focused upon it just because of the 
 infinite variety of its illustrations which every moment of 
 conscious life affords. Whenever we say that one fact 
 throws light on others, that one thing helps us to under- 
 stand, or do, some other thing better, this principle of organi- 
 sation is operative. The development of knowledge, the 
 growth of character are equally instances of it. When 
 repeated observations of the same object, revealing its 
 different qualities and modes of behaviour under different 
 conditions, yield comprehensive and systematic knowledge 
 of it; when countless diverse facts suggest and verify a 
 theory which explains them; when practice brings skill in 
 the execution of a movement; when habit brings economy 
 of time and thought; when interests and purposes which 
 might conflict, are adjusted to each other on a scale of 
 relative urgency and value, with much discipline of desires 
 and feelings in the process, and careful control of conduct — 
 the quality of wholeness is displayed. Yet another way of 
 pointing it out is to remind ourselves that experiences do not 
 simply come and go: they live on, they endure, they are 
 retained, mostly not as distinct memories, but fused into 
 wha;t certain psychologists used to call an " apperceptive 
 system ", which is but the technical name for the power 
 which a mind acquires to assimilate fresh experiences, to 
 interpret their meaning, respond with appropriate action, 
 and to learn and grow in this very process. Indeed, it may 
 fairly be said that the principle of wholeness is most obvi- 
 ously manifest in all learning by experience. But to say 
 that there is learning by, and from, experience is to say that 
 
Ch.I] THE PHILOSOPHER'S QUEST 13 
 
 it contains a lesson to be discovered and elicited; that ex- 
 perience has something to teach or to reveal. To philoso- 
 phise is nothing but the sustained attempt to elicit this 
 lesson, to focus and concentrate experience systematically — 
 what else but this is reflection and speculation? — ^and to 
 state its message and its meaning in the form of a coherent 
 theory. 
 
 If we want a provisional formula for the topic of this 
 lesson, any one of the many current descriptions of the 
 object of the philosopher's quest will do as well as any other. 
 We can put it, if we please, as the universe and man's 
 place in it; as man, the world, and God; as nature, self, and 
 the reality which includes them both; as the order of ap- 
 pearances in the universe. But if such formulae are to 
 have any value as conveying the spirit of philosophy, they 
 must be interpreted as pointing us, by the mention of cer- 
 tain objects, to the central and dominant t5^es of experi- 
 ence in which these objects reveal themselves, come to be 
 known, and to determine behaviour. And, even so, a cata- 
 logue of objects and experiences names rather the data or 
 materials for philosophising, than the effort at synthesis, or 
 ssmopsis, which acknowledges at bottom but one " object " 
 — call it, as we will, reality, God, the absolute, the universe, 
 the whole. 
 
 The spirit of philosophy, then, as exhibited in philosophis- 
 ing, is the highest form of the principle of wholeness which 
 is present throughout the life qf mind wherever something is 
 being learnt in, and from, experience. Philosophy thus is 
 continuous with the rest of experience, as, indeed, it must 
 be, if it is the effort to grasp reflectively its quintessence. 
 At the same time, it has its specific character and is dis- 
 tinguished from other forms of experience in that it is the 
 explicit, self-conscious, and therefore completest, form of 
 the operation of the principle of wholeness. For it is at 
 
14 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.I 
 
 least the aim of philosophical theory to satisfy that principle 
 most fully, alike in comprehensiveness and in systematisa- 
 tion. 
 
 The data and materials for philosophical reflection, 
 again, are not the crude and chaotic experiences of im- 
 mature minds, but the already highly organised systems of 
 experience in which mature minds participate through their 
 feelings, thoughts, and actions. We must have art, science, 
 religion, social and political life, and all these in various 
 degrees and forms, before a situation can airise in which the 
 need for philosophising in the proper sense is felt; before 
 the peculiar problems present themselves which supply the 
 persistent occasion and stimulus for philosophising. This 
 situation, these problems, arise from the contradictions and 
 conflicts between these several t5^es of experience, or within 
 each of them, which threaten to defeat the demand for 
 wholeness, consistency, order. The effort of philosophical 
 reflection is then directed in part Upon eliciting the es- 
 sence, or real nature, of each type of experience, by grading 
 the examples of it so as to study those which exhibit the 
 nature of each at its best, most fully, most characteristically. 
 This is what is meant when it is said that philosophy is not 
 content with first appearances but seeks the ultimately real; 
 that it does not stay at the surface, but penetrates to the 
 deeper meaning. Behind these formulae lies the simple 
 fact, once more easily verifiable for the looking, that the 
 examples, instances, cases, of a quality, nature, law (in 
 short of a universal) commonly can be graded according 
 as they exhibit that universal character more or less ade- 
 quately, and that the standard of interpretation must be 
 taken from the examples which show the character at its 
 best. More particularly, anything which, like mind, is in 
 process of evolution, requires this analysis from the top 
 
Ch.I] THE PHILOSOPHER'S QUEST 15 
 
 downwards. But, further, the task of philosophy is to point 
 out by analysis of the bearing upon each other of conflicting 
 types of experience, how their conflict is actually overcome, 
 and how, therefore, in principle it admits of solution. Here 
 is the place to acknowledge that the spirit of wholeness 
 meets, apparently, with its most formidable defeats through 
 its very triumphs. Its successes in organising orders of 
 experience produce the acutest contradictions and antino- 
 mies. Life threatens to remain chaotic in a chaotic world 
 so long as the very systems of order which supply its frame- 
 work, impose incompatible judgments and actions upon us. 
 A unified life is possible only in a unified world; in a cosmos, 
 not in a chaos. To philosophise is, therefore, to seek to 
 translate the implicit conviction of order into explicit in- 
 sight, to show that the lesson of experience, taken com- 
 prehensively in range but with the best of each ts^pe as 
 the clue to interpretation, yields and sustains this insight. 
 Perhaps the most fundamental antinomy, we might even say 
 predicament, which runs through modern civilisation and 
 carries conflict and perplexity into the thought and conduct 
 of modern men, is that between science and religion, be- 
 tween facts and values, between the actual and the 
 ideal, between nature and spirit. A closely allied predica- 
 ment arises from the existence of evil and the divergent 
 attitudes towards it of morality and religion. If the moral 
 life is essentially a fight against evil, an effort to perfect 
 an imperfect world, how is it compatible with religion, i.e., 
 with the worship due only to that which is perfect? Yet 
 another predicament is always present, and always liable 
 to become acute, in the relations of the individual to the 
 community of which he is a member, when, e.g., the indi- 
 vidual's conscience condemns the public action which is done 
 in his name and in which he may be called upon to take an 
 active part. All such situations, sometimes for the sake of 
 
i6 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.I 
 
 unified conduct, always for the sake of unified theory, 
 operate as stimuli for discovering by reflection a more com- 
 prehensive point of view, in which the divergent ways of 
 thinking and acting may be brought together and adjusted 
 so that unity, consistency, wholeness are recovered, or, 
 rather, are brought to light. 
 
 In this sense, then, to repeat it once more, to philosophise 
 is to seek to apprehend the universe as a whole, and to em- 
 ploy all the resources of experience in this task, taking each 
 type of experience at its best, when its lesson is clearest, and 
 learning most from those experiences which in range and 
 organisation emancipate us most from superficial first im- 
 pressions and lead us deepest into the heart of reality, 
 FinaUty in this enterprise no philosopher has a right to ex- 
 pect, for fresh developments in experience, new scientific 
 theories, new religious movements, profound social and 
 political changes, will continue to present the familiar an- 
 tinomies in ever fresh forms. The predicaments to which 
 philosophising is the response, renew themselves in each gen- 
 eration, and the effort^to deal with them needs a correspond- 
 ing renewal. But if there is no finality in the sense of a 
 termination, there is a stability which comes from the pos- 
 session of an insight which as much enables the philosopher 
 to interpret fresh experiences aright, as it is itself confirmed 
 and sustained by these experiences. 
 
 This account of the spirit of philosophy may provoke 
 the contention that wholeness is predicable, not of the uni- 
 verse as a fact, but only of the philosopher's point of view 
 as an aspiration; that it means wholeness of attitude rather 
 than attitude towards a whole; that it is subjective and 
 psychological, not objective and metaphysical; an intel- 
 lectual demand or ideal, not an actual, or at least not a 
 verifiable, character of the nature of things. The universe, 
 
Ch.I] THE PHILOSOPHER'S QUEST 17 
 
 it may be urged, cannot be apprehended by us as a whole, 
 for, not knowing all of it, how can we know that it is a 
 " whole " at all? We have no right to give it that name; at 
 most we may speak of it only as if it were a whole. As it 
 comes to us in experience, it is sufficiently chaotic to stamp 
 the suggestion of its all-pervading orderliness as, at best, an 
 hypothesis — a " regulative ideal," in Kant's language — for 
 thought and conduct, not an objective truth. This conten- 
 tion may be variously developed. So far as wholeness is a 
 fact, it consists, it may be said, in the effective organisa- 
 tion by a mind of its experiences so as to achieve and ac- 
 quire a stable, consistent disposition of thought and action 
 towards nature, fellowmen, and Gkid (if there is a God). To 
 reflect this subjective wholeness upon the universe is illu- 
 sion and make-believe, conscious or unconscious. It is 
 arbitrary and artificial. It succeeds, so far as it does suc- 
 ceed, by selecting exclusively those features of the universe 
 which lend themselves to being ordered, and shutting one's 
 eyes to the abiuidance of negative evidence. Bold pragma- 
 tists may even glory in this forcible imposition of order on 
 a disorderly world. The world is, or can be made to become, 
 what we would have it be. If we but consistently will to 
 believe in its orderliness, then orderly it is. " Faith in a 
 fact helps create that fact ". Others regard the belief in 
 objective order as an escape from intolerable actualities into 
 the purer world of imagination. Philosophy, like art, is to 
 them an escape from the real. The dreams of metaphysic- 
 ians offer a vicarious satisfaction for wishes which the 
 actual world cruelly represses and frustrates. 
 
 Against this view, in all its variations, it must be urged 
 that it involves an ultimate dualism, a discord in the uni- 
 verse, a discord in our lives. Actual chaos confronts imagi- 
 nary order. And whether we regard the universe as plastic 
 or as hostile to human desires and ideals, whether we deal 
 
i8 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.I 
 
 with it in robust pragmatic aggressiveness, or in self-pity 
 console ourselves with metaphysical fancies, in either case 
 a dualism remains. No unity of mental attitude which is not 
 supported by the facts, which is not rooted in the nature 
 of things, will do. Unless the universe is a whole, it is 
 meaningless to talk of seeking an attitude towards it as a 
 whole. The " point of view of the whole " is not an idle 
 phrase. It means that the conviction of the wholeness of 
 the universe is a lesson of experience, is taught us by the 
 logic of the facts. It claims that experiences, drawn to- 
 gether by reflection, focused so as to interpret each other 
 and thus reveal their common and total meaning, supply the 
 evidence which justifies the conviction of unity and order. 
 Successful organisation of experiences means that the order 
 inherent in them is discovered and revealed. The universe 
 is the common " object ", or point of reference, of all our 
 experiences. It and its nature are revealed in all of them. 
 But the fullest revelation of it, its real nature, its char- 
 acter as a whole, is displayed only in so far as its partial 
 revelations are brought together so as to supplement, cor- 
 rect, interpret each other. The thinking and theorising 
 which yields such a revelation, or insight, is neither a run- 
 ning away from reality, nor a " making of reality " in the 
 image of human wishes. It is a seeking of reality by elicit- 
 ing from experience as a whole its revelation of reality as a 
 whole. It requires an openness of mind which, wljilst ireject- 
 ing no evidence, relies with due discrimination on the most 
 significant and illuminating experiences, rarer though they 
 may be than the surface moods and judgments of every- 
 day life. Above all, it will eschew one-sidedness, and be 
 on its guard against the danger of having its intellectual 
 balance weighed down, contrary to the standards of propor- 
 tionateness, by some fragmentary aspects of life, however 
 intense and impressive. Philosophising is the pursuit of a 
 
Ch.I] THE PHILOSOPHER'S QUEST 19 
 
 will-o'-the-wisp, unless the philosopher can rely on the prin- 
 ciple that there is nothing in the whole range of experience 
 which does not, in its own degree and measure, help to 
 reveal the nature of the universe. 
 
 The universe, to put it succinctly, is always with us, in 
 us, around us. Every thrill of experience attests its pres- 
 ence; compels — in the language of highly reflective theory — 
 acceptance of the judgment that something exists. What 
 exists? What is this something? To these questions, experi- 
 ence in all its forms supplies the answer, or, at least, the 
 materials for an answer. Philosophical thinking is the 
 endeavour to elicit from these materials a revelation of the 
 whole nature of the universe, which shall be as coherent 
 and complete as we can obtain. 
 
 In the light of this analysis of what it is to philosophise, 
 we can understand why now, as in the past, " philosophy " 
 has been used in many different senses, and why, nonethe- 
 less, these different senses, as every student of the history 
 of philosophy knows, are all connected, somewhat like varia- 
 tions on a single theme, or like different solutions of a 
 single problem. If the tree of philosophy has many diver- 
 gent branches, yet is there a single trunk from which they 
 all spring. All sorts of men have set out to be " lovers of 
 wisdom ", and the manner of their loving has been no 
 less varied than the things which they have loved as " wis- 
 dom." There is room in the enterprise of philosophising 
 for all kinds of temperaments and all kinds of experiences, 
 and each individual thinker draws upon the culture and 
 science, the economic, political, religious substance of con- 
 temporary life. Proverbially it takes all sorts to make a 
 world: certainly the world takes all sorts to make philoso- 
 phers. Or to put the same thing in the mathematical lan- 
 guage now fashionable: the function of philosophising is 
 
20 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.I 
 
 everywhere the same, but there are many values for its 
 variables. Our " wisdom " may be social service, or it may 
 be individual development. It may beckon to us as the 
 refined pleasure of the Epicurean, or as the stern discipline 
 of the Stoic. To some it Ues in the faith, indistinguishable 
 for them from knowledge, that the world is perfect. To 
 others it lies in labouring hopefully for its perfecting. Yet 
 others find their wisdom in facing unflinchingly the fact 
 that it is neither perfect nor perfectible, but demands, even 
 so, that men be loyal to ideals doomed never to be 
 realised. 
 
 Thus not only does the emphasis fall differently among 
 lovers of wisdom, but some exclude what others include. 
 Some achieve unity, or wholeness, at a greater cost and 
 sacrifice than others. Some are more balanced and well- 
 rounded natures, others are more fragmentary and one- 
 sided, perhaps even divided against themselves, torn by 
 some inner conflict — of mysticism, it may be, and science; 
 of intellect and emotion or desire. Yet all are fellow- 
 travellers in the same spiritual pilgrimage, bent upon the 
 same goal. 
 
 What is this goal? 
 
 Above we have already characterised it, in general terms, 
 as the spirit of wholeness. Here we may express it, from a 
 somewhat different angle, by saying that every philosopher, 
 whatever his resources of insight and character, wants to 
 discover, and to live, the life worth living. Every lover 
 of wisdom wants to learn what wisdom is and to make it 
 the actual quality of his living. His interest is both theoreti- 
 cal and practical. He is both spectator and agent. In- 
 deed, it is only for exposition's sake that we can thus 
 verbally contrast these two sides. In fact, knowing and 
 doing are not thus separable in the pursuit of philosophy. 
 For thinking, too, is a way of doing, of occupying oiieself, 
 
Ch.I] THE PHILOSOPHER'S QUEST 21 
 
 of spending one's life, and the ways of doing which are 
 not theoretical or contemplative, are the better for catching 
 something of the spirit of selflessness which occupation 
 with eternal truths brings into the fret and stress of practical 
 life. Vice versa, only he who has lived deeply and broadly, 
 has at -his disposal rich and varied resources for meditation. 
 There is indeed a theory according to which the end of all 
 theory is action, and " propositions of practice " the truths 
 most worth discovering. There is also an opposite theory 
 according to which the thing most worth doing is to theorise. 
 This is but another instance of those differences of emphasis 
 in the pursuit of wisdom which are inevitable so long as men 
 are not, in their spiritual make-up, mere repetitions of the 
 same pattern, and so long as each age, each historical type 
 of civilisation, has its own distinctive spiritual needs. 
 
 The identification of the problem of wisdom with the 
 problem of the life worth living throws light on the con- 
 nection between philosophy and value. A philosopher, it 
 is agreed, is above all else a " thinker." Thinking is his 
 business in life. What kind of thinking, then, is most worth 
 while? What kind of employment of his intellect is most 
 valuable? The answer can hardly be given except in terms 
 of the objects, occupation with which is the best use a 
 thinker can make of his capacity for thinking. Instead of 
 " objects ", we might equally say " problems ", or even 
 " truths." The important thing to recognise is that, if there 
 is a capacity for thinking, there is also a specific need for 
 it — a need not merely practical, but contemplative or crea- 
 tive. And if such thinking has value, it is because it is con- 
 cerned, fundamentally, with value. To discern values and 
 to realise them: to appreciate them where they do exist and 
 to bring them into existence where they do not — this cer- 
 tainly is demanded of the lover of wisdom. To appreciate 
 
22 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.I 
 
 and recognise and forward what there is of value in the 
 world; to see, perchance, in the end that nothing is wholly 
 devoid of value — this is the employment of thought which 
 is itself most valuable and which makes the thinker's life 
 itself worth while. It is not difficult to see that in thus 
 describing the philosopher's programme and quest, we are 
 but carrying a step further what we said above about whole- 
 ness, order, organisation. For not only is order itself a tj^e 
 of value, but the reconciliation of " fact " and " value " is 
 the gravest problem which confronts the seeker after whole- 
 ness. Here, again^ we meet with differences of emphasis and 
 inclusiveness. Are all things actual also invested with 
 value? Does only desire confer value on things? Are 
 values concretely embodied only in things made to satisfy 
 desire? Questions such as these stand at the threshold 
 of every inquiry into value, but once we step across the 
 threshold, there is no stopping-place short of the problems of 
 evil and of the relation of morality to religion. Thus here, 
 once more, thinking is true to its character of seeking al- 
 ways the whole and being genuinely satisfied with nothing 
 short of the whole. Indeed, ever since Plato set up the 
 " Form of the Good " as the supreme principle of being 
 and knowing, an unbroken line of philosophers has recorded 
 this conviction, that the deepest need of our intellectual 
 nature is for a reconciliation of fact and value, for a rea- 
 soned insight into their unity. And we may add that not to 
 achieve such a unity, not at least to believe it possible, is to 
 break with every great religion. But the roads to freedom 
 by which, with Spinoza and the mystics, we mean here pre- 
 cisely this inward unity and reconciliation, are many, and 
 we have as little right to lay down one rigid pattern of free- 
 dom as we have a right to lay down a pattern of wisdom. 
 It is enough to acknowledge the spiritual kinship in diverse 
 doctrines and lives. 
 
Ch.I] THE PHILOSOPHER'S QUEST 23 
 
 Yet another way of expressing this love of wisdom which 
 marks the philosopher is to say that he strives for stability 
 in thought and feeling and action. On its emotional side, 
 we all know what is meant by this " stability ": — the peace 
 of mind which comes with understanding even if in the end 
 it surpasses understanding; the harmony within oneself; 
 the confidence, not so much in oneself, or in human power 
 to master the world, or in the world as being, by happy 
 chance, kind to men, but in the intrinsic value of the world 
 and in one's own life as sharing in, and helping to sus- 
 tain, that value. But this stability for a thinker must be 
 intellectual as well — scientia intuitiva no less than amor 
 intellectualis. Wonder, curiosity, perplexity, contradiction, 
 conflict of theories, conflict of feelings and desires, lack of 
 understanding, lack of self-knowledge and self-mastery — in 
 all these ways come discord and instability. The goal of 
 the philosopher is in its reflective form a theory, a Weltan- 
 schauung; in its practical form an habitual attitude or dis- 
 position of response' a power to meet and master whatever 
 comes — elastic, adaptable, resourceful, yet steadfast, in- 
 trepid, unshaken; a self-adjusting equilibrium of insight 
 into the true values of things, which in the greatest becomes 
 the very spirit of their living. 
 
 Is the pursuit of philosophy in this sense worth while? 
 
 Those who have devoted themselves to it have found it 
 so; and they alone are in a position to judge. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE IDOL OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 A PHiLosoPHEE, we Said, is a thinker, but he is also, and for 
 this very reason, a seer. He has his distinctive view or 
 vision of the world, and it is only by hard thinking that he 
 has gained and now possesses it. Insight and intuition on 
 the one hand, thought and reason (which cover here every- 
 thing from analysis and inference to argument and dialec- 
 tics), on the other, are commonly regarded as the two poles 
 of the philosophical attitude. Not infrequently they are 
 opposed to each other even by philosophers. It is then said 
 that there are two ways of knowing: intuition and intellect, 
 or immediate experience and reflection, or knowledge by 
 acquaintance and knowledge by description. Frequently 
 one of these ways is deprecated for the glorification of the 
 other. More particularly the nature, function, and value 
 of thinking have become topics of burning discussion among 
 present-day philosophers, and the debate has spread to such 
 allied problems as whether, and how, philosophical theories 
 can be proved or demonstrated; whether such theories are 
 to be regarded as tentative guess-work or as deeper knowl- 
 edge; and, in short, what is the proper method of philosophy. 
 Fundamentally, we shall surely agree, William James was 
 right, when he spoke of philosophies as "just so many 
 visions, modes of feeling the whole push, and seeing the 
 whole drift of life"; ^ right, too, when he went on to say 
 that these visions are " forced on one by one's total char- 
 acter and experience, and on the whole preferred ... as 
 
 ^4 Pluralistic Universe, p. 20. 
 
 24 
 
Ch.II] IDOL OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD 25 
 
 one's best working attitude".^ Forced and preferred — ^it 
 seems a startling contradiction. It is as if one were com- 
 pelled to choose in one way and in no other. Yet is not 
 this precisely the way in which philosophical convictions 
 come to be formed? The varied aspects of the universe 
 press upon the individual thinker. Alternative syntheses 
 suggest themselves to him, many of them backed by the 
 authority of a great name, but the one which, in the end, 
 he adopts is the one which he cannot help adopting. It is 
 the one which he is obliged to adopt if he is to be true to 
 himself, and this means true to the total revelation of the 
 universe to him through his experience. Thus he comes by 
 his vision, his world-view, his Weltanschauung. " A man's 
 vision is the great fact about him " ^ — yes, and the vision 
 includes the reasons which James says we do not care about. 
 We cannot share the vision, unless we share, or supply our- 
 selves, the reasoning which yields the vision. 
 
 It is no mere accident that the language in which we 
 describe thinking is full of metaphors taken from sight, eye, 
 and light. A theory is a way of looking at things. Good 
 thinking must be clear and lucid. Truth must be perceived. 
 A conclusion must be seen to be implied in the premises. 
 Experiences illuminate each other. Insight, intuition, the 
 vivid aippreciation or realisation of all that a given experi- 
 ence means and conveys — ^what would philosophising be 
 without these? They are its end, even more than its begin- 
 ning. The most valuable insights, as a rule, are the result 
 of philosophising, rather than its starting-point, though 
 sometimes the insight into some central problem becomes 
 the nucleus around which a whole system crystallises. 
 Argument is but a method of getting fresh insights, a gath- 
 ering of materials from which the vision must spring, and a 
 method of communicating and sharing one's vision, an at- 
 
 ''■A Pluralistic Universe, p. 21. 
 2 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 20. 
 
26 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.II 
 
 tempt to direct another mind to seeing the TYorld in the same 
 way. And, again, it is through argument, through reasoning 
 with oneself or with others, that one's insights get tested, 
 connected, stabilised. Thus the intuitional character is 
 present everywhere, though it is in no way sacrosanct or 
 removed beyond the reach of criticism. The eliciting of a 
 fuller insight out of partial ones is precisely the chief busi- 
 ness of systematic philosophising. 
 
 This is, of course, the point where individual differences 
 come into play, where diversities in dominant mood, in 
 temperament, in character, in the experiences which are the 
 thinker's materials, lead to disagreement, to failure to see 
 eye to eye. Yet failure to agree is not necessarily failure to 
 understand. Most commonly when philosophers disagree, 
 it is because each claims that what the other insists upon 
 is included in his own view, but supplemented, corrected, 
 presented in a truer form. In any case, the paradoxical fact 
 remains that, in order to argue effectively against another, 
 one must put oneself at his point of view. In this way 
 the philosopher's intellectual world is enriched by the pres- 
 ence in it, and the pressure upon it, of the very visions 
 which he may vigorously challenge and combat. And, apart 
 from that, he would be a poor philosopher in whom the 
 failure to share another's vision did not keep alive a humble 
 conviction of the likelihood of defects in his own, of some 
 poverty in it of range, some lack of penetration. Grant 
 that philosophies are as full of an intensely personal at- 
 mosphere as poems, and that their sharp differences spring 
 from this fact, still it would be a loss in the main to make 
 philosophising impersonal, and to demand uniformity for the 
 sake of agreement. It would seem rather that the universe 
 has a use, so to speak, for these very differences, through 
 which ever fresh nuances of experience are expressed and 
 tried out. " Philosophies are intimate parts of the universe. 
 
Ch.II] IDOL OF SCIENTIFIC MI;TH0D 27 
 
 They express something of its own thought of itself. A 
 philosophy may indeed be a most momentous reaction of 
 the universe upon itself." ^ Press this, and the existence of 
 differences acquires positive significance, is transformed 
 from a defect into a merit. Moreover, with all their marked 
 individuality, philosophies fall into " schools ", exhibit com- 
 mon tendencies, are affiliated by descent in the sense of in- 
 fluence of earlier on later thinkers. We tend to under- 
 estimate, in the midst of our polemics, the extent of our 
 common ground. Indeed, without a common ground, how 
 could we relevantly disagree? And if it is a pleasure to hit 
 on a theory all one's own which no one else has ever thought 
 of, it is also a pleasure, a very pure one, and not rare, to 
 find one's independent thinking confirmed by the discovery 
 that other thinkers, contemporaries or predecessors, had 
 explored the same problem with the same result. Truth 
 gains, though vanity may suffer. 
 
 And, lastly, the insistence on the quality of insight or 
 vision in philosophising may serve to remind us that philos- 
 ophical argument of the best sort is material, not formal. 
 It seeks to use the very stuff and substance of actual expe- 
 rience as its datum. " The best of logic " and " the best 
 of life " are its watchwords.^ These two must go together 
 in philosophising, for the quality of its logic is to be judged, 
 not merely by the technical correctness of its inferences, 
 but also and even more by the quality of its premises. 
 There is an analogous situation in legal thinking which may 
 illustrate the point. It is a familiar fact to lawyers that 
 technical justice, in the sense of logically correct applica- 
 tion of a law to a case, may be in effect actual injustice of 
 a grievous kind. Hence the appearance of equity as a 
 
 ^A Pluralistic Universe, p. 317. Thus wrote the same James who 
 never tired of dwelling oh the temperamental idiosyncrasies of philos- 
 ophers and philosophies. 
 
 2 B. Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value, passim. 
 
28 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.II 
 
 higher, so to speak a juster, justice; hence the revolt among 
 recent writers on the science of legal method against mere 
 " logic "; hence the demand for a tempering of logic by 
 considerations of social utility, humanity, tact.^ So in 
 philosophy: the use of experiences defective in range and 
 quality, however formally correct that use may be, still 
 means inferior philosophising in the end. On this point 
 there is much which we can still with profit learn from the 
 education and practical experience by which Plato proposed 
 to train, and the moral and intellectual qualifications which 
 he required in, the " lovers of wisdom " who were to be 
 the guardians of his ideal commonwealth. Truth demands 
 more than ingenuity or than formal consistency in rea- 
 soning. These, no doubt, belong to the technique of 
 the philosopher's craft. But unless the material quality 
 of the would-be philosopher's data be of the right sort, 
 skill in dialectics will not give him the fundamental 
 insights. 
 
 If this be true, it follows that improvements, or at least 
 innovations, in philosophical technique alone, however 
 valuable they may be in themselves, will not bring about 
 the salvation of philosophy. None the less philosophers 
 have again and again pinned their hopes to some reform in 
 method. Ever since Bacon with his Novum Organum, and 
 Descartes with his method of doubt, ushered in the period 
 of " modern " philosophy, the problem of the right method 
 or technique of conducting the enterprise of philosophy has 
 been with us. Kant was not the first, as he certainly has 
 not been the last, to raise the question, why hitherto philos- 
 ophy had failed to enter, like physics or astronomy, on the 
 sure and steady path of a science. At the present day, the 
 spectacle of the progress of the natural sciences and of 
 
 ^Cf. the author's review of The Science of Legal Method in the 
 Harvard Law Review, vol, xxxi, no. S (March, 1918). 
 
Ch.II] IDOL OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD 29 
 
 mathematics has once again brought the problem of method 
 to the very forefront of discussion. Once more philoso- 
 phers point to the sciences as models to be imitated. Their 
 triumphs, their unbroken advance from success to success, 
 must be due, it is held, to their method. How else account 
 for the fact that the sciences obtain results which command 
 the assent of all who are competent to form an opinion, 
 whilst there is hardly an important philosophical theory, 
 and certainly no philosophical system, which does not ex- 
 hibit its author's temperament and idios3mcrasy, and from 
 which other thinkers, no less competent, violently dissent? 
 Must not the fault lie in the failure to employ the right 
 method in philosophising? Does not the only hope for 
 the future of philosophy lie in becoming " scientific "? , 
 
 It is a tempting suggestion. We hardly know how to 
 resist it, for the spell of science is upon us all. Science 
 has as firmly put its stamp upon the intellectual culture and 
 the practical organisation of our time, as ever had theology 
 upon the civilisation of the Middle Ages. In peace and in 
 war our lives rest upon the use of manifold appliances 
 which science has put at our disposal. Bacon's scientia 
 est potentia has become our watchword. To control the 
 forces of nature by the study of nature's laws to the end of 
 the " improvement of man's estate " — this is being ac- 
 claimed as the dominant temper of the " modern " age.^ 
 Our houses and our cities, our fields and our factories, our 
 newspapers, our railroads, our steamships bear witness to 
 the triumphs of science over nature. Compared with its 
 predecessors, the XlXth century is pre-eftiinently a century 
 of such triumphs of science, and its dominant temper has 
 been well summed up in the description of it as the " century 
 of hope ". Nor do the praises of science rest solely on its 
 practical benefits, on the countless conveniences and inven- 
 
 1 Cf. R. B. Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, ch. i, p. S ; also 
 F. S. Marvin, The Living Past and The Century of Hope, 
 
30 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.II 
 
 tions by which it has added to the comfort and ease of 
 human existence. The buoyant optimism which comes 
 with the power to do, is matched by the optimism which 
 comes simply from the joy of intellectual conquests. There 
 are many who rank the value of science as pure theory, as 
 pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, far above its value 
 in practical application.^ On both grounds science is claim- 
 ing, and obtaining, an ever larger place in modern education, 
 at the expense of literary and historical subjects. Its ad- 
 vocates, not without reason, maintain that the scientific 
 temper of mind and the scientific attitude towards the 
 world have, not merely a utilitarian, but above all a pro- 
 found spiritual value. Science, they remind us, demands 
 severe submission to the objectivity of fact. It trains us 
 in the virtues of being dispassionate and impartial. It bids 
 us curb our desires before the stern face of truth. It dis- 
 courages the facile human trick of letting the wish be father 
 to the thought. Above all, it discourages us from judging 
 facts as good or bad by reference to our wishes: it teaches 
 us to be " ethically neutral ". As pure theory, too, it is in- 
 different to merely practical interests. In action we look 
 to the future and turn our backs upon the unalterable past. 
 But to the disinterested gaze of science the difference be- 
 tween past and future is irrelevant. Spinoza voiced the 
 very spirit of science when he said, " In so far as the mind 
 conceives a thing according to th^ dictates of reason, it will 
 be equally affected whether the idea is that of a future, past, 
 or present thing." ^ Thus the intellectual discipline of 
 science purges us from the fret of desire and the fear of 
 an unknown future. Whatever there is menschlich, allzu 
 menschlich about us drops away when we are brought face 
 
 1 Cf. the well-known toast in honour of mathematics : " May it never 
 be of any use to anybody." 
 
 2 Ethics, Bk. iv, Prop. 62. 
 
Ch.II] IDOL OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD 31 
 
 to face with the wonder and the necessity of things as they 
 are. Only "the impersonal cosmic outlook" of science, 
 with its " reverence towards fact ", can help us to " sweep 
 away all other desires in the desire to know." "A life 
 devoted to science", concludes Bertrand Russell, "is 
 a happy life, and its happiness is derived from the very best 
 sources that are open to dwellers on this troubled and pas- 
 sionate planet." ^ 
 
 The attentive reader will have noticed that in this sum- 
 mary of the praises of science, the values claimed for it 
 have undergone a subtle transformation. At first the prac- 
 tical and theoretical values of science were presented as 
 complementary. It next appeared that the range of the 
 desire to know is far wider than the range of things which 
 our action can affect; still there was no incompatibility. 
 But, in the end, science came to be praised for its aloofness 
 from action and from the desires on which actions are based. 
 Contemplation, or the cosmic outlook, we found to be valued 
 as the solvent of desire, or at least as detaching us com- 
 pletely from practical, and incidentally from ethical, in- 
 terests. 
 
 Now this is a situation to make a philosopher pause. 
 Clearly, he cannot jrield to the call to make his philosophy 
 " scientific " without further investigation. Before he 
 can grant that philosophy is a science, or at least ought to 
 become one by adopting scientific methods, he wants to be 
 very clear about the consequences of the step he is asked 
 to take. In the first place, he notes that beneath the 
 divergent valuations of science which have come to light, 
 there are concealed incompatible concepts of what science 
 and scientific method are. Is science homogeneous through- 
 out? Is there but one scientific method? It would appear 
 
 1 Mysticism and Logic, p. 45. The phrases in the preceding sentence 
 are quoted from the same book. 
 
32 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.II 
 
 that there is a profound ambiguity here; that the sciences 
 differ widely in type and method, and that the advocates 
 of scientific method have correspondingly different ideals 
 in mind. For one group, the character of science is best 
 embodied in mathematics, especially in so far as it can be 
 reduced to pure logic, stripped of all empirical elements, 
 made purely a priori. The other group is thinking of the 
 laboratory sciences with their experimental methods, their 
 manipulation of concrete objects, their h5T)otheses tested 
 by action, their constant appeal to empirical observation. 
 These two groups face in opposite directions. Though they 
 use the common name of science, their differences are much 
 more marked than their agreement. They are not only 
 thinking of different sorts of facts and different methods of 
 investigation, but the one group values science as an end in 
 itself, for what is contemplative in it; whereas the other 
 values science as a means only, for what is instrumental in 
 it. Which of these two is the philosopher to follow when 
 he is bidden to become scientific? 
 
 Again, it is easy to see that a difference in method here 
 brings with it a difference in matter. What is at stake 
 for the philosopher is not merely the manner of his philos- 
 ophising, but the very problems with which he will be 
 allowed to concern himself. And thus it becomes abun- 
 dantly clear that the proposed reforms of philosophy are 
 motived by fundamental choices or preferences, which must 
 be examined in the light of day, if the value of the reforms 
 themselves is to be fairly assessed. We are dealing, in 
 the last analysis, with what are themselves philosophical 
 attitudes, theories about the right employment of the in- 
 tellect, spiritual valuations expressed in terms of the objects 
 about which, and the conditions under which, it is most 
 worth while for the thinker to think. 
 
 A brief examination of the sorts of philosophising to 
 
Ch. II] IDOL OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD 33 
 
 which these two divergent ideals of scientific method respec- 
 tively lead, will serve to verify this general account. 
 
 The one ideal of scientific method is best represented by 
 Bertrand Russell, who means by it the " logico-analytic " 
 method of modern mathematical logic. It draws its inspira- 
 tion from the success of Frege and other mathematicians 
 in showing that the concepts of space and of number, on 
 which geometry and arithmetic appeared respectively to be 
 built up, can be analysed into simpler logical notions; that, 
 in fact, mathematics, thus pushed to its ultimate foundations, 
 is indistinguishable from logic. This discovery re-enforced 
 the traditional admiration for mathematics as the beau 
 idial of vigor, precision, clearness, consistency, conclusive- 
 ness — in short, as the embodiment of all the intellectual 
 virtues. The ideal type of knowledge has once again been 
 identified with a deductive system, derived according to 
 logical rules of inference, from the smallest possible num- 
 ber of simple, indefinable notions and ultimate, mutually 
 independent postulates or assumptions. Such an ideal sug- 
 gests two tasks, viz., (i) the study of the most general 
 characteristics of deductive systems, such as the forms of 
 propositions involved in them, the relations of implication 
 by which one may be deduced from others, and (2) the 
 analysis of particular complex systems into the simple no- 
 tions and ultimate postulates, in which they can then be 
 shown to be deductively implied. These two tasks would 
 correspond, so to speak, to pure and applied philosophy res- 
 pectively. 
 
 We ask, next, what the philosopher, armed with the logico- 
 analytic method can do to make this actual world of ours, 
 with all its pressing problems, intelligible. 
 
 In seeking an answer to this question we are at once 
 confronted by a singular and perplexing oscillation in Rus- 
 
34 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. II 
 
 sell's views, (a) At times he writes as if the philosopher 
 had no concern with applications of his method to the actual 
 world at all; as if he ought to restrict himself to pure philos- 
 ophy, i.e., to pure logic, (b) At other times, he makes 
 himself most interesting experiments in application, rejoic- 
 ing in " intellectual constructions " designed to illustrate the 
 power of the new method and the " progress " which it 
 promises to effect, (c) Yet, even then, Russell always em- 
 phatically insists that the range of fruitful application of 
 the new method is strictly limited, and that many of the 
 traditional problems of philosophy — and these precisely the 
 humanly most interesting — are not soluble by his method 
 at all and should, therefore, be severely left alone by the 
 philosopher. 
 
 We proceed to illustrate these three strata, or aspects, in 
 Russell's views, bringing to light, as we do so, minor oscil- 
 lations which yet bear on the spiritual valuations underlying 
 his whole theory. 
 
 (a) Philosophy, we note first of all, can deal by the 
 logico-analytic method only with what is abstract and gen- 
 eral, not with what is concrete and empirical. " Philosophy 
 is the science of the possible "/ we are told in emphatic 
 italics — not the practically possible, that is, but the theoret- 
 ically possible, i.e., that which is abstractly conceivable. 
 " Philosophy deals only with the general properties in which 
 all possible worlds agree." It follows, first, that " a philo- 
 sophical proposition must be such as can neither be proved 
 nor disproved by empirical evidence "; it must be " true of 
 any possible world, independently of such facts as can only 
 be discovered by our senses ". It follows, further, that 
 " the difference between a good world and a bad world is 
 
 ^ The following quotations, except where otherwise stated, are from 
 the Herbert Spencer Lecture on " Scientific Method in Philosophy ", 
 reprinted in Mysticism and Logic, see esp. pp. Ill, 112. 
 
Ch.II] IDOL OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD 35 
 
 a difference in the particular characteristics of the particular 
 things that exist in these worlds; it is not a sufficiently 
 abstract difference to come within the province of philos- 
 ophy "/ In thus providing " an inventory of possibilities, 
 a repertory of abstractly tenable h3^otheses ", philosophy 
 emancipates us from pre-occupation with the actual world, 
 alike in its appeal to our desires and its appeal to our senses. 
 It gives wings to the imagination by carrying us into the 
 realms of what may be, instead of focusing our vision nar- 
 rowly on what is. It offers an escape from the intellectual 
 bewilderment besetting those who allow themselves to be 
 entangled, by their interest in the actual, in the insoluble 
 problems of the destiny of the imiverse and of mankind. 
 It introduces us, like mathematics, into a realm of eternal, 
 unchangeable verities, the patient exploration of which is 
 as satisfying to our feeling for beauty as to our desire for 
 knowledge. In the solution, for example, of the contradic- 
 tions which had been supposed to beset the concepts of 
 continuity and infinity, the logico-analytic method has 
 achieved its most characteristic triumphs.^ 
 
 (b) Pure philosophy, then, which is pure logic, deals 
 wholly with abstract, general forms. Out of itself, it is 
 quite incapable of supplying concrete, particular content. 
 Form and content, thus, are sharply sundered, and in- 
 dependent one of the other. " Pure logic and atomic facts 
 (e.g., facts of sense-perception) are the two poles, the 
 wholly a priori and the wholly empirical ".' In the analysis 
 of the actual world we are confronted with a complex prod- 
 uct of these two factors, i.e., with a body of beUefs of very 
 varying degrees of trustworthiness. The first duty of the 
 philosopher is to take up towards this common knowledge 
 
 1 Our Knowledge of the External World, p. 26. 
 
 2 Cf. Our Knowledge of the External World, chs. v-vii. 
 
 3 Loc. cit., p. S3. 
 
36 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. II 
 
 which is his datum, an attitude of Cartesian doubt, so as 
 to sort out the elements which resist criticism and may, 
 therefore, be called "hard" data, from the "soft" ele- 
 ments which dissolve, or at least become doubtful, under 
 examination. The common sense world having thus been 
 reduced to its hard elements, the next task of the philo- 
 sopher is to apply his method in the intellectual construction 
 of complex entities which shall serve all the theoretical 
 purposes of the " things " of common sense, or of the 
 " points " and " instants " of physics, whilst yet being freed 
 from all the " soft " elements contained in them as ordinar- 
 ily conceived. With the details of Russell's catalogue of 
 hard data we need not concern ourselves here, though it is 
 only what we should expect that sense-data and the laws 
 of logic figure among the hardest of the hard, whereas sub- 
 stances and other minds are " soft ". So, again, it belongs 
 to another context^ to appreciate some of the features of 
 Russell's intellectual construction of " things ". It is 
 enough for our present purpose to note that the application 
 of logic to the actual world has these two stages: first, an 
 analytic search, by methodical doubt, for all that is " logic- 
 ally primitive" or "hard"; secondly, a synthetic building 
 up out of hard data, and by logically unexceptionable 
 methods, of entities which fulfill all the theoretical functions 
 of the objects of common sense and current physical science, 
 without being infected by their logical softness. The funda- 
 mental question for Russell under this latter head is always: 
 " Can we make any valid inferences from data to non-data 
 in the empirical world "? ^ or, " Can the existence of any- 
 thing other than our own hard data be inferred from the 
 existence of those data? " ' In the mathematical world of 
 
 ^ See below, ch. v. 
 
 2 Cf. Russell's reply to John Dewey, in Journal of Philosophy, 
 Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. xvi, no. 1, p. 24. 
 ^ Our Knowledge of the External World, p. 73 
 
Ch. II] IDOL OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD 37 
 
 abstract generalities we can and do make such inferences 
 validly. In the concrete world of sense we make them 
 too, but most of the time invalidly. Hence the problem 
 is so to re-interpret the results of our inferences con- 
 cerning the actual world that they are logically hard 
 throughout. 
 
 (c) There are, however beliefs concerning the actual 
 world which philosophy cannot, and must not, seek to re- 
 construct. They are not only open to grave doubt, but logic 
 is powerless to save them. They are beliefs foreshadowing 
 a destiny of the world which is satisfactory to our " mun- 
 dane desires ". They are beliefs concerning the meaning, 
 plan, purpose of the world; beliefs that it is good or at 
 least working towards good; beliefs in its perfection or 
 perfectibility; beliefs in God. With facts the logico-analytic 
 method can deal: but in the realm of values it is powerless. 
 Thus philosophy is bidden to eschew, not only all problems 
 of practice and conduct, but above all the problems of the 
 interpretation of the world in the light of moral and re- 
 ligious experience. " It is my belief ", writes Russell, " that 
 the ethical and religious motives, in spite of the splendidly 
 imaginative systems to which they have given rise, have 
 been on the whole a hindrance to the progress of philosophy, 
 and ought now to be consciously thrust aside by those who 
 wish to discover philosophical truth. . . . It is, I main- 
 tain, from science, rather than from ethics and religion, that 
 philosophy should draw its inspiration."^ To let moral 
 and religious experience enter into one's philosophising is 
 to open the doors to temperamental differences, to let human 
 hopes and fears dictate what the universe is to be. It is 
 to surrender " that submission to fact which is the essence 
 of the scientific temper." '' It is to prostitute the effort to 
 
 ^Mysticism and Logic, p. 98. 
 2 Loc. cit., p. 109. 
 
38 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.II 
 
 understand, in the interest of the desire to improve human 
 existence or at least to inspire it with hope. With human 
 weaknesses of this sort philosophy has no concern, and 
 thus there are banished from it most of the problems upon 
 which it has been traditionally engaged. 
 
 The second form of the demand for scientific method has 
 for its watchword " experiment ", and finds its most plaus- 
 ible advocacy through the " instrumentalism " of Professor 
 John Dewey. It differs from its rival in that it faces to- 
 wards the actual world of our experience, not away from 
 it, and in that it makes ethical categories fundamental in 
 its philosophising, instead of eliminating them altogether. 
 Inspired, at bottom, by the social reformer's zeal, instru- 
 mentalism seeks to supply reform with a technique modelled 
 on the laboratory procedure of the experimental sciences. 
 It does not, like its rival, shun the moral problems raised 
 by the actual world as undeserving of the philosopher's 
 study, but seeks to understand the world in order to better 
 it. It does not want to banish desire as irrelevant, but to 
 supply it with the knowledge which it needs for its realisa- 
 tion, 
 
 " Instrumentalism " is the name for the theory that think- 
 ing (or theorising) is an instrument; that its place and 
 value is that of a means, a tool; that the insight or knowl- 
 edge which thinking jrields ought not to be treated as ends 
 in themselves; and that their being so treated is a perverse 
 development, full of undesirable moral and social conse- 
 quences. Out of action knowledge springs and into action 
 it must return. The special function of thinking is to make 
 action intelligent by making it fore-seeing; to organise 
 experience so as to provide a map, as it were, of possible 
 actions and their consequences; to secure thus control, 
 guidance, efficiency; adaptation of the environment to 
 
Ch.n] IDOL OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD 39 
 
 human needs and of human aims to what the environment 
 permits. 
 
 Filling in this rough outline, we learn, further, that expe- 
 rience is practical, not cognitive. To experience is to experi- 
 ment. Its physiological schema is that of stimulus and 
 response. It is not a mere undergoing of a sequence of 
 sensations with spectator-like passivity: it is a responding 
 to a sensation with some sort of behaviour from which fresh 
 sensations result. Thus a pattern of sensations linked by 
 actions (or reactions) is formed, and each element in the 
 pattern acquires meaning in this context, becomes a cue 
 for possible actions, and a sign for, or evidence of, further 
 experiences which may be had as consequences of these 
 actions. On the basis of this pattern plans can be formed, 
 and conduct be made purposeful and rational. To under- 
 stand anything, to know what it is, means to be able to 
 anticipate further experiences from it as the result of vari- 
 ous actions upon or towards it. Knowing or thinking is 
 thus continuous with, or incidental to, life conceived as 
 commerce with an environment, as activity evoked by, 
 and in its turn altering, that environment. 
 
 But, further, thinking occurs only on occasions of per- 
 plexity and doubt, when there is something going on of 
 which the issue is uncertain, and when consequently right 
 action is a problem. Hence it is a process of inquiry, search, 
 discovery and its method is experimental. The situation 
 is incomplete, its meaning in terms of future developments 
 indeterminate. We proceed by analysis of what is given 
 and by conjectural anticipation of what is to come. We 
 form, in short, a working hypothesis and then work, i.e., 
 act, upon it. The result tests our thinking. This is the 
 only way of " getting knowledge and making sure it is 
 knowledge, and not mere opinion ... we have no right 
 to call anything knowledge except where our activity has 
 
40 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.II 
 
 actually produced certain physical changes in things, which 
 agree with and confirm the conception entertained." ^ 
 
 Thus, in another way, thinking is intimately bound up 
 with activity, and bodily activity at that. It is not some- 
 thing that goes on in detachment " in our heads "; it is not 
 the exercise of a disembodied reasoning faculty, of a mind 
 substantially distinct from a body. As experiment it in- 
 volves doing, physical doing — looking, handling, dissecting, 
 arranging, with or without special apparatus. Whether in 
 the laboratory or in life, whether in the exploration of in- 
 fant or scientist, there is no gaining of knowledge without 
 bodily activity. And this means not merely using one's 
 sense-organs on objects, but using the objects themselves, 
 if only by playing with them, and thus gaining a fuller 
 acquaintance with their nature. 
 
 Again, our world is in process of change and our activity 
 is one of the channels through which this change is taking 
 place — a channel important in proportion to the guidance 
 of activity by knowledge. Knowledge thus looks always to 
 the future. " All that the wisest man can do is to observe 
 what is going on more widely and more minutely, and then 
 select more carefully from what is noted just those factors 
 which point to something to happen." ^ Knowledge, as in- 
 volving activity and involved in activity, is a " mode of 
 participation " in the cosmic process. It is not the mere 
 onlooking of an unconcerned spectator. 
 
 And from this, lastly, flow ethical and social consequences 
 of great importance. For, if we are helping to make the 
 world what it is, we may as well help to make it better. 
 Let our working hypotheses be ideals, let our experiments 
 
 1 All quotatons in this account are from Dewey's Democracy and 
 Education — a book in which there is much to admire and which 
 sums up the quintessence of his philosophy. For the above passage, 
 see p. 393. 
 
 2 Loc. cit., p. 171. 
 
Ch.II] IDOL OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD 41 
 
 be reforms. Not understanding for its own sake, but im- 
 provement; not theory divorced from action, but action 
 illumined by theory, is the end to which thinking is the 
 instrument. In these respects, thus, the instrumentalist's 
 theory of philosophical method is the polar opposite of the 
 mathematician's. It is a synthesis of the method of experi- 
 mental research on the one hand, and of aspirations towards 
 social reform on the other. It has learnt from physiology 
 the function of brain and nervous system as the mechanism 
 for liiiking action with, and adjusting it to, stimulus; from 
 psychology, the importance of movement and behaviour in 
 the organisation of experience; from biology, the increasing 
 role played by intelligence in making the organism master 
 of the conditions of its life; from the natural sciences in 
 general, the testing of hypotheses by experiment; from in- 
 dustrial organisation, the power of knowledge in transform- 
 ing the environment of human life; from social reform, the 
 duty and responsibility of using this power in the service 
 of high ideals. 
 
 Summing up, one might not unfairly say that instrument- 
 alism is an elaboration of the psychological theories of the 
 function of thought to which William James gave currency. 
 " Every idea is a half-way house to action ". " My think- 
 ing is first and last and always for the sake of my doing ". 
 But whilst re-enforcing these positions by general biological 
 considerations, instrumentalism adds a characteristic ethical 
 application: the kind of doing M?hich is at the present day 
 most urgent is social, economic, political reform, and the 
 kind of thinking of which the age stands most in need is 
 " social research ", including social experiment. We need 
 to know more and to think more to the end that we may 
 make, if not a better heaven, at least a better earth. The 
 same organised intelligence which we are applying to gain- 
 ing the mastery over the forces of nature, we ought to 
 
42 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. II 
 
 apply to the better management of social institutions and 
 to the cure of the many ills which spring from existing 
 economic and political systems. It is this reformer's zeal, 
 this meliorism, which is the instrumentalist's religion. His 
 philosophy, put into practice, means intelligent philan- 
 thropy. 
 
 Our survey of these two main proposals for a reform 
 of philosophical method has shown that they differ, not 
 only in their concept of what makes a procedure scientific, 
 but even more in their estimate of the place and function 
 of thought and theory in human life, more particularly as 
 these bear on moral values. 
 
 The enterprise of philosophy, as conceived in this book, 
 has affinities with the positive points in both programmes, 
 but does not share the extremes of their denials. 
 
 To begin with Russell's method, it is clear that, so far 
 from being offered as a better instrument for achieving the 
 traditional task of philosophy, it imposes on philosophy a 
 complete re-orientation, a new task altogether. It is no 
 longer a question of how to do a thing which is acknowl- 
 edged to be worth doing, but of what is worth doing for 
 a philosopher at all. The abstraction of facts from values 
 which is characteristic of science is used to forbid the 
 philosopher even the attempt at a synthesis. The inapplic- 
 ability of the method to the problems of value is not con- 
 fessed as a defect, nor even as a limitation, but recom- 
 mended as a merit and a source of power. The implied 
 claim is that these problems are not legitimate objects of 
 theoretical interest. If it be replied that they are illegiti- 
 mate only for a philosopher who seeks to be scientific — 
 and nobody else, on this view, deserves the name of phil- 
 osopher — ^we must counter by asking, What is gained by 
 this transference of philosophy from its traditional prob- 
 
Ch! II] IDOL OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD 43 
 
 lems to an altogether new and different set? Grant that 
 progress will be made in these new problems, grant that 
 competent enquirers will agree about them (for whoever 
 does not agree will ipso facto be incompetent). That still 
 leaves the old problems as urgent, as persistent, as ever. 
 And men will continue to be troubled by them and to give 
 their best thought to finding a solution for them. Tradition- 
 ally, this has been the philosopher's province. Now the 
 name of philosophy is to be attached to a different set of 
 enquiries. If, then, a manipulation of names is the ultimate 
 issue, what a pitiable storm in the academic teacup! 
 
 But, no — this new programme of scientific method is an 
 important challenge, not because of the problems which it 
 assigns or denies to philosophy, but because of the judg- 
 ment of value which it expresses; because, in short, it em- 
 bodies itself a philosophy, a world-view, precisely in the 
 old-fashioned sense of these terms. On this point, no one 
 can be in doubt who has followed how this present pro- 
 gramme has developed out of the attitude so eloquently 
 voiced in Russell's " The Free Man's Worship ". In that 
 justly famous essay ,^ Russell affirms an irreconcilable an- 
 tithesis between the ideals to which human beings acknowl- 
 edge loyalty, and the physical universe which is the 
 environing scene of their lives. The actual world is there 
 apostrophised as " omnipotent matter, blind to good and evil, 
 reckless of human life and human ideals." The only road 
 to inward freedom is there represented as lying through 
 the abandonment of hope, through stoic endurance, through 
 heroic, though despairing, faithfulness to human values. 
 Love there can flourish only between human beings, " fel- 
 low-sufferers in the same darkness, fellow-actors in the 
 same tragedy".^ This same antithesis of scientific facts 
 
 1 See Philosophical Essays, ch. ii ; or Mysticism and Logic, ch. iii. 
 
 2 Loc. cit., pp. 69, 70 ; or p. 56. 
 
44 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.II 
 
 and human values re-appears in Russell's latest writings. 
 But it has there become a strict neutrality with respect to 
 values, coupled with the withdrawal of theoretical interest 
 into a realm of logical abstractions. It is now a passionate 
 denial that reason can be at home, or help to make men 
 feel at home, in this actual, concrete world of ours which, 
 for better or for worse, grips and holds us by all sides of 
 our natures. It declares the true home of reason to be 
 another world, a world of abstract logical entities and rela- 
 tions, with a fascination and beauty of its own, a perfection 
 which the intellect can enjoy, untroubled by passion and 
 desire. " An impartial contemplation ", we are assured, 
 " freed from all preoccupation with Self ... is very 
 easily combined with that feeling of universal love which 
 leads the mystic to say that the whole world is good."^ 
 Still, all Russell's eloquence can but thinly veil the pro- 
 found pessimism of this view, the confession that reason is 
 impotent to find meaning or value even in the grim and 
 terrible aspects of the actual world. There lies the real 
 sting of Russell's plea for scientific method. There lies 
 his real challenge to all philosophy which, in the hands 
 of the great masters of speculation, has sought to elicit 
 from all the resources of our experience a synthetic vision 
 of the whole, which should justify that deep confidence in 
 the world which is the fruit of religion at its best. It is 
 because of this renunciation that no thorough-going philo- 
 sophy can, in the end, find salvation by any method which 
 is scientific in the spirit of Russell's utterances. 
 
 On the other hand, we can whole-heartedly accept all 
 that Russell says in praise of philosophy as " contempla- 
 tion ", as theory sought for its own sake. It does, indeed, 
 in his own fine phrase, make us " citizens of the universe ",* 
 
 ''■Mysticism and Logic, p. 28. 
 
 2 The Problems of Philosophy, p. 249. 
 
Ch.II] IDOL OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD 45 
 
 a thing it could never do if it were merely subordinate to 
 practical interests. It is just here, in denying to theory 
 any but an instrumental value, that the weakness of instru- 
 mentalism lies. Thinking is often a means, but it may legi- 
 timately become an end in itself. It is often instrumental 
 to the realisation or enjosmient of other values, but it may 
 also be itself enjoyed and practised as an intrinsic value, 
 as worth while for its own sake. We need knowledge in 
 order to live. We need it even more in order to live well. 
 But we need it most of all because the pursuit and the en- 
 jo3mient of knowledge is itself one, though only one, of the 
 values devotion to which makes life worth living. Again, 
 it is a narrow conception of the range of the theoretical 
 interest which identifies it exclusively with things about 
 to happen and things to be done. Theory, as an end for its 
 own sake, is not exclusively concerned with the future. 
 Nor does it scorn to study things which have no essential 
 connection with time at all. So, again, in proportion as the 
 pressure of practical needs is released, we are free to turn 
 our thoughts from the problem of what must be done, or of 
 what it is best to do, to the contemplation of things that 
 give no occasion for action at all except such as helps to 
 a fuller knowledge of them. Nor does such thinking deserve 
 to be depreciated as barren and otiose. It is well to have 
 the experimental character of thinking insisted on, but not 
 all theories can be. tested by manipulation of the physical 
 world, for they may not refer to that world at all. And 
 even the reformer's attitude, however important, is not 
 final, if only because it is not equivalent to, or exhaustive 
 of, religion. A moral agent, without ceasing to be deeply 
 concerned, can yet reflect on his moral activity and realise 
 that it is not everything and affords no ultimate standing- 
 ground. Grant that the world is in process of change, yet 
 that does not preclude its bringing home to us in ever fresh 
 
46 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. II 
 
 ways the same fundamental lessons. It is insight into these 
 lessons which philosophy seeks and, at its best, attains. And 
 the supreme lesson, surely, is this that it does not lie within 
 the power of man to make the world once and for all " safe " 
 for his ideals. Such safe-making is for the moralist and 
 reformer the end-all and be-all of human existence. Yet 
 it may well be asked whether any world in which it is funda- 
 mentally worth while to live can be really conceived as 
 " safe " — as a world in which man no longer needs to 
 " save " himself by standing, with his life and with all that 
 he has, for what he values most, because the forces which 
 would endanger and overthrow these values are, once for all, 
 destroyed? To believe such safe-making possible amounts 
 to an idolatry of man and of men's self-sufficiency and 
 prowess which is the mere moralist's peculiar fallacy, and 
 from which religion with its " Not my will, but Thine, be 
 done," offers the only escape. There can be no sound or 
 complete philosophy, whatever its method, which ignores 
 such lessons as these. 
 
 It must be very clear by now that the theories of method 
 which we have been contrasting are, one and all, " visions " 
 in the sense of James's saying quoted above.^ They express 
 spiritual attitudes — total reactions to each thinker's total 
 experience; they are very literally ways in which each 
 feels the " whole push of the universe." They are experi- 
 ments in thinking, though not experiments in the laboratory 
 sense of verifying by the actual event some prediction which 
 is being put to the test. A philosophical theory is rarely 
 such that it can be proved or disproved by some action 
 devised ad hoc. It must indeed " work " and thus give 
 evidence of its truth, but there is about the verification of 
 it no watching for an anticipated consequence to come off, 
 
 1 See p. 24. 
 
Ch.II] IDOL OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD 47 
 
 nor does the criticism of it proceed, as a rule, by adducing 
 " negative instances ". Of experiment in the instrumentalist 
 sense there is little in philosophy: of experiment in the 
 adjusting of conflicting beliefs there is a great deal. There 
 is a weighing of considerations, a trying out of alternatives, 
 a mobilising of all the resources of one's experience and 
 reflection, a feeling one's way from a distracted and un- 
 stable to a coherent and stable outlook. Experiment in 
 this sense is one with " dialectic ", with learning by expe- 
 rience, with the recasting and transforming of beliefs which 
 mark the growing insight, as the thinker advances from 
 haphazard and partial to orderly and inclusive reflection. 
 Does it follow from this experimental character of phil- 
 osophical thinking that it can never get beyond tentative 
 guesses? It is the fashion nowadays, even among certain 
 philosophers, to evade the accusation of dogmatism by 
 claiming for philosophical theory nothing more than the 
 character of, at best, a probable h3^othesis. Conviction, 
 certainty — these are said to be unattainable. The facts of 
 everyday life, the theories of science are allowed to be, by 
 comparison, far superior in certainty. Proof, demonstration 
 in philosophy are held to be impossible. The philosopher's 
 path is not from doubt, or through doubt, to reasoned con- 
 viction, but from certainty to doubt. He leaves the firm 
 land of common experience to navigate uncharted seas of 
 speculation without assurance of reaching a harbour. 
 Dogmatism, no doubt, is unjustifiable, but it does not follow 
 that the philosopher may not reach convictions which are 
 stable enough at least for him. To demonstrate them to 
 others, to compel their assent, may be beyond his powers, 
 for demonstration requires, not merely technical correct- 
 ness of the argument, but acceptance by the other of its 
 premises. But the difficulties of securing this, where the 
 premises depend on the range and quality of each thinker's 
 
48 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. II 
 
 concrete experience, are obvious. Yet a reasoned and rea- 
 sonable theory (or, if the word be preferred, " faith ") is 
 not unattainable and has rewarded the venture of philo- 
 sophising again and again. Are there not, after all, certain- 
 ties in life, not ordinarily reflected on, which in philoso- 
 phising are raised to the level of explicit insight? " The 
 things which are most important in man's experience are also 
 the things which are most certain to his thought "} 
 
 Does it follow, lastly, that there is no progress in phil- 
 osophising? And if there is none, is the fact a fatal con- 
 demnation? The denial of progress can hardly apply to 
 the individual thinker. He does progress in developing 
 his world-view. Again, it cannot mean that no nfew theories 
 are formulated, no original discoveries made, no old the- 
 ories re-examined, improved, supported by fresh argument. 
 For all these things are happening in philosophy. It must, 
 then, mean that all new theories do but add to the babel 
 and confusion, that there is no cumulative cooperative 
 advance from generation to generation, no funded stock of 
 philosophical truths which can be taught as its established 
 rudiments to beginners, and which are taken for granted by 
 all experts as the basis of further enquiry. The same 
 problems are ever examined afresh. No doubt, typical solu- 
 tions are supported again and again by fresh adherents, 
 yet for philosophers as a body the old problems remain 
 persistently open, 
 
 " Persistent problems " — why do they persist? If phil- 
 osophy does not get on, why not apply to it the whole- 
 some rule: get on or get out? 
 
 The answer to this challenge is to be found in our whole 
 interpretation of philosophy. In whatever respects we may 
 claim to have progressed since the days of Parmenides and 
 
 1 B. Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value, Preface, 
 p. V. 
 
Ch. II] IDOL OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD 49 
 
 Plato, yet the need for discerning the permanent lineaments 
 of the universe in the ever-changing tissue of social and 
 scientific, moral and religious experience remains with us, 
 and is ever renewed by the very changes which we acclaim 
 as progress. Problems persist because, being universal, 
 they recur from age to age in human experience, however 
 its details may be modified. And as often as they recur, 
 the individual thinker has to master them once more him- 
 self, for the solutions of his predecessors are but lifeless 
 formulae, unless he can re-think them on the basis of his 
 own experience. Without such re-thinking, there is no 
 " living past ". Only through it does the thought of the 
 great philosophers become dateless and deathless, living 
 across the ages and helping the thinker of the present day 
 as the record of a pilgrimage may help later travellers pass- 
 ing the same way. But only he who undertakes the journey 
 himself learns to perceive that every philosopher is engaged 
 in the same pilgrim's progress, whether or no he call his 
 goal the city of God. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE AT THE CROSS-ROADS 
 
 Philosophy of Nature grows, like all philosophy, out of 
 the effort to make explicit, in coherent theory, just what 
 is the character of that world which reveals itself in human 
 experience. 
 
 " Nature ", " the physical world ", " the world of sense ", 
 is to us both the environment — the scene, or stage, upon 
 which we act out our lives — and the greater whole, or sys- 
 tem, of which we recognise ourselves as parts. If in the 
 former aspect we think of it chiefly as something to be 
 mastered and used for our ends, in the latter aspect it is 
 brought home to us that, after all, it depends on the con- 
 stitution of Nature what is the ultimate fate of all our 
 efforts, what is the destiny of all those values the realisation 
 of which alone makes life worth living. Bacon's wisdom 
 still holds: naturae non imperatur nisi parendo. 
 
 However, lording it over Nature at the price of submis- 
 sion to her laws has never been man's only, even though 
 it has often been his most urgent, concern. Not on any 
 pattern so simple are the relations of man to the world 
 around him constructed. From control to worship, from 
 intellectual curiosity to aesthetic enjoynient and religious 
 awe, his ways of being interested in Nature are many and 
 various. His attitudes towards Nature run through the 
 whole gamut of emotions, and his theories reflect the oscil- 
 lations of his moods. It is precisely out of these complex 
 and often contradictory data that philosophy must seek to 
 elicit an interpretation of Nature which shall be true as 
 theory and also offer a firm foundation for conduct. 
 
 50 
 
Ch. Ill] PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE 51 
 
 But in attempting this task, philosophy finds itself at 
 a parting of the ways. One of these ways — a way advocated 
 by a growing and influential school of thinkers — is the way 
 of distinguishing sharply between " fact " and " truth ", on 
 the one side, and, on the other, all human wishes, pre- 
 ferences, emotions. " Ascertain first the constitution of the 
 universe and then adjust your feelings to your facts ", say 
 these counsellors. They bid us bear in mind how subtle, 
 because generally unconscious, is the influence of our 
 wishes upon our theories, how ready we are to believe what 
 is pleasing and to disbelieve what is displeasing, how apt 
 our reasonings are to favour rather than thwart our desires. 
 Who has not, on occasion, been tempted to argue that, 
 unless certain beliefs be true, the world would be utterly 
 bad and life in it not worth living? Who has not cried out 
 that certain beliefs cannot be true, because it would be 
 intolerable if they were? Who has not, in effect, tried to 
 infer the falsity of a theory from the undesirability of its 
 consequences? Put in this way, intellectual integrity and 
 moral courage alike seem to demand, that he who would 
 enter the temple of truth must first lay aside all demands 
 and desires, and be ready, in utter humility and submission, 
 to face and accept facts as they are, whatever be the hurt 
 to his feelings. 
 
 Hope, comfort, security, trust — these are the things for 
 which men most long in their dealings with Nature. A 
 world in which they can hope, a world which comforts 
 rather than bruises, a world in which they can feel at 
 home — that is the kind of world which men want above all 
 to believe in, which at all costs they try to believe in, in- 
 venting philosophies and religions which hold out this 
 promise, which bring this assurance. 
 
 But this, so say the advocates of the one way, is to be 
 the victim of illusion. Beliefs which are untrue are bound, 
 
52 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. Ill 
 
 sooner or later, to play the believer false. His comfort, his 
 security, his happiness are built on unstable foundations, 
 and at the remorseless touch of fact will crumble into dust. 
 The only way to salvation lies through the wholly disinter- 
 ested search for truth. Let us ask first what we have a 
 right reasonably to believe, and then let us adjust our 
 feelings and wishes, for better or for worse, to the inexor- 
 able facts. This is the one way of escape from illusion and 
 fear, not perhaps to happiness and hope, but at least to 
 dignity and nobility of living. 
 
