' IP i i I II i i il!i|P I liilliip; nity :i of Wiil Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029046790 THE UNITY OF WILL THE UNITY OF WILL STUDIES OF AN IRRATIONALIST BY GEORGE; AINSLIE HIGHT The Real is One ; wise men call it differently Jiig- Veda NEW YORK E. P. BUTTON & CO. 31 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET Et fioi ^vecrj tfjepovri, fjLOtpa rav cuo-ctttoi' dyv€tav Aoytov €pyiDV re TravTWV, 0)1/ VOflOL TTpOKCLVTai vi/rtTToSe?, ovpavcav ,81' aWipa TCKVw^errcs, Si/ "OAvftTros TTttT^p fiovo?, ovSe viv Ovara ^vo't? avipoiv €TiKT€v, ovSe firjv TTOTc Xci^a KaraKoijuacrci * /Acyas €v TOi^TOts ^eoSj ovSe yrjpd(rK€i, Soph., Oct?. Tyr. " La religion particuli^re aux philosophes est d*^tudier ce qui est ; car le culte le plus sublime qu'on puisse rendre k Dieu est la connaissance de Bes oeuvreSj laquelle nous conduit k le connaitre lui-m§me dans toute sa r^alit^." — AvERROES, from Eenan. PREFACE The views expressed in the foUowiag pages are based upon those of Schopenhauer, contained in his chapter Vom Primat des Willens im Selhst- bewusstsein^ As his doctrine of the relation between Intellect and Will differs from that of all other metaphysicians, and has been little studied in England, my first intention was to prefix his essay as an introduction to this work; but finding that a translation in extenso would unduly swell the bulk of the volume, I have been fain to content myself with this reference to it, and with expressing a hope that my readers will draw at the fountain head, and read, if they have not done so before, what has always appeared to me the most lucid and convincing piece of philosophical exposition that modern literature has to show. The fundamental error of all philosophies, Schopenhauer tells us, has been that of assuming the essential and primary element of the so-called ^ Die Welt ah Wille und Vorstelltmg, Part 11., Ch. 19. vii VUl PREFACE Soul, i.e. the inner spiritual (geistiger) life of man, to be Thought ; of always placing Thought first, while assigning a subordinate place to WiQ, which has been regarded as a mere secondary product, consequent upon thought- With him, on the other hand, the primary reality of every existence is Will, by which he understands not only wish and resolve in the narrow sense, but all striving^ desiring^ shunning^ hoping, fearing, loving, hating, in short everything which makes up our personal weal and woe, joy and sorrow — all being merely modifications or affections of a will, either for or against. Of these Intellect is the instrument, and therefore secondary and dependent, a mere accidens of our existence. The will is master, intellect its busy and accomplished servant ; "while the intellect is laboriously searching and balancing, endeavouring from innumerable data by difficult combinations, to extract a result which seems to accord with the interest of the will, the latter is idly resting, to enter when all is ready, like a Sultan into his divan, and pronounce its monotonous * approved ' or ^ disapproved,* always the same in character, though varying in degree." And so we see the Will remaining in undiminished force through life; as strong in infancy as in manhood; still vigorous and determined in the decrepitude of age, when the faculties are broken. PREFACE ix on the brink of the grave. For the intellect changes with the vicissitudes of life ; it grows old and decays, but the will is imperishable — d/ca/iaros /cal ayj^paros rjfiaTa Trdvra, I have said that Schopenhauer has been little studied in England. When studied he has gene- rally been misunderstood, and it is my belief that, until his metaphysical doctrine is not only under- stood but accepted, no progress in philosophy is possible. No one who has followed the thought of my own essays will, however, mistake me for a disciple of Schopenhauer's school, except indeed in the sense in which it might be permitted to speak of a modem astronomer as a "disciple of Copernicus." I could not be. Schopenhauer is a Buddhist ; I am (if anything) a Vedantist. Our respective personal standpoints are as opposed to each other as those of Calvinist and Eoman, or of Plato and Darwin, i,e. absolutely. But we must distinguish between that part of a man's thought which consists of observed and undeniable facts, only needing to be once formulated and under- stood to become the general property of science, and that part which is, and must always remain, personal opinion, true only with reference to his individuality. Of the first kind is the astronomy of Copernicus and Kepler; once formulated and understood no one would think of contradicting X PREFACE it, though it may be corrected in details and developed. To the other belong all religious and speculative creeds, which are determined by a man's individual character, not by his know- ledge. One we call science, the other opinion. One is an intuition, the other a theory. One provides a secure basis for