The Problem of ktALii y K.BtL.KlRT BAX BOUGHT WITH THE INCO PROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT THE GIFT OP 1S91 ME FUND 1H|-1i|5.3.,. .h^.H.^-%S-S- Ibrary Problem of realty : being outline sugge 3 1924 028 942 865 Cornell University Library The original of tliis 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/cu31924028942865 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY THE PROBLEM OF REALITY ■" BEING OUTLINE SUGGESTIONS FOR A PHILOSOPHICAL RECONSTRUCTION BY E. BELFORT BAX Author qf"A Handbook to the History of Philosophy" " The Reli^on Socialistn^'^ " TJie Ethics of Socialism" etc., etc. iLonlJ0n SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO New York : MACMILLAN & CO 1893 /rrt. LIBRARY Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Feomk, and London. CONTENTS. CHAPTER Preface PAGE I Introductory Note on Terminology . 9 I. The General Nature of Reality • 15 II. Mainly Historical and Critical . • 32 III. The Pure Subject • 59 IV. Chance and Law 66 V. The Individual Consciousness . 84 VI. Truth and Reality . ■ 99 vri. Will . 109 VIII. Particularity or Individuation . . 118 IX. The Telos of Life .... • I3S X. . Summary ... . . • 151 Appendix A . . . ■ 171 Appendix B . . ... . 176 PREFACE. The following pages contain suggestions for a reconstruction of the Philosophical Problem and for its solution, taking it up at the point at which it was left by the classical philosophical schools of Germany, To designate the subject- matter of the Problem, I have sometimes used the word " Metaphysic " for the sake of con- venience. It would be useless to be deterred from this by any fear lest the ordinary Philis- tine should, at the mere use of the word, be thrown into convulsions. Of course, its bare mention will cause him to froth at the mouth with inept common- places as to the impossibility of any science other than that of " phenomena." He will kindly enunciate for you a variety of unimpeachable propositions, all as true as they 2 PREFACE. are trivial, which he considers crushing, and which would indeed be so, had they anything whatsoever to do with the point under discus- sion. A certain Problem exists, call it by what name we will, — " Reality," " Experience," " Nature " (ipva-iog) — as given in Consciousness. This is the Problem to be explained, to be re- duced to terms of Reflective Thought. " Meta- physic," properly interpreted, need mean no more than the analysis of " Nature," of the given, albeit under its ultimate aspect of some- thing- experienced. This Problem only leads us beyond nature or beyond experience in so far as it seeks to formulate the conditions under which experience is possible, or which all experience presupposes. In this sense it may be said to be beyond Nature — fieracjjvcrucos — just as the terms of any synthesis in their abstraction are in a sense beyond or outside the synthesis as concrete. It does not require a very great deal of PREFACE. 3 thought to see (at least after it has been once pointed out) that the whole Problem with which we are here concerned is summed up in what we call " Consciousness," either potential or actual. All Object is, in the last resort, incontrovertibly nothing but a possible or an actual determination of Consciousness. Every actual determination, or, as it is often, with doubtful propriety called, " state " of Conscious- ness, bears within itself the presupposition of another determination or " state " which, because other than the actual determination, is regarded by the unreflective understanding as distinct from Consciousness altogether. Philosophic analysis corrects this opinion of the unreflective understanding, — this " common-sense " view as it is termed, — and discloses Consciousness as the alpha and omega of all things. It is unneces- sary to dilate further upon this point now, as so many of the following chapters are more or less occupied with its elucidation. PREFACE. It is obvious, then, that the Metaphysical Problem exists, and that it is futile to deny its existence. Those who dislike the term " Meta- physic " may call it " Theory of Knowledge," but there is no point gained by doing so. It is open to anyone to allege want of interest in the Problem, but not to deny that the Problem obtains. For a man to question its existence and to suggest that all Philosophical investi- gation issues in mere logomachy, because he has no aptitude for the working-out of the Problem, or has no interest in its subject-matter, is just as absurd as it would be for another man, destitute of any mathematical faculty, to question the possibility of mathematics, and to suggest that its symbols were simply hocus- pocus. Philosophical treatises are not written for those who take no interest in the Problem of Philosophy. You cannot make a man feel an interest where he does not. I well remem- ber my early indignation at being required to PREFACE. investigate whether, if two sides of a triangle were equal, the angles opposite to those sides would be also equal, simply because 1 was per- fectly indifferent as to whether they were equal or unequal. So it is with the man who despises Philosophical investigations. The difference is that the average man of culture is vastly more concerned with the properties of lines and angles than with the conditions and meaning of Consciousness. Like all majorities, the majority who are interested in the problems of Mathe- matics, but not in those of Metaphysic can, because of their majority, easily sustain their attitude of contempt for those for whom the Problems of Metaphysic are of greater in- terest. Practical utility is another question, and one upon which it is almost futile to enter. In the first place, the Problem of Conscious Reality being once admitted, it is obvious that it must contain within itself the rhethod on which all PREFACE. Other investigations in the last resort depend. Apart from this, to boycott a Problem, especi- ally one so far-reaching, on the ground that no immediate utility is to the superficial view apparent in it, is a manifest absurdity. Yet this is the attitude taken up, to all intents and purposes, by those who say that Philosophy is an extinct science, that there is no general Problem of Life and Thought as apart from the special sciences, and that all that the woird "Philosophy" can henceforward mean, if used at all, is a generalisation of the results of the special sciences. The argument sometimes heard that, with the great social questions around us press- ing for solution, abstract Philosophy must yield to studies having an immediate bearing on human progress, expresses undeniably a certain truth. But it applies equally to the investigation of nearly all departments of Natural Science. Lavoisier was no meta- PREFACE. physician, yet he was told that " the republic has no need of chemists." I readily admit that a great and satisfactory progress in Philosophy, as in other intellectual departments, is only possible after the solution of the social question, but the deliberate ignoring, for an indefinite period, of any subject of human interest is a policy that, even were it desirable, could not be consistently carried out. In such discussions as follow, it is difficult to draw the line between expounding at length, at the risk of wearying some readers, points with which they are already familiar, and ren- dering oneself unintelligible to others to whom the question is more or less new. I make this observation, on the one hand, in order to fore- stall the criticism that some items of my ex- position are stale, and, on the other hand, in order to excuse myself with those who, from want of familiarity with Philosophical litera- ture, may find it hard to follow portions of the PREFACE. argument. I may say, in conclusion, however, that I believe that there is nothing in the following pages that a thoughtful reader who has ever opened a book on Philosophy should find any difficulty in grasping. INTRODUCTORY NOTE ON TER- MINOLOGY. The metaphysicophobist often accuses Philo- sophy of being a simple logomachy. The implication is, that the philosopher or meta- physician makes words take the place of thought. Now, those who have devoted serious attention to the investigation of the conditions of Consciousness know well enough that words, so far from being a welcome auxiliary to the philosophic thinker, form one of his greatest stumbling-blocks. That a " fight- about- words " has occupied a place in the History of Philosophy is true enough, but this is the fault, not of Philosophy, but of language itself. It arises from the difficulty which exists, of expressing adequately, in the state of development as yet attained by language, the distinctions discovered by Reflective Thought. Philosophic Thought has outstripped language. Such logomachy, then, as does obtain, is simply THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. due to defects, not of Philosophic Thought, but of language, which can only imperfectly and ambiguously express Thought-distinctions. "Subject." The term " Subject," for in- stance, has a curious philosophic history, and was originally used in the opposite sense to that universal since Kant. In the following chapters, the word "Subject," used with a capital letter for the sake of marking a distinction, is confined exclusively to the " I " of appercep- tion, the referee of all Consciousness, and is not employed, as is the customary fashion, to mean the individual Consciousness. The word "Reality " again may be used with two or three meanings. It may be employed exclusively to denote common-sense Conscious- ness. With me, it means any object or synthesis "Reauty!" appearing in Consciousness of whatsoever nature, and is thus synonymous with the word " Object" or Existence, in the widest significations of those words. There is another and a special sense, in which the word " Reality " means the highest and most complete expression of a thing, its fullest development. This is its meaning as used in the Hegelian system. In this sense "Reality "is synony- INTRODUCTORY NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY, ii mous with one of the meanings of " Truth." Here the " Reality " of Conscious- "Truth." ness, or " Reality " in its highest significance would mean the fullest, the most complete development of Consciousness. In this sense, it may also be used for the specific determin- ations of Consciousness. For example, the " Reality " of a flower is not the stem, nor the bud, but the flower as it is at the moment be- fore it drops its petals and falls into decay, that is to say, the flower at its ripest and when most fully expanded. This is the purpose, the telos, of seed, stem and bud. It is all that the flower as such has to express. The " truth " of a thing also means the fullest expression of its develop- ment, the final phase to which all previous phases are contributory as means to an end. The term " Reality " is, however, used by Kant and by others, to express the intensive- ness of feeling, and hence as a mere element in a perceptive synthesis. It is never used by me in this sense. The lowest and hence fundamental stage of Reality is, obviously, sensible consciousness, its elements being per se unreal, i.e. mere abstractions. The word " being " I employ with a distinc- THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. tive signification, not as synonymous with Real- "Being." ity or Existcnce, but as the element in ReaHty of in-itselfness or self -positing, which, in all Objects corresponds to the " I " in the primal synthesis of Consciousness. '"K»fe:" The words " Knowledge " and " Experience" are from our present standpoint, synonymous with Object-in-general or Reality. There is no Object that is not a synthesis of determinations of Consciousness, and, as such, a piece of Knowledge or Experience. "Tiiougiit." " Thought " is in these pages solely employed to express the element of concept-forming. •"Sgo?^"- The "concept" or "category" is that unification of the sense impression, or mere Feeling, whereby it is constituted Reality, in other words, it is the final element which goes to make up the Object. '!i5ow' By "Reflective Thought" I mean, not the Thought entering into the Object, which, inasmuch as it goes to the making up of the latter, may be termed " Productive Thought," but that Thought as reproduced in the individual mind. The Thought that enters into the Object is immediately common to all. INTRODUCTORY NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY. 13 It belongs to Consciousness-in-general, irrespec- tive of individuals. But on the other hand, Reflective Thought, although it is governed by general laws, belongs nevertheless immediately to each individual remembering mind only. "Idee." The "Idee" in the Hegelian system is the developed form pf the concept. "Dnderstanaing." The " Understanding," in the classical German Philosophy, means Reflective- Thought in its critical stage as separating and defining, the holding fast of distinctions to the exclusion of their opposites. "Reason." " Reason," on the other hand, means the insight into the essential unity of things in their opposition, the fusing of ab- stractions in the concrete whole. "'^F*m!»" Of Aristotle's distinction be- tween "matter" and "form" it is scarcely necessary to say much. It may, in Anglo- Saxon, be most briefly expressed by saying that " matter " is the ^^a^ness of things, while " form " is their what-n.&^s. "FnZiv^"' Every Reality consists of cer- tain " elements " or " principles." Viewed per se^-as distinguished from their union in syn- thesis — these "elements" are abstract quoad 14 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. the Reality in question, but viewed in their syn- thetic union they together constitute the Reality. ApperMpti™." The term " unity of appercep- tion," by which Kant designates the primitive unity of Consciousness, I regard as a function of the pure Subject, and in this we have the primary distinction between what I have termed the " logical " and the " a-logical." In the undifferentiated Subject of all Con- sciousness, we have the a-logical in its purest form. The a-loglcal also appears in Reality as the element of mere Feeling and in events as Chance, and so forth. But all this will be sufficiently discussed in the subsequent pages. "TransoendentaL" The word " transcendental," though avoided by me as much as possible, means Consciousness regarded in its primary elements, and is in this sense synonymous with " metaphysical," neither words implying, as they are commonly supposed to do, something out- side Experience, but merely connoting the con- ditions under which all Experience is possible. These few comments will include all that it is necessary to say regarding the mere definition of terms. " Particularity," " universality," and some other terms are explained in the course of the exposition. CHAPTER I. THE GENERAL NATURE OF REALITY. Philosophy with many persons means specula- tion on things in general. For the student of the development of human thought, Philosophy means inquiry into the true significance of Reality. It means the reduction of the totality of things, or, in other words, of our concrete or immediate Consciousness, to terms of our abstract or reflective Consciousness. The pos- sibility of our doing this rests upon the fact that all Reality contains a ^l-SS^f."' Thought-element. Were thought and thing radically opposed to, or even distinct from, one another, not only Philosophy, but "common- sense" itself would be impossible. A Reality or a thing containing no Thought-element would be unapprehensible, unknowable. If however we examine into our use and meaning of the word " Reality " we shall find that it in- volves the notion pf apprehensibility, and that i6 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. hence an unknowable Reality, a Reality that, by its very nature, cannot become a content of Consciousness or be known, is a contradiction in terms. An unknown Reality — a Reality, that is, which is not an actual Object of Knowledge, can be spoken of; but such a Reality is none the less assumed as a possible Object of Know- ledge, or it could not be spoken of. If what is here said be doubted, the doubter may fairly be challenged to point to any Reality or thing, of which Thought is not a necessary component. What, for example, do we mean by the terms used to express the specific Realities of " com- mon sense" Consciousness," — " table," " house," " tree," — except Thought distinctions ? We affirm a thing to be a table by virtue of re- cognising it in Thought under certain concepts. Its Reality as " table " involves its distinction from other Realities that are not " table," and its reciprocal connection with other Realities or Objects under certain Thought-forms or cate- gories common to them all. It is scarcely necessary nowadays to show that the em- piricist notion of an experience of a succession of particular objects — "tables," houses," "trees " — building up the general conception of the THE GENERAL NATURE OF REALITY. 17 Object, does not militate against what is here said. It may be quite true that the individual mind awakens to the knowledge of the fact that an Object is what it is, by virtue of reflection on experience, and further that it is by virtue of reflection on experience that it is able to ab- stract the universal concept from the Object as given. But this does not alter the fact that the universal concept forms part of the Object in its original concreteness. The Thought-element or concept-relation which the mind abstracts from the Object is there to be abstracted. All that empiricism has to teach us resolves itself therefore into the truism that the form of the concept as abstract — or, as the Schoolmen would have said, in its "second intention" — is not the same as its form as an integer of the concrete world — or in its " first intention." The " univer- sal" and " necessary " element which all Reality involves is clearly thought into the Object. Yet although thought into the Object, it is clearly not thought into it by the individual mind, since the latter finds it already given in the Object. Take it away from the Object and the Object ceases to be Object, ceases to be real. The ordinary empirical perception repre- 1 8 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. sents the lowest stage of Consciousness, The Thought-elemeint, which the individual mind finds embedded in the Reality as presented to it, shows that the Reality itself has no meaning except as forming part of a thinking conscious- ness, potential or actual.^ So much as to the " universal " and " necessary " element in Experience, or Knowledge, which is plainly Thought, and nothing but Thought — Idea, and nothing but Idea. Let us now abstract the general concept- form from the thing, " table," tree," or " house," together with the special categories, such as "substantiality," causal connection," etc., which are involved in the nature of every Object as such ; if we do so, we shall find that all that remains over are the sense-impressions, exten- Feeiing. sion, hardncss, colour, in other words. Feeling. Once the " universal " and " necessary " element, the category, is gone, the Reality has ceased to be, leaving behind it mere Feeling ; the thing has vanished, and the caput mortuum, blind Feeling, remains in its place. Old Kant was clearly right, then, when he saw, 1 See Appendix A, which the reader should study before proceeding further with this chapter. THE GENERAL NATURE OF REALITY. 19 although he did not always consistently keep the point in view, that the independence of the Thing or Object belonged to its " universal " and " necessary " element — Thought. The merely particular and contingent element, Feel- ing, can plainly of itself never furnish Reality. If we look at these two elements still more closely, we shall see further that Feeling is immediate in Consciousness and that Thought is mediate. Thought presupposes the material element Feeling as its substratum. The dis- tinctions, relations or categories, according as we please to call them, which Thought strikes out, are struck out of Feeling. It is Feeling which is differentiated and to which Thought gives the touch of actuality constituting it Object or Thing. Thought reduces the inchoate prin- ciple of Feeling to definiteness and consistency by relating it under the concept-form. This is primarily a mere determination under the con- cept-form-in-general, in accordance with the principle of Porphyry's Tree. It is defined in the first place as Object or Thing in an in- creasing specification. Thus, all Reality is Object or Thing, the words being indeed synonymous. The Object or Thing is further 20 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. defined as, for example, animate or inanimate, sensitive or insensitive, rational or irrational, but always in an increasing specification. But the concept-form always remains " universal," however low it may be brought down. It is always a form which admits of a possible in- finity of instances coming under it. Hence the concept-form never touches the this-ix&ss of re/s-ness. the Object ; the latter is always distinguished from it as immediate Feeling, or, so to say, as raw-material. The same applies to the special form of the category as determining the world of Objects inter se, i.e. to " causa- tion," "reciprocity" and the rest. In short, the nature of the concept-form is always and exclusively " universal," and never touches the particular. Such, then, is the element of Thought, considered per se. And for this reason, language, which is the empirical sign of Thought, can never express anything but " universals." The very " tAis " of language, like its "here" and its "now," is always uni- versalised. It has passed through the mill of Thought and has become any " this," and, there- fore, nothing at all, in the sense that the this- ness, the particularity, having been mediated THE GENERAL NATURE OF REALITY. 21 by Thought, has ceased to be its original self. The true "this" cannot be expressed in Thought or language ; it is in its nature e»^mediate, and when mediatised disappears and leaves behind a mere simulacrum of its former self. This is the gulf which always separates thinking and being. I am of course here speaking of Thought proper — abstract Thought. The mere psychological, remembered image, it is true, has its own this-ness, and is real as a mental image or memory, though it is not real in the same sense in which the Object remembered is real. It is not so, because, in the first place, the sensible content of its this-ness is different (for instance, less definite) ; and because, in the second place, it is not related synthetically under the categories presupposed by Reality in its first intention, i.e. by ordinary " common- sense " Consciousness. In the case of hallu- cinations, the second reason alone applies. Here the sensible content is the same, but the categorisation requisite to constitute its physical Reality fails at some point or other. Qualities as such, the whole essence of which resides in their this-ness, can, similarly, not be expressed in Thought or language. 22 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. No one, for example, can convey in language, hardness, softness, colour or sound in them- selves. The nature of qualities, as belonging to pure Feeling, resides, as already said, ex- clusively in their /^^w-ness, and is therefore absolutely untranslatable into Thought, and is hence incommunicable in language. This indeterminate particularity or //^zV-ness it is that always separates the Reality from the Thought or concept in its abstraction. A Reality is never a mere " universal," but always contains a felt ^^w-ness. Logical and a-iogioai. The element of Feeling, which enters into every determinate Consciousness or Reality, is always antithetical to the concept or Thought-element, which informs it. The one is through and through particular, the other is through and through universal. The first is, as I may term it, through and through a-logical, the second through and through logical. Yet these two elements, antithetical though they be, have a common root and pre-supposition, and this common root is the potentiality of all consciousness expressed in that which we term " I " (" ego "). We can- not get beyond this as the ultimate ground THE GENERAL NATURE OF REALITY. 23 of all Thinking and Feeling, as that which is conscious, and hence as the ultimate matter of Reality. Always passing over into Feeling and Thinking, it is yet never exhausted in them, but always maintains itself as the central ele- ment in the process from which the other ele- ments of Feeling and Thinking come, and into which they return. We can only define the " ego " in w^ords, as the possibility of Feeling and Thinking, as the " that " to which, in the last resort, they are both reducible as mere manifestations, but which is yet only realised in synthesis with them, namely in Concrete Consciousness. The primary element Feeling or sensibility is related to the " I " in a double manner ; firstly, as its mere negation, otherness or difference within itself — I have a Feeling, am determined as Feeling ; and secondly, as determined or informed by the " ego " as a world of external objects connected indissolubly with itself and with each other in a definite manner. This relating-activity is termed Thought, and constitutes the secondary or logical element in Reality. ■'''Ib*^??