 There is something in this appeal which must evoke a 
 thrill of response from everyone who cares at all for 
 truth and who knows, as Spinoza knew, that the service 
 of truth demands a severe discipline and education of the 
 emotions. But is the situation quite so simple as it is 
 here pictured? However much we may all need the warn- 
 ing against the cheery, but cheap, optimism which exclaims 
 " God is in his heaven, all's right with the world ", is there 
 not also the opposite and more subtle danger that we shall 
 distrust, and reject as false, beliefs on no other ground 
 that they are pleasant and comforting? There is a tendency 
 abroad among some present-day thinkers to set down all 
 theories which do not paint the world as an ugly, dark, evil 
 thing, as " compensations " for, or " escapes " from, an 
 intolerable actuality. Shrinking from the cruelty and 
 horror of the world as it is, we build, according to this 
 view, palaces of illusion where we can be at peace. We 
 remould the world nearer to the heart's desire — ^in imagina- 
 tion, deliberately turning our backs upon the actual which 
 we cannot bear. We seek and find in make-believe theory 
 a vicarious satisfaction for the wishes which life, as it 
 really is, brutally thwarts and represses. Philosophies 
 which find value in the world are likened to art, as ways 
 of escape into the realm of the ideal from the imperfections 
 
Cai.III] PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE 53 
 
 of the actual. Religions which give comfort are likened 
 to the dreams of Freudian psychology, as make-believe ful- 
 filments of baulked desires. But if we are thus to " psy- 
 chologise ", or " psycho-analyse ", those whose beliefs are 
 comforting, why not peer similarly into the hidden springs 
 of the thought of those who, in the words of Russell's in- 
 genuous confession, " like some of their beliefs to have the 
 quality of a hair-shirt? " ^ If philosophy has, as Russell in 
 the same passage suggests, its ascetics as well as its volupt- 
 uaries, is it a priori certain that the truth is always and 
 wholly on the side of the ascetic? If there is a bias for 
 what is comforting and pleasant, is there not in some minds 
 also a bias for what is arduous and painful? It is possible, 
 as every psychologist knows, to enjoy the infliction of pain, 
 not only on others, but even on oneself. It is possible to 
 enjoy a theory which tortures by demanding renunciations, 
 and even, unconsciously, to let the fact that it tortures 
 weigh among the reasons for accepting it as true. There 
 never yet was a pessimist who did not enjoy at least the 
 conviction of the truth of his pessimism, not unmixed, oc- 
 casionally, with the pleasure of contemplating the pitiful 
 illusions of his opponents. Bradley was not far wrong 
 when he summed up the pessimist's attitude in the aphor- 
 ism: "Where all is bad, it must be good to know the 
 worst" — a remark unintentionally verified by Russell's: 
 " There is a stark joy in the unflinching perception of our 
 true place in the world." It is, of course, only a bad world 
 which requires unflinching perception. 
 
 If this were merely a dispute about tastes or tempera- 
 ments, there would be little point in paying so much atten- 
 
 1 " Some ascetic instinct makes me desire that a portion, at least, 
 of my beliefs should be of the nature of a hair-shirt ; and, as is natural 
 to an ascetic, I incline to condemn the will-to-believers as voluptu- 
 aries". Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 
 vol. xvi, no. 1, Jan. 1919. 
 
S4 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.III 
 
 tion to it. What is important is to challenge, here and now, 
 the suggestion that philosophies, or religions, which meet 
 spiritual needs, are, jor this reason, false, or, at least, likely 
 to be false. Granted that a wish is often the father of a 
 thought, does it follow either that a given thought which 
 is such that we should prefer it to be true, has therefore 
 a wish for its parent, or is therefore untrue? The situation 
 reminds one of the relation of duty to the inclinations in 
 Kant's moral theory. When duty and inclination coincide, 
 we are but too likely to deceive ourselves concerning the 
 moral quality of our conduct. Hence it is only when we 
 do a thing we utterly dislike from a stern sense of duty 
 alone, that we can be sure our action is moral. So here; 
 it is only when we believe the world to be as we would 
 much rather not have it, that we can be sure of the truth 
 of the belief — or at least sure that no wishes have imposed 
 illusions upon us. The only wish against the influence of 
 which, even then, we shall have no guarantee is the wish to 
 believe what runs counter to other wishes, of one's own 
 or of other people. 
 
 The only aim of our argument, so far, has been to keep 
 open the door for an alternative to this much-advertised 
 way of contrasting facts and wishes. Behind that contrast, 
 there lies the deeper contrast of jact and value, and the 
 problem of their relation, indeed of their identity. It is 
 from this side that we can best approach the second way 
 which lies before philosophy. 
 
 In the first essay, we had laid it down that the spirit 
 of philosophising is the spirit of wholeness, and that whole- 
 ness implies a unity of outlook upon the universe and 
 a stability of attitude, such as are unattainable if no syn- 
 thesis is possible of the realm of fact and the realm of 
 value. 
 
Ch. Ill] PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE 55 
 
 The category of value is as old as morality and religion 
 themselves, and in this sense has been a topic of philosophi- 
 cal speculation as long as these modes of experience have 
 attracted the philosopher's interest. But, in another sense, 
 the realm of values is new to exploration, and it is only in 
 our own day that this exploration has been undertaken 
 with all the resources of modern psychological and 
 logical analysis. The "Theory of Value", eo nomine, 
 is the latest addition to philosophical disciplines, and 
 its development has barely begun to emerge from the 
 experimental stage. Value-judgments, value-feelings, acts 
 of valuation, still stand as so many diverse points of 
 departure for analysis, nor can any single theory claim 
 to have gained undisputed acceptance. All the conflict- 
 ing tendencies which characterise modern philosophy at 
 large, re-appear in the special field of the theory of 
 value. Here, as elsewhere, realism and idealism, natural- 
 ism and mysticism, pragmatism and intuitionism confront 
 one another, though sometimes in strangely assorted 
 alliances. 
 
 Still, through the dust it is possible to discern that 
 the conflict is raging, as it was bound to rage, about a 
 fundamental point, the recognition of which is as old as the 
 Platonic-Aristotelian theory of pleasure. Is value relative 
 to desire and want, and thus "subjective"? Or is it 
 " objective " — a quality of perfection in the universe to be 
 appreciated, though this appreciation may need to be 
 learned, and though this learning may need an arduous 
 effort? 
 
 If value is relative to desire, then nothing has value (or 
 is a value) except what is desired, and so far, and for so 
 long, as it remains an object of desire to somebody. Desire 
 will confer the quality of value on its objects. The exist- 
 ence of a desire will be the condition precedent to anything 
 
56 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. Ill 
 
 having value. To have value will mean to be valued, and 
 this will mean to be desired. 
 
 No doubt, this position may be superficially approximated 
 to its rival, by sa3ang that every desire implies an apprecia- 
 tion and thus a judgment of approval. Whatever you 
 desire, so the plea may run, you approve; to desire is to 
 think (judge) that what you desire is good. Thus all 
 desire is sub ratione boni. 
 
 But this is an evasion, as may be seen by putting the 
 test-question: on the theory of the subjectivity of value, is 
 a thing desired because it is judged to be good, or is the 
 judgment of value a mere consequence, and expression of, 
 the fact that it is desired? The latter position alone would 
 appear to be consonant with the subjectivity-theory. But 
 lest we lose ourselves here in idle hair-splitting, let us rather 
 put the point thus: Are there not approvals, Bejahungen, 
 which are not preceded, or conditioned by, desire? Are 
 there not acceptances, appreciations, satisfactions, findings 
 good of which desire, at best, is only an index under the 
 special condition when the object is absent, lacking, un- 
 realised? Does value cease with fulfilment and thereby 
 cessation of desire? Is there no enjoyment or recognition 
 of value in things, when reflected upon and contemplated? 
 Is there no value discernible in things which, from the nature 
 of the case, cannot be effectively or reasonably desired, as 
 not being within our power? Do not the resources of expe- 
 rience and reflection enable us, on occasion, to perceive a 
 value in things which, in their immediately given character, 
 provoke aversion and condemnation? A theory which has 
 not explored these clues and possibilities, or which refuses 
 to do so, can hardly set up an unchallenged claim to accept- 
 ance. 
 
 Another way of pressing the same point is to enquire 
 whether, except on a theory of objective value, there can 
 
Ch.III] PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE 57 
 
 be any standard for the criticism, and thereby for the cor- 
 rection and education, of desires. In the field of desires 
 the process of learning by experience is, perhaps, even more 
 obvious than in the field of our theoretical beliefs. Mis- 
 takes here are peculiarly glaring and painful. Desired ob- 
 jects so frequently play us false. Attained, they still leave 
 us dissatisfied. Disappointment proves them " false "; 
 shows that they were not what we "really", i.e., truly, 
 wanted. Not that the theory of the subjectivity of value 
 is wholly at a loss in the face of this situation. It may set 
 up the ideal of a harmony of desires, an organisation of them 
 without friction or mutual interference, a goal of maximum 
 satisfaction through desires regulated and adjusted each 
 to the others in due proportion. In that it thus offers a 
 standard of apparent " wholeness ", the theory is tempting 
 and plausible. And indeed it is right so far as it goes. But 
 it does not go all ,the way. It leaves out too much to 
 measure up, even in mere theory, to what wholeness im- 
 plies and demands. It leaves out the enjo3mients and ap- 
 preciations which come unsought and undesired. It leaves 
 out the problem of the appreciation of, or satisfaction with, 
 the world in all those aspects of it for which, because they 
 are not modifiable by human action, desire cannot furnish 
 the criterion or measure of value. Those who hold that 
 " good " is indefinable, or, in general, that value is a quality 
 in things the presence of which can only be perceived 
 or intuited, like the presence of a sense-quality, such as 
 " yellow 'V might support our view here against the theory 
 which makes value dependent on desire. But in so far as 
 they declare such intuition to be infallible (for who can 
 perceive what is not there?), and therefore beyond the reach 
 of, or need for, correction and education; in so far as they 
 deny, by implication at least, that the appreciation and 
 1 G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, ch. i, § 7, p. 7. 
 
58 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.III 
 
 recognition of objective value can be deepened by the lessons 
 of experience, or that there is a " dialectic " through which 
 we come to apprehend more clearly not only what we ought 
 to desire, but the actual value of actual fact, their theory 
 still differs from the one here suggested. 
 
 This is not the place to argue the difficult question of 
 the comparative merits of these rival theories of value. It 
 is enough to have shown what alternatives are open to 
 choice. Which of them a given thinker will prefer is 
 sure to depend on his total philosophical attitude, such as 
 it springs by reflection from the ssoithesis of all his expe- 
 rience. In choices of this sort it is never possible to demon- 
 strate that one alternative is unquestionably right and the 
 other wrong. If that were possible with any ease, there 
 would not be the prevailing divergence of view. But this is 
 not to deny the reasonableness of such choices. For what 
 is a thinker to reason with except the experiences through 
 which the world reveals itself to him? All he can do is to 
 weigh how far any given view sums up, and is consistent 
 with, any experience by which he can test it. On such 
 weighings of total impressions the fundamental differences in 
 philosophy commonly turn. When the question is whether 
 value exists, or comes into being, only in dependence 
 on desire, or whether it may be discerned throughout the 
 world in proportion as the effort to view the world as a 
 whole succeeds, the decision will always depend on what 
 types of experiences furnish the dominant clues, what point 
 of view each thinker is accustomed to treat as decisive. On 
 the one theory, value is essentially a man-dependent 
 phenomenon. On the other, it is a cosmic, or, if we prefer 
 to say so, a metaphysical character. On the one view, cer- 
 tain kinds of things in the universe have value, as being 
 objects of desire. On the other, it is the universe itself, and 
 as a whole, which to the best insight has value. The " best 
 
Ch.III] PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE 59 
 
 insight " of the latter theory will seem romantic fiction, or 
 even mere foolish or mischievous make-believe, to the ad- 
 herents of the former. By contrast, the theory of the former 
 will seem abstract and ill-balanced to the adherents of the 
 latter, as ignoring or depreciating through the device of 
 opposing feeling to fact, or desire to truth, the metaphysical 
 import of moral and religious experience. 
 
 Here, after all, we have the kernel of the issue. Philoso- 
 phical choices turn, we said just now, on total impressions, 
 on the point of view which, in estimating the dominant 
 character of the universe, we treat as decisive. There are 
 for modern men two such points of view, determined for 
 us by the whole historical development of our civilisation, 
 alike on its side of social organisation and activity, and, even 
 more, on its side of speculative theory. Throughout the 
 history of modern philosophy, no less than in the wider 
 movements of educated thought which philosophical theories 
 both focus and stimulate, we can trace the varying rela- 
 tions of these two points of view, now in sharp opposi- 
 tion, now in ingenious compromise, now joined in close 
 synthesis. Knowing them already as interest in fact and 
 interest in value, we may now, summarily if crudely, con- 
 trast them as science and religion. 
 
 Philosophy of Nature, thus, as it pushes on to funda- 
 mental problems, will always become philosophy of Religion, 
 even when, as " Naturalism " or " Materialism ", it con- 
 demns all religion as savage animism or effete superstition; 
 even when, as " Positivism ", it elevates philanthropy to 
 the dignity of a " religion of humanity ". From this angle 
 the ultimate question is: what religion, if any, is possible, 
 for reasonable men when their choice is in favour of accept- 
 ing as dominant and decisive the methods and results of 
 Natural Science? 
 
6o CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.III 
 
 The hold of Science on the minds of educated men, and 
 its influence on their philosophical attitude, is, not without 
 justice, immense. It is amazing to reflect with how small 
 a stock of scientific knowledge, yet with what confidence 
 in the effectiveness of their endeavours, men have in past 
 ages carried on the business of living and built up the 
 complex structure of their civilisations. That knowledge 
 which, as Bacon said, is power and from the acquisition of 
 which he hoped so much for " the relief of man's estate " 
 — ^how recent are its inception and its triumphs! Most of 
 our sciences hardly date more than a century back, and 
 even those which are older have only within this period 
 made rapid and unbroken progress. The control of natural 
 forces for human ends was hardly more advanced in the 
 London or Paris of 1750 than it was in the Rome of 
 Augustus or the Athens of Pericles. Most of the inven- 
 tions and discoveries on which modern industry and com- 
 merce are built up, are the achievements of the last 
 century. 
 
 Let us stop for a moment to recall what this means. 
 Here is the picture as a distinguished scientist draws it 
 for us. " At that date [1754] the steam-engine had not yet 
 assumed a practical form, and apart from some small use of 
 water and wind power, when mechanical Work had to be 
 done this was accomplished by the aid of the muscular ef- 
 fort of men and animals. The question of power supply 
 was, in fact, in the same condition that had existed for 
 thousands of years, and, in consequence, the employment 
 of machinery of all descriptions that required power to 
 drive it was extremely limited. Nor as regards travel for 
 persons, or transit for goods, were things very different. 
 The steamship was unthought of, and ocean journeying 
 was no faster, and but little more certain, than in the 
 days of Columbus. Railways in the modern sense were non- 
 
Ch.III] PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE 6i 
 
 existent, and even the coaching era had scarcely begun. 
 Travelling of all sorts was no more rapid or more conven- 
 ient than in the days of the Romans. Indeed, emperors 
 such as Hadrian and Severus, who visited this Country 
 [England] in late classical times, probably made the jour- 
 ney to and from Rome quite as expeditiously, and very 
 likely even much more comfortably, than did any traveller 
 of the eighteenth century. Furthermore, at the time of 
 which I speak, the communication of intelligence was 
 limited to the speed at which postmen could travel, for, 
 of course, there were no electric telegraphs, such as have 
 shortened the time of communication with the ends of the 
 earth to a few seconds, and have reduced even ambassadors 
 to the status of clerks at the hourly beck and call of the 
 Home Government. In the eighteenth century, moreover, 
 illuminating gas and electric light had still to be invented, 
 public lighting was practically non-existent, and even in 
 London and other large cities linkmen with torches were 
 required to light the passenger to his home after dark. If 
 printing was in use it was slow and expensive, without any 
 of the modern mechanical, photographic, and other adjuncts 
 that have rendered possible our numerous newspapers and 
 the other derivatives of the press. Nor were there any 
 proper systems either for water supply or for the disposal 
 of sewage. Disease, born of filth and neglect, stalked 
 through the land practically unchecked. Medicine was still 
 almost entirely empiric. Little or nothing was known of 
 the causes and nature of illness, of infection by bacilli, 
 or of treatment by inoculation. Anaesthetics had not yet 
 been applied, and the marvels of modern surgery were un- 
 dreamt of. It would be easy to multiply instances, but in 
 the aggregate it is not inaccurate to state that at that 
 time the general mode of life had not much improved on 
 what obtained in civilised Europe in the days of the 
 
62 ' CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.III 
 
 Antonines, while, in some respects, it fell much short of 
 this." ^ 
 
 It is easy to paint for oneself the contrasting picture of 
 how much science, since then, has achieved for the relief 
 of man's estate, in medicine, in chemistry, in metallurgy, 
 in engineering, in fact in all the old, and many new, lilies 
 of investigation. Yet its triumphs, alike in theory and in 
 the application of theory to life, with all they have done 
 for the enlargement of human power and the multiplication 
 of human comforts, have not brought any obvious increase 
 in happiness, or made the living of a good life appreciably 
 easier. The mastery over natural forces with which science 
 has endowed us is, like all power, morally neutral. It may 
 be abused as well as used. Social justice and the welfare 
 of manual workers have not kept step with the development 
 of machinery and of tools. Science has armed the will to 
 destruction with weapons of an efficacy undreamt of by 
 previous generations, but it has not made international 
 relations more stable or less dangerous. It has repeatedly 
 revolutionised the art of war, but it has not taught men to 
 control their own war-like tendencies. It has brought in- 
 creased power for good or evil. It has not strengthened 
 the will for good against evil. Hence in the midst of the 
 keen zest of research and the confident hope of a better 
 future to be gained by intelligent efforts, the mood of men 
 has again and again turned into discouragement and des- 
 pair. For all our pomp of power and pride of knowledge, 
 the applications of science seem but to make life more com- 
 plex and difficult, and to leave the moral and religious 
 aspirations of men as unfulfilled and unsatisfied as ever. 
 Moreover, the scientific theory of Nature, and of man's 
 place and prospects within it, so far from dispelling, rather 
 deepens this pessimism. What is its promise to the human 
 
 1 Science and Its Functions, by A. A. Campbell Swinton, F.R.S., 
 Nature, vol. 100, no. 2511, Dec. 1917. 
 
Ch.III] PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE 63 
 
 race but ultimate extinction? It paints human life as a 
 brief episode in a cosmic drama which is as vast as it is 
 meaningless. It condemns human achievements to destruc- 
 tion, human efforts to vanity. Loyalty to ideals becomes 
 a futile rebelliousness against an inexorable fate. The very 
 ideals may be ranked as no better than pathetic dreams. 
 
 Tjrpical utterances, illustrative of this view, are not hard 
 to find in our literature. For it is a view which stirs the 
 feeling of self-pity, and lends itself to tragic eloquence. 
 Bertrand Russell's " The Free Man's Worship " is no mere 
 voice of one crying in the wilderness of a thoughtless optim- 
 ism. In allowing his imagination to fill in the colours where 
 science has drawn the outlines, he does but put into words 
 a widespread estimate of human destiny. Here is another, 
 less well-known, but no less characteristic statement from 
 his pen. " The universe as astronomy reveals it is very 
 vast. How much there may be beyond what our tele- 
 scopes show, we cannot tell; but what we can know is of 
 unimaginable immensity. In the visible world the Milky 
 Way is a tiny fragment; within this fragment, the solar 
 system is an infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our 
 planet is a microscopic dot. On this dot, tiny lumps of 
 impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with 
 somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl 
 about for a few years, until they are compounded. They 
 divide their time between labour designed to postpone the 
 moment of dissolution for themselves and frantic struggles 
 to hasten it for others of their kind. Natural convulsions 
 periodically destroy some thousands or millions of them, 
 and disease prematurely sweeps away many more. These 
 events are considered to be misfortunes; but when men 
 succeed in inflicting similar destruction by their own efforts, 
 they rejoice, and give thanks to God. In the life of the 
 solar system, the period during which the existence of man 
 
64 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. Ill 
 
 will have been physically possible is a minute portion of 
 the whole; but there is some reason to hope that even 
 before this period is ended men will have set a term to his 
 own existence by his efforts at mutual annihilation. Such 
 is man's life viewed from the outside." ^ 
 
 A similar utterance in the pages of Mr. A. J. Balfour's 
 " Foundations of Belief " used to thrill our fathers in their 
 youth. " Man — ^past, present and future — lays claim to 
 our devotion. What, then, can we say of him? Man, so 
 far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, is no 
 longer the final cause of the universe, the Heaven-descended 
 heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his 
 story a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of 
 the meanest of the planets. Of the combination of causes 
 which first converted a dead organic compound into the 
 living progenitors of humanity, science, indeed, as yet knows 
 nothing. It is enough that from such beginnings famine, 
 disease, and mutual slaughter, fit nurses of the future lords 
 of creation, have gradually evolved, after infinite travail, 
 a race with conscience enough to feel that it is vile, and 
 intelligence enough to know that it is insignificant. We 
 survey the past, and see that its history is of blood and 
 tears, of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid ac- 
 quiescence, of empty aspirations. We sound the future, and 
 learn that after a period, long compared with the individual 
 life, but short indeed compared with the divisions of tiifte 
 open to our investigation, the energies of our system will 
 decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, 
 tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which 
 has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down 
 into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy 
 consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief 
 space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be 
 ^AthencBum, No. 4643 (April 1919), p. 232. 
 
Ch. Ill] PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE 65 
 
 at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. " Imperishable 
 monuments " and " immortal deeds ", death itself, and love 
 stronger than death, will be as though they had never been. 
 Nor will anything that is be better or be worse for all that 
 the labour, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have 
 striven through countless generations to effect."^ 
 
 Few, in this chorus of agreement, are the dissentient 
 voices. Here is one of the most recent. Challenging Rus- 
 sell, Professor R. B. Perry writes: " To pretend to speak 
 for the universe in terms of the narrow and abstract pre- 
 dictions of astronomy, is to betray a bias of mind that is 
 little less provincial and unimaginative than the most naive 
 anthropomorphism. What that residual cosmos which 
 looms beyond the border of knowledge shall in time bring 
 forth, no man that has yet been born can say. That it 
 may overbalance and remake the little world of things 
 known, and falsify every present prophecy, no man can 
 doubt. It is as consistent with rigorous thought to greet it 
 as a promise of salvation, as to dread it as a portent of 
 doom. And if it be granted that in either case it is a ques- 
 tion of over-belief, of the hazard of faith, no devoted soul 
 can hesitate." ^ 
 
 Perry thus denies the alleged " fact ". He challenges the 
 pretended " truth " of the scientific prediction on the gen- 
 eral ground of the limitation of human knowledge. From 
 ignorance he draws hope. He argues, iii effect, that be- 
 cause the worst is not certain there is an even chance of 
 the best, and that we have a moral right, not to say a moral 
 duty, to stake our all on this possibility. But suppose we 
 do not embark upon this venture of the will to believe. 
 Suppose we accept the "fact" and the "truth", on the 
 ground that we must be guided by the knowledge which we 
 
 1 The Foundations of Belief, pp. 33, 4. 
 ^Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 347. 
 
66 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. Ill 
 
 have. Even then our course is not clear. For on the all- 
 important issue our advisers speak with a divided voice. 
 And the all-important issue is to determine what our prac- 
 tical attitude, our conduct, ought to be on the basis of these 
 scientific truths, and how we ought to remodel the beliefs 
 on which our conduct is normally built. It is here that 
 our authorities differ and leave us perplexed. Balfour, 
 finding it impossible to give, within the frame-work of this 
 scientific world-view, an adequate explanation either of the 
 existence of values, aesthetic, moral, even cognitive, or of 
 our devotion to them, draws from this failure an argument in 
 favour of Theism.^ He puts us out of humour with Natural- 
 ism in order to make us turn back more kindly to the 
 verities of traditional piety. Russell, on the other hand, 
 bids us accept the facts and defy them to break our spirit! 
 To admit unwelcome truths, is to purge ourselves from 
 fear, hope, and desire. In breaking loose from bondage 
 to these tyrants of the human spirit, we escape from the 
 littleness of self, and the need for consoling illusions. We 
 become free to contemplate, without plaint or regret,, a world 
 of facts which promises nothing but extinction to ourselves 
 and all we care for. Yet it is only when we have ceased to 
 expect or ask anything on behalf of our ideals, that we 
 are free to be loyal to them, with a stoic austerity and 
 ardour into which enters no base alloy of compromise or 
 delusion of success.'' 
 
 The moral of all these speculations is plain. The prob- 
 lem of fact and value is inescapable, at least for him who 
 would be a philosopher. Is not this, indeed, the funda- 
 mental difference in modern life between science and phil- 
 
 1 See for the most recent statemeijt of his view his Gifford Lectures 
 on Humanism and Theism. 
 
 2 For an examination of this position, see the author's The Religious 
 Aspect of Bertrand Russell's Philosophy, in The Harvard Theological 
 Review, vol. ix. 
 
Ch.m] PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE ' 67 
 
 osophy — ^both taken in their aspect of pure theory? The 
 sciences, each taking some special territory for exploration, 
 are content to accumulate facts and give, as far as may be, 
 a systematic account of them. Balfour's dialectics on be- 
 half of dogma, Russell's despairs and heroics, Perry's haz- 
 ards of faith and over-beliefs — all alike the scientist can, 
 if he pleases, ignore as irrelevant sentimentalities. His 
 enterprise, within its own limited sphere, carries for him 
 its own justification. " Within its limited sphere " — for it 
 is only by narrowing his horizon that he purchases his 
 security. When science becomes philosophy, or when the 
 problems of philosophy come to be attempted on the basis 
 of scientific theories, the horizon at once widens to the 
 whole range of human experience, and troublesome ques- 
 tionings and misgivings corae crowding in. The need of a 
 S3mthesis of fact and value comes into view, and cannot 
 be ignored by the philosopher. For he is the guardian of 
 the whole of experience, and his task is to elicit from each 
 of its forms the contribution which it has to make to a com- 
 prehensive theory of the universe. Values and valuations 
 he cannot ignore. Nor can he a priori subordinate them to 
 facts, for such subordination itself expresses an estimate 
 of value. " Ethical neutrality " is not for him. True it is 
 that of the danger of believing what one wants to believe, 
 he needs ever to remind himself. But he cannot seek safety 
 by settling facts first and then letting values, under the' 
 title of desires, adjust themselves as best they may. For 
 there are experiences in which he seems to himself to per- 
 ceive that the facts themselves, fully understood or, to put it 
 technically, viewed from the point of view of the whole, 
 are embodiments of value. And, at any rate, to the phil- 
 osopher the moral spirit is itself a fact, a force, or quality 
 of Ufe, become operative in human beings and through them 
 in the world. He cannot refuse to enquire what light such 
 
68 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. Ill 
 
 a fact, or rather such a value present as an effective force, 
 throws on the nature of human beings and of the universe 
 of which they are parts. 
 
 " We are not here concerned ", says Darwin at the end 
 of his Descent of Man, "with hopes and fears, but only 
 with truth as reason enables us to ascertain it." The an^ 
 tithesis had its value so long as prejudice disguised as dogma 
 stood in the way of unbiased research. But, if there is 
 anything in the argument of this essay, then to talk of 
 hopes and fears as the enemies of truth is itself misleading, 
 For it diverts attention from the problem of objective value, 
 or of " reality " as being both fact and, to the deepest in- 
 sight, embodiment of value. Hope, fear, desire, are truly 
 secondary, and need to be disciplined if they are not to 
 distort our vision. But it would be false to deny that they 
 serve to direct attention to the value-aspect of the universe, 
 They are an intimation and a reminder that there is more 
 to " fact " and " truth." than scientific theory is able to 
 reveal; and this not so much because, as Perry has it, our 
 science is small and our ignorance large, but because science 
 builds its edifice of theory on a relatively narrow selection 
 of data from among human experiences. It is not true to 
 our experience as a whole. It is " abstract ". 
 
 Nor is the result substantially different when we appeal, 
 like Darwin, to " reason ". For, as we said a short while 
 ago, what is the reasoner to reason with except the materials 
 which human experience, in the widest sense of that word, 
 puts at his disposal? What he is to think on any given 
 problem, and ultimately on the universe as a whole, is bound 
 to depend on what he has to think with. There is nothing 
 else on which it can depend. Reasonings differ partly, no 
 doubt, because some minds are more " logical " than others, 
 but partly, and on philosophical issues fundamentally, be- 
 cause as between one mind and another there are differences 
 
Ch.III] PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE 69 
 
 in the range, kind, and quality of the experiences which are 
 their material for reasoning, and even more because out 
 of the same sort of experience one mind can elicit more of 
 insight than another. In any case, it is well to recognise 
 clearly, that reason and logic are not restricted to the 
 " facts " for which we have the warrant of sense-perception 
 and experiment. It would be a fatal mistake of method, as 
 well as contrary to the practice of all the great philosophers, 
 to exclude the things which are of profoundest human 
 concern from the competence of " reason " and from the 
 field of philosophy, by setting them down as matters of 
 mere feeling, unreasoning itself and incapable of furnish- 
 ing insights which reason can, and indeed must, use in its 
 endeavour to frame a world-view which shall be true to the 
 whole of our experience. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 ON " DOUBTING THE EEALITY OF THE WOBLD OF SENSE " 
 
 It is not hard to understand why the world which we call 
 external, physical, material, is, to ordinary thought, par 
 excellence the " real " world, and why the problem of vin- 
 dicating its " reality " against attacks such as those which 
 " idealists " are supposed to make upon it, is one of the 
 persistent problems at any rate of modern philosophy. 
 
 No doubt, it is well to remind ourselves how narrow, after 
 all, this concept of the " real " world is — ^how much that 
 is undeniably real it fails, on any plausible interpretation 
 of the terms " external ", etc., to include. Still, in a very 
 genuine sense the case of the external world is a crucial one. 
 At all times men have been found to believe in the existence 
 of things which do not in fact exist. The very sense-data 
 which we treat as evidences of the reality of physical things 
 are deceptively aped by dreams and hallucinations. The 
 difficulty of distinguishing with certainty what is real and 
 what is unreal, when in either case the experiences, be they 
 sense-data or images, are equally vivid, lends colour -tn- th g 
 tjheo ry that n ntTiing exists except what is perceived by some 
 ..fnij;^d, , for so long sg it is perceived : and that the existence 
 of " matter ", if not to be denied outright, must be inter- 
 preted in keeping with this esse-est-percipi principle. At 
 the same time, whilst this " subjective idealism " throws 
 doubt on the existence of anything other than, or beyond, 
 the percipient's actual sense-data here and now, from quite 
 a different angle scientific theory threatens to discredit these 
 sense-data as mere " mental impressions ", effects produced 
 in a perceiver's mind by the action, on his sense-organs and 
 
 70 
 
Ch.IV] THE WORLD OF SENSE 71 
 
 nervous system, of material objects conceived in terms of 
 imperceptible, and hence h5^othetical, particles and forces. 
 Every student of modern philosophy is familiar with the 
 maze of polemical discussion which has enveloped the 
 issues thus summarily indicated. Taking the conflicting 
 theories as they find them, philosophers may well wonder 
 what exactly it is in which the " reality " of the external 
 world consists. Extreme views on this problem confront 
 one another. For the orthodox physicist, reality, as it has 
 been picturesquely put, is a " mad dance of electrons ", 
 and sense-data, for all that they are the physicist's only 
 direct evidence of the existence of any external world what- 
 ever, are counted as " merely mental " and " subjective ". 
 On the other side, the physicist who has turned " phenom- 
 enalist ", joins positivists, empiricists, and subjective 
 idealists among philosophers in declaring for the indubitable 
 reality of sense-data, and rejecting, as hypothetical fictions, 
 all imperceptible forces or entities — in short, the orthodox 
 physicist's whole theoretical apparatus of " matter " and 
 " energy ". 
 
 Moreover, our difficulties do not begin and end with the 
 relation of the facts of sense to the concepts of physics. 
 Behind the problem of sense-data and matter there looms 
 up the problem of the relation of matter to life and to 
 mind or consciousness. Mechanism and vitalism compete 
 directly as rival interpretations of the facts of biology.* 
 Just as the mechanical tiieory of nature, from its home in 
 the physico-chemical sciences, is ever tending to overflow 
 the whole field of Nature and engulf biology and psychology, 
 so, in return, there are not lacking attempts to borrow 
 from biology the concept of life or vital impulse, or from 
 psychology the concept of mind or consciousness, as a 
 directive factor, and apply them to all natural phenomena. 
 
 1 See chs. vi and vii. 
 
73 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. IV 
 
 Physics, biology, and psychology have in turn supplied the 
 fundamental concepts for metaphysical theories. We are 
 here in a region of metaphysical experiments where the 
 alternatives range from the materialism of, say, Haeckel, 
 to the vitalism of Bergson and the panpsychism of C. A. 
 Strong. Confronting all these alike are philosophies seek- 
 ing to maintain and defend the orders and distinctions 
 which in common thought we acknowledge and live by, and 
 which are reflected accurately enough in the system of 
 natural sciences. There Nature is taken as a hierarchy of 
 inorganic or non-living, and organic or living. The latter 
 in turn is divided into the living but not conscious, and the 
 living which is also " besouled ".^ Moreover, this hierarchy 
 presents not merely a classificatory scheme, but also- an 
 evolutionary series, in which the lower and earlier stages 
 endure and persist, as basis and environment for the higher 
 and later. We may even, within the realm of living bodies 
 which are besouled, distinguish degrees or levels of soul — 
 beings which can sense and feel but not think from beings 
 which can also think and reason, or beings who are merely 
 conscious from beings who are also self-conscious. At this 
 last point, however, we shall probably be held definitely 
 to pass beyond the legitimate limits of a philosophy of 
 Nature. For self-consciousness is a " reflexive " phenom- 
 enon in which the spectator-standpoint, with its self-forget- 
 fulness, its interest in the object for its own sake, be it an 
 interest of knowledge or of aesthetic enjoyment, is tran- 
 scended. This is not to deny that the attitude of objectivity 
 can be restored, or regained, at a higher level after the in- 
 clusion of self-consciousness. Indeed, we may hold this to 
 be essential, and the supreme task of philosophy, Mean- 
 while, philosophy of Nature moves at the level of thought 
 for which the spectator-attitude is characteristic. The 
 li/ipixos, beseelt. 
 
Ch.IV] THE WORLD OF SENSE 73 
 
 spectator here does not take into account that, after all, 
 he is not merely taking stock of a spectacle, but is, in the 
 very act of doing so, himself a part of the spectacle, an 
 agent in the play. When he does take account of this, he 
 passes from interest in the object to interest in the study 
 and theory of the object, from philosophy of Nature to 
 philosophy of Science; in short, to theory of knowledge. 
 But this is not the only, nor the most important, effect of 
 the turn to self-consciousness. More important is the 
 reminder how completely the meaning of " Nature ", even 
 in the utmost extension which current usage permits us to 
 give to the term, fails to include all those achievements and 
 activities which we may conveniently sum up in the term 
 " Civilisation ". The biological concepts which suffice for 
 dealing with human beings as an animal species fail to serve 
 for the analysis of morality or religion, art or science; and 
 equally patent is the failure of any psychology the orienta- 
 tion of which is towards " naturalism " rather than towards 
 what Hegel called a " phenomenology of spirit ". At some 
 point or other the difference between Naturwissenschajt 
 and Geisteswissenschaft demands recognition; and there is 
 no way of avoiding this recognition and still doing justice 
 to the facts. The turn to self-consciousness, as we called 
 it above, means, in fact, not this or that individual's atten- 
 tion to his private self, but the philosopher's awakening to 
 the ideal values which the lives and institutions of human 
 beings very literally embody — ^which through men and 
 women of flesh and blood**(" physico-chemical machines", 
 if we like) are being realised in, and by use of, that " Na- 
 ture " of which they are parts. It is, we suggest, precisely 
 in the participation in the Service of these ideal values, that 
 the true function of " soul ", " mind ", or " consciousness " 
 in individual human beings is to be found." ^ 
 ^ See ch. viii ad fin. 
 
74 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Cli.IV 
 
 To mention " ideal values " is, of course, to open up the 
 whole problem of teleology which forms, as it were, the 
 upper limit of the philosophy of Nature, the bridge from 
 Nature to Spirit. So far as the mechanical theory of Nature 
 prevails, there is no room for the category of purpose. On 
 the other hand, it is only by doing violence to the facts that 
 biologists can avoid expressing themselves in language of 
 teleological import. At the same time, biologists are rightly 
 reluctant to use the term "purpose" in any sense which 
 might suggest the presence of conscious desire, plan, or 
 design where no evidence for such consciousness is to be 
 found. This raises the very difficult question whether the 
 psychological sense of purpose, as aim or object of desire, 
 can be extended by analogy, as the panpsychists pro- 
 pose to do, through the organic even to the inorganic, or 
 whether conscious purpose in human beings is not a 
 special form of a deeper-lying unconscious purposiveness 
 in the total structure of the world. The suggestion may 
 be ventured that a teleology in terms, not so much of 
 conscious purpose, as of objective value may meet the 
 situation.^ 
 
 But we do not need to pursue these ramifications of the 
 philosophy of Nature in order to see that the special prob- 
 lems of the relation of matter, life, mind, which the spectacle 
 of Nature raises, are forms of the general problem, how to 
 order and how to interpret the sense-data which are what 
 we immediately experience of Nature. To doubt the " real- 
 ity " of the world of sense is to doubt a theory or interpreta- 
 tion of the sense-data. The very distinction among objects 
 of experience between those which are real and those which 
 are unreal is a matter of theory. Hence, before entering in 
 later essays on the special problems of physical objects, liv- 
 ing beings, and minds, we cannot do better than exploi^e, in 
 
 1 See ch. vi. 
 
Ch.IV] THE WORLD OF SENSE 75 
 
 this essay, in what ways it is possible to doubt the reality 
 of the world of sense. 
 
 There is an old tradition in philosophy which holds such 
 doubt to be the gate to wisdom. But many of the grounds 
 which have, in the history of philosophy, been assigned 
 in support of it, have lost their appeal for our scientifically- 
 minded age, or at least do not weigh with us as heavily as 
 once they did. The Eastern doctrines of the senses as 
 spreading a veil of illusion over reality, and of the elabor- 
 ate ascetic regimen for mind and body by which the student 
 must discipline himself for penetrating to the reality behind 
 the veil, have never profoundly affected the main current of 
 Western thought. Most of the great philosophers of the 
 West, certainly since the time of the Renaissance, have been 
 men of the world as well as students and thinkers. They 
 have not tried to be "holy" men, set apart from their 
 fellows and the problems of contemporary life. They have 
 not, even when they were professors, spent their days in 
 meditation and mortification of the flesh in order to achieve, 
 individually, the blessedness of union with the One behind 
 the veil. Again the dualism, commonly, though perhaps 
 erroneously, ascribed to Plato, between the flux of sensa- 
 tions and the immutable, imperishable Forms, is not char- 
 acteristic of the best Western philosophy, though its in- 
 fluences have been, and will continue to be, felt again and 
 again. It is not on such grounds as these that, in recent 
 discussions, the reality of the world of sense has been 
 doubted, present-day doubts fasten, in part, upon the 
 distinction Detween what is real and what is unreal in ex- 
 perience, and in part upon what the " real " nature of the 
 real is. In either case the issue turns on the truth of a 
 theory, an interpretation; be it the truth of the classifica- 
 tion which excludes from the " real " world the objects of 
 
76 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. IV 
 
 dreams, hallucinations, and other abnormal experiences as 
 "unreal "; or be it the truth of one of the many theories 
 concerning the nature of some, or all, of the objects which 
 are real. 
 
 That the problem of the "reality" of anything can 
 always be turned into a problem of the truth of a theory 
 concerning that something, is easily illustrated by reflecting 
 what is meant by speaking of a " world of sense ". Partic- 
 ular sense-data here and now cannot be doubted. Taken 
 thus abstractly, they assert nothing, they mean nothing. 
 They simply are. It has unfortunately become the fashion 
 to speak of them as being " real ", when what is meant is 
 merely that they are, occur, are " had " (as Driesch puts 
 it) or experienced. In this sense, of course, their " reality " 
 is not in debate. But as soon as they are taken to 
 mean something, are classified in some way, are regarded 
 as being related, as having implications and consequences, 
 they are caught up in a network of theory, and their reality 
 in this sense is, at once, open to doubt, but open also to 
 confirmation. Suppose, e.g., that you hear a faint sou^jl" 
 and then begin to wonder whether it is a real sound or an( 
 imaginary one. (The point remains the same if you wonder 
 whether you really heard a sound or only imagined that 
 you did). Here, at once, a thepry is at stake. If the sound 
 you heard was real, it will be connected with other things 
 in the universe in a way very different from that in which 
 the imaginary sound is connected. Or take a somewhat 
 more complicated case. Were the voices heard by Joan of 
 Arc real or were they auditory hallucinations? In either 
 case there is no doubt that Joan really experienced some- 
 thing. But what that something was or meant, a divine 
 presence calling her to save France, or a symptom of 
 religious hysteria — this is the issue of reality in the 
 
 ■) 
 
Ch. IV] THE WORLD OF SENSE 77 
 
 pregnant sense of the true nature of that which she 
 experienced. 
 
 The occurrence, then, of sense-data at the moment when 
 they are being had, is indubitable. But to talk of a 
 " world " of sense-data is at once a theory. It signalises 
 the step from data to interpretation. Do we sense a world? 
 The present moment's tissue of colours, sounds, smells, 
 touches — is this a world? No and Yes. No, if we think 
 of their disorder, as given, of their mutual irrelevancies, 
 of their fragmentariness. Yes, if we think of the order 
 and meaning which we have learnt to discover in them and 
 which we now habitually find there. But, certainly, in dis- 
 covering order and meaning, we have had to go beyond the 
 present moment's data. We have had to call in memories of 
 previous experiences, correlating, S5mthesising, identifying 
 their data with those of present experience. We have learnt 
 to regard the latter as a fragment of something more — of 
 things sensed in the past or to be sensed in the future, or, 
 more generally still, capable of being sensed (" sensibilia "). 
 Thus in all directions the force of " world " carries us be- 
 yond the here-and-now of sense-data. The moment's actual 
 data are but the spear-point of the world of "possible 
 experience ". Again, " world " connotes system, an ordered 
 whole. But what is there of order in our actual sense-data 
 here and now? We might mention co-existence in space, 
 and succession in time, but so far as sense-data exhibit 
 such order, they constitute httle more than a " Together " 
 — a continuum, or changing manifold, which is barely dis- 
 tinguishable from a chaos. More pregnantly, order means 
 relevance, or logical connection — mora particularly con- 
 nection according to some " law " or " universal principle ". 
 It means, too, the grouping of sense-data into complexes 
 such that we are able to recognise and identify a complex 
 when only one, or a few, of its constituent members are 
 
78 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. IV 
 
 given. Perceiving some, we "know" what others belong 
 to the group, and may, or will, be perceived by us. Such 
 complexes of sense-data, actual and possible, are, according 
 to phenomenalist thinkers, all that we mean by individual 
 " things ", either in science or in practical life. But of 
 course, such synthesis of sense-data into things is once more 
 " interpretation ", i.e., expansion of what is given here and 
 now, with the help of previous experience and subject to 
 verification by future experience. There is nothing that 
 brings home to us so clearly the theoretical character of 
 this whole process of the discovery of an orderly world in 
 the chaos of sense-data, than to reflect on the fact that the 
 synthesis of which we have been speaking, involves the 
 identification of a datum here and now with other data ex- 
 perienced on other occasions and in other contexts, nay even 
 its identification with^data of different kinds, as all aspects, 
 or qualities, of the " same " individual thing. But this 
 identification of differences is no arbitrary and subjective 
 device of human thinking. On the contrary, in it we follow 
 and obey the objective principle of identity in difference 
 without which there are neither " things ", nor a " world " 
 of things; without which, in short, any interpretation of 
 sense-data is impossible. 
 
 The view here maintained, that a question of " reality " 
 always discloses, on analysis, a question of the truth of a 
 theory, may also be illustrated by considering the terms 
 " physical ", " material ", " external world ", which are 
 commonly treated as synon3mis of " world of sense ". 
 Every one of these adjectives has a theoretical import. It 
 expresses the interpretation of sense-data in terms of some 
 set of concepts, involving, as a rule, a classification of 
 things, e.g., material and mental, spatial and non-spatial, 
 etc. At the same time, a moment's consideration suffices to 
 
Ch. IV] THE WORLD OF SENSE 79 
 
 show that none of the alleged synonyms is co-extensive with 
 the " world of sense ". The physical world, for example, 
 is no doubt a world of sense in that the physicist, in his 
 observing, experimenting, verifying, is guided by sense-data 
 throughout. But there are many familiar sense-experiences 
 of which he takes no account, and which he methodically 
 excludes from the evidence on which he builds his theories. 
 No element can be known in chemistry, no force or energy 
 in physics, unless its presence becomes sensibly apparent, 
 however indirectly, through some difference in what we 
 observe. The most advanced theories of the constitution 
 of " matter ", whether, they be framed in terms of atoms, 
 or ions, or electro-magnetic discharges, or whatnot, rest in 
 the last resort on specific diJBFerences in sense-data. But 
 the sense-data which are thus relevant for physical theory 
 are not co-extensive with the world of sense-data. The 
 latter is much wider, and more miscellaneous than the 
 world of physics. The physicist practises a vigorous selec- 
 tion among the actual data which he shares with non- 
 scientific mortals. He ignores the beauty or ugliness of 
 physical things. Abnormal and supernormal experiences 
 do not count as evidences to him. He does not admit the 
 objects and events witnessed in dreams as facts to which 
 his theories have to be adjusted. Yet, as Russell has well 
 reminded us, " drearris and waking life, in our first efforts 
 at construction, must be treated with equal respect; it is 
 only by some reality not merely sensible that dreams can 
 be condemned."^ In fact, physical theory both rests on, 
 and results in, a classification of objects of experience, such 
 that those which satisfy the laws of physics are admitted, 
 whilst the rest is left to be dealt with in the context of some 
 other theory. 
 Again, the term " material world ", if not used as a 
 1 Our Knowledge of the External World, p. 86. Russell's italics. 
 
8o CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IV 
 
 mere equivalent of " physical world ", imports into the 
 problem of the reality of the world of sense a burden of 
 theory of its own. For by long-standing association it sug- 
 gests its opposite, the immaterial, commonly identified with 
 the mental or spiritual. Between them these terms in- 
 vite to a sorting out of all things in the universe into two 
 kinds, material things or bodies, immaterial things or souls. 
 When this familiar dualism of popular metaphysics, canon- 
 ised in philosophy by Descartes, is applied to sense-data, 
 we find ourselves asking such questions as. In what sense, 
 if any, can bodies or souls be perceived by the senses? and. 
 Should sense-data be pigeon-holed under " body " or under 
 " mind "? We shall, clearly, come to very different con- 
 clusions about the reality of the world of sense, according 
 as we set down colours, sounds, etc., as " sensations ", and, 
 therefore, as psychical states, modes of consciousness, con- 
 tents of minds, or, else, as the very stuff that bodies are 
 made of, or as qualities of physical things. If we follow 
 the psychologists of the analytic and introspective school 
 in enumerating colour, sound, smell, etc., as so many dif- 
 ferences in the " quality " of " sensations 'V we ought, 
 strictly, to speak not of a sensation of blue, but of a blue 
 sensation; not of seeing a blue thing, but of having a blue 
 state of consciousness. Similar language would seem to 
 be demanded by the view that all sense-data are " subjec- 
 tive ", i.e., mental or intra-mental, on the ground that the 
 " real ", i.e., material, objects must be conceived in terms 
 exclusively of " primary qualities ", and hence as colour- 
 less, soundless, tasteless. This is the view which a dis- 
 gusted critic, quoted by Bosanquet,^ sums up in the im- 
 
 1 Some writers of this school, e.g., Professor G. F. Stout, combine 
 with this the view that the quahties of sensations mediate our knowl- 
 edge of "sensible qualities" inhering in physical objects. Cf. his 
 Manual of Psychology, 3rd edition. 
 
 2 Adamson Lecture, The Distinction Between Mind and Its Objects, 
 p. 7. 
 
Ch.IV] THE WORLD OF SENSE 8i 
 
 patient exclamation: "What a world is that which science 
 pronounces real; dark, cold, ,and shaking like a jelly." 
 Against either view common sense rebels, and so does all 
 philosophy which cares about vindicating for the familiar 
 things of our " material " environment their panoply of 
 sense-qualities. Those neo-realists who declare sense-data 
 to be " non-mental ", in order, by the magic virtue of this 
 term, to plant them safely " out there " in the " real " world, 
 are, at least, guided by a sound instinct, whatever one may 
 think of their language. As a matter of fact, the dualism 
 of body and mind, or matter and spirit, considered as the 
 two substances of which the universe is made up, has been 
 the greatest trouble-maker in philosophy since Descartes' 
 time. Indeed, the history of modern philosophy might be 
 described as the history of the efforts to cast off the meshes 
 of this metaphysical net and return to an unprejudiced 
 " phenomenology ", i.e., a study of appearances, in their 
 diversity, their order, their mutual interdependence, their 
 total meaning. 
 
 When, lastly, we try to take " external world " as a 
 synonym of " world of sense ", once more we find ourselves 
 caught in a net of theories. External, strictly, means spa- 
 tial. The external world is the world of things in space, of 
 res extensae. But do all sense-data belong to the same 
 spatial system? Are the spaces of dream-worlds, or of the 
 many worlds of imagination, identical with the space of the 
 waking world which we call " real "? Those who, with 
 iBertrand Russell believe in the privacy of sense-data, have 
 las many private spaces to deal with as there are sets of 
 I private sense-data. Moreover, there is the problem for 
 iithem of explaining the relations of these private spaces to 
 ' the " public " space of the physical world. The situation 
 is hardly more comfortable for those who endow "sensa- 
 tions ", taken as mental states, with the quality of " exten- 
 
82 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. IV 
 
 sity ", and then labour to show how our " idea " of the real | 
 space of the non-mental, physical world is developed from i ' 
 this basis. In all these ways the " reality " of the world 
 of sense, taken as " external ", shows itself to be a ; 
 matter of theory, and, as such, open to argument. And ; 
 in all this we have not even touched on that other sense i 
 of " external ", in which the reality of the external ? 
 world means its independence, in existence and char- \ 
 acter, of being perceived or known by any mind what- \ 
 soever. "^^ ' 
 
 If in our discussion of the reality of the world of sense 
 up to this point we have roamed far and wide, our excuse 
 must be that a philosopher's argument, like the wind, blow- 
 eth him whithersoever it listeth, but that, at least, it is his 
 duty to expose himself to all the winds of heaven and catch 
 them, if he can, in his sail. And our result, so far, may 
 be summed up as follows. The " world of sense '*, we find, 
 covers all sense-data, but it covers also their interpretation 
 as a world. If we ask concerning the " reality " of v this 
 world, and do not by this term mean simply the givenness 
 (so to speak) of the sense-data, we can get no answer ex- 
 cept in terms of some theory as to what sort of a world it 
 is — what are its constituents, what its structure and order, / 
 what its meaning. These theories, we find, fall, broadly, 
 into two groups. One set is concerned with the distinction 
 between what is real and what is imreal. The other is con- 
 cerned with the real nature of the real world. The difficulty 
 of drawing a clear line of demarcation between these two 
 groups results chiefly from the tendency to restrict the 
 " real " world to that selection from the whole world of 
 sense which is dealt with by the physical sciences, thus 
 excluding as unreal dreams and suchlike sense-experiences, 
 but threatening with unreality also all those characters and 
 
Ch.IV] THE WORLD OF SENSE 83 
 
 relations of real things which are not dealt with by the 
 physical sciences. 
 
 The conclusion which appears to emerge is that the 
 " reality " of anything may be doubted in one of two senses. 
 We may doubt either its being real, or its being really so- 
 and-so. In the former sense, " to be real " is a synonym 
 for " to exist ", and what is real is then opposed to the 
 unreal, the non-existent, the imaginary. In the latter sense, 
 " really " is synonymous with " truly ", and emphasises 
 adverbially the truth of the judgment that something is so- 
 and-so. Both senses appear to be combined intentionally 
 when the universe, as a whole, is spoken of as " Reality " 
 or " The Reality ", the meaning being " all that exists in 
 its true, or real, character." 
 
 Another way of putting the difference is to say that the 
 real, in the existential sense, is opposed by the unreal, but 
 the real, in the sense of the true, by the apparent or the 
 false. The distinction between " reality " and " appear- 
 ance " will then belong to this latter problem of the true 
 nature of the actual or existent. 
 
 Or, again, we may say that the former distinction leads 
 to a classification of objects as real or unreal, existent or 
 non-existent. The latter distinction leads to an ordering of 
 judgments concerning any object of experience according 
 to the " degree " of their truth. 
 
 It is in the former sense that we ask whether such-and- 
 such things exist; it is in the latter sense that, assured 
 of existence, we ask whether a thing is really so-and-so. 
 The one sense concerns the " that ", the other the " what ". 
 In the one sense we may decide, after enquiring, that 
 "there exists no such thing"; in the other sense we 
 may be sure that there is something there without 
 knowing what it is, or whether our judgments of its 
 nature are true. 
 
84 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IV 
 
 Can we throw any further light on this distinction? Can 
 we, perhaps, get behind it? Let us consider some examples 
 of it. Let us experiment with it. 
 
 As synonym of " true ", " real " often has the force of 
 " genuine ", and asserts the fulfilment, as it were, of a 
 claim. Thus when we say, that somebody is " a real man " 
 the meaning is that he embodies all a man ought to be, 
 realises our ideal of manhood. The same thought might 
 be expressed by saying, that he is a man in the true sense 
 of the word, i.e., in the full or maximum sense. The judg- 
 ment would reflect the fact that an object may realise the 
 character by which we classify it, more or less perfectly. 
 Being of the kind it is, a thing is always more or less good 
 of its kind. For every character by which we can classify 
 may also supply a standard for estimating perfection in that 
 respect. Thus, if our example were to be challenged by 
 saying " the person you refer to is not a real man ", or, 
 " not really a man ", the normal meaning would be that he 
 falls short, certainly of the ideal, perhaps of the average, 
 of manhood by being, say, cowardly or effeminate. Only 
 secondarily, or in unusual contexts, would the meaning be 
 that the object referred to is not a man at all, but, say, 
 a wax-figure made to look like a " real " man, or a stump of 
 a tree mistaken on a foggy day for a human figure. Here 
 the very classification would be challenged, but the chal- 
 lenge would only bring to light the fact that the mistaken 
 classification was suggested — one might almost say, de- 
 manded — ^by the cunning fake, or by the shape and height 
 of the stump. In either case, the judgment rests on evidence 
 which further evidence belies. There is a claim not sus- 
 tained, a character suggested, but not proved genuine. So, 
 again, a sleeper who awakes with the vivid recollection upon 
 him of a scene just witnessed, may be at a loss to decide 
 between dream and real fact. The point to notice here is 
 
Ch. IV] THE WORLD OF SENSE 85 
 
 that the data in dreams are interpreted as spontaneously 
 as data in waking perception/ The whole complex of data 
 and interpretation is taken by the dreamer not only as really 
 so, but as real, until conflict with the experiences of waking 
 life suggests doubts. Vice versa, the events of waking expe- 
 rience are occasionally so startling or incredible as to sug- 
 gest doubts whether one be not dreaming.^ In all cases what 
 is doubted is the genuineness of the claim of something to 
 be real or to have really the character which it appears to 
 have. 
 
 In considering examples such as these, and especially 
 examples drawn from the comparison of dream and waking 
 experience, it is impossible not to feel a certain pull towards 
 an assimilation to each other of the problems whether some- 
 thing is real and whether it is really so-and-so. In both 
 cases we deal with matters of theory, of judgment, but our 
 suggestion now is that the judgment that something is real 
 or unreal, depends on the thing's character, and hence can- 
 not be discussed in abstraction from the judgment that the 
 thing is really so-and-so. The two senses of " reality ", in 
 short, though they may be distinguished, are too closely 
 connected to be profitably separated. 
 
 But before we can follow up this suggestion and present 
 a more detailed defence of it, it will repay us to learn what 
 we can from a consideration of two recent discussions of the 
 nature and status of " imreal " objects — discussions which 
 deserve the attention of students of philosophy no less be- 
 cause of the eminence of the debaters than because of their 
 striking divergence from each other in spite of a general 
 affinity in their philosophical positions. We refer to the 
 
 1 This is the reason why dreams can be reported in the language 
 of the " real " world. , 
 2(7/. the proverbial pinching oneself to make sure one is awake. 
 
86 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. IV 
 
 Gegenstandstheorie of Meinong and his school, on the one 
 side, and to Bertrand Russell's criticism of it, on the 
 other.^ 
 
 It is characteristic of the method of Gegenstandstheorie 
 to insist with equal emphasis both on the difference between 
 " mental " acts of apprehension and " non-mental " objects, 
 and also on their invariable correlation, in that every act of 
 apprehension has an object and thus affords a glimpse into 
 the realm where Gegenitande of all sorts have " being ". 
 In fact, we are invited to think of the universe as a realm of 
 " being " in the widest, and therefore also emptiest, sense 
 of the word. Within it, we are to distinguish kinds or modes 
 of being, such as "existence" and "subsistence". Or, 
 using " subsistence " as a synonym for " being " in general, 
 we shall distii^uish existent from non-existent, real from 
 unreal, being, as in the follbwing sketch of the universe by 
 a neo-realist writer who declares it to be composed of " all 
 things physical, mental, logical, propositions and terms, ex- 
 istent and non-existent, false and true, good and evil, real 
 and unreal." ^ The unicorns, the mermaids, the gplden 
 mountains of fairy-tale, the spirits and forces and magical 
 influences of things on one another of primitive supersti- 
 tion, the objects and events of nightmares, will "have 
 being " or " subsist " in such a universe as truly as the 
 things of the " real " world of common-sense and natural 
 science. There simply will be things which are " real " 
 and other things which are " unreal ", and if we are realists 
 we shall add that neither sort owes its being in any way 
 to being perceived, conceived, or in some other manner ap- 
 prehended by a mind. The result may strike those who 
 
 1 See especially A. Meinong's Untersuchungen sur Gegenstandstheorie 
 und Phychologie, and for the most recent statement of Russell's 
 position, his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, esp. chs. xv, xvi. 
 
 2 E. B. Holt, The Place of Illusory Experience in a Realistic W'<orld, 
 in The New Realism, p. 372. 
 
Ch.IV] THE WORLD OF SENSE 87 
 
 have not familiarised themselves with such a view as de- 
 cidedly queer, but it is, at any rate, the outcome of a 
 straightforward application of the principle that whatever 
 any mind is in any way conscious of, or whatever it can 
 think of, or talk about, must at any rate be. 
 
 But, perhaps, as Russell suggests, the grammatical struc- 
 ture of language here induces metaphysical illusions, which 
 it is the business of logical analysis to dispel. Language 
 consists of symbols, and it is the function of symbols to 
 have meanings. The danger is that we may attribute mean- 
 ing to groups of symbols which, by themselves, have no 
 meaning, though when joined with other words in proposi- 
 tions they help to express the total meaning of the proposi- 
 tion as a whole. The propositions of a fairy-tale about 
 fairies and golden mountains, and so forth, are capable of 
 being understood, and thus have an intelligible meaning. 
 The illusion is that this meaning depends on there being, 
 in a " world of imagination ", fairies and golden mountains, 
 just as in the " real world " there are men and women and 
 mountains of chalk or granite. The problem is to find an 
 interpretation of propositions apparently mentioning, and 
 referring to, unreal objects, which shall save for them, as 
 wholes, the intelligible meaning they clearly have, without 
 saddling us with the task of finding a place in the world 
 for things which have no place there. For to the question, 
 Do fairies exist? we shall reply. There are no such things, 
 only to be met by the retort, How then can you talk or 
 think of them? The familiar device of distinguishing " uni- 
 verses of discourse " — a real world, a world of fairy-tale, 
 a world of literary fiction, etc. — does not solve the problem, 
 but only evades it. No doubt, such sorting out into worlds 
 prevents direct contradiction. It permits us playfully to 
 fancy that there are hobgoblins round the corner of the 
 door without being unduly disappointed if, on looking, we 
 
88 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IV 
 
 find nothing there. But, after all, we cannot forget that 
 these make-believe objects and worlds depend on the way 
 in which real minds, real human beings, use the symbols, 
 linguistic and otherwise, which they have fashioned. By 
 this link, as meanings conditioned by symbols employed 
 by men of flesh and blood, unreal objects are tied to the 
 real world. To ignore this is to be lacking in that " sense 
 of reality " which, as Russell insists, " is vital in Logic." 
 " Logic, I should maintain, must no more admit a unicorn 
 than zoology can; for logic is concerned with the real world 
 just as truly as zoology, though with its more abstract and 
 general features. To say that unicorns have an existence 
 in heraldry, or in literature, or in imagination, is a most 
 pitiful and paltry evasion. What exists in heraldry is not 
 an animal, made of flesh and blood, moving and breathing 
 of its own initiative. What exists is a picture, or a descrip- 
 tion in words. Similarly, to maintain that Hamlet, for ex- 
 ample, exists in his own world, namely, in the world of 
 Shakespeare's imagination, just as truly as (say) Napoleon 
 existed in the ordinary world, is to say something deliber- 
 ately confusing, or else confused to a degree which is 
 scarcely credible. There is only one world, the " real " 
 world: Shakespeare's imagination is part of it, and the 
 thoughts that he had in writing Hamlet are real. So are 
 the thoughts that we have in reading the play. But it is 
 of the very essence of fiction that only the thoughts, feel- 
 ings, etc., in Shakespeare and his readers are real, and that 
 there is not, in addition to them, an objective Hamlet. 
 When you have taken account of all the feelings roused by 
 Napoleon in writers and readers of history, you have not 
 touched the actual man; but in the case of Hamlet you have 
 come to the end of him. If no one thought about Hamlet, 
 there would be nothing left of him; if no one had thought 
 about Napoleon, he would have soon seen to it that some 
 
Ch-IV] THE WORLD OF SENSE 89 
 
 one did." ^ This, we shall agree, is common sense, and 
 when common sense can quote the high authority of mathe- 
 matical logic, it is time for philosophers to sit up and take 
 notice. 
 
 What, then, is Russell's solution of the problem? 
 Stripped of his technical language about " propositional 
 functions ", " descriptions ", and so forth, it comes to this, 
 that the meaning of propositions about fairies depends on 
 the concept fairy, but not on the existence of " a fairy " 
 or " fairies " somewhere in the real world which is the only 
 world. In other words, though we can talk of fairies and 
 make significant assertions about them, we never meet in 
 experience with a situation in which we can say, " This 
 is a fairy ", or " there are fairies ", where " this " and 
 " there " are the linguistic equivalents of pointing at actual 
 sense-data or particulars. If we ever perceived something 
 of which we could truly say, " This is a fairy ", then at 
 least one fairy would exist. But, for lack of such cases, 
 we must say of fairies, " There are no such creatures ", or 
 " Fairies are unreal ", the meaning being that the concept 
 " fairy " is inapplicable in the real world, which, at the very 
 least, is the world of actual sense-data. In Russell's lan- 
 guage, " fairies are unreal " means that the " description ", 
 fairy, describes nothing, that the function a; is a fairy, is 
 always false. 
 
 There is a great deal of technical refinement in Russell's 
 statement of his view into which it is not necessary for our 
 purposes to follow him. But if the above correctly repre- 
 sents the substance of his theory, we may heartily agree 
 to it, so far as it goes. It is, however, easy to see that there 
 are a great many questions suggested by such a theory, 
 to which Russell neither refers nor replies. There is, e.g., 
 the question, how we get these concepts, or descriptions, of 
 
 ^Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, p. 169. 
 
90 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IV 
 
 unreal things — ^how we know what it would be to be a fairy 
 — seeing that there are no fairies to give us a clue. The 
 interest of such a question lies in its suggestion of the 
 parallel question, how we get the concepts, or descriptions, 
 which do apply in the real world, and how we determine 
 when we have got a concept in its " true " or " real " form. 
 To the technicalities of formal analysis in which Russell is 
 interested throughout his argument, these " epistemologi- 
 cal " questions are perhaps irrelevant. But when we are in- 
 terested in the concrete problem of the reality of the world 
 of sense, these questions inevitably come to the front. 
 
 At any rate, there is one thing which we may well learn 
 from Russell, and hold fast against Meinong. Apparent 
 classifications of objects into " real " and " unreal ", " ex- 
 istent " and " non-existent ", are not really classifications of 
 particular objects at all, but of concepts, or descriptions, 
 according as experience presents, or does not present, cases 
 for their application. And, further, " being real " and 
 " being unreal " are themselves concepts, or descriptions, 
 predicable of other concepts according as these are, or are 
 not, to be found realised in sensible particulars. The same 
 remark applies to " existent " and " non-existent ". It is 
 only concerning concepts that we can ask, " Does such a 
 thing exist? " meaning whether in the world of sense some 
 datum, or group of data, can be found of which we can say, 
 " This is it ", or " This is one of that sort ". It will be 
 noted that this is but a more elaborate statement of the 
 position from which we started out above, viz., that a ques- 
 tion of reality, once we pass beyond bare, uninterpreted 
 data, is always a question of the truth of a theory, i.e., in 
 the language of the present argument, of the applicability 
 of a concept, or description. 
 
 But are we not, it may be asked, making a predicate, or 
 attribute, of " existence "? Are we not forgetting, or run- 
 
Ch. IV] THE WORLD OF SENSE 91 
 
 ning counter to, the well-known argument by which Hume 
 and Kant upset the ontological proof? By no means — on 
 the contrary, we may claim that ours is but a modern ver- 
 sion of their position. For what they challenged when they 
 argued that " existence " is not an attribute analytically 
 contained in the definition of a concept, was the view that 
 an a priori concept can guarantee its own applicability, 
 i.e., that it can guarantee the occurrence in experience of 
 a " this ", of which it shall be true to say, " This is it " 
 ("it" in the ontological argument being God).^ When 
 Kant declares that there is no difference in attributes, i.e., 
 in description, between " real " and " imaginary " dollars, 
 and that the difference lies in that the former are empiri- 
 cally given, the latter not, he is clearly affirming, in effect, 
 the position here laid down. 
 
 What we have said may suffice for the abstractly formal 
 side of the problem of reality. But the situation, as we 
 have already indicated above in anticipation, is a great deal 
 more complicated when we are dealing with concrete prob- 
 lems of reality in respect of the actual world of sense. 
 It will help to clear up these complications to some extent, 
 if we distinguish at least three t5^ically different ways in 
 which problems of " reality ", i.e., of the truth of judgments 
 affirming a concept (or " universal ") of the this-here-now, 
 may arise. 
 
 (i) The first of these three situations arises from the 
 fact that what is given always has a definite character of 
 its own — ^is a " this-such " ^ — but that the extent and de- 
 
 1 Of course, it is quite another matter to begin at the empirical end 
 by asking whether the world as a whole, or anything in the world, 
 possesses the special character which, once recognised, we call " divine ". 
 Here we begin with what is given, and work, through deepening and 
 enlarging experience and interpretation to its true character. We do 
 not begin with a definition and seek to apply it. See ch. x. 
 