further advance; the other, in all objective enquiry, must be shunned as dangerous and slippery ground. Schopen- hauer's doctrine of the metaphysical nature of Will belongs to the first category, that of truths which, once correctly stated, take their place among the established data of science, and cannot be safely neglected in future enquiry. But it is just to this part of his doctrine that the great majority of his readers pay no heed. Most people read only to gain opinions, and so the few who read Schopenhauer at all are attracted to his more generally interesting doctrines of pessimism, of sympathy as the basis of morality, of ascetic negation, etc., all of which he has undoubtedly iUimiined with his dazzling intellect, but which are purely personal. Us views, and no more. On these it is the right, nay the duty, of every one to judge for himself, to refuse to accept them ready-made from the laboratory of any mind, however great ; for no two will think quite alike. Those who read to gain material for their own PREFACE xi minds to fashion will easily distinguish what is "clear and new and true" from what is personal. We can believe Newton's laws of motion, and yet doubt about the prophecies of Daniel and ' the Apocalypse. A conviction of the ideality of perception does not commit me to a belief in tar-water. The present work may be regarded as a con- tinuation of my Essay on Culture; as a further and fuller treatment of some of the problems there merely hinted at, especially of its central thought, the Unity of Will. To bring so vagt and comprehensive a doctrine, the outcome of many years of thought and observation, within the compass of a short volume was a work of no small difficulty. The need of conciseness, the novelty of the point of view, the obligation which I felt myself under of not trammeling the thought within rigid formulas of verbal expression; my determination to avoid all logical demonstration, and appeal only to the intelligent sympathy of the reader, not to his calculating reason, have, as I feel most painfully, rendered the course of the thought difficult to follow in its natural sequence. To assist the mind of the reader I have therefore added at the beginning a short summary of each study, and at the end of the book will be found a statement, in clear and simple language, of my xii PREFACE philosophic creed, intended, not as a list ot formulas or dogmas to be necessarily adopted by all, but as nuclei round which thought may be grouped ; living seeds to be planted in the garden of the reader's own mind. G. AINSLIE EIGHT. AUDISQTJES, September^ 1905. INDEX OF SUBJECTS I THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF PHILOSOPHY PAGE Philosophy has severed itself from daily life and set up a kingdom of its own, whereas the really great have always lived in sympathy with common things and common men. This is a misunder- standing of its purpose, and has resulted in philosophy and logic having fallen into the hands of an academic clique who use them for their own ends, not for the welfare of mankind. We must aim at intellectual self-government 1 II PHILOSOPHIC STANDPOINTS Illustrated by a comparison between Plato and Aristotle, or Darwin, Each speaks " truth," i,e. describes clearly what he sees ; but the view of each dififers with the standpoint . , . . 25 Appendix, On the notion of life 36 III PHYSICAL REALITY What our senses show in this world is Action, not Existence, We cannot perceive things apart from their activity. Creation is not static but dynamic 40 IV THE SEARCH FOR BEING Hitherto the reality of Being has been sought in two ways : (1) by observation, and experiment upon physical objects ; (2) dialecti- cally, by logical methods. The first leads finally to Chance, which is a negative notion — ^a nothing ; the second begins and ends in words. By neither method can we arrive at any useful result 53 xiii xiv INDEX OF SUBJECTS THE UNITY OF WILL FAOB The physical world is contained within, or surrounded by a meta- physical world. Every science begins and ends in metaphysical notions. This metaphysical world is Will, and is apprehended in the self-consciousness, in moments of exaltation and poetic dreaming, when it is felt to be One. Contemplated from the other side, whilst the attention is busy with external objects, it is not seen, and appears as a negative. Each world, the physical and the metaphysical, may show itself as either positive or negative, according to the attitude which we assume towards it; but the metaphysical is primary and fundamental; the physical grows therefrom 72 VI INSPIRATION Knowledge, in so far as it is fruitful, does not spring from examina- tion of the external features of things, but is an inspiration from the metaphysical world, and is communicable by sympathy alone 94 VII THE CEREBRAL MECHANISM Philosophy has hitherto assumed Mind to be the ruler of all things, and the source of knowledge. This cannot be, because tbe Eeason is eminently fallible, and the cause of all our errors. The mind is the brain, a purely mechanical apparatus, of ex- quisite delicacy and finish, for receiving and dealing with impressions in the service of the Will 112 Appendix. On positive and negative cognition .... 