^™^"'** The principle of individuation or particularity, and therewith, a fortiori, 24 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. that of number or plurality, first arises in the Object considered as "universe." The "world" displays itself as an endless plurality. Through its Thought-activity, the " I " regains in the individual mind, or in (as Kant calls it) " the object of the internal sense," a pseudo- unity antithetical to this plurality or number. But it is a pseudo-unity in the sense that it is not an absolute unity like th^ "I" which is conscious of it as of all other objects. The "I" which constitutes the possibility of all con- sciousness whatever, experiences the world of external Objects immediately in its plurality. The personality or mind, on the contrary, only appears immediately in Consciousness as a unity. It is the immediate intuition of myself as this memory-synthesis which gives colour to the notion that my individual mind is absolute. But Thought revolts against such an assumption and proclaims it inconsistent with the system of Reality as a whole. It thereby reduces the memory-synthesis, or personality, myself, from the rank of an absolute unity to that of a relative unit, in other words, to the same level as that of external objects, or to that of being a particular representative of a universal class or kind. THE GENERAL NATURE OF REALITY. 25 no "transoendentai j^e transcendental "ego" has often been the butt of small wits. It is, however, of the first importance in Philosophy to distinguish between the Subject of Con- sciousness-in-general, the fundamental presup- position of all Reality whatsoever, and the mere memory-synthesis or personality, which is in truth its Object, but which " common-sense " Consciousness confounds with it under the common word " I " or " Subject." " I am self- conscious," simply means " I," Subject, appre- hend or become aware of this memory-synthesis or personality as Object. In Self- Consciousness the " I " is objectified immediately as a more or less definite unity of Thoughts and Feelings (mental world) categorised at second hand, just as in external perception or common- sense Con- sciousness it is objectified as a more or less definite unity of Thoughts and Feelings, cate- gorised at first hand. The first is element merely in a synthesis, albeit the fundamental element, and, apart from the synthesis, it is abstract and therefore unreal. The second is concrete or real, and therefore itself a synthesis, standing indeed at the opposite pole to the former. But here the saying " les extremes se 26 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. touchent" has its application. This most com- plex of all Realities, the memory-synthesis, or self, can only by a refinement of abstract Thought be distinguished from its antithesis, the Subject of Consciousness-in-general. In popular phraseology, they are confounded under the word " I ; " in philosophical terminology, under the word " Subject." It is at the point of Self-Consciousness that Subject and Object coalesce and proclaim their essential unity. Were it not for the exigencies of language, one might more correctly reserve the words " me " and "myself" for the self as the Object of Self-Consciousness. But if we retain the word " Subject " for the memory-synthesis, we must certainly invent another word for the " I " which apprehends that memory-synthesis or which is the referee of all modes of Consciousness, men- tal and material. JdthL'-i-lfo^jeol The difficulty of the ordinary man in getting rid of the absurd notion that Reality is anything else than a synthesis of relations in the Subject of Consciousness-in general, of which his personality or memory- synthesis is merely the temporary determina- tion,. — the idea which he has that the " mind " THE GENERAL NATURE OF REALITY. 27 merely apprehends a Reality subsisting in itself, independent, not only of his own mind but of Consciousness altogether — rests upon his in- ability to grasp the cardinal distinction I have, just indicated. He cannot distinguish, that is to say, between the mental world itself, on the one hand, the sum of thoughts and feelings knit together by memory called " mind " or " personality," which is itself the Object of ex- perience in the fact of Self-Consciousness, and on the other hand, the " I " which apprehends or experiences all that is apprehensible — Kant's " I " of original apperception. Both the mental world and the material world are respectively parts of the experience of this latter. The assumption of a world outside myself in the last resort means nothing but the ascription of a certain section of my Feelings as immedi- ate in a universal Subject to which numerical difference cannot be ascribed, but which is the basis of all Consciousness, whether mine or thine, in contradistinction to another section of my Feelings, which I recognise as merely secondary and derivative, because falling ex- clusively within the range of myself, or memory- synthesis, which necessarily implies this Subject. 28 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. Only by virtue of the fact that this assumption, as one may call it, has its roots in the deepest recesses of Consciousness, do I become aware of an external world as such and recognise it as the common property of all minds. This is the only possible solution of the distinction between what, in the loose terminology of the psycholo- gists, is called the Subjective and Objective. For the sake of convenience, one may term the first class of feelings — those which are extra- individual — felt-nesses, whilst reserving the word feelings for the second class, for those, namely, which I recognise as belonging, directly and exclusively, to my memory-synthesis or self. The Feelings in the first class, no less than those in the second, are viewed through this memory-synthesis, although distinguishable from it. Fallacy as opposed to truth simply means the distortion of the cognition of the "pure ego" by that refracting influence of the memory-synthesis.^ This "self" soul- object or mental world, as already said, in spite of the absoluteness of its unity as felt, is reduced by Reflective- Thought to a merely relative unit — to an individual of a kind or ^ See Appendix B. THE GENERAL NATURE OF REALITY. 29 class, which has no significance except as belonging to its class. ^"S^eSt.*^* To sum up : Reality in its broadest and simplest expression, implies three elements : (i) an " I " feeling, which constitutes the possibility of apprehending ; (2) a " Felt- ness," or the negation of this " I " as such, constituting the possibility of apprehendedness ; and (3) the reciprocal determination or fixation of the " felt-ness " by that which feels and con- versely. It is this third or formal element of reciprocal relation, which we term Thought, the category, the logical, and in it Consciousness is complete in its simplest aspect. Such and nothing else is the ultimate nature of Reality. Outside this primary synthesis, Reality, Ex- istence, Universe, Nature, Object, or by what- ever other name we may call it, is not. The above synthesis is the eternal framework of Reality, and when we postulate Reality in any sense whatever, we unwittingly postulate it. But, as already hinted, the whole synthesis, looked at more closely, resolves itself, as old Fichte showed, into its primary element. " Felt-ness " is nothing but the determination of " I " as Feeling, and Thought is nothing but 30 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. the reciprocal determination of " I " as that which feels by its " felt-ness " and conversely. So that the whole world is nothing but a sys- tem of manifestations of " I "-ness, although the personality or self seems to be nearer the start- ing-point than the intermediate stages constitu- ting the fixed order of external nature in space. This will, however, be a matter for future con- sideration. The question that may possibly occur to some reader, as to what determines this ulti- mate potentiality of all Consciousness which we call " I " to the act of self-determination crys- tallised in its " felt-ness," is really altogether meaningless. It rests upon the misapprehen- sion that we are dealing with a process in Time having a " before " and an " after," rather than with one in, by, and for, which. Time itself is, and which is therefore, in the true sense of the word, eternal, as being the same in all time. Time, in fact, has no meaning except within this primary synthesis, implied in all experience. The function of Philosophy is to analyse the conditions of Experience or Consciousness, and in doing so, it finds a synthetic process eter- nally passing through the same elements, which THE GENERAL NATURE OF REALITY. 31 elements, though clearly distinguishable in thought, are never separate in fact. The pri- mary synthesis implied in all Consciousness furnishes the mould or schema for all Reality in its dynamical aspect. Throughout the whole system of the universe we have the self-same elements recurring in a transformed guise. The search for these elements and their expo- sition constitutes the dialectical method. CHAPTER II. MAINLY HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL. Philosophy has always consisted in the endea- vour to formulate in abstract Thought the first principles of Reality and the method which Reality follows. It has been the endeavour, in short, as has often been said before, to reduce the manifold of things to the unity of Reflective- Thought. In the history of Philosophy we Historyofpniiosopiiy. have thinkers who have main- tained a purely critical attitude, others whose Philosophy consisted in the enforcement of one particular point from various sides, others again who have arrived at some form of synthetic construction. These latter will be found to be, in the last resort, in substantial agreement with one another, and also with the short analysis here given of the nature of Reality. The dif- ferences between them are those of emphasis, of the alto relievo in which certain aspects of the problem stand out in contrast to other MAINLY HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL. 33 aspects. There is however one point in which they all more or less diverge from the formu- lation of "the nature of things" as given in these pages. They all, namely, tend to con- found Reality with the formal element of Thought, or rationality. The latter is for them the prius to which the other elements, which we have indicated as constituting the framework of Reality, are subordinate. For Plato, the first of synthetic thinkers, the con- piato. cept form was not simply the basal element in the real, but was itself a concrete or thing, of ■which "common-sense Reality" was the mere blurring or spoiling — " universalia ante rem!' Aristotle so far modified the Platonic theory as to reduce the concept to its true Aristotle, value as merely an element in the real, as the form of a matter — " universalia in re." But with him, no less, the ultimate nature of things was formal; his " ww iroeTiKo^," his "ens realissimum," as defined in the tenth book of the " Metaphysics," is pure form, a form in which is no matter, an absolute actuality. With the Neo-Platonists it is substan- The Neo-piatomsts. tially the same. Pure form is to them the highest principle of the real, matter is its com- D 34 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. paratively unessential negation. The root principle with them is hence the abstract con- cept-form, for as such we may fairly interpret the first hypostasis of the Alexandrian Trinity. Tie Schoolmen. The Schoolmen and later thinkers of the middle ages, inspired as they were mainly by Aristptle and Plato, were also partisans of the theory of "pure intelligibility " as the ultimate principle of the real. To come to the modern schools, in the well-known Cartesian formula, the " cogito " appears as the Spinoza. ground of the " sum." Spinoza's " timca substantia " when logically followed out resolves itself to all intents and purposes into the attribute of Thought. Spinoza's " God," like Aristotle's, is " pure intellect." That the Leibnitz. " monads " of Leibnitz also were " pure intelligibles," goes without saying. Leibnitz, moreover, held to the Platbnic prin- ciple that the " non-logical " element in Experi- ence was the mere limitation of the " logical " Kant. element. Kant in the main evades the issue, though in his " deduction of the categories," the " I " of apercepfton appears as a formal principle. Even with Fichte, who at Fiohte. times seems inclined to give a due MAINLY HISTORICAL AND CRITIC4L. 35 value to the opposite point of view, the ten- dency is to regard the "That-handlung " ("deed- action ") as a principle of Thought-activity. It is sometimes spoken of as " vernunft-fassende Vernunft" (Werke, vol. ii., p. 375). Schelling also hesitates in his attitude, soiiemng. though, generally speaking, the same remarks will apply to him. But in the greatest of all synthetic thinkers, Hegel, we find Hegei. what may be termed the apotheosis of the concept-form in its most uncompromising and most developed shape. It is to Hegel, there- fore, that we must direct our criticism — a criti- cism to some extent anticipated in the history of Philosophy, as I have elsewhere pointed out, by the reaction indicated in the systems of Herbart and Schopenhauer. For Hegel, Reality is simply Thought-process, the evolu- tion of the " Begriff." Reality is for him merely an evolving synthesis of relations. There is no matter, all is form. The appre- hending element, the " I," and the apprehended, the ''non-I" in which it is negated as Object- Consciousness, are alike for Hegel mere elements momenta or terms in the one process of the " thinking of Thought." The formula of 36 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. that process is the triple momentum "Ansichseyn" (" in-itselfness "), "Fursichseyn " (" for-itself- ness "), and " Anundfilrsichseyn " (in-and-for- itselfness "). As will be seen this corresponds in its working-out to the schema given in the last chapter as the ultimate postulate of Con- sciousness-in-general.^ Thought, the concept, the " Idee," the sys- tem of Thought-determinations, is thus in the Hegelian philosophy the beginning and the end of all things. For Hegel, there is no " I think," but only Thought which, to coin a word, " ego- ites." In this system of Pan-logism, as it has been termed, the concept or " idee " has a sub- ject. Subject is its determination, just as Object is its determination, no more and no less. And 1 "Ansichseyn" stands for the immediateness of the " I " as Feeling, " Fiirsichseyn " stands for the otherness of the "I" as completed Feeling, or "Felt-ness," "Anund- fiirsichseyn" stands for the completed Experience or Reality as mediatised by Thought — the reciprocal relation of the a-logical antitheses. The terminology is a useful one, even for those who dissent from the Hegelian pan-logism. The middle term, the " Fiirsichseyn," is the moment of separation and antithesis, or of isolation. This isolation is abolished, and the unity reafifirmed in the third term, this time no longer embryonic as in the first term, but fully- fledged and developed — a unity in difiference. MAINLY HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL. 37 now let US consider by what right the element of Thought is made co-extensive with the whole synthesis of Reality. By what right do we regard it as " prius." It must be remembered that Hegel was possessed from the very outset by what may be called a noumenophobia or dread of the " Ding-an-sich" under which absurd guise the non-logical elements in the general synthesis of Consciousness had appeared in earlier philosophies, especially in Kant. This led Hegel to the bold step, which no previous thinker had ventured upon in the same uncom- promising manner, of explicitly and categori- cally expounding Thought, the " Begriff " or " Idee," as the sole principle of Reality. Now the notion of the thing-in-itself, that is to say, a thing existing outside all possible consciousness, is a manifest absurdity. But though there may be no thing-in-itself, there is undoubtedly an in-itselfness in the thing, that is, in Reality. Hegel, naturally, cannot ignore this, and in accordance with his thesis, he is bound to treat it as a mere " moment " of Thought, or of the " Begriff." But the in-itselfness contained in Reality cannot by any process of expository legerdemain be wrung out of Thought or out 38 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. of logical determination per se. In this hope- less attempt the Hegelian system made ship- wreck. It may be very neat and convenient to reduce all Reality to the element which deter- mines it finally for the "mind," but to do so is simply misleading, and we are not helped by question-begging phrases, such as " concrete Idee" " der Begriff in seiner Totalitat" nor by talk about the non-logical elements of the real synthesis (which are, of course, for Hegel the imperfect momenta of the " Idee "), as being " aufgehoben " in the " Idee " as completed. The clumsy objection of the man of " common- sense " and of the empirical psychologist, that out of Thought alone Thing can never be de- duced, represents, apart from the ineptitude of form in which it is usually expressed, a hard fact against which pan-logism dashes itself in vain, and which it, in the end, in vain endea- vours to circumvent by the literary devices of exposition. If words have any meaning, the concept, the " Begriff," is not co-extensive with the whole synthesis. ^InloeifSTm':' We must not confound two different things. There is first the great truth, which it was the historical function of MAINLY HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL. 39 Transcendentalism to enforce, understanding by Transcendentalism the classical philosophy of Germany, to wit, that Reality or Experience- in-general with its countless syntheses and processes, is, in the last resort, but one and the same synthetic process ; that Conscious- ness, possible and actual, embraces the whole problem of existence, and that only by a con- fusion of thought do men suppose a problem outside of it. Secondly, there is Hegel's identi- fication of the whole process with the Thought or concept-factor involved in it. These two points must not be confounded. That Hegel, after making that identification, should begin his exposition with the logical system of the categories was inevitable, but it is signifi- cant that it is precisely this which has been the great stumbHng-block to the understanding of his system. The gist of the " transcendental " standpoint lies in the recognition of the fact that Existence or Reality must mean " knowable- ness," or " known-ness,'' or, otherwise put, that the universe exists only in and for Experience or Consciousness-in-general, that is, in and for an Experience or a Consciousness not limited by this or any particular memory-synthesis or 40 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. individual mind, but which is the eternal con- dition of all the memory-syntheses that co-exist with, and succeed, each other in Time. If, as I have heard Hegelian friends contend, this is all that is meant by the " BegrifF" or " Idee," the criticism would resolve itself into one of terminology, but as a matter of fact, this is not so, and the consequences of the distinction are abundantly evident in the working-out of the Hegelian system. ■^"'"stasisf"^* For the present, we may briefly observe that the formulation that makes Thought or Reason ultimate, i.e. the alpha and omega of all things, necessarily issues in a stasis. As final telos it appears as the " Absolute Idee " which has absorbed and eliminated all that element in Reality that is not pure Form — all Feeling, all Particularity, all Contingency, all Impulse (Will). The con- ception, of course, easily lends itself to a theistic interpretation — the " most perfect Being," the " Being whose essence is Good- ness," and so forth. But the main thing to note is that the re- duction of all things to pure Thought is the destruction of their concreteness. This diffi- MAINLY HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL. 41 culty is not got rid of by treating the non-con- ceptual element as a mere phase or moment of the conceptual ; that the several elements exist merely in the synthesis may be true, but their distinguishability is eternally complete. ^"irStl^i:*" An absolute Thought, if it mean anything at all, implies a Relation without a " that " which is related, whereas in the problem as given we find elements of which the Concept is the mere form of Relation, and which this form therefore pre- supposes as its condition. The postulate of all Thought is the "Felt-ness" of an "Ego." What we mean by " Ego " is simply the " congealed " possibility of apprehending, or of Consciousness as posited, which passes over into actuality by being negated in its own completed Feeling. This is what the analysis of Experience reduced to its simplest expres- sion discloses. By what right do we dog- matically exclude the material elements in the synthesis, the that which knows, the poten- tiality of knowledge together with the "felt- ness " into which it passes over in the act of Consciousness, in favour of its mere formal activity as Thought-determination ? Surely 42 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. " common-sense '' is vindicated when it protests against pan-logism, and avers that Relations without related elements^ — Relations "in vacuo" — are nonsense. To insist that the " I " as such, or in its self-negation as " Felt-ness," is a mere determination of Thought, is an inversion of the conditions of the synthesis, which was overtaken by its historical nemesis in the break-up of the old Hegelianism and in the formation of the Hegelian "left;" also on its metaphysical side in Schopenhauer. Criticism continued. It was felt that ^^w-ncss, in all its modes, was left out of account in the Hegelian formula. Thought, the Reflex- Activity of the " Ego," the " Begriff," is and remains universal. Hegel, it is true, recog- nises this and surreptitiously reinstates the extruded elements under the notion of con- creteness, distinguishing therefrom the " Be- griff" in its abstraction. He does not, how- ever, recognise that, in doing so, he is simply playing fast and loose with language. The term " Concept," " Begriff" means, and has always meant, the universalising of Thought. The expression "Idea" ("Idee"), as used in Philosophy, is more vague, but has also beei^ MAINLY HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL. 43 employed, and notably by Plato, for the con- cept as hypostatised. As popularly used the term "Idea" usually signifies a mental image, and in its derivatives, "ideal," "idealism," is opposed to the term " Reality, in the sense that it is itself the telos of Reality. The " ideal " is the perfect form to which Reality tends, but when once " realised," it ceases eo ipso to be " ideal." But in any case as used in the sense of the completed synthesis, it can only be misleading. "Idea" like "Reason" always implies the universalising, the defining and connecting Thought-activity, and is used as opposed to Feeling and Willing. Hence it was that the terminology, " Begriff" '■'Idee" " Vernunfi," used by Hegel to express the ultimate nature of Experience, proved histori- cally unjustifiable. The Real contains other elements than pure Intelligibility (Intellectus) and these other elements are not absorbed in it. The "Informed" is not completely exhausted in "Form," the "Related" in the " Relation." But the " Real," the concrete, always consists of elements, which although related in Thought, are, throughout its entire range, distinguishable as other than Thought, 44 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. nay, are apprehended by Thought itself as other than itself. As elements of the primary conscious synthesis (Kant's " unity of apercep- tion"), they appear as the " I " reasserting itself in its own negation, its " Felt-ness." In the Object itself, they manifest themselves as Being (" that-ness ") and Quality ("what-ness"). The first is the principle of " in-itselfness," of " self- subsistence," of " subjectivity," of what Herbart termed '■'position ; " the second is the principle of the negation or determination of this " posi- tion " through accidents or attributes. Thought, then, appears as the secondary or derivative principle in Reality. It is, so to say, a Reflex- Activity of the " Ego," "foSlo^o." The distinction is apparent in the opposition so much insisted upon by Hegel between "Dialectic" and "Formal Logic." Contradiction is of the very essence of " Dialectic," whilst it is excluded by " Formal Logic." Why is this, except that " Dialectic," the " Concrete Logic " of Hegel, involves the play of what I may term " a- logical" elements, while in " Formal Logic " we have the play of pure Thought alone } For Thought or the Concept, as such, contradiction MAINLY HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL. 45 is impossible. The Laws of Identity, Contra- diction, and Excluded Middle, are for it absolute. The nature of Thought or Reason per se is consistency, its function the reduction of the a-logical under its own " laws." This is achieved in those matters that can be ade- quately dealt with by " Formal Logic." On the other hand, in " Dialectic," which is the general expression for our Reflective-Consci- ousness of the inner process of our Perceptive- Consciousness or common-sense Reality, the laws of mere Thought are insufficient. Hence for Thought or Reason per se, the immanent contradiction contained in " Dialectic " is an absurdity. Thought has first of all to recognise its own limitation and abstractness, before the meaning of " Dialectic " dawns upon the Con- sciousness. Thought demands that the definite- ness and self-consistency pertaining to its own activity and to those aspects of the concrete where its own activity predominates, should extend to the ultimate process of the world- order. The nature of Thought per se is (to use the expression of the classical German Philosophy), " Understanding " (" Verstand"). It only becomes what by an arbitrary use of 46 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. terms is called by the same Philosophy, " Reason " (" Vernunft "), by ceasing to com- pletely dominate its own material, by its in- ability, that is to say, to reduce under its laws the a-logical elements which it presupposes, thus giving rise to antinomies. Logical and «-iogioai The logic of Hegel, then, con- Hegeiian Categories, tains what, though generalised formally in Reflective-Thought as notions, are, correctly viewed, a-logical elements. For in- stance, Being is essentially a-logical. It is