 2 We shall have occasion to return to this point in the following 
 essay (ch. v). 
 
92 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IV 
 
 gree to which this character is revealed or known, depepds 
 both on the range of experiences which furnish materials for 
 synthesis, and on the tj^e of unity thus discerned. In all 
 argument, whether in ordinary intercourse, in science, or in 
 philosophy, if the disputants are not simply " at cross-pur- 
 poses ", the " this ", or, more generally, the point of refer- 
 ence, is agreed on and recognised to be the same, but the 
 rival theories, or descriptions, of its character conflict. The 
 familiar story of the theological disputant exclaiming to his 
 opponent: " Your God is my Devil ", is an extreme instance 
 of such conflict. Everyday instances may be found in any 
 argument between men disputing the accuracy of one an- 
 other's memory of the same event, or whether an object seen 
 at a distance is a human being or a tree-trunk. Other ex- 
 amples may be found whenever we distinguish between 
 denying a " fact " and denying a " theory about the fact ", 
 as when a behaviourist, like E. B. Holt, warns his fellow- 
 behaviourists against repeating the " materialist's error, of 
 denying the jacts, as well as the theory, of consciousness." ^ 
 That there are things in the world, things met with in expe- 
 rience, to which the term " consciousness " applies, is here 
 conceded as fact. But what is the nature of these conscious- 
 nesses, that is in dispute, the extremes of theory ranging 
 from immaterial, immortal soul-substance to stream of ideas 
 and integration of reflex-responses to the environment. All 
 these are questions of something being really so or really 
 thus, with two, or more, positive alternatives of theory op- 
 posing each other. And most commonly these questions 
 arise at a level where, not only the bare data, but up to a 
 point the interpretation is agreed upon. For, clearly, there 
 are levels, or strata, of interpretation. At the level of des- 
 cription of the given which suffices for the correct identifica- 
 
 _i The Freudian Wish, Supplementary Essay on Response and Cog- 
 nition, p. 207, 
 
Ch. IV] THE WORLD OF SENSE 93 
 
 tion of the familiar objects and happenings of daily life, 
 savage and civilised man commonly agree. When interpre- 
 tation is pushed further, e.g., into causes, they begin to dis- 
 agree, the savage taking the turn into magic and animism, 
 the civilised man into science. Potatoes, water, and cook- 
 ing they recognise alike, but when, at a high altitude, boiling 
 water fails to cook potatoes, the unscientific mind blames 
 the devil in the cursed pot, the scientific mind traces the 
 correlation of boiling point and atmospheric pressure.^ Mr. 
 T. P. Nunn proposes ^ to distinguish " primary syntheses " 
 (or interpretations) of sensational data on which all men 
 agree, from " secondary syntheses " which may be either 
 " animistic " beliefs or " scientific " hj^otheses. But it 
 would be better to distinguish not merely two, but many, 
 levels, or strata, of interpretation, some mutually incom- 
 patible, others rather complementary or built up on one 
 another in some such hierarchical order as we have in the 
 order of the sciences, from physics and chemistry through 
 biology to psychology. Here, as before, the aim is to get 
 the best total interpretation, where " best " means both 
 the most comprehensive or inclusive, and the most system- 
 atic and organising. And if we are to be honestly system- 
 atic, there must be no slurring over of empirically recog- 
 nisable differences, in order to be able to say that " noth- 
 ing but " some abstract generality is involved. Thus, e.g., 
 the distinction between the living and the non-living is one 
 of the corner-stones of the order we recognise in the world 
 and on which we found our conduct, yet the theory of me- 
 chanism confronts that of vitalism, and panpsychism claims 
 to be able to replace both. Indeed, all interpretations in 
 terms of " life " and " mind " raise, for the philosopher, the 
 
 1 The instance comes from Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle. I 
 owe it to Mr. T. P. Nunn's The Aims of Scientific Method, ch. ii, p. 46. 
 z l-QC. (it., p. 47, 
 
94 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IV 
 
 choice between being " positivistic " (or " phenomenal- 
 istic "), i.e., construing every fact as a complex of sense- 
 data, and being " metaphysical ". And there are, again, 
 two ways of being metaphysical — one, which consists in 
 positing non-perceptible entities and forces, from " atoms " 
 to " entelechies " and "souls"; the other, which claims 
 that characters such as life and mind are empirically recog- 
 nisable where they occur, though not perceptible in the 
 sense of consisting merely of patterns of sense-data with 
 their relations of co-existence and succession. 
 
 (ii) The examples on which we found Russell chiefly 
 relying — creatures of fairy-tale, characters in literature, and 
 all figments of the imagination generally — raise the " real- 
 ity " problem in a very different form. Much depends here 
 on how explicit the distinction between fact and fiction is 
 in a person's thought. To a child, believing in the existence 
 of the grotesque creatures of nursery-tales, afraid of the 
 dark because of unseen presences in it, these creatures are 
 real as objects of possible perception.^ But when a novelist 
 assures us that the characters of his tale " have no existence 
 outside the pages of his book ", i.e., that he has not de- 
 scribed the doings of actual persons of his acquaintance, we 
 understand clearly that we must not expect to meet his 
 characters in the street, or have any of the relations to 
 them, of buying or selling, marrying or giving in marriage, 
 which we have to " real " people. We can see, on reflec- 
 tion, that we are dealing with a phenomenon of language, 
 
 1 1 may, perhaps, illustrate this by an experience of my boyhood. 
 I believed so firmly in the reality of the Christ-child as the giver 
 of good things at Christmas that one of my first uses of the laboriously 
 acquired art of writing was to indite a letter to the Christ-child, setting 
 forth my wishes. The letter was duly placed outside the window 
 for the convenience of the angelic mail, and, of course, removed 
 by a grown-up relative. But I, presently finding it gone, was firmly 
 convinced that I had just caught the flash of the departing angel's 
 wings in the sky. I had there my data on which the reality of the 
 whole belief hung. 
 
Ch. IV] THE WORLD OF SENSE 95 
 
 or, generally, of symbolism. For, though the meanings of 
 our symbols are, in the first instance, found realised, or, at 
 least, considered as realisable, in the " real " world, they 
 can, by supposition or make-believe, be detached, and as 
 a result, through the whole range from idle fancy to highest 
 literary art, we can indulge in a real occupation with mean- 
 ings unrealised and unrealisable — ^with the " imreal things " 
 of common parlance. 
 
 (iii) But a third group of reality-problems is not so 
 simply disposed of. The problems of this group have this 
 in common, as distinct from those of the preceding group, 
 that they spring from actual data, the interpretation of 
 which is wellnigh impossible within the framework of theory 
 which we call the " real " world of practice and science, and 
 which suggest interpretations of their own, more or less 
 flagrantly in conflict with that framework. In two direc- 
 tions we find especially striking instances of such vagabond 
 phenomena, roaming on the fringes of our orderly universe, 
 and not admitted into it, like the arts, as licensed jesters or 
 tragedians. One of these groups of instances is to be found 
 in all the phenomena under investigation by Societies of 
 Psychical Research. Any one who knows these phenomena 
 only by description, may well feel, when perusing reports 
 of apparitions of ghosts, materialisations, levitations, com- 
 munications from departed spirits through the trance-utter- 
 ances of mediums, that he might be more convinced if he, 
 personally, were to have such experiences — to see what he 
 could not but explain as a ghost, to witness heavy objects 
 moving through the air without discoverable physical cause, 
 to receive communications of unmistakable authenticity 
 from departed friends. But this is the smaller difficulty. 
 Having the experiences, he would, indeed, have the data, the 
 " facts ", and so far he would be in a better position to 
 judge. But the mere seeing and hearing would not, even 
 
96 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IV 
 
 then, settle for him the question of the truth of rival inter- 
 pretations, from telepathy and telaesthesia to supernormal 
 action of " spirits ", which are so utterly without analogue 
 among the interpretations to which especially the natural 
 sciences have accustomed him. And when he finds reput- 
 able witnesses recording themselves as convinced, from their 
 personal observations, of the truth of such tales as that men 
 can take on at will the shape of wild beasts ^ — tales which 
 he had been wont to class among the most grotesque super- 
 stitions of savages — Hamlet's reminder that " there are more 
 things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in 
 your philosophy," may seem the only possible comment. 
 To set these phenomena aside as abnormal does not help. 
 The field of psychical research is full of data, as multi- 
 tudinous as they are varied, which the best will to disbe- 
 lieve cannot either fit into the pattern of orthodox physical 
 or psychological science, or dispose of by wholesale label- 
 lings as fraud, coincidence, credulity. What is real here, 
 what unreal, i.e., what theory will turn out to be true, what 
 others false, who will confidently presume to tell? Of one 
 thing only can we be reasonably sure: reality here, as else- 
 where, will in the end prove to be that theory which sup- 
 plies the most comprehensive, as well as systematic, inter- 
 pretation of all the relevant data. 
 
 And the other group of difficult instances is formed by 
 dreams, which are difficult even when we wholly omit from 
 consideration prophetic and veridical dreams as being, once 
 more, abnormal and rare. In spite of all the illuminating 
 study of dreams which in recent years we have had from 
 psychologists, like Freud, or from philosophers, like Berg- 
 
 1 See Richard Bagot's article on The Hyenas of Pirra in the Corn- 
 hill Magazine, Oct. 1918. The article is based on the independent 
 testimony of two British officers in Nigeria. See also the Journal 
 of the Society for Psychical Research (London), vol. xix, no. 157 
 (July 1919). 
 
Ch. IV] THE WORLD OF SENSE 97 
 
 son, the problems which dreams present for a theory of 
 reality can hardly be said to have been exhausted. Dreams 
 are composed of sense-data,^ which are all through the dream 
 interpreted and identified, be it as objects we are familiar 
 with in waking experience (e.g., in dreaming of a friend), be 
 it as objects like those we are familiar with (houses, trees, 
 etc.). The verisimilitude of dreams is sometimes so com- 
 plete that there is nothing to exclude the experience from 
 the real world except the fact that we awake from it in bed. 
 Still, this is enough of discontinuity, at any rate for practical 
 purposes, to justify our setting dream-objects and events 
 down as " unreal ", a conclusion reinforced by the many 
 dreams in which the sequence of events and the behaviour 
 of objects are chaotic as measured by the order of the day- 
 light world. " Unreal " here means that the theory — for 
 we know, by now, that the order of the daylight world 
 is a theory — the application of which to the sense-data to 
 which it does apply, yields the " real world ", does not apply 
 to the data within the dream. But with dreams we are 
 fortunate enough to be able to take a further step. Granted 
 that what we dream is unreal, i.e., that taken bona fide for 
 what it ostensibly is, it does not fit into the pattern of the 
 real world, and has none of the consequences and implica- 
 tions there which as a genuine member of the pattern it 
 should have, yet at the same time the dreamings, as events 
 in a real dreamer's life, have a place and date in the tem- 
 poral order. And if, in addition, we can interpret the sub- 
 ject-matter of dreams, as Freud has taught us to do, as the 
 symbolic disguise of the satisfaction of wishes repressed in 
 
 1 It would take too long to defend this statement, which might easily 
 be supported from the literature, against objections. Suffice to say- 
 that a vivid dream is indistinguishable for the dreamer from waking- 
 experience along the lines of images versus sense-data; that the in- 
 ference to dreams being composed of images, in spite of their vivid- 
 ness, is open to criticism; and that images, in any case are revivals 
 of sense-data. 
 
98 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IV 
 
 real life, we have taken yet a further step towards integrat- 
 ing these excursions into the unreal with the tissue of the 
 real world. 
 
 At any rate, throughout this discussion, we have found 
 no reason to abandon the general, if so far purely formal, 
 principle that " reality ", or " the real world ", is the most 
 comprehensive and coherent system of interpretations which 
 alike is based upon, and also continually confirmed by, the 
 manifold sense-data which come and go from moment to 
 moment. At any point the true interpretation of these data 
 is that which (a) either implies, or is at least compatible 
 with, the largest number of other interpretations accepted 
 as true; and (b) which is open in principle, if not always 
 in practice, to verification by fresh evidence in the form of 
 further sense-data (including the testimony of others). 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 " SAVING THE APPEARANCES " IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD 
 
 Throughout the argument of this essay we are to keep 
 steadily within the context of perceptions, the objects of 
 which are regarded, bona fide, as physical or material 
 things. Hallucinations, dreams, imaginations are to be 
 excluded. We are to deal with such familiar experiences as 
 looking around a room and touching this thing or that; 
 looking out of the window, too, at things which, like clouds, 
 we cannot touch; listening to the multifarious noises of 
 traffic in the street; recognising, throughout, each thing for 
 what it is, and taking it for granted that each is real, and 
 is really, i.e., truly, what we perceive it to be. Memories, 
 too, we shall admit into our argument, provided again they 
 are memories of perceptions of physical things, not of 
 dreams or other experiences of what is not physically real. 
 For memories help to generalise the situations which we 
 are to examine. But it is best to steady our argument by 
 conducting it in a context of actual perception of physical 
 things. To give himself actual examples of the kind of ex- 
 perience he is about to analyse, is the philosopher's only 
 equivalent to the scientist's experiment. 
 
 The setting for our argument is provided by the common- 
 sense belief that what, at any given moment, we perceive 
 is a bit of a world of individual " things ", of which the 
 colours we see, the sounds we hear, the solidity we feel by 
 touch, etc., are " qualities ". Throughout the first stage of 
 the argument we shall take it for granted that " seeing is 
 believing ", or, in other words, that every act of perception 
 is also an act of judgment. We shall assume that to per- 
 
 99 
 
100 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. V 
 
 ceive a thing — to identify, recognise, know it for what it is 
 — no less than to perceive its qualities, or its relations, is 
 to judge that what we perceive is really such-and-such a 
 thing, with such-and-such qualities and relations. The com- 
 monest class of such judgments of perception consists of 
 those in which some sense-datum is affirmed, or interpreted, 
 to be the quality of a thing. We are first, then, to examine 
 the various problems which centre around the status of 
 sense-data ^ in the perception of physical things. An amaz- 
 ing amount of philosophical ingenuity has been emended 
 upon efforts to show that the things which we perceive are 
 not really what we perceive them to be. The point of these 
 arguments is not merely that perception does not give us 
 the whole truth about things, but that things must be judged 
 to be definitely other than, or different from, what to our 
 senses they " appear " to be. We must face, at least in its 
 main forms, this challenge to our naive confidence that 
 through sense-data we become acquainted with the nature of 
 physical things. If sense-data are not what we take them 
 to be, viz., qualities of physical things, then this confidence 
 is unjustified, and all our ordinary judgments of perception 
 are, in fact, false. 
 
 This first group of problems will lead us on to a second 
 group, concerned, in part, with the distinction — insisted 
 upon as fundamental by eminent present-day thinkers — ^be- 
 tween perception and judgment; and, in part, with a deeper 
 analysis of what is involved in the perception of a " thing ". 
 
 ^ The term " sense-data " is used throughout as being theoretically 
 the most neutral and non-committal. The term " sensations ", by cur- 
 rent usage, commits us at once to the theory that colours, sounds, 
 etc., are " mental " states, and J:herefore cannot be qualities of physical 
 things or belong in any way to the texture of the external world. Its 
 meaning, in short, belongs traditionally to the context of the theory 
 which sorts out the contents of the universe into " physical " and 
 " psychical " as mutually exclusive classes. The present discussion 
 neither takes this theory for granted, nor supports it. To introduce 
 it here would be indefensible irrelevance. 
 
Ch. V] « SAVING THE APPEARANCES " loi 
 
 In this context, we shall have occasion to carry a step fur- 
 ther the discussion of data and interpretation upon which 
 we had entered in the preceding essay. And we shall also 
 be compelled to define our attitude towards two tendencies 
 in the contemporary treatment of the thing-problem which 
 we may call, respectively, the phenomenalistic and the meta- 
 physical. The former begins, historically, with Berkeley's 
 analysis of a thing as a complex of " ideas of sense "; is 
 continued by Hume and by Comte; elaborated in J. S. 
 Mill's theory of a thing as a " permanent possibility of sen- 
 sations "; and it counts among its present-day representa- 
 tives a physicist like Ernst Mach, a mathematician and 
 biologist like Karl Pearson, a logician and philosopher like 
 Bertrand Russell.^ Indeed it may be said to have attained 
 its highest refinement in Russell's account of a thing as a 
 " logical construct ", a class of sense-data and sensibilia. 
 The metaphysical tendency, by contrast, is the philosophical 
 defender of that scheme of common thought which has 
 shaped our language into substantives, adjectives, and verbs, 
 expressive of the theory that ours is a world of things, 
 possessed of qualities, and active in their relations to each 
 other. Formerly this t37pe of philosophical theory used the 
 concepts of " substance " and " attribute ", but so far as 
 substance was conceived as distinct from its attributes, and 
 as somehow the bearer of them, it has long given way before 
 the assaults of phenomenalistic critics who, first pressing the 
 distinction, pushed the substance into the position of an un- 
 known and unknowable x, and then denied its very existence 
 as an otiose fiction. Berkeley's denial of " matter " is • 
 t3^ical of the logic of this situation. But substance always 
 meant more than merely something which has qualities. It 
 meant above all something which exists in its own right, is 
 
 1 See Mack's Analysis of Sensations, Pearson's Grammar of Science, 
 Russell's Our Knowledge of the External World. 
 
102 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. V 
 
 therefore independent of other things, self-contained and 
 self-existent — individual, in short, in the most pregnant 
 sense of this word. Spinoza's Per substantiam intelligo id 
 quod in se est et per se concipitur is perhaps the most fa- 
 mous historical link between a tradition almost as old as 
 philosophy itself, and its vigorous modern representatives. 
 It is the mark of the modern metaphysician, as distinct 
 from the phenomenalist, to use as fundamental the categories 
 of individuality and self-existence. But there are two ways 
 of doing even this. One way, by bold speculative guesses, " 
 takes us away from experience, and seeks to construe in- 
 dividuality everywhere on the analogy of psychical activity, 
 attributing some degree of consciousness, will, or soul, to 
 every physical thing.^ The other way, which will be our 
 way, is to save things as individuals, of at least relative self- 
 existence, equally from being dissolved into classes of sen- 
 sibilia, and from having their unity referred to the posses- 
 sion of a soul of which we have no empirical evidence. We 
 shall try to show that there are perceptible clues to individ- 
 uality which the current analyses of the perception of things 
 overlook. 
 
 Throughout both groups of problems, we shall try to 
 " save the appearances ", i.e., to construct a theory of the 
 physical world as we perceive it to be, which shall not dis- 
 card, or reject, sense-data, and still less set up an "un- 
 knowable somewhat " behind appearances, but which shall 
 include all data offered by experience in such a way that 
 
 ^ There is no need to review in detail the various hypotheses, from 
 Leibniz - to Lotze and modern panpsychists and voluntarists of all 
 sorts, not to forget Schopenhauer's Will, von Hartraann's Unconscious, 
 Bergson's elan vital, Clifford's Mind-stuff, recently resuscitated by. 
 Strong. Perhaps the most attractive and plausible statement of this 
 type of theory in recent literature is to be found in Professor Mary 
 Whitton Calkins's Presidential Address to the American Philosophical 
 Association, published under the title, The Personalistic Conception of 
 Nature, in the Philosophical Review for March, 1919 (vol. xxviii, 
 no. 2). 
 
Ch.V] " SAVING THE APPEARANCES^' 103 
 
 each, in its place and character, may be retained, and that 
 the contradictions and incoherencies which, prima facie, be- 
 set our data may yield to the discovery of order. This is 
 in keeping with our ideal of philosophical theory as striving 
 to find a place and use for all that is given in experience, by 
 incorporation in a self-consistent system. 
 
 " When we see a tree we think that it is really green and 
 really waving about in precisely the same way as it ap- 
 pears to be ".^ In short, when we perceive we judge that 
 what we perceive is really so. Clearly the truth of a class of 
 judgments is here at issue, viz., the judgments which af&rm 
 that colours, sounds, tastes, smells, touches are qualities of 
 physical things. We can distinguish four main problems 
 which have been raised about judgments of this sort, four 
 lines of argument along which their truth has been either 
 doubted or denied. We may formulate them in the follow- 
 ing four questions: 
 
 (i) Are sense-data really qualities of physical things, 
 
 1 C. D. Broad, Perception, Physics and Reality, p. 1. " As it appears 
 to be " is, of course, only a synonym for " as it is seen to be ", though 
 " appears ", with its reminder of a possible difference between " appear- 
 ance " and " reality ", hints also, by anticipation, at the problem of 
 the truth of what we think, or judge, when we see a tree. It is worth 
 noting that, whilst our linguistic resources for expressing what we 
 perceive are very varied and flexible, they gravitate towards the judg- 
 ment-form, "I see a tree", "I see this (object) to be a tree", "I 
 see that this is a tree". Here the initial substantive is drawn out 
 into what is unmistakeably a judgment. If we express what we per- 
 ceive without the prefix " I see ", " I hear ", the remainder, " this 
 is a tree ", even if shrunk into the exclamation, " a tree ", is obviously 
 a judgment. Moreover, phrases like " I see " are frequently mere 
 synonyms for "there is . . ." They rarely, in current speech at any 
 rate, demand an interpretation placing the emphasis on the ostensible 
 grammatical subject " I ". They are not, in this first intention, state- 
 ments of fact about me, but about what it is that is perceived by me. 
 When challenged in this, their first, intention, the emphasis may, of 
 course, shift to the seeing : — " but I see it is a tree " — as the evidence 
 on which I rely in my belief. Certainly, intelligent perception, " know- 
 ing what ^ne sees ", is indistinguishable from judgment. 
 
I04 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.V 
 
 i.e., are physical things really coloured, tasting, smelling, 
 etc., things, or are their so-called qualities merely impres- 
 sions produced in the minds of observers of appropriate 
 psycho-physical constitution? 
 
 (2) Granted that physical things really have these sen- 
 sible qualities, what is the " real " quality of a thing, as 
 distinct from the varying appearances of that quality? 
 
 (3) Do things possess their sensible qualities only when, 
 and so long as, they are being perceived? Or are their 
 qualities " real " in the special sense of existing when not 
 perceived by anybody? 
 
 (4) Are sense-data " private " to each observer, and 
 hence unshareable, incommunicable? If so, can two persons 
 be said to perceive the same thing, or even merely to see 
 the same colour or hear the same sound? 
 
 To simplify the discussion, let us restate these four 
 questions quite briefly in terms of a single quality, viz., 
 colour: 
 
 (i) Is a physical thing which we see really coloured? 
 
 (2) If so, what is its real colour? 
 
 (3) Is it coloured at times when no one perceives it? 
 
 (4) Has it all the colours which different percipients see 
 in it from different points of view and at the same time? 
 
 (i) The grounds on which it is denied that the colours 
 we perceive are really qualities of physical objects fall, 
 broadly, into two groups. One group consists of arguments 
 drawn from the difficulty of determining the " real " colour, 
 or, else, from the alleged " privacy " of colours. They thus 
 fall to be considered under (2) and (4). The other group 
 consists of the familiar distinction between primary and 
 secondary qualities, together with the causal theory of per- 
 ception by which that distinction is commonly supported. 
 The psycho-physiology of perception, which is but the 
 
Ch.VJ "SAVING THE APPEARANCES" loS 
 
 causal theory drawn out into a detailed account of the sense- 
 organs and the nervous system as a mechanism of response 
 to stimuli, lends additional weight; and so apparently does 
 the fact that the fundamental concepts of physics define 
 " matter " in terms which make no mention of secondary 
 qualities.^ If the advocates of these theories always re- 
 membered them in making their judgments, they would say, 
 not " This tree is green ", but " This tree produces a sensa- 
 tion of greenness in us." Among recent writers, Mr. H. A, 
 Prichard, with his usual intellectual honesty, draws prec- 
 isely this conclusion, and, den3dng colour to be a quality 
 of bodies, sets it down that, " with respect to colour, things 
 look what they never are, or, in other words, are wholly 
 different from what they look ".^ 
 
 There is no need to review the prolonged debate on this 
 issue in all its twistings and turnings. But we may usefully 
 dwell on certain points which do not appear to have met with 
 the recognition they deserve. 
 
 (a) First, it is worth noticing that the arguments do not 
 attack the concept of quality as such, for physical objects 
 (" bodies ") continue to be thought of as characterised by 
 primary qualities. All they deny is that colours and other 
 secondaries can be qualities, whatever " being a quality " 
 may mean. So when Locke denies the " reality " of second- 
 aries, he merely means that they are not qualities of bodies, 
 but ideas in our minds. In short, all that the arguments 
 do is, first, to substitute, in the interpretation of sense-data, 
 the relation of cause and effect for the relation of thing and 
 
 1 Locke's defence of the distinction between primary and secondary 
 qualities (Essay on the Human Understanding, Book II, ch. viii), 
 which, though not the earliest in modern philosophy, exercised the 
 most influence on subsequent thought, relies on a most heterogeneous 
 assemblage of arguments. See Note at the end of this chapter. 
 
 ^Kant's Theory of Knowledge, p. 87. For other secondaries, see 
 pp. 85, 6. Mr. Prichard's premises, however, are drawn mainly JErom 
 arguments which, for us, belong to questions (2) and (3) in our list. 
 
io6 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. V 
 
 quality; and, secondly, to class sense-data as intra-mental 
 impressions in contrast to extra-mental bodies. 
 
 (b) Now when we consider the bearing of these theses 
 on the practice and theory of the physical sciences, we find 
 -that they amount to a subtle distortion of the intellectual 
 perspective. In the first place, every scientist, as observer 
 and experimenter, identifies and discriminates the objects 
 he uses and investigates, by their look and feel and other 
 sensible properties. But more important than this is the 
 fact that secondaries, so far from being excluded as 
 " mental ", and therefore non-physical, actually belong to 
 the physicist's field of investigation. This is true, at any 
 rate, for colours and sounds. In optics and acoustics, 
 colours and sounds become objects of investigation, not as 
 " sensations " or " ideas ", but as phenomena. The physi- 
 cist's actual procedure cuts right across, and ignores, all clas- 
 sificatory boundary-lines dividing the supposedly physical 
 from the supposedly mental. He does not permit himself 
 to be hampered by such barriers as these in following up 
 the connections of phenomena with one another or with 
 their hypothetical conditions. When light is, by a prism, 
 broken up into a spectral band of colours, or when, in 
 spectroscopy, faint lines in such spectral bands are taken 
 as evidence of the presence of certain chemical elements in 
 distant stars, there is no suggestion that, at some point in 
 this argument, the astronomer steps across the line which 
 divides " mind " from " matter " or " ideas from " things ". 
 He deals in good faith throughout with phenomena to 
 which all these divisions are utterly irrelevant. No doubt, 
 in dealing with colours as phenomena, he is thinking of 
 them as effects rather than as qualities. But in what sense 
 are they " effects "? Not in the sense that they are pro- 
 duced by bodies in a non-physical medium called " mind ", 
 but in the sense that they occur imder conditions which 
 
Ch. V] " SAVING THE APPEARANCES " 107 
 
 can be precisely stated and with which they are correlated 
 according to precise laws. It is true that in this sense the 
 physicist " explains " sense-data by their " causes ", i.e., 
 he correlates colours with ether-waves of which,' as they 
 are invisible, he does not need to think as coloured. He 
 correlates sounds with air-vibrations which, as such, are 
 conceived as soundless. He correlates temperatures with 
 molecular motions which, as such unfelt, do not need to be 
 thought of as either hot or cold. 
 
 When physiology shows that among the conditions of 
 which account must be taken in studying the occurrence of 
 colours and sounds, are the ways in which eyes and ears and 
 nervous systems are constructed and function, the situation 
 becomes more complex, but is not altered in principle. And 
 for physiologist, as for physicist, the study of the conditions 
 is possible only so far as eye and ear are themselves visible 
 and, therefore, coloured, tangible, hard, soft, and so forth. 
 
 To sum up: colours, and other secondaries (so far as 
 they are considered at all) are, for physical science, pheno- 
 mena, and, as such, effects rather than qualities. But they 
 are effects only as correlated according to law with other 
 phenomena, actually observed or hypothetically assumed, 
 not as removed from the physical context into a world of 
 ideas. And their being treated as effects is not incompatible 
 with their being also treated as qualities. By an obvious 
 abstraction, we can define, as the object of our investigation, 
 colours rather than coloured things, just as we can define 
 psychology as concerned with mental processes rather than 
 with minds or selves. And if we will agree to say that things 
 possess, or exhibit, varying qualities in varying conditions, 
 and that, as thus correlated with conditions, qualities may 
 be considered " effects ", no difficulty of principle stands in 
 the way of accepting the conclusions of physical theory for 
 the familiar characters in which things present themselves 
 
io8 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. V 
 
 to our senses. So far from saying, "This tree produces 
 a green sensation in our minds ", we shall still be able to say, 
 with common sense, " This tree is green "; only we shall 
 now understand that this judgment is elliptical in that it 
 omits to specify the conditions under which the tree pos- 
 sesses, or exhibits, the quality of being green. 
 
 (c) Why, thirdly, do we apply the causal point of view to 
 sense-data at all? The question arises most pointedly in 
 the context of psychology, in connection with theories of 
 the " stimulus " of sensation. The reason most commonly 
 given is that sense-data are largely independent of our will: 
 they are given, they come unsought, they force themselves 
 upon us, they interrupt trains of thought, they may have to 
 be, like disturbing noises, shut out by concentrating atten- 
 tion on the matter in hand. But fully as important, and 
 far less frequently noticed, is the fact that often by one 
 sense we can observe the sequence of events leading up 
 to experiences of another sense, e.g., when feeling for a 
 match-box and striking a match in the dark gives us the 
 setting in which seeing light occurs as an effect; or when 
 we watch a body approaching to the moment of contact, 
 and then feel its tactual quality or its temperature. In such 
 situations we may recognise the empirical basis from which 
 start all attempts scientifically to correlate phenomena. 
 The mere fact that colours, sounds, etc., are given, does 
 not, by itself, lead to the discovery of causal connections be- 
 tween phenomena, in the sense of correlations according 
 to law. 
 
 (2) Having tried to defend the truth of the judgments 
 in which, perceiving colours, we affirm them to be qualities 
 of things, we turn now to the second question, What is the 
 real colour of a thing? 
 
 The main reason for discussing this question at all is 
 
Ch.V] " SAVING THE APPEARANCES " 109 
 
 that the difficulty of determining the " real " colour has 
 been used — most recently by Bertrand RusselP — as a 
 premise for the conclusion that objects cannot really have 
 any colour at all. The argument is that, e.g., a so-called 
 " brown " table exhibits actually a large variety of colours, 
 according to the incidence of light, the spectator's point of 
 view, the condition of his eyes, and so forth. Whence it is 
 held to follow that " colour is not something which is in- 
 herent in the table, but something depending upon the table 
 and the spectator and the way tlie light falls on the table." ^ 
 All colours actually seen have an equally good right to be 
 considered real, and, therefore, " to avoid favouritism, we 
 are compelled to deny that, in itself, the table has any one 
 particular colour."^ From the point of view which we 
 are advocating, the difficulty is wholly due to the identifica- 
 tion of " the real " colour with a colour supposedly " in- 
 herent " in the table " by itself." Russell himself shows 
 that, at any moment, the colour of the table is relative to 
 varying conditions, and that these varjdng colours have 
 an equal right to be considered real. Now these are the 
 only colours with which, empirically, we ever can, or do, 
 deal.* With a table " by itself ", i.e., a table abstracted 
 from these conditions, and with its colour, when so ab- 
 stracted, we have no concern. We might as well speculate 
 what colour things have in the dark, and argue, with Locke, 
 that because they have no colour then, they never have any 
 colour at all. The thing " by itself " is a self-contradictory 
 fiction. A thing's qualities vary with different conditions. 
 The demand for qualities which shall be unchangeably the 
 
 1 The Problems of Philosophy, pp. 11 ff. Cf. also H. A. Prichard, 
 loc. cit, p. 86. 
 
 2 B. Russell, loc. cit, p. 13. 
 
 3 Ibid., p. 14. 
 
 *When, remembering, or reflecting, we "think of" an object as 
 blue, we are attributing to it the colour we saw in it and expect to 
 see again in the same conditions. See below (3). 
 
no CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.V 
 
 same, however the conditions may vary, is one' for which ex- 
 perience gives no warrant or excuse. Identity, of course, 
 we want, but not the static, abstract, identity of a supposed 
 thing " by itself ", but a mobile identity in difference — the 
 identity of a thing which, in a concrete network of relation- 
 ships, shows different sides of itself in different settings, 
 and yet is, in all this display of differences, always " itself." 
 
 Any colour, then, actually perceived is " real ", in the 
 sense that the judgment attributing this colour, seen here 
 and now, to the object is, so far and in these conditions, 
 true. If further observations demand further judgments, 
 to the effect that, in other parts, at other times, from other 
 points of view, in other illuminations, the same object has 
 other colours, then these judgments, too, are true within 
 the limits of the evidence., What is necessary for a syn- 
 thesis of them is the discovery and recognition of the sys- 
 tem in which each colour-difference is correlated with differ- 
 ences in the conditions under which it occurs. 
 
 It is by a similar, but more selective, synthesis that we 
 can speak of the " real " colour of a thing, so far as that 
 phrase implies " a normal spectator from an ordinary point 
 of view under usual conditions of light." ^ There is no 
 reference here to the object " by itself ", but either to the 
 average, or the most frequent, or, else, to the best and most 
 favourable, conditions of perception. There is, in other 
 words, an attempt at standardisation. Now it must be con- 
 ceded that, with colours, such attempts have not succeeded 
 far, though sufficiently for the rough-and-ready uses of prac- 
 tical life. The main obstacle lies in the difficulty of measur- 
 ing, and the consequent lack of precision. This appears 
 clearly enough when we turn to the corresponding problems 
 of the " real " size, or " real " shape, or " real " temperature 
 of an object. All these are standardisations amidst a vari- 
 
 ^Loc. cit, p. 14. 
 
Ch. V] " SAVING THE APPEARANCES '" 1 1 1 
 
 ety of perceptual " appearances ". The same thing, seen at 
 different distances, has different sizes. A circular coin looks 
 elliptical from most points of view; the warmth of a fire 
 increases as we approach. In fact, we can here, as above, 
 agree on what shall be normal conditions of perception, but 
 the decisive solution is through measurement. The " real " 
 distance is the measured distance, and so for figure, or tem- 
 perature. It is to be remfembered, however, that measuring 
 comes down, in the last resort, to the accuracy with which 
 an observer can perceive the coincidence of two lines, e.g., 
 of the top of a mercury column with the notches on the 
 scale alongside it.^ But, whether or no we can measure, the 
 way to " save the appearances " is not to deny them whole- 
 sale of the object " by itself ", and consign them to some 
 metaphysical limbo of illusions, but to correlate them with 
 their varying conditions. Thus, for example, we learn to 
 understand why " the " sound which a bicycle-bell makes is 
 heard as a different sound by hearers at different distances 
 or of different auditory acuity. The miracle would be if 
 there were no such differences — if what each hearer hears 
 and calls " the " sound of the bell were actually identical 
 in quality for all. Except as identity in difference, there is 
 no way of getting an intelligible synthesis of the data. 
 
 (3) We turn to our third problem, which was whether an 
 object, perceived to be coloured, is " really " coloured in the 
 sense that it is, or remains, coloured at times when it is not 
 perceived by any one. In short, does the esse-est-percipi 
 principle apply to colours and other secondary qualities? If 
 it does, then the further question arises, how are we to think 
 of the object, i.e., what character we are to attribute to it, 
 in the intervals of its being perceived. 
 
 1 Mr. T. P. Nunn has some excellent observations on this whole 
 subject in his book, The Aim and Achievement of Scientific Method, 
 pp. 5-7. 
 
112 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.V 
 
 To judge from the present state of the discussion of this 
 problem, the question is an entirely open one. Even a pro- 
 fessed realist, like Russell, is found scandalising his fellow- 
 realists by admitting it " as probable that the immediate 
 objects of sense [ = sense-data, or secondary qualities] de- 
 pend for their existence upon physiological conditions in 
 ourselves, and that, for example, the coloured surfaces 
 which we see cease to exist when we shut our eyes." ^ Nor 
 does he shrink from the consequences of his view: " The 
 starry heaven, for instance, becomes actual whenever we 
 choose to look at it," ^ where, of course, the phrase " the 
 starry heaven " means strictly nothing but the yellowish 
 spots of light in a dark expanse which are " the immediate 
 objects of sense " in this case. 
 
 The first point to note, in approaching this problem, is 
 that, quite apart from the presence of a spectator, or from 
 dependence on his physiological condition, we do not, on 
 reflection, believe that objects are coloured (or that colours 
 exist) always and under any conditions. Both common 
 sense and physical science recognise that colours vary with 
 variations in the illumination, and that in the absence of 
 light they disappear, i.e., tease to exist. No doubt, it is 
 barely possible to argue that the colours are there all the 
 time, and that the presence of light is necessary only to 
 their being seen. But such a view could certainly not be 
 established by an appeal to experience, and would have to 
 be based, in the last resort, on the principle of identity 
 abstractly interpreted. The principle of identity lays it 
 down that " every thing is what it is." The issue — one of 
 those fundamental issues which run through the whole his- 
 tory of philosophy and seem destined to be re-tried by 
 each new generation — is whether this principle demands that 
 
 1 Our Knowledge of the External World, p. 64. 
 
 2 Loc. cit., p. 112. 
 
Ch. V] " SAVING THE APPEARANCES » 113 
 
 we should attribute to each thing an absolute character, i.e., 
 a character not variable with varying conditions, but un- 
 changed and fixed in whatever setting or relationships the 
 thing may exist, or that we should acknowledge its char- 
 acter to be relative to conditions, and its identity, or self- 
 maintenance, to consist just in the resourcefulness (so to 
 speak) with which it responds differently to different set- 
 tings. On the latter interpretation, a S5mthesis of the mani- 
 fold data of experience becomes possible; on the former, the 
 changeless identity of each thing must either be sought in 
 some hjTpothetical character which does not appear in the 
 flux of empirical data at all, or else we must elevate each 
 separate datum here and now to the rank of a tiny abso- 
 lute. The philosophers who have explored this path, have 
 had little success, and meanwhile the weight of common 
 sense and of science is against them, and in favour of the 
 philosophers who have interpreted the principle of identity 
 concretely, i.e., as identity in difference. 
 
 But to return from this debate on principles to the em- 
 pirical situation. We are from experience familiar with 
 perceptions of the " same " object ^ in different conditions 
 of hght. We perceive it coloured in bright daylight, and 
 colourless in the dark, identifying it then either by touch, or, 
 in very dim light, by seeing outline and shape. And there 
 are all intermediate stages. The problem is so to interpret 
 our judgments of perception concerning the colour of ob- 
 jects as to save all these empirical data. The way to do 
 this is neither to affirm that the object has " really " no 
 colour at all, nor to attribute to it, as " real ", an absolute, 
 unchangeable colour which is different from all, or most, of 
 the colours perceived in it, but to correlate the observed 
 
 iThe right to say the "same" rests, of course, precisely on such a 
 synthesis of different perceptual' data as we are trying to defend 
 throughout. 
 
114 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.V 
 
 differences with differences in the conditions under which, 
 in each case, the object is what it is. The result of the 
 application of this point of view to the interpretation of 
 judgments of perception is that, e.g., the judgment, "This 
 is blue ", made in the moment of perception, will not now 
 be taken to mean, " This is blue always, however light and 
 other conditions may vary ", but " This is blue here and 
 now." And the " here and now " will, with increasing 
 knowledge and completer analysis of the whole context, 
 give way to " under conditions such as these ", where the 
 conditions are as exhaustively and precisely specified as our 
 evidence permits. Thus qualified by the inclusion of explicit 
 conditions, the judgment not only permits of other colours 
 being predicated of the same thing under other conditions, 
 but also is true both at the moment of perception and " al- 
 ways ". For the statement of conditions, " such as these ", 
 generalises the particular datum and invests it with the 
 truth belonging to an instance of a universal.^ 
 
 The principle, then, here advocated for the saving of 
 appearances demands that the possession of qualities by an 
 object be taken, not as absolute, but as relative. It is 
 dependent on conditions, some of which are comparatively 
 uniform and stable, others of which are variable and transi- 
 tory. What the conditions in any given case are is as much 
 a question for empirical analysis and synthesis, as is the 
 corresponding question how to recognise and identify cer- 
 tain data in the flux of experience as appearances of the 
 " same " thing. 
 
 If, then, there are, as there would seem to be, good rea- 
 sons for saying that colours, and other secondary qualities, 
 are found to occur only under conditions which include the 
 presence of a properly functioning physiological organism, 
 
 1 A fuller discussion of this view of truth will be offered in a sequel 
 to the present volume of Studies. 
 
Ch. V] " SAVING THE APPEARANCES " iiS 
 
 no a priori prejudices ought to stand in the way. If colours 
 vary with physical conditions, why not with physiological 
 conditions, which, after all, are physical, too? 
 
 At this point, however, an objection will be raised, not so 
 much on the score of the general principle, as on the ground 
 of its consequences when applied, as here, to making human 
 beings, or, in general, living beings with sense-organs, one 
 of the conditions of the occurrence of secondary qualities. 
 The objector will urge that, according to the theory of evo- 
 lution, the physical world existed before there were living 
 beings in it: — ^what, at that time, were its qualities? And, 
 in any case, there are even now many physical things which 
 are never perceived by any living being, so far as we know, 
 and there is no physical thing which is perceived all the 
 time. If unperceived objects have no secondary qualities, 
 what qualities have they? 
 
 Two replies may be made to this objection. In the first 
 place, judgments of perception, whether primitive, or ampli- 
 fied by conditions, are retained by memory. In other 
 words, we " think of " objects as possessing the qualities 
 which we perceived in them. Does this mean that we think 
 of them as possessing these qualities even when no one 
 perceives them? No — as little as the perception of an 
 object as hot compels us to think of it as always hot. We 
 cannot, in memory,, endow the object with any qualities 
 except those which we found it to have at the times, and 
 under the conditions, under which it was perceived. And 
 if we have perceived it frequently, and for continuous 
 stretches of time, we may ultimately be able to piece to- 
 gether these data and think of all the details of the object's 
 existence and behaviour, as if we were continuously observ- 
 ing it. In this manner we fill out the gaps by analogy, 
 imagining the qualities we should see, if perception were 
 possible. We can anticipate what, under statable con- 
 
ii6 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.V 
 
 ditions, we shall see, and verify our anticipations by realis- 
 ing the conditions and perceiving what we had expected to 
 perceive. In this context, " thinking of " an object as 
 blue means remembering that one has seen it to be blue, 
 and expecting to see it as blue again. Certainly, in ordi- 
 nary intercourse, we talk and think of objects as blue, i.e., 
 judge them to have that colour, at times when we do not 
 perceive them. But a judgment expressed thus roughly, and 
 without nice qualification, cannot fairly be taken to mean 
 that the objects are blue now, or apart from any conditions. 
 If this were its meaning, it would simply be false. But 
 these judgments can be saved, too, by interpreting their 
 meaning to be that the objects are blue, if perceived under 
 proper conditions — which is, in fact, all that the evidence 
 of past experience justifies, and the evidence of future ex- 
 perience can verify. We have a right, then, to think of 
 objects in the intervals of perception, as we should find 
 them to be if we were perceiving them. And, on the same 
 principle, basing ourselves on present perceptual evidence, 
 we reconstruct in imagination what we should have seen, 
 heard, felt, had we lived in ages of the world when, in fact, 
 no living things yet existed. Again, having never seen atoms, 
 we think of them as colourless, but if some new discovery 
 in microscopical instruments were ever to make an atom 
 visible, can we doubt that we should see it coloured? 
 
 But this is not quite the end of the problem. For the 
 objection we are discussing rests, at bottom, on the principle 
 that everything which exists has a nature or character; that 
 all existence is qualified existence. Hence, if an object has 
 certain qualities only at certain times, and under certain 
 conditions, and yet is to be thought of as existing at other 
 times, and under other conditions, then it does not seem a 
 meaningless question to ask: What is the nature, what are 
 the qualities, of objects unperceived? The temptation is 
 
Ch.V] " SAVING THE APPEARANCES » 117 
 
 great to try and get behind the tantalising " if " and 
 " should " in our sentence, above, about " thinking of ob- 
 jects in the intervals of perception as we should find them to 
 be if we were perceiving them." If we yield to the tempta- 
 tion, we shall be drawn into speculative guesses beyond the 
 reach of perceptual evidence. We shall, with Berkeley, say 
 that objects are at all times perceived by God, or with 
 panpsychists of all shades, that each object is inwardly a 
 will, or soul, and exists in its own right as such. But a more 
 cautious temper in philosophising, guided by the empirical 
 distinctions between things in the context of Nature, will 
 content itself with a solution which keeps closer to the 
 evidence. It will either extend to objects unperceived the 
 deliberate abstraction from secondary qualities and the con- 
 ditions of perception, which characterises the point of view 
 of " mechanical theory ". It will then think of unperceived 
 objects in terms only of primary qualities, i.e., of those 
 qualities which are involved in the purely "mechanical" 
 relations of things to each other. Or, else, it will recognise 
 that the knowledge of things which we have through the 
 senses is subject to conditions, and that the path of wisdom 
 is to accept these conditions and make the most of the re- 
 sources which perception puts at our disposal, rather than 
 indulge in speculations, however fascinating, for which the 
 evidence furnishes neither basis nor verification. Percep- 
 tion furnishes genuine knowledge of the nature of physical 
 things, and we know more, not less, about them when we 
 discover that the qualities which we perceive them to have 
 are subject to, and variable with, conditions of which we 
 can formulate the laws. This is all which the argument, so 
 far, fairly entitles us to say, though something more re- 
 mains to be added below.^ 
 
 1 See p. 135. The view in the text tries to do justice to what is sound 
 in the phenomenalistic position. Mill's formula for that position, 
 
ii8 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.V 
 
 (4) In the light of the preceding discussions, our fourth 
 problem can be briefly disposed of. It concerns the ques- 
 tion whether different percipiwits, since for each the object, 
 according to the different conditions under which he per- 
 ceives it, has different qualities, can be said to be perceiving 
 the same object, or even merely to be seeing the same col- 
 our or hearing the same sound. In Russell's picturesque 
 terminology, if the sense-data are " private ", is there a 
 " public " object at all, and if there is, can the private sense- 
 data possibly be qualities of the public object? In The 
 Problems of Philosophy, Russell argues that our " instinc- 
 tive beUef " — for it is no more than that to him — that we 
 perceive the same objects, can be reconciled with the dif- 
 ferences in our sense-data only by assuming that the object 
 is something " over and above " the sense-data, distinct 
 from them in existence and qualities.^ In Our Knowledge 
 of the External World, on the other hand, Russell jwings 
 over to the view that the physical thing is not something 
 other than the sense-data which we call its qualities, but is 
 the system, or set, of these, though each be perceptible only 
 to one spectator at one time and place. In short, Russell 
 is here no longer divorcing the thing from its " appear- 
 ances": he now sets himself the explicit task of "finding 
 
 defining a physical thing as a " permanent possibility of sensations '', 
 is awkward, and lays itself open to the retort, that what is " possible " 
 (.i.e., may occur) is sensations, and that what is "permanent" and 
 makes sensations possible, must itself be actual, with a nature of its 
 own (C/. G. F. Stout, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. iv, 
 article on Primary and Secondary Qualities). Russell's account of a 
 thing as a logical construct of actual and ideal sense-data is a vast 
 improvement on Mill's. Russell's suggestion that, if we know under 
 what conditions an " ideal " sense-datum (i.e., a sense-datum thought 
 of) becomes an "actual" sense-datum (i.e., one actually sensed by 
 a mind), it is unnecessary even for physical science to assign exist- 
 ence to the ideal elements, is closely similar to the view in the text. 
 (Cf. Our Knowledge of the External World, p. 112). 
 
 1 " One great reason why it is felt that we must secure a physical 
 object in addition to the sense-data, is that we want the same object 
 for different people," — The Problems of Philosophy, pp. 31, 2. 
 
Ch. V] " SAVING THE APPEARANCES " 119 
 
 a place " ^ for all data; in fact, saving the appearances by 
 correlation in a system on what we have called (though 
 Russell would not) the principle of identity in difference. 
 The point is exactly the same, at bottom, as that which has 
 occupied us in the preceding problems. Are we to seek 
 the identity of the object — ^its character as existing, its what- 
 it-is — ^apart from its various appearances in the world of 
 sense, or are we to identify these, construe them in spite of 
 their difference from one another as none the less its ap- 
 pearances — different appearances of the same thing? If 
 the latter is possible at all, there need be, in principle, no 
 limit to the number of different appearances, provided only 
 and always that the judgments affirming this interpretation 
 tlo not contradict each other. And such contradiction is 
 avoided by resting them on the system in which each ap- 
 pearance is correlated with its exclusive conditions. 
 
 From the first group of problems, in which we have 
 argued on the basis that we know physical things by per- 
 ception, because every perception is a judgment interpreting 
 sense-data as qualities of things, we must now turn to our 
 second group. The problems of this second group may 
 conveniently be formulated as follows: 
 
 (i) Is the view that every perception is a judgment cor- 
 rect? If not, what is the difference between them, and what 
 the motive, or ground, for passing from a perception to a 
 judgment " about " what we perceive? Is there such a 
 thing as " pure " perception, into which judgment does 
 not enter, and, if so, what is its cognitive function and 
 value? 
 
 (2) What is the relation in a judgment of perception be- 
 tween datum and interpretation? For it appears to be 
 
 *-Loc. cit., p. 97. 
 
120 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.V 
 
 agreed on all sides that, whatever our answer to (i) may 
 be, a judgment, at any rate, transcends a bare datum, and 
 the analysis of it, therefore, demands that we distinguish 
 between the given and what, by interpretation or construc- 
 tion, the given is identified as meaning. We affirm, or be- 
 lieve in, the existence of more than is simply found within 
 the four corners of the given here and now. What makes 
 this transcendence, this expansion of, the given, possible? 
 What, above all, justifies it? We shall have, at least, to 
 touch on the whole problem of meaning which, despite 
 many nibblings at it in recent psychology and philosophy, 
 has hardly yet begun to yield up the solution of its riddle.^ 
 
 (3) Has our analysis of what is given in perception, up 
 to this point, exhausted all the clues for the discrimination 
 and recognition of things as " individual " objects, self- 
 identical despite change? 
 
 These problems, again, we shall survey in order, seeking, 
 as before, to " save the appearances." 
 
 ( I ) The question, " What do we perceive? ", if under- 
 stood in the sense of, " What do we know by pure percep- 
 tion, without judgment? ", is not nearly as easy to answer 
 as is sometimes assumed. It throws us back inevitably on 
 some theory about perception, into which much more enters 
 than can be got from a naive inspection of examples of 
 perception. The obvious advice, "Take a perception and 
 analyse it ", is deceptive in its simplicity. For there is 
 no infallible way of analysing correctly or getting a true 
 theory by simply looking and recording what is there. Too 
 many philosophers (and psychologists, too) indulge the 
 pleasant habit of assuming that " introspection " can do no 
 wrong, and that all that is needed is to put the findings of 
 
 ^ Cf. my article, Image, Idea, and Meaning, in Mills, N. S., vol. xvi, 
 no. 41. 
 
Ch.V] " SAVING THE APPEARANCES " 121 
 
 introspection into words. To dispel this illusion it is enough 
 that we remind ourselves of the utterly disparate and mutu- 
 ally contradictory analyses of perception which are being 
 offered, if not always in the name of introspection, at least 
 in the name of what is euphemistically called an "unpre- 
 judiced inspection of the facts ". Introspection has been 
 much criticised, chiefly on the grounds that it is difficult to 
 introspect experiences whilst one has them, and impossible 
 to introspect the experiences of others. But the biggest 
 difficulty of all — a difficulty attaching to every theory claim- 
 ing to be based on a plain inspection of facts — is hardly 
 mentioned in the literature. It arises from the fact that 
 the findings, in order to yield usable theory, must be put 
 into words. But what dictates the words to be employed? 
 What makes the difference between a true and a false re- 
 port? One theorist " finds " that what we perceive is 
 " things ", qualified things. Another " finds " that we per- 
 ceive neither things nor qualities, but just sense-data. What 
 a third " finds " are " sensations ", and he will talk of col- 
 ours, sounds, etc., as qualities of sensations and there is, 
 so far, for him no evidence of objects extra mentem. What 
 a fourth " finds " are " acts " of sensing and either " con- 
 tents " or " objects ", where it remains a moot question 
 whether these are sense-data or physical things. The 
 " raw, unverbalised " facts, as James happily calls them, 
 appear to suffer any one of these analyses as patiently as 
 any other. Is it not clear that the question. Which is the 
 true report? can be settled only in a general context of 
 theory in which such rival descriptions are supported as 
 much as supporting? 
 
 Here, for example, is a typical account of "pure per- 
 ception ": " The stage of pure perception of a coloured sur- 
 face corresponds, it would seem, to the state of a man who 
 just reads the enumeration or sees the figure of the 47th 
 
122 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.V 
 
 proposition (of the first book of Euclid), but to whom the 
 words and figure convey no meaning ".^ This amounts to 
 saying that the object of pure perception consists of bare 
 sense-data, as they come and go, stripped of every vestige 
 of interpretation. Moreover, to judge that the object of 
 perception is just what we perceive it to be, could at best 
 only amount to taking each sense-datum for just what it is. 
 We should have no right to say that things and qualities are 
 perceived. Judgments like " this is a tree ", or " this tree 
 is green and is waving about in the wind " (to take Broad's 
 own examples), could not be offered as judgments of percep- 
 tion, the truth of which was infallibly derived from, and 
 guaranteed by, the accompanying perception. For in all 
 such judgments there is interpretation. A meaning is af- 
 firmed of which pure perception, ex hypothesi, contains no 
 trace. Even the mere "this is green" bursts across the 
 boundaries of the object of pure perception when they are 
 thus narrowly drawn. For green is a universal, and no 
 universal can be tied down to any momentary particular in 
 which it is realised. To see and recognise " this " as 
 " green " is to think of " this " as a case or instance of being 
 green, as a member of the class of green particulars. But 
 what hint does the pure datum here and now contain of 
 other data of the same sort, or of membership in a class 
 of similars? Thus, the more we push back to the pure 
 datum, the harder does it become to identify any cognition 
 which could fairly be said to arise just from it, by itself, 
 and to be assured by it of infallible truth. Facing in this 
 direction, we move further and further away from getting 
 out of perception anything remotely like the world of com- 
 mon experience with its relatively permanent things, exhibit- 
 ing in different settings a wide range of different qualities. 
 The world of immediate data is a chaos in which nothing 
 1 C. D. Broad, Perception, Physics, and Reality, pp. 24, 5. 
 
Ch.V] " SAVING THE APPEARANCES " 123 
 
 is permanent, nothing so connected that we can identify 
 any two data as appearances or qualities of the same thing. 
 The question — to quote Russell's wording of it — ^becomes 
 urgent: " By what principles shall we select certain data 
 from the chaos, and call them appearances of the same 
 thing? " ^ The appeal to pure perception, thus, throws 
 into more vivid relief the fact that, in intelligent perception, 
 we always mean very much more than we perceive, at least 
 if we whittle down what we perceive to bare sense-data. 
 This becomes unmistakable when we put into language what 
 we perceive, or think we perceive. For language is not 
 only, for beings given to philosophising, the most convenient 
 vehicle of judgment, but the meanings of words, being uni- 
 versal, transcend the data even when particularised by 
 application to them. This is true even of " this " as the in- 
 strument par excellence of emphatic particularisation. For, 
 taken abstractly, there is hardly another word in the lan- 
 guage which has so wide a range of potential application, 
 being used to designate anything and everything which can 
 appear in the focus of attention. Thus a datum of percep- 
 tion is never more than a cue for a meaning, and the mean- 
 ing, though identified with this datum here and now, as a 
 whole transcends it. Yet the whole meaning is judged to 
 be real on the strength of the real datum, taken as a frag- 
 ment of the whole, and as a sign of its presence. The given 
 carries a meaning, from which it derives its full character 
 and to which it guarantees existence by its own existence, 
 by being itself emphatically there. 
 
 It is easy to understand that this curiously double-edged 
 character of transcendence should attract philosophical in- 
 terest now rather by one of its sides, now rather by the 
 
 ^Our Knowledge of the External World, p. 108. It might have 
 been even better to ask, " By what principles do we select?" for there 
 can be no doubt that we do select and identify, and, in the main, 
 do so rightly. 
 
124 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.V 
 
 other. To some, like Russell, the problem, above all others, 
 is how, and by what right, we pass from data to non-data. 
 And, since the data seem to guarantee so very little, these 
 thinkers gravitate towards a profound doubt concerning the 
 validity 'of the elaborate superstructures which common 
 sense and science so readily erect. Yet what choice is there? 
 We neither do, nor can, stop at the point of pure perception, 
 even supposing that unordered, uninterpreted sense-data do 
 form the actual first stage in the process of our learning 
 to know the physical world. Transcend, synthesise, order, 
 invest with meaning we do, and must, even at the least 
 speculative level of perception. Does it help to suspect, 
 or depreciate, root and branch this transcending of data, 
 on the ground that it is everywhere shaped by hope and 
 fear, whim and convenience, that it rests on nothing better 
 than " instinctive belief "? To say this is to say that tran- 
 scending is, at bottom, irrational, and that, at best, reason 
 has no other function than that of organising into the most 
 harmonious possible system the instinctive beliefs in virtue 
 of which we do transcend the data and cannot help tran- 
 scending them.^ Is it not preferable to explore the obvious 
 alternative? According to this, the data themselves demand 
 to be transcended, furnishing clues for doing so precisely 
 through their universal character, which it is the function 
 
 ^ This is, dearly, the geperal position set forth in the remarkable 
 passage at the end of ch. ii (pp. 39-41) of Russell's The Problems of 
 Philosophy. Note especially : " All knowledge, we find, must be built 
 up upon our instinctive beliefs, and if these are rejected, nothing is 
 left"; and "There can never be any reason for rejecting one in- 
 stinctive belief except that it clashes with others; thus, if they are 
 found to harmonise, the whole system becomes worthy of acceptance." 
 Yet Russell's actual practice is to cut down the number of admissible 
 instinctive beliefs to the point where they almost vanish. Thus, he 
 would dearly like to be able to dispense with the instinctive belief 
 in the existence of other minds, and build his world on a solipsistic 
 basis of his own sense-data plus the principles of pure logic. That, 
 however, only raises the further awkward question. What justifies 
 the application of logic to sense-data, the treatment of sense-data as 
 "values" for the "variables" of logic? 
 
Ch.V] " SAVING THE APPEARANCES " 125 
 
 of reason to seize upon and follow up into that system of 
 meanings which, as most comprehensive and internally cohe- 
 rent, constitutes " truth " and " reality ", and hence is 
 affirmed as the true nature of that real world to which each 
 moment's data bear witness.^ 
 
 So far, then, we can conclude only that neither can tran- 
 scendence be avoided by falling back on pure perception, 
 nor ought it to be condemned as merely instinctive. It is 
 the very life of reason, the very process of discovering 
 truth under the pressure of the " logic of the facts ". 
 
 But mention of truth may remind us that there is another 
 angle from which it has been asserted that perception, as 
 " knowledge of things ", is completely different from judg- 
 ment, as "knowledge of truths" (i.e., propositions), and 
 that a special function and value belong to it as a mode of 
 knowledge which cannot possibly ever be mistaken. Per- 
 ception, it is said, is a two-term relation of mind to object, 
 and since there must be an object for a mind to have this 
 relation to it, perception cannot be deceptive. There can be 
 no misperceiving, we are told, for that would be perceiving 
 the non-existent, or, rather, perceiving what is not there, 
 or, else, what is not so. " I may ", says G. E. Moore, in 
 advocating this view, "judge with regard to an animal 
 
 1 It is not a mere paradox to suggest that Russell's " instinctive 
 beliefs" (Cf. preceding footnote) _ are identical in function with what 
 " idealists " have called " categories of thought " or " principles of 
 reason ". Kant's " synthetic activity of the understanding ", applying 
 the categories to the manifold of sense and thus constructing objects 
 judged to be empirically real, has undeniable affinities with the order- 
 ing and interpreting of sense-data along the Unes of instinctive beliefs. 
 The categories of thing and quality correspond, for example, to the 
 instinctive belief that diverse sense-data are appearance of the same 
 thing. And in both cases the question is how to select the sense-data 
 which are to be identified as qualities, or appearances, of this thing 
 rather than of that. The differences in detail between Kant and 
 Russell are, no doubt, profound. But are not both, at bottom, trying 
 to solve the same problem with assumptions the similarity of which 
 is disguised by differences of terminology? 
 
126 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. V 
 
 which I see at a distance, that it is a sheep, when in fact it 
 is a pig. And here my judgment is certainly not due to the 
 fact that I see it to be a sheep; since I cannot possibly see 
 a thing to be a sheep unless it is one ".^ In more technical 
 language Russell analyses perception as involving only the 
 object a R b and the perceiving mind, whereas judgment in- 
 volves the mind which judges that a stands in the relation 
 i? to b. The objection that there are errors of perception, 
 Russell tries to meet by saying that, whilst no perception 
 can be mistaken, we may wrongly think we are perceiving 
 when, in fact, we are not.^ Unfortunately, he does not tell 
 us how to recognise a genuine perception when we have one. 
 And, thus, after all, the infallibility of perception turns out 
 to be, not so much an empirical fact, as an a priori defini- 
 tion, framed — ^as if in confirmation of our observation above 
 concerning the influences of theory on the analysis of per- 
 ception — to provide the setting for a new version of the 
 correspondence theory of truth. For Russell's analysis does 
 not appeal to introspection, nor is it even based on current 
 psychological theory. Its motive appears to have been to 
 provide, first, a fact-complex aRb by the correspondence to 
 which the proposition " that a is in relation R to b" may 
 be true, and, next, an infallible way of knowing the fact in 
 
 ''■Some Judgments of Perception, in Proceedings of the Aristotelicm 
 Society for 1918-19, p. 6. From the point of view of these essays 
 the correct analysis of the situation posited by Moore would be this : 
 I see something which from its look I identify as a sheep but which, 
 on closer inspection, I identify as a pig. Of course, I may be cautious 
 and say, " That looks like a sheep but may be something else " ; but 
 no one will deny that there are cases where, without any misgivings, 
 but with the utmost confidence, we judge things from what we see 
 of them, to be what we find afterwards they are not. If it be said 
 that seeing a pig as sheep is wrong inference, the obvious reply is 
 that seeing a pig as a pig is right inference. If it be said that we 
 can speak of seeing a pig as a pig only when it actually is one, and 
 no mistake is possible, the reply is that there is always interpretation 
 and with it a chance of error, however remote-sunless we whittle 
 down what is perceived to mere sense-data, in which case we neither 
 see nor know any " thing "—•be it pig or sheep — at all. 
 
 2 Cf. Principia Mathematica, p. 45. 
 
Ch.V] " SAVING THE APPEARANCES " 127 
 
 order that we may know when the proposition is true. But, 
 in fact, the symbols aRb oversimplify the situation and the 
 problem. In giving concrete values to these symbols in 
 any particular case, we shall unawares assume the real prob- 
 lem to have been solved already, i.e., the object to be cor- 
 rectly perceived for what it is. Whereas the real problem 
 is when a perception, involving always, as it does, data tran- 
 scended by interpretation, can be trusted as correct. And 
 this can be only in a system of interpretations, mutually 
 supporting each other.^ It is precisely because this attempt 
 to distinguish perception and judgment traverses the dis- 
 tinction between datum and interpretation that it finds, 
 we may bluntly say, no support in the actual facts. 
 
 (2) Having tried to show that pure perception is a will- 
 o'-the-wisp which it is unsafe to follow, we are in a posi- 
 tion to appreciate critically the way in which the problem 
 of datum and interpretation is raised in the very subtle and 
 acute analysis of some judgments of perception, given by 
 G. E. Moore in the article from which we have just quoted. 
 At the risk of slurring over some of Moore's cautious quali- 
 fications of statement, we may summarise the substance of 
 his theory as follows: 
 
 (a) Let us assume that we are perceiving an inkstand and 
 judging, " This is an inkstand." What factors are involved? 
 Clearly, we are not perceiving the whole of the inkstand. 
 Very rarely, if ever, do we perceive the whole of the object 
 which we judge ourselves to be perceiving. Our judgment, 
 in such cases, is on the one hand about " this " — the datum, 
 the item in the total field of presentation at the moment, 
 about which, as distinct from every other simultaneous 
 datum, the judgment is being made. On the other hand, 
 
 lA fuller treatment of this point, with special reference to per- 
 ception, is planned for the second volume of Studies. 
 
128 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.V 
 
 the judgment is also about the " inkstand " which we cer- 
 tainly believe ourselves to be perceiving. Now, whilst the 
 , datum is thus " the real or ultimate subject " of every judg- 
 ment of perception, yet, clearly, it is not, in general, the 
 kind of thing for which the predicate term (here " ink- 
 stand ") is a name. The " this " may be a colour, or a 
 sound, or any other sort of sense-datum; it will not be what 
 we mean by a physical or material thing. If " this " is all 
 we perceive, then we are not perceiving an inkstand, and 
 the judgment " this is an inkstand " will be false. Is there 
 any line of analysis open by which we can avoid this con- 
 clusion? 
 
 (b) If " this " is all that is strictly perceived, then the 
 whole object is only " known by description " as " the ob- 
 ject which stands to this in a certain relation." What is 
 that relation? It seems plausible, especially in examples 
 drawn from sight, to say that " this " is a part of the object, 
 e.g., a part of its surface. In that case, " This is an ink- 
 stand " would be only a loose way of saying, " This is part 
 of the surface of an inkstand." ^ This analysis would pro- 
 vide plausibly for the difference between the datum and 
 the object with which in the judgment of perception it is 
 identified. A part might be a datum, and might be seen, 
 in a sense in which the whole was neither a datum, nor 
 seen. But there is a formidable difficulty: . many things 
 are true of sense-data which are not true of genuine parts 
 of physical objects. There are many occasions when we 
 judge that we are perceiving the same thing, or the same 
 part of the same thing. We do so, frequently, even when the 
 " same " part has perceptibly changed. But whether it 
 
 ^ With temperature-, sound-, smell-,- taste-data, such language would 
 be very much less plausible, though Moore does not touch on this. 
 At any rate, we could speak of a "part" here only in a metaphorical 
 sense. " Aspect ", " quality ", " appearance " would be less awkward, 
 but it is to be admitted that there is no device of language by which 
 it is possible to dodge the problem which Moore raises about " part ". 
 
Ch. V] " SAVING THE APPEARANCES " 129 
 
 has perceptibly changed or not, the data involved on these 
 different occasions always are perceptibly different. When 
 we look, e.g., at the " same " inkstand from different dis- 
 tances, or from different angles of perspective, or when 
 we perceive it by touch rather than by sight, the sense- 
 data differ perceptibly throughout, yet we do not judge the 
 inkstand to have perceptibly changed.^ Hence the sense- 
 datum cannot be, or truly be judged to be, " part " of the 
 object perceived. In fact, in so far as it is true that we 
 perceive a part, not the whole, of the inkstand, that part, 
 once more, will be known only by description as the part 
 which stands in the sought-for relation to " this ". 
 
 (c) The situation at this point drives Moore to the 
 desperate expedient of suggesting that sense-data, after 
 all, may not really differ perceptibly but only seem to dif- 
 fer. " What now seems to me to be possible is that the 
 sense-datum which corresponds to a tree, which I am seeing, 
 when I am a mile off, may not really be perceived to be 
 smaller than the one, which corresponds to the same tree, 
 when I see it from a distance of only a hundred yards, but 
 that it is only perceived to seem smaller; that the sense- 
 datum which corresponds to a penny, which I am seeing 
 obliquely, is not really perceived to be different in shape 
 from that which corresponded to the penny, when I was 
 straight in front of it, but is only perceived to seem dif- 
 ferent — that all that is perceived is that the one seems el- 
 liptical and the other circular; that the sense-datum pre- 
 sented to me when I have the blue spectacles on is not per- 
 ceived to be different in colour from the one presented to 
 me when I have not, but only to seem so; and finally that 
 the sense-datum presented when I touch this finger is not 
 
 lA reference to a similar argument in Professor G. F. Stout's 
 British Academy paper on Things and Sensations may here be in 
 place. See Proceedings, 1905-06. 
 
130 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. V 
 
 perceived to be different in any way from that presented 
 when I see it, but only to seem so — that I do not perceive 
 the one to be coloured and the other not to be so, but 
 only that the one seems coloured and the other not." ^ 
 If this suggestion held good, it would be possible to 
 interpret a datum (a " this ") as a part of the physical 
 thing. 
 
 (d) But if we hold to the usual view that sense-data 
 really differ, their relation to physical things is still to be 
 discovered. Moore considers two possible theories, only to 
 discard them both. One is the causal theory, that the sense- 
 datum has one, and only one cause, viz., the physical thing. 
 The other is the theory that the sought-for relation might 
 be an ultimate and indefinable one, " being a manifesta- 
 tion of ". The causal theory Moore rejects as, on the 
 whole, improbable; the other, on the ground that no such 
 relation is actually experienced. Perhaps, then, the analysis 
 into sense-datum, object, and a relation between them 
 is at fault? If so, the Mill-Russell theory of a physical 
 thing as a complex of actual or possible sense-data, 
 none of which is itself a physical thing, seems the only 
 well-accredited alternative, unless we are to fall back, 
 after all, on the desperate expedient discussed under (c) 
 above. Not being convinced of the truth of the Mill-Russell 
 theory, and confessing himself otherwise completely puzzled, 
 Moore finally inclines to favour this desperate view, because 
 at least it allows the sense-datum to be regarded as really 
 identical with part of the object. 
 