134 VIII THE ABERRATIONS OF THE MECHANISM Hysteria and Sophistry, the deadly evils of civilization . , .137 IX ROUTINE AND GENIUS There are two phases in human life : (1) Routine, carried on more or less automatically by the bodily machine ; (2) the genial INDEX OF SUBJECTS xv PAGE life of Inspiration. Routine, whicli makes up by far the greater part of life, may continue for a time, but cannot be sustained without some afflux of Inspiration. Even the humblest life draws perpetual nourishment from the metaphysical world . 153 X DEFINITION AND THE CRITERION OF TRUTH Logic is not a self-dependent science ; it needs a criterion lying beyond its own sphere, and inexpressible in words. The attempt to enforce strict definitions of words is futile, and has led to words becoming our masters 172 XI SOPHISTRIES OF SCIENCE Agnosticism is not the harmless creed that it pretends to be, but is eminently aggressive and intolerant. Above all it turns its back upon the one thing which has interest and value for human life, Inspiration, Not content with this it sneers at and persecutes all who try to bring this ineffable reality into notice. Words are only the instruments of our thought, and must be used as a mechanic uses his tools 200 XII SUB SPECIE AETERNITATIS To reach Truth the individual standpoint must be set aside, and things viewed from that of pure Being ; as they are, not as they appear to us. Logic will then teach Perspective, the absolute value of things, and Relevance, or their value relatively to any given purpose 221 FIRST PRINCIPLES 239 THE UNITY OF WILL I THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF PHILOSOPHY If it be true that philosophy begins in wonder, assuredly it ends in life. It has sadly fallen in honour since Plato wished that the governors of the State, the leaders of public action, should be philosophers. Long before Plato, indeed, as far back as the days of father Thales, we hear of witty Thraoian maids and others telling stories disre- spectful to the wise. But these were slaves, and it is natural to suppose that Plato's wish found response among educated Athenians of his day. To us it appears absurd ; not without reason, for it is undeniable that a *' lover of truth " would be very much out of place as the political head of affairs in the present order of society. People ask disparagingly: what is the use of philosophy? The question is itself one of the most philosophical that can be asked ; and if the philosophical specialist shrinks from putting it to himself, and evades the reply when directly chal- lenged, it is because he finds it too difficult. Let us, then, begin by understanding clearly what is 2 THE UNITY OF WILL meant by philosophy. Shortly and unteohnioally some one might answer that it means thinTcivg about a thing instead of doing it. And if we enquire more particularly what is " thinking," we shall find that the mind, directly it receives an impression, proceeds to classify it; that is, to arrange it under certain headings or groups, just as a large public office will arrange the letters pouring in miscellaneously by the post under head- ings : "traffic," " roUing-stock," "finance,*' etc. The human organism, like every other machine, is a contrivance for transforming energy received into useful work, and the purpose of the classifi- cation is — just as in the office — to facilitate the Work by arranging the confused mass of raw material in orderly form, that it may be more easily handled, and ready when wanted for use. Philosophy views the phenomena under simpler aspects, under higher concepts. The higher con- cept is always the simpler ; Le. it is made up of fewer attributes, whUe embracing a larger number of individuals. Classification is therefore a simpli- fication of thought. The process is exceedingly difficult to carry out weU, because of the number, on the one hand of the data, on the other of the necessary groups ; and we have to decide in each case which grouping will be most useful for our purposes. But it cannot be evaded; without it the data are useless. Nor in reality does any one ever attempt to dispense with its aid; all men philosophize more or less perfectly ; only a very wide difference exists between the crude, slovenly THE MISUNDERSTANDING 3 and unreliable generalizations of the soi-disant " practical" man, and those of the skilful thinker, marked by perfect adaptation to the end in view. This classification is the essence of abstract thought, or philosophy, and the important point which I wish to bring home is that it is not a tashy but a valuable, indeed indispensable, aid when the circumstances become too difficult to be dealt