the absolute " in-itselfness " of the " I " translated into its negation or "Felt-ness." What we mean by "Being" is really the "this-ness" of the " Ego," which is incommunicable in Thought and language. On the other hand, Essence and Existence which imply the " Object " are concepts in the true sense of the word. They involve the element of inter-relation or synthe- tic connection, which Being per se does not. The Being of a thing always eludes us. It is just as unthinkable as the Transcendental "Ego" itself. We analyse an Object into its qualities and find no Being there. Yet the Reality of the Object presupposes its Being. In the same way we analyse Consciousness and MAINLY HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL. 47 do not find the true " Ego " in it, that is, in the Object or ReaUty, and nevertheless we are bound to refer all Consciousness to the " Ego." It is the a-logical aspect of Reality that we have primarily under consideration when we refer to the " being " of an Object. The aspect which is presented in Consciousness, which, in other words appears, is simply the phenomenon. The " Ding-an-sich " notion arises from this. Similarly Quality (mere sensation) is in itself a-logical. It involves no inter-relation. But again " Substance," " Cause," " Phenomenon," are true logical concepts, as expressing the inter- relating activity of Thought. Being and quality to be realised in Consciousness must, in short, be inter-related by the original produc- tive-activity of Thought, that is, by Thought or the Category, as entering into the Object (in contradistinction to the Category as an abstract concept in our minds). But in this very fact they proclaim themselves as the matter out of which the form Thought con- structs Reality, and to confound them with the form is simply to create confusion. If the foregoing be correct, it must be admitted that Hegel failed to make good his attempt to get 48 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. rid of what he termed the two " things-in-them- selves" of Fichte, to wit, the " Ego," and the " Anstoss." ^ "Being -'Force,- jj^g » j " ^f apperception, as that to which the whole system of Reality is ultimately reducible, is the original of what we mean by Being, and though certainly not a thing, yet by virtue of this has nevertheless in a sense a noumenal value, which cannot be ascribed to the other members of the primary synthesis. They are referred to it ; it is not referred to them. They are modi- fications of it; it is not a modification of them. In the subject or " I " we have the architype of all that in the Object, whether mental or material, which is groundwork, substratum or agency. Being is simply the original " position " or in-itselfness of the " I " carried over into its sensations or Felt- nesses. " Force," as Schopenhauer well showed, is simply what we call Will, or the immanent tendency of the " I " towards realisation simi- larly ascribed to the possibility of motion ap- pertaining to objects in Space. The ultimate source of external change we ascribe to 1 Hegel's " Geschichte der Philosophic," vol. iii., p. 633. MAINLY HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL. 49 " Force," to that, namely, which is the ana- logue of Will. The " I," therefore, in its aspect of pure Subject of Consciousness, rather than the system of the Categories, may be, pace Hegel, not unfairly described as the Absolute. It may be said to be eternal in the sense of containing in itself the potentiality of Time as of every other mode of Consciousness. It obtains, therefore, alike in any and every time as the element of self-subsistence on which all Reality, mental or material, hinges. In this sense as the common or ultimate ground of Experience, the " Ego " may be said to be the absolute " Universal." It is not " universal " in the sense in which class names are " uni- versal," — "table," "horse," " tree,"— or in the sense in which abstract names of qualities are " universal "— " red," " hard," " soft." The logical " Universals " exist in their unity merely as the abstract concepts of Reflective- Thought, or in the individual mind — qualities merely as sensations of the individual. But the " I " as universal principle, though it is in one sense an abstraction (that is, as dis- tinguished in Reflection) is nevertheless also concrete, as being the eternal presupposition of E S<3 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. that perceptual Experience which originally furnishes Reflection with "tables," "horses," "trees," with "reds," "hardnesses," "soft- nesses," with, in short, the concepts abstracted by it therefrom. It is a presupposition of all individual minds and not simply a common characteristic of them all. Theism. The qucstion of Theism may here be raised, the question, namely, as to the justification of the assumption that the pure Subject, which is realised as personality in the memory-synthesis of self- conscious- ness or personal identity, is realised as such under any other conditions than those known to us or such at least as are easily deducible from those known. This is the assumption of Philo- sophical Theism. The Hegelian " Right " saw all things in a " God," which was pure Mind, the quintessence of the Categories, and for which, therefore, the particular and the a-logical was absorbed in the universal and logical. To this it may be objected that personality in- volves the a-logical as well as the logical, and that a mind composed of pure " intelligibles " like every other object so composed would be a contradiction in terms. But the assumption MAINLY HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL. 51 in any form or shape of the absolute element of Consciousness becoming self-conscious under conditions fundamentally different from those known to us is illegitimate so far as Philosophy is concerned. All that the analysis of the conditions of our knowledge discloses to us is certain elements, of which one is the prius realised primarily in a world (" material-com- plex ") as reflected in a mind (" mental-com- plex "). This world is called " Reality " — a word which, though in popular discourse used in contradistinction to the Mind and its Feel ings and Thoughts which are spoken of as " ideal," must nevertheless in philosophical discussion be understood also to be in contra- distinction to the elementary conditions which it implies, as considered per se, that is, as distinguished from their synthetic union. No analysis of the conditions of Experience can discover " God " to us. He always appears as a gratuitous speculation, surreptitiously foisted upon the analysis. By " God " I of course understand in this connection an eternally con- crete and actual self-consciousness. This is not presupposed in the conditions of our Conscious- ness, which proclaims itself in its very nature 52 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. not pure actuality but necessarily a synthesis of potential and actual. Omniscience implies an exhausted knowledge, an actual knowledge beyond which there is no possible knowledge. Moreover this hypothesis does not in any way assist us in the explanation of the conscious process, except in the manner of a very crude analogy. It does not for the simple reason that an eternally complete and individual Con- sciousness must be just as much outside our individual Consciousness as one individual is outside another. Of course, we may fall back upon the pure subject of Consciousness-in- general, but, as we have seen, this is precisely non-individual. Where you have individuality, you have the element introduced of particular- ity or " this-ness." If by the word " God " we simply mean Consciousness-in-general, that is, the eternal possibility of Consciousness, then the question resolves itself into a mere dispute about words. But if, on the other hand, a distinct actual Self-Consciousness, but yet one not presupposing the physical conditions in Time and Space presupposed by individual Consciousness as we know it, I maintain that Philosophy has no room for such an assump- MAINLY HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL. S3 tion. Consciousness - in - general is, qua the actual Self-Consciousness of the individual, merely potential, and in any other connection it does not concern us. One more personality distinct from mine, however wider its range, cannot explain this "my" Consciousness here and now. But it may be argued that if the root- element of Consciousness-in-general, which we term " I," cannot be shown to metaphysic- ally realise itself or become self-conscious ex- cept under recognised conditions, may we not infer from these conditions themselves the prob- ability of its realising itself under another form, also under physical and psychical con- ditions, although these may be different from those of a memory-synthesis involved with an animal body ? Such an inquiry can, in the nature of things, only issue in a more or less probable speculation. Philosophy, which properly speaking means investigation into the meaning of Reality, considered under at once its deepest and most comprehensive aspect, as a conscious process, is either an exact science or nothing at all. Here, on the contrary, we are in the region of mere unverifiable conjec- ture. But, granting so much, may we not with 54 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. some probability conjecture such a possible goal of organic and social evolution as follows ? ■""'fJoiuMoT'"' From the earliest beginnings of organic life up to the human animal — the most perfect realisation of the animal body — we observe, or, to be strictly accurate, we infer, a progressive development from the mere sen- tiency, that is, the mere Feeling of a Subject, undetermined by thought, towards Intelligence or Thought-determination, culminating in the Self-Consciousness of the human being. Now I think it may fairly be asked by what right we assume the psychical evolutionary process, which has hitherto advanced pari passu with the physical, to stop at this point. If it does not stop here, we may clearly assume it to follow the steps of the physical evolution. It then behoves us to ask what specific type in nature may be regarded as the next highest after the animal body. We have no reason for supposing an intrinsically and essentially higher evolution of the mere animal body as such than that attained in man. But there is yet another type of existence in the world which is based upon the human animal with its personal units, just as the human animal is based upon organic MAINLY HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL. 55 matter with its cellular units, and just as organic matter is based upon matter-in-general with its molecular units. This type of existence is sometimes termed the super-organic, and is constituted by human society. The highest type of the animal body thus becomes the ma- terial or groundwork for a new and higher type or synthesis of Objectivity than itself, a type which, though it presupposes it as element, is nevertheless distinguishable from it as such. Society, in other words, is not a mere aggregate of persons any more than an animal body is a mere aggregate of cells. It is this and some- thing more. To its most complete develop- ment in the human personality, the animal body requires social conditions, but Society again, which is at one stage simply contributory to the full realisation of the Self-Consciousness of the complete human personality, tends after- wards in an increasing ratio to constitute this personality contributory to itself. We might therefore regard the personality as the turning point — at once the telos of organic development and the matrix or nidus of a new departure, to wit, the super-organic or social. But if this be the case on the physical side, why should we S6 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. assume a breach of continuity on the psychical ? We habitually conceive of a continuous process from the low sensiency of mere organic matter the full Self- Consciousness of the human per- sonality. Surely it is but natural to conceive the same process as advancing till the new physical type, the " social organism," based upon the human animal as the human animal is based upon cellular tissue, should attain to a Self-Consciousness of its own as much higher and more complex than the Self-Con- sciousness of its component units — human personalities — as the Self-Consciousness of the latter is higher than the mere sensiency of their component cellular tissue. May not the true significance of Ethics, of Duty, of the "Ought" of Conscience, the conviction that the telos of the individual lies outside of himself as such, consist in the fact that he is already tending towards absorption in a Consciousness which is his own indeed but yet not his own, that this limited Self-Consciousness of the animal body with the narrow range of its memory-synthesis is simply subservient and contributory to a completer, more determined Self- Consciousness of the Social Body as yet MAINLY HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL. 57 inchoate in Time ? If this be so, the craving of the mystic for union with the divine Con- sciousness in some transcendent sphere would be but the distorted expression of a truth per- fectly consistent with the recognised lines of a scientific materialism. That moral impulse, that unsatisfied longing, would be at basis but the higher expression of the same fact as " or- ganic irritability " — namely, the tendency to realisation on a higher level of development. The yearning for the " ideal self," the " self," which throughout history men have sought to realise in the negation of " self," would then acquire a new meaning. The "ideal self" would be identifiable no longer with a trans- cendent divinity, but with an immanent fact. The perennial- ethical contradiction, the " self" that can only fulfil its higher destiny by the denial of " self," would have its explanation in the truth that the death, no less than the birth, of the animal individual is as necessary a part of the process by which the life of the social individual develops, in the same way that the disintegration of the organic individual, the cell, is as necessary a part of the life-process of the animal system as the production or reproduc- 58 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. tion of that cell — that, self-conscious though he may be, the personality of the human animal is yet not the last word of Self-Consciousness, but is in its nature subordinate to a higher Self- Consciousness, his relation to which the indi- vidual human being dimly feels but cannot formulate in Thought. It is this hypothesis that affords, it seems to me, an explanation of many of the phenomena of human character, life and development, that are otherwise utterly inexplicable. CHAPTER in. THE PURE SUBJECT. The foregoing speculative hypothesis has led us away from the more immediate purpose with which we set out, the analysis of Reality. We must once again revert to that terrible night- mare of the empirical thinker, but very simple and incontrovertible fact to the analyst of Con- sciousness, namely, the pure Subject or the " I." Now it is to be observed, ^"^oJae^a^i""' as regards this presupposition of all Reality, that its distinction from the Object, whether physical or psychical, resides in the fact that per se it cannot be said to be either formal or material, and this for the simple reason that the distinction between matter and form is its own creation. Just as little can it properly be said to be either abstract or concrete. The concrete must always be Object, and the abstract must always be element of Object. Every Object consists of at least two elements, one maierial 6o THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. and the other formal. The material element is that which, considered from the standpoint of Theory of Knowledge, pertains to Sense, whilst the formal element pertains to Thought. The Being of all Object is a-logical and " sensible." Its form is logical and therefore rational. But when we arrive at that last word of all distinctions, the distinction between Reality or Consciousness-in-general itself and the Subject in and for which it all is, moves and has its being, and whose deter- mination it is, we have got to a terminus a quo that does not admit of being defined in the terms of any of its resultants. Although it is the tacit postulate of all our feeling, thinking, or saying, yet we can only indicate it in words by the term " I " or by the still more ambiguous term " Subject." Tue psyoiioiogioai The psychologfical Object or Object or Memory- '■ ■" ° "^ _ synthesis. memory synthesis, the " micro- cosm " or universe of impressions and ideas, is identified in a special sense by ordinary Thought with the primal Subject or " I " of Consciousness in opposition to the " macro- cosm " or universe of spacial Objects. Hence the inability of popular, and of certain phases THE PURE SUBJECT. 6i of philosophical thought to distinguish between the true Subject and the individual conscious- ness or pseudo- Subject, which is also Object. The indisputable Schopenhauerian formula, " the world is my presentment," IXTment"^ suffices to tell us that the " I," of which the world is the presentment, is not the mind or memory-synthesis, which I immediately cognise as myself. It is quite obvious that the world is not my presentment in the sense of falling ex- clusively within my memory-synthesis, and yet I cannot separate the "I" which apprehends myself as Object, no less than the world as Object, from this myself which it apprehends. Myself is identified with " I " in self-conscious- ness, with the root of all knowing, in a sense in which the world outside is not so identified. This is simply the dialectical movement of Knowledge, in which the final moment or phase of Reflection, the winding-up or actual- ising of the dialectical cycle of Consciousness, appears in opposition to the immediate stage which it presupposes, but of which it is the negation. Hence it recovers the starting-point on a higher plane. In the primary synthesis, into which concrete 62 THE PROBLEM OF REALITl . Consciousness may be resolved, we have seen that the " ego " negates itself in its " felt-ness," and that this negation is in its turn negated by Thought, in which the " ego " re-affirms itself, as it were, in the negation. The final form of this re-affirmation is in the identification of Object with Subject in Self-Consciousness. For soit-oonBoiousness. this rcason. Self- Consciousness is often said to be the key-stone of Philosophy. The same dialectic repeats itself in every real cycle of development in Space and Time. To take a concrete illustration of this from the Dialectic of History : — On the theory of human development to which modern historical re- search is tending, the final stage of communism in the cycle of human evolution, though de- veloping directly out of the intermediate stage of individualism, is nevertheless in essence a return, albeit on a higher plane, to the first form of human society, properly so-called, that is, to the principle of association or co-opera- tion. The substantial results of the inter- ™"'ar|Snt*"' mediate or individualist stage are incorporated in and through the very destruction of its form. Socialism appears to be in diametrical opposition to Capitalism, and THE PURE SUBJECT. 63 yet it presupposes Capitalism as its sine qua non. It is, in one sense, merely a further develop- ment of Capitalism, although it is, in another sense, its antithesis. This is not the place to discuss the content of the Socialist doctrine of historic development, but its form may well serve to illustrate what is here meant, with the exception that, while in the one case we are dealing with the conditions of a special Reality in a Time-series, we are in the other case concerned with the elementary conditions of all Reality irrespective of Time. The first moment of definite Reflection presents to us the outer world as something radically distinct from our own mind, but further Reflection shows us that, while on the one hand all psychical processes can be explained physic- ally, so on the other hand all Objects can be reduced to the affections of the conscious Sub- ject. The moment that it is pointed out, it is obvious that Extension, Hardness, Figure, Motion, the primary, that is, no less than the secondary qualities of bodies, that poSn°?esteted!" Time and Space themselves even, are nought but affections of a Subject feeling and thinking them, in short, conscious of them as it own 64 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. " Felt-nesses " and Thoughts. As soon as this is grasped, it is plain that the old dualistic antagonism between mind and matter is at an end. The reaction sometimes take the mis- taken form of the psychological idealism of a Berkeley, where the primary and immediate determinations of Consciousness constituting the external universe are inadequately, if at all, distinguished from the secondary and de- rivative affections of the mind or memory- synthesis. This is unavoidable if we fail to seize the crucial distinction between the true subject, the " I " of Kant's "synthesis of aper- ception," and the memory-synthesis, Kant's " Object of the internal sense." A deeper analysis, however, discloses this distinction and shows us the " I " of apperception as the raw material of all Reality, and it shows us, more- over, that only in this sense can it be said that the world is my presentment. On the other hand, the personality, the mind, the series of impressions and ideas strung upon the thread of memory, is derivative and exists only by virtue of the " I " of " apperception," which is there throughout all Time and in every Time, since Time itself is its presentment and means THE PURE SUBJECT. 65 nothing more than the form of its Conscious- ness. But this perceived "Object Ego," which completes and rounds off Reality, is, like every Object, particular. It has a " this-ness " and is categorised as one of a class called minds, souls, persons. It is subordinated to the ordinary conditions of Objectivity, as being, a synthesis of universal and particular, of matter and form, of a-logical and logical. . As soon as this synthesis is dissolved, the object ceases to be. It ceases to be, that is, a presentment to the "I" of apperception, or to the Knowing-Sub- ject, the ultimate postulate of all Reality. All Object as conscious presentment implies a syn- thesis of logical and a-logical. But the aspect in which the a-logical presents itself in Time or Sequence is that of Chance or Contingency as opposed to Cause or Law. The pseudo- " Ego " or Object constituted by the memory- synthesis, like the objects of the external world from which it draws its sustenance and into the system of which it enters, is pre-eminently a Chance-product. CHAPTER IV. CHANCE AND LAW. It has been said by them of old-time in Philo- sophy that there is no such thing as chance in the universe. This is also a popular way of expressing the theory of Panlogism as regards '^'^o&'!"^°" events or the content of Time. Every happening or event is supposed to be capable of reduction to a final cause or Law, so that an Infinite Mind, able to seize in one eternal glance the entire universe at this moment, could construct therefrom the whole Past and Future. " Chance" on this theory is only the name given to imperfect knowledge. Now let us see how far this is true and where it breaks down. In the first place, we must observe that we have here to deal with infinites, with infinite Time, with infinite Space, and with infinite collocations of matter and motion. As we have before remarked, infinites always 66 CHANCE AND LAW. 67 imply the a-logical, since the logical is always (sfe-finite. They imply Matter, not Form ; Potentiality, not Actuality. If this is so, an infinite glance, an actual and immediate cogni- tion, that is, a now of an infinity is a manifest contradiction in terms. An infinite glance would have to be actual and concrete, An infinite gianoe. and yet nevertheless of a limitless content. But a limitless content of Reality requires a limitless Time for its apprehension, and this is what the theory involves. That the logical is essentially ^ijfinite is obvious. Every concept is a defining of, every law a determining of, something pre- viously undefined and undetermined. The famous tree of Porphyry is but a progressive reduction of the infinitude of pure Definition of 'law." " being " under determinate finitudes or cate- gories. Similarly, every Law of Nature as of Thought, is the reduction of the infinitude of pure "agency" (Swafiis), under certain deter- minate forms or limits. It says, in effect, " thus shall the happening be and not otherwise." The logical, the rational, in all its manifesta- tions is a limiting, a fixing, of the infinitely possible. The determining, law-giving logical is waging incessant war on the indeterminate. 68 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. law-less a-logical. It is this process that con- stitutes the ceaseless movement of Reality ; " Das sausen der ewige Webstuhl der Zeit." Here then is a test-instance of the capacity of °"^^1™™*' '° Panlogism to maintain its position. In every event, we have on the one hand, the Category, or logical element, Cause, and, on the other, the a-logical element, Chance. This, no one can deny, is what appears upon the face of things. But on the theory of Panlogism which, in this case, has passed over into popular thought, the above is an illusion. Cause, on this theory, swallows up Chance, but it must be admitted by the Panlogists that, as in the celebrated case of Pharaoh's lean kine, the swallowing does not result in increase of bulk. They say that every particular occurrence or happening is completely reducible in its every detail to Cause or Law. I maintain, on the contrary, that no concrete event is reducible in its entirety to Law, but that on analysis it will "■^'"St?.