 The essential problem could hardly have been put with 
 more startling clearness. Judgments like " this is an ink- 
 stand" or "I see (this to be) an inkstand", express 
 
 ^Loc. cit., p. 23. I can, frankly, make nothing of this suggestion. 
 In offering it Moore himself admits it to be possible that he is " talking 
 sheer nonsense ". 
 
Ch.V] " SAVING THE APPEARANCES " 131 
 
 straightforwardly and, normally, with undeniable truth — 
 what? What we perceive, or — does it not amount to the 
 same thing? — what we judge that to be which we perceive. 
 Yet the audacity of this judgment is brought to light by the 
 analysis which whittles down what we strictly perceive to 
 the mere " this " here and now, so that we are judging 
 more to be real than, in fact, we do perceive. Yet the 
 paradox is that we do not stop at mere data, and that it 
 would not help us if we did. For the road to knowledge 
 lies precisely in expanding this " more " — in making a 
 whole universe, in the last resort, hang upon each moment's 
 data. Certainly we perceive " things " only by interpreting 
 data to mean wholes which, as wholes, are not data. Is 
 there any way of throwing further light on this mystery 
 of transcendence? 
 
 The first step on such a way is to recognise that every 
 datum is a this-such — an Aristotelian toSs Toiovde— hence 
 a realised, or embodied, universal. It is emphatically this, 
 and no other, and so far a " particular ". But it has also 
 a nature, quality, character — a " what " — ^which is not con- 
 fined to " this " but appears in other particulars; not only in 
 particulars similar to this one, or of the same sort, but also 
 in particulars different from this one, yet recognisable as 
 aspects of the same higher unity as this one. Transcend- 
 ence, in short, is the function of universals. We may mar- 
 vel at it and find it unintelligible — ^but it can be so only 
 in the sense in which it may be said to be unintelligible that 
 there is anything at all. We must not only accept univers- 
 als as embodied in particulars and yet transcending each, 
 but recognise that they are the condition of the intelligibil- 
 ity of anything whatsoever. Knowledge consists in the 
 progressive and constructive discovery of the xmiversals — 
 of all sorts and degrees — which are embodied in the data 
 of our experience. Thought, intelligence — call it what we 
 
132 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.V 
 
 will — are the response to, or acknowledgment of, universals, 
 or, as we may also put it, of the same in the different — 
 a response made possible, indeed exacted, by the fact that 
 the flux of experience brings an ever fresh multiplicity of 
 data from moment to moment. The discovery of universals 
 here takes place through the ordering, organising, synthes- 
 ising — again call it what we will — of data. And these terms 
 describe an activity which is, so far as it is " logical " or 
 " rational ", under the control, the " objective " control, of 
 the universals embodied in the data. We are obliged to 
 think as we do think, when we think truly. There is noth- 
 ing capricious or arbitrary about this logical activity. Still 
 less is it an imposition, upon a neutral mass of data, of 
 principles of order invented or imagined by human minds, 
 or given with them as their habitual ways of working. We 
 are not dealing with the tricks of an animal species, but 
 with the nature of the world revealing itself to us. In 
 thinking, it is not we who operate on the world, but the 
 world (i.e., the system of universals concretely presented in 
 data) which operates in us — subject, of course, to the limita- 
 tion which Spinoza expresses in the words natura quatenus 
 humanam mentem constituit. Though it strains language, 
 it would be truer to say, that the world thinks in us than 
 that " we " think it, or about it. Least objectionable, per- 
 haps, is the formula: reality reveals itself in what, on the. 
 basis of perception and feeling, we are obliged to think it 
 to be. 
 
 The problem, thus, of " transcendence " is solved (so 
 far as we can speak of " solving " it at all) by recognising 
 that data are particularised universals, that it is of the na- 
 ture of universals to transcend any one particular, and 
 that this power of universals is exhibited in what we call 
 " our activity " of thinking, when, with the help of memory 
 and " association of ideas ", we identify different data as in- 
 
Ch. V] " SAVING THE APPEARANCES " 133 
 
 dividual ^ things, or as higher types of concrete unities. 
 The reminder will hardly be required that language, so far 
 as it does not consist of symbols for mere denoting or point- 
 ing,^ consists of symbols for universals of various sorts. 
 Being, by common consent, the instrument for the expres- 
 sion and fixation, even more than for the communication, 
 of thought, language surely bears witness to the universals 
 which judgment predicates of the given as its true nature. 
 In keeping with this general view, we may now reaffirm 
 the position adopted above that " seeing is believing ", or, 
 in other words, that the perceptions which guide us in ac- 
 tion and enter as " observations " into scientific research are 
 judgments. It is certainly only on this view that we can 
 plausibly be said to perceive physical " things " or a phys- 
 ical " world ". 
 
 In truth, the so-called " facts " of perception are " theor- 
 ies ". This follows at once from the admission that intel- 
 ligent perception is a species of judgment, and involves 
 interpretation of data by identification with a universal, 
 
 ^ It should be noted carefully that the term " particular " in the 
 above account refers only to what may also be called a datum, or a 
 " this ". It does not refer to " things " or to anything which can 
 be called an identity in differences. On the other hand, an " indi- 
 vidual", being an identity in differences, is a kind of universal — a 
 " concrete " universal, though it must be remembered that there are 
 degrees of individuality. It would assist present-day philosophical 
 discussion if it were to be authoritatively settled what is the position 
 of the " simple " and unanalysable " terras ", which a modern fashion 
 in logical theory hails as the ultimate constituents of the world, in 
 respect of the distinction of particular and universal. 
 
 2 Whether a symbol merely denotes, and what it denotes, can be 
 determined only by its use, i.e., in the context of an actual application. 
 The " values " for the " variables " of Russell's logic are, I understand, 
 to consist in the last resort of entities merely denotable each by its 
 "proper name" (Cf., e.g.. Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, 
 p. 182). These entities, it may be observed, will not be physical 
 things, or persons, or other complex objects, such as in our un- 
 philosophical language may have proper names, but will probably, 
 when Russell comes to exhibiting them, be found to be "particulars" 
 such as sense-data: this, and this, and this. And then it will be tim,e 
 to repeat the question raised at the end of the preceding note. 
 
134 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.V 
 
 with which we have become acquainted also in other data 
 on other occasions. Incidentally, it follows that sense-data, 
 though facts in the sense that here and now they occur, 
 are not the fact which is known or affirmed. They are 
 evidence, and circumstantial evidence at that, for the fact. 
 Experience of illusion soon brings home to us the inferential 
 character of perception, just as do the not infrequent oc- 
 casions when we have to support our judgments of per- 
 ception, like our judgments of memory, by argument, as 
 well as by more attentive observation, or additional sense- 
 data which furnish corroborative circumstantial evidence.^ 
 The current distinction between " fact " and " theory " 
 arises from this, that there are obvious stages, or degrees, 
 of interpretation within what would commonly still be 
 called a judgment of perception, the subject being denoted 
 by " this ". Keeping to judgments expressed in language, 
 there is clearly an advance from " this is brown " to " this 
 is a table ", and to " this table is brown ". Though we 
 should still be said to perceive what is asserted in the last 
 judgment, we certainly know much more in the last judg- 
 ment than we do in the first. For, if the first is taken to 
 express, bona fide, the degree of knowledge supplied by 
 merely seeing a brown (something), without any recognition 
 of the kind of thing it is, the progress to " this is a (brown) 
 table " is undeniable. The difference is, perhaps, most fre- 
 quently experienced with unfamiliar noises. To hear a 
 novel noise and to appreciate its peculiar sound-quality is 
 rather sharply marked off from learning of what thing it is 
 the noise.^ The inferential transition or synthesis is here 
 most marked. 
 
 1 See B. Bosanquet, Logic (2nd edit.), vol. ii, pp. 16, 7. 
 
 2 Incidentally, it may be observed that, even in current speech, the 
 sound-qualities of things are nearest to being treated as effects. We 
 pass from a noise, not so much to a noisy thing, as to the thing which 
 " makes " the noise, though we still speak of " hearing a lark ", etc, 
 
Ch. V] " SAVING THE APPEARANCES " I35 
 
 Whatever may be the details of such expansion of 
 knowledge within what is still " perception ", according to the 
 current meaning of the term, and whatever account we may 
 give of it in terms of " acquisition of meaning ", " associa- 
 tion of ideas ", " learning by experience ", etc., the funda- 
 mental point remains unaffected that all these processes are 
 possible only because of the universals which, in supplying 
 logical, or objective, control, at the sanje time become them- 
 'selves explicit and articulate. What is called the "logic 
 of the facts " is the logic of the universals which we learn 
 to recognise as the true nature of the data in which they 
 are realised. 
 
 It is worth adding, that the recognition of degrees of 
 knowledge within perception supplies an additional argu- 
 ment against the infallibility of perception. The more there 
 is of meaning in a perception, the more its truth will depend 
 on matters falling outside the moment's " this ". And on 
 the attempts to save the theory by eliminating meaning we 
 have definitely turned our backs. To eliminate meaning is 
 to refuse to follow the lead of the principle of identity in 
 difference. Is it from a fear that this intellectual adven- 
 ture may end in the absolute? 
 
 (3) We must turn to our last problem, whether we have 
 exhausted all the clues which perception furnishes for re- 
 cognising and discriminating " individual " things. 
 
 The view that a thing is a class of actual and possible 
 sense-data reminds us, correctly enough, that we know any 
 " thing " by a sjmthesis of actual and remembered sense- 
 data, in which the gaps are filled out on principles of con- 
 tinuity and correlation. But, quite apart from the awkward 
 
 The reason is obviously that the occurrence of noises is conditioned, 
 as a rule, by visible movements or activities of the thing which makes 
 the noise. Cf. the dependence of speech-sounds on movements of the 
 speech-organs. 
 
136 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.V 
 
 fact that the author of this view now regards a " class " as 
 a " logical fiction "/ this view fails to do justice to the 
 character of individuality which things possess and which 
 we — ^why shrink from saying it? — perceive in them. At 
 least, there is the striking fact that the objects which we 
 most commonly and readily recognise as " things " belong 
 to three main classes, wz., (i) organisms of all kinds; (2) 
 artefacts of all kinds; (3) objects which are neither organ- 
 isms nor artefacts but, like mountains, or rivers, possess 
 an aesthetic unity and individuality.^ Now, in part, this 
 individuality is perceived, especially by the eye, in a certain 
 characteristic jorm or structure, which the analysis of 
 things into assemblages of actual and possible sense-data 
 has, so far, completely ignored. It would not be a relevant 
 reply to say that every sense-datum, e.g., a colour-patch, has 
 its " form ", i.e., definite boundary lines. The important 
 point is that in and through the colour-patches which we 
 perceive as a thing, and which may change in outline with 
 the movements of the thing, we recognise a characteristic 
 shape and structure, which we learn to analyse into a dis- 
 tinctive proportion and balance of parts within a whole. 
 And, thence, further analysis will take us, on the one hand, 
 by way of measurement, into the quantitative formulae for 
 the proportions, e.g., of size and weight, and, on the other, 
 into the function or purpose which these parts in just these 
 proportions fulfil, either relatively to each other (e.g., in- 
 ternal proportions within a tool or organism), or relatively 
 to other things {e.g., adaptation of organism to environment, 
 of tool to human need). Dr. Bosanquet may exaggerate 
 
 1 Bertrand Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, chs. xiii 
 and xvii. 
 
 2 Our habit of giving proper names to such natural objects is surely 
 significant here. On the whole subject of the individuality of things 
 there are some incidental remarks in Dr. Bosanquet's Logic (2nd ed.), 
 vol. i, pp. 129, 218, which are, unless I am greatly mistaken, too com- 
 monly overlooked by students of philosophy. 
 
Ch.V] « SAVING THE APPEARANCES " 137 
 
 in suggestipg that, but for our familiarity with the embodi- 
 ment of our purposes in tools made by ourselves, we should 
 not find it so easy as we do to recognise " things ".^ The 
 individuality, at any rate, of living tilings is likely to have 
 struck men long before they had made much advance in 
 the making of tools. But the main point is, surely, sound: 
 " It is by acquaintance with the perceptible character im- 
 pressed by . . . proportions . . . that we readily pro- 
 nounce on the use of objects made by the hand of man, 
 and that we detect, somewhat less readily, the actual pur- 
 pose served by adaptations in the organic world. Such at- 
 tributes as are expressed in these proportions form, for 
 perception, the content of individualities ".^ 
 
 The character of individuality, then, is conveyed at the 
 very least in the perceptible proportions and arrangements 
 of ihe parts of a thing — or, in other words, in its structure, 
 form, organisation. This, clearly, is something more than 
 is fairly conveyed by terms like assemblage or conjunction 
 of sense-data, even when these terms are applied to a com- 
 plex of sense-data presented together. It is something 
 more than, and by attentive analysis distinguishable from, 
 the sense-data, yet it is given in them as their arrangement, 
 and is perceived just as they are. But the most interesting 
 point of the whole theory is that, whilst the arrangement, in 
 detail and as a whole, is, and must always be, capable of 
 a causal explanation, by laws formulating its correlation 
 with its conditions, yet it challenges also an interpretation 
 of that other sort for which " purpose " or " purposive- 
 ness " are the only convenient terms. The proportions of 
 the parts and their qualities — and in the economy of nature 
 this is true equally of primary qualities such as size, weight, 
 resistance, and of secondary qualities, such as the coloura- 
 tion of animals and flowers, their smell, their sound — 
 
 '^Loc. cit., p. 218. ^Loc. cit, p. 129. 
 
138 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.V 
 
 demand explanation in terms of " function " and " use ". 
 Yet this teleological character of thingk, in structure and 
 behaviour, raises tantalising problems. 
 
 With tools of our own making, we know what purpose 
 they are intended to serve, and can explain why, in order 
 to serve that purpose, they had to be endowed with the 
 structure and qualities they possess, though it ought not to 
 be ignored that natural materials, by their " given " quali- 
 ties, partly lend themselves to our purposes, partly handicap 
 us, or at least impose severe conditions on the way in which, 
 and the extent to which, they are usable. But when we pass 
 to organisms, the application of the concept of purpose be- 
 comes difficult and precarious. The functions of an organ 
 are generally easily enough traced, though even here we 
 may run up against riddles, which may extend through the 
 whole economy of an organism's existence, especially when 
 research brings to light, e.g., microscopic structures or 
 chemical processes unknown to ordinary perception. But 
 the chief difficulty is that organisms as wholes seem to have 
 no obvious or necessary function except that of being just 
 themselves and fulfilling the routine cycle of their existence. 
 And even then, though conscious intention or purpose may 
 sometimes, as in men, play a part, we cannot, in general, 
 say, on obvious evidence, that every natural organism is 
 what it is, grows as it grows, behaves as it behaves, because 
 of its own conscious purpose to be, grow, behave just so. 
 No human being is the designer of his own body: a fortiori, 
 no animals or plants are. And there is still less empirical 
 warrant for saying that Nature, as master-artist, designed 
 the tout ensemble, and fitted each thing into its place in the 
 general plan. Yet teleological categories will not let them- 
 selves be ousted. Structure and function, being frequently 
 still perceptible in whatever sense " things " are perceptible, 
 connect teleological categories directly with sense-data and 
 give them a place in the interpretation of sense-data. At 
 
Ch.V] " SAVING THE APPEARANCES " 139 
 
 the same time, through their suggestion of purpose they are 
 also connected both with " consciousness " and with 
 " value ", and thus introduce us to an order of appearances 
 requiring to be saved even more urgently for not being any 
 longer so directly sustained by sense-data. 
 
 Note on John Locke's Distinction of Primary and Secondary 
 Qualities 
 
 It is of interest in connection with the first half of the preced- 
 ing essay, to analyse in detail Locke's argument for the distinction 
 of primary and secondary qualities, because there is hardly a 
 point in the prolonged subsequent discussion of the problem, 
 which Locke has not anticipated, however briefly. From the very 
 start of his argument Locke takes for granted ihe psycho-physio- 
 logical causation of " ideas " in our minds, by the " impulse ", 
 or " motion " which bodies impart to our sense-organs, and which 
 " our nerves or animal spirits " carry to the brain or " seat of 
 sensation ", there to produce the ideas we have. He takes for 
 granted, also, the physical theory that bodies consist of " insen- 
 sible particles " of matter, each having its figure, bulk, solidity, 
 motion. These are " primary " qualities because (a) they are 
 constantly found " in every particle of matter which has bulk 
 enough to be perceived"; (b) even if we imagine particles so 
 small as to bb utterly imperceptible, we must still endow them 
 with all these qualities, for matter is inconceivable without them; 
 (c) they are necessary to the action of one body on another, and, 
 therefore, to the production of ideas in our minds; (d) they are 
 real qualities in that they are really in bodies, " whether any one's 
 senses perceive them or no "; (e) primaries are free from contra- 
 diction: a figure is never perceived as other than it is. The ideas 
 of themselves which primary qualities produce in us are " resem- 
 blances " of the " patterns " which " do really exist in the bodies 
 themselves ". On the other hand, the secondary qualities " in 
 truth are nothing in the objects themselves, but powers to pro- 
 duce various sensations in us by their primary qualities." The 
 colour and scent of a violet are but the effects in us of the bulk, 
 figure, texture, and motion of the insensible parts of which the 
 violet, as a material thing, is composed. Why is it a " mistake " 
 to attribute " reality " to secondaries, as we commonly do? (a) 
 
140 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.V 
 
 Because bodies produce in us sensations of whiteness or sweet- 
 ness just as they produce the sensations of pain or of sickness. 
 Why attribute warmth to the fire, but not pain? Why' sweet- 
 ness to manna, but not the sickness of which it is in the same 
 way the cause? (b) Because, " Take away the sensations of 
 them; let not the eyes see light or colours, nor the ears hear 
 sounds; let the palate not taste, nor the nose smell; and all 
 colours, tastes, odours, and sounds, as they are such particular 
 ideas, vanish and cease, and are reduced to their causes, i.e., bulk, 
 figure, and motion of parts ". (c) Because, if pain does not exist 
 when it is not felt, there is no reason to think that sweetness 
 exists when it is not tasted, or colour when it is not seen, (d) 
 Because secondary qualities are variable with physical condi- 
 tions: " Can any one think any real alterations are made in the 
 porphyry by the presence or absence of light, and that those ideas 
 of whiteness and redness are really in porphyry in the hght, 
 when it is plain that it has no colour in the dark? " (e) Because 
 secondary qualities are often mutually contradictory: " The same 
 water, at the same time, may produce the idea of cold by one 
 hand, and of heat by the other; whereas it is impossible that the 
 same water, if those ideas were really in it, should at the same 
 time be both hot and cold." Locke fairly boxes the compass 
 collecting premises for the conclusion he is bent on reaching. 
 Yet most of his arguments, taken singly, each on its merits, are 
 open to criticism, and, taken together, they are irrelevant to one 
 another. For exaniple, the arguments against the reality of sec- 
 ondaries, drawn from their relativity and mutual incompatibility, 
 not only lend no support to his account of the causation of 
 perceptions, but since, on Locke's own showing, all our knowledge 
 of things is derived from sensations, make the very possibility 
 of formulating such a causal theory unintelligible. The most 
 curious point is, I think, the assimilation of colour and taste 
 to sickness and pain as effects in us, not real qualities in 
 things. The corresponding assimilation of " the stomach and 
 guts " to the " eyes and palate " teaches one to appreciate the 
 greater subtlety and psychological accuracy with which Berkeley 
 has restated the pain-argument in his Dialogues. Modern writers, 
 like Broad, Russell, and others, have done well to separate the 
 relativity arguments from the causal theory in its psycho- 
 physiological form. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 MECHANISM AND VITALISM: A STUDY IN THE ORDER OF 
 NATURE 
 
 The problem of mechanism and vitalism may be regarded 
 as single, but it is certainly far from simple. Recent dis- 
 cussion ^ has shown it to be the meeting-point of a veritable 
 maze of questions, touching experimental facts on one side 
 and logical principles on the other. What is meant by 
 " mechanism "? What are the limits, if any, of a me- 
 chanistic explanation of natural phenomena? How many 
 different types of theory sail under the common name of 
 " vitalism "? Do living beings in their structure, growth, 
 behaviour, exhibit features incapable of being explained in 
 physico-chemical terms? If so, must we refer them to a 
 
 1 It is, surelyj no mere coincidence, but a symptom of the trend of 
 contemporary thought, and especially of the way in which science and 
 philosophy react upon each other, that during 1918 the Aristotelian 
 Society of London and the American Philosophical Association 
 arranged, independently of each other, discussions on the topic of 
 mechanism versus vitaUsm, and that on both sides of the Atlantic 
 scientists and philosophers co-operated in these attempts to compare 
 their theories and points of view, and, if possible, make them meet. 
 To the " Symposium " of the Aristotelian Society on the question, 
 "Are Physical, Biological and Psychological Categories Irreducible?", 
 there contributed J. S. Haldane, D'Arcy W. Thompson, P. Chalmers 
 Mitchell, and L. T. Hobhouse. Their papers are to be found in the 
 Proceedings of the Society for 1917-18 (N. S., vol. xviii) ; they have 
 also been republished by Dr. Wildon Carr in Life and Finite Individ- 
 uality (London: Williams and Norgate). The leaders of the discus- 
 sion of the American Philosophical Association were L. J. Henderson 
 (Harvard), H. S. Jennings (Johns Hopkins), H. C. Warren (Prince- 
 ton), W. T. Marvin (Rutgers College), and myself. The present 
 essay is a reprint, with a few verbal changes, of my contribution 
 to the discussion, as originally published together with the papers 
 of the other four leaders, in the Philosophical Review (vol. xxvii, 
 No. 6, pp. 628-645). A select bibliography, compiled in connection 
 with the discussion, will be found in the Journal of Philosophy, 
 Psychology and Scientific Methods (vol. xv., no. 20, Sept. 1918). 
 
 141 
 
142 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VI 
 
 special vital force? What is the nature of this force? What 
 is its mode of operation? Can any theory on this point 
 'be tested and verified.by experiment? If not, is such a vital 
 force anything more than a fiction, at least for a science 
 which seeks to be strictly empirical? Yet, without such a 
 factor, is there any way of accounting for the difference be- 
 tween the living and the non-living? What, again, is the 
 relation of biology to physics and chemistry? Is it a de- 
 partment of these latter sciences, or is it autonomous, with 
 a field of facts and with characteristic concepts of its own? 
 Suppose we decide for its autonomy, how does this affect 
 the ideal of a unified theory of nature? Does this ideal 
 commit us to seeking the explanation of all facts in terms of 
 the smallest possible number of concepts? And should 
 these concepts be taken exclusively from the physical 
 sciences? 
 
 These and similar questions have been interwoven in the 
 recent literature of our topic. They are obviously closely 
 connected with one another, yet no less obviously a discus- 
 sion of each of them on its merits requires an expertness in 
 so many different fields of knowledge, that hardly any single 
 thinker nowadays can hope to handle with equal compe- 
 tence all sides of the problem. The best results, now as 
 in the past, may be expected from the sympathetic coopera- 
 tion of scientists and philosophers. For we ought not to 
 forget that to the historical development of mechanism and 
 vitalism philosophers and scientists have equally contri- 
 buted. It is enough to recall, prior to the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, such names as Aristotle, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, 
 Newton, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, in order to realise that our 
 topic has been one of the chief meeting-points of experi- 
 mental research on the one side and philosophical specula- 
 tion on the other. It is no mere accident that Hans Driesch, 
 in thinking out bis vitaliptic theory, found himself driven 
 
Ch.VI] MECHANISM AND VITALISM 14^ 
 
 into fundamental problems of logic, and that the advocate 
 of a mechanistic theory, like Loeb, is much more of a 
 " speculative " philosopher than he is himself aware of. 
 
 The thesis which we shall try to support, and the bearing 
 of which Qn some of the problems above enumerated we 
 shall try to draw out in the following pages, may be sum- 
 med up in the formula: Not mechanism or vitalism, but me- 
 chanism and teleology. The " universe of discourse " of 
 our discussion is best described, in Henderson's happy 
 phrase, as " The Order of Nature ";^ and biology is our 
 best door of entry into it. For biology can hardly avoid 
 the larger issues of context which are suggested by the ap- 
 pearance of living beings in nature, of organisms built upon 
 and growing out of the inorganic. However much the 
 worker in biology may seek to limit himself to the phe- 
 nomena of life as suck, to the problems of structure, growth, 
 behaviour, without troubling himself about the larger ques- 
 tions of the origin and status of life in the system of nature 
 as a whole, still even the most superficial acquaintance with 
 biological literature shows that such isolation is largely 
 artificial, and always on the point of breaking down under 
 the pressure of the desire for fuller knowledge. It breaks 
 down, first of all, because, whilst physicist and chemist can 
 ignore the phenomena of life, the biologist cannot ignore the 
 phenomena of physics and chemistry. The living beings 
 which he studies, whether single cells or multicellular organ- 
 isms, are far too obviously physico-chemical systems. Once 
 the breach has thus been made, the whole tide of wider 
 issues sweeps in. Beginning with the difference between 
 the living and the non-living, there comes next into view 
 the problem of the way in which the phenomena of life are 
 conditioned by their occurrence in bodies, i.e., in physico- 
 
 1 See his book under this title. , 
 
144 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VI 
 
 chemical systems, and, again, by an environment, partly it- 
 self composed of living things, partly non-living. And once 
 this point has been reached, the " order of nature " con- 
 fronts us as the context within which the other questions 
 must find their answers. Our argument will seek to con- 
 firm the view that there is both an order of objective 
 phenomena, and a corresponding order of the sciences which 
 give us the truth about these phenomena. It will thus at- 
 tempt to do justice to the continuity of nature on the 
 one side, and, on the other side, to the broad qualitative 
 differences which we find within it, and which appear to 
 demand an ascending, or, at least, a cumulative arrange- 
 ment. 
 
 Within this universe of discourse, then, of biology ex- 
 panded into the problem of the order of nature, the formula 
 " not mechanism or vitalism, but mechanism and teleology " 
 is to be interpreted. It means that we ought to replace 
 the disjunction of mechanism and vitalism, as mutually ex- 
 clusive alternatives, by the conjunction of mechanism and 
 teleology. It demands that these concepts be treated as 
 cumulative in the order of nature, and, therefore, teleology 
 as logically dominant over mechanism in biology. It re- 
 gards the arguments against vitalism as decisive, if by 
 " vitalism " we mean the theory that in all the things called 
 " living " there is present some non-mechanical, non-spatial, 
 semi-psychical force or factor — ^whether biotic energy, or 
 entelechy, or elan vital — which yet has the power to inter- 
 fere by way of regulation or control with the physico- 
 chemical processes in the body; which can suspend the 
 second law of thermodynamics; which can select for real- 
 isation one of the physically open possibilities; which can 
 create novelties, not only unpredictable in advance, but in- 
 explicable after they have occurred. Vitalism in this sense 
 we do not want to save, and this is the sort of vitalism be- 
 
Ch. VI] MECHANISM AND VITALISM 14S 
 
 tween which and mechanism the choice for biology is usually 
 said to lie. But whilst it is part of our thesis to reject vital- 
 ism on its merits, it is also part of it to reject the whole 
 disjunction of vitalism and mechanism, acceptance of which 
 would commit us to the affirmation of mechanism by the 
 denial of vitalism. It is here that the second half of our 
 thesis, " mechanism and teleology ", comes into play. This 
 is intended to give full scope to mechanistic theory to carry 
 us as far as it can, but it is also intended to maintain that 
 there is a sound sense in which it is true to say, that the 
 phenomena of life cannot be explained, or, better, formu- 
 lated, in physico-chemical terms. Or, to put the positive 
 side of the contention, teleological terms are required, not 
 as substitutes for physico-chemical terms, but as fixing 
 what we have called the " dominant " character of life-pro- 
 cesses to which their physico-chemical aspect is subsidiary. 
 The relation is easier to illustrate than to put into words. 
 We find it wherever in nature there appears a new stratum 
 or level, a new type of quality, or of structure. In the 
 theory of colours, e.g., or of sounds, the " dominant " con- 
 cepts are derived from an analysis of colours and sounds 
 themselves — colours as such, or as actually seen, sounds as 
 such, or as actually heard — and it is only the ordering of 
 these data in terms drawn from their own nature that gives 
 relevance to the subsequent correlation of colour-differences 
 or sound-differences with differences in the rate of vibration 
 of some elastic medium. So, again, the dominant concepts 
 of chemistry are patently derived from a study of the pro- 
 perties and states of elements and compounds in their re- 
 lations to one another under varying conditions of tempera- 
 ture, presence of catalytic agents, etc. And it is not as a 
 substitute for, but as a supplement, that we seek to cor- 
 relate these facts and their laws with facts and laws of the 
 physical structure and relations of atoms, or whatever the 
 
146 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VI 
 
 ultimate constituents of matter may be. So with the 
 phenomena of life. The dominant concepts required for an 
 adequate theory of them are, on the view here maintained, 
 teleological, but this involves no denial of their physico- 
 chemical aspect, or of the importance of discovering the 
 physico-chemical arrangements and processes on which 
 teleological characters and relationships are built. To fore- 
 stall misapprehension, however, we ought to say at once 
 that, when we speak of teleological concepts, we do not 
 mean a design, or plan, or purpose, or desire consciously 
 entertained by any mind, be it of God, of man, of animal, 
 or of plant. We need teleological concepts freed of these 
 implications; concepts so general that conscious designs 
 or desires are but a special tj^pe falling under them. The 
 way to such a view is opened by the concept of value, the 
 introduction of which permits us to read relations of cause 
 and effect as also relations of means to ends. The one 
 reading belongs to mechanism, the other to teleology. The 
 two readings do not exclude each other but are compatible, 
 and, where the teleological reading is possible at all, cumula- 
 tive. Life requires both readings, but the teleological read- 
 ing must be dominant. This is our thesis. 
 
 One of the corollaries of this thesis is the " autonomy of 
 life ", or to put the same point from a different side, the 
 autonomy of biology. Now, in one sense this is, of course, 
 a truism, which no one, when the point is put up to him, 
 seriously wants to deny, and to insist upon which, there- 
 fore, may seem a work of supererogation. Thus a convinced 
 anti-vitalist, like Claude Bernard, is found writing: "Je 
 serais d'accord avec les vitalistes s'ils voulaient simplement 
 reconnaitre que le etres vivants presentent des phenomenes 
 qui ne se retrouvent pas dans la nature brute, et qui, par 
 consequent, leur sont speciaux. J'admets en effet que les 
 
Ch. VI] MECHANISM AND VITALISM 147 
 
 manifestations vitales ne sauraient 6tre elucidees par les 
 seuls phenomenes physico-chimiques connu dans la matiere 
 brute ... La biologie doit prendre aux sciences physico- 
 chimiques la methode experimentale, mais garder ses 
 phenomenes speciaux et ses lois propres ".^ 
 
 The same autonomy obviously can, and ought to, be 
 claimed by every science for itself and for the field of 
 phenomena which it studies. All the differences which 
 experience reveals in the world are, in this sense, unique, 
 specific, sui generis. Why, then, is it worth while insisting 
 on such a truism? Because there is a noticeable tendency 
 in many quarters to deny it, in effect, by the way in which 
 the ideal of a " unified " theory of nature is interpreted. 
 This interpretation constantly takes the form of claiming 
 to " reduce " one type of phenomena to another, of treating 
 one as nothing but another. Life, e.g., we find it said, is 
 " merely " a particular kind of physico-chemical process. 
 Interpreted as a denial of vital force or entelechy, the state- 
 ment is harmless enough. But it is harmful, or at least 
 dangerous, in so far as the unique and distinctive character 
 of life-processes is left completely unspecified and undeter- 
 mined in this sweeping assimilation of them to physico- 
 chemical processes in general. If we ask. What particular 
 kind of physico-chemical process? it becomes clear at once 
 that physico-chemical terms are not sufficiently specific and 
 relevant for the answer required. In view of this situation, 
 it is of the utmost importance to insist that the attempt to 
 eliminate differences, to break down boundaries, to unify by 
 the " nothing but " device, makes, not for orderly, but for 
 disorderly thinking and does a disservice to science. The 
 
 ^Introduction d I'etude de la Medicine Experimentale (1865), p. 118. 
 For a similar statement, see H. S. Jennings, Am. Journal of Psychol- 
 ogy, 1910, pp. 349-370. For A. O. Lovejoy's comments see Science, 
 N. S., vol. xxxiv, no. 864, pp. 75-80 (July 1911), and his paper on 
 " The Unity of Science " in the University of Missouri Bulletin (1912), 
 vol. i, no. 1, esp. pp. 22 ff. 
 
148 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. VI 
 
 phenomena of life require to be dealt with first and foremost 
 in their own teleological terms, and this not as a mere 
 convenience of provisional " description ", but as a necessity 
 of adequate " explanation ", or, better, of understanding. 
 
 The principle of the autonomy of life, then, means the 
 right to use in biology teleological concepts. That biologists 
 constantly do use such concepts, is too familiar a fact to 
 require illustration. Some frankly confess that they cannot 
 help using them. Others are apologetic about them, as if 
 they were a temporary makeshift pending the formulation 
 of an " explanation " in physico-chemical terms. The thesis 
 here maintained is that the use of teleological terms is not 
 a S5miptom of relative ignorance. It is not a sign of the 
 inferiority of biology to physics and chemistry. The prin- 
 ciple of the autonomy of life should be for biologists a 
 charter of emancipation from the false fashion which leads 
 some thus to depreciate their science. It should be a watch- 
 word reminding them to have the courage of their practice, 
 and to insist on their right to use the language demanded 
 by the facts with which they deal. Those who are 
 really consistent in eliminating all teleological concepts 
 from their thought and from their language — and this is 
 patently the ideal which some " mechanists " strive to real- 
 ise — are compelled to misconceive and misdescribe the facts. 
 The criticism which E. B. Holt directs against biologists 
 who, in their anxiety not to compromise themselves 
 with animal souls, analyse, e.g., a bee's behaviour into suc- 
 cessive responses to visual, auditory, olfactory, etc., stimuli, 
 and over it all lose sight of the bee and of the dominant fact 
 that " the bee is carrying honey to its home 'V may serve 
 to illustrate the point. It is noticeable that the analysis of 
 Bethe's which Holt here criticises, is itself still far removed 
 from using strictly physico-chemical terms. Suppose, then, 
 
 ^The Freudian Wish, p. 77. 
 
Ch.VI] MECHANISM AND VITALISM 141, 
 
 we push the issue back to the point to which a convinced 
 mechanist must want to push it. Is not, let us ask, the bee's 
 flight a case of the motion of a material body, and must it 
 not, as such, conform to the laws which physics has formu- 
 lated for matter in motion? Of course it is, and we may 
 readily grant that, even though the flight of a bee, or the 
 antics of a monkey in his cage,^ or the behaviour of any 
 other living thing have not yet been formulated in terms 
 of mechanism, yet " in theory " this can be done. The rea- 
 son why it has not at present been done lies in the exceed- 
 ing complexity of the phenomena, not in any inapplicability 
 of the laws of matter in motion owing to their being sus- 
 pended, or interfered with, by some vital force. The im- 
 portant point is: supposing it were done, would it be relev- 
 ant? Would it really explain, i.e., give us a fuller insight 
 into, what the bee is doing and why, than the account in 
 teleological terms that it is laying by honey in its home? 
 The moral of these considerations is that biology not only 
 does, but may, not only may, but must, use teleological con- 
 cepts, and use them, moreover, as logically dominant over 
 all other concepts which for subsidiary use it may borrow 
 from other sciences. That all living beings, or, better, liv- 
 ing bodies, are physico-chemical systems is here conceded 
 and, indeed, insisted upon as much as the most whole- 
 hearted mechanist can desire. But what we also insist upon 
 is that, when we study living beings exclusively from the 
 physico-chemical point of view, their character as living does 
 not come within our field of study at aU. From that point 
 of view the difference between living and non-living is 
 simply irrelevant. So far from being explained, it is rather 
 ignored. It is not part of the physicist's or chemist's uni- 
 verse of discourse. Witness the transformation of the 
 meaning of " organic " in the chemist's language. The term 
 1 See A. O. Lovejoy, Unity of Science, loc. cit., p. 16. 
 
ISO CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. VI 
 
 there has lost the exclusive reference to the living which 
 it retains in the biologist's mouth, and applies for the 
 chemist to all carbon-compounds whatsoever, regardless of 
 whether they are found or produced in the living or in the 
 non-living. This, surely, is instructive. And the moral of 
 it is that the biologist who knows his business will not try 
 to " reduce " himself to a species of chemist. Indeed, it is 
 only on condition of his keeping his teleological categories 
 dominant, that the investigation of the chemistry of vital 
 processes becomes for him relevant and significant. He 
 must first recognise a living thing or a living process as 
 such, before the study of its chemical side or basis becomes 
 important for him as throwing further light on his topic. 
 In short, if our topic is carbon-compounds, life and the 
 concepts it involves are irrelevant to us. But if our topic 
 is life, then the laws of carbon-compounds, so far as these 
 occur in vital structures and processes, are relevant, not 
 because they reveal to us, as it is sometimes said, the 
 " secret " of life, but because a knowledge of the chemical 
 processes involved in life (or, put differently, of the chem- 
 ical bases or conditions of life) is part, but not the whole, of 
 an adequate knowledge of life. Nor is biology in any way 
 inferior to chemistry and physics, because it uses them 
 ("depends" upon them, as it is sometimes ambiguously 
 expressed), so far as they are relevant for its purposes. Its 
 cognitive interest is centred, first and last, upon the study of 
 living beings, their structure, their growth, their behaviour. 
 Their characteristic nature as living clamours for recogni- 
 tion in specific concepts. This is the situation to which 
 the vitalist has the merit of calling attention, though he 
 misinterprets it when he invokes entelechies or what not. 
 This, again, is the situation which gives rise to the familiar 
 assertion that " no physico-chemical explanation of life is 
 possible ". Such an explanation is impossible, not because 
 
Ch.VI] MECHANISM AND VITALISM 151 
 
 of the operation of a vital force, but because, however de- 
 tailed and complete in itself, it would necessarily fail to 
 touch the specific character of vital phenomena. To repeat: 
 the principle of the autonomy of life, as here interpreted, 
 means, not vitalism, but teleology — and teleology as com- 
 patible with, but logically dominant over, mechanism in 
 biology. 
 
 This thesis may be challenged on the ground that it con- 
 flicts with the aspiration of science to achieve such an or- 
 ganisation of knowledge as shall enable it to deduce vital 
 phenomena from physico-chemical phenomena. Very com- 
 monly in recent literature this ability to deduce is identified 
 with an ability to predict, and neither is held to be possible 
 except on the basis of a mechanistic theory of nature. In 
 fact, the reduction of organic processes to inorganic proces- 
 ses is, according to this view, undertaken chiefly in the 
 hope that it will enable us from purely physico-chemical 
 data to deduce, i.e., to predict, vital phenomena say the be- 
 haviour of an animal in a definite situation. Thus Wilhelm 
 Roux, in his Entwicklungsmechanik, formulates the me- 
 chanistic programme in the words, "Das organische Ge- 
 schehen auf anorganische Wirkungsweisen zuriickzujiihren, 
 es in solche Wirkungsweisen zu zerlegen, zu analysieren." 
 So keen a student of mechanistic and vitaUstic theories as 
 A. O. Lovejoy expands this formula as follows: "In what 
 would a Zuritckfiihrung of biology to chemistry or physics 
 consist? It would consist in showing that a given organic 
 process A can be subsumed under and deduced from a given 
 generalisation B of the more " fundamental science." ^ In 
 another paper this is further expanded as follows: "What 
 the partisans of the doctrine of organic autonomy deny is 
 that you conceivably ever can, from a study of the laws 
 
 i Science, N. S., vol. xxxiii, no. 851, p. 611. 
 
152 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VI 
 
 of motion of inorganic particles, arrive at a law from which 
 you can predict how any living body will behave, even if 
 you know the number, size, arrangement and composition of 
 the particles composing that body." ^ 
 
 Before passing to the particular issue of the predictability 
 of organic phenomena, it may be as well to say something 
 about prediction in general, to which an altogether exag- 
 gerated importance is assigned in modern theories of the 
 function of science. Claude Bernard had a sounder view. 
 " Toute la philosophie naturelle," he writes, se resHtme en 
 cela: Connaitre la loi des phSnomenes. Tout le problems 
 experimental se riduit a ceci: Privoir et diriger les ph6- 
 nomenes." This distinction is surely well taken. It is a valu- 
 able corrective of the fashionable view which makes predic- 
 tion the main interest and business of science, and treats the 
 discovery of laws as nothing more than a means to predic- 
 tion. Indeed, we may go even further here than Claude 
 Bernard, and regard prediction, not as a co-ordinate aim of 
 science, but as incidental to the experimental discovery of 
 laws (in the process of verifying hj^otheses), and as domi- 
 nant only in the practical application of scientific knowledge 
 in industry. From this point of view, it is a mistake when 
 the t3T)ical formula for a scientific law: — If A, then B, is 
 read off as essentially a prediction: — If A happens, then B 
 will happen; or. If you do A, then you will get B. Funda- 
 mentally, a law is a statement of a functional correlation be- 
 tween variables. "If A, then B " means " A implies B ", 
 and there is no exclusive or essential reference in this form- 
 ula to the anticipation of future events. It would, more- 
 over, be wholly false to restrict science to a preoccupation 
 with the future. Science is as much interested in the past 
 as in the future, and its problems as often take the form 
 
 ''■Science, N. S., vol. xxxiv, no. 864, p. 78. Lovejoy's italics. 
 2 Introduction d I'etude de la Medicine Experimentale, p. 100. 
 
Ch. VI] MECHANISM AND VITALISM 153 
 
 of discovering the causes of given effects, as of predicting 
 the effects of given causes. And, lastly, the treatment of 
 an implication as a prediction is false, not only to the char- 
 acter of an implication, but also to the character of a 
 prediction. Prediction, in the proper sense, is not h5^othet- 
 ical, but categorical. You do not predict so long as you 
 merely say, // A, then B. But you do predict when you 
 say. Here is an ^, and in virtue of the law. If A, then B, I 
 infer that there will hea B. A law, in short, is not a predic- 
 tion, but may make a prediction possible when applied to 
 a particular case, or to put it differently, when a definite 
 value is given for one of the correlated variables. And even 
 then the correlation must be of the kind which involves 
 temporal sequence or order. 
 
 Prediction, then, is by no means identical with deduction 
 in general. It is a special case of deduction, possible only 
 under special conditions. Moreover, it owes its prominence 
 in the discussion of mechanism and vitalism to the fact 
 that the relation of biology to physics and chemistry, or of 
 organic to inorganic processes, is usually conceived, not' 
 merely as one of reduction, i.e., of subsumption of particular 
 under general, but as an evolutionary and, therefore, tem- 
 poral sequence. In this context we get the problem of the 
 origin of life, in the form whether from physico-chemical 
 data alone a Laplacean calculator could have deduced, i.e., 
 predicted, the future appearance upon this earth of living 
 beings. Or, more narrowly, could such a calculator, given 
 an exhaustive knowledge of the particles and forces in- 
 volved in the present position of a human body in its en- 
 vironment, predict the next movement of that body, e.g., 
 the words (articulatory movements) with which it is about 
 to break silence? ^ 
 
 1 1 agree whole-heartedly with the remarks of H. S. Jennings con- 
 cerning predictability in his paper "Life and Matter," originally 
 
iS4 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VI 
 
 Let us make the question even more precise by restrict- 
 ing it to the law of falling bodies, and giving it the form 
 of an imaginary experiment. Compare the fall, through 
 the same distance of space and under the same atmospheric 
 conditions, of two bodies which differ only in that the one is 
 lifeless, the other living, whilst they are alike in weight, 
 shape, surface-texture, and any other factors which affect 
 the rate of fall. Do you, as physicist, expect to find any 
 difference in the rate at which the falling body in each case 
 traverses the distance to the ground? If you find no dif- 
 ference in this respect, is the difference between being life- 
 less and alive relevant to you, as a physicist, at all? It 
 will not be part of the data which make the falling body a 
 " case " of your laws. Hence your laws are indifferent, or 
 neutral, to that difference. They hold equally in either case. 
 A living cat does not infringe or violate them. It does not 
 fall slower or faster than a dead one. Yet there is a dif- 
 ference, as we all know, not in the rate of fall, but in the 
 turnings by which the live cat lands on its feet and breaks 
 the fall, escaping injury and death, whereas the impact of 
 the dead cat involves contusions of the body and broken 
 bones. The point of the argument, if there is anything in 
 it, is simply this, that the physicist's data and laws abstract 
 from certain differences, which conslequently can neither be 
 subsumed under his laws nor predicted from them alone.^ 
 
 written for the fifth International Congress of Philosophy which, 
 owing to the war, was never held. The paper will be found in the 
 Johns Hopkins University Circular, N. S., 1914, no. 10. The refer- 
 ence is to p. 11. 
 
 1 Mention of " lifeless," in the sense of " dead," bodies suggests a 
 curious point, about the exact bearing of which I am neither clear 
 myself, nor are, so far as I can find, my biological authorities. If 
 we dichotomise bodies into living and non-living, organic and inor- 
 ganic, where do we put the bodies which are dead in the sense of 
 having lost their life, of having been alive and having died? Does 
 an animal or a plant by dying pass straightway into the same class 
 with bodies that are lifeless in the sense that neither life nor death 
 can be predicated of them? In short, death seems to fit awkwardly 
 into the tidy classification of organic and inorganic. The point has 
 
Ch.VI] MECHANISM AND VITALISM iSS 
 
 The conclusion which we would draw is that considera- 
 tions of this sort support our previous contention. The 
 biologist is interested in the study of living things, and hence 
 finds it convenient to divide all things in nature into those 
 which are living and those which are non-living.^ The in- 
 clusion in his field of study of some things, the exclusion 
 from it of others, depend upon the presence or absence of 
 the distinctive quality or character which we call " life ", and 
 which is empirically observable and recognisable. The phy- 
 sicist and the chemist are not interested in this character, 
 and its presence or absence is irrelevant to them. Hence 
 to them living bodies as much as lifeless bodies are physico- 
 chemical systems. But the biologist's interest in life makes 
 him interested also in the physico-chemical structures and 
 processes without which life is not found in our world. 
 Hence his point of view, in this respect, may be called 53^1- 
 thetic or synoptic. In any case, if our universe is to be 
 intellectually tidy and ordered, we need both points of view 
 as cumulative and supplementary, viz., the point of view 
 
 interesting ramifications. The biologist, in effect, ceases to be inter- 
 ested in an animal when it has died. It has ceased to " behave " and 
 to " respond " ; its organs have ceased to function ; the phenomena 
 of regulation, so important in the economy of life, no longer appear. 
 Yet would a physiologist necessarily agree to draw the line there? 
 I recall being shown as a student an elaborate and expensive apparatus 
 in the Physiological Laboratory at Oxford, used for experiments upon 
 eyes taken from dead frogs, the result being interpreted as bearing 
 on the question whether black is a positive sensation. It seemed to 
 me humorous, but mechanists may think the joke is on me. — If we 
 look in another direction, we find in the economy of nature that 
 dead organisms play an immensely important part as food for organ- 
 isms which are alive. Is not breathing almost the only exception to 
 the rule that, above the level of plants, living things absorb inorganic 
 substances only indirectly, by inflicting death on other living things 
 or living on things that have died? And to a large extent this is 
 true even of plants. 
 
 ^ It is perhaps not an unnecessary reminder, at least to those of us 
 who are unfamiliar with biology, but familiar with the history of 
 philosophical terms, that when biologists use " animate " as a synonym 
 of living or organic, and " inanimate " as a synonym of non-living 
 or inorganic, they do not identify life with the presence of an anima 
 or soul. They ring the changes on these terms simply to &void 
 monotony of style. 
 
iS6 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. VI 
 
 from which all bodies are physico-chemical systems, and 
 the point of view from which some are living and others 
 are not. There is, if we like to put it so, homogeneity and 
 continuity from one point of view, heterogeneity and discon- 
 tinuity from the other. But nothing is gained by ignoring 
 one of these two sides. 
 
 But this, it may be said, is incompatible with the unity 
 of science, which requires a determinism in homogeneous 
 terms, such as can be supplied only by a mechanistic theory, 
 i.e., a theory by which all qualitative differences are reduced 
 to, and explained in, terms of one kind only, and these ulti- 
 mately the terms of physics. The admission of non- 
 mechanistic concepts would destroy the determinism which 
 is essential to science in general and to experimentation in 
 particular. 
 
 The reply to this objection is, briefly, that our thesis not 
 only does not involve the surrender of determinism, rightly 
 interpreted, but meets all the logical requirements of the 
 situation. The main points may be summarised as follows. 
 (a) In the first place, we ought to distinguish between 
 determinism and mechanism. The determinism which is 
 identical with " reason " in science, and without which any 
 " rational " explanation of natural phenomena is rightly 
 said to be impossible, requires merely that every such phe- 
 nomenon shall be " determined by " some other phenomenon, 
 i.e., correlated with it according to a law. A mechanistic 
 theory is but a special form of this general principle 
 of determinism, deriving its specific character partly from 
 the introduction of a temporal factor (cause preceding ef- 
 fect), but more characteristically from the exclusive use of 
 physico-chemical terms, (b) Every law is a statement of an 
 implication between universals, or, in mathematical termin- 
 ology, of a functional correlation between variables. In the 
 
Ch. VI] MECHANISM AND VITALISM 157 
 
 natural sciences which deal with existences in time and 
 space, presented or presentable in the form of sense-data, all 
 universals have cases, or instances, or applications; all 
 variables have definite values, (c) But a unified theory of 
 nature does not require the reduction of all universals to 
 one kind, or the restriction of all variables to one type of 
 values. We have laws correlating geometrical, physical, 
 chemical phenomena among themselves in each group, as 
 well as laws correlating phenomena of one group with 
 those of another. There will then result a scheme, or an 
 order, in which differences are preserved and " saved ", in- 
 stead of being " reduced ", and in which a unified theory is 
 achieved by the correlation of different t5^es, or groups, 
 or levels, of phenomena which follow also among themselves 
 each its own characteristic laws, (d) We shall thus expect 
 to find what, indeed, we actually get in a large part of 
 biological work, viz., a determinism in terms which are 
 thoroughly teleological. Such a determinism will meet all 
 the requirements of what H. S. Jennings pleads for under 
 the names of " experimental determinism " or " radically 
 experimental analysis ".^ One might formulate the prin- 
 ciple of determinism as " every difference makes a differ- 
 ence ". This is nothing but functional correlation expressed 
 in other words. For, when two factors are correlated, a 
 change in one must involve a corresponding change in the 
 other — " corresponding ", whether or no the variations on 
 both sides are measurable and quantitatively determinable. 
 In scientific observation the rule of method is, given an ob- 
 served difference A to search for some other observable dif- 
 ference B, such that A is present where B is present, absent 
 when B is absent, and varies concomitantly with the varia- 
 
 1 See his contribution to the discussion, Philosophical Review, Vol. 
 xxvii, No. 6, pp. 592 ff ; also his article ■ on Driesch's Vitalism and 
 Experimental Determinism in Science, vol. xxxvi, p. 434. 
 
158 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VI 
 
 tions of B. This is the elementary ABC of induction. Ex- 
 perimentation applies the same principle by artificially in- 
 troducing, removing, or varying B so as to study its correla- 
 tion with A. As H. S. Jennings says — in complete accord 
 with the teachings of logicians on this point — the whole 
 " organisation " of experience by " discovery of correspond- 
 ence in diversities " depends on this principle.^ (e) The 
 only point of refinement which we may, perhaps, claiih to 
 add to the above account is the insistence on what we have 
 ventured to call the " logical dominance " of the character- 
 istic concepts and laws of biology, on the ground that bio- 
 logy deals with structures and processes which have, in- 
 deed, their physico-chemical aspect, but cannot be reduced 
 to exclusively physico-diemical terms without sacrificing 
 precisely what makes them distinctive. 
 
 It remains to say a few words in defence of teleology 
 and of the language of "purpose," by ridding the latter 
 term of certain associations, the presence of which makes 
 it unwelcome to scientists, and which are not required by 
 the facts. 
 
 " Purpose " is objectionable, because it suggests the 
 activity of a scheming or designing intelligence where no 
 evidence of such is found. To talk of purposes in nature 
 at once gives rise to the suspicion that their admission is 
 to be exploited, as in the old Argument from Design, in 
 the interests of an anthropomorphic deity; that intelligible 
 law is to be replaced by an unintelligible will. But our 
 plea here is that the terms can be freed from these impli- 
 cations and made scientifically useful. A transition can 
 be made from " efficient " to " final " causes by the simple 
 reminder, that a nexus of cause and effect can also be taken 
 
 1 Life and Matter, p. 6 et passim. Cf. also the general position out- 
 lined there on pp. lO-ll. 
 
Ch.VI] MECHANISM AND VITALISM 1S9 
 
 as a nexus of means and end, whenever the effect has value. 
 A natural law neither demands nor forbids the introduction 
 of the concept of value, and is, therefore, entirely com- 
 patible with it, if the empirical facts should demand it. 
 Some modern writers, indeed, would limit the application 
 of the concept of value to whatever is desired. Things, 
 they say, become valuable, or acquire value, by being de- 
 sired. But, again, it is not in this sense that the term 
 " value " is to be employed here. When biological science 
 speaks of conditions as " beneficial " or " harmful " for the 
 organism; when it calls some chemical substances " foods," 
 others " waste-products "; when it speaks of the " func- 
 tion " of an organ, or through the concept of " organisa- 
 tion " interprets the parts in the light of the whole; when, 
 in dealing with " growth," " behaviour," " reproduction," 
 etc., it applies the concept of the maintenance or develop- 
 ment of each characteristic type of living structure — its 
 language is full of the kind of teleology which the term 
 " value," or, if it be preferred, " objective value," is here 
 intended to cover. Wherever, broadly speaking, the facts 
 challenge us to say, not merely that B is the effect of A, 
 but that B is the reason why, or that for the sake of which, 
 A exists or occurs, there we have the immanent purposive- 
 ness of living things. To introduce here the analogy of 
 human purposes, i.e., to suppose the existence of these 
 structures, the occurrence of these activities and function- 
 ings, to have been preceded by a desire for their existence or 
 occurrence, or by a conscious design, plan, scheme, first 
 thought out and then realised by the manipulation of means, 
 would be misleading and irrelevant. No living thing begins 
 by planning or desiring its own existence, its own form and 
 function. No organism grows and lives according to a pre- 
 conceived specification, building up its body like a builder 
 working to a design, or like a tailor working to a pattern. 
 
i6o CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Cii.VI 
 
 "No living thing", we said. And this covers not only 
 plants and animals, but man. For, though we may claim 
 each to be " master of his fate," yet for all the planning 
 that we do, for all the efforts that we make to guide our- 
 selves and our world towards desired results, we tend vastly 
 to overrate the part that desiring and scheming play in 
 making us and our world what they are. Conscious choice, 
 intelligent control, art, mask but do not displace the im- 
 manent and unconscious purposiveness which the lives of 
 individuals and societies exhibit, and which is discernible 
 even through their misfits and failures. 
 
 When we ask what character in natural objects, or in 
 nature as a whole, exhibits this immanent purposiveness, 
 this " design," most clearly, the answer must surely be that 
 it is organisation — not merely in the static sense of a sys- 
 tematic structure of differentiated parts, but in the dynamic 
 sense of this structure at work and functioning as a whole, 
 responding through its organs (which are very literally 
 " instruments ") to its environment, adapting that environ- 
 ment to itself and itself to it. A purposive structure, in 
 Kant's famous phrase, is one in which parts and whole are 
 reciprocally means and ends. The subordination of the 
 parts to the whole lies precisely in that delicate mutual 
 adjustment of the parts which, in respect of their function- 
 ing, we call regulative, and which in form as well as in 
 function yields the characteristic individuality — one might 
 almost say, using the word in the artistic sense, " the effect " 
 — of each living thing. Aristotle went straight to the heart 
 of the matter when he compared this organisation of each 
 living thing to the order of a commonwealth. "And the 
 animal organism must be conceived after the similitude of a 
 well-governed commonwealth. When order is once estab- 
 lished in it, there is no more need of a separate monarch to 
 preside over each several task. The individuals each play 
 
Ch. VI] MECHANISM AND VITALISM i6i 
 
 their assigned part as it is ordered, and one thing follows 
 another in its accustomed order. So in animals there is 
 the same orderliness — nature taking the place of custom and 
 each part naturally doing its work as nature has composed 
 them." ^ We have here clearly what in the language of 
 modern biology is expressed as " the conception of the living 
 thing as an autonomous unit in which every part is func- 
 tionally related to every other and exists as the servant of 
 the whole ".^ 
 
 And yet living beings are also constantly spoken of as 
 " living machines " and their organs as " mechanisms " for 
 doing this or that. Whence it is a short step to the demand 
 for an exclusively " mechanical " explanation. But a brief 
 reflection on the concept of a machine will both account for 
 the plausibility of this language and yet lend support to 
 our view. It is surely a startling paradox that machines, 
 which, as human tools for human ends, are more patently 
 purposive than anj^ing else in the world, being artefacts 
 of human design, should have furnished by analogy the 
 concepts which are used to shut out from the purview of 
 science, not merely conscious design, but the immanent pur- 
 posiveness exhibited in organisation and regulation. Yet a 
 machine is nothing if not organised, and frequently it is 
 fitted with devices for regulating its own workings. It is, in 
 fact, like an organism, a systematic structure of differenti- 
 ated parts with differentiated functions. It was this un- 
 canny likeness of machines to organisms which suggested 
 Samuel Butler's brilliant fancy, in Erewhon, of a revolt of 
 machines against man, their maker, the intelligence em- 
 bodied in them making itself, as it were, independent. What 
 
 1 Henderson has done a real service in reminding us of this passage 
 in his Order of Nature, p. 16 ; Arist., De Part. An., 64Sa, 20. 
 
 2 Henderson, ibid., p. 21. "Functionally related" in this context 
 must be taken to bear both the mathematical and the teleological sense. 
 The two senses correspond to cause-effect, means-end respectively. 
 
i62 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VI 
 
 is it that enables science to borrow from so purposeful and 
 highly organised a thing as a machine the concepts for deal- 
 ing with the non-purposive and inorganic? The answer 
 would seem to be this. A machine, just because as a human 
 tool it exists, not for its own sake, but for the sake of some- 
 thing other than itself, makes it easy to abstract from its 
 purpose and to consider its organised structure as simply 
 a system of particles and forces, undergoing transformations 
 according to purely physical laws. A physicist, whom we 
 will suppose ignorant of the purpose of a watch, might still 
 be able to analyse it as a mechanism and to explain just why 
 this intricate arrangement of toothed wheels and other 
 devices, operated by a spring, must effect the rotation of 
 two hands, each at its own uniform speed, but one twelve 
 times as fast as the other. So far the mechanistic point of 
 view, with its cause-effect principle, might carry him, nor 
 need he know the end to which the whole arrangement is the 
 means. Now, if it is easy to analyse a machine which has a 
 purpose as if it had none, because its purpose is " external " 
 to its own existence, it is even easier to ignore the imma- 
 nent purposiveness of an organism, which is not obviously 
 an instrument for anything. Thus, by a similar abstraction 
 from their teleological character, organism and machine can 
 be analysed, as if neither exhibited any characters except 
 those of which we take account when we study them as 
 physico-chemical systems. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 MECHANISM AND VITALISM: FURTHER PROBLEMS. 
 
 Broadly speaking, the argument of the preceding essay has 
 been built upon nothing more recondite than the two prin- 
 ciples of the autonomy of each science within its own field, 
 and of the order of sciences which results from the fact 
 that one science may be, as we called it, " logically domi- 
 nant" over another. The science which is higher in this 
 sense makes a subsidiary use of the more general prin- 
 ciples and theories of the lower, whilst maintaining through- 
 out the characteristic concepts appropriate to its own more 
 special and distinctive phenomena. In this way, so we had 
 urged, the order of the sciences corresponds to, and reflects, 
 the way in which in the " order of nature " phenomena of 
 a higher level or tj^pe are, as it were, superimposed on 
 phenomena of a lower ts^pe, whilst being at the same time 
 conditioned by the latter, in the sense that without these 
 latter the former are not found to occur. The relationships 
 here involved seem peculiar, and none of the familiar meta- 
 phors or analogies appear to fit them. So far as the higher 
 phenomena are conditioned by the lower — ^have in the lower 
 their sine qua non — there is, if we like to say so, a " corre- 
 lation." Yet this term, with its suggestion of a parallelism, 
 or one-to-one correspondence, does not really hit off the 
 way in which, e.g., in breathing, the physical process of in- 
 flating and deflating the lungs, and the chemical process of 
 oxidising the blood, are subservient to, are means for secur- 
 ing, an effect which is " beneficial " to the organism, or, 
 in other words, a necessary element in its total self-main- 
 tenance. The teleological character which is dominant, and 
 
 163' 
 
i64 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VII 
 
 is taken for granted when we talk of " breathing," instead 
 of talking merely of " oxidisation," or of sucking air into 
 a bag and expelling it again, depends on considering the 
 function of the process in the life-economy of the organism, 
 the importance of the part it plays in the creature's self- 
 maintenance; in short, its value. The recognition of this 
 situation, so we had argued, is required in order to " save," 
 as elements in an inclusive world-view, both the appearances 
 which we call " mechanical," and those which we call 
 " teleological." For the lower science the phenomena of the 
 higher are merely another set of " cases " falling under its 
 general principles, but precisely for this reason the lower 
 science is completely incapable of dealing with what is 
 distinctive and unique in the phenomena of the higher. 
 This is why there is no a priori way of " deducing " the 
 higher phenomena from the principles of the lower. When 
 the higher phenomena are met with, they are always found, 
 not only to be consistent with the laws of the lower, but 
 also to require the existence of the lower phenomena for 
 their own existence. But no knowledge merely of the lower 
 phenomena would make possible a purely deductive " antici- 
 pation of nature " — a prevision of teleological structures 
 at a time when none had as yet made their appearance in 
 nature. 
 
 The present essay is to be devoted to a further examina- 
 tion of certain aspects of the problem — aspects which run, in 
 a tantalising way, through all the current discussions of 
 mechanism, vitalism, and teleology, without being, as a rule, 
 explicitly focused so that their bearing on the resulting 
 theory may be clearly perceived. We shall discuss these 
 aspects most conveniently under the following three head- 
 ings: 
 
 (i) The concept of machine in its relation to mechanical 
 theory. 
 
Ch.VIIl MECHANISM AND VITALISM (Cont.) i6s 
 
 (2) The " scientific " and the " romantic " points of view, 
 with special reference to the ideal of " logical continuity." 
 
 (3) The empirical basis of teleology as applied to life.'^ 
 
 (i) First, then, we take up the concepts of machine and 
 mechanism. " The living body in general, and the human 
 body in particular, obviously acts in some respects like a 
 mechanism, while in other respects it appears to act dif- 
 ferently." With these words, Mr. L. T. Hobhouse, one of 
 the Aristotelian symposiasts,^ opens his contribution. Pres- 
 ently he goes on: " The characteristics of mechanism can be 
 seen in a man-made machine," and after some discussion he 
 sums them up in the formula, " A whole is mechanical when 
 and in so far as its parts act uniformly in response to the 
 forces operating in each of them, not varying in relation 
 to the results of this action or to the state of other parts." 
 The force of the negatives in this account will be appreciated 
 by comparison with the formula for an "organic whole," 
 viz., " A whole acts organically when and in so far as the 
 operation of any part is varied in accordance with the re- 
 quirements of the whole as a self-maintaining structure." 
 The crucial point of observation behind the contrasting 
 formulae appears to lie in a comparison between what hap- 
 pens when a living organism and a man-made machine, 
 respectively, get out of order. Supply motive power to a 
 machine out of order and, so far as it works, or rather 
 moves, at all, " each several part acts uniformly without 
 relation to the rest in response to the forces operating upon 
 it, whatever they may be." Disorder, in short, reveals the 
 characteristic principle on which the working of a machine 
 even in order depends, but which is there disguised by the 
 
 iSee the Note at the end of this f^say for a brief discussion of 
 the problem of the origin of life, with special reference to Bergson's 
 ilan vital. 
 
 2 See note at the beginning of the preceding essay, p. 141. 
 
i66 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VII 
 
 fact that the human designer and maker has so arranged 
 the parts and forces in their " normal " state, that, though 
 " each acts uniformly without relation to the rest in re- 
 sponse to the forces operating upon it," they yet together 
 produce the result which the designer wants. A living 
 organism out of order — short of the degree of disorder 
 which results in death — struggles back to order and normal 
 functioning, or as near to these as it can. Its structures 
 are so arranged, and their functions so regulated, that it 
 keeps itself in order and, when injured or disturbed, re- 
 stores itself to order. A machine out of order loses the co- 
 operation of its parts, nor can it, by itself, restore or recover 
 that cooperation. It ceases to function as a " whole," where 
 the character of wholeness consists in producing the result 
 for which it is the instrument, in doing what it is designed 
 to do and what, in good order, it actually does. An organ- 
 ism out of order, short of death, never ceases completely to 
 function as a whole, though the character of wholeness here 
 can be defined only as that self-maintenance, that perform- 
 ing of the characteristic cycle of activities, in which the 
 life of each kind of creature consists. The cooperation of 
 the parts, though disturbed, is not lost. Regulatory ad- 
 justments take place which enable as much of the normal 
 life-economy to be carried on as possible, and which tend to 
 restore it to full normality. 
 
 Something like this, in fact and theory, seems to be in- 
 volved for Hobhouse in the difference between living or- 
 ganism and man-made machine. 
 
 With more elaborate scientific detail, the same contrast 
 runs through the argument of another one of the symposi- 
 asts. Dr. J. S. Haldane, the well-known physiologist. " A 
 living organism," he writes, " differs in this respect from 
 any mechanism we can construct or conceive, that it forms 
 itself and keeps itself in working order and activity." The 
 
Ch.VII] MECHANISM AND VITALISM (Cont.) 167 
 
 moral which Haldane does not hesitate to draw, with a 
 lengthy illustration from the stages in the development of 
 the kinetic theory of gases, is that the scope of the mechani- 
 cal theory is limited to what we can " construct and con- 
 ceive," and that, even as applied to infra-organic, purely 
 physical and chemical, entities and processes in nature, it 
 is no more than a useful "short-cut," a convenient, but 
 highly abstract, working-hypothesis, the formulae of which 
 are " imperfect representations " even of the behaviour of 
 molecules. " The abstract mechanical conception of a mole- 
 cule is unreal." "We cannot sum up the properties of 
 molecules in the conception of mass, extension, and central 
 forces proportionate to mass, in accordance with the funda- 
 mental physical conceptions of Newton." The very progress 
 of physical chemistry, he claims, is constantly sharpen- 
 ing and justif5dng the distinction between what is living 
 and what is non-living. His main arguments^ in support 
 of this claim are the following two: (a) Physiological 
 processes once thought capable of a simple and easy 
 mechanical explanation, have for modern research turned 
 out to be so complex, that the probability of a mechanical 
 explanation sufficing is fast disappearing. " On the whole 
 there is no evidence of real progress towards a mechanistic 
 explanation of life." (b) " The idea of a mechanism which 
 is constantly maintaining or reproducing its own structure 
 is self-contradictory," for a mechanical explanation must 
 assume, as given, a fixed system of interacting parts,, and 
 such a system can neither itself grow, nor out of a tiny 
 speck of itself give rise to another system of the same sort. 
 The growth of a crystal is no point to the contrary, no valid 
 link between the living and the non-living, for " the arrange- 
 
 1 We omit here his general philosophical argument that " the physical 
 and biological worlds are only abstractions from the objective world," 
 i.e., " the world as interpreted in knowledge," or, in other words, that 
 they represent degrees of approximation to a complete theory of reality. 
 
i68 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VII 
 
 ment of the molecules in the crystal is mere repetition, 
 whereas in the organism there is individual variety of detail, 
 and yet perfectly definite and specific unity of plan." This , 
 is clearly Haldane's version of Bergson's point that, for 
 mechanism, " tout est donne" and of Driesch's distinction 
 between mechanism and an " equipotential system." It may 
 be recalled here to what an extent Driesch, in building up 
 the concept of an equipotential system, relies on argument 
 concerning what a machine can, or cannot, do. 
 