with directly. It does not, like scientific research, add to the raw material of our know- ledge, and therewith to our labour, but works up that which science has extracted from the quarry. The question as to the use of philosophy is thus easily answered : it is a labour-saving contrivance of the most powerful description. He who is able to take a truly comprehensive philosophic view of the material available for his life, is able to deal with a hundred or a thousand times as much as the one to whom each fact is a single detached item, to be treated on its own merits alone. One more point needs to be noticed. If I am conversing with an expert in any craft — suppose a singer — and begin to talk with him about abstract principles of music, he will probably reply that he is contented to take music as he receives it, to render it as best he can, but neither knows nor cares to know anything of its philosophy. With true instinct he recognizes that it lies beyond his sphere as an artist, and that attention to it might even dim the cJfearness of his art. As artist he feels that of the thing which he can do perfectly and well, no philosophy is needed ; the 4 THE UNITY OF WILL accomplished work carries its own credentials; its own beauty and harmony are the consumma- tion of philosophy, and their attainment has rendered needless the logical classifying process. Philosophy is not for the master but for the learner; it is a means to an end. Were the world nothing more than a machine, and fully revealed to us in all its parts, we might rest satisfied here, and discard philosophy altogether, resigning ourselves to the mechanical action of cause and effect. We might then also be content to die peacefully; for there would be no object for toil ; all our work would be finished. But it is not so. We are all learners ; we all, from in- sufficiency of knowledge, stumble and fail in the work which we undertake. So long as men are not finished artists, but are struggling for mastery over the technical means, so long will they, con- sciously or unconsciously, continue to seek for some philosophic scheme to guide their hands. If I wish to tunnel through a mountain, I shall begin by making surveys and calculations, and shall continue them as the work progresses, modifying and adjusting my conclusions with every new accession of data afforded by the work completed. Moreover, every workman, mechanical though his actual labour be under my direction, will reckon with himseK and direct his strokes in accordance with the nature of the rock before him and his previous experience, syllogizing thus with minor and major premiss in strict philosophic form. But when the work is finished the calculations THE MISUNDERSTANDING 5 are cast aside; the workman's difficulties with this piece of hard rock or that crumbling fault find a place in his stories of the past, only that small portion of them which has permanent value being stored as experience in his memory, to be used again as major premisses for future syllogisms when similar circumstances recur. By philosophy, therefore, we mean nothing more than skilful classification. It follows from the analysis we have just made that all those who call do the work which their hands find to do — or think they can — will find it a useless encumbrance, while those who are not easily inclined to feel satisfied with their own workmanship, who keenly feel its deficiences and desire to improve upon what they have done, will turn to philosophy for guidance. Those who look to no ideal beyond see nothing unfulfilled ; they are satisfied with having done their best, and desire no more. Our notion of philosophy clearly takes no account of any recognized philosophic systems, such as " materiaUsm," " idealism," " impres- sionism," "pessimism," "rationalism," "monism," and other technical formulas with which the earnest enquirer is at once confronted when he asks philosophy for its aid. I am ready to admit that each of these expresses a perfectly natural and healthful current of thought ; but they are not the truth, not philosophy. The truth is one and undivided; it knows neither systems nor schools. The systems are, many of them, mutually con- tradictory, and therefore, in so far, self -refuted ; 6 THE UNITY OF WILL but no honest thought is ever false. ^ These sys- tems each disclose one side of the truth, hut that side only, while they often deny or contradict that which they cannot see. This distinction between the subject in itself and the particular direction which it follows in the different schools is one which underlies aU speculative thought. When it is forgotten, as it very generally is in such regions, the enquiry gradually begins to claim an existence independent of its source, to seek its own purpose in itself, and to mistake its own un- verified inferences for the truth. By doing this it cuts itself off from the source of the only nourish- ment upon which thought