*^"' invariably be found to contain an irresolvable Chance-element, which Thought in vain endeavours to force into the mould of the Category. This irresolvable Chance-element, the actual happening in Space and Time, is the CHANCE AND LAW. 69 particular, as opposed to the universal, element in the event itself.^ To give an example : on the fifteenth day of June, at eleven a.m., Julius Schmidt performs the experiment, in the laboratory Examples. at Zurich, of combining oxygen and hydrogen so as to produce water. The causal element is apparent. The combination of the two gases according to the chemical formula, that is, according to Law, is the cause of the water being produced. This is not, however, the whole event, but an abstract element in the event. The event as concrete, as happening in the real world, embraces a great deal more than this. When water is chemically produced in this world, there is an agent, at a particular moment of Time and ina given place, effecting the combination. Now that this should happen on the fifteenth day of June, 1892, at eleven a.m., on the particular spot of the earth's sur- face named, by the agency of the particular indi- vidual named, cannot, I contend, be treated as a pure case of Causality. There is no chance in the production of the water, once the conditions 1 For the detailed treatment of Particularity, see chapter viii. 70 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. are given, but that the conditions should be so given is a matter utterly irreducible to Causation, attempt it which way we will, for every con- dition was empirically contingent on another condition, and so on to infinity. It is a case of (particular) antecedent and consequent but not of (universal) cause and effect. Each con- dition might have been absent or might have happened otherwise. That Julius Schmidt was in the laboratory at the hour named was consequent on the failure of a friend to keep an appointment with him on the previous even- ing. This was contingent on the friend having met another friend, whom he had not seen for a long time, and this again on something else, and so on to infinity. Had the friend kept his appointment, Schmidt would have had such an attack of " Kater" that he would not have been in the laboratory at all. The fact that Julius Schmidt is in the laboratory under any circum- stances rests upon the fact of his studying practical chemistry, which is again contingent upon the circumstance that his father's failure in business necessitates his applying himself to something that held out him an early prospect of remuneration, and that, owing to his father's CHANCE AND LAW. 71 personal influence with a firm of colour-manu- facturers, the desired field was afforded by applied chemistry. The existence of the la- boratory in Zurich was contingent upon the existence of a Polytechnic School and of a University, and that again upon another com- bination of historical circumstances hinging upon the influence of particular men at a par- ticular period, and so forth. Once more the existence of Julius Schmidt himself is contin- gent upon the meeting of his father and mother at an evening party, and upon their subsequent marriage, which was again conditioned by the fact that his father, a few weeks before the event took place, had forgotten to wind up his watch, and thus missed a train. The result of this was, that he failed to take part in a boating excursion on the Bodensee, in which the boat sank and all on board were drowned. It is unnecessary to go further. Though in each of these events taken absolutely and viewed as isolated, it is possible to trace the category of Cause, yet when considered as concrete, as a focussing of an infinite series of events, there is an element of Contingency, of Chance, of, in short, a-logicality, irreducible to Causality, but 72 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. yet forming a part of the very essence of the event as real. The point here insisted upon may easily be illustrated in a more striking manner, if a case be supposed where a serious event, an event of national or international importance hinges upon a trivial matter. For instance, imagine a journalist, A., in the act of walking down Fleet Street. He is for two moments obstructed by colliding with a shoeblack, and just fails in con- sequence, to catch a certain train at Ludgate Hill. In the train next following, which he takes, he meets an editor, B., who asks him to write an article upon a strike in Northumber- land. This particular article, from a casual paragraph in it, leads to a controversy on a certain social reform, questions are asked in the House of Commons, an agitation is started throughout the country, leading finally to a change of ministry. Now, directly owing to the change of ministry, a European war, which would otherwise have been avoided for an in- definite time, is precipitated, and the affairs of the whole world are thereby affected. How ? Really by the original shoeblack. The break- ing out of the war at the particular point of CHANCE AND LAW. 73 time was contingent upon the particular change of Government. This change hinged upon a certain agitation, arising out of a certain con- troversy in a certain journal, and this contro- versy would not have been started when and where it was started but for the meeting of A. and B. Finally, A. and B. would not have met, we of course assume, but for the fact that a certain shoeblack obstructed A. at a certain point for a certain two minutes of time. Here we have indeed the Category. The war, the change of ministry, the influence of A.'s article, all these are reducible to general principles or laws, psychological, social, or historical, but the actual happening when, where, and how, it did, is like the production of the water in the Zurich laboratory, on the fifteenth of June, 1892, by Julius Schmidt, an element irreducible to any general principle or law, in other words, is pure Chance. Viewed abstractly in Reflection, time apart, you have only the Category before you, but as an event immediately given in Time and Space, you have always an element over and above the mere Category. The " this- J^'l^/ce'^w'S^i. ness " of Time and Space presentment is here, 74 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. as elsewhere, a-logical. Every matter of fact, every event or time-determination is conditioned not alone by one infinite series, but by an in- finite number of infinite series of events, each of which might have happened otherwise. Thus, in tracing back any event, we are con- re^e'/sLnttSy. fronted at every step with an infinite vista of converging circumstances or other events, without the occurrence of which the particular event would not have happened. But each of these is yet in its turn itself simi- larly conditioned by infinite vistas of events, without which it would not have happened. This very fact makes it difficult to render one's meaning clear by an illustration, since one could always spin out such an illustration in- definitely without exhausting it, and neverthe- less quickly become banal and tedious, and be no nearer the end. We have said that the individual is a chance- product. If the foregoing be true, it is obvious ™chan»p?olu"rthdt this man, as a particular that has arisen in Time, is like every other par- ticular, a chance-product. This does not mean that the causal element does not enter into his coming into being or into his continuing in CHANCE AND LA W. 75 being. The physiological laws of procreation are the cause of his coming into being, but the bringing of these laws into operation at a par- ticular time and place and under particular cir- cumstances, which are all known to physiolo- gists to have their influence at the moment of conception and upon the later development of the embryo, depends upon particular events or matters of fact. His very existence directly hinges upon the fortuitous circumstance of the meeting of his father and mother, a circum- stance most probably the result of a casual in- troduction. The same fortuity doubtless applies to the meeting of the ancestors of his father and mother, direct and collateral, right back through the ages.^ The particular event, the mere coming together of father and mother, is, irrespective of anything else, consequent upon other particular events, and not dependent upon 1 I must again remind the reader that I do not wish to imply that any event consists, literally speaking, of pure Chance, any more than it does of pure Law. My purpose in the illustrations has been merely to fix attention upon the point that I am urging, and for this reason I have selected cases in which the particular (or Chance-) element predo- minates, and have opposed them to cases in which the universal (or Law-) element predominates. 76 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. any cause, Law or universal principle. It is dependent upon a concatenation of particulars, each of which might have happened otherwise, so far as any law was concerned, and all of which are equally irreducible to the Thought- form or Category or to anything outside the flux of particulars in Time and Space. We cannot jump over from the flux in Time to the Category, which is valid for all Time. The Category, the Cause, the Reason, may be piously read into the flux, but it is not to be found there as such. It is always distinguish- able from the flux itself. The Tossing of Coins. The sharp distinguishability of Chance, of the a-logical, as an element in the dynamics of Reality, is aptly shown by the contradiction involved in the " theory of proba- bilities," The causal (or Law-) element is ex hypothesi eliminated, and it is sought to construct a law out of the a-logical residuum. The absurdity of the attempt to logicize the essentially a-logical is therein crucially illus- trated. The two sides of the " Law of proba- bilities" are obviously incompatible. Given two absolutely equal chances at tossing coins, there is no reason, the " Law " says, for one side CHANCE AND LAW. 77 turning up rather than the other at any given throw. Yet it is proclaimed by the same " Law " that in a long series, at some point in the series, one side will turn up neither more nor less than the other. So firm is our convic- tion of the latter fact that if, in a long series of throws, the same side generally turned up, we should consider ourselves justified in asserting that the chances were not equal, in other words, that there was some assignable Cause why that side came up and not the other. Yet if the chances are absolutely equal at each throw, there is no conceivable reason why " tails," let us say, should not turn up a hundred or a thousand times in succession, since how- many times " tails " had turned up before, the following throw would afford precisely the same probability of " tails " turning up as at the start. Whence, then, this inconsistency ? Why do we allege that, if " tails " turn up a dispropor- tionate number of times, the chances are not equal, that is, that there must be a determining cause in favour of " tails," while at the same time admitting that, if the chances were equal, there would be no cause preventing " tails " turning up each time ? The one side of the 78 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. " Law " contradicts the other. If there is any circumstance that in a long series of throws somewhere compels equality in the results of the throws, then the chances are not equal at each throw ; or, on the other hand, if they are equal at each throw, then there is no assignable cause why one side should not turn up to all eternity. ?el".°SSeLiw: Again, the "Law" defines nothing. A true " Law " defines something ; that is, it proclaims some event as impossible. Thus we may say that such and such things cannot happen because contrary to the Law of Gravity, or to the Laws of Chemistry and Physics. But no event is irreconcilable with the " Law of Probabilities," theoretically con- sidered. The turning-up of black a hundred times at Monte Carlo is an apparent defiance of this " Law " ; but the apologist for the " Law" can say that it is not so, for there is no chance however improbable that may not turn up. Thus the " Law " decides nothing, and determines nothing, since every conceivable event can theoretically be brought under its operation. And therein it shows that it is not a true Law. The upshot of all this is that this CHANCE AND LAW. 79 so-called " Law " is no Law at all, but merely an empirical generalisation, which, from its very- nature, can never be anything else, simply be- cause the a-logical element in it cannot possibly be eliminated or subordinated by the Category. ''IScTtaowfedgr'" But it may be, and is, often said that what we call Chance is simply imperfect knowledge. Were we to know all things, they would be all seen to conform to a rational plan, there would be no Chance, no element left over unaccounted for by Law, but all would be according to ultimate Cause or Reason. This may be a pious opinion that is not discoverable by an analysis of the conditions of Reality. We have already observed that every event or fact is conditioned in its actual happening by an infinitude of other events or facts, each of which is itself conditioned in the same way, and each of which might not have happened. A Law, Cause, or general principle on the contrary, is valid, apart from all particulars of Time, Space, and the sensible content of Time and Space. It is through and through logical. In spite of the pedantry of certain "Empiricist" thinkers, we are justified in saying that oxygen and hydrogen combined according to the recognised chemical 8o THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. formula must necessarily produce water, but to allege that the matter of fact that the water was so produced by Julius Schmidt on June 1 5th, 1892, at eleven a.m., in the Zurich laboratory, is equally necessary, indicates, I submit, a state of intoxicated Panlogism that ignores all distinc- tions and all factors in an analysis that do not suit its preconceptions. It is alleged that could the whole circumstances be known, we should see the occurrence to be necessary. But herein, be it observed, lies a false assumption ; a finitude of conditioning particulars or circumstances is assumed, whereas what we have to deal with is an infinity. Could we speak of the whole cir- cumstances, we might possibly conceive this whole as known, but when with every step we take we are confronted with the opening out of an infinite vista of conditioning particulars, each one of which particulars is a terminus ad quern, of a similar infinite vista, and so on ad infinitum, it is plain that we cannot talk of a totality. And yet a complete knowledge or com- prehension of an infinity is absurd. We can only comprehend the determinate or the determin- .able. All knowledge, all thinking being an act of determination, in other words, a negation of CHANCE AND LAW. 8i infinity, therefore, as already said, the under- standing, the grasping under a concept, for this is what " understanding " means, of an infini- tude, implies a contradiction in terms. We are no better off, if we conceive the knowing to take the form, not of an intellectual compre- hension, but of an immediate apprehension of perceptive Consciousness — an "eternal glance." With this, no less, infinity of Time is incompat- ible. The Consciousness is a determining, a focussing of the indeterminate. -^^■gjSl^y'.'"" * The idea with most men who rail at the notion of Chance, is that of the positing of an absolute prius in the order of time, a first event or complex of events un- caused or having the will of a Supreme Being for its cause, whence all subsequent events flow. It is, put plainly, the notion of a machine being set going. These worthy persons do not, perhaps, consciously represent this to themselves, but it is implied in what they say. If we confine ourselves to the analysis of Experience or Reality as we find it, and refrain from reading into it a gratuitous and, in the last resort, unthinkable hypothesis, we see that we can assign no beginning to the G 82 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. flux of events in Time, since the flux is co- extensive with Time itself, and hence with ReaHty. Any question of an absolute prius is, therefore, absurd and meaningless. The element of this-ness, the particularity, always remains stubbornly outside as an a-logical surd, necessary to the realisation of the Category, but never absorbed by it. In the evolution of the real world, there is, therefore, in every event an element of Chance, constituted by the this-ness of the actual happening in Time and Space. The this-ness may be regarded as the noetic unity of the now-ness and the here-ness that really constitutes the actual happening of the event.-' The popular and The illusiou that there is such phllosopliical fallacy ,. . inChanooandLawa thmg as the totality of events, part of tlie general ^ '' ' Paniogistio fallacy, ^j^^ that every event as such is reducible to a final cause, a principle only hidden from us by our ignorance, as opposed to 1 Many persons in using the word " Cause " fail to dis- tinguish between the connection, that is the mere antece- dents and consequents of events, and the true Category ot Causation, the reduction of the event under a general principle or Law. There is a sense in which the word " Chance " is used as synonymous with " Accident," that is, the accidental as relative to the point under considerntion, CHANCE AND LAW. 83 its casual or proximate condition, is but a part of the general illusion of Panlogism that the concept-form is absolute, that the antithesis between matter and form in Reality may be transcended in favour of what is after all the formal principle, that the universal ultirriately absorbs the particular, the logical absorbs the a-logical. This general illusion receives its fullest expression in the Hegelian hypostatisa- tion of the concept. When we recognise that the concept, inasmuch as it is merely element, can never be concrete, but that it has its root in the potentiality of Consciousness termed its ultimate expression " I," — which is just as little pure universality as pure particularity, just as little pure form as pure matter, since it is that in, by, and for, which, these distinc- tions are drawn, — when we see this, there is an end of the Panlogistic fallacy in the case of Causation as elsewhere. which is the essential. In this sense the word is used merely relatively. All circumstances other than that under consideration are regarded as Chance, quoad the matter in hand. This is, however, simply a psychological conveni- ence. CHAPTER V. THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. The Individual LiKE cverv Other " real " or "con- Gonsciousness of ■' various aspects, ^j.^^^,, ^j^^ ^^^^ ^j. personality, immediately presented in the unity of the memory-synthesis of each, contains a universal and a particular side, and, as regards its genesis, is a product at once of Law and of Chance. The Greeks went a long way towards a correct view of the matter. The '7repi-<\rv)^eia of Aristotle remains, in spite of its confusions and obscurities, a wonderful mine of sugges- tions upon the question. Self-consciousness means the Consciousness of a definite thread of memory associated with the immediate Con- sciousness of an animal body as its instrument. This synthesis is, as before noticed, reduced by Reflective Thought — which means the Reflex- Activity of the " I " of apperception — to being simply one of the objects of Consciousness, not- withstanding the unique position it occupies THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 85 among them as being, so to say, the gate by which they all enter. " I," as used in common language, "myself," "me," are expressions de- noting the determinate memory-synthesis with which is involved the particular external object, the animal body, as immediately given in Con- sciousness.^ The Individual Consciousness, meaning thereby the association of Conscious- ness-in-general, the pure Subject, with a par- ticular {this) memory-synthesis involving a par- ticular (this) animal body, of which it appears as the function, forms the eternal problem of Metaphysic. In this dialectical totality, con- 1 That the this-ness of the memory-synthesis, that, in other words, the personality identified in this synthesis, is predominantly a-logical, may be seen from the fact that it is impossible to discover any ground or reason why myself, this personality now writing, obtains in one particular con- tent of Time rather than another, at the end of the nineteenth rather than at the end of the fourteenth or of the first century. My character, of course, implies a definite historic evolution, and we can very well discover a cause why it, that is, myself as concrete, could only exist at the present and at no other time. But that the this-ness, the mere self-reference per se, should have presented to it, and should be limited by, the specific content of the nineteenth century, rather than that of any other in the past or future, is inexplicable, that is, irreducible to any Law or Cause. 86 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. stituted by the Individual Consciousness, we find the identical momenta that we meet in the primary synthesis of Consciousness- in-general. Individual Consciousness, the mind, presup- poses a world-order, as external universe, from which its condition in Time, the animal body, immediately proceeds according to the Cate- gory of Causation and as one of an infinite number of similar Chance-products in Time. It presupposes it, moreover, as the ground- work of all its determinations, that is, as the source whence it draws its impressions and ideas, as the empirical psychologists are fond of reminding us. But the physical universe itself, as we have already seen, presupposes the con- ditions of Consciousness- in-general, inasmuch as it is resolvable into the categorised " felt- nesses " of the Subject. The middle term of this dialectical process, the external world, which seems to be independent of the first and the last, is thus shown to be a mere element in the process conceived as a whole, an element, that is, of the system of determinations of one Subject or " I." seif-consoiousness Self-consciousness is thus the the determinatioiL "'"Teirar"" determination of Consciousness in THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 87 general, or, in other words, of the Subject pre- supposed in all Consciousness as this memory- synthesis indissolubly associated with this ani- mal body. Our conviction that the world does not arise or perish with ourselves means that we recognise, over and above this memory- synthesis associated with this animal body, the universal principle of knowing as being pre- supposed in Self-consciousness. We instinc- tively feel that the that in us which distinguishes between the Object self and the Object not-self is the subject of Consciousness-in-general, of which self and not- self are the determinations. But what to the ordinary man is an instinctive feeling, -which he interprets falsely as implying an existence for the outer world independent of all Consciousness, receives its adequate formu- lation in Philosophy. Personal Identity. It must never be forgotten that the unbroken continuity of the thread of memory is what personal identity means (apart, of course^ from the outward phenomenon, the body, with which it is associated). This thread, once snapped, is gone for ever. The same thread cannot be renewed, since its identity consists simply and solely in the continuity of its this- THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. ness. The foregoing may sound paradoxical to some persons who are accustomed to think of the " soul " as a thing, capable, it may be, of transmigration— or, at all events, as having some unexplained Reality, apart from the this-ness of the memory-synthesis. According to their hypothesis, a person now existing might, with- out knowing it, be the same as Julius Csesar or William the Conqueror. But if we examine the matter more closely, we shall find that the notion of identity here is wholly illusory and based upon a very crude analogy. The " soul " or personality is conceived, namely, as the receptacle of certain aptitudes and tendencies, which it holds together much as a skin may hold wine or oil. It is regarded in some sense as an Object in Space, much in the spirit in which Claudio in " Measure for Measure " says : — " Ay, but to die, and go we know not where ; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot : This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod ; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling regions of thick-ribbdd ice ; To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world." — (Act iii., scene i.) THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 89 l^foJSSi'l^moiS" It is against so crude a sur- vival of primitive ideas as this, that the Materialism of modern science rightly protests in proclaiming that, viewed from the physical standpoint, mind is nothing but cerebral action, that is, matter in motion. On the other hand, viewed metaphysically, all we find is a deter- mination of the potentiality of Consciousness, which we term " I " as a particular memory- synthesis associated with a particular animal body as its instrument. That the Individual Consciousness is not immortal follows from the fact that it has arisen in Time, and hence par- takes of the nature of a Chance-product. All that arises in Time must perish in Time. The fact of its having arisen, when before it was not, shows its existence to have no inherent necessity attaching to it. It must therefore be contingent on the infinity of things in Time, and, in the ceaseless change belonging to the very essence of the Time-content, it is uninterruptedly ex- posed to the possibility of the occurrence of a collocation of circumstances incompatible with its existence. Whether the dissolution of the animal body by death constitutes in itself such a collocation is simply a question for science, 90 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. and one that science seems at present inclined to answer in the affirmative. Eeason. Qn