 The challenge of these views is taken up in the Aristote- 
 lian symposium by Professor Thompson who, adding to an 
 equally sound scientific equipment the sure instinct of the 
 practised debater, makes the following points in reply: (i) 
 man-made machines have been equipped with devices, how- 
 ever crude, for self-regulation, such as, in infinitely greater 
 variety, complexity, and delicacy, we find in natural ma- 
 chines. " In Nature herself, if we look at her larger handi- 
 work, self-regulation and self-maintenance become para- 
 mount attributes and characteristics of her machines. The 
 solar system, qua mechanism, is the perfect specimen, the 
 very t3^e and norm, of a self-maintaining, self-regulating 
 mechanism; and so also, grade after grade, are its dependent 
 mechanisms, such as the world-wide currents of the at- 
 mosphere." This amounts to an assimilation of man-made 
 machines and living organisms. The latter are viewed as 
 more perfect machines — ^patterns, as it were, to the perfec- 
 tion of which human machines but remotely approximate. 
 (2) The same assimilation, the same " community of prin- 
 ciples in the two classes of machines," is supported by the 
 actual and fruitful interchange of observations and ideas be- 
 tween the workers in ordinary physics and chemistry and 
 those in biological chemistry and physiology. Physiologists, 
 from their study of the "physiological machine," have 
 helped to collect evidence for, and formulate, the principles 
 
Ch.VII] MECHANISM AND VITALISM (Cont.) 169 
 
 of the conservation of energy. It was a botanist who intro- 
 duced osmosis to the attention of physicists. (3) " Mecha- 
 nism is not a stationary concept but a growing one ": its 
 apparatus of concepts and principles is constantly expand- 
 ing as further research reveals previously undreamt-of 
 complexities. The concept of " matter " has recently under- 
 gone, and is still undergoing, profound modifications, but the 
 new concept is still "commensurate with the old" — its 
 fundamental character is still "mechanical."^ 
 
 What emerges from this confrontation of witnesses on 
 what a machine can or cannot do? The outcome of a judi- 
 cial summing up would seem to be this: — 
 
 If by " mechanism " we mean the theory of " machines," 
 the only question is, which among the objects in the world, 
 and in respect of what properties and activities, are to be 
 counted as machines? This, be it noted, is not a question to 
 be answered by an a priori definition. The actual procedure 
 of science is not now, and never has been, to inscribe first, 
 as it were on a tabula rasa, a neat definition of what char- 
 acters anything is to possess which is rightly to be called a 
 " machine." The actual procedure is to compare and analyse 
 objects, tracing affinities, noting differences, and thus collect, 
 or, if we like to say so, construct, the concept or definition 
 of a machine. Now the whole issue is, technically, whether 
 certain affinities are to prevail over certain differences. If 
 with Hobhouse and, on the whole, with Haldane, we collect 
 our concept from man-made machines, the obvious differ- 
 
 1 Here, as beforeTvre omit Professor Thompson's general philosophr 
 ical position, which is built on two principles, viz., (a) a dualism of 
 "matter" and "mind" (consciousness), biology being "the study of 
 the forms, whether gross or molecular, assumed by matter in the 
 fabric of living things, and all the changes, processes, activities asso- 
 ciated therewith, so far . . . as we can study them apart from 
 Consciousness, or 'conscious reactions'"; (6) a conviction that 
 mechanism, though "but one aspect of the world," is a "glorious" 
 aspect, and the study of it is one way of nourishing the "faith that 
 the world is good." 
 
I70 Contemporary metaphysics [Ch.vii 
 
 ences between them and living creatures forbid, of course, 
 the application of the machine-theory to the latter, for all 
 that they are both " physical bodies." If with Thompson 
 we start out by collecting our concept of machiae from liv- 
 ing creatures, we shall, of course, credit machines with the 
 power to do whatever we find living creatures doing, and 
 man-made machines will seem only poor caricatures of the 
 marvels of Nature. Indeed, if it were not for Thompson's 
 capricious retention of the dualism of matter and mind, 
 there would be no reason why he should not acknowledge 
 the existence of thinking and talking, empire-building, 
 war-making, railroad-conducting, stockmarket-operating 
 machines of Nature, as well as of self-reproducing and self- 
 maintaining ones.^ If a machine can do whatever a physical 
 body does, then whatever human beings do, enlarges our con- 
 cept of machine. La Mettrie's L'homme machine, like the 
 Mecanique humaine with which Thompson would like to 
 parallel the astronomer's Micanique celeste, loses all its 
 " materialistic " terrors if we credit the human machine, not 
 only with physiological functions, but with art and science, 
 religion and morality. Nothing but prejudice can put a stop 
 to this extension of the machine-concept, though strangely 
 enough the defenders of a mechanical theory of living bodies 
 generally lose interest in their theory at this point. The 
 reason is that, at bottom, the issue is not what a machine 
 can or cannot do, but what physics and chemistry can or 
 cannot do in the way of explaining the structure and be- 
 haviour of living beings. To this point we shall turn in a 
 moment. Meanwhile, it is clear that the controversy about 
 machines is bound to be indecisive, so long as the one party 
 to the dispute tends to shrink the concept of machine to 
 
 ilf self-reproducing, then marrying; if marrying, then, perhaps, 
 loving; if self-maintaining, then eating; if eating, then, perhaps en- 
 joying food and elaborating the arts of cookery. Why ignore these 
 obvious glories of human machines? 
 
Ch.VII] MECHANISM AND VITALISM (Cont.) 171 
 
 structures which human beings have planned and made, 
 whilst the other expands it to cover every natural body or 
 system of bodies, from the solar system to the human frame.^ 
 Incidentally, there is a further ambiguity involved, when the 
 difference between machines and organisms is treated as 
 coinciding with the difference between the " non-living " 
 (or " dead ") and the " living." The latter distinction cor- 
 responds properly to that between the inorganic and the 
 organic in Nature, conceived ad hoc as exclusive of human 
 artefacts. The assimilation of Nature in her inorganic or 
 non-living aspects — air, sea, mountains, or, more scien- 
 tifically, the physicist's " matter " and the chemist's " ele- 
 ments " — to man-made machines is utterly inappropriate, 
 for it looks only to the materials of which the machine is 
 constructed and the forces which work it, not to its struc- 
 ture, i.e., to the organisation of these materials and forces 
 for a purpose. In short, man-made machines are non-living, 
 considered simply as material objects, but they are organic 
 like organisms, considered in respect of their structure and 
 function. Strictly, they do not fit into any classification 
 of natural bodies, unless we bring them in, by an extension 
 of the concept of living body, as detached organs (so to 
 say), or tools, fashioned by living bodies for the more 
 efiicient securing of their self-maintenance. 
 
 And so we come back to the point that " mechanism " 
 puts us on a false track if it leads us to argue about what is, 
 or is not, a machine. The real issue is, as we said just now, 
 what in Nature can, and what cannot, be explained in 
 terms of the concepts of physics and chemistry. Mecha- 
 nism, or the mechanical theory means, in short, a physico- 
 chemical theory. And " explanation," as we need hardly 
 
 ^Cf. Professor W. T. Marvin's examination of the argument that 
 it is inconceivable that a machine should do what a living being does. 
 Philosophical Review, vol. xxvii, no. 6, p. 624. 
 
172 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VII 
 
 add after what has been said in the preceding essay, does 
 not mean " deducing," in the sense of " predicting," par- 
 ticular phenomena, but the recognition of a phenomenon, 
 when presented, as a case falling under the laws of physics 
 and chemistry. Now if we are to call any object a " ma- 
 chine," and any process a " mechanical " process, so far 
 as they can thus be treated as cases for the application of 
 physico-chemical theory, then quite obviously man-made 
 machines are only in part " mechanical." So far from vio- 
 lating, they conform to every physico-chemical law of 
 which account has been taken in their construction, but 
 this " taking account " of laws discovered by scientific re- 
 search can as little be formulated in physico-chemical 
 terms, as can the purpose which a machine embodies, or 
 its usefulness in the economy of human life. And so, again, 
 living beings in general, and human beings in particular, 
 may be studied as " physico-chemical machines," to borrow 
 the favourite phrase of Loeb and other enthusiastic mecha- 
 nists, but our mechanists seem to think that when they 
 have shown that, say, thinking cannot go on without physico- 
 chemical processes in the brain, they have shown that it is 
 identical with these processes, in the sense of being " noth- 
 ing but" such processes and exhaustively describable in 
 terms of them. Against these mistaken claims, those biolo- 
 gists cannot help being in the right who point out, that a 
 theory based on actual observation of the behaviour of living 
 beings in their natural environment, must yield a working 
 concept of life not expressed in physico-chemical terms. 
 Thompson, surely, hits off the actual position of the biologi- 
 cal sciences happily and accurately when he writes: " For 
 the ' ordinary naturalist ', the ordinary student of beast and 
 bird, specific difference, if not all in all, is the cardinal 
 concept; for all he cares, for all he sometimes knows, the 
 tissue and the cell are concepts which might never have 
 
Ch.VII] MECHANISM AND VITALISM (Cont.) 173 
 
 been devised. The comparative anatomist or the mor- 
 phologist deal with larger units, and care little about the dif- 
 ference between a blackbird and a thrush, a robin and a 
 wren. The physiologist deals with still larger groups: the 
 cell and the tissue are his especial themes, and most (though 
 of course not all) of the lessons which he learns are les- 
 sons common to and taught by the study of a very few 
 ' t5TDes ', such as man, the rabbit, and the frog. The work- 
 ing hj^otheses of (say) the ornithologist are certainly not 
 mechanical, they are very largely teleological; the ordinary 
 working hypotheses of the physiologist are, in the great 
 majority of cases, distinctly mechanical, and include and 
 practically coincide with those of the physicist and the 
 chemist." This corresponds to the position throughout main- 
 tained in these essays. The concepts of physics and chemis- 
 try, being abstract, are also general; hence, the living and 
 the non-living alike present " cases " for their application. 
 But the characteristic appearances of life in the structure 
 and behaviour of living things are not adequately expressed 
 by such concepts, not even though, like Loeb, one put the 
 organism " as a whole " into the title of one's book.^ Hen- 
 derson hits the nail on the head so far as the characteristic 
 " pattern," or " organisation," of living beings is concerned, 
 when he points out that both in form and function organisms 
 possess a pattern, that the study of patterns is ignored, in 
 the main, by physics and chemistry, and therefore by the 
 orthodox mechanistic philosophy built on them, and that " a 
 mechanistic philosophy which leaves organisation out is 
 meaningless." ^ Why should we not be willing to recognise 
 that, whilst all living bodies illustrate and verify physico- 
 chemical truths, many of which have been discovered only 
 
 1 See Jacques Loeb, The Organism as a Whole from a Physico- 
 Chemical View-point. 
 
 2 See his contribution to the Mechanism and Vitalism discussion in 
 Philosophical Review, Vol. xxvii. No. 6, pp. 571-76. 
 
174 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VII 
 
 by the study of living bodies, yet there are also truths to be 
 discovered about them which are not dreamt of by, nor ex-, 
 pressible in the language of, physicist or chemist? Philoso- 
 phy can render at least this service to science in this debate, 
 that it justifies, in the interests of systematic knowledge, 
 equally those who explore the physico-chemical principles 
 which are common to both the non-living and the living, 
 and those who, observing the differences between the non- 
 living and the living, study the latter as living and build 
 up an autonomous biological theory with characteristic 
 concepts and laws of its own. We look for order in the uni- 
 verse, but why should that order consist exclusively in prin- 
 ciples of one kind, and that kind " mechanical," in the sense 
 of " physico-chemical " ? 
 
 (2) The question we have just asked cuts very deep into 
 the contrast between two points- of view, two methods of 
 dealing theoretically with natural phenomena, which it has 
 become fashionable in recent literature to label, respectively, 
 " scientific " and " romantic." In part the contrast between 
 them is described as one between two tempers of mind; in 
 part it flows from two different concepts and ideals of logic. 
 Let us consider each of them in turn. 
 
 (a) The scientific temper of mind is commonly identified 
 with " naturalism " or " positivism ", the romantic with 
 " supernaturalism " or " transcendentalism." Here is a 
 typical utterance: "There have been, are, and always will 
 be, dispositions reluctant to picture a Universe unsustained 
 by creative will. ' Creative will ' assumes many phases, 
 philosophically indifferent. It may be presented as God or 
 gods, entelechy, or vital spark, but is something beyond pre- 
 diction or control, the subject of observation, not of experi- 
 ment. Belief in it is an expression at once of man's humility 
 and of man's pride; an admission of the limits of our in- 
 
Ch.VII] MECHANISM AND VITALISM (Cont.) 175 
 
 telligence, and a soothing exaltation of what is beyond our 
 intelligence" — thus Dr. P. Chalmers Mitchell, the fourth 
 of the Aristotelian symposiasts. The same contrast between 
 temperaments, dispositions, motives is insisted upon, among 
 tjie leaders of the discussion of the American Philosophical 
 Association, by Professor W. T. Marvin.^ He opposes 
 "modern science" to "modern romanticism"; the belief 
 that the Universe is " logically continuous " and, ultimately, 
 " mathematical," to the belief that the universe is " alogi- 
 cal " and best described " in such pre-scientific language as 
 that of the layman, the poet, and the animist." The ideal 
 of logical continuity requires, according to his analysis, as 
 the main principles of scientific method, (i) determinism; 
 (2) analysis of the complex into the simple; (3) the paucity, 
 and (4) the mutual independence of the ultimate simples. 
 The result is the ideal of a logical order of sciences 
 amounting to one single deductive science, " in which all the 
 special sciences or bodies of explanation follow from logi- 
 cally prior sciences and these ultimately from mathematical 
 sciences." Into such a scheme, a vitalistic theory after the 
 maimer of Driesch or Bergson will not fit. The elan vital, 
 the " entelechy," cannot be " explained," i.e., deduced from 
 physico-chemical premises. They can only be " intuited." 
 They are " indeterministic." They are incurably " roman- 
 tic " concepts. They are the modern descendants of primi- 
 tive magic and animism. Indeed, their vice goes deeper 
 still. It is not merely intellectual, it is moral. These 
 theories offend, not merely by being unscientific, but by 
 being demoralising. They are s3miptoms of "weakness, 
 fatigue, dependence, wajnsrardness, and failure," whereas 
 the scientific attitude is one of " vigour, independence, and 
 mastery." They are the creed of the " quitter " who wants 
 peace and rest through reliance on non-human powers, in 
 
 "^Philosophical Review, vol. xxvii, No. 6, pp. 616-627. 
 
176 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VII 
 
 short, on a protecting deity, whereas science calls to man 
 to be a master of his destiny, and preaches " the religion 
 of effort, and of self-confidence." ^ 
 
 This reading of science as expressive of a particular in- 
 tellectual and moral disposition which is to be contrasted 
 with, and valued more highly than, the poetical, romantic, 
 religious disposition, is still so common, and at the same 
 time so at variance with the point of view maintained in 
 these essays, that it is worth while to disentangle the truth 
 from the bias in this whole estimate, especially in order to 
 bring clearly into the focus of the discussion what is, at 
 bottom, the one issue of genuine philosophical interest, viz., 
 what method of saving the appearances realises best the 
 ideal of " logical continuity." 
 
 Now the antithesis of " naturalism " or " science ", and 
 " supernaturalism " or " animism ", especially when con- 
 sidered in the context of the history of our civilisation, is 
 justified up to a point, viz., as a statement of the fact that 
 physics and chemistry have achieved their " autonomy " 
 (as we have called it) as sciences precisely by their em- 
 ancipation from animistic and theological principles of ex- 
 
 1 C/. loc cit., " If science wins, the world will prove to be one in 
 which man is thrown entirely upon his own resources and skill, upon 
 his self-control, courage, and strength, and perhaps upon his ability 
 to be happy by adjusting himself to pitiless fact. If science fails, 
 there is room for the childlike hope that unseen powers may come 
 to the relief of human weakness. If science wins, the world is the 
 necessary consequences of logically related facts, and man's enter- 
 prise, in Huxley's figure of speech, is the playing of a game of chess 
 against an opponent who himself never errs and never overlooks our 
 errors. If science fails, the world resembles fairyland, as matter 
 of great anthropological and psychological importance; and man's en- 
 terprise either is no longer a task for skill and knowledge or is 
 conditioned by the ' goodness ' of man's will or is in part a game of 
 luck. Historically considered, the wish behind the belief in the vic- 
 tory of science is the motive prominently manifested in civilization 
 in general, and in particular in vigorous, progressive, and youthful 
 periods of history ; whereas the wish behind the belief in the defeat of 
 science is the motive markedly manifested in a people's childhood and' 
 old age, in general in savagedom and in periods of decadence or 
 defeat." 
 
Ch.VII] MECHANISM AND VITALISM (CoM^) 177 
 
 planation. " The " mechanical theory of nature " is nothing 
 but the triumphant declaration of this autonomy, its magna 
 charta, its bill of rights. The ramifications of this develop- 
 ment in the history of European thought are as wide-spread 
 as they are often subtle and indirect. With almost theatrical 
 eclat it is advertised in Laplace's famous retort to Napo- 
 leon I, " Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis ", viz., the 
 h)TDothesis of God for the explanation of the solar system. 
 More subtly it appears in the way in which the fundamental 
 concepts of the mechanical theory have been stripped of 
 all anthropomorphic colouring. " Cause " no longer con- 
 notes " activity ", but only " invariable succession " or 
 " uniformity of correlation according to law ". A fortiori, 
 there has disappeared, along with " activity ", all reference 
 to " will ", and through will, to " purpose ", " design ", " in- 
 telligence ". Moreover, this tendency has operated, not only 
 in the direction of the extrusion of " God ", but, what is 
 perhaps more remarkable, it has deepened the dualistic 
 breach between body and soul, matter and consciousness. 
 Animal and human minds are, in themselves, far less ob- 
 jectionable to the mechanist than either an omnipotent 
 divine creator, or capricious spirits or demons which are 
 supposed to manifest themselves in all natural phenomena, 
 and are but precariously controllable by prayer, sacrifice, 
 and incantation. Compared with these, human " souls ", at 
 any rate, seem facts of normal, natural experience. But 
 even they remain awkward appendages to the mechanistic 
 universe, and many are the devices for making that universe 
 immune against them, for sterilising them as it were, and 
 avoiding at all costs the necessity of admitting their effi- 
 ciency as verae causae. The fear seems to be that, if con- 
 sciousness is admitted to be effective anjwhere, to be 
 among the causal antecedents of any physical changes, it 
 may, in principle, be effective everjrwhere. Hence safety 
 
178 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VII 
 
 is sought by excluding it root and branch. Thus we get 
 Thompson's striking exclusion of " consciousness " from 
 the field of biology. Thus arises the fashion, generally pre- 
 vailing among all who approach biological problems from 
 the physico-chemical side, of confessing incompetence to dis- 
 cuss consciousness, and then proceeding as if there were no 
 such thing at all concerned in the phenomena under dis- 
 cussion. Thus we get the steam-whistle theory of conscious- 
 ness,^ more politely known as epiphenomenalism. Thus we 
 get psycho-physical parallelism, combined in disorderly 
 union with a belief in the " continuity " of evolution. Thus 
 we get Loeb's thrilling programme of showing us^t is 
 " only a question of time " — that sex with its poetry, 
 mother-love with its felicity and suffering, the pride of good 
 workmanship, the struggle for justice and truth, the enjoy- 
 ment of human fellowship are, as instincts, akin to the 
 tropisms of plants and animals, and open to a purely phy- 
 sico-chemical explanation.^ The logical analyst chimes in 
 from his own angle. " To the logical analyst souls seem 
 round squares. They are complex yet simple. They have 
 structure but remain unities. iThey are wholes without 
 parts. They are creative agents but need no fuel . . . " ^ 
 The net result is the curious one that, consciousness having 
 been either denied outright, or ignored, or politely segre- 
 gated, the remainder of the phenomena of life is handed 
 
 1 See Huxley, Collected Essays, vol. i, p. 240. It does not seem 
 to have been commonly noted that Huxley's inference to the epiphe- 
 nomenal character of consciousness, from the fact that a decerebrated 
 frog behaves as froggishly without consciousness as with it, proves 
 much more obviously, not the superfluity of consciousness, but the 
 superfluity of the cerebrum. It eliminates the function of the whistle- 
 machinery far more conclusively than it eliminates the whistle-sound. 
 The one thing which the experiments referred to by Huxley show 
 quite clearly is that the cerebrum is not necessary for the performance 
 of certain reflex-actions. On the relation of consciousness to the 
 cerebrum they throw no light whatever. 
 
 2 See The Mechanistic Conception of Life, pp. 30, 1. 
 s W. T. Marvin, loc. cit., p. 621. 
 
Ch.VII] MECHANISM AND VITALISM (Cont.) 179 
 
 over, sub voce " body ", to physics and chemistry, and 
 biology as an autonomous science disappears. It becomes 
 a special case of physics and chemistry. This is bound to 
 be always the result of the application to biological phe- 
 nomena of the rigid matter-mind dualism. The mechani- 
 cal sciences, in this division, claim the substantial body and 
 all its works; psychology gets the unsubstantial aninta and 
 all its fire-works; and the human being, if enough of a 
 philosopher to remember the need for a synthesis, is left 
 to contemplate himself with amazement as a mysterious 
 conjunction of a soulless " machine "-body with a body- 
 less " ghost "-soul. 
 
 With the question of the proper way to " save " the ap- 
 pearances which we call souls, or minds, we shall be con- 
 cerned in another essay.^ Here it is only necessary to 
 reduce these extravagances to their due bounds. They over- 
 shoot anything that was necessary to check the unscientific 
 abuse of souls as principles of explanation — the ignava 
 ratio of regarding any given phenomenon as made suffi- 
 ciently intelligible by saying that God, or man, or beast, 
 or devil, wanted it just so. From " just so " stories of this 
 sort the progress of science continues to emancipate us, 
 though we should have more reason to be proud of the fact 
 that we are leaving off telling tales, if the sciences did not 
 occasionally produce myths of their own. 
 
 Reduced to its proper proportions, then, the mechanical 
 theory of Nature is nothing but the charter of autonomy for 
 the physico-chemical sciences. But, emphatically, it does 
 not amount to the declaration that all phenomena in the 
 order of " Nature ", or in the wider order of the " Uni- 
 verse", are exclusively physico-chemical in character. 
 Order demands the recognition of differences as much as the 
 recognition of identities. " Mechanism " secures the right 
 1 See the following Essay, Ch. viii. 
 
i8o CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch-Vll 
 
 of the physical sciences to eliminate from among their con- 
 cepts, or working-hj^otheses, all reference to will, purpose, 
 design, intelligence. As thus excluded, these may be called 
 " supernatural ", and even a human mind is, in this sense, 
 supernatural. But this device can, assuredly, not be inter- 
 preted as denying that there are other strata, higher orders 
 of phenomena, in the system of the universe, in the analysis 
 of which these, and other, terms may have their proper 
 place, supplementing and completing, not contradicting or 
 destroying, the account given by the mechanical sciences. 
 Mechanism, in short, is right as a protest against confusion 
 of categories, wrong in denying the legitimacy of all cate- 
 gories other than its own. Its advantages, and its justifica- 
 tion, are that, within its own field of phenomena, it has 
 substituted, to put it briefly, the notion of " law " for that 
 of incalculable " will " or capricious " purpose ". As a 
 heuristic method of investigation this change has been of 
 incalculable value. It has opened the way to that observa- 
 tional and experimental procedure to which modern science 
 owes its triumphs. It has replaced the question " why? " 
 by the question " how? ". It has led to the formulation of 
 uniformities of correlation between phenomena, and to that 
 " experimental determinism " which demands that every 
 observed difference in phenomena be shown to be connected, 
 according to some general law, with other observed differ- 
 ences. It has led to measurement, and the statement of cor- 
 relations in precise quantitative terms. It has supplied the 
 natural sciences with a programme of research, the inex- 
 haustibleness of which is brought home to us with every 
 fresh complexity which keener investigation reveals. All 
 this has its rightful place in the order of the universe and 
 the order of knowledge, and there is no need to say that 
 because this is right and good, every other point of view, 
 every other ratio cogitandi about the world, provided it does 
 
Ct.VII] MECHANISM AND VITALISM (Co«^) i8i 
 
 not deny this mechanical ratio on its own ground, is wrong 
 and bad. We can smile at the kaffir-tribe, reported by 
 Dudley Kidd, which, when drought threatened to destroy its 
 fields and flocks, asked a neighbouring missionary to go 
 forth with his umbrella, though even here we can perceive 
 a crude attempt at correlating phenomena. We are well rid 
 of the belief, and the practices built on the belief, that by 
 charms and sacrifices we can influence natural events, or 
 rather avert the wrath or secure the good will of the spirits 
 supposed to manifest themselves in natural events. But 
 it does not follow from this that religion is a superstitious 
 survival of primitive animism. All that follows is that we 
 need another kind of theology, a better knowledge of God. 
 It does not follow that there are not phenomena properly, 
 and even scientifically, dealt with in terms of " life " or of 
 " consciousness ", though it does follow that we need a 
 better knowledge of these in their place in the articulate 
 order of the universe. There is nothing in the physico- 
 chemical theory of " matter " which excludes, though it is 
 equally true that there is nothing in that theory which posi- 
 tively supports, such speculative h5^otheses as that of Berg- 
 son concerning the origin of matter through the slackening 
 of the elan vital, or the theory mooted by thinkers as diverse 
 as Charles Peirce and James Ward, that physico-chemical 
 correlations, as uniformities, are analogous to " habits " — 
 once plastic choices, now petrified routine. The mechanical 
 sciences have no use for such speculations, but are they 
 therefore entitled to debar them by an intolerant censorship 
 from the thinking of men in general? Even a "personal- 
 istic " interpretation of Nature is not in conflict with the 
 mechanical theory, unless that theory is illegitimately taken 
 as claiming that nothing can possibly be true except what 
 it says. 
 
 With these remarks we may leave the more extravagant 
 
i82 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VII 
 
 manifestations of the bias against " romanticism " and 
 " supernaturalism ". For, after all, they but avert attention 
 from the really important problem of method, viz., how to 
 reconcile the demand for " logical continuity " with the 
 recognition of unique differences in the order of nature. 
 
 (b) This issue is a technical, a " logical ", one. Contin- 
 uity means, at bottom, identity. Identity is commonly 
 taken as requiring that all phenomena, however different 
 at first sight, shall to a deeper understanding reveal them- 
 selves as being of the same sort, or, to put it differently, 
 cases of the same principle. They shall differ, in the last 
 resort, only as sets of values for the variables of a mathe- 
 matical formula differ, which all " satisfy " the formula. 
 The differences between the sets of values have no signi- 
 ficance beyond making it possible to discriminate any one 
 from any other one. Beyond that, the only thing which 
 matters is that they should alike be cases of the same func- 
 tional correlation. The carrying-out of such a programme 
 as Professor Marvin, among many others, advocates^ ap- 
 pears to depend wholly on whether the differences between 
 the phenomena in the universe are differences simply of this 
 mathematical sort. // they are not, some other method of 
 holding differences within the grip of an identity will have 
 to be sought; that they are not, appears to be shown clearly 
 by the difficulty which mathematicians find when they try 
 to apply their logical apparatus to empirical data. In one 
 way or another, they are compelled to acknowledge a gap, 
 an incommensurability, between a priori and a posteriori 
 knowledge. The identification of empirical data as 
 " values ", or " cases ", of functions laid down a priori has 
 about it something precarious and arbitrary. AU-too-fre- 
 quently, the empirical shows itself to be " alogical ", by 
 
 ^ See above, p. 175, 
 
Ch.VII] MECHANISM AND VITALISM (Cont.) 183 
 
 refusing to fit into the neat patterns prepared for its recep- 
 tion. Whence, according to the thinker's mood and disposi- 
 tion, result disparagements of the intellect (vide Bergson) 
 or of the world of experience (vide Russell). In any case, 
 in the face of this gap, who can genuinely hope to be able 
 to " deduce " empirical details from abstract a priori gen- 
 eralities? 
 
 But quite apart from such unsubstantiated dreams of 
 deductions, is even an ex-post-facto unification of science 
 along these lines possible? Can we conceive the sciences 
 which we actually have, as allowing themselves to be ordered 
 in a single comprehensive scheme on the principle of 
 logical " priority " and " posteriority " — such that the prior 
 science furnishes the premises from which the posterior 
 sciences " follow "? Until some more definite and convinc- 
 ing progress towards carrying out this ambitious aspiration 
 has been made than can, so far, be exhibited for inspection, 
 it must remain an open question whether we are here deal- 
 ing with a legitimate ideal or a will-o'-the-wisp. And, if 
 there is any value in our concept of the " autonomy " of 
 each science, and any truth in the account given in the 
 preceding essay, of the super-ordination of phenomena, the 
 evidence would seem to be against the possibility of the 
 unification dreamt of by the " logical analyst ". 
 
 But, apart from this debatable possibility of exhibiting 
 all sciences as branches of a single stem of deductive theory, 
 there is in the proposed " reduction " of biology to physics 
 and chemistry, and in the " explanation " of the phenomena 
 of life in terms of, i.e., as cases of, physico-chemical laws, 
 another point of great logical interest which more positively 
 supports the view taken in these pages. 
 
 To " understand " anything — what is this but to perceive, 
 or appreciate, the " universal " in it? It is only to the 
 mind which grasps the " universal " that the particular be- 
 
i84 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. VII 
 
 comes " intelligible ". Hence the importance for knowledge 
 of " generalisation ". A general " rule ", a scientific " law ", 
 furnish us with the most obvious and familiar instances of 
 this power of universals to make large, and in their sensuous 
 detail often widely diverse, masses of facts intelligible. 
 They draw attention to the common character of the many 
 diverse particulars. They unify; they very literally iden- 
 tify differences. Hence the intellectual achievement, the 
 advance in knowledge, involved in every discovery of a law, 
 and even more in the extension of it to a fresh field. To 
 recognise some group of phenomena which are, prima facie, 
 very different from those of another group, as cases of the 
 same sort, permitting the application of the same principles, 
 is a contribution of the first order to the unification of 
 knowledge. No wonder that, pressing along this line, the 
 ideal of achieving the maximum of generalisation should 
 have been set up and pursued. It is a legitimate ideal, but 
 the method of research to which it gives rise is subject to 
 strict limitations, and, used by itself, it leads to " abstrac- 
 tion ", i.e., to a levelling, or assimilating, of differences 
 which ought to be recognised in their characteristic unique- 
 ness and retained in an order of super-imposed " levels " or 
 " strata ". This is precisely the point involved in the argu- 
 ment of the preceding essay, that the physico-chemical 
 analysis of living things must, perforce, ignore precisely what 
 is characteristically " living " about them. In short, the sav-' 
 ing of appearances requires chiefly a saving of differences 
 from being completely swallowed up by the " another-case- 
 of-the-same-sort " or the " nothing-but-so-and-so " method. 
 In the language of the logicians, commonly called " ideal- 
 ist ", we require not only universals of the " abstract " type 
 of the general law applicable to a range of cases which, for 
 all their differences from each other, count as being all of 
 the same sort, but we require also universals of the " con- 
 
Ch. VII] MECHANISM AND VITALISM {Cont.) 185 
 
 Crete " tj^pe of the individual " system ", or " world ", to 
 be analysed on the homely principle that it " takes all sorts 
 to make a world "^ To follow the track of universals is 
 always to recognise identity in difference, but we may do so 
 either by forming " classes " of " cases " of the " same 
 sort ", or by discerning " systems ", " wholes ", " struc- 
 tures " (or whatever else we may call them) into which 
 elements of diverse sorts enter as constituents, and in which 
 they acquire new functions and often exhibit new proper- 
 ties.^ The universe, or cosmos, is obviously such a system, 
 and the differences in it must be preserved by showing how 
 the higher are conditioned by the lower, without being there- 
 fore reducible to, i.e., identifiable with, the lower in the way 
 we call " being of the same sort ". Once we enter upon 
 this path, we must, of course, expect intellectual adventures, 
 and some philosophers hold back because they do not like 
 the adventures that await them. For the working methods 
 of the logical analyst will no longer prove wholly adequate. 
 New levels of phenomena will have to be recognised and 
 dealt with in their own terms. Synthesis as well as analysis 
 will be required — a synoptic insight such as, innocent of 
 any deep philosophical issues, we all currently rely on 
 in perceiving the identity of a person, or of a people, in 
 their many-sided interests and activities. In general, it 
 may be said that the emphasis on " law " is the character- 
 istic of " abstract " science, and, more widely, of the spirit 
 of generalisation by the ignoring, or levelling, of differences, 
 whilst emphasis on " system " as an actual " whole " func- 
 
 1 Cf., on this whole distinction, B. Bosanquet, The Principle of In- 
 dividuality and Value, especially Lectures II and III; and Logic, 2nd 
 edition, passim. 
 
 2 The concepts of " integration " or " organisation ", as employed, 
 e.g., by E. B. Holt, in Response and Cognition {The Freudian Wish, 
 PP.1S3 ff.), appear to meet this requirement. The critical point is the 
 admission that the " whole " formed by the organisation of the parts 
 "now does things which the isolated parts never did or could do" 
 (p. 1S4). 
 
i86 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. VII 
 
 tioning through differentiated " parts ", is the characteristic 
 of "concrete" philosophy, of the spirit of unification by 
 " saving " differences whilst acknowledging the conditions 
 necessary to their existence. 
 
 In short, the former, " scientific," method, seeks logical 
 continuity by Jhe way of " abstract " identity; the latter, 
 " philosophical ", method does so by the way of " concrete " 
 or systematic identity. And, on the technical side, this 
 rather than the antithesis of positivism and romanticism 
 constitutes the philosophically important divergence be- 
 tween the two methods. 
 
 (3) The third problem on our list, that of the empirical 
 evidence for teleology, as applied to the facts of life, may 
 be stated in a way which presents a genuine difficulty for 
 the view here advocated. Intellectual honesty compels 
 equally a frank formulation of the difficulty and a frank 
 confession, that the solution here adopted is not one to 
 which mere argument can compel those to assent who do 
 not see their way to it. We are face to face, in short, 
 with one of those ultimate problems on which human beings 
 seem bound to differ in their interpretations, making iil- 
 stinctively or reflectively one of those fundamental choices, 
 which lead some to characterise the position adopted as an 
 " article of faith ", or a " postulate ", or an " assumption ", 
 or an " affirmation of the will ", and which lend colour to 
 the view that differences in philosophical theories spring 
 from differences of " temperament " and " disposition ". 
 But, as we have seen in a previous essay ,^ to admit all 
 this is not to admit that such choices are unreasoned or 
 unreasonable. Though argument may not produce agree- 
 ment on these ultimate issues, still they are arguable, of at 
 least comparable with each other by argument. And such 
 ^ See Chapter III. 
 
Ch.VII] MECHANISM AND VITALISM {Cont.) 187 
 
 argument helps each thinker to make clear to himself and 
 others the grounds of his choice, and to realise, from the 
 very difference between his choice and that of others, that 
 there is some limitation or idiosyncrasy in his own. As 
 philosophers we reason to the best of our power on these 
 issues, but in reasoning we must have something to reason 
 with. It is because philosophers differ in these materials 
 of their vision, that the resulting theory or interpretation 
 is for each the view he must reasonably take, and yet 
 different from the views to which others are as reason- 
 ably led. 
 
 The relation of mechanism and teleology presents pre- 
 cisely such a problem in which ultimate choices come into 
 play — choices in which thinkers sum up the total impres- 
 sions gathered from their acquaintance with the world and 
 their efforts to trace the order, and read the meaning, of 
 its infinitely varied spectacle. Teleology, as we argued in 
 the preceding essay, introduces the concept of value. From 
 the point of view of mechanism all value-predicates are out 
 of place: only facts, and the causal correlations of facts, 
 engage our interest. But, as we put it, a causal nexus can 
 sometimes also be read as a nexus of means and end. Where 
 B requires A as the condition of its own existence, there, 
 provided B has value, we can reasonably say that B is 
 that for the sake of which A exists. 
 
 If this theory of the relation of teleology to mechanism 
 is not to lead us seriously astray, two qualifications would 
 seem to be required as safeguards. The concept of value 
 is a dangerous thing and easily misused. Hence it is well 
 to remind ourselves, (a) that it should not be used as an 
 argument against determinism. The suspicion with which 
 teleology often meets, springs from the fear that it is the 
 thin end of the wedge of indeterminism. It is thought that 
 when once we begin to value facts as good or bad, we shall 
 
i88 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VII 
 
 presently slip into saying that they would have been better, 
 had they been different, and end by arguing that, because 
 they would have been better otherwise, therefore they could 
 have been otherwise. Whereas, for determinism, every fact 
 is " necessary ", i.e., it could not have been otherwise than 
 it is in its actual context. The teleological point of view, as 
 understood in these pages, implies no such retrospective in- 
 determinism. And (b) it does not set up the untenable 
 claim that we can show of any and every particular detail, 
 picked at random out of the, system, just how and why it 
 is good, either as a means or as an end. It bases its appeal, 
 so to speak, on broader effects. Its position is, perhaps, best 
 appreciated by putting to oneself the question, whether, as 
 one surveys the order of appearances — matter, life, mind; 
 or, more concretely, the inorganic world, the world of 
 plants and animals, the human world with its achievements 
 not only in material civilisation, but in art, science, social 
 organisation, friendship, and love — one does not appreciate 
 and recognise, going up the scale, a value which the lower 
 levels lack, or in which they share only as nec^sary con- 
 ditions of the things which are worthwhile for their own 
 sakes.^ 
 
 Now it is precisely here that we must admit that the 
 making of this experiment does not yield the same result 
 for everybody. It calls for a comparison of total impres- 
 sions which an infinite variety of detail has gone to form 
 in each thinker's personal experience, and the resulting 
 estimates are bound to differ. The most we can do is to 
 consider a few of the most tj^ical, in order to make sure 
 that we have not wholly omitted or ignored the facts on 
 which they rest. 
 
 ^ The reader would do well to compare my inadequate statement of 
 this argument with the fuller presentation of it by B. Bosanquet. 
 Logic, 2nd edit., vol. ii, pp. 218-223. 
 
Ch.VII] MECHANISM AND VITALISM (Cont.) 189 
 
 There are, at least, three chief ways in which our tele- 
 ological argument may be met. ( i ) It may be denied out- 
 right that there is anything of value in the existence of either 
 life or mind. Or (2) whilst life and mind are admitted 
 to be values, it may be denied that nature can be inter- 
 preted as existing for their sake. Or (3) values may be 
 regarded as purely " subjective ", as, so to speak, the mere 
 shadows cast by natural instincts, hence as offering no 
 basis for an objective teleology in the interpretation of the 
 world. 
 
 (i) Those who take the first position commonly accept 
 the current standards of value, but maintain that, as meas- 
 ured by them, the overwhelming impression to be gathered 
 from experience is one of disvalue. Life, they say, is ugly, 
 brutal, cruel, ruthless. Hunger and lust are its driving- 
 forces. Struggle is its key-note — a struggle for food; a 
 struggle for mates; a struggle against the forces of the in- 
 organic universe ever threatening it with extinction; a 
 struggle against rival forms of life, parasites and enemies, 
 large and small; a struggle even against living fellows of the 
 same kind. To live is to prey on other life: its law is the 
 law of the jungle, " kill or be killed ". The general verdict 
 on life must be that which Hobbes passed on men's existence 
 in the supposed state of nature: — " nasty, short, and brut- 
 ish ". And when this sort of critic turns from plant-life 
 and animal-life to human-life, where his moralising judg- 
 ment is more obviously in place, he finds abundant material 
 in every direction for painting a picture in dark colours. 
 The selfishness, the stupidity, the viciousness, meanness, per- 
 versity of human beings, whether taken individually or 
 collectively, in all their ramifications and remoter conse- 
 quences, may well furnish a theme for pessimistic eloquence, 
 and justify the conclusion that, if this is the crowning 
 achievement of the universe by which above all else it is to 
 
igo CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VII 
 
 be judged, nothing but indignant condemnation deserves to 
 be its portion/ 
 
 (2) From this extreme denial of any value, not only to 
 life in general, but even to the manifestations of the human 
 spirit, we turn to the second position which admits that 
 there are things of great and intrinsic value, especially in 
 the endeavours and creations of men, but denies that in 
 the context of the universe they are anything but happy ac- 
 cidents destined, after a transient bloom, to total extinction. 
 It is the familiar argument from the prospective annihila- 
 tion, not only of human civilisation, but of all organic life 
 on this earth. With various expressions of this point of 
 view, and various reactions to it, we have already met in a 
 preceding essay .^ Here we may illustrate it by another utter- 
 ance: " It is conceivable that man and his works and all the 
 higher forms of animal life should be utterly destroyed; 
 that mountain-regions should be converted into ocean 
 depths; the floors of oceans raised into mountains; and the 
 earth become a scene of horror which even the lurid fancy 
 of the writer of the Apocal)^se would fail to portray. And 
 yet, to the eye of science, there would be no more disorder 
 here than in the sabbatical peace of a summer sea." * 
 
 (3) The third position is perhaps the one most insidi- 
 ously and plausibly antagonistic to our view. It is to be 
 found in that ethical naturalism, for which calling a thing 
 " good " is only a way of saying that it is being desired, for 
 which values are functions of instinctive needs. All living 
 things cling to Ufe; hence the theory that life is worth liv- 
 ing is but the mirage of value with which reflection justifies 
 the primitive instinct of self-preservation. That mind, 
 surveying itself, should find itself good, and extend its 
 
 1 For a vivid and impressive presentation of the dysteleological argu- 
 ment, see H. G. Wells, The Undying Fire. 
 
 2 See Chapter III. 
 
 » Huxley, quoted by Bosanquet, Logic, 2nd edit., vol. ii, pp. 216-7. 
 
Ch.VII] MECHANISM AND VITALISM (Cont.) 191 
 
 approval to the world which has made it possible for minds 
 to exist, seems still more plausible, but the value to which 
 this self-bestowed testimonial bears witness, is none the less 
 an illusion. There are, on this view, no objective values 
 which minds help to sustain, and the participation in which, 
 or the enjoyment of which, makes human existence worth- 
 while. There are only needs and instincts conferring a pass- 
 ing worth, i.e., the character of being desired, on the objects 
 needed for their own satisfaction. " Of course it is a fact 
 that devotion may breed the illusion that the object of devo- 
 tion is intrinsically precious; but it is perverse to explain the 
 devotion by the illusion rather than the illusion by the devo- 
 tion." ^ This puts the antithesis of the conflicting theories 
 of value in a nutshell. The " apprehension of values ceases 
 to be, then, any possession of or participation in an objective 
 good by the mind; it becomes rather the utterance and pro- 
 jection of the basic exigencies of our existence. Values be- 
 come intelligible only from below. Devotion to an object 
 comes to signify no apprehension of any inherent worth 
 residing in the object, in that which the desire faces and 
 which it may hope to possess. If we still think that our 
 desires, our loyalties, and our devotions look ahead to their 
 objects whose worth shall justify them, we suffer from the 
 old illusion. In truth, we are told, these activities and 
 propensities, the objects of all our strivings are but mir- 
 rors in which are reflected the real forces, the brute and 
 basic necessities of our existence which lie behind them." ^ 
 These are the words of a critic of this view, but they are 
 a fair statement of the view criticised. 
 
 To those for whom any one of these three views ex- 
 presses the plain and obvious truth,, there is nothing more 
 
 1 E. M. McGilvary, The Warfare of Ideals, in the Hibberf Journal, 
 October, 191S, p. 46. 
 
 2G. P. Adams, I dealsm and The Modern Age, p. 107, and also 
 chs. V and vi, passim. 
 
192 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. VII 
 
 to be said. All one can do is to think oneself fully and 
 sympathetically into each of them, and then judge whether it 
 squares with the total impression which one's own experi- 
 ence yields. If it does not square, the way is opened for 
 seeking another interpretation more consistent with one's 
 own gathered vision. Whichever view we adopt, there is 
 no escaping the responsibility involved in every judgment 
 concerning the nature of the universe as a whole in its 
 bearing on those values which make human life, at its best, 
 a thing of spiritual grace and beauty, and not merely an 
 instinctive effort to keep alive an animal body and perpetu- 
 ate an animal species.^ At any rate, the choice we have 
 made is in favour of the affirmations that the higher we go 
 in the order of appearances, the more undeniably do they 
 exhibit the character of values; that these values are not 
 merely " contingent," or accidental, in the total scheme of 
 things; and that they are not merely subjective or merely 
 illusory. A complete presentation of the empirical data 
 which have gone to form the total impression summed up 
 in these propositions would be the modern equivalent of 
 a theodicy. It would not be possible without calling in 
 the evidence of religion, especially in its bearing on the 
 problem of evil.^ 
 
 Meanwhile, even in the present scientific context, some- 
 thing of the dialectic of teleology may be exhibited. There 
 is a useful lesson to be learned from L. J. Henderson's 
 recent attempt to show, mainly from bio-chemical evi- 
 dence, that there is a teleological " pattern " in nature, 
 and from the criticism with which this attempt has met. 
 In his books on The Fitness of the Environment and on 
 
 1 Cf. B. Bosanquet, Logic, 2nd edit., vol. ii, p. 220, note : " If you 
 believe that the world-system is wholly indifferent to the interests of 
 civilization, you shoulder just as heavy a logical responsibility as if 
 you believe the opposite." 
 
 2 For Religion, see below, Ch. x. On the problem of Evil I hope 
 to say something in the second volume of Studies. 
 
Ch.VII] MECHANISM AND VITALISM (Com*.) 193 
 
 The Order of Nature, Henderson argues that when the 
 physico-chemical system is viewed, not in abstraction by 
 itself, but in its bearing on life, the manifold forms of which 
 it conditions and makes possible, it becomes startlingly 
 clear that the fundamental properties of the three common 
 elements, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and of some of 
 their compounds, and the wide distribution of these ele- 
 ments and compounds, exhibit a maximum of fitness for 
 the needs of precisely such living forms as we actually find 
 upon earth. This " fitness of the environment," is, from the 
 purely physico-chemical point of view, a happy chance. 
 Countless other distributions, countless other conjunctions 
 of properties would have been just as possible. The fact 
 that the actual distributions and conjunctions have this fit- 
 ness for life is for physics and chemistry irrelevant, and 
 their principles afford no specific explanation for it. It 
 becomes intelligible only if we read it as a teleological pat- 
 tern, as a " preparation " for life.^ The antithetic reading 
 of the situation is supplied by Professor Warren. " We may 
 raise at least two objections to Professor Henderson's argu- 
 ment. In the first place it is ex post facto. The evolutionist 
 holds that organic life has grown up as it has as a result of 
 conditions which actually exist. If carbon were absent or 
 rare, possibly another t5^e of organism would have evolved, 
 based upon silica compounds. If the properties of elements 
 had been otherwise, we might expect to find different types 
 of organisms, exhibiting different characteristics. If the 
 earth's surface were mainly land, possibly fresh-water or 
 aerial organisms would have arisen earlier than marine t5^es. 
 In other words, evolution is a process of adaptation to the 
 given environment. Whatever environment is present is 
 presumably fit for the ts^pes of organism which evolve within 
 
 1 See for details, esp. The Order of Nature, Chs. viii-x, and The 
 Fitness of the Environment, Chs. vii, viii. 
 
194 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VII 
 
 its limits." * We may legitimately wonder how Warren can 
 be so very sure that, if the environment had been funda- 
 mentally other than it is in its chemical constitution, other 
 t37pes of organisms would have evolved within it at all. 
 There are in his argument two strains which ought to be 
 kept apart. One is the appeal to the perfectly sound prin- 
 ciple that " every difference makes a difference." We can- 
 not consistently conceive that the same organisms should 
 have evolved, or be able to live, under conditions funda- 
 mentally different from those under which we find them. 
 But it does not follow that other organisms would have 
 evolved instead. Ought we not rather to say that under 
 other conditions no life might be possible at all? " Only 
 life as we know it would have been impossible," it may be 
 retorted; " how can you deny that other forms of life are 
 possible than those with which we are acquainted." But 
 how can our opponent affirm it? We are approaching the 
 point where it becomes a question what our ignorance does, 
 or does not, permit us to conceive as " possible." In a nut- 
 shell, the situation is this. We both know the given forms 
 of life in the given environment. This is our actual world. 
 We both beUeve that in this environment only these forms 
 of life are possible. This is the principle of determinism, 
 and if we are thorough with it, we shall say further that the 
 actual forms of life are also necessary. The issue which 
 divides us is, whether from the supposition of an entirely 
 different environment we are to infer forms of life unlike 
 any we know, or treat this suggestion as scientifically illegiti- 
 mate — as a speculation which, in the absence of positive 
 grounds, hangs in the air. 
 
 The lesson which may patently be learned from this ex- 
 ample, will help us to clarify the issue. Teleological concepts, 
 we shall all agree, are out of place except where something 
 
 1 H. C. Warren in Philosophical Review, vol. xxvii, no. 6, p. 613. ^ 
 
Ch.VII] MECHANISM AND VITALISM (Cont.) 195 
 
 which is an actual fact is also an actual value — ^where some- 
 thing which exists is also intrinsically good. If now it be 
 granted that life and mind are intrinsic values, then we have 
 before us a world in which these values are facts, and neces- 
 sary facts. For they are conditioned or determined to be 
 just what they are. Formally, the world is a " determi- 
 nistic " one, i.e., subject to the " law of sufficient reason." 
 And nothing but this deterministic point of view prevails in 
 the abstract sciences of physics and chemistry which supply 
 the frame-work of "mechanism." Yet this mechanical 
 world is such as to evolve life and mind. If we are not will- 
 ing to say that this is a fortunate coincidence, nor, with 
 Leibniz, that God in his wisdom and goodness chose to 
 create out of an infinite number of possible worlds the " best 
 possible," i.e., the one in which the maximum of value could 
 be actually embodied, there is no alternative open but to 
 say that the total scheme of the universe is not indifferent to 
 the values to which it gives rise and which it sustains; that 
 the existence of values in it as necessary facts reflects value 
 on the whole; that the elimination of teleological concepts 
 from the mechanical sciences, the divorce of fact from value, 
 is the result of an abstraction which a more synthetic or 
 synoptic point of view corrects. 
 
 The empirical basis of the teleological point of view, thus, 
 is precisely this, that values, like life and mind, are not 
 only facts which " happen " to occur, but necessary facts, 
 i.e., facts which, so far as our positive evidence goes, must 
 occur under determinate mechanical conditions and cannot 
 occur without them, though it does not follow that, there- 
 fore, they are themselves of the mechanical order and 
 analysable in purely physico-chemical terms. The appeal to 
 the actual nexus of necessary fact and value makes us secure 
 against the bogey of other possible worlds, such as Huxley 
 suggests, in which for science there should be no disorder, 
 
196 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VII 
 
 and yet in which there should be nothing of value. When 
 thrown into the scale against the actual nexus of fact and 
 value these unmotived possibilities weigh as nothing. 
 
 A Note on Bergson and The Origin of Life 
 
 It is but meet that a philosopher, having stated his view, 
 should offer a sacrifice at the altar of the unknown god in the 
 shape of confessing " ultimate doubts." In this case, having 
 tried to save both necessity and value in our theory of the uni- 
 verse, we cannot do better than throw our ultimate doubts into 
 the form of a consideration of " novelty " and " creation " in 
 their relation to necessity and value, with special reference to 
 Bergson's theory of " creative evolution " and the elan vital. So 
 far as vitalism offers points of philosophical interest, it is in 
 Bergson's theory rather than in Driesch's that they are to be 
 found. For, although Driesch's concept of " entelechy " involves 
 " experimental indeterminism," it does not, like Bergson's elan 
 viM, involve absolute indeterminism. The entelechy is intro- 
 duced as explaining what from the mechanical point of view 
 would be inexplicable novelty and creation. The argument rests 
 on the principle, well-known to the school-men, that there can- 
 not be more in the effect than there is in the cause. If any 
 structure, at the end of a process of growth or evolution, exhibits 
 perceptibly a higher degree of complexity than was perceptibly 
 discernible in it at the start, there must, so Driesch infers, have 
 been present throughout an imperceptible, semi-psychical factor, 
 to account for the appearance of more out of less. This addi- 
 tional factor which restores the balance is the " entelechy." ^ Of 
 course, the entelechy is endowed by Driesch with the power of 
 getting results out of a given constellation of physical and chemi- 
 cal elements (e.g., out of a cell) which could not have been got 
 out of it on purely " mechanical " principles. Conversely, its 
 own modus operandi is not analysable, or calculable, in physico- 
 chemical terms. Thence results experimental indeterminism: 
 " Two systems absolutely identical in every physico-chemical 
 [i.e., perceptible] respect may behave differently under abso- 
 lutely identical conditions, in case that the systems are living 
 
 1 See e.g., History and Theory of Vitalism, pp. 195 S. and Thi 
 Problem of Individuality, pp. 47 ff. 
 
Ch.VII] MECHANtSM AND VITALISM {Cont.) 197 
 
 systems." ^ But in that the difference in behaviour is attributed 
 to the entelechy, Driesch's view is deterministic in the absolute 
 sense. In fact, the entelechy does not belong in any sense to an- 
 other level or order of phenomena: it is simply an additional, 
 though imperceptible, factor operating to modify, and even sus- 
 pend, physico-chemical laws. 
 
 Quite otherwise is the position of Bergson. For him, the creativ- 
 ity of the elan vital does manifest itself in a continual production 
 of more out of less. In Bosanquet's sympathetic phrase, " The 
 stream rises higher than its source." Determinism and mechanism 
 are powerless to make intelligible the spontaneous and inex- 
 haustible fertility of the life-impulse in the creating of novel 
 forms of structure and behaviour. Their " laws " express only 
 the uniformities and routines which the life-impulse assumes when 
 it slackens and relaxes, but which are melted into plasticity where 
 the spear-point of life pushes through to novel achievements. No 
 wonder that Bergson declares that only by " intuition " from 
 within, not by analytic " intelligence " from without, can this 
 life-impulse in ourselves and in the world around us be appre- 
 hended. 
 
 Now, whether we can share this intuition or not, there is 
 at least one point in Bergson's critique of " mechanism " which 
 deserves consideration. 
 
 (a) This point may be expressed bluntly by saying that 
 mechanism is incompatible with evolution. This is the real 
 point in Bergson's theory of duree or " real time ", as distinct 
 from the " spatialised " time of physics. The mechanical point 
 of view is non-evolutionary, non-historical. A mechanical system 
 is a closed system. The changes which, as a given configuration 
 of elements and forces, it can undergo, are strictly predetermined. 
 Tout est donne. In such a system no novelties can appear: all 
 is repetition of the same. Routine, not creation; uniformity, not 
 variability, are its dominant characteristics. The theory that 
 Nature is a mechanical system is in flat contradiction to the 
 theory that there is a historical process of evolution, in the course 
 of which there came a point at which life first appeared in a 
 hitherto lifeless world. " Mechanism " analyses on its " formal " 
 side into determinism, on its " material " side into physics and 
 
 1 Quoted from correspondence with Driesch by H. S. Jennings in 
 Philosophical Review, Vol. xxvii, No. 6, p. S81. 
 
iqS contemporary metaphysics [Ch.VII 
 
 chemistry. The general formula of determinism is, " If A, then 
 B ", and also, " If not B, then not A ". If the world was once 
 without life, the conditions which now, when there is life, we 
 perceive to be necessary for its existence, cannot themselves 
 have as yet existed. Why not? Because their conditions, in 
 turn, did not yet exist. Thus the novelty of the origin of life 
 is thrown back on the novelty, at some point in history, of the 
 conditions of life, and so forth in infinitum. But for mechanism 
 there can be no novelties, except by the accident of our ignorance. 
 Mechanical theory finds life existing under determinate conditions 
 and formulates the law. It finds these conditions in turn de- 
 termined by conditions, and once more formulates the law. It 
 goes on finding: tout est donne. But the historical process of 
 evolution sifts somehow through the meshes of the mechanist's 
 intellectual net and escapes. 
 
 The difficulty may be crystallised into the dilemma: either 
 life must have been there always, or it could not have got in at 
 all. And if we choose to take the first horn, it is clearly more 
 plausible to think of life as " being there always ", not in the 
 form of particular sorts of living beings, but as a metaphysical 
 ultimate, be it as Schopenhauerian " will ", or as elan vital de- 
 positing " matter " in its downward, embodying itself in living 
 forms in its upward, movement. The inorganic world is, so to 
 speak, the death, the organic world the eternal youth, of the 
 cosmic life-impulse. Poetical metaphors seem almost unavoid- 
 able in the attempt to render Bergson's theory. 
 
 But that the dilemma is genuine, and not merely fanciful, may 
 be easily shown by the shifts to which scientific theory is driven 
 when it honestly faces the problem of the " origin " of life, which 
 is, of course, but a special case of the problem of the origin of 
 anything new in kind in a universe so conceived that it does not 
 provide for the emergence of what is new in kind. It is hard 
 to say which is more remarkable: — the profound insensibility of 
 many " mechanistic " writers to this problem, or their wild guesses 
 when they become sensible of its awkwardness. Tj^ical of the 
 wild guesses are the speculations of Arrhenius on the possibility 
 of life having got into our planet by the immigration of micro- 
 scopic living particles from interstellar space. This, surely, if 
 accepted, would amount to a confession of the bankruptcy of the 
 physico-chemical theory of life. It admits, by implication, that 
 it is not in virtue of some physico-chemical character that these 
 
Ch. VTI] MECHANISM AND VITALISM (Cont.) 199 
 
 microscopic particles are called "living". Moreover, the suit- 
 ability of the physico-chemical constitution of the earth for the 
 maintenance and development of these living particles is, of 
 course, not " explained ", but assumed as a piece of good luck. 
 Good luck, or, in other words, chance, coincidence, is what, in 
 fact, all scientific theories on the origin of life take for granted 
 at the crucial point. Of course, they are none of them so naive 
 as to call it good luck, but that is what it comes to when the 
 camouflage of a learned terminology is stripped off. The com- 
 monest device is to say "let but such-and-such things happen, 
 and behold you have the first bit of living substance ". Exactly: 
 you take for granted what is required to get life, and, of course, 
 life results. Nothing could be simpler. Here is a typical in- 
 stance: — "A little reflection will serve to show that if we are 
 not diffident in our application of the conception of catalysis it 
 will provide us with an explanation of life from the very start. 
 Let us suppose that at a certain moment in earth-history, when 
 the ocean waters are yet warm, there suddenly appears at a de- 
 finite point within the oceanic body a small amount of a certain 
 catalyzer or enzyme. Let us, moreover, imagine that the sea- 
 water contains in solution a number of substances which react 
 very slowly to produce an oily liquid, immiscible with water. A 
 reaction of this character based upon probable solutes of the 
 early seas might easily be specified. Now in the third place, 
 we must imagine that our enzyme is related with this reaction in 
 such a way as greatly to reduce the chemical friction which it 
 encounters, and hence markedly to increase its rate. What will 
 be the outcome? Why, obviously the particle of enzyme will 
 become enveloped in the oily material resulting from the re- 
 action, and if it happens that the original substances which enter 
 into combination are soluble in the oil as well as in the sea-water, 
 the little oil drop will wax greater until it is split up into smaller 
 globules by the natural currents of the ocean. It is clear that 
 that developing oil drop is intended to represent the origin of the 
 first and simplest life-substance . . . The most fundamental 
 objection which can be raised against the theory has reference to 
 the source of the original enzyme. This enzyme is a very special 
 sort of a body, and consequently its fortuitous formation in the 
 primeval oceans may be regarded as an improbable event. How- 
 ever, this is not equivalent to saying that it was an impossible 
 occurrence, and since only one event of this specific kind is re- 
 
200 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. VII 
 
 quir^ by the theory during a period of time covering many mil- 
 lions of years, objections based upon general considerations of 
 probability have practically no force. Chemistry must answer 
 the question as to whether our first enzyme is possible. A very 
 great number of different compounds must have been formed as 
 a result of the multitudinous chemical reactions which un- 
 doubtedly took place in the primordial oceans, and there is no 
 reason why one of these compounds should not have been just the 
 body required to mediate the origin of living matter. The strik- 
 ing fact that the enzymic theory of life's origin, as we have out- 
 Imed it, necessitates the spontaneous production of only a single 
 molecule of the original catalyst, renders the objection of im- 
 probability almost absurd "} Of course, if you imagine the 
 right conditions you have a right to imagine the right results, 
 but we want more than imaginations concerning how it might 
 have happened; we want evidence that it did so happen. It is 
 not enough to say: there is no reason why it should not have 
 happened as imagined. We want to know whether there is 
 any reason to think that it actually did happen. Happy chance 
 is the deus ex machina which helps these theories across the gap 
 between the " possible " and the " actual ". It would be just 
 as logical to argue that because one among the theoretically pos- 
 sible combinations of cards in a pack is that which, on dealing, _ 
 will yield four hands each consisting of a complete suit, therefore 
 that distribution wUl actually result, if only some one goes on long 
 enough shuffling and dealing. Unless we are prepared to say 
 that every combination which is " possible ", i.e., conceivable, is 
 also actual, or must necessarily at some time become actual, the 
 actuality of the right combination, i.e., the combination to which 
 alone some special interest, or some consequence of value, at- 
 taches, requires always a specific reason for its explanation. In- 
 deed, the becoming actual of any one of the alternatives permitted 
 by the system requires a positive reason. A " possibility " can 
 become an actuality only when it is a " necessity ". There is 
 no escaping this logical principle. For the actual is, by the very 
 principle of determinism, not only possible but also necessary. 
 If this is true of the actualisation of any possibility, it is even 
 more eminently true of the actualisation of those possibilities 
 
 iL. T. Troland, The Chemical Origin and Regulation of Life, re- 
 printed from the Monist, January, 1914, by the Open Court Publish- 
 ing Co. 
 
Ch.VlI] MECHANISM AND VITALISM {Cont.) 201 
 
 which yield life and mind. We are brought back to the familiar 
 parting of the ways: — ^Was it luck? Did it just happen so? Or 
 is the realisation of the right possibility when, for all we know, 
 it might have remained unrealised, somehow connected with the 
 value of the result? In some such form as this the concept of 
 objective value is bound to return upon us in these speculations.^ 
 
 We may be accused here of ignoring a third alternative — the 
 " cunning " which Samuel Butler opposed to Darwin's lucky 
 accidental variations.^ But to attribute cunning, and with it 
 consciousness, be it to life in general, be it to individual cells, 
 or even merely to germ-cells, outruns all empirical evidence, and 
 even Butler's fascinating and skillful argument does not make 
 the suggestion plausible. It throws too large a burden on slender 
 analogies. 
 
 In any case, neither luck nor cunning play any part in the 
 creative activity of Bergson's elan vital. As a metaphysical prin- 
 ciple it does not need luck, and, on the other hand, it does not 
 hamper itself with plans. It aims at no ends. It just creates 
 in abundant profusion unpredictable novelties. Mechanism does 
 not give the clue to its riddle, neither does " finalism ", which is 
 but mechanism upside down. For once the end is fixed and the 
 plan thought out, the whole process of realisation is determined. 
 There is no creativeness in it any more. That will all have gone 
 into the thinking out of the plan, which is a process to be under- 
 stood only from within by intuition, by living through it oneself, 
 not to be dissected from without by analytic intelligence. 
 
 There can be no doubt that Bergson's philosophy is the com- 
 pletest antithesis, and the sharpest challenge, to tiie positions ad- 
 vocated in the preceding essays.^ There is no room within his 
 metaphysics of creative evolution for the hierarchy of appearances 
 for which we have tried to argue as characteristic of the order 
 of the universe. There is no room for our view of the nexus of 
 fact and value. It will stand as a possible alternative, unless, 
 
 1 It should be noted that the " mechanism and teleology " theory of 
 the preceding essay is an attempt to state the relation of life to its 
 physico-chemical conditions as actually found. It does not pretend to 
 be a theory of the historical origin of life. And all that is suggested 
 here is that, if we speculate on origins at all, the fact that the result 
 has value, cannot be ignored as a priori irrelevant. 
 
 2 See especially Butler's Luck or Cunning? 
 
 3 The same has to be said of Charles Peirce's Tychism, many of 
 the doctrines of which resemble those of Bergson. 
 
202 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. VII 
 
 and until, it can be shown that creative activity is a logical pro- 
 cess, and accessible in this its logical character to a reflective 
 analysis which will not simply " mechanise " it and " spatialise " 
 it after the manner of Bergson's intelligence. But the examina- 
 tion of Bergson's free-will argument (in Les Donnees Immediates 
 de la Conscience), which would be necessary for this purpose, lies 
 beyond the scope of these essays. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THEORIES OF MIND 
 
 Having been engaged, in the preceding two essays, in an 
 attempt to save the appearances in biology, with much inci- 
 dental discussion of the philosophical problems which that 
 attempt raises, we are now to make an attempt to save the 
 nominal object of psychology, viz., the soul, or, as we shall 
 say, the mind. Our argument, welcoming in the interests 
 of concrete analysis the present-day movement towards a 
 junctional theory of mind, will plead for a synthesis of the' 
 Aristotelian and Descartian, the biological and introspective, 
 points of view. This requires that we should frankly face 
 the difficulty, too often ignored, that the terms mind, soul, 
 consciousness, are used in very different contexts and hence 
 with widely different meanings. The lines between these 
 contexts are not easy to draw; indeed they are more or less 
 fluctuating. This situation is reflected in the fact that 
 modern psychology strikes the observer hardly as a single 
 science, but rather as several sciences going under one name. 
 It is certainly true, that in no science is there so much 
 controversy about fundamental concepts or about methods. 
 No other science is in the paradoxical position of offering 
 descriptions of its subject-matter as widely divergent from 
 each other as are " mental processes " and " behaviour." 
 No other science offers a parallel to the startling phenomenon 
 of a leading psychologist solemnly propounding the ques- 
 tion: "Does Consciousness Exist? "^ Moreover, a great 
 deal of what, in a broad sense of the term, might be set down 
 under " mental life," is not included in current psychology 
 
 1 William James, in Essays in Radical Empiricism. 
 
 203 
 
204 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VIII 
 
 at all. Social Psychology has, indeed, of recent years begun 
 to correct the abstractness of the over-individualistic point 
 of view of classical psychology. A book like James's Vari- 
 eties of Religious Experience has shown the way from 
 excessive generalities to a study of a concrete type of ex- 
 perience in its specific modifications. Behaviourism has 
 broken down the artificial isolation of a mind from its body 
 and its environment. Freud has furnished an integrating 
 principle which, with necessary qualifications, E. B. Holt, 
 for example, is beginning to use to such excellent effect, 
 that he even re-discovers, with due psychological authority, 
 the commonsense of Socrates' moral teaching.^ There is, in 
 short, noticeable a distinct movement from the abstract to 
 the concrete. But it is still true that psychological theory 
 hovers uneasily between physiology on the one side and 
 " philosophy of mind " on the other. Too many psycholo- 
 gists, when they become conscious of these depths, seek 
 safety in confining themselves to the purely experimental 
 side of their subject, content to gather facts and let theory 
 take care of itself. But the policy of the ostrich works no 
 better here than elsewhere, and fundamental questions are 
 not disposed of by being ignored.^ At any rate, unless we 
 are greatly mistaken, there is in present-day psychology, 
 so far as it dares to speculate, a noticeable movement 
 towards a more concrete concept of mind. Mind is coming 
 again to be looked on as a dynamic and effective factor in 
 the world, precisely because it is again being looked on as. 
 functionally related to its bodily basis, and through its 
 body to the wider world. Something of this development 
 we shall try to trace, but before we can do so profitably, 
 
 1 The Freudian Wish, p. 141 ; see also the whole of ch. iv. 
 
 2 Miinsterberg's distinction between causal and purposive psycho- 
 logy is, of course, an example of the recognition that there are 
 different points of view yielding widely different concepts of mind, 
 but his distinction between them is too sharply dualistic to be 
 satisfactory.. 
 
Ch.VIII] THEORIES OF MIND 205 
 
 we must work our way past certain difficulties which threaten 
 to make all theory of mind impossible. 
 