can subsist; it must now sicken and die, though its withered form may remain to deceive those who seek only the outer shell, and care nothing for the animatiug soul. To speak without a figure, each philosophical school represents one possible classification of the phe- nomena of the world, which we know to be a useful, nay, a necessary process for the attainment of true insight, and rendering it available for action. But the schools commit the error of regarding the means — the formula — as an end in itself, instead of as a step towards the true end, which is Insight, itself again only a link in the chain, a means to the final end — ^Action. This 1 I do not count in this the thoughts of those who write or speak merely because their position requires it, or to earn a living. How many- are to be comprehended in this category, the reader must judge for him- self. Nor do I call honest the crude guesses and pretended explanations of physical phenomena which were in vogue among the later Greek sects, and more of the kind. THE MISUNDERSTANDING 7 explains why, in spite of the enormous mental activity of the present day, and of the excellent work which is constantly being produced, men have now no more definite notion of the purpose of their lives than they had a hundred years ago, and rather less than they had five hundred years ago, when they received their purpose ready made from the Church, but are sinking deeper and deeper into the morass of Agnosticism and Deter- minism — ^Negativism in all its Protean forms. Meanwhile, philosophy sits with her hands folded. Her ministers have nothing to offer but dry bones and the rags of her former splendour. It is this that I mean by the Misunderstanding of Philosophy ; the notion that it can thrive when severed from the soil from which it sprang, when it has become a formula instead of a helpful instru- ment for life. It is a misunderstanding of its purpose ; for philosophy is not sent into the world to occupy the minds of the idle with a pleasant stimulant, nor to enable scholars to earn a liveli- hood and reputation by retailing the vast mass of thought from past ages to students to learn by heart and put aside when they have finished their examination. Philosophy is not a plaything, but a reality rooted in life, and the humblest generaliza- tion of the mechanic who widens the scope of his activity by devising some new method of useful work, some finer adjustment or finish to the methods already known, is worth more for culture than all the lore poured out by a candidate for university honours, unless that lore has been 8 THE UNITY OF WILL assimilated into his life, to help him practicaUy in shaping his course, in foreseeing and surmount- ing the dangers which he wiJl have to encounter in his journey. I have heard it said, and the view finds some favour amongst the learned, that higher philosophy is above common things ; like higher mathematics it forms a world of its own, and thrives best wlfen kept unsoiled by the things of vulgar life. This view may recommend itself to the academical pro- fessor, whose authority as a law-giver depends upon the belief of men that he and his work are something higher than themselves ; nor need we deny it a certain truth in the philosophy of formulas, where the formula itself, the creed, is taken as a suflScient end. But in the higher and purer philosophy it is most directly and mis- chievously untrue. The truth, the one indivisible Truth, is rooted in human nature. Everything becomes degraded and at last perishes when severed from the nourishing soil of life, and it is as true of philosophy as it is of all science and aU art that directly it loses touch with the universal emotions of plain, unsophisticated humanity and falls into the hands of a professional coterie, it sickens. Accordingly we see how the sympathies of all the really great, aU with whom the individual interest vanishes beside the weal of mankind, lie with those aspirations and emotions which are the moving force of human effort, which mark the man, be he prince or labourer, artist or me- chanic, as an individual integer self-contained and THE MISUNDERSTANDING 9 self-sufficient amidst the universe ; their dominant passion is a consuming, never satisfied love of naive, unadorned human nature ; amidst the din of creeds and dogmas they hearken for " the still, sad music of humanity," So Socrates, a greater intellect and a greater man (though not a greater philosopher) than any of his disciples, was to be found, not in academies and learned institutions, but "in the public walks, the gymnasia and the markets, where all who would might listen " — just as Jesus Christ sat with publicans and sinners. So Eaphael, when wishing to convey his loftiest con- ception of divine mystery, chose as its vehicle that before which the coldest heart never failed to warm, the lovely face of a woman. In the beauti- ful statue before the theatre in Weimar Goethe