the theory of Panlogism, the highest form of the Individual Consciousness is Reason. The ideal man is the man absolutely dominated by Reason. This view we find in its original form in Socrates, and again emphati- cally stated and elaborated by Spinoza in the fifth book of his " Ethics." If by action accord- ing to Reason be meant simply action accom- panied by a clear Consciousness of the end-in- view of the action and the knowledge of the effect of immediate ends-in-view to be obtained in relation to the ultimate end-in-view, then, no fault is to be found with the doctrine. But the fact remains, nevertheless, that the basis of the Rationality in human action is always Feel- ing. It is Feeling that dictates the purpose Feeling the basis of of all actiou to the Consciousucss. hiimaii action and also the goal thereof. Rationality, the mere knowledge of the relation between means and ends-in-view, is subordinate to Feeling. The end, the telos, of all activity is immediately given by Feeling. Even though it may be alleged that, in the present stage of the development of Conscious- ness, we are not able to formulate this telos in THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 91 its totality, we are nevertheless immediately conscious beyond all dispute of the fact that happiness, or pleasure, using the words in their widest sense, is at least its essential attribute. But you cannot reason a man into happiness. The pleasure experienced is, in the last resort, unreasoning and immediate, although often alto- gether covered up by "sweet reasonableness." Reason may have an effect in determining the specific form that the desire for, or the belief in, pleasure takes, but it will not alter the fact that the ielos of human action remains pleasure, and that its content can only change with the change of Feeling. You cannot reason a man out of the fact that he experiences pleasure or pain. I once heard a quack doctor at a country fair argue to the gaping crowd of swains around that they might, without any hesitation, allow him to draw their teeth, since the pain they feared in the operation could not really be there at all. Teeth were of the nature of bone, and "there is," said he, striking a skull, "no feeling in bone ! " All that Reason can do is to exhibit the consequences of certain pleasures as more painful than the pleasures themselves are pleasurable. It may thus make the man abstain 92 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. from them, but the Reason is always the hand- maid of Feeling, It is always the means to the end-in-view, and never the end itself. So that pure Reason as the absolutely dominating factor in human action is an absurdity. The starting point and goal of all human action remains Feeling. ^"fpeeSSl''*""' Even the distinction, which is such a crucial one, between higher and lower in pleasure is not logical or rational. No process of Ratiocination can demonstrate that the genius is happier than the contented swine. One al- ways comes back upon the bed-rock of a fact, the essential of which is immediate Feeling. For Hegel, of course, the a-logicality here as elsewhere is a mere " sick selbst aufhebendes Moment." But precisely the same may be said of the logical with this difference, that the logi- cal, the rationalizing of the Feeling, always presupposes the Feeling, and not conversely. The mere Feeling, it is true, is always becoming- informed with Thought or rationalized ; but in the resultant synthesis, though the form of the Feeling may be changed, and even transformed, it remains Feeling nevertheless, and in its turn becomes the raw material for further Rationality. THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 93 One might, pace Hegel, define the final term of the dialectical process as, not " Thought thinking itself," but rather "Feeling feeling itself as determined by Thought." Thought should rather be described as the "szcA selbst aufhebendes Moment " in Reality. A nd nowhere is this more apparent than in the phenomenology of mind. The first term no less than the last is always Feeling. The difference between them is that, in the first case, the Feeling is indeterminate, in the last it is determinate. We start with a vague desire or impulse ; this becomes deter- mined ; it discloses differences within itself, which differences emphasize themselves as mutually implicatory and antithetical, so that the Consciousness of the interrelationing is stronger than that of the terms interrelated. The proximate end, dictated primarily by the Reason as means to the ultimate end, becomes mistaken for the ultimate end itself, till it finally assumes the place of the ultimate end, which disappears from view. But, in the last resort, the te/os is found in the completed pSaJlenas. Feeling or satisfied impulse. Thus, to take the case of any purpose to be effected, this Feeling of desire, which is irreducible to 94 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. Reason, is ultimate. Then comes the question of means. In following out the means, the Feeling of desire for the ultimate end becomes split up into desires for proximate ends. The logical consideration — the comparison and re- flexion on these proximate ends — next fills the place of the original Feeling of desire for the ultimate end, till Thought itself in the shape of further reflection formulates definitely the cui bono, and the original Feeling of desire re- asserts itself, but this time definitely and with a full knowledge of all its implications. The scientific investigator, for example, may start on his work with the desire of passing through life as comfortably as possible. He must do some- thing for his living, and he finds in scientific investigation that which affords him his bread and butter and amusement. Or it may be that what he seeks is not these, but the mental satisfaction,- the au fond aesthetic pleasure de- rived from a glimpse into the inner working of nature or from a coherent view of the universe. Or it may be, again, that what he seeks is fame or honours; or it may be a mixture of all these several ends-in-view. But in any case, it is Feeling that dictates the end. THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 95 Generally, the Reason, the reflective faculty of the individual does not reach the final stage of recognising the telos as the realisation of specific desire. It stops at the second stage, in which the ultimate end is negated in proximate ends. It does not reach the stage at which they are, in their turn, negated, and in which the original and final end emerges into full consciousness. It aimlessly pursues the means for their own sake, oftentimes in a purely mechanical manner, without thought of aim, as illustrated in the case of a man who has made his fortune and who has been persuaded by his friends to sell his business, but who, finding his occupation gone, begs as a favour to be allowed to go back to the old counting-house for a few hours every day. Here the mere feeling of discomfort at the breach in the mechanical round of what was originally means to an end shows that the man had never brought to a clear Consciousness the ultimate end before him. Of course, in the view of those who hold Reason to be the telos of the mind. Reason is, correctly speaking, opposed to Impulse. The "wise man "is supposed to act in accordance with the dictates of Reason and impulse. 96 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. not in accordance with those of unreflective Im- pulse. But this means nothing more than that he does not follow immediate Feeling ; not that Feeling does not ultimately dictate his action, but that the Feeling that guides him forms the final term in a dialectical process, or, in short, that it is not raw or crude Feeling, but that it has already passed through the mill of Thought. ™ a??taeS.°' We said, a while ago, that pleasure or happiness was an essential element in the telos of all activity, and yet in general that the man, who consciously and deliberately formu- lates pleasure as his goal, does not get it. This is because he has before him merely the abstract Category and no concrete end. The Category as abstract is unreal. It is only realized as entering into a synthesis, of which the primary elements are other than itself The man who attains happiness, formulates as the telos of his action, not the immediate feeling of pleasure or happiness, but something else, the carrying out of some plan, be it the attainment of wealth, "the establishment of his fame," the acquire- ment of insight into nature, or what not. In any case, what he pursues with definite Con- THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. 97 sciousness, that in the ielos which is most prominent in his Consciousness, is the concrete Object itself. The real root of the whole, the pleasure or happiness residing in the attainment of the Object, remains implicit and not explicit in his Consciousness. It is the implication of the whole, the " ihai " which all conscious action presupposes, and without which no conscious action would be. But nevertheless it can never permanently become Object perse. The pursuit of happiness in the abstract is simply the pursuit of a chimaera. When the mere happiness or pleasure as abstract category be- comes recognised as end in itself, we have ennui. It is only as element of a concrete that happiness has any meaning. "^e'rsZauLpptaeJt In the pursuit of extra-personal ends, there is an indication, as already hinted at in an earlier chapter, that the Self-consciousness associated with an animal body is not the final form of Self-consciousness. That a man should de- liberately sacrifice his life without believing in any posthumous continuance of his particularity as memory-synthesis is, on the ordinary em- pirical hedonistic hypothesis, absurd, but it nevertheless obtains. Such conduct can only H g8 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. find its explanation in the instinct, if one likes to call it so, that the true significance of the particular memory-synthesis does not lie in itself, that this significance is not exhausted within its own limits, but that it is merely a passing phase in something intrinsically more comprehensive than itself. CHAPTER VI. TRUTH AND REALITY. When once it is admitted that the alpha and omega of Reality is Feeling, not Reason, the a-logical, not the logical, our notions of the nature of things must be profoundly modified. When we consider that the logical is invariably only the middle term in a synthesis, the ex- tremes of which are both of them Feeling, the element of Reason is clearly dethroned from the absolute position it was wont to occupy. For the beginning and the end of things are alike Spontaneity and not Law, alike Feeling and not Thought, and the end or last term in the process differs from the beginning or first term, only in that it has passed through Thought and Law. Thus the completed and perfected Feeling, or Spontaneity, contains within itself Thought, or Law, as element subordinated indeed, yet not eliminated. Our THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. ^"S"" conception of "truth" undergoes a modification in consequence of this. We have defined " truth " to mean the highest reahsation of a given synthesis, or the most perfect expression of the Reality of a given plane of Consciousness. Thus every depart- ment of knowledge has its special "truth." The " truth " of Physics is no4 the " truth " of Chemistry ; the " truth " of Chemistry is not the " truth " of Physiology ; none of these " truths " is the " truth " of Social Science. The " truth " of Philosophy, on the other hand, is the "truth" common to all departments of knowledge, inasmuch as it is the " truth " in- volved in the conditions of Knowledge itself In Philosophy, therefore, we have no longer to deal with a relative " truth," such as those last- named, but with an absolute " truth," from which the former are deducible, and to which they are merely contributory. But even this absolute " truth " is no longer absolute in the old sense of a complete, yet nevertheless infinite whole. The ultimate " truth " of things cannot be in its nature complete, because there is no real syn- thesis possible not involving a-logical elements. It is the a-logical in every synthesis, or in every TRUTH AND REALITY. Reality, that forces forward to a new Reality, that is, in other words, perpetually falsifying " truth." Hence there is no conceivable for- mulation of the nature of things that cannot be transcended by a more adequate formulation. For " truth " being simply the highest expres- sion of Reality, or of the meaning of Conscious- ness, and all Reality involving an a-logical and therefore indeterminate element, which is given in Time as what we call " change," it follows that " truth " can never be completely and finally wound up. A " truth " is only absolute for its own plane and for those below it. Other- wise, by its very nature, it becomes, that is, it in- volves within itself, a higher " truth," in respect of which it is per se falsehood. This, it will be said, is nothing but the old and often-stated Hegelian Dialectic again. And so it is, but with this difference ; that, with Hegel, Thought is the substance of the whole process, of which that element which is not Thought, that is. Feeling, is a mere accident, the mere passing phase in the immanent development of Thought. But the point we have endeavoured to elabo- rate here is that Thought is itself the deri- vative element in the synthesis of Reality. THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. This change of position results in a shifting of the emphasis, so to say, throughout all de- partments of human knowledge and action. Of The distinction He- coursc, I shall bc met with the well- tween Season and Understanding, -vvom distinction between Under- standing and Reason. In the Reason, it will be said, in the Absolute Idea, the lower gradations of Thought and Feeling are alike absorbed. I can only reply with Schopenhauer, that the distinction made between Understanding and Reason by the German classical Philosophy is largely, if not entirely, an artificial one. What is meant by Understanding is the discursive and defining faculty of Thought considered /^r se, whereas what is called Reason, is that final term which we have designated as " Feeling feeling itself ; " but this is never made clear by those who employ the distinction. Thought, the " ^(?^r^" is assumed as the salient moment of the process from first to last. It is never adequately recognised that Consciousness is, in the last resort, Feeling and not Thought. The very employment of the word "Reason " shows this, since " Reason," at least as used in ordi- nary language, always implies the definite pro- cess of Ratiocination (" Vernunft"). But if we TRUTH AND REALITY. 103 accept the position put forward in these pages, that Consciousness is essentially a-logical, that is, Feeling, some consequences vaguely sug- gested by the old Transcendentalism come into a clear light. " Truth," that is, the highest expression of a given Reality, can no longer be sought for in the sphere of definitely categorised Knowledge. In other words, it cannot be sought for in the phase of Consciousness domi- nated by the Categories of scientific Thought, but it can only receive its adequate expression in that other phase of Consciousness that re- cognises itself as Feeling, and that recognises, therefore, that these categories of scientific Thought are inadequate for it. The above phase of Consciousness finds its expression, more or less imperfectly in the various forms of Art. s'SLfmol^tMtudl. Historically, in the infancy of knowledge, man blindly followed his Feeling as the interpreter of the world-order for him. At a later stage, the products of this Feeling, and the attitude of mind to which those pro- ducts belonged, became superstition for him. The scientific attitude assumed the sway of Knowledge. The " truth " of the universe, in 104 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. this scientific sense, appeared very different from its truth before the rise of Science. We are still living under the domination of the scientific "truth." The highest "truth" for most of us now means the reduction of the manifold of the world to the categories of science, and, until all departments of knowledge are as completely reduced to those categories as their nature admits, the " truth " of science will not be complete, and the scientific attitude must continue to be supreme. The question arises, however, whether ultimately this whole scien- tific way of looking at things is not destined to be superseded in its turn by a different one, whose " truth," while in no manner abrogating the results of the scientific Welt-ansicht, will nevertheless so completely metamorphose them that they, in their present shape, will become as much superstitions as the naive, unreason- ing theories of primitive man are to the science of to-day ? This is a point that intimately concerns our view of the relation of the Esthetic-conscious- ness to the Discursive Thought-consciousness. Schopenhauer had an inkling of this in his art- theory as developed in the third book of the TRUTH AND REALITY. 105 " Welt ah Wille." He recognises the possi- bility of Discursive Thought being transformed into immediate apprehension, which means no- thing else but that the logical, or Discursive Consciousness, can become subordinate to the a-logical or Feeling-Consciousness. But Scho- penhauer — who repudiated, because he did not understand. Dialectic, and whose method, such as it was, consisted in a translation of the " inductive method " into a sphere where it is non-sensical — could not see the necessity of the progress from the logical, or the Category, to what he not very happily terms " the Pla- tonic Idea." The main point, however, is indicated by him, to wit, that the two ele- ments in Consciousness-in-genferal, Thought and Feeling — the logical and the a-logical — have their counterpart in Reflective-Conscious- ness in the two aspects in which " truth " may appear ; that is, firstly, in the Reflective- Consci- ousness as dominated by the active Discursive element of Thought or the Category — in other words, the scientific Consciousness — and, secondly, the Reflective Consciousness as do- minated by immediacy or Feeling, — in other words, the aesthetic Consciousness. io6 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. If we admit Thought to be an element sub- ^"'^'th'Reamy!'"'' Ordinate to Feeling— if we admit, in other words, that the logical is always a function of the a-logical — we are driven to the conclusion that " truth " as formulated in the categories of abstract Thought must be ab- sorbed in " truth " expressed in the immedi- acy we call Feeling. The distinction has been much insisted upon by a recent writer, between Reality and Truth. The simplest definition of " truth " is that already given — namely, the highest expression for the Reflective Conscious- ness of Reality on a given plane of perceptive Consciousness. For this reason, of course, Truth must not be considered as identical with Reality. The " truth " of science, for example, often differs very widely from Reality. Reality suffers violence in its translation from primary Consciousness into Reflective-Consciousness, where it appears as " truth." Reality under- goes many striking modifications.^ The late G. H. Lewes defined the sciences as " verified poems." The expression, however, is distinctly unhappy, since poetry aims at translating 1 Cf. the "atomic theory," the "ether theory," etc. TRUTH AND REALITY. 107 Reality into the " truth " of the a-logical, and science aims at translating it into that of the logical. It is at present difficult to conceive that sensibility, or Feeling, can have a " truth " of greater validity than the logical " truth " expressed in the discursive Thought which finds its highest embodiment in science. This is so, because Thought and Feeling are con- ceived as mutually exclusive, and, so long as such is the case, Thought with its exactness, its definiteness, its rigid determination, always maintains its ascendancy over the immediacy of Sensibility or Feeling, which, however in- tensively strong, is always vague and indeter- minate ; just as a well-drilled body of men armed with weapons of precision will easily keep in subjection an unorganised, undisci- plined host of ten times its own numerical strength. But who shall say that when the significance of the Discursive or Scientific Con- sciousness has become exhausted as the em- bodiment of " truth," the Consciousness of things thence arising, involving the predomin- ance of the Category, shall not give way to that of Feeling, which in this new phase may have lost its old vagueness and may, while io8 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. retaining its essential character of immediacy or this-ness, have absorbed into itself the pre- cision of its old antagonist, the Category, as represented by the universe of science. CHAPTER VII. WILL. The word " will " is used in two or three different senses — by Schopenhauer, no less than by other writers. It is used to mean sometimes desire, sometimes, and aaiNem^itj. most frequently, what we may term that in- wardness of spontaneity, which was called by the schoolmen velleitas. I n the ordinary accep- tation of the word, this spontaneity must be conscious of itself in order to constitute Will. Will may be defined, in short, as the tendency of the Self-consciousness of the individual to realise itself more fully. The whole system of things is implied in this self-realisation. Kant and Schopenhauer have the merit of having been the first to clearly intimate the nature of the antinomy of Freedom and Necessity. Kant here, as elsewhere, confounded the individual Self- consciousness with the ultimate ground of all Consciousness, With him, therefore, the THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. individual Will was double ; it might be viewed as phenomenon or as noumenon. It is in the one case necessitated, in the other free. Schopenhauer points out with justice that it is only free as the ground of Consciousness-in- general ; but that, as displayed in the Self-con- sciousness of the individual, it is necessitated. What Schopenhauer termed Will was clearly nothing other than the " I " to which all con- ^"'"'S™ '"'* scious determinations are referable; On the plane of Self-consciousness, " I " as an individual find myself pursuing certain aims — in other words, endeavouring to realise my nature. In all my action, setting aside, of course, external coercion, I feel myself to be acting spontaneously or freely, whilst I know that my action is rigorously necessitated by motives. In this problem of Free-will and Necessity, we have, therefore, the a-logical and the logical in crass and irresolvable opposition in Consciousness. The logical, in the form of Reflective Thought, presents our actions to us as being through and through necessitated ; immediate Feeling presents them to uB as altogether spontaneous. This contra- diction cannot be transcended by Thought, for WILL. 1 1 1 the reason that it has its ground in those a- logical elements that Thought presupposes. Thought by its very nature must reduce the particular under the universal, the contingent under the necessary, spontaneity under law. Viewed from the scientific standpoint, from the standpoint, namely, which makes abstraction from the conditions that Self-consciousness pre- supposes, Necessitarianism is a plain and incon- trovertible conclusion. On the other hand, viewed from the standpoint of Self-conscious- ness and its conditions. Freedom is an equally irresistible truth. This antinomy can no more be resolved by Thought, than the infinity of Space and Time and their content can be grasped or reduced to rule by. Thought. Reason always glances off the a-logical ; it al- ways glances off that element in Reality which is not itself Reason holds a brief to reduce the whole of Reality to the Category, and it always succeeds in doing so, as long as its point of view is retained in the Reflective-consciousness and abstraction is made from the other point of view in which the a-logical predominates. The Reflective-consciousness, it is true, al- ways has before it the complete synthesis of the 112 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. Productive-consciousness which it presupposes, but it can by a voluntary act throw one of the elements of the Object into the background and fix its attention upon the other. It can either view things directly through its Self-conscious- ness, and thereby strike through at once to the core or Subject of Consciousness-in-general, of which it is the completion, or it may abstract from the first and the last term of the synthetic process in its totality and fix its attention upon the middle term — namely, the external world viewed under its salient category, that of Causation. It ascribes action to motive — that is, it deduces action determinately from charac- ter, under a hierarchy of laws, the foundation of which is the principle that the action follows the strongest motive. But, as Schopenhauer has pointed out, it ignores the fact that the character itself and the relative power of the motives influencing it are prescribed by some- thing not itself per se, but by something that is the presupposition not merely of it, but of the whole world-process, whence it takes its origin. In short, the Spontaneity immediately given in the act of Will is not an individual fact, but has its origin in the Subject that identifies WILL. 113 itself in a Time-content with this fact as this myself. Praise and wame. In the antimony presented by moral praise or blame, we have the opposition clearly brought out between the logical and the a-logical, in a similar manner as in the case of Law and Chance. In the opinion of most think- ing persons, nowadays, character is the product of the circumstances of the individual and of those of his ancestors. This is the theory of modern Necessitarianism. " But," says its opponent, " moral judgments