 The saving of mind, like the saving of any other appear- 
 ance, is effected, as we know from preceding essays, by 
 devising a theory which accepts the appearance in question 
 and exhibits it in its place in the order of the universe. 
 And accepting an appearance is itself a matter of theory 
 concerning what the true, or real, nature, of that appear- 
 ance is. 
 
 There was a time, not so very long ago, when the most 
 conspicuous obstacle to a saving of mind would have been 
 the theory known as " materialism." There is no need to 
 stir once more the ashes of this burnt-out controversy. At 
 the present day the obstacles to the framing of an adequate 
 theory of what a mind is, spring from sources far other 
 than the bogey of a purely material universe. One obstacle 
 is to be found in the denial that- data for a theory of mind 
 are available. This denial is based sometimes on the al- 
 leged difficulty of self-observation or introspection, but 
 more frequently on the alleged impossibility of any mind 
 directly observing any other. Another obstacle arises from 
 the abstract concept of mind which is still being defended, 
 or perhaps we should rather say being wrestled with, in 
 some quarters, as a supposed requirement of the theory of 
 knowledge. 
 
 Of this latter obstacle we can dispose without much 
 ado. If the problem of knowledge is, first, conceived in 
 terms of a " cognitive relation " between a " subject " or 
 " knower " and an " object " or " known "; if the subject, 
 next, is defined as " mind " and as different in nature from 
 everything that is object or known; and if, lastly, to give 
 a final twist to the tangle, the distinction of subject and ob- 
 ject is identified with the distinction of soul and body, 
 
2o6 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VIII 
 
 then, of course, a situation is created which is well-nigh 
 desperate. For all these distinctions result in, so to speak, 
 isolating a mind alike from its body and from the objects 
 .which it is supposed to know. They burden us with the 
 problem of the relation of body to soul, conceived as two 
 distinct substances. They burden us with the even more 
 awkward problem of the relation of intra-mental " ideas " 
 to extra-mental " objects." Many and ingenious are the at- 
 tempts to escape from these predicaments, especially the 
 latter one. Sometimes it is done by a declaration ad hoc. 
 Thus Bertrand Russell assures us that " the faculty of being 
 acquainted with things other than itself is the main char- 
 acteristic of a mind," ^ and this is about the beginning and 
 end of what this distinguished thinker has to say about the 
 nature of a mind. Similarly, Professor S. Alexander tells 
 us that minds " enjoy " themselves and " contemplate " 
 other things, though he, to be sure, makes a valiant attempt 
 to build a psychology on this basis.^ Some of the American 
 Neo-realists propound a " relational theory of conscious- 
 ness " in order to fill the mind with real things and save real 
 things from being engulfed by the subjectivity of ideas. 
 But — if the bull be permitted — the best way to get out of 
 these coils is never to get into them. In other words, the 
 all-important thing is to refrain, first and last, from mixing 
 up theory of mind with theory of knowledge, especially in 
 that sense of the latter in which it is devoted to solving the 
 insoluble conundrum how a mind shut up with its own 
 ideas knows that there are objects outside to which its ideas 
 correspond.^ The problem of the theory of mind, like the 
 problem of the theory of any other phenomenon in the 
 
 1 The Problems of Philosophy, p. 66. 
 
 2 See especially Foundations and Sketch-plan of a Conational 
 Psychology, in the British Journal of Psychology, vol. iv (1911). 
 
 ' For the genuine problem of the theory of knowledge, see the Note 
 at the end of this essay. 
 
Ch. VIII] THEORIES OF MIND 207 
 
 world, is concerned with data and their interpretation — 
 with learning to recognise the data and interpret them 
 rightly. 
 
 This is, of course, exactly the attitude of any psychology 
 which is not false to its name. The two working-assump- 
 tions of every psychologist are: (a) that minds ^ of all 
 sorts exist for him to study — ^he takes minds for granted 
 exactly as every other scientist takes his subject-matter for 
 granted; (b) that minds can be known, i.e., that true 
 propositions concerning minds can be formulated on prop- 
 erly tested evidence. Thus the psychologist proceeds — 
 naively, if we like to say so — with his business of finding 
 out as much as he can about what minds are and what they 
 do. Nor does he make much difference between evidence 
 drawn from his observation of his own mind and evidence 
 drawn from his observation of others. Certainly the theory 
 which he aims at is a theory of mind as such, not of his 
 own mind in particular, still less of his own mind exclu- 
 sively. 
 
 But it is just here that the other obstacle threatens to 
 bar the way to a theory of mind. It challenges introspec- 
 tion: How is it possible for a mind to observe and analyse 
 itself whilst carrying on simultaneously the activities to be 
 studied? Can a mind become wholly object to itself, or 
 is the object always a part, a fragment focused by atten- 
 tion, the subject remaining a surd, a background of non- 
 objectifie^ immediate feeling? It challeivges no less com- 
 pletely and vigorously all observation of otlier minds: only 
 bodies and their movements are open to public observation; 
 minds are inward and private and observable each only by 
 itself. A mind can know other minds only by analogical 
 inference, whence it seems to follow that a psychologist 
 
 1 The term is here used without any prejudice to the position of 
 the behaviourists. 
 
2o8 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VIII 
 
 erects an amazingly audacious superstructure of generalisa- 
 tions on a slender basis of self-observation. 
 
 The fact that psychology in practice successfully ignores 
 these misgivings may reassure us, but even a pragmatically- 
 minded philosopher will want to know, not merely that a 
 procedure is successful, but why it is so. It behooves 
 us, therefore, to satisfy ourselves that the above objec- 
 tions to the very possibility of a theory of mind do not 
 hold. 
 
 This task we may conveniently accomplish in two stages, 
 considering, first, the general problem of acquaintance with 
 minds, and, secondly, the various theories concerning a 
 mind's acquaintance with itself and with other minds. 
 
 (i) The question, What is a mind? is equivalent to the 
 question, What does the term " mind " mean? The ap- 
 proach to our first problem by way of meaning has this ad- 
 vantage: it reminds us that when we are engaged in the 
 study of appearances for which we have empirical data, 
 terms are both denotative and connotative or descriptive, 
 i.e., experience both furnishes points for their application 
 and materials for the development of the description, or 
 theory, of the nature of what we are dealing with. The 
 meaning of every descriptive term is a concept, a universal, 
 a theory — drawn from experience by that ordering and inter- 
 preting of data of which synthesis and discrimination are 
 the correlative sides, and which is open both to verifica- 
 tion and to expansion and correction by fresh experience. 
 Thus "psychology without a soul" merely proclaims, in 
 epigrammatic form, that a certain theory of what a soul 
 is, is false. It does not deny that there are phenomena to 
 which, with a different connotation, the term is applicable. 
 Again, when James puts the question, " Does consciousness 
 exist? " and answers at first, " There is no such thing ", 
 
Ch.VIII] THEORIES OF MIND 209 
 
 the sting of his answer lies in the " such ". For his second 
 answer is another theory of consciousness. 
 
 But how are we to set about getting and verif3dng the 
 true theory, the correct meaning, of mind? 
 
 Bluntly put, the answer is, of course, " Study actual 
 minds, get at the thing behind the word." But do we not 
 need the description, or theory, for the correct identification 
 of the instances? Put bluntly again. How shall we know 
 a mind when we meet one? The question may seem absurd, 
 when applied to the particular case of minds, familiarity 
 with which we are all ready to assume. But the pnnciple 
 it raises is important to note, if only because it gives us an 
 opportunity to reinforce the position we have taken up in 
 these essays concerning the place of " experience ", or 
 "data ", or "particulars ", in knowledge. This position is 
 that even the minimal datum is never less than a this-such. 
 There is always some degree of acquaintance with the nattfre 
 of a thing whenever we meet with the thing at all. With this 
 clue to guide us we have to solve the problem of making 
 ourselves acquainted with its nature more completely, the 
 ideal goal being to know its whole nature. Theory thus 
 rests on acquaintance, and, more than that, on cumulative 
 acquaintance, which, as it progresses, involves much dis- 
 crimination and ordering of diverse data. But the nature 
 of a thing is always " universal," and the progress towards 
 a completer theory is controlled by this universal char- 
 acter. 
 
 Applying this general view to our present problem, how 
 the meaning of " mind ", i.e., the theory of the nature of 
 mind, is built up by the study of actual minds, we see that 
 we have to realise, and keep realising, by acquaintance with 
 minds what the nature of mind is. Minds exhibit them- 
 selves, and we have to study their exhibitions so as to gather 
 gradually an impression of their complete nature. There are 
 
2IO CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VIII 
 
 various ways of such exhibition. An animal exhibits its 
 mind by behaving as it is its nature to behave. But for a 
 psychologist to perceive its mind correctly, depends on what 
 he attends to, and with what insight into the meaning of 
 what he perceives. For him, in turn, to exhibit what he per- 
 ceives to another psychologist, so that the other sees what he 
 sees, may need much argument and common technical terms, 
 mutual understanding of which presupposes that both have 
 previously learned to synthesise the same sort of data in 
 the same sort of way. Psychological laboratory-technique 
 refines the ways in which human beings exhibit their minds 
 to each other for purposes of study, but it is artificial and 
 restricted compared with the infinite diversity of ways in 
 which by speech, gesture, conduct, men in their dealings 
 with each other exhibit their minds to each other. Self- 
 observation is the study of the exhibitions of one's own 
 mind, and it may, of course, take experimental form. Every 
 one is acquainted with what it is to be a mind by being one, 
 though being a mind and exhibiting one's mind are not the 
 same thing as noticing, or reflecting on, the exhibitions with 
 theoretical interest. Certainly self-observation is wider 
 than introspection, at any rate when the latter term, as 
 " looking into one's own mind ", is so restricted that obser- 
 vation of one's body and one's behaviour towards surround- 
 ing objects and other human beings is excluded. But to 
 exclude these is precisely to cut off the most illuminating 
 exhibitions of one's mind. The difficulties urged against 
 introspection do not touch this side of the evidence, and, 
 again, on this view of the evidence, the alleged inaccessi- 
 bility of other minds loses most of its terrors. 
 
 Of course, it is true that no one can simply point with his 
 ffnger at a mind, either his own or his neighbour's, as he can 
 point at a coloured patch. But argument, or theory, is an 
 indirect way of pointing. It teaches to identify by descrip- 
 
Ch.VIII] THEORIES OF MIND 211 
 
 tion. It directs the attention so that the desired effect or 
 impression may be got. 
 
 The upshot of all this is that the meaning of " mind " 
 must be derived from acquaintance with minds, it being the 
 systematic account of the universal nature of mind as ex- 
 hibited in particular minds. Even the first acquaintance 
 with a particular mind is already, so fair as it goes, an ac- 
 quaintance with the universal nature of mind, though it 
 takes further acquaintance with fresh data to develop this 
 knowledge of the universal at which the theory of mind 
 aims. 
 
 (2) We are now in a position for the second part of our 
 task which consists in reviewing, in their connection with 
 each other, the various theories concerning a mind's ac- 
 quaintance with itself and with other minds. 
 
 We may begin with the familiar view that the only mind 
 which any one can become acquainted with is his own mind.^ 
 We may call this, briefly, the principle of the privacy of 
 mind. To adopt it as the basis of psychology seems fatal, 
 for strictly taken it would limit the psychologist to self- 
 observation and autobiography. Intercourse by language 
 hides the difficulty in human psychology: in animal psy- 
 chology it becomes inevitably glaring. We cannot wonder 
 that, in protest, a demand for an " objective " psychology 
 should have sprung up, refusing to concern itself with the 
 inaccessible " inside " of other creatures' minds, and study- 
 ing instead the well accessible " outside " of their behaviour. 
 But even more interesting is the development of this protest 
 
 ^This view, though verbally similar, is, of course, to be strictly dis- 
 tinguished from such a view as that of Leibniz's Monadology. The 
 privacy of minds of which we are here speaking, is compatible with 
 the beliefs that there are bodies or physical objects, that these are 
 radically different from minds, that a mind can know by acquaintance 
 Isoth its own body and the bodies associated with other minds. All 
 jt denies is that any mind can be acquainted with any other mind. 
 
212 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VIII 
 
 in the direction of a rival theory of minds as open to one 
 another's inspection, as in fact " overlapping," ^ The pos- 
 sibility of the knowledge of other minds, of getting judg- 
 ments concerning them which not only are de facto true, 
 but which we can see to be true, has been attracting an 
 increasing amount of attention in recent philosophical litera- 
 ture. It will repay us to study the situation in some 
 detail. 
 
 At one extreme, we have the familiar view that only 
 bodies are perceptible by the senses, whilst minds, from 
 their very nature, are imperceptible. It follows that whilst, 
 by sight and touih, I can observe another's body, I cannot 
 observe his mind. His mind is not a datum for me. I 
 know it, if it can be called " knowing ", only by inference, 
 and by a dubious inference at that. Among recent writers, 
 Mr. Russell has been most prominent in pressing this view 
 and elaborating its consequences. For him the belief that 
 there are other minds, and that they are so-and-so, is " psy- 
 chologically derivative." It is based on the observation of 
 other peoples' bodies plus the analogical inference that when 
 other people's behaviour resembles mine, they have thoughts 
 and feelings like those which I have when I behave as they 
 do. This is, in fact, the most commonly accepted theory, 
 but few of those who have accepted it have drawn out its 
 consequences with the same ruthless intellectual honesty as 
 Russell. He recognises that the belief in other minds, thus 
 founded, is "soft," i.e., open to doubt; that the evidence 
 for it is inconclusive; that it is an " instinctive belief " for 
 which the best we can say is that it is a reasonable working 
 hypothesis, because " it systematises a vast body of facts 
 and never leads to any consequences which there is reason 
 
 _i"We often know something of both the contents and, the limita- 
 tions of another's mind. And this is at least to say that somehow one 
 consciousness may overlap another." E. B. Holt, Concept of Con- 
 sciousness, p. xil. 
 
Ch.VIII] THEORIES OP MIND ii3 
 
 to think false. " ^ At the same time he would, clearly, like 
 something speculatively " harder " than this pragmatic argu- 
 ment, for he realises that trying to do without this belief has 
 devastating consequences. At once the testimony of others 
 becomes mere " noises and shapes ", and my world, resting 
 now on a purely solipsistic basis, shrinks into a miserable 
 fragment of what it is when I allow the experiences of 
 others to supplement my own.^ And thus Russell leaves us 
 in the amusing position of holding a belief which is at once 
 instinctive (we "cannot help" it), logically unjustifiable, 
 and so eminently useful that as reasonable men, if not as 
 philosophers, we do well to stick to it. Is this not a little 
 perverse? Meanwhile, we can but regret that Russell has 
 not paid more attention to what must underlie the analogical 
 and pragmatic attribution of mind to others, viz., a mind's 
 acquaintance with itself, and the conditions of its pos- 
 sibility. 
 
 It is, in fact, characteristic of the attitude of most of 
 those who hold knowledge of other minds to be purely in- 
 ferential, that whilst denying knowledge by acquaintance of 
 other minds, they take self-knowledge for granted as if 
 it raised no problems; and then place a burden upon the 
 analogical and pragmatic arguments which they are quite 
 incapable of bearing. 
 
 Russell condemns the analogical argument chiefly on the 
 ground that phantasms in dreams appear to have minds, and 
 that there the inference is held to be mistaken. But there 
 are stronger reasons than this. The " animism " of primi- 
 
 1 Our Knowledge of the External World, Lecture III, p. 96. 
 
 2 When in the mood to eschew the luxury of soft beliefs, Russell 
 boldly sets up the ideal of building all knowledge, including physics, 
 on a solipsistic basis, though when, in the search for hard data, he 
 turns his annihilating analysis on the " self ", it can hardly be said 
 that any "ipse" remains. At least, there- are hints that the belief 
 in the identity of one's own self from moment to moment, from ex- 
 perience to experience, is distinctly soft. 
 
214 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VIII 
 
 tive peoples means an extension of the belief in souls, 
 spirits, or demons, far beyond what our sciences endorse. 
 The suggestion that similarity to human behaviour is the 
 basis of the extension is surely stretched to the breaking- 
 point when river, rain and sea, wind, storm, stars and stones 
 are regarded as animate. Is it not rather that the primitive 
 thinker fails to discriminate living and non-living, animate 
 and inanimate than that he hypothetically endows with 
 conscious life, akin to his own, objects prima facie given to 
 him as non-living and inanimate? Moreover, if our knowl- 
 edge of other minds really rested on analogy alone, it would 
 be very much more limited than it is, and this not merely 
 because the clue of similarity soon fails face to face with 
 strange forms of life, but chiefly because each person's 
 acquaintance with his own expressive looks and gestures is 
 exceedingly limited, and what we have of it is as much 
 mediated by perception of others (i.e., by inverse analogy) 
 as by self-perception. The principle that " we do not see 
 ourselves as others see us " covers a very large range of 
 our expressive behaviour, and even frequent use of a mirror 
 would but partially remove this handicap. In so far as each 
 of us is limited in his knowledge of how he looks and be- 
 haves under the influence of certain experiences, whereas he 
 is very familar with the corresponding looks and gestures 
 of others, the situation assumed by the analogical argu- 
 ment is non-existent. Our criticisms do not, of course, 
 amount to the contention that analogy gives no help at all. 
 On the contrary, for the detailed extension of our knowledge 
 of the minds of others it is of great value. But we do con- 
 tend, that it cannot well be either the only, or even the 
 chief, source of the hj^othesis that other bodies have minds. 
 
 The case is not much better with the pragmatic argu- 
 ment. An " idea " (= an hypothesis), we are told, is true 
 
Ch.VIII] THEORIES OF MIND 215 
 
 if it "works". Most plausibly this means that in order 
 to verify an hypothesis I must act on it, and judge by the 
 congruity of the results with my anticipations. Suppose 
 the other body has a mind like my own, it will behave, on 
 being treated by me in a certain way, as I should myself 
 behave if treated in that way. I make the experiment, 
 and if the response agrees with my anticipation, my h5^othe- 
 sis " works ". I kick a stone and address insulting lan- 
 guage to it: it does not kick or answer back — Whence it does 
 not " feel ", it has no " mind." It is easy to see that it 
 depends entirely on the nature of my hs^pothesis whether 
 the evidence I obtain is positive or negative. What would 
 be confirmatory evidence for one theory of mind, might well 
 be negative evidence for another. A fetishist who fears that 
 his stone idol will revenge itself on him for having been 
 treated abusively, may regard an illness into which he falls 
 as verification of his fears. Thus the evidence is bound 
 to be ambiguous so long as a change in my hypothesis may 
 turn unfavourable into favourable evidence and vice versa. 
 Am I to make belief in God dependent on the issue of a 
 prayer experiment: — if this wish of mine is fulfilled, I shall 
 know there is a God; if it is disappointed, I shall know 
 there is none? People do argue like that, but it is not 
 obviously a good argument. In short, we may make our 
 pragmatic experiment with entirely false notions of what a 
 mind is or does, and, consequently of what would, or would 
 not, be evidence of mind. Moreover, as in the analogy 
 theory, the experimenter, ex hypothesi, is familiar only with 
 his own mind; hence he could recognise evidence only of a 
 similar t3'pe of mind. Evidence of types of mind widely 
 different from his would necessarily be for him negative 
 evidence. 
 
 A somewhat different version of pragmatic " working " is 
 to be found in James's famous " automatic sweetheart " 
 
2i6 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VIII 
 
 argument.^ James asks us to suppose "a soulless body 
 which should be absolutely indistinguishable from a spirit- 
 ually animated maiden, laughing, talking, blushing, nursing 
 us and performing all feminine offices as tactfully and 
 sweetly as if a soul were in her ", and then goes on, " Would 
 any one regard her as a full equivalent? Certainly not, and 
 why? Because, framed as we are, our egoism craves above 
 all things inward sjmipathy and recognition, love and ad- 
 miration. The outward treatment is valued mainly as an ex- 
 pression, as a manifestation of the accompanying conscious- 
 ness believed in. Pragmatically, then, the belief in the auto- 
 matic sweetheart would not work . . ."' The use which 
 James proceeds to make of this argument throws a revealing 
 light on it. With regard to the universe it is absolutely 
 indistinguishable whether it is the product of blind forces 
 or the work of a benevolent God. But the belief that it is 
 the work of God is emotionally more satisfactory, hence it 
 works, hence God exists. Does not this give the argument 
 away? In the absence of differential evidence, emotional 
 preference is to tip the scale. It is the old " will-to-believe " 
 argument cropping up. If, per impossibile, an automaton 
 were to be so cunningly contrived as to be really " abso- 
 lutely indistinguishable from a spiritually animated 
 maiden ", our pragmatist lover, proceeding happily on the 
 h57pothesis soothing to his vanity, would get from his auto- 
 matic sweetheart all the love and S3mipathy he could pos- 
 sibly want in the only way he could possibly get them, viz., 
 in the look of her eyes, the tone of her voice, the caressing 
 touch, the tender embrace. Nor would he ever discover his 
 mistake: the " absolutely indistinguishable " saves him from 
 
 1 The Meaning of Truth, p. 189, note. 
 
 " There is a good example of the automatic sweetheart in Oflfen- 
 bach's Tales from Hoffmann. There the automaton is discovered 
 when her mechanism goes wrong and her behaviour becomes unpleas- 
 fintly distinguishable from that of a living maiden. 
 
CkVIII] THEORIES OF MIND 217 
 
 that awful fate. Never, surely, did philosopher invent an 
 argument which more securely entrenched sentimental illu- 
 sions. If the presence of mind in a human body is not 
 differentially evident, the game is up. The hypothesis that 
 there is a mind must be capable of verification by a recog- 
 nisable difference between facts which corroborate it and 
 facts which refute it. In the absence of such a difference, 
 emotional preference is no better than instinctive belief, 
 and philosophy becomes the gentle art of mistaking pleasing 
 make-believe for truth. Of course, the pragmatic method of 
 verification by experiment presupposes the possibility of 
 getting differential evidence, and as such it has a legitimate 
 place in our dealings with other minds. But, like the 
 analogy-argument, it helps rather to add detail and precision 
 to our knowledge of others, than to mediate the initial step 
 from the existence of one's own mind as a datum to the 
 existence of other minds as an inference. 
 
 Its main fault, however, is that it does not examine the 
 principle of the privacy of each mind, of its isolation from 
 every other. So long as each mind is supposed to be im- 
 prisoned in its own inwardness, no intellectual acrobatics 
 will help it to burst the walls of its prison and have inter- 
 course with its fellows. 
 
 A half-way stage on the way to the principle of over- 
 lapping minds is represented by the theory of empathy 
 (Einfiihlung) in its various forms. Broadly speaking, this 
 theory appeals to the feelings we experience in contact with 
 other minds. Expressive gestures still play their part, but 
 they are used no longer by way of comparison and analogy. 
 Instead we are bidden to note the feelings which they evoke 
 in us, and to find in these feelings our evidence for our 
 knowledge of other minds. 
 
 Perhaps the best approach to the theory of Einfuhlung, 
 
2i8 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VIII 
 
 as applied to the knowledge of other minds ^ is through a 
 consideration of sympathy, in the literal sense of " shar- 
 ing ", as we say, another's feeling. What exactly does this 
 " sharing " mean? " I am as pleased about your success 
 as you are ". " I feel your sorrow as much as you do." 
 " Your joy is also mine ". Let us note the precise point of 
 this sympathy. In order to share another's feeling I must 
 not merely be pleased at his pleasure or be sorry that any- 
 thing should grieve him, for in order to experience these 
 secondary or response emotions about the other's emotions, 
 I must somehow know what these emotions of his are. It 
 is precisely the method of this " knowing " which is in 
 question. Clearly, unless we are to invoke telepathy, he 
 must somehow show me what he feels. But how can he 
 show me his feelings except by means of outward signs 
 such as sounds and gestures? Here the empathy theory 
 seeks to open a way for direct experience. The other's 
 words and actions, it holds, evoke in me not merely the 
 same emotion as his, but an emotion which I feel at once as 
 his and not as mine. For this emotion fuses with, is felt by 
 me as inseparably part of, or one with, the gestures I see, 
 the words I hear; and these, though seen and heard by 
 me, are not my gestures and my sounds. A cry of terror 
 and I tremble, not because, in the first instance, I am afraid 
 for myself, but because I " hear ", i.e., immediately feel, the 
 terror expressed in that cry. I " see " a look of pride in 
 another's eye. But such " seeing " is precisely EinfUhlung. 
 For what I see, strictly, is not pride, but the colour, shape 
 and movements of the eye. The pHde is " expressed " and 
 as such is felt by me, but I feel it, not as my pride, but 
 precisely as the pride of that other whose eye I am looking 
 
 ^ Theodor Lipps, the father of the empathy theory, developed it in 
 the first instance as an instrument for the analysis of aesthetic ex- 
 perience. Its application to our problem is of secondary interest for 
 him, and not beyond doubt in its details. 
 
Ch.VIII] THEORIES OF MIND 219 
 
 at. I feel pride, but I do not feel proud myself in the sense 
 in which to feel proud is to be proud. The pride I feel is 
 his, not mine. Even if he looks at me superciliously, I feel 
 his contempt in his look, whilst at the same time I may feel, 
 on my own behalf, resentful or humiliated.^ Perhaps the 
 most challenging way of putting the empathy theory is to 
 say that, for it, a feeling which may be called " mine " 
 in the sense that I feel it, is yet felt by me not as mine, 
 but as another's, and this not by way of inference from 
 data, but as a genuine character of the data themselves. Its 
 merit is to draw attention to experiences to which the rigid 
 distinction of mine and yours is but awkwardly applicable. 
 It leads us to question the almost legalistic attitude of the 
 privacy-principle, which bids us say, in effect, " Here is 
 my mind, there is yours; my mind has its own thoughts and 
 feelings, your mind has yours; and it is impossible for what 
 is mine to be yours." 
 
 To the perspectives which are opened up by ques- 
 tioning this principle we shall return. Meanwhile, we can 
 learn something further from a different form of the 
 empathy theory which Professor S. Alexander has devel- 
 oped.^ Whilst still clinging to the view that it is of the 
 very essence of consciousness not to be shareable, Alex- 
 ander holds that each mind must have a clue to the other 
 mind in some direct feeling, or modification of feeling, 
 of its own. " The clue would seem to be found in those 
 elementary experiences, on the level of instinct, where 
 cooperation, reciprocation, or rivalry is necessary in order 
 that the experience should have its full flavour. . . . Thus 
 it (tenderness) is felt more towards an affectionate than 
 towards a cold child, and it is felt more and differently to a 
 child and to a puppy. . . . We may press a yielding object 
 
 iCf. Lipps, JEsihetik, pp. 106, 140. 
 
 2 See his article on Collective Willing and Truth, in Mind, N. S., 
 No. 8S, pp. 17. 
 
220 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. VIII 
 
 and become aware of its soft firmness and have besides the 
 experience of our own effort of grasping. But there is all 
 the difference between this and the experience of a hand 
 which in any degree returns the pressure of ours. ; . . The 
 experience of another man's trying to get the same thing as 
 yourself is a direct suggestion that he is wanting it, and is a 
 different experience from seeking the object and being merely 
 obstructed. . . . Thus the immediate basis of our experi- 
 ence that another person exists is a direct ingredient in 
 certain feelings, which ingredient is not present if that other 
 being were inanimate or unconscious." On this basis Alex- 
 ander disposes of the automaton. "An automaton might 
 look and even act like a child, but if it did not participate 
 in our behaviour to it, we should miss the flavour of tender- 
 ness." Clearly, for Alexander, no automaton could be 
 " absolutely indistinguishable " from a conscious person, 
 for there is a difference of behaviour which we directly feel. 
 A conscious person " responds to our action and fulfils it." 
 From this point on, the recognition of something common 
 in the experiences of different minds becomes increasingly 
 manifest. For there is at least a common situation which 
 the several minds are experiencing and with which they 
 are dealing. " It is not because under similar circumstances 
 foreign bodies exhibit behaviour like our own that we be- 
 lieve them to be minds like ourselves, by an act of inference; 
 but because in one and the same situation they take part 
 with ourselves in a joint action in which their part may or 
 may not be like our own, and because without such response 
 on their side our own experience is incomplete." It is clear 
 here that in this appeal to social experience, or " intersub- 
 jective intercourse ", the common situation makes possible 
 the experience of the other mind's response or opposition, co- 
 operation or competition. For Alexander this " instinctive " 
 experience of other minds is open to animals in their rela- 
 
Ch.VIII] THEORIES OF MIND 221 
 
 tion to other animals and to men. Among men, dealing 
 with one another, the experience becomes " reflective " and 
 is vastly extended by speech, and by " combination of wills 
 in practical affairs or of intellects in the pursuit of knowl- 
 edge." Notwithstanding these admissions, however, Alex- 
 ander reasserts that assurance of another mind's existence 
 is gained only by an " act of faith ", and that knowledge 
 of its nature remains wholly symbolic. " We transfer the 
 contents (of our own consciousness) to this foreign being, 
 and give indefinite scope to our sympathetic imagination 
 in this construction ". This transference, however, is based, 
 for Alexander, on empathy, not into the expressive move- 
 ments of another, but into the objective situation in which 
 the other acts. By imagination I put myself into the 
 other's place and thus experience how it feels to be in such 
 a situation. " I do not feel your feeling, but I read my 
 feeling into your imagined position." 
 
 Alexander's view is particularly instructive because his 
 very attempt to effect a synthesis of privacy plus inference 
 (or " transference ") with social intercourse plus the shar- 
 ing of a common world, exhibits very clearly under the pres- 
 sure of what considerations the former view is brought to 
 its breaking-point. 
 
 This brings us, finally, to theories which take their stand 
 either on social intercourse or on the common world. 
 
 The former, with a good deal of difference in detail, 
 appeal, one and all, to the principles: (a) that self-knowl- 
 edge is possible only in a social medium; (b) that most of 
 the purposes of an individual mind are social, involving 
 not only cooperation with other minds, but functional dif- 
 ferentiation of members in a social system; (c) that the 
 individual owes his knowledge of the universe far more to 
 communication from others than to his private efforts. 
 
222 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VIII 
 
 Thus all these theories are innocent of any flirtation with 
 solipsism. They point out that the very facts which are 
 commonly quoted as supporting the privacy, or mutual iso- 
 lation, of minds — e.g., that I cannot feel my neighbour's 
 toothache, nor he mine; that no one can know what goes on 
 inside my mind unless I give outward signs, and that by 
 posing, pretending, lying, I can not only conceal my mind, 
 but mislead the inferences of others — ^have point only in a 
 medium of social relations. They argue that we first learn 
 about ourselves from and through our fellows; that each of 
 us gets to know his own mind because he is treated by 
 others as having a mind of his own, long before he is able 
 to discover that fact for himself; that it is only through 
 the minds of one's fellows that one's own fragmentary 
 glimpses of the universe are completed.^ Or, again, it has 
 been argued that each of us, as an actively willing subject, 
 or ego, directly acknowledges other subjects, each with a 
 will of his own. Will meets will, in conflict or cooperation, 
 and demands to be acknowledged. Social life is a tissue of 
 such mutual acknowledgments, and in these we must look 
 for the basis of our knowledge of each other's minds. Even 
 the minds of animals are known to us only by such an act 
 of acknowledgment.^ Or, lastly, it may be bluntly asserted 
 that " it is a pure blunder of subjectivist psychology to 
 assume that somehow the fact of my own existence as a 
 centre of experience is a primitive revelation. . , . Self- 
 knowledge, apart from the knowledge of myself as a being 
 with aims and purposes conditioned by those of like beings 
 in social relations with myself, is an empty and senseless 
 word." ' 
 
 As is clear from the very language employed by these 
 writers, they are thinking of self-knowledge, rather than 
 
 1 See e.g., Royce, The World and the Individual, vol. ii, ch. iv. 
 
 2 Cf. Munsterberg, Grundziige der Psychologie, ch. ii. 
 
 3 A. E. Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics, p. 205, 
 
Oi.VlII] THEORIES OF MIND 223 
 
 of mind-knowledge. But the very fact that the language of 
 " self " and " other " comes so readily to our lips when we 
 are talking about minds helps to emphasise that the social 
 relations of mind to mind are the medium in which mind- 
 knowledge arises. This suggests that the individualistic 
 standpoint of traditional psychology, basing itself simply on 
 the existence of a multitude of individual minds, and thus 
 led to study mind as a class-character, involves an abstrac- 
 tion similar to that of considering human beings merely as 
 specimens repeating the type of an animal species, instead of 
 as differentiated and organized in social systems. The stu- 
 dent who comes to the study of mind from the side of 
 biology is easily tempted to think of mind merely as a 
 class-character repeated, no doubt with variations of degree 
 and kind, in all the members of an animal species. He can- 
 not learn too soon that, from this point of view, social 
 relations, and the higher forms of mental life generally, 
 tend to be either ignored, or not to be treated on their 
 merits. 
 
 A second important lesson which the social theories of 
 mind bring to light is the ambiguity of the word " mine ". 
 It is due to this ambiguity that theories so diametrically op- 
 posite as the " privacy " view and the " social " view are 
 in the field. We must seriously consider the possibility 
 that when the upholders of the privacy view say that my 
 own mind is a datum, yours an inference, they are using 
 " my " in a different sense from that in which the upholders 
 of the social view maintain that " I " and " you ", myself 
 and yourself, my mind and other minds, are correlates; that 
 the distinction between them is developed pari passu; that 
 both are equally inferential, equally concepts or " ideal 
 constructions ". The familiar criticism of the privacy view 
 — " If I am acquainted only with my own mind as a datum, 
 how do I know it as ' mine '? What right have I to call it 
 
224 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VIII 
 
 mine? ' Mine ' has meaning only by contrast with ' not- 
 mine ' (' yours ' or an ' other's ') " — turns wholly on the 
 ambiguity of the personal pronoun. The fact is that 
 " mine " may be used either in a social sense, or else like 
 " this ", " here ", " now ", as a mere linguistic synonym for 
 " immediate experience ", or " datum ". The advocate of 
 the privacy view, when he talks of " his " mind as a datum, 
 is talking tautologically. He really means these present 
 feelings and thoughts here and now. If calling them " his " 
 is anything but another way of saying, " these . , . here 
 and now," if it means his-not-another's, he is, of course, at 
 once guilty of the fallacy with which the advocate of the 
 social view charges him.^ 
 
 The point comes out more clearly in Russell's statement 
 of the privacy view than in that of any other writer. With 
 our clue, it is easy to see that the inference to other minds 
 from the datum of my own is but a special case of what is, 
 for Russell, perhaps the most crucial problem of philosophy, 
 viz., how to justify quite generally the inference to the exist- 
 ence of non-data from the existence of data. In short, it is 
 the problem of " transcendence ". But, of course, the full 
 meaning of " my mind " or " my self " transcends any 
 datum as emphatically as does " your mind " or " another 
 self." ^ The minds which the psychologist studies carmot 
 be saved by eschewing transcendence and inference, and 
 falling back on bare data. They can be saved only by 
 that synthetic and cumulative organisation of data which 
 Russell himself calls " logical construction ". Indeed Rus- 
 sell has made an ingenious attempt to construct a world 
 which, in his own words, " can, with a certain amount of 
 trouble, be used to interpret the crude facts of sense, the 
 
 1 A fuller statement of this ambiguity will be found in the article 
 on Solipsism which the writer has contributed to Hastings's Encydo- 
 peedia of Ethics and Religion. 
 
 ^ Cf. above, p. 23, footnote. 
 
Ch. VIII] THEORIES OF MIND 225 
 
 facts of physics, and the facts of psychology." ^ More than 
 that — in suggesting thp,! the physicists' construct of a ma- 
 terial thing and the psychologists' construct of a mind differ 
 only in that both classify the same appearances from dif- 
 ferent points of view, he comes very near to the view that 
 a mind is, in E. B. Holt's language, a " cross-section " of 
 the universe." ^ 
 
 This brings us to the second group of social theories, if 
 for convenience we may so label them, viz., the theories for 
 which minds are objects of observation to each other 
 through the medium of a common world. 
 
 To the " objective " and " behaviouristic " motives in 
 present-day psychology, and to the " realistic " motives in 
 present-day philosophy, which reinforce theories of this 
 type, we have already alluded. Their common principle is 
 to analyse a mind in terms of its " contents ", which con- 
 tents are at the same time regarded as being, and remain- 
 ing, constituents of the object-world, capable of becoming 
 simultaneously objects of other minds. There are three con- 
 verging arguments which make theories of this type ex- 
 ceedingly plausible, notwithstanding an effect of paradox 
 which they almost invariably produce on first acquaintance. 
 
 (a) The first argument appeals quite frankly to the 
 method of observation of behaviour, which is the chief 
 method of animal pschology, and plays no small partz-in 
 human intercourse and in the psychological laboratory, 
 though outweighed among human beings by communication 
 through language. For the success of this method it is 
 essential that the question, " What is a creature conscious 
 
 1 Our Knowledge of the External World, p. 93. The text has 
 "physiology" but the context shows, I think, that this must be a 
 slip for "psychology". ,„ . . - 
 
 ' The main difference is that Russells mind-classes do not overlap, 
 do not have members in common, vrh?rw§ Holt's cross-sections do. 
 
226 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. VIII 
 
 of? " should be answerable, not by inference about the 
 creature's imperceptible mind, but by observation of its per- 
 ceptible actions. It must be interpreted to mean, not " What 
 goes on in the privacy of the creature's inner conscious- 
 ness? " but " What is the creature looking at, listening to, 
 sniffing at, digging for, watching for, etc. — in short, what 
 is it doing? " In order that the question in this form may 
 be answerable, the object which the creature under observa- 
 tion is responding to, or interested in, must be perceptible 
 to the observer, too. He must be able to identify it among 
 the objects which he is himself perceiving. It must be an 
 item in the environment within which he is watching the 
 creature's behaviour.^ The " world " as the observer is 
 aware of it, may be much more comprehensive and varied 
 than the " world " as the creature under observation is 
 aware of it. But the important point is that the creature's 
 world is contained within the observer's — that, to this ex- 
 
 1 The argument, e.g., of von Uexkuell's Die Umwelt und die Innen- 
 weli der Tiere, rests throughout on the above principle; and so, of 
 course, do the exphcit contributions to " behaviourism ", like John 
 Watson's Behaviour. For an elaborately worked-out example from 
 the observation of human behaviour, see E. B. Holt, The Freudian 
 Wish, esp. pp. 85 ff. Its application to language may be illustrated 
 by the following quotation from R. B. Perry's Present Philosophical 
 Tendencies, Part V, Ch. xii, § 8, p. 291 : " Language does not arise 
 as the external manifestation of an internal idea, but as the means 
 of fixing and identifying abstract aspects of experience. If 1 wish 
 to direct your attention to the ring on my finger, it is suflficient for 
 me to point to it or hand it to you. In seeing me thus deal with the 
 ring, you know that it engages my attention, and there occurs a mo- 
 ment of communication in which our minds unite on the object. The 
 ring figures in your mind even as it does in mine ; indeed the fact that 
 the ring does so figure in my mind will probably occur to you when 
 it does not to me. If, however, I wish to call your attention to the 
 yellowness of the ring, it will not do simply to handle it. The whole 
 object will not suffice as a means of identifying its element. Hence 
 the need of a system of symbols complex enough to keep pace with 
 the subtlety of discrimination. Now the important thing to bear in 
 mind is the fact, that as a certain practical dealing with bodies con- 
 stitutes gross communication, so language constitutes refined com- 
 munication. There is no difference of objectivity or subjectivity. 
 In the one case as in the other, mind is open to mind, making possible 
 a coalescence of content and the convergence of action on a common 
 object." 
 
Ch.VIII] THEORIES OF MIND 227 
 
 tent, the two worlds coincide, or " overlap ", or, at least, 
 can be made to coincide. Instead of speaking of " two 
 worlds coinciding ", we might equally well speak of a " com- 
 mon " world for both, in fact of " one " world present to 
 two minds. And the principle is, " obviously, capable of 
 extension to any number of minds. When I watch a cat ly- 
 ing in wait for its prey near a mousehole, do I not know 
 what she is thinking of? When I see people in the street 
 turning their heads, and, on looking around myself, per- 
 ceive a trolley-car off the rails, do I not know what they 
 have in mind? The whole issue may be reduced just to 
 this: should such everyday experiences as these be inter- 
 preted on the principle of a common world, in which situa- 
 tions constantly arise such that each can say that he per- 
 ceives what others perceive, and that what things mean to 
 him they mean to others? Or should he " introject ", i.e., 
 treat what he perceives and what others perceive as so many 
 " private ", " inaccessible ", " mutually exclusive " contents 
 of consciousness? The alternatives are private, or " sub- 
 jective ", sensations a,nd ideas, which, being mine, cannot 
 be yours, being yours, cannot be mine, versus common and 
 public objects, which we — ^you and I — not only share but 
 know that we share. 
 
 (b) The second argument tries to bring even introspec- 
 tion to the support of the second of these alternatives. To 
 introspect is to take stock of the contents of one's mind. 
 But an enumeration of these brings to light nothing but 
 objects belonging to the universe at large, and actually, or 
 potentially, open to other minds. The things I see are„ or 
 may be, seen by others; the sounds I hear — as when a crowd 
 listens to a speech — are not debarred from reaching other 
 ears by the fact that they reach mine. Any object in the 
 world which is, or may become, a content of my mind, is, 
 or may become, an object also of other minds. And, in 
 
,lf*» 
 
 228 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.Vm 
 
 any case, it remains always just the object it is in the world. 
 The particular selection, or grouping, of items in my mind 
 may be peculiar to me and private, but the items themselves 
 are not. " In so far as I divide them into elements, the 
 contents of my mind exhibit no generic character. I find 
 the quality "blue", but this I ascribe also to the book 
 which lies before me on the table; I find " hardness ", but 
 this I ascribe also to the physical adamant; or I find num- 
 ber, which my neighbour finds also in his mind. In other 
 words, the elements of the introspective manifold are in 
 themselves neither peculiarly mental nor peculiarly mine: 
 they are neutral and interchangeable. It is only with res- 
 pect to their grouping and interrelations that the elements 
 of mental content exhibit any peculiarity." ^ 
 
 (c) The third argument seeks to meet the plausible ob- 
 jection that an analysis of mind cannot be given in terms 
 only of contents or objects, but must recognise, over and 
 above all objects, the existence of acts of mind, or else of 
 an indefinable entity or quality of " awareness ", in virtue 
 of which alone an object can be said " to be presented to " 
 a mind, or " to be its content ". English reahsts, from 
 G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell to S. Alexander, have 
 been unanimous in holding to this analysis of experience into 
 act and object (sensing and sense-datum, thinking and 
 concept, etc.), identifying the act or awareness as the pe- 
 culiarly mental or conscious factor in the situation. They 
 take this analysis for granted as self-evident. Alexander 
 explicitly defends it as an " intuition ".^ American real- 
 ists and behaviourists deny this whole analysis; they re- 
 fuse to recognise any distinctive mental act. What activity 
 there is belongs to the body, or more specifically to the 
 central nervous system (including the sense-organs). The 
 
 1 Perry, loc. cit., p. 277. 
 
 2 The Basis of Realism, p. 7 {Proceedings of the British Academy, 
 vol. vi). 
 
Ch. VIII] THEORIES OF MIND 229 
 
 verbs naming mental acts, looking, hearing, thinking, etc., 
 are all to be interpreted as referring to specific responses, or 
 " motor sets " in operation, analysable in physiological 
 terms. The alleged evidence of introspection in favour of 
 a peculiar mental activity is flatly denied. The supposed 
 " feeling " of activity is shown to consist of movement sensa- 
 tions (or rather "sense-data"), thus confirming the view 
 that what activity there is, is bodily activity. The body 
 is the principium individuationis. Its position in the uni- 
 verse is always unique, and so is the history of the nervous 
 system of each of us, which determines so largely what each 
 of us perceives, thinks, desires, is interested in. This is 
 the germ of truth which the " privacy " theory tries to pre- 
 serve by setting up imperceptible, inward consciousnesses, 
 isolated from each other and from the world of objects; 
 hence, in principle, incapable of cooperation in knowledge 
 or in conduct.^ 
 
 1 See Perry, loc. cit., Ch. xii, § 6, pp. 254, 5 (against W. James) ; 
 Ch. xiii, §9, pp. 321-3 (against G. E. Moore). It is interesting to add 
 an argument, which without any influence from realism and behaviour- 
 ism, reaches a similar conclusion with an effect of fresh observation. 
 " I have sometimes sat looking at a comrade, speculating on this mys- 
 terious isolation of self from self. Why are we so made that I gaze 
 and see of thee only thy wall, and never thee? This wall of thee 
 is but a movable part of the wall of my world; and I also am a 
 wall to thee : we look out at one another from behind masks. How 
 would it seem if my mind could but once be within thine ; and we 
 could meet and without barrier be with each other? And then it has 
 fallen upon me like a shock — ^as when one thinking himself alone has 
 felt a presence — But I am in thy soul. These things around me are 
 in thy experience. They are thy own; When I touch them and move 
 them I change thee. When I look on them, I see what thou seest; 
 and I experience thy very experience. For where art thou? Not there, 
 behind those eyes, within that head, in darkness, fraternizing with 
 chemical processes. Of these, in my own case, I know nothing, and 
 will know nothing; for my existence is spent not behind my wall, 
 but in front of it. . . . And there art thou, also. This world in 
 which I live, is the world of thy soul: and being within that, I am 
 within thee. I can imagine no contact more real and thrilling than 
 this ; that we should meet and share identity, not through ineffable 
 inner depths (alone), but here through the foregrounds of common 
 experience; and that thou shouldst be — not behind that mask — ^but 
 here, pressing with all thy consciousness upon me, containing me, and 
 tiese things of mine. This is reality: and having seen it thus, I can 
 
230 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. VIII 
 
 The dispute about mental activity between the English 
 and American realists illuminates just what it is in the 
 " relational theory of consciousness " — ^to use R. B. Perry's 
 term for it — that produces the effect of paradox alluded to 
 above. In three ways, chiefly, is this paradox felt. 
 
 (i) This theory of consciousness seems to leave out " con- 
 sciousness ". The English thinkers' emphasis on acts and 
 awareness seems much more like what we mean, or think 
 we mean, when we talk of " being conscious " of something. 
 A theory of consciousness, like that of S. Alexander, who 
 regards it as a new quality arising, in the course of evolu- 
 tion, when the organism has developed the requisite nervous 
 system, seems to give the body its due and still save the 
 mind as a non-physical something, wholly sui generis, en- 
 dowed with the function of " enjoying " itself, and " con- 
 templating " the object-world within which it has arisen.^ 
 Its weakness is that, when we have acknowledged that there 
 is this indefinable awareness, we have exhausted all that 
 there is of interest in it.^ The philosopher's interest turns 
 at once to the concrete universe — the field of knowledge and 
 action. Provided that universe is saved, it may well seem 
 a small matter whether, in addition to the physiological 
 responses, which are common ground to both sides, there 
 is, or there is not, an indefinable something to be called 
 " awareness ". The whole dispute is one of the most curi- 
 ous in the history of psychology, and it is hard to see how 
 it is to be settled, if treated as a question of evidence, or, 
 at least, of mere introspecting or intuiting. Thus treated, 
 
 never again be frightened into monadism by reflections which have 
 strayed from this guiding insight " (W. E. Hocking, The Meaning 
 of God in Human Experience, pp. 265, 6). 
 
 lA similar concept of consciousness, as a "mental light" revealing 
 the universe, has been advocated among American thinkers by Pro- 
 fessor J. E. Boodin in A Realistic Universe. 
 
 2 The above remark requires to be qualified by acknowledging that, 
 for S.Alexander, at least, beauty requires the co-operation of mind 
 and object {The Basis of Realism, in Proceedings of the British Acad- 
 emy, vol. vi). 
 
Ch.VIII] THEORIES OF MIND 231 
 
 it looks as if what is unanimously by realists on one 
 side of the Atlantic is nearly as unanimously not found by 
 realists on the other side. Reality, clearly, is having its 
 little joke with the realists. Introspection does not settle 
 the question, because introspection cannot be kept clear 
 of theory. To report findings in descriptive terms is at 
 once to theorise. There is no getting away from that. 
 Hence the real moral of the dispute is that " meanings ", 
 i.e., theories, of consciousness are at variance. We shall 
 suggest below what may be the correct solution. 
 
 (2) The theory of minds overlapping in a common world 
 may be accused of pressing identity in two directions to 
 points where obvious differences begin to be ignored, (a) 
 It requires restatement at least to the extent of making 
 room within its general frame-work for all the facts com- 
 monly summed up in the principle of the " relativity of 
 sensations ". However right it is in insisting on the funda- 
 mental truth that two persons can perceive, and recognise 
 that they perceive, literally the same real thing, it must also 
 be made to include the fact that, oWing to differences of posi- 
 tion, distance, angle of vision, condition of sense-organs, past 
 history of the nervous system, there are differences in what 
 each perceives of the identical object. To develop, because 
 of these differences, a new monadology, as Russell does in 
 effect, is as one-sided as to insist on complete identity. Ap- 
 pearances are not to be saved by any such extremes of short- 
 cuts, (b) And the theory requires also a fuller recogni- 
 tion of other ways in which minds may fail to overlap and, 
 hence, will be limited in knowledge of one another. The 
 field of perception supplies an illustration. Those of us 
 who enjoy the full possession of our senses find it easy to 
 say what a blind or a deaf person must miss. Our common 
 world is definitely poorer for them by so much as it lacks all 
 colour and light and sotmd. We can confidently say that, 
 
232 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VIII 
 
 because in the darkness and silence of the night we have a 
 clue to what the world of the blind-deaf person lacks com- 
 pared with our daylight world of colour and sound. But 
 it is not so easy for us to realise, how varied and interest- 
 ing the world may be to a blind-deaf person, who has learnt 
 to make the most of the data of the remaining senses which 
 we comparatively neglect. His world, in short, is not only 
 poorer, but also richer, and it is just where it is richer that 
 our understanding begins to fail. Descriptions such as 
 Helen Keller and others have furnished, do not wholly fill 
 the gap. Better would be experiments like that of the hero- 
 ine of The Rosary. How far, again, can we share the world 
 of animals which, like dogs, live by differences of smells 
 that we are unable to perceive? That we are as insensible 
 to most of the odours of the universe as we are to the 
 " music of the spheres " may be a blessing in disguise, but 
 it is none the less a definite limitation. Perhaps, as F. H. 
 Bradley suggests, a dog's philosophy would run: What 
 smells is real, what does not smell is nothing. But even the 
 profoundest human philosopher is inevitably an outcast 
 from the dog's paradise of smells.^ 
 
 (3) Lastly, on any interpretation of the behaviouristic 
 view, it is to be remembered that behaviour may be inten- 
 tionally deceptive. Language, as Talleyrand reniarked, is 
 intended to conceal rather than reveal thought. But the lie 
 in words is not so potent a source of misunderstanding as the 
 lie in deeds. And this, in turn, suggests sham, make-believe, 
 pretence, with all their ramifications. Some animals lie to 
 their pursuers by shamming death. In human intercourse 
 the problem becomes ethical, not only in the crude form, Is it 
 ever right to tell a lie? but in the subtler forms of pretence 
 
 1 It is worth remarking also on the differences in the means of ex- 
 pression. Whatever advantage over animals language gives to men, 
 the lack of a tail is a real handicap in the expression of emotions by 
 gesture. 
 
Ch. VIII] THEORIES OF MIND 233 
 
 and make-believe which social convention exacts as part 
 of " good manners ". Our ideals of tact, etiquette, polite- 
 ness exact a certain amount of make-believe as a moral 
 duty. More than that, the self-control, or self-repression, 
 necessary in the building of a moral character, involve some- 
 thing closely akin to pretence in the effort not to betray 
 certain feelings, not to express certain thoughts, not to 
 indulge certain desires. No doubt, it is one thing to suffer 
 from certain thoughts and desires; another, to encourage 
 and entertain them, though not to the point of overt action. 
 It is one thing to repress a feeling in order to deceive others 
 concerning its presence, another, in order to be rid of it one- 
 self. To regulate one's behaviour in an effort at self -puri- 
 fication is different from regulating it so as to mislead others 
 into thinking one is better than one is. A suppressio malt 
 in conduct need not be a suggestio falsi to others. Still, 
 the suppression of the visible act is common alike to the 
 effort to emancipate oneself, and to the effort to deceive. 
 Hence the dividing line between them is always dangerously 
 thin. Too frequently the moral struggle stops with the 
 make-believe in outward conduct that satisfies the social 
 demand. Hence the sins of thought, the vicarious indul- 
 gences in imagination, which may make a man's life a lie not 
 only to others, but even to himself. 
 
 The privacy view, on the one side, the " over-lapping- 
 minds " view, on the other, seem both in their extreme 
 forms too rigid for facts, such as these, to be comfortably 
 fitted in. Indeed, they were not devised with a view to facts 
 such as these. But by just so much do they fail to save 
 the appearances completely. 
 
 We have fetched a wide compass, and it is time that we 
 gathered in our results and applied them to the purpose 
 in hand, to the saving of the mind. 
 
234 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. VIII 
 
 Saving the mind, we have found, means acknowledging 
 the existence of minds as genuine phenomena in the order 
 of the univeirse. But such acknowledgment is possible only 
 in terms of a theory of what a mind is, or of what it is to 
 be a mind. We have sought to remove the difficulties which 
 are alleged as standing in the way of such a theory, on the 
 grounds that no mind can fully know itself, still less be 
 known by any other mind. In trying to free the theory of 
 mind from these embarrassments, we were compelled to 
 notice other difficulties arising from the fact tiiat theories of 
 what a mind is may be framed in very different contexts. 
 The biologist and animal psychologist needs a theory of 
 mind which will allow him to observe minds as functions 
 of living bodies in their environment, and this spectator 
 point of view is applicable also to human minds. Yet when 
 the psychologist takes minds at the human level proper, 
 he runs up against two facts which cannot be kept from 
 profoundly modifying the purely " objective " or spectator 
 attitude. One of these facts is self-consciousness, making 
 possible self-analysis and introspection. The other is the 
 social relations of men: their mental life in social form. 
 The psychologist's own mind comes into the picture as an 
 object of study, and in cooperation and conflict, in the 
 fluctuating relations of self and other self, the thoroughly 
 social character of his own life is brought home to him. The 
 former fact, taken by itself, leads to an extreme individual- 
 ism, if not solipsism — a retirement of " mind " or " con- 
 sciousness " upon what is " mine ", in the sense of imme- 
 diate, unique, unshareable feeling. The other fact may lead 
 to an opposite extreme of emphasising what is actually or 
 potentially common to many minds. The problem is, some- 
 how to get all these floating bits of theory into some coher- 
 ent scheme — the common character of minds as such and 
 also their diversity of t3^e; their conjunction with living 
 
Ch.VIII] THEORIES OF MIND 235 
 
 bodies and their function in the economy of life; their uni- 
 queness as individuals; their sharing of a common world; 
 their social relations pregnant with consciousness of the play 
 of self versus other self. All these have their place: the 
 trouble is to find that place. 
 
 This is the situation which we had in mind when, at the 
 beginning of this essay, we threw out the suggestion that 
 the present-day movement in psychology pointed towards a 
 sjmthesis of the Aristotelian and Descartian, the biological 
 and introspective, theories of mind — a. synthesis which must 
 needs be both polemical and constructive, holding fast what 
 is of value in each of these two points of view, but going 
 definitely beyond either where the saving of the appearances 
 makes this necessary. It remains to substantiate this sug- 
 gestion. 
 
 To any one surveying the road which the theory of the 
 mind has travelled since the days of Hume and Kant, such a 
 suggestion may seem unpromising. Without being guilty 
 of mere caricature, he might recapitulate the history of 
 modern theories of mind somewhat as follows. Hume and 
 Kant, he might say, found in the field a " metaphsreical " 
 theory of the soul as an immaterial, spiritual substance, 
 indivisible, self-identical, immortal.^ For this sort of soul 
 they denied all empirical evidence or warrant. In its place 
 Kant put the " empirical ego ", Hume the " bundle of 
 ideas ", rebaptised by James and other empirical psy- 
 chologists the " stream of consciousness ". Thus they in- 
 augurated the era of the " psychology without a soul ", for 
 which there is no soul or self which "has" experiences; 
 which feels, thinks, wills. The experiences themselves, the 
 feelings, thoughts, volitions, as they come and go, are all the 
 soul there is. And when it comes to the self, James is, in 
 
 1 Cf. Descartes' res cogitans, Berkeley's " spirit which is active in 
 perceiving ". 
 
236 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VIII 
 
 certain moods, even more annihilating, " The inner nucleus 
 of the spiritual self " the " self of selves ", so James de- 
 clares, consists, when carefully examined, mainly of "pe- 
 culiar motions in the head, or between the head and 
 throat". The ordinary man may glibly say "I think", 
 but introspection, so James tells him, shows nothing but 
 " I breathe "/ At the same time, whilst the self thus seems 
 to shrink into the bare experience of certain bodily pro- 
 cesses, the stream of consciousness threatens to make up 
 for losing a soul by appropriating the whole universe. 
 " What is the subject matter of psychology? " asks Yerkes, 
 and replies: " It is consciousness, or the world of objects 
 and events viewed as consciousness . . . Upon reflection 
 we discover that the whole world may be viewed either as 
 consciousness or as objects and events existing apart from 
 consciousness ".^ Here at last the ordinary man may think 
 (or breathe) is something substantial to lay hold of. But 
 just as he stretches out his hand, the prize is snatched from 
 his grasp by the behaviourists. Whilst most psychologists 
 assure him that there is such a thing as consciousness, and 
 that by introspection he can perceive that it is there and 
 what it is like, the strict .behaviourist denies both conscious- 
 ness and introspection. He does not think it possible to 
 find out what goes on inside a creature's mind. Hence he 
 proposes to study the creature's behaviour in response to 
 definite features of its environment. You say the creature 
 has a mind? Well, there it is, patently exhibited before 
 you in its behaviour. What is the creature conscious of? 
 What does it perceive or think? Look what it does and to 
 what objects in the environment it responds. Its conscious- 
 ness is the cross-section of the environment composed of 
 the things to which the creature's central nervous system 
 
 ^Essays in Radical Empiricism, p. 37; Principles of Psychology, 
 vol. i, pp. 299-305. 
 ^Introduction to Psychology, ch. ii, p. 13. 
 
Ch.VIII] THEORIES OF MIND 237 
 
 specifically reacts. Do you ask for a self, a knower? There 
 is the body. It is the knower, and its specific response is 
 the knowing. Thus, with the passing of the spiritual sub- 
 stance, we first got " a psychology without a soul ", and 
 now we are getting a psychology even without consciousness. 
 From spiritual substance to stream of consciousness, from 
 stream of consciousness to cross-section of the universe de- 
 fined by behaviour — such are the vicissitudes which the 
 mind has suffered at the hands of its students. 
 
 But if, with the programme of a synthesis of Aristotelian 
 and Descartian theories to guide us, we take a more com- 
 prehensive view, this whole development appears in a some- 
 what different light.^ We can then see that it is a steady 
 effort to work back from empty abstractions to a more 
 concrete point of view. It is surely significant that E. B. 
 Holt should explicitly present his behaviouristic or func- 
 tional concept of consciousness as a modern statement of 
 Aristotle's theory of the soul.^ 
 
 For Aristotle, a living body, an orgaaism, is " besouled " 
 (ifjiipvxos) , when it is actively exercising its proper func- 
 tion. What actual seeing is to the eye, that having a soul 
 is to the organism as a whole. The soul of a plant consists 
 in that it lives a t5^ical plant-life according to its kind, 
 carr3ring on the cycle of activities of growth and generation 
 in the manner characteristic of that sort of plant. Similarly, 
 the soul of an animal consists in its using its body to carry 
 on effectively the sort of activities proper to that kind of 
 animal. In this sense the soul is the " actualisation " of 
 
 1 Our programme has obvious affinities with the three stages in the 
 growth of psychology, according as the fundamental concept is life, 
 mind, or experience, which Professor James Wiard distinguishes in his 
 recently published Psychological Principles. There are some differ- 
 ences between the view set forth in Ward's first chapter and the view 
 of this essay, but they are probably differences of language rather than 
 of doctrine. 
 
 2 The Freudian Wish, pp. 49 and 95 ff. 
 
238 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. VIH 
 
 the body's " potentiality ". It is like the difference between 
 a machine at work, performing the function for which it 
 was built, and the same machine standing still, except that 
 a machine, unlike a living body, neither builds itself (i.e., 
 grows) nor performs its functions of its own initiative. So 
 a human soul consists in a human body actually doing all 
 the things which make a normal human life, from the nutri- 
 tive and generative activities which it shares with plant 
 souls, through sensation, appetition, locomotion, which it 
 shares with animal souls, to the characteristically " ra- 
 tional " activities which are specifically human.^ A soul, 
 then, for Aristotle, is the " form " or " entelechy " of a 
 body, i.e., the actual functioning of a body according, as 
 we might say, to its immanent design; and obviously a 
 functioning body implies a setting or environment to which 
 its functioning is related. Thus out of the fundamental con- 
 cepts of a living body as a system of organs; the functions 
 or uses of these organs as subsidiary to the function of the 
 system as a whole; and the actual functioning (svepyeta) 
 of the whole in its setting, Aristotle builds a theory of the 
 soul according to its three kinds, plant-soul, animal-soul, 
 man-soul. Dropping all technical terminology, we might 
 simply say that, for Aristotle, to be, or have, a human soul 
 is to do whatever things a human body can do, and prefer- 
 ably to do them well, i.e., with that excellence which comes 
 from grasp of principle grounded in sound habituation. 
 
 His standpoint is, of course, " objective ". His " ener- 
 geia " is " behaviour ", especially whep behaviour is ex- 
 tended to cover, as it ought to cover, " working or playing, 
 reading, writing, or talking, making money or spending it, 
 constructing or destroying, curing disease, alleviating pov- 
 erty, comforting the oppressed, and promoting one or an- 
 
 ^That Aristotle, unable to find an organ for the intellect (wwc), 
 should have got into a difficulty at this point in carrying through his 
 view does not affect the argument 
 
Ch.VIII] THEORIES OF MIND 239 
 
 other sort of orderliness." ^ This is, of course, the reason 
 why Aristotle has no difficulty in using his theory of the 
 soul as a basis for theories of perception, of moral train- 
 ing, of citizenship. It is a theory drawn to the proportions 
 of the actual, as well as of the " good ", life for human 
 beings, concretely taken in a concrete world. But compared 
 with traditional modern psychology, other than behaviour- 
 ism of the Holtian kind, Aristotle's theory strikes us as al- 
 most alien for two reasons. One is that it is wholly free 
 from the obsession of the problem of the relation of body 
 to soul, conceived as two disparate " substances ". The 
 other is that it lacks the individualistic note of introspection, 
 and has no term equivalent to " consciousness ". 
 
 Consciousness and the body-soul dualism owe their cen- 
 tral position in so much of modern thought chiefly to Des- 
 cartes. This is not to deny that Descartes, in his concept 
 of mind as a res cogitans, substantially distinct from body 
 as a res extensa, was the heir of centuries of scholastic 
 thought. But it would be irrelevant here to trace how, 
 through the influence of Christianity, carrsnng on and gath- 
 ering up kindred tendencies in Greek and Eastern thought, 
 the dualism of " flesh " and " spirit " was developed into a 
 metaphysics of two substances, or how the religious in- 
 dividual's preoccupation with the state of his soul, in res- 
 pect of sin and salvation, gave rise to that inwardness and 
 self-analysis which prepared the way for the attitude of 
 introspection.^ Suffice it to say, that when Descartes laid 
 down his famous cogito ergo sum; defined the soul as the 
 substance which is conscious; and which, moreover, is con- 
 scious, in the first instance, only of itself and its " ideas " 
 but not of any real thing, be it its own body or God, he 
 definitely established the " subjective " point of view, and 
 
 IE. B. Holt, loc. cit., p. 58 (slightly abbreviated in quotation). 
 
 2 St. Augustine's influence on this development is especially marked. 
 
240 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VIII 
 
 fixed that gulf between a mind and its body, as well as 
 between a mind and the real world " outside ", which it 
 has taken centuries of philosophical argument to break 
 down again. Indeed, what Descartes did was even more 
 fundamental than this. For actually, his appeal to cogitatio 
 or consciousness, was an appeal to self -consciousness, but, 
 owing to the exclusion, not only of the body and the corpor- 
 eal world generally, but also of the social world of other 
 selves, it was an empty and abstract self-consciousness to 
 which he appealed — a self-consciousness reduced to bare 
 immediacy. Descartes' method of doubt, together with his 
 desperate shifts for justifying the belief in the existence of 
 " real " things corresponding to the " ideas " in our minds, 
 shows that it is really he to whom modern philosophy owes 
 the recognition of immediate experience, or data, and the 
 problem of " transcendence ".^ The self, or ego, existence 
 of which is assured by the cogito ergo sum, is not the con- 
 crete self, conscious of itself as a member of a physical and 
 social world, but a mere synonjmi for immediate experience, 
 for this present feeling, this present thought, etc. So far 
 those critics are right who urge that Descartes was entitled 
 to say, not cogito, but only cogitatur. The personal pro- 
 noun here covers the ambiguity pointed out above.^ 
 
 This is not to deny the value of Descartes' influence on 
 philosophy in that he emancipated natural science from the 
 animism with which in scholastic speculation it was still in- 
 fected. But in treating living bodies, even the human body, 
 physically regarded as mere machines, he set the fashion of 
 reducing biology to physics; he bequeathed to psychology 
 
 1 Hume deepened both the recognition and the problem in the ultra- 
 empirical setting of his own analysis. It is characteristic that modern 
 thinkers occupied with the same problem, like Bertrand Russell, have 
 afiinities with both Hume and Descartes. The deeper affiliations cut 
 across the current superficial classifications into Empiricist and Ration- 
 alist. 
 
 » See pp. 223, 4. 
 
Ch.VIII] THEORIES OF MIND 241 
 
 and philosophy the body-soul problem; he burdened theory 
 of knowledge with the dualism of intra-mental ideas and 
 extra-mental things; he divorced and isolated each individ- 
 ual mind alike from other minds and from the common 
 world; he destroyed for psychology all chance of a concrete 
 analysis of human minds by dividing the living man not 
 only between a soulless body and a bodyless soul, but by 
 dividing the soul further between a metaphysical, non-em- 
 pirical " substance ", and an abstract self-consciousness 
 whittled down to the bare data of immediate experience. 
 As far as any single thinker can be called so, he is the 
 father of all evil in modern philosophy. 
 
 Fortunately, these errors acted as challenges and stimuli 
 to thought and thus prepared the way for most of the con- 
 structive philosophy and psychology of modern times. On 
 its logical or epistemological side, Descartes' concept of 
 consciousness, through the problem of transcendence, led, 
 via Hume, to Kant's re-discovery of judgment (instead of 
 idea) as the clue to the analysis of knowledge. On its psy- 
 chological side, his concept of consciousness made possible 
 the contributions of introspective psychology, though these 
 were loaded, from the pressure of their initial setting, with 
 three defects: (a) a tendency to sensationalistic association- 
 ism; (b) a complete ignoring of the motor or behaviour 
 aspect of mind; (c) a leaning towards either epiphenome- 
 nalism or parallelism as the relation of soul to body, with 
 the result that consciousness, whether as thought or will, 
 ceases to be an effective factor in conduct or evolution. 
 
 The inevitable reaction to these fictions is represented, 
 partly by McDougall's return to an animistic (i.e., spiritual 
 substance) theory of mind and an interactionist theory of 
 the relation of mind and body, partly by Bergson's theory 
 of the Man vital and his peculiar theory of the relation of 
 mind and body in Matter and Memory. 
 