stands with his feet firmly planted upon the earth, looking down on the human multitudes that pass below, while Schiller beside him looks with rapture up to Heaven. Goethe holds in his hand the laurel wreath, which Schiller only touches wistfully. All through the works of Eichard Wagner there runs like a ground-bass the passionate cry, not for the Ideals of music or art, not for philosophy, but for ''the purely human"; and his greatest triumph is that, however critics and musicians may rage, he has never failed to touch the heart of his public. These are some of the greatest, and I might have named many more. The keynote of every great life is the same ; yearning, longing for sympathy with mankind, passionate craving to draw men upwards. Never has it been more strongly or more lo THE UNITY OF WILL directly expressed than by Friedrich Nietzsche: "Man," he says, "is too beautiful for man to contemplate, and not only the moral man, but every man." Nothing could be further from me than a wish to popularize philosophy in the vulgar sense ; that is, lower it to the reach of unnurtured minds by shirking every difficulty and humouring the crude, xmdigested thought of indolent and half-hearted smatterers. It is not for philosophy to lower itself, but for men to look upwards, to understand its true teaching and rouse themselves to a higher way of life than the sordid, slovenly particularism which is the wretched product of our high-pressure industrial civilization. Above all, the student must put out of his mind the notion that philo- sophy can be learned, as history is learned, from a book, or by any easier or shorter method than that of his entire life. The proper purpose of a philosophical book is to put into clear logical form the ideas already present vaguely in the mind of the reader. The ideas must be there before the book is read. And why has philosophy fallen into dishonour ? Why, if it be such a powerful instrument, is it not used ? Practical men know better than to refuse any useful aid which is offered them, and if they reject philosophy it must be that they find in it nothing useful. The present age is by no means imphilosophical. Countless books are published, and on every side men are putting philosophical questions. The mass of material contkiually THE MISUNDERSTANDING ii accumulating through the activity of scientific research has to be dealt with systematically ; the ever-increasing pressure of the struggle for exist- ence threatens to sap the nerves and the life of communities ; now more than ever before is the co-operation of philosophy needed to support and perfect the empirical methods of the scientist. Why does philosophy withhold her hand and retire to the lecture hall, the scholar's study, the specialist's journal, there to sit smugly criticizing and sneering at the multitude struggling and dying beneath ? The answer is a very serious one, but it is inevitable. Philosophy is useless because it is false. This may seem like a rather bold statement ; but let us first ask whether it be true. If it is, we neglect it at our peril. If a canker is eating at the root of the tree, of what use are the beautiful blossoms? To save the tree we must not spare the disease. We must restate our formulas, "revalue all values." The great error which I believe vitiates philo- sophy, and is the cause of its utter barrenness, in view of the realities of life, is the false position assigned to Will. In modern theory Intellect or Mind is supreme; Will has become more and more refined away and minimized until its very existence has come to be questioned. Will is the originator of action, and if it be true that we are in the world to do^ and not to think^ the error of a philosophy which neglects the wiU is patent. The Intellect, which is simply the brain, an organ of 12 THE UNITY OF WILL the body, is its instrument, the servant which fulfils its behests. I need not trouble myseK with the demonstration of this, for nothing can be added to Schopenhauer's brilliant and masterly chapter quoted in the Preface, the fascinating interest of which is due to its lucid and convincing truth. But I must add, in opposition to Schopen- hauer, that from the supremacy of Will its freedom, as Will fer se follows directly. In asserting that philosophy has strayed into false paths, I am not making any extraordinary demand upon the credulity of my readers. I am not asking them to believe that modern philo- sophers are under the spell of some mysterious infatuation, or that they are all in a dark con- spiracy to lead men to the devil, and that we are to believe nothing that they say. I asserted a few pages back that no honest thought was ever false, and I am as little likely to accuse any indi- vidual enquirers of wilful perversion of the truth, as I am to overlook or disparage the beauty of a very large portion of their work. The doctrine that all mankind, or any considerable class of them, are fools