on actions, then, can have no meaning ; you cannot praise or blame a man for that which his character necessitates his doing. If he is so made that he must do certain things, given certain circum- stances, then it is obviously unjust to blame him for doing them." The solution of this problem I take to be as follows. In every moral action, just as in every other event, there is a Law-element and a Chance-element. The general principle of the action can be deduced from the character of the individual performing it, or, in other words, can be reduced to the category of Causation. In so far, the individual may be said to be not " obnoxious " to praise I H4 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. or blame, since his action is determined. But his determination is only general. A man's character indeed determines the general course of his action ; this is its logical and necessitated side. On the other hand, every concrete action, that is, every action as happening in the real world at a certain time and place is not merely general and logical, but has a particular and a-logical side to it that is irreducible to the category of Cause or to any other category. It is to this side of the action that moral praise or blame, in the strict sense of the word, alone applies. The character in general may be provocative of either admiration or loathing, but a man cannot properly be praised or blamed for inheriting a certain character or for having acquired such from the circumstances attending his up-bringing. But, as already said, there is in every concrete moral action one element deducible from the character- in-general of the man, and another spontaneous, aleatory, and altogether irreducible to any category. Either alone is abstract, but their synthetic union con- stitutes the concrete character of the man as displayed in his actions. This concrete charac- WILL. 115 ter is to be distinguished from his mere dis- position or abstract character. In some cases, of course, the disposition, or the causal element, so predominates as to completely over- shadow the other element, in other words, we say that the temptation is irresistible to the man. This is most perfectly illustrated in the case of certain criminals where the a-logical element entering into action seems to be almost entirely absent. Such persons may be regarded as approaching the condition of automata. Their whole action is determined by their character, by their inherited aptitudes, and by their sur- roundings. The a-logical or spontaneous ele- ment, that might modify this, is as good as absent. But in the general way, because a man has certain elements of brutality in his character, it does not follow that he will ever commit a murder, or because he has a strongly erotic temperament, that he will ever perpetrate a rape. A thousand men may have more or less strongly developed brutal or erotic instincts, and yet only one of their number may either assault a man or violate a woman. Hence it is that the rough test of moral praise or blame is the average of the com- ii6 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. munity. According as a man's action is above or below this average, he is praised or blamed. Poverty, for example, is a condition that pre- disposes to theft; it gives the character a twist in the direction of theft. But the man who actually steals is blamed, because thou- sands of others, in precisely the same circum- stances as he, do not, and would not, commit the act of theft. The moral "ought" only applies to the particular or a-logical element in the action, and it is the preponderance of this particular a-logical element over the neces- sitated and logical element in any personality that makes us respect a man as having " strength of will," or, as it is sometimes termed, "strength of character." In the latter designation, " character " is used in its con- crete, rather than its abstract, sense, for, strictly speaking, the man in such a case resists his character, that is, the sum of the tendencies and inclinations built up in him by circum- stances. From the foregoing it will be seen how in- consistent is the ordinary theist who wishes to eliminate Chance from the universe, and at the same time to retain Freedom of the Will. WILL. 117 Self-interest identifl- The basis of moral judgrment, aWe with Social- ^ <=• interest. jj^^j jg^ ^f praise or blame, is the same as the basis of sympathy, namely, the identification of self-interest with social-interest. What the true meaning of this identification is, of the impulse, that is, to realisation of self out- side of self, I have elsewhere indicated.^ I take it, mainly, to imply the realisation of Self- consciodsness in the social body in opposition to the animal body, as referred to in an earlier part of this book. Sympathy postulates an identity between one personality and another. It cries out against the notion that the Self- consciousness associated with an animal body is the last word of Self-consciousness. 1 "Ethics of Socialism," p. 50. CHAPTER VIII. PARTICULARITY OR INDIVIDUATION, 'teV^rSlr."^ The particular or the individual— the antithesis of the universal — has two modes, a quantitative and a qualitative. The latter can be merely indicated in Thought, and there- fore in language, but cannot be expressed, much less interpreted, in terms of the logical. The former can be only very partially and inade- quately expressed and interpreted by the Category. The quantitative mode of Particu- larity (the " denotation " of the formal logicians), the form of which is Time, is in a sense the link between Particularity in its qualitative and immediate form as this-ness and the universal or logical. The logical as such has no this-ness or qualitative Particularity. This is why a pure abstract concept, that is, a pure universal, cannot be Object of Consciousness. On the other hand, this-ness as such has no logical universality, and hence can be just as little PARTICULARITY OR INDIVIDUATION. 119 Object of Consciousness. But, as Kant well pointed out, Time is the conditioning link between the universal concept and the par- ticular of sense. Extending this principle, we see that number or infinite repetition is the quantitative mode of the particular and that which mediates between the concept-form and the particular in its immediate and qualitative mode as this-ness. The Category realises itself in an infinite number of particulars in Time and Space. The particular in this mode has always been regarded by thinkers, from Plato down to the " Realistic " schoolmen, as pre-eminently the potential, the matter which the concept z^forms. The mere element of Particularity or Individuation was to the early Greek thinkers the non-existent sensible ele- ment that was the mere blurring or spoiling of the logical, that is, of what was to them the true essence of Reality. What we find, however, in an analysis of the conditions of Reality is that this a-logical element of Particularity or Individuation is as essential a principle in the completed synthesis as the typal form or abstract Category. Consciousness as completed in Self-conscious- 120 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. ness takes on itself the form of Particularity in SSlK^e^L^ t^^ memory-synthesis. But here that Of intelligences, j^ j^ ^^^j^ indirectly Or through Reflection that this is presented as numerical. That there are other " my selves " or memory- syntheses besides this one, may be a primary inference of Reflective- Thought, but it is only an inference notwithstanding, and not, like the manifold of particular objects in Space, some- thing presupposed in all Reflection. The above is indicated in the fact that in the earlier stages of Reflection, to wit, with primitive man, the inference has a tendency to over-reach itself, and is applied indifferently to all external objects (Fetichism). It is only at a very much later stage that the inference becomes narrowed to the human form. Its starting-point is the animal body, with which the immediate per- sonality is connected. The latter presents itself to Consciousness as one of a possible infinity of instances of its own type in Space and Time. We are partially conscious of our own body as a phenomenon in Space like other phenomena in Space. From this, of course, the inference is made to a plurality of minds or memory- syntheses like itself and, in a sense, distinct from PARTICULARITY OR INDIVIDUATION. 121 itself, and yet not distinct from itself as par- ticular objects in Space are distinct from one another. This latter is an important point. The quantitative Particularity of spacial objects is absolute and mutually exclusive. The Indi- viduation of objects in space cannot be trans- cended and reduced to unity except in the concept where their this-ness is lost. But the vague Consciousness that the Individuation of intelligences is not so ultimate as that of bodies in Space is indicated in various ways, by language, the vehicle of intercommuni- cation,, by sympathy in its various forms, and by the associative principle, which dominated the whole life of early man, and which has never been entirely lost, however obscured at times. The Category, then, is realised in an infinity of particulars, apart from which it is an abstrac- tion. But it is not the less true that the element of Particularity, that is, the element over and above the Category in this infinity of objects, obtains just as little apart andX-nrss. from the Category as the Category does apart from it. The contention of the empiricist, therefore, that the many alone can be said to THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. exist, and that the one that is discoverable in them is merely an abstraction and nothing more, is no less an absurdity than the Platonic theory of " universalia ante rem" namely, that the one Concept, the universal element, exists apart from the manifold of particular instances, in which it is manifested. The elements Particularity and Universality, w««jj/-ness and o«e-ness, are equally unreal apart from their union in synthesis. The one is neither more nor less unreal than the other. This is no less true of the object constituted by the self or memory-synthesis than it is of any external object in Space. Philosophy traces up the conditions of individual Consciousness, that is, of Consciousness as completed in the person- ality, or 5'e^-consciousness, but the personality, the developed memory-synthesis that Philoso- phy elaborates, remains, after all, universal and therefore, strictly speaking, abstract. It is, of course, concrete inasmuch as it represents the synthesis of all the momenta of the dialec- tical process that has led up to it, but it still lacks the touch of actuality of the this-ness that is the true seal of reality. It lacks, in other words, the element of Particularity, both PARTICULARITY OR INDIVIDUATION. 123 quantitative and qualitative. It has first to be realised as this personality, myself, amid a possible numerical infinity of my-selves. partiouiarity as The two modes of Particularity tA/s-ness and as infinite repetition, are Correlative. The quialitative mode as this-n^ss or immediacy is unstable, and this instability is corrected by the possibility of repetition ad infinitum in Time. The two modes of Particularity may also be viewed as respectively potential and actual. The qualita- tive mode, the ^^w-ness, is equivalent to pure actuality. The quantitative mode as infinite repetition or number is purely potential. These considerations, which may seem to so many persons barren hair-splitting, evince their true significance when applied, let us say, to elucidating the full meaning of the personality with its rise and fall in Time. Particularity as this-ness is simply the deepest and most immediate expression of the " I " that is the Subject of all Consciousness. The ultimate attribute of the pure Subject is this-ness, and therein is contained the possibility of all de- terminations of Consciousness, that is, of all Reality. This-ness is the point of indifference of Time and Space. It is the unity oi here-ness 124 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. and now-ness. Time and Space are nothing but abstractions effected by the splitting-up of this-ness. We are here again therefore suddenly confronted with our root-principle. But Philo- sophy, that is, the investigation of the condi- tions presupposed in Consciousness, forces us to assume that these conditions from their very nature must complete or round themselves off as personality. We find a reciprocal implica- tion in the whole series of momenta from the subject " I," which apprehends, to the object Self or memory-synthesis, which is apprehended. Between these two extremes lies Reality in all its manifestations, " the world and all things that are therein." If so, we must assume that the Subject in every time and throughout all Time knows itself as this personality, but this does not constitute the same personality in the empirical sense, sameness here implying con- tinuity of memory. With the quantitative mode of Particularity, to which, like every other real, the personality or self is subordinate, sameness is incompatible. Every unit of the infinite number of instances embraced under the Concept is outside every other unit, that is, it excludes every other particular of the same PARTICULARITY OR INDIVIDUATION. 125 kind, and this applies (up to a certain point at least), to the Self as much as to any other Object in Time and Space. The Self, too, is expressed in an infinite sequence and indefiinite simultan- eity of discrete particulars in Time and Space. It is this quantitative mode of the particular, the primary condition of which is Time, that is the true veil of the "maya," which hides from us the essential unity of Consciousness irre- spective of Time. Consciousness is in every moment of Time encased in a memory-synthesis that it cannot transcend, but though there is a discreteness, a separation, between the particular concrete instances of this Reality as of every other, yet the totality of the Consciousness with its Mw-ness remains unaffected by this flux of particulars. It, so to say, runs through them all. They are all merely its manifesta- tions. ■me flow of Time. It may not be out of place here to refer to a point of some interest as regards Time. We speak of the flow of Time. How is that flow to be regarded, as from past to future or from future to past ? Shall we con- ceive Time as carrying us along with it from past to future, or as coming towards us from 126 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. the future, meeting us and passing us ? Now, the Time-content, as subordinated to the Cate- gory of Causation, must undoubtedly be con- ceived as moving from the past to the future. But, on the other hand, we are compelled also to regard the future as coming towards us. Language itself indicates this ; we speak of a time coming, that is, of a future time, and of a time past, that is, of a time gone. There would therefore seem to be a double flow of Time and its content. Viewed under the Cate- gory of Causation, the movement is undoubtedly from the past to the future, as already said ; but, on the other hand, we are undoubtedly in a sense meeting Time and its content. The actual moment of Consciousness is the meeting- place or point of contact between these two flows, and it is literally what we may term a metaphysical point. It consists, if we examine it, merely in the point of contact. This point of contact, the now, is always present as in the middle of Time. Every moment or now of Consciousness presupposes a past moment. Past Time and future Time are, in other words, the essential constituents of the actual moment. But it is difficult to find a formula for the PARTICULARITY OR INDIVIDUATION. 127 double flow of Time. Events in the past are non-existent ; so are events in the future. Events in the future are potential in the con- tent of past time. Yet the past is non-existent, and the future also. But the now, the actual moment of consciousness, is the synthesis of these two non-existences and nothing else. The known non-existence, the past, we call " real," although it is not actualised or actualis- able in any Consciousness. We say that Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon is a real fact of history, yet this fact is unpresented and unpresentable as Reality in Consciousness. Similarly we say that the events that happened to us yesterday are real, though they are just as little present- able in Consciousness. But there is this difference between the two cases, that the events of yesterday, though not actually real qua events, are yet contained within the limits of the individual memory-synthesis, whereas Caesar's exploits are not. The question arises here whether Reality is predicated of the former by virtue of their falling within the limits of an actual memory-synthesis, and if so, whether we are not in ascribing Reality to events that do not fall within an actual memory- 128 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. synthesis, unwittingly assuming the possibility of a memory-synthesis accruing, not to the individual, but to humanity. This, perhaps, has some bearing upon the speculation ven- tured upon at the end of Chapter II. But what of the unknown non-existent future ? This we do not term " real," and yet it is as much a constitutive moment of Consciousness as the past. The present moment is but the union in synthesis of the two elements, the immediately past and the immediately future. It is, to employ a metaphor, the eddy produced by the two flows at their confluence.^ ofttlto^oai. We have now seen that Philo- sophy, which may be not inaptly defined as " the last word of the logical,", in its deduc- tion of the personality, cannot, strange though it may seem, get beyond the " universal indi- vidual," as it has been termed, that is to say, its general conditions. The impossibility of 1 There is a sense in which we may say that Time does not flow, inasmuch as it is the source of the flowing of events, just as motion cannot be said itself to move. But this is really little more than a logomachy. Time means nothing more than flowing in general. It is the fluid this-ness in which the Real is presented. PARTICULARITY OR INDIVIDUATION. 129 the logical as such expressing the a-logical par- ticular remains. But Philosophy is the science in which the logical is pushed to its extreme limits, to the point at which it transcends it- self. Philosophy shows us the boundary of the logical, its point of contact with the a-logical, but beyond this it cannot go. Its instrument is language, and language is the exponent of definite concepts, that is, of Thought proper, of Thought in its purity. The aim of philosophical terminology is directly to express thought, and not, like the language of poetry, indirectly to evoke Feeling by means of suggestion. Yet the analogy between Philosophy and Poetry, which has been often remarked upon, is undoubted, and rests upon the fact that the last word of Philo- sophy is a hint at expressing that which its in- strument. Reflective- Thought, is, strictly-speak- ing, unable to express. Discursive Thought always glances off immediate Feeling, and hence can never express it directly. The logi- cal universal cannot penetrate the particular. Hence the particular as such can never be the subject-matter of Science or Philosophy. The bare principle of Particularity can be expressed, K I30 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. or at least indicated, but the thing itself eludes the abstract Thought of Philosophy. The problem as regards the future is whether we are destined to attain a mode of knowledge in which the a-logical shall be immediately presented as universal. At present, this is imperfectly attempted to be done in Art. "Ourselves." Now, although we as particular individuals may be mere evanescent Chance- products, the warp of our Consciousness, sensible no less than intelligible, is not particu- lar, but universal, and this is the universal typal personality that Philosophy deduces. We as personalities may, therefore, be viewed from a two-fold stand-point. As quantitative par- ticular, myself now writing no less than Smith, Brown, Jones, or Thompson, am outside the scope of Philosophy ; but these extra-philoso- phic and evanescent particulars, each and all pre-suppose those universal conditions of per- sonality, which are the furthermost point touched by Philosophy. In destroying the superstition of the man of common-sense and of the Empiricist that Particularity in its quantitative mode has a special validity as against Universality, Philosophy must pro- PARTICULARITY OR INDIVIDUATION. 131 foundly modify our views as to the importance of the personality as a mere particular.^ The personality as traced up by Philosophy lacks the this-w&s?, that makes it real. It re- mains a mere re-reading in the Reflective- consciousness of what is involved in Self-con- sciousness, apart from, and previous to, the moment of Reflection. This previous moment is for it Reality.^ ^ The Empiricist in attacking the universal is always fighting the logical Concept, which he rightly designates as an abstraction, while he does not see that the particular per se is also an abstraction. Moreover, he does not see that the a-logical, that mere tMs-ness in itself, may possibly transcend the mode of quantitative Particularity, and thus acquire a certain Universality of its own, however different it may be from the Universality of the logical Concept. 2 I may here perhaps quote what I have said elsewhere : — " This " universal individual " is the abiding fact in each particular individual. The particular personality, the Ms- ness of self, is the apex of an infinitely complex and unstable series or rather network of real, that is, physico-psychical (spacial-temporal) particulars. Physically, it is coincident with the particular organic system or animal body ; psychi- cally, with the synthesis of memory or myself. Now if by this latter word be understood the content of the //^w-ness of the memory-synthesis, as a temporal fact, it comes into exis- tence and passes out of existence like every other temporal object. But the self which is its potential ba-sis is not identical with this content of the memory-synthesis . . . 132 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. The te/os of The telos of Reflective-Con- Reflective-Conscious- ^"^^^ sciousness, as such, is the elimin- ation of the mere quantitative mode of Particu- larity, the material of Chance, and the acquire- ment of a synthesis of /^w-ness with Univer- sality. Such is and has always been the problem of human culture, namely, to disengage the quantitative particular from the essence of Reality. It has striven to accomplish this in a two-fold manner, by Reason, or its reduction to abstract Thought, and by Art, or its reduction to abstract Feeling. In all cases, the manifold of Particularity is the enemy with which the intellectual progress of humanity is perennially waging war. The common man is occupied /shall be really just as little effected by the lapsing of this memory-synthesis or myself as / am now concerned for the lapsing of the memory-synthesis of other tnyselves going on in past Time-contents — past generations — of Julius Caesar, Apollonius of Tyaha, Hildebrand, Marat, etc. On the hypothesis of metempsychosis it would be otherwise. In this case, where the " personal identity " — memory-synthesis or " soul " — subsists eternally with the whole or nearly the whole of its content, but is shunted hither and thither, the shuffling off this particular mortal coil would be a matter of vital importance either for bliss or woe. The same applies, equally, to the vulgar notion of immortality." — " Hand-book of the History of Philosophy." [2nd Edition, p. 420. J PARTICULARITY OR INDIVIDUATION. 