242 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.VIII 
 
 But the real saving of mind requires neither an anima nor 
 an elan vital. What it does require is that we should undo 
 Descartes' abstractions without surrendering that advance 
 in inwardness and self-analysis, which has come to character- 
 ise modern men in direct proportion to the increasing com- 
 plexity of modern life, with its increasing stress and conflict 
 of spiritual values. Descartes' cogito, so far as it does stand 
 for a human being's consciousness of himself, is but the 
 highly attenuated reflection in theory of the characteristi- 
 cally modern feeling for personality, i.e., of the individual's 
 sense of his own value; of his uniqueness; of his " rights ", 
 not only as a human being but as the person he is; of his 
 moral autonomy as a rational being; of a world open to his 
 self-expression, in science, in art, in industry. But a human 
 mind, thus conceived, can neither be divorced from the body 
 in which it is very literally " embodied ", and through which 
 alone it is actual and effective, nor from the natural or social 
 environment from which it draws its " contents " and which, 
 by its responses, it modifies and helps to make or mar. The 
 modern Aristotelianism of the behaviourists carries us a 
 long way in this desired direction, and so does the concept 
 of consciousness as, in respect of its contents, a " cross- 
 section of the universe ". But to the element of truth in the 
 emphasis on inwardness and subjectivity this " objective " 
 view hardly does full justice. What seems required is a 
 concept of mind, not so much merely as a " cross-section " 
 of the universe, but as a jocus, or centre, of experiences of 
 the universe — a " subject " (in Hegel's sense of the term), 
 not a substance; a new power, one might almost say, evolved 
 in the world, endowed with the function of bringing past ex- 
 perience to bear on the interpretation of present data, of 
 planning and guiding action in proportion to knowledge, of 
 controlling desire and seeking new truth, of enjoying beauty, 
 of loving and hating, of serving and fighting, of cooperating 
 
Ch. VIII] THEORIES OF MIND 243 
 
 with its fellows and of persecuting them, of ascending, in 
 short, to all the heights and falliiig to all the depths which 
 men and women know to lie within the compass of human 
 nature. 
 
 The crucial facts which our modern Aristotelians do not 
 yet cover with such meanings as they have been able to 
 give to their terms " behaviour " and " cross-section of 
 the universe ", are precisely those for which, on the whole 
 Aristotle's youff stands. No doubt, the principle holds that 
 the central nervous system provides for all the achievements 
 of vovSf but this is not equivalent to a behaviouristic 
 analysis of, say, the logical operations which result in the 
 formulation of a scientific theory — say of behaviourism it- 
 self — or the creative thinking of an artist, or constructive 
 statesmanship, or great administrative and organising 
 achievements in business. No doubt the body is concerned 
 and the environment to which the body, or rather the nerv- 
 ous system, selectively responds; no doubt, too, past re- 
 sponses have their influence. But with all this, we are still 
 far from having rendered in " objective " terminology the 
 secret of inventiveness, creativeness, and all manner of con- 
 structive thinking and doing. It seems as if, in the main, 
 this could only be done, as many philosophers have tried, 
 and are trying, to do it, by direct analysis of these activities 
 and achievements in their logical character. In fact, do 
 not all considerations point towards the need of acknowledg- 
 ing minds or souls as unique concentrations of elements 
 of the universe, infinitely diverse in range and variety of 
 elements concentrated, and fluctuating in power of dealing' 
 with them, but, at their best, able to elicit from the materials 
 focused perhaps a new scientific theory, perhaps a plan for 
 an adventure, a business enterprise, a social reform, per- 
 haps a new thrill of beauty to be enjoyed and communicated 
 through a work of art? 
 
244 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. VIII 
 
 The " saving of the mind " means, at its fullest, the saving 
 of appearances such as these. The extent to which these 
 familiar facts are ignored by much current theory is the 
 measure of its failure to be equal to its opportunities. 
 
 Note on the Theory of Knowledge 
 (See p. 206) 
 
 The name of epistemology has not unjustly become a by-word 
 for all that is least reputable in philosophy, for all the arid 
 dialectics and idle hair-splitting over fictitious problems which 
 are, proverbially, the philosopher's besetting temptation. Even 
 after we have successfully disentangled ourselves from the old 
 dualism of ideas and objects, intra-mental thoughts and extra- 
 mental things, we are still confronted by a perplexing variety of 
 analyses of the " knowing-process " or the " knowledge-situa- 
 tion ". But what is not always clearly seen is that this variety 
 of analyses, with all the impatient argument at cross-purposes to 
 which it gives rise, is here, as always, a symptom of logical in- 
 stability of concepts, of the criss-crossing of inconsistent points of 
 view. In fact, problems may be put under the same heading 
 of " knowledge ", and yet be discussed from widely different 
 points of view, i.e., in contexts, and on the basis of assumptions,, 
 utterly disparate. ' 
 
 We shall do something towards threading our way through the 
 maze, if we distinguish at least two angles from which, in recent 
 philosophical literature, the problem of knowledge has been form- 
 ulated and discussed. 
 
 (i) We may start out by saying that knowing is a specific 
 activity of certain kinds of animals (including the human ani- 
 mal), and that, like other activities, such as eating or walking 
 or talking, it must be observed and studied by taking typical 
 cases of it. This way of approach is often called " empirical " 
 and " scientific ". It certainly takes for granted the point of view 
 of biology. It places knowing in a biological context, interprets 
 it as one phase of the living creature's commerce with its environ- 
 ment. The " cognitive relation " is similarly interpreted. The 
 creature, through its mind, is the knower; the environment, with 
 more or less selection, is the object, or known. 
 
Ch. VIII] THEORIES OF MIND 245 
 
 Alternatively, with less explicit emphasis on the biological set- 
 ting, but still fundamentally with the same orientation, we may 
 ask what a given mind knows, where " knowing " means 
 simply " being aware of ", in the widest sense. It means asking, 
 What is in X's mind? What is X perceiving, thinking, imagining? 
 To say that this question is largely answerable by observation, 
 by watching the " responses " of the " knower " to his environ- 
 ment, is, granting the biological setting, plausible enough. And 
 if, in addition to observing the knower, the observer imderstands 
 the knower's language, the limits of the observer's own mind 
 are the only limits to his finding out what the other knows. In 
 short, if by something being known we mean merely its being 
 " in ", or " present to " somebody's mind — ^very literally some 
 body's mind, for the " body " is tiie " subject " on this view * — 
 the problem of knowledge admits, in this form, of a solution in 
 terms of the knower's behaviour (including his language) towards 
 his environment. His mind, his consciousness, his knowledge 
 will be a " cross-section " of the universe, consisting of those 
 elements of the xmiverse to which the knower's nervous system 
 specifically responds. Throughout this way of putting, and solv- 
 ing, the problem of knowledge, nothing more is, clearly, in ques- 
 tion than a stock-taking, so to speak, of the contents of a know- 
 er's mind, considered as a selection from the contents of the 
 universe at large. With the virtues of such a view, as providing 
 a delightfully " realistic " escape from the toils of " subjective 
 idealism ", we are not here concerned. All that interests us is 
 to distinguish this t3^e of theory of knowledge from another 
 one which is quite differently oriented. 
 
 To this second theory we are led, not by seeking to distinguish 
 what, out of the total universe, is and what is not object for a 
 given mind, but by seeking to distinguish between " opinion " 
 and " knowledge ", or, better still, between truth and error. 
 The problem here is not one of stock-taking; of noting, or infer- 
 ring, a given person's awareness of this, or failure to be aware 
 of that. It is a problem of evaluation: is what he^ is aware of 
 " really " or " tnily " so? Is it what he believes it to be? Even 
 this way of putting it is still misleading, at any rate for any 
 
 1 E. B. Holt, Response and Cognition, in The Freudian Wish, p. 174. 
 See also above, pp. 237, 8. 
 
 2 The " he ", of course, of this question may be " I ". Do I knowf= 
 Is it really so, where " so "=as I perceive and judge it to be. 
 
246 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. VIII 
 
 one who should throughout keep the emphasis on " he ", on some 
 " particular " mind. For the real point of this second kind of 
 theory of knowledge is, not to find a general formula defining 
 the conditions under which independent reals become objects of 
 somebody's apprehension or contents of some mind, but to dis- 
 cuss the character (or " what ") of the real world from the angle 
 of the question, whether it truly is what it is judged, or believed, 
 or assumed, to be. Our topic of investigation is not what is 
 de facto " in ", or " before ", a given mind. Our topic is judg- 
 ments, theories, beliefs, and the grounds on which their claim 
 to be true, and to constitute " knowledge " because they are true, 
 may be justified. We are to deal, not with " ideas ", as distinct 
 from " real things ", but with real things as they are perceived 
 and conceived to be. A theory of knowledge of this sort will find 
 its " typical cases " of knowledge in any systematic body of judg- 
 ments such as the natural sciences, and it will be entirely indif- 
 ferent to the question whether a particular scientist happens, at 
 the moment, to be noticing a particular fact, or to be thinking 
 of a particular theory. It will examine the logical structure of 
 the sciences, point out their dominant concepts, evaluate their 
 success as attempts at the systematisation and interpretation of 
 empirical data, estimate their degree of abstractness, and so forth. 
 With individual minds, as properties or activities of animals or 
 human beings, taken biologically in their environment, it is not 
 concerned. Rather is it concerned with the nature of the uni- 
 verse or of " reality ",^ approached from the only possible angle 
 of the logical adequacy, or truth, of the judgments or beliefs 
 which in systematic form sum up what the data, synthetically 
 used, reveal of its constitution and character. It is concerned 
 with knowledge, not with knowers, with science, not with scien- 
 tists. And when it says " knowledge ", or " science " it means 
 the world as known, i.e., the world as it is judged to be in judg- 
 ments which, like scientific theories, have witiliin certain fields 
 made good their claim to be true. Of course, we can, if we 
 please, be interested in scientific theories, or discoveries, as inci- 
 dents in the personal history of great scientists, just as we rightly 
 honour such men for having " added to knowledge ". But to 
 the main problem of theory of knowledge this is irrelevant. What 
 matters is not the fact that somebody accepts a theory but 
 
 iSee the argument of Essay IV. 
 
Ch. VIII] THEORIES OF MIND 247 
 
 whether that theory is true. And, again, it is not the details of 
 theory which matter, but the fundamental, or, in our language, 
 " dominant " concepts. Theory of knowledge, somewhat like 
 Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, but without the latter's entangle- 
 ment with " consciousness-as-such ", asks whether the general 
 character and logical framework of the world are what scientific, 
 moral, religious judgments declare it to be. This situation is 
 obscured by the necessity which none of us can escape of rely- 
 ing on some one else's authority in matters in which we cannot 
 get knowledge at first hand. Then the fact that so-and-so, be- 
 lieved to be an authority, thinks so, is important as evidence 
 for its being so. But the authority may err, not only in detail — 
 other workers in the same field will sooner or later correct his 
 mistakes — but by extending the fundamental concepts of his field 
 of knowledge beyond the boundaries within which they are valid. 
 And then arises precisely that problem of the systematic order 
 of the xmiverse as a whole ^ which has to be faced, whether we 
 call the attempt to solve it " theory of knowledge " or " meta- 
 physics ". 
 
 Let us push this contrast a little further. The verb " to 
 know " is ambiguous, in that its uses range from the mere affir- 
 mation of awareness to the emphatic affirmation of truth. When 
 I say, in common intercourse, that I " know " a thing, I may 
 mean no more than that I am aware of it, in the sense that I 
 have witnessed it, read it, been told it, etc. Or it may mean that 
 emphatically the thing is so, that my judgment or belief that it 
 is so is true, not because it is " mine ", but because there is good 
 evidence to show that it is so and not otherwise. Of course, I 
 can appeal to these grounds only so far as I am aware of them. 
 Still my claim that I " know ", i.e., that what I think is true, 
 
 lis it still necessary, at this time of day, to remind critics of the 
 phrases " as a whole " or " point of view of the whole ", that they 
 miss the point if they keep interpreting these phrases in terms of their 
 own contrast between the illimitable universe and the narrow human 
 mind? Every educated man, including the critics, thinks of the uni- 
 verse partly in terms of the fundamental concepts of the various natu- 
 ral sciences, partly in terms of moral, religious, esthetic concepts. 
 Every judgment he accepts as true introduces, or implies, some one 
 or more of these concepts, and claims that reality, in one of its aspects 
 at any rate, is so. Here, surely are enough materials out of which 
 to try to form a " whole ". How? is no doubt a matter of experiment. 
 But those who have never tried have no. right to say " it can't be 
 done " : and those who have tried and failed, should not stand in the 
 way of those who want to try again. 
 
248 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.Vni 
 
 rests not on the mere fact that I happen to be aware of both 
 grounds and conclusion, but on the fact that the grounds logically 
 support the conclusion, that there is an " objective " relation 
 between them which would be equally authoritative for any 
 other thinker. This is the factor of " objective control " so much 
 emphasised by many writers on logic and theory of knowledge. 
 Obviously to the study of it the fact that it appears in individual 
 minds is irrelevant, though such appearance is the sine qua non 
 of its being accessible to study at all.^ 
 
 Another way of putting the contrast between the two types of 
 theory of knowledge is to say that the concept of the " cognitive 
 relation ", as a relation between knowing mind and object known, 
 belongs essentially to the former type, and not to the latter at all. 
 So far as the second type of theory can be said to have any con- 
 cern at all with any sort of relation which might be called " cogni- 
 tive ", such concern would be either with the relation, if any, 
 between datum" or "fact", and "judgment" or "theory"; 
 or else, after the manner of F. H. Bradley, with the adequacy 
 of " discursive thought ", i.e., of all relational concepts whatso- 
 ever. 
 
 At any rate, the present chaos in epistemology will not disap- 
 pear, until it is clearly recognised that some such sorting out of 
 problems, as we have above suggested, is absolutely necessary.^ 
 We can take human beings as known to psychology and physi- 
 ology, bring them as an animal species within the field known 
 to zoology and biology, place them in an environment as known 
 
 1 The fact that the meaning of " knowledge" ranges from awareness 
 at one end, which if we like to say so, is "subjective", to truth or 
 fact, at the other, which are "objective", has many curious conse- 
 quences. It accounts, for example, for the oft-felt difficulty of dis- 
 tinguishing between truthfulness and truth. " Many people cannot see 
 the difference between impeaching their argument and impeaching their 
 veracity" (Bosanquet, Essentials of Logic, p. _2S). Again, in debate, 
 it is not easy to attack a theory without seeming to attack those who 
 hold it. However objective and impersonal the criticism may be in 
 tone, there is but a thin line between the imputation of error and 
 the imputation of stupidity, or of bias amounting to intellectual dis- 
 honesty. At best, though the dispute be all about objective truth 
 betTveen two lovers of it, it is a measuring of minds and personalities 
 against each other ; and " personalities " are apt to result where the 
 fate of reputations trembles in the balance — a good example, we must 
 suppose, of what Hegel calls " die List der Vernunft ". 
 
 2 An essay in the second volume of Studies will give a fuller exposi- 
 tion and defence of the above view, especially in its historical con- 
 text. 
 
Ch. VIII] THEORIES OF MIND 249 
 
 to physics, chemistry and the rest of the natural sciences. Be- 
 tween a human being thus known and an environment thus known 
 we can, then, to our hearts' content construct a " cognitive re- 
 lation ", in terms of which we, onlooker-wise, can say just what 
 of the environment our human knower perceives, remembers, etc. 
 It is a harmless amusement, and even an addition to knowledge. 
 But what it is not is a theory of knowledge in the sense in 
 which such a theory should seek to answer the question, how 
 far all this apparatus of sciences which provides the setting for 
 the cognitive relation can claim to be knowledge, i.e., what 
 grounds there are for thinking that the universe is really, or 
 truly, such as the sciences, between them, declare it to be, and 
 what is to be done with the evidence of all the modes of expe- 
 rience which the sciences ignore — ^with all the bricks which the 
 scientific builders reject as not fitting into their pattern. 
 
 It is only fair to acknowledge that the doctrines of the various 
 neo-realistic schools of thought, however much they may differ 
 from each other or from the position maintained above, may 
 certainly claim one great and undeniable merit, viz., that in 
 their polemics against epistemology and " idealism " (or what 
 they take to be idealism), and in tieir efforts to disentangle ob- 
 jective reality from the " accident " of being known by someone, 
 they are at least clearing the way for themselves to a Gegenstands- 
 theorie which bears unmistakably all the marks of a return to 
 metaphysics.^ Are we venturing on an unsafe prophecy when we 
 say that their metaphysical interests will compel them, sooner 
 or later, to take up the considerations which yield theory of 
 knowledge in our second sense? 
 
 1 The most recent example is E. G. Spaulding's The New Rational- 
 ism which has come to my notice too late for detailed reference in the 
 course of these essays. 
 
CHAPTER rX 
 
 THE SELF IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 Throughout the preceding essay, it will have been noticed 
 how often problems of " mind " touched so closely on prob- 
 lems of " self " as to be almost inseparable. It will help 
 us to open up our present topic, if we recapitulate these con- 
 tacts. 
 
 The most obvious of them is incidental to the familiar 
 view that each mind is certainly conscious of itself, whether 
 or no it be conscious of anything beyond itself. The up- 
 holders of this view might even, if it were put to them, be 
 found willing to make this the defining characteristic of a 
 mind. Self-knowledge, in the sense of self-awareness, they 
 might say, is the essential'prerogative of a mind: only a 
 mind has this unique relation to itself. 
 
 But the exact meaning of this view is far from obvious, 
 however plausible the language may sound. It appears to 
 identify being a mind with being a self, being conscious 
 with being self-conscious. This identification, however, may 
 well make us pause. We shall hardly accept it in the sense 
 that to be conscious is the same as to be conscious of being 
 conscious; i.e., it is not "consciousness", as an abstract 
 quale, of which it can be intended to say that it is aware 
 of itself and of nothing else. But if we turn from conscious- 
 ness in the abstract to the objects of which we are conscious, 
 the suggestion that whatever any mind is conscious of is 
 a piece, so to speak, of itself, comes to all our ordinary 
 habits of thinking with the effect of violent paradox. This 
 paradox is but intensified when it is defended, along the 
 
 250 
 
Ch.IX] SELF IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 251 
 
 traditional lines, by turning every object into a complex of 
 " mental " sensations or ideas. For this defence cuts clear 
 across all the ordinary classifications of the objects we are 
 conscious of, as " minds " and " bodies ", or " particulars " 
 and " universals ", and so forth. It cuts across — indeed, it 
 threatens to make meaningless — even the familiar distinc- 
 tion between me and you, what is my self and what is your 
 self. If it is of the essence of a mind to be aware of itself, 
 and of nothing but itself, the whole status of the " other " 
 becomes exceedingly problematical. Not only what is other 
 than mind (non-mental), i.e., the physical world, is affected, 
 but, even more sweepingly, what is other than this mind, 
 i.e., other minds, other selves. This situation led us to 
 recognise as one of the chief sources of trouble in the theory 
 of mind, consciousness, self, the fact that these terms, and 
 especially the pronouns of the first person singular, are used, 
 at one end of the pole, as pure demonstratives referring to 
 immediate experience or feeling, and, at the other end, in 
 a social context in which each mind or self not only is, but 
 also recognises itself to be, surrounded by, and related to, 
 other minds and selves, as well as non-mental objects. Psy- 
 chology, like every other science, is a social phenomenon. 
 The knowledge, i.e., true theory of what mind is, which it 
 seeks to offer, is attained by the cooperation of different 
 minds, communicating to each other, in fact pooling and 
 even correcting, their observations and theories. For this 
 to be possible, minds must be capable of becoming " com- 
 mon " and " public " objects to each other, and " objective " 
 psychology has here its justification. At the same time, 
 each mind has an individuality of its own, which not 
 only enables it to be discriminated as one " object " from 
 others of the same sort, but which enables it also to make 
 its own distinctive contribution to the social intercourse of 
 minds in general, and in particular to the cooperation of 
 
252 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IX 
 
 minds in the building up of knowledge, whether of minds 
 or of anything else. Here lies the value of introspec- 
 tion; here, too, the relative justification of the " privacy " 
 view. 
 
 In short, to sum up, the dialectical difficulties which we 
 had found surrounding the theory of mind, derive, so we now 
 see, from the intensified difficulties surrounding the theory 
 of self. Psychology, as a social phenomenon, is possible 
 only for minds individually capable of self-consciousness. 
 And self-consciousness, as we may now put it, is double- 
 edged. It has its basis, on the one hand, in immediate feel- 
 ing, this-here-now. But it requires no less, and is sus- 
 tained and developed only by, the varying relations of each 
 self, not only to the " not-self " in general, but to specific 
 other selves in social intercourse. If we try to whittle down 
 the self to mere immediate feeling, the very distinction be- 
 tween self and not-self, or other self, disappears, and noth- 
 ing is left but the general contrast between datum and non- 
 datum. If, on the other hand, we go for the concrete self, 
 as known to itself and to others, we not only find that data 
 are transcended,^ but that this transcending is a social or 
 cooperative process. Moreover, it is social or cooperative 
 at, broadly, two levels. One is the level of ordinary social 
 intercourse in all its diverse practical sides: the rubbing of 
 mind against mind, the various mutual influences and con- 
 tacts, the actions and reactions which are constantly form- 
 ing each of us, the play of self against others, friendly or 
 hostile. The other is the level of reflective theory, at which 
 minds who have at the former level learned to recognise 
 themselves, and each other, as selves, take stock of this 
 whole situation and try to work out a systematic and com- 
 prehensive theory of it. 
 
 1 Whether we describe this transcending as inference, or construc- 
 tion, or interpretation, or synthesis, makes no difference. 
 
Ch.IX] SELF IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 253 
 
 Not the least of the difficulties which stand in the way of 
 such an attempt arises from the elusive and shifting mean- 
 ings of " self-consciousness ". Abstractly, it is tempting to 
 argue that self-hood (being a self) must precede self-con- 
 sciousness (being conscious of one's self). There must be 
 a self, it may be said, before there can be consciousness of 
 one, but experience appears to show that one's self is not 
 simply a datum, but grows and develops, one might almost 
 say lives, in all the nuances and oscillations of self-con- 
 sciousness. Yet, on the other hand, we want to distinguish 
 being conscious from being self-conscious. Merely to have 
 experiences is not the same thing as to have experiences into 
 the pattern of which the difference between self and not-self 
 enters. 
 
 This last point, perhaps, gives us the clue which leads 
 to the solution. Is it not best to say that a mind is not a 
 " self " in the pregnant sense, until its experiences take 
 on the characteristic structure of a distinction between self 
 and not-self? To be merely conscious, then, will mean to 
 have experiences into which, for all that they are mine, no 
 trace of a contrast between me and not-me enters. To be 
 self-conscious will be to have experiences marked by this 
 contrast. And only when, and in so far as, this contrast is 
 felt, or is capable of being felt, will it be safe to say that 
 there is a self to be conscious of. 
 
 Selfhood and self-consciousness thus hang very closely 
 together and both, at the same time, imply a social medium, 
 i.e., effective relationship to other selves. Moreover, on 
 this view we can further distinguish between self -conscious- 
 ness and self-knowledge. The latter belongs definitely to 
 the level of reflective theory. It consists of one's own judg- 
 ments about one's self. It implies that one makes of one's 
 self an object of attention and study. The judgments of 
 explicit self-knowledge require to be distinguished from all 
 
254 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. IX 
 
 the countless judgments which are mere expressions of self- 
 consciousness. Most of the judgments of current conversa- 
 tion in which " I " figures as subject, are spontaneous self- 
 revelations rather than critical self-judgments. They belong 
 to the give-and-take of social intercourse. They are not made 
 with scientific interest in the effort after self-knowledge. 
 Relatively to self-knowledge, they are data — materials 
 for a study of self. It is clear from this that self- 
 knowledge enjoys no special prerogative of infallibility. The 
 theoretical judgments I make about myself, do not, as a 
 class, exhibit any marked superiority in respect of freedom 
 from error. And, apart from self-deception, it is a far from 
 easy task to make the whole of one's self effectively an ob- 
 ject of study. This is not only because in some respects 
 others are in a better position to know me as I really 
 am, than I am myself, but even more because it is hard for 
 reflection to comprehend and order the endless ramifica- 
 tions and fluctuations of self-consciousness. For the line 
 between Self and Not-Self, or Other Self, is not a fixed, but 
 a shifting, one; and. elements which in one context fall on 
 the side of the self, may be excluded from it in another. 
 There are even experiences in which the distinction between 
 self and other, whilst still felt, is yet transcended in a union 
 of self and other, an identification of self with other. It 
 was, we may suppose, the thought of these fluctuations of 
 self-consciousness, and the consequent difficulty of " giving 
 an account " of one's self, which moved Mr. Bradley to 
 write: " We are all sure that we exist, but in what sense and 
 what character — as to that we are most of us in helpless 
 uncertainty and in blind confusion. And so far is the self 
 from being clearer than things outside us that, to speak gen- 
 erally, we never know what we mean when we talk of it "} 
 The difficulty is akin to that which, by common consent, be- 
 ^ Appearance and Reality, ch. ix, p. 76. 
 
Ch.IX] SELF IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 255 
 
 sets all attempts at an " objective " history of contemporary 
 events. 
 
 Our argument sums up to this: Self-consciousness is the 
 name for all forms of experience the structure of which ex- 
 hibits the characteristic distinction of Self and Other. Such 
 experiences are the source of, and furnish the data for, ex- 
 plicit self-knowledge. They bear witness to the existence 
 of self in a world other than it, and containing other selves 
 in various relations to it. More particularly, self-conscious- 
 ness is the general form of experience for a self in social 
 intercourse with other selves. If there is a level of mental 
 life at which experiences are not characterised by any sense 
 of distinction between self and not-self, it is better not to 
 speak of a " self " at that stage, though once the distinction 
 has come to be felt and the self come to be recognised as 
 against the other, these un-self-conscious experiences can be 
 constructively affiliated to those marked by self-conscious- 
 ness. 
 
 A last source of difficulty demands to be briefly dealt 
 with. Just as psychology is not concerned with a particular 
 mind for its own sake, least of all with the psychologist's 
 own mind, but studies minds of all sorts as furnishing the 
 materials for a knowledge of the nature of mind as such, in 
 its different forms under different conditions, so our interest 
 here is in " the " self. So far as each of us supplies data 
 for such a study from his own self, the accounts of parti- 
 cular selves have to be stripped of their autobiographical 
 character and generalised. Here, as elsewhere, every parti- 
 cular is a " this-such ", an instance of a universal; and it 
 is as an instance bringing new knowledge of the universal, 
 that the particular, even in extreme and abnormal cases, 
 has its value for science. We come here upon yet another 
 way in which self and self-consciousness turn out to be 
 
256 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IX 
 
 double-edged. For the terms point, on the one hand, to the 
 extreme of individual uniqueness, " self-identity ", differ- 
 entiation from all that is " other " and " not-me ", Yet, on 
 the other, within varying limits, what is true of one self is 
 true of others. And more than that: selves do not merely 
 form a class of similars, but as members of communities 
 supplement and, as it were, complete one another in every 
 cooperative enterprise or achievement which it is beyond 
 the power of any single self to plan or achieve by itself. 
 The very uniqueness of each self and their differences from 
 each other become positively significant through member- 
 ship in a common life, so far at least as differentiation of 
 function corresponds to the differentiation in character and 
 ability of the constituent selves. In a very curious and strik- 
 ing way this is illustrated by the meaning of the personal 
 pronoun, in the first person singular and plural. The speech 
 of ordinary intercourse is " personal " and self-revealing, or 
 self-communicating, to a high degree. No other word, we 
 can safely say, is used with such frequency as the personal 
 pronoun, I, and its derivatives. This fact bears witness to 
 the centrality of the " self-other " structure of experience. 
 This does not mean, of course, that we are always " think- 
 ing of ourselves " in a reprehensible sense, or that there is 
 no such thing as disinterested interest in the " Other ", be 
 it the physical world, or fellow-men. But it does mean that 
 the self-not-self form is dominant in most of human experi- 
 ence. Thence results the curious ambiguity in the meaning 
 of " I ", which is unlike the ambiguity of any other word 
 in the language. " I " is, of course, in the first instance a 
 denotative or demonstrative term, a label for self-reference, 
 a signal for directing the attention of others to oneself. 
 But it differs from other demonstratives in that it has mean- 
 ing only as applied by each speaker exclusively to himself. 
 Other demonstratives may mean the same object in ap- 
 
Ch. IX] SELF IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 257 
 
 plication for different speakers, as, e.g., when you and I 
 both refer to " this page." But when I say " I ", and when 
 you say " I ", the same word means a different self to each 
 of us. " I " is as exclusive a s5mibol in application as a 
 proper name, but with this difference that it is " proper " 
 only in each person's application of it by himself to him- 
 self. I is a common device for exclusive self-reference by 
 individual selves. But just because it is a common device, 
 just because each self refers to itself as " I ", differentiates 
 itself from " you ", recognises community with others in 
 " we ", this common function can be studied as a universal, 
 under the name, or description, of " the self " (the " Ego ", 
 or, as James has it, the "Me"). At the same time, 
 our whole argument makes it clear how one-sided and frag- 
 mentary any account of the self is bound to be which 
 ignores the experiences expressed by each individual self 
 in the " we " form of language. The plural of the personal 
 pronoun is standing testimony, too often neglected by 
 philosophers as well as by psychologists, to the fact that the 
 identity of individual selves is compatible with their func- 
 tioning as constituents of identities (wholes, systems) of 
 a higher order, and that these relationships are recognised, 
 and expressed in language, as characteristic of what are per- 
 haps the most important forms of self-conscious experience. 
 
 The " savmg of the self " calls, not so much for a defini- 
 tion of the self, as for a theory exhibiting the self, enabling 
 it to be appreciated, we might almost say perceived, within 
 its proper context and in the typical range of its manifesta- 
 tions. This task we can best attempt by dealing, first, with 
 the " constituents " of the self; next,. with personal identity; 
 and, lastly, with the fluctuations of self-consciousness. 
 Throughout, our task demands the ssmthesis of two points 
 of view. Just as in dealing with " mind ", we found it neces- 
 
2S8 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IX 
 
 sary to combine an " objective " with a " subjective " ap- 
 proach, the evidence of the spectator with the evidence of 
 introspection, so in dealing with the self there are two 
 sources of judgments. One consists of the utterances, naive 
 or reflective, which every one makes about himself; the 
 other of the judgments uttered by others, or implicit in 
 their attitude and behaviour/ 
 
 (i) In order to appreciate the movement from an abstract 
 to a concrete theory, we cannot do better than begin our dis- 
 cussion of the constituents of the Self with the crude body- 
 soul metaphysics which still do duty for a theory of the 
 self in popular thought. 
 
 Dr. J. McT. E. McTaggart, in his discussion of immortal- 
 ity,^ calls attention to the awkwardness of the current 
 phrase, I " have " a soul, suggesting, as it does, that " my " 
 soul is something I own, a piece of property almost, which 
 is no part, or constituent of me, its owner. His point is 
 
 1 It need hardly be said that the two sets of judgments which we 
 are here distinguishing in respect of their source and point of view, 
 do not fall apart as they do in the following passage which is typical 
 of a theory, the prevalence of which has done much to retard the 
 development of a concrete study of both mind and self. " Suppose, 
 then, I could remove the brain-cap of one of you, and expose the 
 brain in active work, — as it doubtless is at this moment. Suppose, 
 further, that my senses were absolutely perfect, so that I could see 
 everything that was going on there. What would I see? Only de- 
 compositions and recompositions, molecular agitations and vibrations; 
 in a word, physical phenomena, and nothing else. There is absolutely 
 nothing else there to see. But you, the subject of this experiment, 
 what do you perceive? You see nothing of all this; you perceive an 
 entirely different set of phenomena; viz., consciousness, — ^thought, emo- 
 tion, will; psychical phenomena; in a word,_ a self, a person. From 
 the outside we see only physical, from the inside only psychical phe- 
 nomena." — Quoted from Professor Joseph LeConte's comments on 
 Royce's Conception of Go3 (1895), pp. 43, 4. It need hardly be pointed 
 out that, even from the "outside there is more to be seen of a 
 person's mind and self than is here conceded. And as for the " inside ", 
 let this experiment decide. Suppose, while Professor Le Conte was 
 exposing the brain of some one, a third person removed the Pro- 
 fessor's skull-cap and studied his brain, would the things which the 
 Professor is seeing, the " molecular agitations " and the rest, thereby 
 suddenly be transformed from " physical " into " psychical " phe- 
 nomena? 
 
 ^Some Dogmas of Religion, Ch. iii, p. 78. 
 
Ch.IX] SELF IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 259 
 
 that the immortality of my soul, if it really were thus dif- 
 ferent and separable from me, would be worthless. What 
 interests us is ffie immortality of that which, saying " I ", 
 means itself. The important question is not. Is my soul im- 
 mortal? but, Am I immortal? Or, to put it differently, if 
 my soul's immortality is the same thing as my immortality, 
 then my soul is not something which I have, but some- 
 thing which I am. I am my soul: but to affirm this is, very 
 obviously, to affirm a theory, to give an, account of the 
 nature of my " self "; and it is such a theory quite regard- 
 less of whether my soul, i.e., myself, does or does not sur- 
 vive death. 
 
 Should the same conclusion be extended to the body? 
 The phrase, I have a body, seems parallel to the phrase, I 
 have a soul. Should it, too, be interpreted to mean, I am 
 my body? This is, clearly, what is intended ordinarily by 
 popular thought. " I am my body and my soul ", or, " my 
 self consists of body and soul ", would fairly sum up its 
 position. For even when it is said that I " have " body and 
 soul, the " having " is intended to convey a relationship 
 much more close and essential than mere ownership of 
 things which I can acquire or lose, possess and use or give 
 away and use up. A man, it will be urged, can be stripped 
 of all his possessions, and still be himself. He can be 
 divorced from all his associations to other human beings, to 
 his home, his country, his church, and still retain his iden- 
 tity. But if, in fact or in hypothesis, you take his body from 
 him or his soul, in either case is he destroyed. The remain- 
 ing fragment, supposing anything to remain after the muti- 
 lation, is no longer what he, or any one else, would call his 
 " self ". His body and his soul are the irreducible con- 
 stituents of his " self ". 
 
 The above statement represents an attempt to set down 
 in explicit terms the implicit metaphysics of current views 
 
26o CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IX 
 
 concerning what a human being is essentially made of. If 
 the statement strikes any reader as obvious and familiar, 
 then this is so far testimony to the success of our attempt. 
 But current thought is not so simple or self-consistent, as 
 we have here made it out to be. Moral and religious teach- 
 ings, to say nothing of metaphysical theories quite differ- 
 ently oriented, have passed as fragments, and streaks of 
 tradition, and allusions in literature, at least into the average 
 thought of educated people, and a very brief reflection will 
 suggest questions to which the above statement can supply 
 no answer, and theories which are inconsistent with it. If 
 we try to hold to the view that a self consists of a body and 
 a soul, such questions as: What is a body? What is a soul? 
 How are they connected and related? cannot be put aside. 
 On the other hand, there are plenty of theories which, 
 whilst distinguishing no less sharply between body and soul, 
 insist that the self is identical only with the soul, and that 
 the body is not genuinely part of it at all. Most of these 
 theories are inspired mainly by moral or religious motives, 
 connected with beliefs in survival of death, pre-existence, 
 re-incarnation. But recently the same position has been 
 defended, in a purely scientific spirit on grounds of intro- 
 spective analysis by Professor John Laird in his Problems 
 of the Selj.^ And there are theories combining both mo- 
 tives, with much variation in detail, like Professor W. Mc- 
 Dougall's " animistic " theory in Body and Mind, or Miss 
 May Sinclair's vivacious argument, ranging from Samuel 
 Butler and Freud to the mysticism of East and West, in 
 A Defence of Idealism. 
 
 An exhaustive examination of all these experiments 
 in speculation lies beyond the scope of this essay. But 
 a few salient points require to be touched on, if we are 
 
 1 For a review of this book by the writer, see Philosophical Review, 
 vol. xxvii, no. 3, pp. 296-303. 
 
Ch. IX] SELF IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 261 
 
 to exhibit the contrast between abstract and concrete 
 theories. 
 
 The best preparation for a critical appreciation of the 
 body-and-soul theory of the self is to realise, not only how 
 fully and adequately all that one feels, thinks, wills, does, 
 can be expressed in terms which do not introduce the dis- 
 tinction of body and soul at all, but even more to what an 
 extent the attempt to classify the elements of one's being 
 under these two mutually exclusive heads cuts across the 
 felt unity of the self. A trivial example may serve to bring 
 out the point. Is it really satisfactory to analyse the expe- 
 rience of being bitten by a mosquito, by assigning the bite 
 to the body and the itch to the soul? Emotions, again, re- 
 sist equally the attempt to set them down exclusively either 
 to the body or to the soul, and the attempt to divide their 
 felt unity between the two. This, surely, is the plain moral 
 of the James-Lange theory of emotion, which shows that 
 what we feel are the physical disturbances, the beating of 
 the heart, the sudden flush in the face, the shiver down 
 the spine. Is it really possible to analyse voluntary activity, 
 e.g., the doing of one's work, on the scheme of a material 
 body and an immaterial soul, mysteriously conjoined, some- 
 how cooperating in the production of an intelligent, purpose- 
 ful act? Take a man in a fight and split him up, if you can, 
 with your body-soul theory, so as to show that his body 
 does this and his soul does that. Take any desire, more 
 especially a so-called " physical " desire; take hunger or 
 sex and, once more, try your analysis honestly on the facts. 
 If the body-and-soul theory holds, such a phrase as " bodily 
 desire " is a contradiction in terms. For the desire will 
 have to be assigned to the mind, and nothing strictly physi- 
 cal will enter into it, whilst the bodily state, correspondingly, 
 must be taken as divorced from all consciousness. In being 
 
262 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. IX 
 
 hungry, where is the line between body and mind? This 
 point is not countered by the reminder that there is a 
 hunger of the soul for righteousness as well as a hunger 
 of the body for food. This merely shows that the self, being 
 many-sided, hungers for many different things. It does 
 not show that it is a compound of a material and an im- 
 material " substance ", somehow conjoined. 
 
 Our suggestion, then, is that' the two-substance theory of 
 the self is an artificial rendering of the ways in which a 
 self actually experiences itself. But we ought not, for this 
 reason, simply to condemn it without considering on their 
 merits either the grounds which make the two-substance 
 theory plausible, or recent attempts to reformulate and 
 defend it. 
 
 The grounds which favour a dualistic theory of the self 
 may be grouped as being either moral and religious, or else 
 scientific. 
 
 There can be little doubt that the experience of moral 
 conflict — of the self divided between, and torn by, desires, 
 not only incompatible in execution, but opposed in moral 
 value — has done much to confirm the antithesis of body and 
 soul in popular thought. It would go beyond the evidence 
 to say that in this conflict we have one of the original roots 
 of the theory. But we can say that the conflict lends itself 
 to formulation in terms of the theory, and thus in turn lends 
 plausibility to the theory. More particularly when the con- 
 flict takes the form of an effort to resist a " temptation ", 
 to prevent strong excitement or intense craving from pass- 
 ing into overt action, to maintain the supremacy of " will " 
 or " reason " over " impulse " or " passion ", the antithesis 
 of " flesh " and " spirit " springs readily to our lips. The 
 task being primarily to restrain bodily movement, to re- 
 press a physical disturbance lest it burst into action, the 
 
Ch.IX] SELF IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 263 
 
 power to control and oppose the body is naturally ascribed 
 to something other than the body, though still part of the 
 self. To interpret a conflict within the self as due to disr 
 tinct substances, or forces, or, in the most attenuated ver- 
 sion, faculties, is the natural procedure of primitive meta- 
 physics. The experience is that I am trying to control 
 myself, to do this rather than that, to refrain from doing 
 what I know I ought not to do. The theory turns this into 
 a struggle between my " spirit " and my " flesh ", ascribing 
 failure to the " weakness " of the latter despite the " willing- 
 ness " of the former. And it ends by differentiating body 
 and soul so completely, that it becomes a wellnigh impossible 
 task to explain how the one can influence or control the 
 other at all. A genuine fact of moral experience has been 
 translated into an abstract metaphysical scheme. 
 
 Moreover, it is not merely the experience of moral con- 
 flict which has exercised its influence on this development. 
 There are also all the experiences which lead to the familiar 
 estimates of the body as both the iijdispensable instrument 
 of, and also a handicap to, the soul. Without it, the soul 
 can effect nothing, yet with it, it can effect nothing per- 
 fectly. If we go behind the metaphors of instrument and 
 handicap to the experiences crystallised in them, we see at 
 once that education and self-education, training and learn- 
 ing, the acquisition and the practice of the skill to do some- 
 thing, characterise, in greater or less degree, every human 
 life. From the infant's efforts to learn to walk, feed itself, 
 clean itself, clothe itself; to talk, write, read, up to the 
 mastery, later on, of special forms of manual skill, of special 
 expertness in, and aptitude for, conducting industrial and 
 commercial undertakings, or scientific researches, or any 
 other human enterprise — the general task is to learn to do 
 something and to do it well. Moreover, these doings have 
 to be regulated and ordered, if room is to be found for them 
 
264 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IX 
 
 in life, compatibly with their relative urgency on the one 
 side, and the resources of strength and time on the other. 
 And, lastly, some of these activities not only stand higher 
 in the scale of values than others, but are possible only if 
 other activities are managed with strict economy. " Dis- 
 sipation " not only disorganises life, but consumes the time 
 and strength which ought to be given to doing more im- 
 portant things as excellently as one can. Now in all activi- 
 ties, from the manual to the most intellectual, the body is 
 involved. There is no " doing " without it, there is no 
 excellence of achievement attainable without training one's 
 body, or without disciplining and ordering the needs and 
 impulses which have their basis in its organisation. One 
 might almost sum up the task of education, moral and intel- 
 lectual, in the phrase " learning to make the most of one's 
 body," Along this line we are led to the suggestion, which 
 is in harmony with the conclusions of the preceding essay, 
 that one of the best clues to the nature of soul or spirit is 
 to think of them in terms of the activities which we have 
 learned to perform, the excellence with which we habitually 
 perform them, and the worth which belongs to them in an 
 objective scale of values. From this angle we can under- 
 stand how the body comes to be looked on as the instru- 
 ment of the soul. And from this angle, too, we can under- 
 stand why it should seem a handicap or obstacle. For train- 
 ing involves fatigue and pain which make it hard to per- 
 sist. The needs of the organism, especially hunger and 
 sex, with the enjo5Tnent attendant upon their satisfaction, 
 have legitimate claims, and yet make the ordering of life in 
 subordination to higher values more difficult. Through the 
 limitations of physical endowment, accomplishment tends 
 to fall short of aspiration. If often we do less well than 
 our best, and if the best we can do does not measure up 
 to the ideally best we can conceive, the body tends to receive , 
 
Ch.IX] SELF IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 265 
 
 the blame. The "flesh" is either too weak to respond 
 to the call of the " spirit ", or else obstructs with rebellious 
 desires of its own. Thence results the hostility to the body 
 which marks the extreme forms of asceticism, the morbid 
 delight in self-torture, the attempt to wrest spiritual per- 
 fection from self-inflicted pains and repressions. Rare as 
 systematic self-persecution has become nowadays, yet the 
 germ of it lurks in the theory that the body is a prison, or 
 a tomb, from which the soul must seek escape; that the 
 flesh, or, generalised, " matter ", is the principle of evil 
 and imperfection, and that goodness can be attained only 
 by emancipation from it. Asceticism is but a perversely 
 logical attempt to practise this emancipation here and now. 
 But death, above all, has been seized upon by the imagina- 
 tion of mankind as the release of the soul from the bondage 
 of the flesh, as the gateway to a glorified existence. In 
 " shuffling off this mortal coil ", we terminate the ill-as- 
 sorted manage de convenance of body and soul. Yet, 
 though death, viewed thus, should be welcomed as a bless- 
 ing, it is often dreaded and generally accounted an evil — an 
 inconsistency of which the Fool in Twelfth Night makes 
 pretty play: " The more fool, Madoima, to mourn for your 
 brother's soul being in heaven ".^ 
 
 At the same time, a moment's reflection shows that the 
 discarnate or disembodied soul, which is held to survive the 
 dissolution of its partnership with the body, whereas the 
 body — " dust unto dust " — is dispersed into its elements, 
 must be something very different from the embodied self 
 as others know it, or even as iTSnows itself. On the ques- 
 tion of the evidence for survival, we shall have something 
 to say presently. For the moment, we are interested in 
 these speculations concerning the destiny of the soul, chiefly 
 from the angle of the light they throw on the nature of the 
 
 ^Act I, scene 5. 
 
266 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IX 
 
 self. In detail the survival-beliefs have been variously ela- 
 borated. McTaggart's contention that the soul's survival of 
 bodily death ought not to be considered without weighing 
 also the possibility of pre-existence before birth, has much 
 plausibility. And if once we consider this present incarna- 
 tion as an interlude in discarnate existence, we can hardly 
 refuse to consider also the hypothesis of many such inter- 
 ludes, i.e., the theory of successive incarnations, in higher 
 or lower forms according to the moral merit of this present 
 life in the body; with final emancipation from the need of 
 incarnation as the reward for distinguished purity and saint- 
 liness. However, whether we take such beliefs seriously, or 
 reckon them among the curiosities of religious mythology, 
 it is not wholly beside the point to consider what conse- 
 quences for the theory of the self they would involve, if 
 they were true. The important consequences turn on the 
 separability of body and soul. It implies that the normal 
 theory of the self as consisting of body and soul somehow 
 conjoined, has to be modified so as to identify the self es- 
 sentially with the soul. And, this done, the problem be- 
 comes one partly of the identity of the soul in its incarnate 
 and discarnate conditions of existence, and partly of the 
 possibility of self-identification or recognition. Self-identi- 
 fication, we may say at once, requires memory. Survival 
 without memory would, in effect, be survival as a different 
 person; or, at least, in the absence of memory my relation 
 to a previous existence of my own would be like my rela- 
 tion to the life of another person of whose very existence I 
 am ignorant. Pathological cases of complete loss of mem- 
 ory, or of " alternating personality ", appear to show this 
 clearly. The evidence for memory of previous incarnations 
 is scarce, and its truth will, in general, be unverifiable.^ 
 
 1 1 cannot pretend to an extensive acquaintance with the literature, 
 and Fielding Hall's account of such memory occurring not infrequently 
 pmong the Burmese is the only definite reference I can now recall 
 
Ch. IX] SELF IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 267 
 
 It does not really help us in this situation to claim, with 
 Samuel Butler, that the automatic completeness and facility 
 of many reflexes and instinctive actions are explicable only 
 on the assumption, that we remember them so well from 
 having practised them through untold previous existences; 
 or to support this claim, again with Butler, by an appeal 
 to Weismann's theory of the continuity of the germ-plasm. 
 For the germ-plasm is a physical thing and its continuity, 
 or deathlessness, assuming this to be conceded by biologists, 
 is certainly not the same thing as what is meant in our 
 present context by the immortality of the soul or the self. 
 And, further, even if heredity be a case of memory, we are 
 still far from the recollection of specific acts and incidents 
 in historically discriminated previous existences, which 
 would be required for explicit self-identification. Nor is it 
 easy to see how identity could be conclusively established 
 from the point of view of other persons. In cases of " alter- 
 nating personality ", as in law-cases turning on claims to 
 identity, it is in the main the identity of the body, as seen 
 by others, which guides us. And the medical analysis of 
 psychopathic cases hardly as yet makes it possible to decide 
 conclusively between the two hypotheses of " dissociation " 
 of one self and of a multiplicity of selves or souls, genuinely 
 distinct, yet inhabiting the same body. On the former view 
 — on the whole, the more plausible — ^we are dealing with 
 split-off fragments of one self. On the latter, we are back 
 at something like the old concept of " possession ". At any 
 rate, the spectator's task of estabUshing the identity of a 
 soul, in abstraction from the body, is one of no small diffi- 
 culty, especially when there is no memory of self-identifica- 
 
 (,The Soul of a Nation, Ch. xxii). Kipling'sTA^ Finest Story in the 
 World (originally published in Many Inventions') is a good example 
 of the literary exploitation of the possibility. The fact that memory 
 is lacking is recognised by the provision in the myth of Er, according 
 to which souls, prior to re-incarnation, drink of the river of Forget- 
 fulness (Plato, Republic, Book X). 
 
268 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IX 
 
 tion on the part of the self under observation to assist 
 him. 
 
 It is also worth considering what a profound difference 
 it would make to any one's experience of himself to be se- 
 parated from his present body, or to be re-incarnated in 
 another body, possibly not human at all. The change might 
 well be so complete as, in fact, not only to destroy the pos- 
 sibility of self-identification, but identity itself. It is im- 
 possible, of course, to picture to oneself in imagination what 
 disembodied existence, in terms of actual experience, would 
 be like. The elimination of all the experiences which we 
 refer to our bodies — and they are interwoven even with our 
 most intellectual activities and our most spiritual moods — 
 would hardly leave us, in any intelligible sense, the 
 same."^ 
 
 It may, of course, be retorted by some, that whatever the 
 evidence for pre-existence or re-incarnation may be, we do 
 have empirical and conclusive evidence both for the fact 
 of survival and for the manner of existence after death. 
 Taking this contention at its best, i.e., as referring to such 
 evidence (communication through the trance-utterances or 
 automatic scripts of mediums, materialisations, cross-cor- 
 respondence experiments, etc.,) as the Societies for Psychical 
 Research have collected and sifted, the claim to conclusive- 
 ness appears to overshoot the mark. It is certainly true 
 that many sitters are fully convinced of the identity of the 
 
 ^ It is perhaps worth while to remark that the teaching of the 
 Christian churches gives by no means unqualified support to the notion 
 of survival as a disembodied soul. Religious tradition on the matter 
 is, indeed, as confused as the popular thought which it has so largely 
 helped to form. Most of the tortures of hell, as painted by the imagi- 
 nation even of a Dante, would have 'few terrors for a disembodied 
 soul. More to the point, however, for our argument, is the fact that, 
 side by side with the belief in discarnate survival, there is taught the 
 resurrection of the body. Theologically, this is important because it 
 admits the body which is the principle of evil, to " salvation ". Philo- 
 sophically, it seems to concede that without the body the self is not 
 complete. 
 
Ch. IX] SELF m SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 269 
 
 departed spirits who claim to be communicating, with, or 
 without, the mediation of a " control ". It is true also that 
 many of the investigators are, like Sir Oliver Lodge, trained 
 in the scientific management of experiments and cannot 
 a priori be accused of unscientific credulity. But, on the 
 other hand, it is also true that other investigators, no less 
 careful in method, and perhaps more cautious in hs^jothesis, 
 are far from convinced, and that the telepathy-h5^othesis 
 has not been finally disposed of, though it is certainly be- 
 coming strained. But here, again, the crucial point for 
 the establishment of the " spirit "-hj^othesis is the trust- 
 worthiness of the identification. Considering that among 
 the communicating spirits are some who claim to be identi- 
 cal with such well-known men, recently deceased, as Will- 
 iam James, or R. Hodgson, or F. W. H. Myers, it is perhaps 
 surprising that it should be so difficult to establish identity 
 beyond doubt. The mere assertion of the alleged spirit, 
 of course, goes by itself for nothing. Its truth precisely 
 is the thing to be tested and established. The verisimilitude 
 of the communication (its being " in character ") is liable 
 to be very differently estimated by different observers. 
 Specific memories are either unverifiable, and therefore use- 
 less as evidence, or verifiable, and thus open to the alterna- 
 tive explanation of telepathy. In general, telepathy may 
 cover many things which can be trustworthily shown not 
 to have been in the medium's normal knowledge. Experi- 
 ments such as the attempt to communicate after death the 
 contents of a sealed message deposited before death, have 
 hitherto failed completely.^ If, however, spirit-communica- 
 tion is a fact, it seems plausible to allow full weight to the 
 contention, often occurring in the communications, that the 
 communicators are severely handicapped by the limitations 
 of the instrument (the medium) through which they have to 
 
 1 See Sir Oliver Lodge, The Survival of Man, Ch. viii, pp. 121 fF. 
 
270 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IX 
 
 work.^ All in all, it hardly seems safe to say more than 
 (a) that a body of evidence has been collected which de- 
 mands, and fully justifies, further investigation; (b) that 
 its proper theoretical interpretation is still open, the in- 
 vestigator's inclination towards spirits or telepathy being 
 in part determined by what he would prefer to believe 
 or not to believe; and (c) that the evidence, even when 
 taken as favouring the spirit-hypothesis, is of doubtful 
 value either for religion or for the consolation of the 
 sorrowing survivors. Opinions on this last point are 
 bound to differ. But, at any rate, it seems clear that 
 the lover who cherishes the belief that his beloved still lives, 
 does not need, nor commonly seek, communications to sus- 
 tain either his love or his assurance. And it may be doubted 
 whether many men would really look forward to engaging 
 in this kind of communication after their death, even were 
 they convinced that it were possible. There is something in 
 the view of a critic of one of Sir Oliver Lodge's books, who 
 said that if Sir Oliver's theory were true, it would " add a 
 new terror to death ". 
 
 It must be admitted that scientific and philosophical or- 
 thodoxies have alike looked askance at these investigations 
 and the speculative h5^otheses they suggest. This attitude 
 it is not possible to justify, even though it must also be ad- 
 mitted that both the spirit- and the telepathy-hypotheses, 
 if either of them were to be currently accepted, would 
 require wide-reaching modifications in our present theories 
 of the human self. Whilst leaving this possibility distinctly 
 open, we shall presently find, in a return to the facts of self- 
 consciousness from which, above, we started out on the 
 examination of the body-soul theory, a way to a more em- 
 
 _ 1 In detail, the evidence is rich in opportunities for ingenious specula- 
 tion, e.g., concerning the limitation of the spirit by the medium's 
 imagery and vocabulary; or concerning the physical appearance of the 
 spirit in materialisation. See the publications of the Psychical Re- 
 search Societies. 
 
Cfa.IX] SELF IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 2?i 
 
 pirical study of the self — a study based on normal introspec- 
 tion and observation of selves in the normal setting and 
 activities of ordinary experience, hence free from the 
 toils of the body-soul problem in its bearing on the 
 existence of the self before, and after, its present embodi- 
 ment. 
 
 But before we can do this, we must glance at the scientific 
 arguments for the distinction between body and soul. Here 
 we can be brief, for the situation demands little more than 
 an application of the conclusions suggested in the preceding 
 essay. If we ha,ve succeeded in purging our theories thor- 
 oughly of the Descartian dualism, we are, in principle, 
 ready to deal also with the psycho-physiological dualism 
 which is its modern successor. No doubt, the latter has 
 changed with the fashions of thought sufficiently to dis- 
 card the Descartian " substances ", and put in their place 
 two series of " phenomena " — a. series of psychical processes 
 open only to introspection (its own?), and a series of 
 physiological processes open to public observation like all 
 other physical facts. Descartes, fantastically enough, had 
 made his two substances interact through the pineal gland in 
 the brain — the " seat of the soul ". Modern theory, acutely 
 conscious of the difficulties of this scheme, has generally 
 favoured the happy expedient of a psycho-physical, or, bet- 
 ter, psycho-neural, parallelism in a theory according to 
 which mental processes are correlated, one-to-one, with pro- 
 cesses in the cerebrum. The main virtue of this theory, in 
 the estimate of its defenders, has always been that it isolates 
 the psychical and the physical series of phenomena com- 
 pletely from each other — subjects them to a theoretical 
 quarantine, as it were, so that neither can infect the other. 
 Each series is regarded as causally coherent in itself, neither 
 as causally related to the other. They accompany each 
 
272 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IX 
 
 other by a blessed miracle, for, on the theory, it could not, 
 and would not, make any difference to either if the other 
 did not exist at all. This device suited the materialistic 
 temper of XlXth century science, enabling it to undertake 
 the study of the physical world (including living beings) 
 without having to bother about any thing so troublesome as 
 " consciousness ". It shelved consciousness very effectively, 
 without exactly sasdng, " there is no such thing ". It left 
 a place for psychology, at the price of condemning it to 
 study minds as if, contrary to all the evidence, they were dis- 
 embodied. In fact, the most plausible argument for psy- 
 cho-physical parallelism is, perhaps, this that it is an in- 
 genious device for enabling the physiologist to study the 
 bodily machine without reference to feeling, thought, or 
 will, and the psychologist to study psychical processes with- 
 out considering brain, body, or physical environment. Such 
 a plea for confessed abstractions might be conceded. For 
 every science has the right to abstract according to its needs, 
 and an abstraction, recognised and acknowledged as such, 
 becomes theoretically innocuous. It can no longer be 
 mistaken for absolute truth. It is appreciated for what it 
 is — a convenient supposition or makeshift. 
 
 But the question, of course, is whether it is really so 
 satisfactory a device as its defenders represent it to be. We 
 have already noted, in another context, how little it agrees 
 with the function assigned to mind by the theory of evolu- 
 tion, which furnishes the background to all modern natural 
 science. And it is obvious how unworkable parallelism is 
 as a basis for the study of behaviour, be it human or animal, 
 be it from the moral, the legal, or the purely biological 
 point of view. Indeed, the constant recrudescence of inter- 
 action theories in some form or other, even at the price of 
 harking back to the soul-substance concept, is evidence 
 that the artificiality and inadequacy of parallelism have 
 
Ch. IX] SELF IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 273 
 
 never wholly ceased to be felt and proclaimed. At the pres- 
 ent day, dialectician and experimentalist join in their attacks 
 upon it and, beset from every quarter, parallelism is fast 
 losing its position as the orthodox scientific formulation of 
 the relation of body and soul. But it is not interaction 
 which is destined to supplant it. For interaction, even if it 
 provides for a much closer cormection between body and 
 soul, still has to retain the dualistic distinction between 
 them. It may avoid the word " substance ", but it will 
 effectually retain the meaning, for else it cannot intelligibly 
 state its own position. If there is anything in the argument 
 of the preceding essay, the future lies, not with any body- 
 soul dualism, be it sharp or be it blunted, but with an ob- 
 jective and functional theory of mind, towards which " be- 
 haviourism " is leading the way, especially when under the 
 pressure of its own ideal of a full description of " what the 
 creature is doing ", it is steadily being driven, beyond phy- 
 siological reflexes in response to immediate Sensory stimuli, 
 to an unbiased study of the behaviour of the creature as 
 a whole. The way in which E. B. Holt, more particularly, 
 is employing the point of view of the whole, and the theor- 
 ies to which it leads him, of the " recession of the stimulus " 
 and of the reference of behaviour, not only to isolated ob- 
 jects, but to complex situations, are most instructive.^ The 
 study of the self by way of self-consciousness, i.e., of expe- 
 riences the structure of which is characterised by the differ- 
 entiation of self from not-self (or what-is-other-than-self), 
 calls, so we suggest, for a synthesis of the objective and 
 introspective methods. Introspection, however, for the pur- 
 poses of this programme, must be extended from the narrow 
 meaning, in which it refers to noticing things not ordinarily 
 attended to, like images or kinaesthetic sensations, to the 
 wider meaning which it originally bore and in which it is 
 
 1 See, e.g.. The Freudian Wish, pp. 78. 
 
274 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IX 
 
 co-extensive with self-consciousness. In effect, this is done 
 in James's analysis of the self to which we must now 
 turn. 
 
 James offers his analysis of the self as a study of the 
 " empirical self ", the " me " or " object-self ". But, it is 
 not difficult to see that, in effect, his analysis is a study of 
 the " I " or " subject-self " as well. It is, in fact, a study 
 of the latter through the former, or, to put bluntly the prin- 
 ciple on which James, with sound instinct, proceeds with- 
 out explicitly realising it: — self-consciousness means self- 
 identification and self-differentiation. If we refuse to work 
 with this principle, we are left with the empty tautology " I 
 am I ". But the truth is that, concretely, what I am is re- 
 vealed, or expressed, for me as well as for others, in my at- 
 titudes and behaviour towards the world in which I exist. 
 Every such attitude or behaviour, considered now from the 
 point of view of self-consciousness, is seen to be an act of 
 identifying myself — ^yes, quite literally my " self " — ^with 
 something, or turning myself away from it. Obviously, this 
 principle covers the facts on which the body-and-soul theory 
 of the self relies. What my body does, I do; when it is 
 hurt, I am hurt; when it dies, I die. When my soul is 
 joyful, I am joyful; when my will is stubborn, I am stub- 
 born; when my thoughts are clever, I am clever. But iden- 
 tification is meant to be taken here in a further and less 
 superficial-sense. / am what I identify myself with, in such 
 senses as what I am interested in, what I give myself to, 
 spend myself on, even sacrifice myself for, still feeling my- 
 self realised in the very giving. Spending myself, I may 
 spend my money, my time, my physical strength, my 
 thoughts, my knowledge — in short, to be a self is to lead 
 a life into the tissue of which the world enters in countless 
 different ways and degrees, becoming thus my world, and 
 making me what I am. In saying this, we are but pushing 
 & step further that dynamic concept of mind, or soul, sug- 
 
Ch.IX] SELF IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 275 
 
 gested in the preceding essay. A self, even more obviously 
 than a mind, is a unique and individual focus or concentra- 
 tion of elements of the universe. 
 
 True, James does not explicitly frame his theory in just 
 these words, but any one who, with this clue, will turn to 
 James's text, will, we suggest, find this principle staring 
 him ever5rwhere in the face. Even the body's place in the 
 self is " fluctuating." " Our bodies, themselves, are they 
 simply ours, or are they us? Certainly men have been 
 ready to disown their very bodies and to regard them as 
 mere vestures, or even as prisons of clay from which they 
 should some day be glad to escape." ^ Does not this throw 
 a flood of light on the angle from which the facts, travestied 
 in the two-substance theory, should be approached? That 
 theory stereot5^es one of the fluctuations in self-conscious- 
 ness, and exaggerates it, first, into a standing antithesis of 
 factors in the self, and, next, breaks the living self into two 
 disparate metaphysical figments. "We are dealing with a 
 fluctuating material, the same object being sometimes treated 
 as a part of me, at other times as simply mine, and then 
 again as if I had nothing to do with it at all. In its widest 
 possible sense, however, a man's self is the sum total of all 
 that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic 
 powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, 
 his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands 
 and horses, his yacht and bank-account." ^ And then fol- 
 lows the principle, as near as James in explicit statement 
 comes to it: " All these things give him the same emotions. 
 If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they 
 dwindle and die away, he feels cast down." There is no 
 need to recapitulate the details of an analysis, so well-known, 
 so deservedly famous, carried through with such wealth of 
 illustration and insight. One may not think the classifica- 
 
 ^ Principles of Psychology, vol. i, Ch. x, p. 291. 
 ^Ibidem. James's italics. 
 
il6 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. IX 
 
 tion of the " constituents " of the self as (a) the material 
 self, (b) the social self, (c) the spiritual self, (d) the pure 
 ego, very happy, the last rubric especially not being on a 
 level with the others, but it is impossible not to admire the 
 masterly handling of such topics as self -feelings; self-seeking 
 and self-love; the rivalry and conflict of Mes; the hierarchy 
 of Mes, i.e., the need for some organisation or order among 
 the fluctuating constituents of the self according to their 
 worth. It will suffice to set down a few passages, picked 
 almost at random, to show the principle ever5nArhere at work 
 in James's analysis. 
 
 "We so appropriate our clothes and identify ourselves 
 with them that there are few of us who, if asked to choose 
 between having a beautiful body clad in raiment perpetually 
 shabby and unclean, and having an ugly and blemished form 
 always spotlessly attired, would not hesitate a moment be- 
 fore making a decisive reply." ^ " When they [our rela- 
 tives] die, a part of our very selves is gone. If they do 
 anything wrong, it is our shame. If they are insulted, our 
 anger flashes forth as readily as if we stood in their place ".^ 
 " The parts of our wealth most intimately ours are those 
 which are saturated with our labour. There are few men 
 who would not feel personally annihilated if a life-long con- 
 construction of their hands or brains — say an entomological 
 collection or an extensive work in manuscript — ^were sud- 
 
 1 Loc. cit., p. 292. 
 
 ^Ibidem. During the campaign for the first liberty loan a Boston 
 newspaper published a whole page appeal from which I quote a few 
 phrases. " This is your war, your Congress has declared war upon 
 Germany. Wake up to that, Mr. Citizen. . . . You go home and think 
 over your relationship to your government. You will find that you 
 cannot separate yourself from the State. You will find that you and 
 your government are identical. When the government, which you 
 created, de9lares war, you declare war. And you are obligated to do 
 your part. . . ." (Boston American, June 11, 1917). This is sound 
 philosophy in a place where it is unusual to find any philosophy what- 
 ever. 
 
Ch.IX] SELF IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 277 
 
 denly swept away." ^ Loss of possessions brings " a sense 
 of the shrinkage of our personality, a partial conversion of 
 ourselves to nothingness." ^ " We do not show ourselves to 
 our children as to our club-companions, to our customers 
 as to the labourers we employ, to our own masters and 
 employers as to our intimate friends." ^ Further on, under 
 the heading of " self-love ", we read: " To have a self that 
 I can care for, nature must first present me with some 
 object interesting enough to make me instinctively wish to 
 appropriate it for its own sake, and out of it to manufacture 
 one of those material, social, or spiritual selves, which we 
 have already passed in review." * And, then, comes another 
 attempt at the principle: " The words ME, then, and 
 SELF, so far as they arouse feeling and connote emotional 
 worth, are OBJECTIVE designations, meaning ALL THE 
 THINGS which have the power to produce in a stream of 
 consciousness excitement of a certain peculiar sort."^ A 
 page or two further on James concludes that the self ia 
 " self-love " is never the pure ego, the abstract principle of 
 conscious identity. It is " simply my total empirical self- 
 hood again, my historic Me, a collection of objective facts." * 
 Why, for example, do I claim respect and resent disdain? 
 " It is not as being a bare / that claim it; it is as being an I 
 who has always been treated with respect, who belongs to a 
 certain family and " set ", who has certain powers, pos- 
 sessions, and public functions, sensibilities, duties, and pur- 
 poses, and merits and deserts." ^ In almost so many words, 
 James finally declares that the self is co-extensive with the 
 range of things in which it takes an interest, which elicit its 
 feelings, determine its conduct. Nor ought we to forget in 
 this brief survey the startling pages* in which James ex- 
 
 1 Loc. cit, p. 293. " Loc. cit, p. 322. 
 
 2 Ibidem. ' Ibidem. 
 
 3 Loc. cit., p. 294. 8 Loc. cit., pp. 29S-30S. 
 * Loc. cit., p. 319 ; James's italics. 
 
 s Loc. cit., p. 319 ; James's italics. 
 
278 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IX 
 
 plores the innermost " self of selves " and finds it to con- 
 sist of " a collection of (feelings of) motions in the head or 
 between the head and throat."^ They are the relatively 
 permanent core or nucleus of what each is conscious of as his 
 self. This both assigns a central position in the self to the 
 body, and traverses all attempts to cut the self into body 
 and soul and identify it essraitially with the latter, divorced, 
 or at least divorcible, from the former. 
 
 The principle, then, on which James's analysis explicitly 
 or implicitly rests, appears to be perfectly sound. Change 
 my world and you change me. Introduce fresh objects 
 into my experience and I become a being of new feelings, 
 thoughts, actions. Everything is, or becomes, a constituent 
 of me in which I am positively or negatively interested, so 
 that my feelings are coloured by it, my thoughts are occu- 
 pied with it, my actions directed towards it — ^technically 
 put, so that all these are a function of it. Or, as we put it 
 above, each self is a unique focus or concentration of ele- 
 ments in the universe, entering into it, occupying it, making 
 it in varying degrees what it is. And as we found James 
 incidentally recognising, there is no giving any account 
 of the " I " apart from the " Me ". Vain is the attempt 
 to seize and inspect the subject-self as distinct from the 
 object-self. For " I " am what " my " interests make " me," 
 every interest being an identification of " my self " with some 
 object in the world of my experience of which my body is 
 the centre. The identity of the subject-self, to borrow 
 James's apt phrase, is not substantial, but functional. 
 
 Recent philosophical literature appears to show only 
 one serious challenge to this analysis from the same basis 
 of introspection, or rather self-consciousness. This is to 
 be found in Professor John Laird's Problems of the Self." 
 