may be left to others to hold ; I need no assumptions that are not in full accordance with everything we know of human nature, and the error which I have indicated will, when rightly understood, be found to be just what might have been predicted under the given conditions, and to be closely paralleled when similar circumstances have occurred in other afifairs. The delicate question, how far the philosopher THE MISUNDERSTANDING 13 is impelled by a love of abstract truth need not trouble us. It is perfectly certain that there exists in all inen one motive impulse which far outweighs every other, to which in fact all others are sub- servient ; namely, the love of power, the desire to become the lawgivers for the rest of mankind; nor are philosophers any different in this respect from other men. Now the department of human life with which the philosopher has to deal is Intellect, or, if we like, Miad — the two words mean the same thing ; what is more natural than that he should endeavour to exalt Mind, or Intellect, and ascribe to it supreme authority over all other things, even to invest it with a sort of unapproach- able sacredness, as a mystery high above the know- ledge of the vulgar, and not to be profaned ? And he can point to Mind itself, so conspicuously the director and designer of all created things, to sup- port his view ; or rather he will assume it to be self-evident and axiomatic. Descartes placed the " soul" in the pineal gland; even Newton believed it to be in the brain ; and thus we may trace the error from its origin with Anaxagoras, through all its stages down to the schools of the present day crowned by the dictum of Sir William Hamilton : — " In the world there is nothing great hut Man ; In Man there is nothing great hut Mind" This position is not only perfectly natural and logical, but it has every appearance of truth. The mind is the ostensible head and ruler of the human body, and therewith of the human universe. It is so in exactly the same sense as the political head 14 THE UNITY OF WILL of the Governmentjthe King, or Prime Minister, is the ruler of the country, inasmuch as all orders, all actions, seem to emanate from him. But, as the minister is himself the recipient of those orders from a still higher authority, the wiU of the country, the aggregate of the inhabitants, so the brain also receives its orders from the will of the body, the aggregate of all its parts ; each is fundamentally only the channel of communication between the will and the agents of its behests; the human mind is as completely the servant of the will as the minister is servant of the country. For ages men believed the " Prince " to be the supreme authority in the community, an authority against whom in the nature of things no appeal could lie ; nor were there wanting political philosophers to prove that the people existed for the sake of the prince, just as now there are others who believe the final purpose of human life to be^*Eeason." But political theory has since very clearly established the true relations between ruler and ruled; it is for us to understand that those between Mind and Body are precisely similar. I must here explain the sense in which I understand the word "Mind," which in English answers to the Latin mens or intellectus. The human organism is a machine for the transfor- mation of energy, and we must guard against confusing the material upon which it works with the mechanism itself. " Mind " and " Intellect " mean the Brain, the perceiving, understanding, THE MISUNDERSTANDING 15 remembering, and acting brain, in which all the senses are centred, from which all motor impulses issue. More particularly they often mean the human reasoning brain. Any meaning which they may be supposed to bear beyond that has been put into them by philosophers. They have nothing whatever to do with the creative power or energy which passes through the brain, to be arranged and disposed by its mechanism, and it is of the utmost importance that we should keep the two distinct. A simile will perhaps bring it clearly home. Suppose that I am walking through a country road, and beside me is a telegraph wire, leading, it may be, to a great capital close at hand. To my senses the wire is a very ordinary object, a simple thread of iron or copper; yet it is the vehicle of a vast and incomprehensible world of action, passing continually along its substance in the messages that it transmits. Invisible, intangible forces play about its molecules, with tales of battles and intrigue, of nations built up and ruined, of the great ocean of finance, where my eye can see nought but grey fibres of metal. Supposing my senses to be so refined and perfected that I could follow the detailed course of each cujrrent passing, see what happens with my own eyes, still they would tell me nothing about the surging action related in the messages, although these messages are indeed the final cause of the