133 almost exclusively with the quantitative particu- lar, with the manifold of sense. The intellec- tual man is occupied with the universal, either of Thought or of Feeling. He has one of two aims, either to transcend the quantitative Par- ticularity of events and persons, by translating Reality into the unity of Reason, of the Cate- gory, or to transcend this quantitative Particu- larity by translating Reality into the unity of Feeling, whereby, though the quantitative mode is abolished, yet the qualitative mode of Particu- larity, the /^z5-ness, is still retained. To carry out the former of these two aims, he has to sacrifice the qualitative aspect of Particularity, its Mw-ness, by reducing the Reality to the mere logical abstraction, to the general principle or Law. The sesthetic abstraction, or, as it is conventionally termed, " beauty," on the other hand, in combining the qualitative particular, or Mzj-ness, of Feeling with the universal, which in ordinary empirical consciousness accrues merely to the logical side of Reality, in a sense transcends the opposition of the particular to the universal. This opposition can never be transcended by the mere reduction of the Reality to the terms of the logical per se, aS 134 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. is done by Science. The goal of Philosophy is to afford an eirenikon between these two opposed modes of reducing the manifold of Particularity to unity and Universality. In both the end is so far the same, that it is a war with the a-logical as quantitative particu- larity. In the one case it is sought to be abolished by its complementary factor, the logical, in the other, by itself These are points that have not been sufficiently noted in any theory of Art. CHAPTER IX. THE TELOS OF LIFE. S-miatlw^' We have elsewhere defined the telos of Life as always a substantive end of which Feeling, pleasure, or happiness, is a basal element. But though happiness, or, as it is sometimes rather affectedly called, "blessed- ness," is an element in this end, it is, viewed by itself, a mere abstraction. It can only be realised as the form of a matter and not as in itself a concrete thing or substance. The school of introspective moralists have always con- tended against happiness being considered as in any way the goal of human action. To maintain this is surely to revert to a dogmatic position which arbitrarily fixes the telos of Reality. The only criterion of any end is the happiness conceived as involved in it. But can we find any formula for the absolute world-/^/<3^ itself ? We may of course employ phrases such as the "ayaSov" — the "summum bonum " — of 136 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. Plato. We may define this telos as " Freedom " or " Self-realisation." But without any further definition, they remain mere phrases. " Free- dom," per se is an abstraction. Were we able to formulate this telos we should be bound to regard it as, ex hypothesi, absolute finality, while aware that a being in which there is no be- coming, a form in which there is no material content, is an abstraction, and therefore no longer possesses that condition of synthetic union in which Reality consists. So that though happiness may be the criterion of the telos of Reality, it is not so per se, but only per aliud. If happiness per se were the substantial telos, the distinction between higher and lower in happiness would remain unaccounted for. The pig happy in that cas,e must be preferable to Socrates miserable. We may define the end or purpose of Reality as the objectivation or bringing into clear Consciousness of that which is immanent in itself — or, as we may otherwise express it, the actualisation in the Object of the potentiality or inner meaning of the Subject — in other words, the inner meaning of that which knows as expressed in that which is known. The ultimate aim of all the great ethical, or so- THE TELOS OF LIFE. 137 called universal, religions of the world, was to strike out a short cut by means of which the telos of Reality could be attained by the indi- vidual soul. The methods are various by which " perfection," the " perfect good," " sal- vation," " Nirvana," the " union with God," or what not, is sought to be placed within reach of the personality. But they practically con- verge in the severance of the person from nature, from society, and from sensuous pleasures, and in his withdrawal within him- self. On this view. Self-consciousness, as realised in an animal body — ^the individual soul — is regarded as the final form of the realisation of the world-principle. Hence the impulse towards the attainment of the world-purpose is supposed to come from within, and the whole process is supposed to centre in the individual soul. This view, of course, is based upon the assumption that has prevailed throughout the greater part of the historical period. oXToriraS. Men are now awakening to the conviction that the attempt to realise " perfec- tion," or the " summum bonum," by an act of will on the part of the individual, as such, is futile. The want of faith in these short cuts to 138 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. the " final goal -of all " through individual initia- tive is growing, and this want of faith is no- where more displayed than in the change that has come over these ethical religions them- selves and their exponents. The significance of the individual has waned and the conviction has grown up and is everywhere prevalent, implicitly where not explicitly, (i) that it is impossible to comprehend the world-telos in any definite formula, (2) that the world-destiny has to be reached through a long and weary course of social development. Any attempt to formulate the ultimate goal of reality must necessarily fail, since it would imply finality, which, in the last resort, is unthinkable and absurd. We have said that happiness may be affirmed as an inseparable element of the final purpose of Consciousness. But in this connection we The Pessimists, have the Pessimistic theory to deal with. Now, what does the Pessimist allege ? That the sum of misery in the world out- balances the sum of happiness, and tends to do so in a progressively increasing ratio. In this assertion, let it be noted that there are at least three questions begged. Firstly, it THE TELOS OF LIFE. 139 is assumed that happiness and misery can be quantitatively measured through the reduction of all qualitative difference to the mere abstract Category. Secondly, the problem is stated in terms of individual Feeling, the organic indi- vidual being regarded as the sole norm and self-sufficient arbiter in the matter. Thirdly, the main trend of human evolution during the historical period up to the present time is as- sumed as the only possible one. ■'""^Fau^i"^'"'' Now, as regards the first of these points, this in its turn rests upon the assumption that happiness is an independent entity and not merely an element of a syn- thesis. But this is a serious mistake. Happi- ness as realised " broadens down from prece- dent to precedent." For example, to a man in want of food, clothes and shelter; these are his telos ; they represent happiness to him. He cannot conceive of happiness apart from them, or even beyond them. He acquires these ; no longer is he a starving man in the street, but has food, clothes and shelter enough. Still he is not happy ; happiness now consists for him in congenial sexual intercourse, to obtain which is henceforth his aim. He does obtain it, but 140 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. happiness is still not for him ; he seeks now to acquire it in ringing the changes on these bodily pleasures. But it is of no use ; he be- comes satiated. If he is a man with no intel- lectual or social instincts, he continues ringing the changes and becomes still more blasd. If he have the capacity for other pleasures, he may not rest satisfied with these, but a self- sufficiency of the above necessaries of life be- comes for him simply the standing-ground for something else intrinsically different in quality. He seeks happiness in, for instance, science, or art, or " social progress." When he has attained his end in any of the things named, he will, assuming life to be long enough, take them as matters of course and seek " fresh fields and pastures new," and so on. But although right in one sense in saying the above, I am in another sense wrong. I have said that at each stage he fails to find happi- ness, and this the Pessimists might, and do, claim as an argument in their favour. But though true from one point of view, this is false from another. For at each stage the man does obtain satisfaction or happiness, and this is what the Pessimists overlook. This THE TELOS OF LIFE. 141 happiness, however, which, in the moment of attainment may seem complete, soon discloses itself as common -place and makes way for a further sense of want, and this is what the Optimists overlook. Such is the inevitable Dialectic of pleasure, or happiness, as realised. But the qualitative evolution which it implies entirely upsets all calculations based on merely quantitative considerations. The discussion as to whether the greater quantum of pleasure is derived by the sensual man from sensual en- joyments or by the intellectual man from in- tellectual enjoyments is idle, as the two things are heterogeneous and incommensurable. One thing, however, is certain, and that is the im- mediate Consciousness we have that the latter are nearer the ^oxXdi-telos than the former, or, as we call them, higher than the former, and therefore preferable. And this irrespective of whether the quantum of happiness in sensual pleasure be greater or less than that in intel- lectual. Thus I say that happiness, or pleasure, is an element running through every stage or momentum of the world-process of conscious evolution, and that no end can be conceived that does not include it, but that it is neverthe- 142 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. less no concrete Reality in itself. The higher we go in this evolution, the more the end is pursued for its own sake, and the less directly for the pleasure accompanying it. Now this which refers directly to the individual human being applies also to the telos of life in general. ■'''' 'to^auao?.™" The second fallacy of Pessimism, the assumption that the individual is the abso- lute norm, is based on the further assumption that Self-consciousness as involved with an animal body — in other words, that the organic individual is the ultimate natural form in which Self-consciousness can be embodied. Now this assumption is obviously unjustified. I have indeed given grounds in an earlier chapter for conjecturally holding its very opposite. But, whether the particular theory there given be ad- mitted or not, we have assuredly no justification for dogmatically assuming that the terms of individual Feeling, that is, of Feeling as ex- pressed in the Self-consciousness associated with a determinate animal body, are the only terms in which Feeling, and, a 'fortiori, pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness, can be ex- pressed at all. May not this, too, have a bear- THE TELOS OF LIFE. 143 ing upon the point just mentioned, the quality, namely, of pleasure or happiness ? It is perfectly true that for practical pur- poses we may consider abstract pleasure as a proximate end, since it is the only direct standard we have of gauging the worth of things. And in the same way we may regard the individual considered in himself, in abstrac- tion, that is to say, from the social life and progress into which he enters, as a proximate end to himself. But we must never forget that, so long as we regard things in this way, we are dealing with abstractions which only acquire their true meaning — often a very dif- ferent one from their apparent meaning when viewed as abstractions — in their relation to the world and human nature considered as an organic whole. When we regard either of these proximate ends as ultimate or absolute, we are oblivious of the larger point of view in which the significance of the individual man is seen to consist not in himself, but in his rela- tion to the continuous social life of which he is a component. This attitude is exhibited in its extreme form in the criminal or man of dis- tinctly anti-social instincts, but i't is the attitude 144 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. also of the common-place individualist or man of the world. The effect of the introspective morality and the religions founded upon it, namely, the so-called "universal" religions, at the head of which stands Christianity, has been to reverse this attitude by means of asceticism. Their salient ethical categories are " sin " and " holiness." But in asceticism, individualism is not abolished, but merely inverted. Self- denial, for its own sake or considered as end- in-itself, is as intrinsically individualistic as self- indulgence as end-in-itself. In either case, the point of view is limited to the individual, who is therefore converted into an abstraction. The intrinsically higher point of view from that of the self-centred man of the world is not what is usually regarded as its antithesis, namely, the ascetic, but is, on the contrary, that which transcends alike both these standpoints. This point of view is, in fact, the recognition of the personality and its immediate pleasure as con- stituting a proximate end, but no more than a proximate end ; as constituting a stage merely, albeit a necessary stage to something higher than itself From such a standpoint as the foregoing, the truth is seen plainly that the only THE TELOS OF LIFE. 145 effective manner in which the bad, or, as we may term them, the abstract-personal, instincts can be abolished is in the identification by the sheer necessity of circumstances of individual interest in the narrower sense with the interests of society as a whole. The abstract individual- istic or anti-social impulses then abolish them- selves. The antagonism between the indi- vidual and the community, which seemed from a lower standpoint irreconcilable, has vanished. ^""'"^f^y^'*'" This brings us on to the third assumption of the Pessimists, which is equally the assumption of the ordinary man, namely, that the main trend of human progress, which from the dawn of history up to the present day has been in the direction of the autonomy of the individual, will continue in this course. This underlies most Pessimistic theories as to the future ; yet, that this, too, is a fallacy is becoming more evident day by day to the observer of the economic conditions of modern society. Such an observer cannot fail to see that the autonomy of the individual is doomed, that economic evolution is forcing on a change in the mode of production and distribution of L 146 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. wealth which will be the material basis for a transformation of social conditions generally, and that this transformation will issue in the aboli- tion of the present antagonism between the individual and the community. The present work, however, is not the place to elaborate this point, more especially as I have dealt with it in detail elsewhere. teXoTasreg^Jds F^om the foregoing we come ^^PSy."^" naturally to the problem of the tendency of social evolution towards increase or diminution of happiness. This question is accustomed to be judged of by the tiny span of time constituting history. It is quite true that a study of this limited period — limited as regards even the existence of man on this planet — leads us to the conclusion that happiness and misery have not so much increased or decreased in amount as varied in the relative proportions of their distribution. It seems to be the ten- dency of misery to become less acute and more massive, less concentrated and more widely distributed. The hardship of the serf of the middle ages, the acute and devastating epi- demics, the perennial imminence of fire and sword, the oubliettes of the feudal castle, the THE TELOS OF LIFE. 147 torture-chambers of the criminal courts, the general violence that characterised social life are evils most of which have passed away entirely and the rest have been mitigated past recognition. But in the present day we have the ever-deepening gulf between poverty and \\realth, the huge agglomeration of coagulated misery represented by the proletariat of the nineteenth-century city, a mass ever increasing in volume. We have the ugliness, the filth, the squalor of the modern world consequent on the triumph of the capitalistic system as applied to- all the departments of production. With all their drawbacks, the middle ages exhibit to us a careless and joyous life for the majority, free from over-work and accompanied, for the most part, by fresh air and healthy conditions, com- bined with rough and rude, but unaffected and natural culture among all classes. The sacrifice of this is the price which thus far we have paid for the riddance of the exceptional and acute miseries peculiar to the earlier phase of society. All this, however, does not afford us any cri- terion as regards future progress, the conditions of which must be, as already hinted, entirely different frofn those of the past. 148 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. "Gooa"an(i"ETU." Whatever may be the ultimate goal of human evolution, whether or not we believe it to be tending towards the new form of the conscious individual, based upon social rather than organic conditions, the fact remains that the antithesis between what we compre- hensively term "Good" and "Evil" is one of those ultimate oppositions which lie deep down in the nature of things, or of Reality, and which cannot be transcended without abolishing Reality itself. All specific "Evil," that is, particularised " Evil," passes away. What does not pass away is " Evil-in-general." In other words, the abstract category of " Evil," which is eternal,, is continually being embodied in different manifestations. Every embodied " Evil," every realisation of the category, is necessarily transient, but nevertheless the abstract concept " Evil " runs through these divers concrete "Evils." It must- be admitted that these remarks apply also to the antithetical complement of " Evil," namely, to the " Good." The latter, as realised, as embodied in any concrete particular in Time, passes away also. But there is this difference between the two cases. Realised or concrete "Evil" appears THE TELOS OF LIFE. 149 as the beginning, or as the first term, of a given dialectical cycle of evolution, while the "Good" acquired by its elimination or transformation evinces itself as the telos or completed Reality of the cycle in question. Thus it is evident that a " point " is always given in favour of the " Good," and hence that the trend of all evo- lution is towards the " Good," notwithstanding that we cannot conceive this " Good" as ever completely absorbing and exhausting all future possibility of " Evil." Every realised ideal, every concrete " Good," although it has com- pletely exhausted and abolished the " Evil," to which it was originally opposed, yet neverthe- less on its realisation discloses the germ of a new and different " Evil," which in its turn forms the beginning of a new cycle in which the same process is repeated. The belief in the absolute triumph of " Good-in-itself," that is, of abstract " Good," over " Evil-in-itself/' or abstract " Evil," is as much a chimsera as the search for a light in which is no darkness. Such a light would indeed be a light as never was on earth or sea, and such a "Good" as ex- cluded all further possibility of "Evil" would be nothing but a pure abstraction wanting all the /50 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. conditions of a real synthesis. Such a finality is really a self-contradiction. It would b? death and stagnation. We can only put the case in this connection hypothetically and say : " Were there a finality to the infinite process, then that would imply the complete absorption of Evil by Good." As it is, in the moment of realisa- tion, there is an undoubted increment of "Good," of happiness over the opposing prin- ciple ; at the moment, that is, when the old "Evil" has been abolished and the new is as yet unrealised. We can assign no end to this process, to this absorption of specific " Evil " by specific "Good," of specific misery by specific happiness. CHAPTER X. SUMMARY. We propose in the present chapter to give a brief recapitulation of the positions advanced in the foregoing pages. We have seen that the primary problem of Philosophy is the investiga- tion of the conditions and meaning of Reality. Reality. We have further seen that Reality is not something over against Consciousness, but that it is nothing more than that Conscious- ness-in-general presupposed in all particular Consciousness, in that Consciousness, namely, that identifies itself with a particular memory- synthesis, proclaiming itself "myself "as opposed to "thyself" and to "himself." Analysis further discloses to us that though there is nothing out- side Consciousness, yet that there is an element presupposed no less by Consciousness-in-general than by the Self-consciousness which is its com- pletion, namely, an " I " which is conscious, or, in other words, which becomes determined as 153 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. feeling and thinking and which knows, that is, re-feels and re-thinks these its primary modi- fications (Thought- Feltnesses), firstly, as a world of external Objects in Space, related in an indissoluble synthesis according to certain cate- gories, and, secondly, as a synthesis of Thoughts and Feelings in Time, united by memory alone and associated with a particular external Object, an animal body. With this memory-synthesis, the original " I," or Subject of Consciousness- in-general, immediately identifies itself and this act of identification or Self-consciousness is the limit of Consciousness-in-general and the starting point of Reflective -Thought. It is at this point, to wit, in the act of Self-Con- sciousness, that the " Ego " identifies itself with the Kantian " Object of the internal sense," and thus becomes particularised as one of an infinite number of minds or personalities. But it is plain that this individuation cannot be pre- dicated of the primal subject, of the " I " which is the ultimate postulate of all Knowledge, whatsoever. This Subject, which recognises itself immediately in Self-consciousness is also presupposed in the Consciousness of external Objects in Space. They, no less than the SUMMARY. 153 memory-synthesis through which they appear, are its modes. The pure Subject of Know- ledge, in short, is one in many, whereas the Object-self, or memory-synthesis, is one 0/ many. Turn the matter which way we will, we cannot get away from the fact that all Reality is nothing but categorised Feeling, or, in other words, it is nothing but a co-ordinated whole or system of modes or inflections of Consciousness. But all Consciousness is simply the determination of the " Ego," or, in other words, of that which becomes conscious. We may, if we like, define the " Ego " as the potentiality of Consciousness, or Consciousness as the actuality of the " Ego," since the two are correlative. The only point to be borne in mind is that all conscious determinations are referred to the "Ego" as their Subject, whereas the " Ego " as such is not referred to any of its determinations. The " Ego " is, in short, in itself, whereas conscious determinations are nothing in themselves, but only In and for the " Ego." The " Ego " has thus a higher meta- physical value than its modes. Once more, it is plain that the " I," as pure Subject, as the potentiality of Consciousness and its forms, is 154 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. prior in nature to those forms and therefore to Time and to that which arises out of Time, namely, number. The moment that it is seen that the " Ego " in this sense, namely, as the universal Subject, obtains in any and all Time, as being in fact the " fount and origin" of Time, we may proceed with our construction. We find that the content of all Consciousness or Object consists of two eleinents, Feeling and Thought. In the completed moment of Feel- ing, or, as we have termed it, in a Feltness, the "Ego" as such is negated. This is the primary opposition, or, as Fichte termed it, the "Anstoss." A Feltness, although ultimately referred to the " Ego," is referred to it by Antithesis ; the " Ego " is Su6}ect, the Feltness is Odject. This negation is in its turn negated in the third term of this primary synthesis of Consciousness, namely, as Thought in which the " Ego " is re-affirmed, not as identical with the non-ego or Feltness, but as standing in a determinate rela- tion to it. This latter or logical element in the synthesis, the element of definiteness or reci- procal connection which I have termed ike logical, completes this synthesis which forms the o-round-work of Consciousness. In abstrac- SUMMARY. 155 tion, the logical element furnishes complete consistency (as displayed in formal logic), but, when we consider Reality as a conscious pro- cess, we have to do with a reproduction of the complete original conscious synthesis, in other words, we have the a-logical elements, which the logical pre-supposes, re-instated. The result is dialectic — contradiction and its resolu- tion — which is nothing more than the continuous positing of the a-logical and its continuous reduction to reason; in other words, to the forms of the logical concept. Reality we find to consist of a complex of, at first sight, diverse and more or less disconnected processes. Phi- losophy shows us all these processes as pre- supposing and as, in their ultimate nature, reducible to, one and the same process, namely, to the one synthetic unity of Consciousness. In common-sense Consciousness, in external perception, in the movement of events in Time, we find, throughout the whole range of Reality, that activity of the Subject, which we call Thought, universalising, defining and reducing to its special forms or categories the a-logical element of Feeling or Sensibility. The cachet of the latter is Particularity in what we may iS6 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. call its qualitative and quantitative modes as immediacy or /^w-ness and as indefinite re- petition in Time and Space. ^scSl*"* A systematic treatise on the problem of Reality would have required that each aspect of the problem should have been shown to proceed dialectically from each other aspect of the problem, but the present work only professes to contain more or less detached suggestions as to the lines along which a future philosophical construction must proceed, and lays no claim itself to embody such a construc- tion. Philosophy, that side of the Reflective- Consciousness in which abstract Thought is the dominant factor, pushes the latter to its extreme limits and already touches that other side of the Reflective-Consciousness in which Feeling predominates. The salient distinction between the logical formulation of the Real by Science and by Philosophy is that in the former, the leading category employed is Cause and Effect, whereas, in the latter, it is Reciprocity, or Action and Re-action. paniogism. The present suggestions differ from previous attempts to formulate the prob- lem of Reality and its solution in that the latter SUMMARY. 