 1 Loc. cit., p. 301 ; James's italics. 
 
 2 See especially chs. ii, iii, xiii. 
 
Ch.IX] SELF IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 279 
 
 Laird tries to show that the body is not part of the self, 
 that the self is essentially soul, and that the soul, being a 
 " unity of experiences ", may be called a " psychical sub- 
 stance ". The theory is built on the analysis of every 
 experience into an object and a mental act, the latter term 
 covering feeling, volition and cognition. If this be granted, 
 the principle may be laid down that objects are jor the self, 
 experiences are 0/ it. The " being ", as Laird likes to say, 
 of all experiences is to refer to objects. This reference 
 to objects is for him " the only common characteristic of 
 that which is psychical." ^ It follows at once that the body, 
 as object, is jor, not of, the self; an argument which Laird 
 supports by polemic against the James-Lange theory of emo- 
 tion, on the ground that it mistakes bodily sensations, i.e., 
 the objective data to which the internal sense refers, for 
 the apprehension of them. The latter alone is psychical and 
 forms part of the self; the former are part of the body, 
 which is the self's most constant object and, in a sense, also 
 its instrument. 
 
 The argument, of course, collapses if the initial analysis 
 of experience into object and act be denied, by which alone 
 Laird is able to evade the full force of James's theory. 
 Now this analysis has been, and reasonably can be, denied." 
 But it is even more instructive to notice how close, pressed 
 by the logic of the facts. Laird comes to admitting James's 
 analysis. "Are the men whose lives radiate out towards 
 other things and other persons less really selves than those 
 who try to shrink into some unapproachable crevice of 
 private being? Surely the facts are otherwise. To under- 
 stand the self it is best to go outside it and consider its 
 influence and the range of things which it contemplates." ° 
 
 1 Problems of the Self, p. 33. 
 
 2 It is denied, e.g., by many American neo-realists, see preceeding 
 essay, pp. 229-31. 
 
 « Lac. cit., p. 94. 
 
28o CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IX 
 
 " The mind grows as the objects revealed to it grow. It is 
 not more of a unity than what it knows, nor is it less of a 
 unity. It does not overlap its object but is co-extensive with 
 that object." ^ " An experience is a reference to an object 
 ... it varies as the object varies, and to define it or to 
 think of it, without reference to its specific object is plainly 
 impossible. . . . Our private experience shows itself in the 
 things and events to which it refers. These things and 
 events are not ourselves, though we would not be ourselves 
 unless our experiences were directed to them."^ In such 
 passages as these Laird, almost against his will, becomes a 
 witness to the necessity of the view which his explicit theory 
 compels him to reject. 
 
 (2) From the constituents of the Self we must pass to 
 the vexing problem of personal identity. 
 
 Here, again, James's masterly commonsense shines like 
 a bright beacon-light through the fog of dialectics. We can- 
 not do better than gain a starting-point for discussion by 
 quoting him: "This consciousness of personal sameness 
 may be treated either as a subjective phenomenon or as 
 an objective deliverance, as a feeling, or as a truth. We 
 may explain how one bit of thought can come to judge other 
 bits to belong to the same Ego with itself; or we may 
 criticise its judgment and decide how far jt may tally with 
 the nature of things." * This puts the problem fairly and 
 squarely. The " fact " of identity is to be examined by 
 tracing the judgment of self -identity to its grounds; by 
 exhibiting the factors in experience on which it rests. 
 James is right, too, when he goes on to declare that " There 
 is nothing more remarkable in making a judgment of same- 
 ness in the first person than in the second or third," * and 
 
 1 Loc. cit., p. 223. 2 hoc. cit., p. 247. 
 
 3 Principles of Psychology, vol. i, p. 331. ■* Ibidem. 
 
Ch.IX] SELF IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 281 
 
 that, in fact, the" judgment of self-identity is but a special 
 case of the judgment of identity in general. 
 
 This gives us the clue for our argument. Like all 
 judgments, identity-judgments may be true or false. With 
 the truth or falsity of any particular judgment in a given 
 case we are not concerned. But we are concerned with 
 analysing in general the conditions under which true 
 identity-judgments may be arrived at. There are two plati- 
 tudes which commonly loom large in discussions of this 
 problem, but which do not advance the argument at all. 
 One tells us that the judgment, x is identical with y, is 
 true when there exists a " fact ", the identity of x and y. 
 But what we want is something more than to be told that a 
 judgment is true if a corresponding fact exists, and false if 
 the fact does not exist. We want to iind out what the em- 
 pirical evidence is on which in identity-judgments we rely, 
 and what logical right we have to rely on it. We want to be 
 shown how the identity of anything with anything else, e.g., 
 of my self of to-day with myself of yesterday, is actually 
 experienced. The other platitude, with a reminder of the 
 school-boy's knife which is still the " same " in spite of a 
 new handle and new blades, tells us that identity is a wholly 
 relative and arbitrary matter, that it " depends on the 
 point of view ". But the answer here is that some points 
 of view are much more fimdamental than others, and that 
 in an orderly universe certain types of identity are so 
 prominent as to demand, and receive, imiversal recogni- 
 tion. 
 
 This leaves us with two questions to discuss. The first 
 concerns the fundamental logical issue whether a judgment 
 which affirms that two differents are identical can ever be 
 true at all.^ The second has to be answered by setting out 
 
 1 Cf. the phrases used above, " identity of anything with anything 
 else " ; " identity of x and y." 
 
282 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch. IX 
 
 the empirical factors which enter into judgments of identity, 
 and more particularly of self-identity. 
 
 As it happens, there is an empirical fact through which 
 we are all made familiar with our first, the logical, issue. 
 This fact is the fact of change. For anything to change 
 is for it to become different and yet to remain the same. 
 " It " becomes other than it was, and yet is still " it ". The 
 ^dialectics here possible have been explored almost from the 
 dawn of philosophy — our bare allusion to them will suffice 
 to recall them. But the difficulty cuts very deep. When 
 we probe it to the bottom, we are brought up against noth- 
 ing less than the question, whether judgments conforming 
 to the standards of consistent thinking can be made concern- 
 ing the empirical world at all — or whether there is a funda- 
 mental gap between the data of experience and the logical 
 realm of pure reason. Can we, in short, discover in the 
 empirical world a rational system or can we not? 
 
 Now when the problem is brought home to us through 
 the experience of change, there is an undoubted temptation 
 to cut the knot by saying that only the absolutely unchang- 
 ing can be, and be judged to be, identical with itself. And 
 when we follow up this notion, we are, by the same logic, 
 driven on to the conclusion that nothing but the absolutely 
 simple, homogeneous, unrelated, can satisfy this prescrip- 
 tion. But when we try to apply this concept to empirical 
 objects, there appears nothing in the whole " choir of heayen 
 and furniture of the earth ", from our " selves " down to 
 the grains of sand on the shore, which is thus simple, homo- 
 geneous, unrelated, unchanging. This is certainly true of 
 the self. We have seen how its constituents are fluctuating. 
 Stability, no doubt, it has, but it is a dynamic stability, a 
 self-maintenance in change, responding differently to dif- 
 ferent situations. But this is precisely the concept which, 
 on the principles of the identity-logic, we must at all costs 
 
Ch.IX] SELF IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 283 
 
 eschew. Even on the body-and-soul theory no simple, self- 
 identical kernel for the self can be found. Consider the 
 body's mobility; its modifications from infancy to old age; 
 its decomposition after death; its constant metabolism. 
 There is nothing in it on which we can lay a finger and say, 
 "Though all the rest change, this is now what it always 
 was and ever will be." The same result, no less obviously, 
 is yielded by an analysis of the stream of consciousness. 
 Hume has settled that, once and for all. It avails nothing 
 here to plead that surely it is possible to have the same 
 thought twice. The answer is, the second thought is an- 
 other thought,^ similar perhaps to the first, but not the same. 
 Repetition yields similars, not identities. By this logic, as 
 Hume clearly saw, there is no justifying any empirical judg- 
 ment for, in some way or another, they all assert an identity 
 between differences. Yet for all that this logic tells us that 
 no two experiences can possibly be more than similar, we 
 identify them by saying that it is the " same " object we 
 experience on both occasions, and the " same " self, too, 
 which experiences. The issue is clear. On the logic of 
 abstract identity, of the principle that identity is identity, 
 and difference is difference, and never the twain shall meet, 
 all the thinking embodied in judgments about empirical mat- 
 ters of fact, is fundamentally inconsistent and illogical. 
 Every empirical judgment is a slap in the face of the law 
 of contradiction, an offence against reason. Either this, 
 
 or ? 
 
 Well, the alternative is another sort of logic. The con- 
 sequences of the identity-logic are plainly devastating ex- 
 cept, perhaps, in the field of pure mathematics. As measured 
 by its standards, the whole body of natural sciences, con- 
 sisting as it does of statements of empirical matters of fact, 
 requires to be either condemned or re-interpreted out of all 
 
 1 Cf. also W. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. i, p. 480. 
 
284 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IX 
 
 recognition. Or, else, we must explore the possibility of 
 framing a logical theory which starts from the hs^othesis 
 that scientific judgments are rational, and makes it its busi- 
 ness to formulate the standards actually used, and recog- 
 nisable in them. In other words, we must adopt a logic of 
 identity in difference, or of concrete universals. This is the 
 substance of Kant's reply to Hume. Its principle is to treat 
 every judgment concerning empirical facts as a " synthesis " 
 of different data. Synthesis means identification; and every 
 identification rests on a universal (or "category"). In 
 other words, it recognises, or acknowledges, an identity in 
 difference.^ In detail, judgments may be mistaken. But 
 the judgment-function as such cannot be mistaken. We 
 have no basis outside of it from which to criticise it. We 
 can but trust it, as we do, both in practical life and in 
 science; and, in philosophy, too, which is capable of endors- 
 ing this confidence against sceptical doubts. On this logic, 
 which is the logic on which throughout these essays we have 
 taken our stand, judgments of identity, i.e., judgments iden- 
 tifying bond fide differences as elements in some form of 
 universal, cannot be challenged as a class. A given judg- 
 rtient may be a case of " mistaken identity ", but the recog- 
 nition of identities in the multiplicity of empirical differ- 
 ences is of the very essence of that advance in knowledge, 
 which reveals the universe progressively as an orderly and 
 rational system.^ Physical " things " and " selves " are such 
 identities, or universals, though they stand on different levels 
 in the order of the universe, and differ in the way in which 
 
 1 That Kant made the categories " subjective ", by calling them 
 " forms of the human understanding " was, no doubt, a mistake. They 
 belong to the "objective" structure of the universe, acknowledged in 
 judgments. 
 
 2 William James's struggles with the logic of abstract identity, and 
 his revolt against it, though it took him to Bergson rather than to 
 Hegel, will always remain instructive for students of philosophy. 
 Cf. A Pluralistic Universe, Lectures III, V, VI, VII. 
 
Ch.IX] SELF IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 285 
 
 they appear, and come to be recognised, in experience. But 
 there is, on the identity-in-difference logic, nothing illogical 
 or irrational in the judgments which, following empirical 
 clues, identify " this " and " that " as the " same ". " I am 
 I " must, in principle, admit into itself both " I am this " 
 and " I am that ", provided a distinction is introduced which 
 prevents " this " and " that " from conflicting with each 
 other. I cannot be both well and ill at the same time, but 
 I who am well to-day may be ill to-morrow, and truly 
 judge that both conditions belong to " one and the 
 same " Me. 
 
 So much for the principle. It remains to say a few words 
 on the evidence, on the " experience " of identity. James's 
 analysis makes identity a conclusion from " resemblance " 
 and " continuity ".^ This clearly will not do. Similarity is 
 precisely not identity. We need two distinct things, two 
 particulars, in order to have similarity. We need only one, 
 though this one capable of existing in different contexts and 
 of undergoing change, in order to have identity. One self 
 may be called similar to another in so far as both are selves, 
 i.e., members of the class " self." But a self is not similar to 
 itself, for it is not a class of similar members at all — Rus- 
 sell's attempt to uphold the contrary notwithstanding.^ 
 Again, continuity will not do any more than similarity, 
 partly because it would only be available as evidence in the 
 form of memory, and memory is both fragmentary and 
 fallible, partly because, in any case, experience suffers recur- 
 rent interruptions in sleep, so that at best continuity would 
 not supply evidence for identity during more than a single 
 stretch of working hours. In what, then, does the experience 
 of identity actually consist? What is the evidence on which 
 the judgment of identity rests? " Just as the concept blue ", 
 
 1 Principles of Psychology, vol. i, ch. x, p. 334. 
 ^Principles of Mathematics, Appendix B, §497, "a person is 9 
 class of psychical existents." 
 
286 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IX 
 
 writes Professor De Witt Parker, " has been derived from 
 blue experiences, and so must apply to the like, so the 
 meaning of identity has been acquired as a reflex of personal 
 identity experiences. It means, aboriginally, a certain 
 feature of experience and so must be true of it." ^ The ex- 
 perience of identity, Professor Parker goes on to argue, is 
 given by the recurrence of what is actually the same experi- 
 ence on successive occasions. This, as he clearly recognises, 
 is possible only if we are prepared to abandon the prevail- 
 ing Humian view that one and the same experience can 
 never be repeated, that experiences are fugitive, and that 
 so-called repetition must refer to a second, similar, experi- 
 ence.^ Are there instances, then, of the same experiences 
 recurring? Parker instances the use of the same concept on 
 different occasions, the concept even being modified and en- 
 riched by the fresh cases to which it is applied; the per- 
 sistence of the same interests in the individual's life; the 
 carrying out of the same plan through varied activities 
 extending, it may be, over a long period of time;* the recur- 
 rence of the same imagery. These illustrations, undoubt- 
 edly, supply the kind of identity which is wanted, but they 
 hardly quite bear out Parker's programme of showing that 
 the same " experiences " (as distinct from experiences of the 
 same " objects ") recur. Perhaps our difficulty is merely 
 verbal. But " experience ", especially when thus set over 
 against " object ", suggests an act or event, and it is not easy 
 to see how anything into which time enters so essentially as 
 it does into acts and events, can be " one and the same " on 
 diverse occasions. The clue to the correct analysis of iden- 
 
 ^ The Self and Nature, p. 43. 
 
 2 The discussion of Personal Identity in Professor Parker's Self and 
 Nature (Ch. ii) seems to me the best in current literature, and I am 
 glad to acknowledge here how much I owe to it. 
 
 3 Cf. my paper on The Analysis of Volition in Proceedings of the 
 Aristotelian Society, vol. xii (1912-13), p. 156 ff., where the same 
 point is made. 
 
Ch. IX] SELF IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 287 
 
 tity would seem to be suggested rather by some such pas- 
 sage as this: " The universal, as possessed by the mind, is 
 essentially a system or habit of self-adjusting response or 
 reaction, whether automatic or in thought, over a certain 
 range of stimulation. An acquired skill, such as that of a 
 cricketer, is a good example."^ Considered as acts, the 
 cricketer's strokes ar6 merely similar, or of the same kind, 
 for balls of the same kind, but his skill in dealing with each 
 ball appropriately according to its kind is identical, as a 
 system or motor-set for producing acts adjusted to their occa- 
 sions. It is a universal, and a concrete one; an existing and 
 embodied individual system, not a mere class. In the same 
 way every habit secures identity, or, at a higher level, every 
 principle of conduct or jujigment which the self applies 
 whenever occasion arises. It is clear that Parker's ex- 
 amples, the concept, the interest, the plan, are identities in 
 this sense. They are not recurrent events; they are growing 
 and modifiable systems of response, issuing in action on 
 successive occasions. 
 
 From this point of view, too, we can interpret the doc- 
 trine that identity is a matter of degree — that a man is 
 sometimes more himself, sometimes less; sometimes at his 
 best, sometimes below it. It depends how much of the 
 organised self, considered as a complex system of responses, 
 comes into play. In this sense Parker can rightly say that 
 the amount of identity is " great when a man puts all his 
 emotional energy into some task which requires the use of 
 his whole past experience, the total resources of his memory 
 and learning; then, as we say, he is most himself; it is little 
 when, in a light moment of gaiety, he forgets himself, feed- 
 ing on new impressions. It is great again in constancy and 
 continuity of work and affection, and less in disloyalties 
 and infidelities."* 
 
 ^ B. Bosanquet, Principle of Individuality and Value, p. 40, note. 
 2 Loc. cit., p. SO. 
 
288 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IX 
 
 (3) Having tried to argue that the consciousness, and 
 judgment, of self-identity, so far from excluding differences 
 within the self, consist in their identification, or synthesis, 
 we are free to bring our discussion of the self to a con- 
 clusion with a consideration of the way in which the flucti^a- 
 tions of the self are influenced by its relations to other 
 selves. 
 
 How far is a contrast, varying from mere difference or 
 otherness to hostility, between self and not-self a neces- 
 sary condition of self-consciousness and, therefore, of self- 
 knowledge? 
 
 It is worth observing, in the first place, that a man's self 
 is, in the main, not of his own making, nor, for that matter, 
 was it consciously planned, such as it is, by any other human 
 being. A man's self, however much in detail it may have 
 been deliberately shaped and moulded by his own will and 
 purpose or that of others, is yet, in the main, a thing of 
 natural growth — in origin and development quite literally 
 the product of forces largely beyond our control, if not be- 
 yond our present comprehension. Even when a man can be 
 said to have been deliberately begotten by his parents 
 (which is hardly the rule), they certainly had no provision 
 or intention that he should be just the person he turns out to 
 be. Not even the sex of the child is under the control of 
 the parents' will, nor how much of their qualities, physical 
 or mental, he inherits. After birth, deliberate training does 
 much to mould the self, but in its response to, and absorp- 
 tion of, educational and environmental influences, it still is 
 always growing into a unique personality, the pattern of 
 whose intellectual and moral character no general formula 
 enables us wholly to forecast. In fact, every man has to 
 learn, and discover by experience, what is the nature of his 
 own self, just as his parents and fellows have got to dis- 
 cover it. It is a plain fact of everyday life that men are 
 
Ch.IX] SELF IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 289 
 
 full of surprises and revelations, not only to others, but to 
 themselves. Every man has to find out, largely by trial and 
 error, what are his capacities, physical and intellectual, and 
 what their limits; what is his temper, and how to control it; 
 what is his strength and his weakness; to what temptations 
 he had better not expose himself, and what tasks he may 
 confidently attempt. Moreover, this kind of self-knowledge, 
 acquired in familiar routine situations, is liable to be upset 
 by exceptional crises which may, for good or evil, reveal 
 hidden depths, astonishing or shocking, not only onlookers, 
 but the agent himself. Great excitement may put a man 
 "beside himself," and in this condition he may rise far 
 above, or fall far below, his " normal " self. Thus the 
 self is plastic within wide limits. It is made what it is in 
 part by the influences which press upon it. It is also in part 
 made by itself — ^made, one is tempted to say, by what it 
 succeeds in making out of its given endowment and all the 
 shaping forces of education and circumstance in response to 
 which it grows to its stature. As always, we find the self 
 double-edged — self-made and world-made. 
 
 The same conclusion may be confirmed by another line of 
 reflection. One's experiences are one's own: on any view 
 they are of the very tissue of the self. Yet, if calling them 
 one's own means that one is somehow their source and 
 author, that they are the product of one's activity, it soon 
 appears that in this sense the self has very little claim to 
 them. Of sense-experiences this is commonly acknowledged. 
 They are given to us. They come unsought. They even 
 force themselves upon us. To them we are passive, as com- 
 pared with our activity in thinking. For our thoughts are, 
 as commonly, considered to be of our own making, or at 
 least under our control, obedient to our will. Yet is it not 
 true that, fundamentally, thoughts come to us, are given to 
 us, happen to us as mudi as sense-experiences or feelings? 
 
290 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.IX 
 
 In the striking German phrase, Sie fatten uns ein. If we 
 did not reserve the term " inspirations " for exceptionally 
 striking and novel thoughts, we might fairly apply it to all 
 thoughts whatever. Indeed, it is in many ways easier to 
 control one's sense-perceptions than one's thoughts. I can 
 move out of hearing of a disturbing noise, but I cannot so 
 easily shake off a haunting memory. In a familiar environ- 
 ment I can largely, by suitable movements, determine what 
 I shall see. Hear, feel, and taste, but thought is proverbially 
 like the wind which iloweth where it listeth. Even volun- 
 tary thinking is no exception. I may set myself, as now, to 
 meditate on the Self, but I cannot choose or determine be- 
 forehand what thoughts shall come to me, or whether they 
 shall be of any value. Volition can do little more than set 
 the stage, but the right actors may capriciously ^refuse to 
 appear. I may in vain strive to recapture yesterday's bril- 
 liant idea. Any name but the one I want to recollect may 
 occur to me. Nay, the very fact that my will is what it is, 
 is ultimately not my doing, but an expression of my nature, 
 such as it is, reacting on my world, such as I find it. Again, 
 I {i.e., all that I am and say and do) radiate effects in all 
 directions, few of which I intend, of most of which I am 
 unaware, and none of which I can follow beyond a short 
 distance. Every self is inextricably interwoven with the 
 tissue of its world in all its variations and fluctuations. 
 
 And so again the greater purposes and achievements of 
 this world in which I interest myself and with which I iden- 
 tify myself, are not of my making or of that of any other 
 single man. The things in which many minds, and many 
 successive generations of minds, cooperate — states and 
 churches; sciences, arts, philosophies — these grow in and 
 through human minds, yet as by an impulsion of their own. 
 Men's minds are the organs of growth for them — very 
 literally " organs ", through which, we may boldly say, the 
 
Ch.IX] SELF IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 291 
 
 universe is working. The organ's " own " will and wisdom 
 count in the result only so far as they express, or are a 
 function of, the forces of the universe. It is, indeed, the 
 fashion to speak of these things as man-made. But if 
 " made " means designed by men just so, this way of speak- 
 ing is hardly even a half-truth. And if it does not mean 
 this, what more does it mean than that they come about 
 through men and fill their lives with such value as they 
 have? We may speak of " building up " a science. But 
 neither its principles nor its details were foreseen. Rather 
 they were discovered, and came to their discoverers as 
 revelations. We give credit to the inventor for his inven- 
 tion, but to him it was an inspiration. In fact, " man-made " 
 is appropriate only when it is a question of the attribution 
 of authorship for social purposes. It has no bearing on any 
 deeper theory of man's relation to the world of which he 
 is a part. A man's thoughts and works are his property 
 which he may sell and for which his fellows may give him 
 credit and reputation, but these social rights and claims of 
 ownership do not alter the fact that the intellectual power 
 which makes one man a great artist, another a great scientist, 
 and so on, is to each of them a gift not of his own devising 
 or procuring. Apart from social claims, the experience of 
 artistic conception or scientific discovery is truly described, 
 not by sasdng "I am the maker of this thought", but 
 rather, " This thought takes form, or shapes itself, in me ". 
 Am I active in this or passive? It is my activity, no doubt, 
 and not another man's, but as between me and the truth or 
 beauty which inspires me, it is its activity in me. It is 
 characteristic that the thinkers of the Middle Ages were 
 wont to speak rather of being " passive " in thinking. Pas- 
 sivity expressed for them the sense of being instrumental to 
 something which, whilst making the thinker great among 
 men, yet is acknowledged by him to be greater than him- 
 
292 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.lX 
 
 self. "Not I, but God that worketh in me." What is 
 here " self ", what " not-self "? If we are to use these terms 
 at all, we shall have to say that the destiny of a self lies 
 in " transcending itself ", i.e., in surrendering itself to, and 
 identifying itself with, the universe. This may be traced, 
 e.g., in such a common experience as choosing one's career. 
 We may set it down to natural bent or interest on the one 
 side, and circumstances and opportunity on the other. But 
 " bent " or " interest " are but names for the fact that some 
 aspect of my world lays hold of me and makes me its in- 
 strument. A man's choice of science as a career may be 
 due, say, to the chance reading of a book which fascinated 
 him by its line of thought and suggested a field of work to 
 which his whole being responds. Does he choose or is he 
 chosen? Does he select the problem or does the problem 
 select him? The man will probably say that the problem 
 " took hold " of him, that the thought " possesses " him. 
 He is, and makes himself, its willing and devoted instru- 
 ment for working itself out. The career he chooses is his 
 " calling ". This applies no less to those lives which are 
 devoted to distinctively social service or to social reform 
 and reconstruction. The individual's mind and will is the 
 medium through which the social world strives to perfect 
 itself. 
 
 The philosophical interest in all this is that the individual 
 self is once more seen to be double-edged. Tennyson's 
 triumphant " For man is man, and master of his fate " 
 gives one edge. The view that we are nothing but " God's 
 puppets " gives the other. The whole truth is neatly 
 summed up in Bergson's Nous sommes du reel dans le reel. 
 From this principle flows the spiritual structure of all self- 
 consciousness. It implies both identity and difference of 
 " self " and " world ". As a part, the self is distinguishable, 
 not from, but within, the whole, and the whole so far con- 
 
Ch.IX] SELF IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 293 
 
 fronts the self as an overwhelming, and in some moods as a 
 foreign or hostile, " Other ". But the part also belongs to 
 the whole, and the life of the whole pulses in the part; and 
 this sense of being at one with, or at home in, the universe, 
 is the complementary oscillation in the experience of being a 
 self and, as such, an individual focus of the universe. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 epilogue: religion and philosophy op keligion 
 
 Nothing is more striking in modern philosophy of religion 
 than the shift of emphasis from proofs of the existence of 
 God to the effort to understand and appreciate religion, not 
 merely as a historical and institutional phenomenon, but as 
 an essential, and indeed dominant, factor in a fully- 
 developed " life of reason "/ The point may be put, with 
 perhaps exaggerated sharpness, in the form of an antithesis. 
 Religion may either be made dependent on the success of 
 demonstrations of the existence of God, or the existence of 
 God may be shown to be revealed and guaranteed by re- 
 ligion. 
 
 The former approach may seem, on the face of it, the 
 more plausible. It would appeal to the spirit of an age 
 which has become critical of traditional dogmas and sus- 
 picious of being the victim of superstition. It is easy to 
 urge that, if religion is to be justified to reasonable men, 
 they must be convinced first that God exists. Religion is 
 man's relation to God, but what if there be no such thing 
 as God? What if God be merely a figment of the imagina- 
 tion, a survival of infantile stages of human thought, when 
 natural forces, as yet not understood nor controlled, were 
 personified as higher powers, good or evil, and when human 
 safety was thought to depend on conforming to their capri- 
 cious will or escaping their incalculable wrath? Religious 
 practices and religious beliefs, in fact, the whole ordering 
 
 1 1 borrow, as best expressing my meaning, the title of George 
 Santayana's well-known series of books, without pretending that he 
 >rould endorse my use of it. 
 
 294 
 
Ch.X] PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 295 
 
 of life with reference to God, hinge, from this point of view, 
 on the possibility of first showing, beyond any reasonable 
 chance of doubt, that God exists and may be ignored only 
 at inescapable peril to human fortune. Not only to sceptic 
 and atheist has it seemed plausible to argue thus, but even 
 believers have, at times, yielded to the temptation to accept 
 this demand as reasonable. And, thus, " proofs " have been 
 constructed by way of communicating a conviction, which is 
 communicable only on the basis of actual religion, to those 
 who are without that basis or have lost their hold upon it. 
 God as the designer of the best of all possible worlds, God 
 as first cause and creator of the world, God as necessarily 
 existing because his " essence " as all-perfect logically im- 
 plies his " existence " — there is no need to rehearse again 
 the familiar details of the physico-theological, cosmological, 
 ontological proofs. Divorced from their basis in religion, 
 through which alone the very word " God " has any vital 
 meaning, they become ingenious pieces of dialectics, easily 
 riddled by counter-dialectics, and enabling the critics of 
 religion to argue that a scheme of faith and conduct built on 
 foundations so flimsy has no claim upon the allegiance, or 
 even the respect, of reasonable men. 
 
 Far otherwise is the result if we take our point of de- 
 parture from religion itself, if we approach God through 
 religion, instead of religion through an argument about the 
 existence of God. The crucial importance of Hume's Dia- 
 logues on Natural Religion and Kant's Critique of Pure 
 Reason in the development of the philosophy of religion is 
 just this that, by exposing the weakness of the traditional 
 proofs, they cleared the ground for that fresh philosophical 
 appreciation of religion in which Hegel showed the way, 
 and to which various modern schools of thought are con- 
 tributing. Technically, this movement may be character- 
 ised in several different ways. We may fasten on Hegel's 
 
296 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.X 
 
 defence, or rather re-statement, of the ontological proof, 
 which rests, at bottom, on the principle that religion has 
 metaphysical value, that it not only helps to reveal the na- 
 ture of the universe, adds to our insight into it, but that it 
 embodies, like philosophy, the point of view of the whole. 
 " The objects of philosophy are upon the whole the same as 
 those of religion. In both the object is Truth, in that 
 supreme sense in which God and God only is the Truth." ^ 
 Or we may say that theology, as the theory of God, pre- 
 supposes "acquaintance" with God, and that religion is 
 this knowledge of God by acquaintance. As Mr. C. C. J. 
 Webb puts it: " The great question for the thinker about 
 religion is not whether God exists, but rather what God is." ^ 
 For " ultimately our only evidence of the existence of any- 
 thing must be in our consciousness of it. . , . Thus the 
 religious consciousness is sufficient evidence of the exist- 
 ence of its object. ... So far as we mean by God no more 
 than the object of the religious consciousness, the existence 
 of God is not really doubtful at all." ' What is doubted, 
 what may, legitimately in a sense, be doubted, is not God's 
 existence but God's nature. Doubt of God's existence 
 " means the doubt whether what we have been accustomed 
 to call God is God at all. In the last resort of all it means 
 the doubt whether the ultimate nature of reality, if it were 
 known as it really is, would continue to excite the religious 
 sentiment of reverence and worship." * Another illustra- 
 tion of the characteristic point of view of modern philosophy 
 
 1 From the opening sentences of Hegel's Logik, ch. i, § 1 (trans- 
 lation by William Wallace). 
 
 ^Problems in the Relation of God and Man, p. 14S. Mr. Webb's 
 writings belong to the very finest work in present-day philosophy of 
 religion. 
 
 3 Loc. cit., p. 141. 
 
 * Loc. cit., p. 143. Tt will be noticed that Mr .Webb's position agrees 
 with the doctrine of these essays, that doubting the existence of a 
 thing is doubting the truth of a theory concerning the nature of that 
 thing; see Ch. iv. 
 
Ch. X] PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 297 
 
 of religion may be found in Professor W. E. Hocking's The 
 Meaning of God in Human Experience, which, by its very 
 title, proclaims that reversal of approach to which we have 
 been drawing attention. Instead of starting with a defined 
 meaning of " God ", and then inquiring whether that mean- 
 ing applies to any object met with in experience, the new 
 method seeks to give a meaning to " God " by philosophical 
 examination of what experience (which term, of course, in 
 this context includes thought, or, in Hocking's language, 
 " idea ", as well as " feeling ") reveals of the nature of the 
 universe. This is to " know " God and be assured of his 
 existence. This is to realise, and make a vital possession of, 
 what the word " God " stands for. And by calling this 
 examination " philosophical " we mean, as explained in the 
 first essay, that it requires not merely a stock-taking, but 
 an evaluation, guided by the immanent dialectic of experi- 
 ence — ^by that process of correction, completion, deepening 
 interpretation, which takes place when diverse "appear- 
 ances ", as "systems of judgment or theories, are focused 
 together and press for inclusion in a coherent system, stand- 
 ing, relatively to the systems absorbed into it, in the position 
 of " the whole." 
 
 Not least has modern psychology of religion reinforced 
 this whole movement, though it is to be confessed that some 
 of our psychologists have made a study of religious experi- 
 ence " from within " unduly difficult for themselves by 
 approaching it with naturalistic or biological categories — 
 anything but examining it on its own ground, or analysing 
 it in its own terms, which is, after all, the only way of 
 understanding it on its merits. Yet the man who was 
 bahnbrechend in this field is not open to this charge, and his 
 example may well serve to point our moral. The last chap- 
 ter of James's Varieties of Religious Experience shows how 
 profoundly his study of the forms of the religious con- 
 
298 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.X 
 
 sciousness had impressed him with its metaphysical implica- 
 tions. One may feel misgivings about the direction which 
 he gave to his speculations on the nature of reality as re- 
 vealed through religion, but his general principle is sound. 
 One may not share his sympathy with Fechner's concept of 
 a world-soul, or his opinion that the mind-cures of Chris- 
 tian Science are of special significance for religion and meta- 
 physics. But the truth of his final estimate of religion is 
 independent of these things. " The logical understanding, 
 working in abstraction from such specifically religious ex- 
 periences, will always omit something, and fail to reach com- 
 pletely adequate conclusions. Death and failure, it will 
 always say, are death and failure simply, and can never- 
 more be one with life; so religious experience, peculiarly so 
 called, needs, in my opinion, to be carefully considered and 
 interpreted by every one who aspires to reason out a more 
 complete philosophy." ^ This, as will have been seen, is the 
 position of these essays, too. 
 
 If the efforts of modern philosophy of religion to under- 
 stand and appreciate religion are themselves to be justly 
 appreciated, two things must be borne in mind. 
 
 (a) The first is that, whilst these thinkers care greatly 
 about religion, they care, as a rule, little about the institu- 
 tional forms of religion, and the special problems which these 
 raise. They think of religions rather than of churches, de- 
 nominations, sects. They may even be said to be thinking 
 more of religion as such than of religions, or of the minutiae 
 of creed and ritual which are so often all that divide religions 
 from one another. In this neglect of church, as distinct 
 ' from religion, there is probably loss as well as gain, but it is 
 the outcome, at any rate, of an effort to penetrate behind the 
 outward form and body to the spiritual life. Moreover, it 
 
 ^A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 306-07. 
 
Ch.X] PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 299 
 
 corresponds to the facts in an age when much genuinely 
 religious thought is driven out of the churches, or, at least, 
 cannot find free development in their cramping atmosphere, 
 and when the reluctance of the churches to abandon tradi- 
 tional forms of words which have become outworn, con- 
 demns them to fall ever further behind the best modern 
 thought. If we are to seek the " meg,ning of God " in human 
 experience, we cannot prejudice the success of our enterprise 
 by starting out with a burden of traditional terms and pre- 
 possessions. Philosophers, theologians, and literary men 
 agree in urging that we must re-think, and reformulate too, 
 our concept of God, if we are to deal satisfactorily with the 
 age-old problems in the light of modern knowledge. From 
 Professor A. Seth Pringle-Pattison's The Idea of God in the 
 Light of Recent Philosophy, to H. G. Well's God the In- 
 visible King and The Undying Fire, these experiments, as 
 varied as they are sincere, in re-thinking and reformulating 
 are going on. But, with rare exceptions, the representatives 
 of the churches are holding aloof, and continue to speak, if 
 not to think, of God in terms which " may be not unfairly 
 described as a fusion of the primitive monarchical ideal 
 with Aristotle's conception of the Eternal Thinker ". ^ 
 Here, too, we must look for the reason why philosophy of 
 religion is, as a rule, little interested in interpreting specific 
 dogmas, especially when these, like the doctrines of most 
 Christian churches, are made up of propositions of very 
 different orders, partly purely historical, partly miraculous, 
 partly attributing spiritual significance to certain historical 
 events, partly expressing directly moral or spiritual truths. 
 Moreover, there is much of metaphor and ssmibolism in the 
 religious language of tradition, the interpretation of which is 
 apt to take the interpreter far away from the more or less 
 literal meaning demanded by orthodoxy. 
 1 Pringle-Pattison, loc. cit., p. 407. 
 
300 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.X 
 
 And, lastly, the consideration of religion organised in 
 churches is bound to draw the student into problems which 
 cease, in any specific sense, to be religious. They are the 
 problems which we may conveniently sum up under 
 " church-politics " — problems of church-government; prob- 
 lems of the mutual rivalries of churches in the mission- 
 field and at home; problems of the relations of church to 
 state; problems of the entanglement of churches, as prop- 
 erty-holding bodies, with the social and economic issues of 
 the time. From whatever point of view these may interest 
 the philosopher, they are remote from those actualities of 
 religious experience in which he seeks to find God. Even 
 Royce is not wholly an exception to this statement. For, 
 although his study of " loyalty " led him in his Problem of 
 Christianity to emphasise the social form of experience,' and 
 to claim that " the church, rather than the person of the 
 founder, ought to be viewed as the central idea of Chris- 
 tianity ", it is easy to see that Royce's " blessed com- 
 munity " bears the lineaments rather of the ideal " com- 
 munion of saints " than of any historical organisation 
 enmeshed in the toils of legal, economic, and political re- 
 lationships. Or, at least, it is only after these meshes and 
 encrustations have been torn off, that it can be made to 
 appear how little the individual can do for his salvation, 
 apart from that spiritual union with others through which 
 alone the evil he does can be atoned. And even then it 
 does not follow that the church of his fathers can be to a 
 given man his blessed community. Royce's plea is a plea 
 for a religious community as such. It is not a plea that 
 existing churches, as they stand, are capable of rendering 
 the spiritual services which he values.^ 
 
 ^ See Royce's The Philosophy of Loyalty and, for its relation to the 
 Problem of Christianity, the preface of the latter book (vol. i, p. vii ff.). 
 
 2 The development of Royce's philosophy of religion would be an 
 interesting subject of study. He would seem to have passed from 
 
Ch.X] PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 301 
 
 (b) Having, so far, considered what we are not to 
 expect from modern philosophy of religion, we must now 
 turn to our second point: what are we to expect? 
 
 In answer to this question we may at once crystallise 
 what we have said so far into the affirmation that the stu- 
 dent of religion, if he is not to miss the heart of his subject, 
 must himself be religious.^ To be religious, to know religion 
 from within or by acquaintance, to know what it is to be 
 religious by being it — these are ways of describing the pre- 
 requisite without which we may bluntly say that the student 
 will not know what he is talking about. Without it, his 
 thinking will not be, in Royce's phrase, " from the life ". 
 Without it, his knowledge will be an outsider's knowledge — 
 knowledge about religion, not knowledge of it. Without it, 
 he will be a helpless prey to the danger which besets all 
 reflection — the danger of over-detachment from its subject 
 in the very effort to get a good look at it. 
 
 Further, being religious, his " criticism " of religion, i.e., 
 his effort to understand it, will be sympathetic and appre- 
 ciative. His aim will be a theodicy, or, rather, as we must 
 say, a justification of religion, an exhibition of its value. 
 His theme will be the " truth " of religion, in the sense of its 
 essence, its meaning, which, in turn, cannot be adequately 
 appreciated except through a study of what religion truly is. 
 For this purpose he must, of course, study it where it is at 
 its best, where its true character is most fully manifest. So 
 studied, he will find it to be a response to, or acknowledg- 
 ment of, that character of, or in, the world for which we 
 have the words " God " or " divine ". Religion is the con- 
 sciousness of this character. The presence of this character 
 
 a concept of God in which Aristotelian were blended with Berkeleian 
 motives, via the concept of Absolute Exoerience, to the concept of 
 the Blessed Community. 
 
 1 It is hardly necessary to repeat that bemg religious , here, does 
 not mean being a member of a particular church, or accepting some 
 set of " orthodox " dogmas in their orthodox interpretation. 
 
302 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.X 
 
 is by it revealed. The sentiment of worship, reverence, 
 awe, is our response to it in terms of feeling. The judg- 
 ment of perfection ^ is our response to it in terms of thought. 
 
 This does not exhaust, as we shall see presently, the har- 
 vest of the philosopher of religion. But even at this point 
 he has got beyond the estimate that the religious sentiment 
 is a mere superstition or make-believe, a mere childish whim 
 to be outgrown. It is not merely " subjective ", but charged 
 with objectivity. A real character of the world is in it 
 seized by us, brought home to us. 
 
 And what is this real character which religion is to be 
 valued for revealing? It is that " the real world is in- 
 finitely charged with interest and value," ^ indeed that it is 
 our weakness, or limitation, or self-will, our lack of power 
 or understanding which brings moods when the world seems 
 otherwise, and the above too hard a saying to accept. 
 
 For, certainlyi this hard saying opens up further problems 
 for the philosopher of religion. To acknowledge that some 
 things in the universe are charged with interest and value 
 is easy. To show that all things are, or rather that the 
 whole is — for the value now in question i!s not to be taken 
 distributively, as attaching to things in isolation, but as 
 belonging to them through, the whole of which they form 
 part — this is a task. not to be attempted by working with 
 superficial impressions or shallow reflections. If we are to 
 •have a theory wrought from the life, then, as Dr. Bosanquet 
 
 ^ " Perfection '', in anything like its everyday sense, is, of course, 
 an awkward term to use for what is here intended, though there is 
 good authority, both philosophical and theological, for the use. Suffice 
 it to say that the judgment of perfection includes such an experience 
 as this: "In the_ spectacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable 
 pain, and in the irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a sacred- 
 ness, an overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the 
 inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange mar- 
 riage of. pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow." 
 — B. Russell, The Free Man's Worship (Philosophical Essays, p. 67). 
 
 "W. E. Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 
 p. xiii. 
 
Ch.X] PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 303 
 
 puts it, we need not only the best of logic, but the best of 
 life. Indeed, we cannot have the former in these questions 
 of the central and fundamental values without the latter. 
 
 The full sting of this problem of the value of the world 
 from the point of view of the whole is concentrated in the 
 problem of evil, and in that solution of it which in the lan- 
 guage of religious experience is variously described as salva- 
 tion from sin, reconciliation or union with God, freedom or 
 escape from bondage.^ If the student would hold steadily 
 to his path here, he must pass by the plausible despair of 
 pessimism, the more tempting for many an eloquent utter- 
 ance, and the even more plausible siren-song of meliorism, 
 saying that the only problem of evil is how to do away with 
 it, and calling to him to be its vanquisher. If he holds 
 steadily on his path and learns to appreciate the spirit of 
 religion at its best, he will find that it lifts him equally be- 
 yond despair at human impotence, and a too ready confi- 
 dence in a victory to be achieved by human knowledge and 
 power over a world inhuman and reckless of human ideals. 
 He will find himself encouraged, indeed, to use his resources 
 to the utmost — trust in God does not mean " moral holi- 
 days " — ^but he will be taught also that the roots of evil lie 
 very deep and that his strength is weakness.^ Above all, 
 he will be led to seek to understand, and form an estimate 
 of, evil, not taken in the abstract, but in the context of what 
 the best, i.e., the bravest and most understanding, response 
 can make of it. And the reminder that Christianity is a 
 religion of suffering, will help to teach him that he may miss 
 happiness altogether, if he expects to get it on terms too 
 cheap. 
 
 1 Cf. the fourth and fifth books of Spinoza's Ethics, de servitute, 
 and de libertate fmmana. 
 
 2 " Sincerely to give up one's conceit or hope of being good in one's 
 own right is the only door to the universe's deeper reaches." — W. James, 
 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 305. 
 
304 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.X 
 
 The problem of religion, in short, is a problem of con- 
 fidence and trust in the universe — not the kind of confidence 
 in which a man, hoping God is on the job, takes life easily 
 himself, but the kind which is a source of power, and makes 
 him an effective force for good. It is a confidence without 
 which his heart may well fail him in the fight with evil, but 
 which must be grounded so deep, that even defeats in that 
 fight cannot unsettle it. 
 
 Such confidence is neither easily acquired nor easily main- 
 tained. It is liable to be assailed, even broken, by doubts, 
 when greatly tried by pain, by sin, by the sense of meaning- 
 less effort against meaningless evil. 
 
 Such doubts have come to many during the soul-searching 
 days of the war. " God and Christianity raised perplexities 
 in the minds of simple lads desiring life and not death. 
 They could not reconcile the Christian precepts of the chap- 
 lain with the bayoneting of Germans and the shambles of 
 the battlefields. All this blood and mangled flesh in the 
 fields of France and Flanders seemed to them — to many of 
 them, I know — a certain proof that God did not exist, or if 
 He did exist was not, as they were told, a God of Love, but 
 a monster glad of the agonies of men. That at least was the 
 thought expressed to me by some London lads who argued 
 the matter with me one day before the German drive in 
 March, and that was the thought which our army chaplains 
 had to meet from men who would not be put off by conven- 
 tional words. It was not good enough to tell them that the 
 Germans were guilty of all this crime and that unless the 
 Germans were beaten the world would lose its liberty and 
 life. ' Yes, we know all that,' they said, ' but why did 
 God allow the Germans and how is it that both sides pray to 
 the same God for victory? There must be something wrong 
 somewhere.' It was not often men talked like that, except 
 to some chaplain who was a human, comradely soul, some 
 
Ch. X] PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 305 
 
 Catholic 'padre' who devoted himself fearlessly to their 
 bodily and spiritual needs, risking his life with them or to 
 some Presbyterian minister who brought them hot cocoa 
 under shell-fire with a cheery word or two, as I once heard, 
 of ' Keep your hearts up, my lads, and your heads down.' 
 Most of the men became fatalists. . . . " ^ 
 
 Here we have the genuine voice of religious doubt. And 
 let it be noted that it is a doubt not engendered by specula- 
 tion about the miraculous features in traditional dogma, the 
 virgin-birth, the resurrection, the ascension, and the rest; 
 nor, again, by conflicts between the world of scientific 
 theory and the world of religious imagination. The vital, 
 devastating doubts about God's existence and goodness are 
 born of the bitter experience of evil, of the overmastering 
 sense of being engulfed in a world without sense or reason — 
 a world without value. 
 
 Against such doubt, proofs of God's existence are power- 
 less, and the best subtleties of theological speculation on the 
 personality of God or his attributes little better than words 
 borne on the wind. Such doubt cannot be overcome by argu- 
 ment, unless argument should succeed in mobilising again 
 resources of confidence and appreciation of value which are, 
 for the time being, eclipsed. Perhaps, as the author of 
 the passage seems to imply, the best answer is to carry on, 
 with steadfast courage, some unselfish action, revealing re- 
 ligious confidence more eloquently than words can do. 
 
 In any case, we have cited this example of doubt, in order 
 to show that what matters, at bottom, when men believe in 
 " God " or despair of him, is this sense of the pervading 
 value, or worthwhileness, of the world. 
 
 The essence of religion is the claim that the world has 
 this value and is, in that sense, divine. To be religious is 
 to respond to, and appreciate, this value, not primarily by 
 
 ''■ Quoted from an article by the war correspondent, Philip Gibbs. 
 
3o6 CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS [Ch.X 
 
 dint of reflective theory, but in the simple straightforward 
 spirit of one's living. But when life becomes dark and diffi- 
 cult, this sense of value may be lost and prove hard to re- 
 cover. That it is not easy, nor in every one's power, when 
 the test comes, to hold steadfastly to the attitude of confi- 
 dence and worship, should not dismay us. Omnia praeclara 
 tarn difficilia quam rara sunt. A study of religion, above all 
 in the lives of the men and women who have in an eminent 
 sense been inspired by its power and courage, shows that no 
 burden so heavy can be laid upon the human heart as to 
 prevent " God from firing it with his presence." 
 
INDEX 
 
INDEX 
 
 Activity, mental, 229. 
 Adams, G. P., 191 n. 
 Alexander, S., 206, 219 ff., 228, 230. 
 Analogy, in knowledge of other 
 
 minds, 207. 
 Animate, meaning of in biology, 
 
 ISS». 
 Animism, banished from science, 
 
 176 ff.; not based on analogy, 
 
 213 ff. 
 Antinomy, as a source of prob- 
 lems for philosophy, 15. 
 Appearances, saving the, ch. S; 
 
 102, rii, 114. 
 Aristotelian, tlieory of mind, 203, 
 
 235, a.'^rff. 
 Aristotle, 131, 142, 160, 242, 299. 
 Arrhenius, 198. 
 Augustine, St., 239 w. 
 Automatic sweetheart, 215 ff., 220. 
 Autonomy, of a science, 146, 
 
 176 ff. 
 
 Bacon, Francis, 142, Novum Or- 
 ganum, 28, 50, 60. 
 
 Bagot, R., The Hyenas of Pirra, 
 g6n. 
 
 Balfour, A. J., The Foundations 
 of Belief, 64; Humanism and 
 Theism, 66. 
 
 Behaviour, behaviourism, 203, 204, 
 225, 228, 232, 238 (B.= Aris- 
 totle's energeia), 242, 273. 
 
 Belief, instinctive, 124. 
 
 Bergson, Henri, 72, 96, 102 n., 
 165 re., 168, 17s, Note to ch. 7 
 (pp. 196 ff.), 201, 241; 284 n., 292. 
 
 Berkeley, loi, 117. 140 »-. 235 w. 
 
 Bernard, Claude, 146, 152. 
 
 Bethe, A., 148. i 
 
 Boodin, J. E., 230 m. 
 
 Bosanquet, Bernard, 197, 332 ; The 
 Principle of Individuality and 
 Valite, 27 M., 48 M., i8SM., 2&7 n.; 
 The Distinction Between Mind 
 and Its Objects, Son.; Logic, 
 
 134 «., 136 »., 137, 188 «., igo»., 
 
 192 «., 248 n. 
 Bradley, F. H., 53, 232, 248, 254. 
 Broad, C. D., 140 re.; Perception, 
 
 Physics and Reality, 103 »., 
 
 121 ff. 
 Butler, Samuel, Erewhon, 161; 
 
 Luck or Cunning? 201, 267. 
 
 Calkins, Mary Whitton, 102 ». 
 
 Cause, effcient v. final, 158 ff. 
 
 Chance, in origin of life, 199 ff. 
 
 Clifford, W. K., 102 re. 
 
 Cognitive Relation, 205 ff.. Note 
 to ch. 8 (244 ff.), 248 ff. 
 
 Comte, Auguste, loi. 
 
 Consciousness, how dealt with by 
 science, 178; theories of, ch. 8; 
 relation! theory of, 20l5, 230; 
 existence of, 208; as cross-sec- 
 tion, or as quality, 225 ff., 
 242 ff.; as stream, 235; Des- 
 cartes' concept of, 241. 
 
 Dante, 268 re. 
 
 Darwin, F. S., Descent of Man, 
 68 ; Voyage of the Beagle, 93 n. 
 
 Data (see also Sense-data), of 
 Philosophy, 14 ff.; Transition to 
 non-data, 36; and interpreta- 
 tion, 77 S. 
 
 Dead, how fitting into classifica- 
 tion of living and non-living, 
 iS4«. 
 
 Descartes, 28, 80, 81, 142, 203, 
 235, 239 ff., 240 re., 241 ff., 271. 
 
 Descriptions, in the theory of 
 unreal objects, 89 ff. 
 
 Determinism, 156, 187. 
 
 Dewey, John, theory of scientific 
 method in philosophy, 38 ff.; 
 
 'Democracy and Education, 40. 
 
 Dreams, as unreal, 70, 74, 81, 96 ff. 
 
 Driesch, H., 142, 167, 175, 196. 
 
 Duree, or real time, 197. 
 
 309 
 
310 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Elan vital, 102 n., 144, 175, 196," 
 
 198, 201, 241, 242. 
 Empathy (Einfuhlung), 217 ff. 
 Entelechy, Driesch's, 94, 144, 19S; 
 
 Aristotle's, 238. 
 Enzyme-theory, of origin of life, 
 
 199 ff. 
 Epiphenomenalism, 178, 241. 
 Equipotential svstem, 168. 
 Ethical, neutrality in philosophy, 
 ^30, 67. 
 Existence, and the ontological 
 
 proof, 90 ff. 
 External, world, 70, 81 ff. 
 
 Fact, opposed to value, 22, 54 ff., 
 187 ff.; needing to be synthe- 
 sised with value, 67, 19s; op- 
 pos^ to wishes, 51 ; distin- 
 guished from theory, 92, 133 ff. 
 
 Fechner, G.Th., 298. 
 
 Form, V. matter in philosophy, 
 
 27, 35- 
 Frege, Gottlob, 33. 
 Freud, Sigmund, 53, 96, 97, 
 
 204. 
 Functions, propositional, 89. 
 
 Galileo, 142. 
 
 Gegenstandstheorie, 86 ff., 249. 
 
 Geisteswissenschaft, v. Naturms- 
 senschaft, 73. 
 
 Gibbs, Philip, 304 ff. 
 
 God, eliminated from science, 
 177; proofs for existence of, 
 294 ff. ; existence guaranteed by 
 religion, 296 ff. ; meaning of, 
 301 ff. 
 
 Good, as indefinable, 57. 
 
 Haeckel, Ernst, 72. 
 
 Haldane, J. S., 141 «., 166 ff. 
 
 Hall, Fielding, The Soul of a 
 Nation, 266 «. 
 
 Hartmann, E. von, 102 ». 
 
 Hegel, 242, 248 »., 284 »., 29s, 
 296 ». 
 
 Henderson, L. J., 141 »., 173 ; 
 The Order of Nature, 143, 
 161 n.; The Fitness of the En- 
 vironment, 192. 
 
 Hobhouse, L. T., 141 n., 165 ff. 
 
 Hobbes, 189. 
 
 Hocking, W. E., on knowledge of 
 other minds, 229 n.; The Mean- 
 
 ing of God in Human Experi- 
 ence, 296. 
 
 Hodgson, R., 269. 
 
 Holt, E. B., on mind as a cross- 
 section, 225; revival of Aris- 
 totelian concept of mind, 237; 
 The Place of Illusory Experi- 
 ence in a Realistic World, 86 m.; 
 The Freudian Wish, 92, 148, 
 185 «., 204, 226 «., 237 »., 239 »., 
 24s, 273; The Concept of Con- 
 sciousness, 212 n. 
 
 Hume, David, 91, loi, 142, 235, 
 240 M., 283, 284, 295. 
 
 Huxley, T. H., 178 w., iga 
 
 I (personal pronoun; see Mine), 
 ambiguity of, 256. 
 
 Idealism, subjective, 70. 
 
 Identity, in difference, no, 1 13,. 
 119, 284; and continuity, 182; 
 personal, 280 ff.; judgments of, 
 281 ff. ; and change, 282 ; ab- 
 stract, 283; experience of, 285; 
 degrees of, 287. 
 
 Image, Idea and Meaning, au- 
 thor's article on, 120 ». 
 
 Indeterminism, experimental, 157, 
 19s ; absolute, ibidem; and 
 teleology, 187 ff. 
 
 Individual, as self-existent, 102; 
 perception of, 135 ff. ; more than 
 a class of sense-data, 136; has 
 form or structure, ibidem. 
 
 Instrumentalism, 38 ff. 
 
 Interaction-theory of body of 
 soul, 272 ff. 
 
 Introspection, 120; difficulties of, 
 205, 207; in support of "objec- 
 tive " psychology, 22' ff. 
 
 Introspective v. biological theory 
 of mind, ch. 8, passim. 
 
 Intuition, 24, 197. 
 
 James, William, 41, 121, 229 »., 
 23s. 257, 269^ 284 ».; A Plural- 
 istic Universe, 24 ff., 303 m.; 
 Essays in Radical Empericism, 
 203"., 236 M.; Varieties of Re- 
 ligious Experience, 204, 297; 
 The Meaning of Truth, 216 ».; 
 Principles of Psychology, 236 »., 
 274 ff., 280 ff. 
 
 James-Lange theory of emotion, 
 261. 
 
INDEX 
 
 3" 
 
 Jennings, H. S., 141 »., 147 «., 
 iS3»., 157. 158, 1^7 n. 
 
 Kant, 17, 28, 54, 91, loi, 125, 142, 
 160, 23s, 241 (re-discovery of 
 judgment), 247 (on theory of 
 knowledge), 284, 295. 
 
 Keller, Helen, 232. 
 
 Kidd, Dudley, 181. 
 
 Kipling, R., The Finest Story in 
 the World, 267 n. 
 
 Knowledge, theory of, Note to 
 ch. 8 (244 if.), 205 ff.; biological 
 theory of, 244; v. opinion and 
 error, 245 ff. ; as reality truly 
 apprehended, ibidem. 
 
 Laird, John, 260; Problems of 
 Self, 278 ff. ; defence of psy- 
 chical substance, 279. 
 
 La Mettrie, 170. 
 
 Language, as cause of meta- 
 physical illusions, 87 ff.; as ex- 
 pressing universals, 133. 
 
 Laplace, 177. 
 
 Law, in science, 156 ff.; v. sys- 
 tem, 185. 
 
 LeConte, Joseph, 258 ». 
 
 Leibniz, 1Q2»., 142, 195, 211 ». 
 
 Life, origin of. Note to ch. 7 
 (196 ff.). 
 
 Lipps, Theodor, 218 »., 219 m. 
 
 Locke, John, on distinction ot 
 primary and secondary qualities. 
 Note to ch. 5 (139 ff-)- 
 
 Lodge, Sir Oliver, 269, 270. 
 
 Loeb, Jacques, 142, 172, 173 »-, 
 178. 
 
 Logic, in philosophy, 27 ; tem- 
 pered by social utility and tact, 
 28; and sense of reality, 88. 
 
 Lotze, H., 102 M. 
 
 Lovejoy, A. O., W^., 148 »., iSi- 
 
 McDougall, W., 241; Body and 
 Mind, 260. 
 
 McGilvary, E. M., 191 ». 
 
 McTaggart, J. McT. E., Some 
 Dogmas of Religion, 258, 266. 
 
 Mach, Ernst, loi. 
 
 Machine, living, 161; and mech- 
 anism, 165 ff.; and physico- 
 chemical theory, 170. 
 
 Marvin, F. S., The Living Past; 
 The Century of Hope, 2gn. 
 
 Marvin, W. T., 141 n., 171 »., 
 17s ff., 178 «., 182. 
 
 Material world, 70, 80 ff. 
 
 Materialism, 59, 205. 
 
 Matter, v. form in philosophy, 27, 
 35 ; existence of physicist's, 
 70; Berkeley's denial of, loi. 
 
 Mechanism (see also Machine 
 and Teleology), v. vitalism, chs. 
 6, 7; in terms of primary quali- 
 ties, 117; compatible with teleol- 
 ogy, 143; not identical with 
 determinism, 156 ff. ; as exclud- 
 ing conscious purpose from 
 science, 180; incompatible with 
 evolution, 197 ; incompatible with 
 novelty, 198. 
 
 Meinong, A. von, Vntersuchungen 
 zur Gegenstandstheorie, 86 «. 
 
 Meliorism, 42. 
 
 Metaphysical, v. positivistic, 94, 
 
 lOI. 
 
 Method, problem of in philosophy, 
 chs. I, 2; scientific, ch. 2; 
 philosophical method as experi- 
 mental, 47. 
 
 Mill, J. S., loi, 118 «., 130. 
 
 Mind, theories of, ch. 8; func- 
 tional theory of, 203; the sav- 
 ing of, 205 ff. ; acquaintance 
 with, 208 ff. ; alleged privacy of, 
 211 ff., 224; in sobial inter- 
 course, 221 ff. ; as over-lapping 
 other minds in a common 
 world, 226 ff. ; acts of, 228 ff. ; 
 as subject, or focus of experi- 
 ences, 242 ff., 290 ff. 
 
 Mine (see "I"), ambiguity of, 
 223 ff. 
 
 Mitchell, P. Chalmers, 141 n.; 
 175 ff.^ 
 
 Moore, G. E., on consciousness as 
 a quality, 228; Principia Ethica, 
 57 n.; Some Judgments of Per- 
 ception, 126 ff. 
 
 Morality, relation to religion, 46. 
 
 Miinsterberg, H., 204 m., 222*1. 
 
 Myers, F. W. H., 269. 
 
 Naturalism, 59, 174 ff. 
 
 Nature, philosophy of, ch. 3; as 
 
 a hierarchy of appearances, 72; 
 
 unified theory of, 147. 
 Neo-realists, 81, 112, 206, 228, 
 
 249. 
 
312 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Newton, 142, 167. 
 
 Nunn, T. P., The Aims of Scien- 
 tific Method, 03 n., ilin.; pri- 
 mary and secondary syntheses, 
 93- 
 
 Ontological proof, gi. 
 Organisation, as evidence of pur- 
 posiveness, 160, 173. 
 
 Panpsychism, 72, 102 n. 
 
 Parallelism, psychophysical or 
 psychoneural, 271. 
 
 Parker, DeWitt, The Sdf and 
 Nature, 286; on personal iden- 
 tity, ibidem. 
 
 Pearson, Karl, loi. 
 
 Peirce, Charles S., 181, 201 n. 
 
 Perception, ch. s; as a kind of 
 judgment, 99; as pure, distinct 
 from judgment, 120 ff.; as a 
 two-term relation, 125 fif. ; G. E. 
 Moore's analysis of, 127 flf. 
 
 Perfection, 302 w. 
 
 Perry, _ R. B., Present Philo- 
 sophical Tendencies, 29 n., 65, 
 226 «., 228»._, 229 M., 230. 
 
 Personal identity, 280 flf. 
 
 Phenomenalistic, v. metaphysical, 
 94, lOI. 
 
 Phenomenology, concept of, 81. 
 
 Philosophy, its nature and value, 
 ch. I ; scientific method in, 
 ch. 2; and practical life, 4flf. ; 
 and social reform, 5 flf. ; and 
 science, 6 flf., 174; and religion, 
 8 flf., ch. 10; its data, 14 flf. ; 
 subjective or objective, i6flf. ; 
 make-believe like art, 17, 52 flf. ; 
 as revelation of reality, 18; and 
 value, 21 ; intuition and reason 
 in, 24; disagreements in, 26; 
 material, not formal, 27; proof 
 and verification in, 46 ff.; prog- 
 ress in, 48; reasonableness of 
 choices in, 58. 
 Philosophising, 10 ff. ; as spirit of 
 wholeness, 11, 54; as learning 
 by experience, 12; as search for 
 stability, 23. 
 
 Physical world, 70, 78 ff. 
 
 Plato, 49, 267 n. 
 
 Positivism, 59, 174. 
 
 Pragmatism, 17, 215 (knowledge 
 of other minds). 
 
 Prediction, in science, 151. 
 
 Prichard, H. A., Kant's Theory 
 of Knowledge, 105, 109 n. 
 
 Pringle-Pattison, A. Seth, The 
 I&ea of God in the Light of 
 Recent Philosophy, 299. 
 
 Psychical Research, 95 ff., 268. 
 
 Psychology, social, 204; funda- 
 mental concepts of, 203 ff. ; 
 working assumptions of, 206; 
 without a soul, 208, 237; objec- 
 tive, 211; too individualistic, 
 223 ; animal, 225 ff. 
 
 Purpose (see also Teleology), in 
 relation to desire and value, 
 74, lS9ff. ; in relation to indi- 
 vidual, 137; and purposiveness, 
 159 ff. 
 
 Qualities, are they real? 104 ff.; 
 real v. apparent, 108 ff. ; unper- 
 ceived, iiiff. ; relative to con- 
 ditions, 113 ff.; private and in- 
 communicable, 118. 
 
 Real, ch. 4; as synonym of true, 
 84 ff. 
 
 Reality, as truth of a theory, 76, 
 82 ff. ; two senses of, 83 ; as dis- 
 tinct from appearances, ibidem; 
 three problems of, in actual ex- 
 perience, 91 ff. 
 
 Reason, 24, 68 ff., 124 »., 186 ff. 
 
 Reduction^ of biological phe- 
 nomena to physico-chemical, 
 147, 151 ff., 182 ff. 
 
 Reincarnation, 268. 
 
 Religion, relation to morality, 46, 
 303 ; V. science, 59 ff. ; of instru- 
 mentalism, 42; of humanity, 59! 
 philosophical examination of, 
 297; psychology of, ibidem; 
 and church, 298; truth {i.e., 
 justification) of, 301 ; doubts 
 about, occasioned by the war, 
 304 ff. ; essence of, 305 ff. 
 
 Resurrection, of body, 268 ». 
 
 Romantic, v. scientific, 1746. 
 
 Roux, W., 151. 
 
 Royce, Josiah, 229 «.; The Prob- 
 lem of Christianity, 300; The 
 Philosophy of Loyalty, 300 m. 
 
 Russell, Bertrand, 33 ff. (theory 
 of scientific method), Zdn., 
 42 ff., 44, S3, 79, 86 ff. (theory 
 
INDEX 
 
 313 
 
 Meinong), 88 ff. (on unreal ob- 
 jects), loi, logff., 130, (on 
 sense-data and physical objects), 
 118, 124, 206, 212, 213 n., 224, 
 228 ; Mysticism and Logic, 31 if., 
 43; Our Knowledge of the Ex- 
 ternal World, 35 ff., 79 n., loi «., 
 118, 123, 213 »., 225; The Free 
 Man's Worship, 43, 63, 302 w.; 
 The Problems of Philosophy, 
 44, log re., 118, 124 «., 206; In- 
 troduction to Mathematical Phi- 
 losophy, 86 w., 133 »., 136 ».; 
 Principia mathematica, 126 n.; 
 Principles of Mathematics, 285. 
 
 Santayana, George, 294 ». 
 
 Schopenhauer, 102 »., 198. 
 
 Science, as model for philosophy, 
 ch. 2; and modern civilisation, 
 29; mathematical v. experi- 
 mental, 31 ff. ; V. religion, 59 ff. ; 
 as power, 62; morally neutral, 
 ibidem. 
 
 Self, ch. 9; dualistic (body-soul) 
 theory of, 262 ff. ; James's func- 
 tional theory of, 274 ff.; and 
 Not-Self, 288 ff.; activity and 
 passivity of, 290 ff. 
 
 Self-consciousness, ch. 9; its sig- 
 nificance for philosophy, 73; 
 double-edged, 252, 255, 290; and 
 self-knowledge, 253. 
 
 Sensations, their quality, 80; phys- 
 ical or mental, ibidem; and 
 sense-data, 100 ».; relativity of, 
 231. 
 
 Sense-data, ch. 5, passim; v. sen- 
 sations, 100 M.; as qualities of 
 things, 104 ff.; as neutral phe- 
 nomena, 106; as effects, ibidem; 
 how subject to causal point of 
 view, ic^; private or public, 
 118. 
 
 Sinclair, May, A Defence of 
 Idealism, 200. 
 
 Socrates, 204. 
 
 Solipsism, 224 n. 
 
 Soul (see Animism and Self), 
 why banished from science, 
 177; as immaterial substance, 
 23s; and body, 239 ff., 262 ff.; 
 how related to self, 259; sur- 
 vival and pre-existence of, 
 265 ff. 
 
 Spaulding, E. G., The New Ra- 
 tionalism, 249 re. 
 
 Spinoza, 22, 30, 52, 102, 132, 
 303 re. 
 
 Spirit-hypothesis, 269. 
 
 Standardisation, of qualities by 
 measurement, no. 
 
 Stout, G. F., 8o»., ii8»., 129 «i 
 
 Strong, C. A., 72, 102 ». 
 
 Swinton, A. A. C, 62 ». 
 
 Substance, loi. 
 
 Supernaturalism, 174. 
 
 Survival, of soul, 265. 
 
 Taylor, A. E., 222 ». 
 
 Teleology (see also Purpose and 
 Mechanism), 74, 138, 143; 
 logically dominant over mech- 
 anism, 144; and determinism, 
 187 ff.; teleological pattern in 
 nature, 193; empirical basis of, 
 I9S. 
 
 Telepathy, 269. 
 
 Tennyson, 292. 
 
 This-Such, 131, 209, 255. 
 
 Thompson, I^Arcy W., 140 «., 
 168 ff., 172, 178. 
 
 Transcendence (see also Data), 
 123, 131 ff., 224, 240. 
 
 Transcendentalism, 174. 
 
 Troland, L. T., 199, 200. 
 
 Uexkuell, von, 226 «. 
 
 Universal, and particular, 13 1 ; 
 function in knowledge, 135, 
 183 ff., 208 ff. ; abstract and con- 
 crete, 184. 
 
 Universe of discourse, criticised, 
 87. 
 
 Unreal objects, 85 ff. 
 
 Value, as opposed to fact, 22, 
 54 ff., 187 ff.; synthesis of, with 
 fact, 67, 195; dependent on de- 
 sire, 22, 55 ff-; theory of, 55; 
 subjective or objective, 56 ff.; 
 relation to purpose, 74; of 
 life, 189; naturalistic theory 
 of, 191 ; not merely contingent, 
 192. 
 
 Vitalism, v. mechanism, chs. 6, 7. 
 
 Ward, James, 181; Principles of 
 
 Psychology, 237 re. 
 Warren, H. C, 141 «., 193. 
 
314 INDEX 
 
 Webb, C. C. J., Problems in the . whole, i66. 
 
 Relation of God and Man, Wisdom, love of, 19. 
 
 296 ff. World, of sense, 76 ff. ; as ordered 
 Weismann, 267. whole, 77; as result of inter- 
 Wells, H. G., igon., 299. pretation of data, 78. 
 Whole, point of view of, 18, 
 
 247 n.; living organism as a Yerkes, R., 236.