157 have all had the tendency to eliminate the a- logical element in Reality and to make Thought, or the Concept- Form, absolute. This tendency receives its most drastic expression in the Hegelian system, which has been aptly defined as Panlogism. Against this panlogistic doc- trine some criticisms have been directed in the preceding pages. It has been especially criti- cised in the popular form, which the doctrine assumes, that there is no such thing as Chance in the world. We have shown, on the con- trary, that there is such a thing as Chance in the world. Chance being simply the a-logical as represented in the ceaseless change of events in Time, while Cause or Law is the logical, real evolution implying the synthesis of these two, here of change and changelessness, the fleeting instance and the abiding category. Fatausm. What we havc said as to the co-relativity of Chance and Law, of Particu- larity and Universality, of the a-logical (as Time and its content) and the logical (that is, the Category), affords us a key to the problem that puzzles so many worthy persons as to the compatibility of working for definite social or political ends with the beHef that those ends 158 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. are causally determined by economic and social conditions, independent of the action of any in- dividual, and are hence outside individual con- trol. Viewing historical progress as a concrete synthesis, there is no incompatibility at all ; the seeming inconsistency is due to taking an ab- stract view of the matter. Historical progress, like every other Reality, is a synthesis of logi- cal and a-logical, of universal and particular, of Law and Chance. Now the causal element, the Category, which proclaims that progress must necessarily be along certain lines and that the process in itself cannot be determined by individuals, obtains irrespective of Time. It says merely that along such and such lines pro- gress must move. Such and such, in general terms, must be the outcome of past and present conditions, but the when and where and the filling in of the picture, it does not touch. All this, the actual happening in Time and Space, constitutes the a-logical element in history, which is irreducible to any category, which is, in other words, the domain of Chance, that is, of Particularity. The two elements, although distinguishable, are really inseparable ; their union in synthesis constituting Evolution. SUMMARY. 159 From this it will be evident who are the true fatalists — the Theists who deny Chance and who would reduce every event to the working- out of a determinate Law or plan ; or those in whose view of things Chance finds a.n integral place, and who thus vindicate a real and not a merely nominal importance for the action of the individnal. To our thinking, nothing can be more immoral, in the true sense of the word, as leading to apathy, indifference and imbecile contentment, than the doctrine of the " natural theologian," who sees in the Time-process of the real word a puppet-thow, determined by the precious' divine wisdom of a deus ex machind, and who thus leaves the actors therein without any raison d'itre for action, other than that supplied by the dictates of pure self-interest. If " divine " wisdom were going to take the matter in hand at all, it could not surely require or expect the luckless individual to worry himself in clumsy endeavours to assist. ■meism. Theism, understanding thereby the doctrine of a concrete intelligence distinct from our own or any other that is correlated with physical conditions in the same way that ours is, we have pointed out as being a hypo- i6o THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. thesis which does not come within the scope of philosophical analysis, and which cannot be deduced from the given conditions of Con- sciousness. On the possibility of individual Consciousness being associated with other con- ditions than those of direct correlation with an animal body, a hypothesis has been indicated having some plausibility, and serving at least to direct the tendency of our thoughts on the subject. ■^ha^nolS^r In the subsequent chapters we have dealt with the a-logical and logical as ex- hibited in Chance and Law, also with special reference to the personality considered as a Chance-product. ■'^h! M^^^ar* I n Chapter V. we have discussed Particularity and Universality — another aspect of the distinction between the a-logical — and the logical in their entire range and not merely with reference to events, in other words, to the content of Time as changing. ^'^fnnK™"* What we may term the per- ennial struggle between the a-logical and the logical for the upper hand in Reality is nowhere better illustrated than in History, where we see, on the one side, the law of human developmeat SUMMARY. i6i in its various aspects, and on the other, the free play of the impulse of individuals co-existing with and succeeding one another in Time. We see the Category, the logical course of human evolution continually being twisted, turned aside and overridden by the a-logical and therefore indeterminate action of particular individuals, and yet continually realising itself in and through them. The Category must be realised ; the logical course of human development must ob- tain ; but the individual working in his own element, so to say, the form of all quantitative Particularity — Time, to wit — can indefinitely delay or accelerate its realisation. Human progress in the concrete consists, therefore, of these two elements — the logical, which does not per se presuppose Time, and which is hence " eternal," and the flux of Chance-particulars in Time. History or human development as realised, is the synthesis of these two elements. This is the solution of the dilemma upon the horns of which so many persons are impaled, and which leads them to think that if there be a law discernible in History, if human de- velopment follow a determinate course, irre- spective of individuals, therefore we should M 1 62 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. hold our hands and repeat "kismet." The answer is that the logical fatalism of History is only realised in synthetic union with the a-logical free-will of men. The direction of the development is determined by the Law of de- velopment. The shape that this developnient assumes in the concrete, the filling-in of the category in Time, is determined by the tran- sient Particularity of men and circumstances. Science and Art. We have again viewed the a- logical and the logical from the point of view of Knowledge in its higher sense, namely, as Reality transformed by the Reflective-conscious- ness. We have seen that this may take place in a double manner. It may be transformed in the direction of the logical by its reduction as far as may be to the categories of Science, the most fundamental of which is Cause and Effect. Or it may be transformed in the direc- tion of the a-logical, that is, of Feeling, by its reduction as far as may be to terms of pure Sensibility, which is the ideal of all the fine arts. In both cases what is sought to be effected is the reduction of the manifold of sensible Reality — in the one case, to the in- direct unity of Thought, or the Category ; in SUMMARY. 163 the other, to the immediate unity of Feeling. The nature of Thought is Universality, but the nature of Feeling is Particularity. Now Universality always implies a unity in the manifold, but Particularity does not. The particular, as we have seen, has two modes, a qualitative and a quantitative. The first is the immediate expression of the unity of Con- sciousness — this-ness. The second is numerical indefiniteness. Now the aim of Art is to eliminate this latter mode of Particularity, to reduce the content of the infinite number of particular things to this thing-in-general. The aesthetic ideal may therefore be defined as the point of indifference of Universality and Par- ticularity. The transformation or sublimation of Reality effected by Science is conventionally termed " truth," that effected by Art is termed " beauty." Science with all its attempts never succeeds in attaining its goal of eliminating the a-logical completely, nor does Art completely eliminate the logical. Were their ostensible goal to be actualised on either side, at that moment the real syn>thesis would disappear, and we should have an abstraction alone, remaining. Whether the form of Knowledge represented i64 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY by Science and Art, as understood at present, is destined to be superseded or not, we cannot predict; but the scientific attitude of mind as seen supreme to-day may well be transitory, and the possibility at least must be admitted that it may become merged in one in which the essential abstractness of this attitude will be recognised, — in short that the current categories of Science may be merged in a more comprehensive unity. "^^t^plisoStf The personality, as we have seen, is also a synthesis of logical and a-logical. The character, that is to say, the sum of the tendencies embodied in the particular individual, his way of life, etc., may be reduced to the cate- gory of Cause. All this can be traced back to psychological laws, to those of historical evolu- tion, and so forth. But what cannot be so re- duced is the this-vtes,^ of the whole. The fact, for example, that this particular memory-syn- thesis should occur within this particular in- terval of time rather than within any other, at the end of the nineteenth century rather than at the end of the first, cannot be reduced to any category — cannot be explained. We cannot see the why of it. Like all that concerns Time it is a-logical. SUMMARY. 165 '"'moral MttonT '° There are other aspects in which the Personality may be viewed wherein the antithesis between the logical and a- logical is discernible. These aspects we have indicated in the foregoing chapters. In the moral sphere, for instance, this is especially noticeable, for every moral action presupposes a Law- element and a Chance-element. The general principle of the action can be deduced from the character of the individual acting, and this again from general psychological principles. In other words, it is logically determined according to the Law of Causation. But, on the other hand, a particular action, taking place at a certain time and in a certain place, is indeterminate. A man may have a certain character or disposition and yet not act up to it in any given case or cases. It is this element of Particularity in the action, with which praise and blame is concerned. Again, we have the antinomy of Freedom and Necessity exhibited from another side, as the feeling that we are free, and as the thinking that we are necessitated. I feel immediately that my action is free and self-determined, but I know, according to the category of Causation, that it is necessitated. The a-logical (Feeling) i66 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. tells me that I am free, the logical (Thought) tells me that I am constrained by motive. We can never explain this problem of Freedom and Necessity, since we cannot get rid of either element entirely, albeit, according to the point of view we occupy, the one or other element will predominate. t?ospS?lu^oi^." In discussing the telos of Life, we have come to the conclusion that happiness is not a Reality in itself, but only the element of a Reality, the different manifestations of which on different planes of Consciousness are incommensurable the one with the other. We have further come to the conclusion that no formulation, in the terms of Reflective-Thought, of the ultimate telos, or of anything more than a very proximate telos, is possible. The attempt of the introspective religions to bring the telos within the reach of the individual soul has proved a failure, as is evidenced by the fact that these religions are waning or are assuming another form, in which this attempt is practically abandoned. The abstract factor in moral action, on which they have laid such great stress, namely, self-sacrifice, they have erected into the end-in-itself of moral action. SUMMARY. 167 thereby getting into a vicious circle which may well lead, as in some cases it has led, to a favourable judgment on an action that is, viewed concretely, immoral. For example, a pigeon- trainer, a member of the Salvation Army, some time ago, being desirous of doing an act of self-sacrifice, wrung the necks of his favourite birds. This act, his moral sense, perverted by the introspective morality with its apotheosis of self-sacrifice, regarded as meritorious, because it gave him pain to destroy the pigeons. Cases have been known of religious mania, in which, actuated by this morbid and perverse notion, men have murdered their best-loved children, in imitation of Abraham's readiness to sacrifice Isaac. The new morality must proclaim war to the knife with this abstract morality centring in the individual. The new ideal proclaims that no action is morally wrong that has not directly anti-social consequences, for men are slowly beginning to recognise that the end of conscience is the identification of individual interest with social interest. There are still Rip van Winkles, who talk of a man "only being capable of wronging himself," but the unmistakable tendency of modern thought is i68 THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. to the opposite view, although this tendency is in many cases unconscious and is indeed definitely formulated with comparatively few persons. The perfection of the individual, not through himself, but through society, is the motto of modern Socialism and this doc- trine involves a complete inversion of the tra- ditional ethical theory. mtimate Ideals. All our ideals hitherto have been based on the hypostatisation of abstractions. The Panlogist seeks a reality in which the logical has absorbed the a-logical. The Optimist postulates a telos in which Good has absorbed Evil. The Pessimist postulates Evil in the same way as having absorbed and ex- tinguished Good. The Mystic seeks a light in which is no darkness. The Theologian imagines a Being too pure to look upon iniquity. The Philosopher hitherto has been given to seeking a form in which is no matter, an actuality that has exhausted possibility. The Artist believes in an ideal beauty, in which the shadow of ugliness is not and cannot come. What all fail to recognise is that each of these terms exist only in antithesis to the other, and that the concrete Consciousness we call Reality is a SUMMARY. synthesis into which both enter as elements. They fail to see that when one term of the synthesis is destroyed, Reality itself is de- stroyed, and that only an abstraction, a lifeless wraith, remains ; that the complete absorption of one term in the other implies, not a higher Reality, but no Reality at all, stagnation, an- nihilation, in short, the higher " O." The infantile superstition of Reflective-consciousness crying for the moon of "the absolute" gives place in the maturity of Reflective-consciousness to a conviction which recognises that, though all specific Evil passes away, yet. in the very Good in which that Evil is absorbed, there is a further potentiality of Evil, not the same Evil, but still an Evil ; that though the Evil thing passes away, the Category of Evil is co-incident with Consciousness, and that the same is true of the Good, but with the difference that Good realises itself as the telos of every dialectical cycle, and the movement of Reality is always a progressive approximation to absolute Good, albeit the latter is never absolutely attained. This approximation and relative realisation of Good in all its forms, this appearance of Evil as the middle term of a cycle of evolution, a 17° THE PROBLEM OF REALITY. germ only at its beginning and exhausted and abolished at its close, is all we can discover by- investigating the conditions of Reality. As may be seen, this always gives a "point" in favour of the Good. Realised Good — I use the word " Good " genetically, that is, in all its forms— appears as the first and as the last term of every dialectical process. Evil is realised in the middle term alone. Hence, as already said, a " point " is always given in favour of Good. If we seek for more than this, we seek after will-of-the-wisps and abstrac- tions, which cannot be formulated in Thought and which lack the conditions of a real synthesis. In acknowledging this dynamical perfection, this eternal movement of consciousness towards a Good, which is not " not-ourselves," but which is " ourselves " and is an element in our very essence, we have surely attained the highest ideal that lies within our grasp, one that can afford us more stimulus to action and more inexhaustible hope than any theory of finality could possibly supply to human nature. APPENDIX A. It is perhaps necessary to allude to the common objection of the ordinary man to the irrefutable philosophical truth that existence is nothing but determinations of Consciousness-in-general. It is always said : " But I can conceive of all sorts of things existing and happening without any one being present to see or know of them." The objector usually goes a somewhat roundabout way to empha- size his point, and talks of the " nebulous period of the solar system," the " pre-glacial epoch," " Erebus and Terror," "the other side of the moon," and so forth. He might just as well confine himself to instancing the nearest room that is, at the present moment, empty as regards any human or animal occupants. The extreme and sensational instances which he adduces are on precisely the same footing as the very common-place one we have just given. The crux of the whole question lies in the abstraction of Consciousness in its first intention, — of Conscious- ness-in-general, — from the Particularity of the indi- vidual memory-synthesis and from the immediacy or tkis-ness in which it consists. The individual, as individual, or as memory-synthesis, presupposes the whole synthesis of Consciousness-in-general. His 172 APPENDIX. particular thinking and perceiving is merely the rounding-off of this synthesis. His self-consciousness is, so to say, super-imposed upon this ground-work. Now, the ordinary man in putting the above poser to the philosopher is really unwittingly making the dis- tinction which the philosopher definitely formulates. Says the ordinary man : " An uninhabited island exists, rocks are falling, waves are dashing up against the shore," etc. He forgets all the time that these things that he is talking about imply the primary and secondary qualities of matter — hardness, impenetra- bility, weight, extension, colour, figure — reciprocally bound up together in a systematic order, all of which qualities are nothing but Feltnesses related by Thought. But Feltnesses and Concepts presuppose what 1 A Subject or " I," of course, feeling and con- ceiving them. The common-sense man, try as he may, cannot get out of the circle of Consciousness. When he thinks to have shaken it off, he is only the more deeply immersed therein. All he gets rid of by the abstraction of Reflective-Thought is the quantitative Particularity of the individual, as one among many, which is philosophically quite un- essential. To s.ny given plane of consciousness the other momenta which it presupposes, but which it has superseded, always appear as something outside itself. Hence the illusion of the ordinary man that the object or material of Consciousness is something distinct from Consciousness altogether. Philosophy professes to deduce the conditions of experience, but it can never touch the true this-ntss. APPENDIX. 173 which is the essence of the particular, because its medium is Reflective-Thought, which, as already observed, is always discursive. The questions re- ferred to, all presuppose Time, and, inasmuch as Time is the form of the particular, Philosophy cannot touch its content. Time, however, which is posited in these assumptions, itself pre-supposes Conscious- ness. Given Time, and we have a Time-content that is determined up to a certain point by the category of Causation. The synthesis of Consciousness-in- general, then, obtains irrespective of any or all par- ticular memory-syntheses that come and go as the content of Time. The common-sense man is implying this when he asks you whether the other side of the moon does not exist although no one sees it. He finds that the content of his memory-synthesis, of his immediate Consciousness, presupposes conditions other than itself ; but he has not reached the point of recognising that there is no break in the continuity of these conditions, that the world-process is through and through a conscious process, and that the true distinction between the this-Vi&ss of a particular indi- vidual Consciousness incased in its memory-synthesis and the universal synthesis it presupposes is not the distinction between Consciousness and something that is not Consciousness, but that between Con- sciousness as actual and Consciousness as merely potential. Philosophy, then, deduces the whole conditions of individual Consciousness, barring alone the qualitative Particularity or psychological ^/^w-ness of Self-con- 174 APPENDIX. sciousness ^ and a fortiori its quantitative Particularity or antithesis to other individuals. The common-sense man thus finds that his imme- diate Consciousness involves a complex system of im- plications or presuppositions. He abstracts therefrom the final ^Aw-ness or actuality to which they have led up, and thinks that he has got a Reality left behind, which is something other than Consciousness. He does not see that he has merely stripped off the element of Particularity and that all else remains. It would indeed be absurd to suppose that Space and Time with their content Reality were dependent on the existence of individual minds associated with animal bodies, which arise in Space and Time, and ' " Philosophy says that the synthesis of individualised experience is prior in nature to any or all particular minds. The particular individual, in thinking of the interior of the earth or of any other place too hot for the experience of himself or any organic being like himself, merely abstracts from his Particularity, throws himself back on that virhich his Particu- larity presupposes — on that of which he is a determination — to wit, on the possible conditions of individual Consciousness-in- general. And he does the same for that matter every moment of his life when he thinks on the past or the distant. The question arises in a simple misunderstanding. It cannot be stated as a philosophical problem, nor can it be so answered. The only terms in which it can be properly stated, namely, those of common-sense or science, as the case may be, are the only terms in which it can be properly answered. The con- ditions of individual Consciousness as such involve the whole Space and Time synthesis with all its implications : — abstract from the particular, the organic individual, and your question has no longer any significance." — " Handbook of the History of Philosophy." Bohn's Series. Pp. 415, 416. (2nd Edition.) APPENDIX. 175 whose very origination and continuance form part of the Reality that is their content. It is true that the synthesis of Consciousness-in-general is to the psy- chical synthesis in which it is reproduced merely potential, and this is the point at which the view here put forward, which I have designated in the work ■ already quoted from as Neo-Transcendentalism, dif- fers from the Hegelianism of the " Right." To the orthodox Hegelian of the school of the late Professor Green, the universal conscious synthesis presupposed by the individual mind has an actuality of its own. To him all Reality is; in short, eternally present in it. This view is traversed in discussing the theory of philosophic Theism, as in no way necessitated by the philosophic analysis.^ To the starting-point of the latter, to our immediate Self-consciousness here and now, the primary synthesis that it implies is merely potential. We may conceive of it as actualised under other conditions if we like, but such an actualisation in no way enters into the explanation of our Con- sciousness. Consciousnessrin-general, qua the indi- vidual mind that distinguishes it, is and must remain a pure potentiality, whatever it may be otherwise. See Chapter I. APPENDIX B. The disturbing influence of the psychological factor in the apprehension of Reality, referred to in the text, is very noteworthy in some cases. For example, on first going to a town, its reality, even to the most " objective " details, the " lie " of the streets, and so forth, is altogether overlaid by the element of psycho- logical particularity. It looks quite different after we have lived there a year. The mere psychological apprehension has by that time given place to the real apprehension. But it is not in all cases so easy to distinguish the admixture of psychological particu- larity from the real apprehension as in the one given. What, for instance, is the Reality of a historical period, say the middle ages ? as seen through the psycholo- gical lens of contemporaries, or of the scholar of a later time ? — if of contemporaries, of the feudal villain, of his lord, of the cleric, or of the burgher? We have psychological refraction in all these cases ; each sees the period from a different point of view ; but which are we to assume as the nearest to Reality.'' In the mind of a scholar of a later age, again, the period presents itself in a light in which it could never have appeared to any contemporaries ; and assuming the scholar to be a man of powerful imagination (a Scott or a Flaubert), are we to regard 176 APPENDIX. 177 his reconstruction as in any way nearer the reality than the conception of an ignorant contemporary whose view was limited ? Is that conception of the nineteenth century which is the product of the memory-synthesis of a London costermonger more or less real than that of an Oxford graduate, or are they either of them more or less real than that of a scholar of the twenty-first century, who sees our age in the light of the subsequent evolution of events, and whose view is modified accordingly? This is only another instance of the puzzle of one's childhood — what was the real size of any object ? Was the real table the table one saw when one's face was pressed against it, or was it the table one looked at twelve inches away, or the table as it appeared from the other end of the room, or looking down the " well " of the staircase, as it might happen ? It would be interesting, by the way, to know which of these hypotheses the partisans of the theory of an external world, independent of consciousness, would adopt. To the Idealist or the Metaphysician the problem offers no special difficulties. For, to the latter Reality is something fluid, not fixed, it contains within it an infinite potentiality, and hence can never become definite. "Das ewige Webstuhl der Zeit" is real only in its whirring. THE END. Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London. N