wire; its shape, dimensions, sub- stance, are determined by them, and without them i6 THE UNITY OF WILL the wire would not be there. So perfect is the interaction between the two that the message received at one end, after passing as it were out of existence into the mysterious substance of the metal, is duly discharged at the other, intact in every particular, exactly as it was received. The wire is the brain, including the nervous organism, receiving those unknown and incon- ceivable impressions which it discharges again as action. And as in common language we some- times transfer the name of the^ vehicle to the matter conveyed, and call the message itself a "wire," so by a process exactly analogous men have come to speak of the impulses conveyed by the brain, and of their source itseK, as " Mind," as though it originated these impulses. The static, rationalist, materializing tendency of modem thought lends its aid, and the vehicle comes to be confounded with the things which it conveys. "Mind" is used indifferently for three things which are quite distinct. 1. The action of the brain, perception, and movement. 2. One part of that action, the process of reasoning. 3. Will. It is true that several things may often be included under one term ; but supposing we were to confound under one name : 1. The metaUic wire. 2. The currents that pass. 3. The mes- sages which those currents convey — how would the science of telegraphy prosper with such a terminology ? Philosophy has to do with the mind alone, the vehicle, the mechanism. It cannot deal with THE MISUNDERSTANDING 17 the thing conveyed, because that is ineffable. There is no "mind" but the material organ which we call Brain, which is a pure machine — though one of inconceivable delicacy — performing purely mechanical tasks by processes of strict physical causality. Out of this initial misconception of the relation between Will and Intellect has ultimately sprung all the intellectual confusion which marks our time. I can here do no more than enumerate a few of the points in which modern thought appears to me to have gone astray in consequence. Their fuller discussion will be reserved for the following essays. From the assumption of the Primacy of Mind the step is a very short one to supposing that the objects contemplated by the mind are the only things worthy of consideration; that the world of sense and reason, the physical world, is the only reality, and forms a system closed and complete in itself, self-sufficient and self-existing. Now it is a truth attested by a thousand facts of daUy observation that the various parts of the physical world, when left to pursue their own course, tend always to come into conflict together and destroy each other; in other words the physical world per se is self-contradictory and self-destructive. It was the consciousness of this universal truth that inspired the ancient rishis of India, and is clearly distinguishable beneath its Oriental dress in the Upanishads and Ved^nta Commentaries, where also the foundations of a more truthful and logically consistent way of c i8 THE UNITY OF WILL thought are laid. A philosophy which acknow- ledges only the physical world as real, must there- fore fall to pieces, as ours has done, by ending in the negative creeds of Agnosticism, Scepticism, or what is worse than either, and their inevitable outcome — Sophism. Another great and almost universal misconcep- tion is with regard to the nature of knowledge and belief; the notion that any processes within the brain can bring new knowledge, except with re- spect to the forms of the brain itself. The inherent defect in the form of the syllogism has long ago been recognized by logicians, who have consequently several times tried to set aside the syllogism as the form of reasoning ; but this is im- possible, for every argument is in form a summary of syllogistic processes which can easily be laid out in full. Now the reasoner may without difficulty veil his process, and make it appear as if he were stepping by irrefragable arguments to a conclusion of established certainty. What cannot, however, be concealed is that the conclusions drawn from the same premisses, and put forward as demon- strated truth by various champions of reason, not only disagree, but actually contradict each other ; the multitude in their intellectual bewilderment draw the sophistical conclusion that men beheve what they wish to believe, and that there is no real truth. Very closely connected with this is the erro- neous notion of the logical definition. Nothing is more severely insisted upon in scientific discourse THE MISUNDERSTANDING 19 than the rigid definition of terms. This is of course perfectly just ; we must define our terms if we wish to know what we are talking about ; but another canon of logic, quite as important, is regularly overlooked in practice, the rule, namely, that nothing must be defined or spoken about until we know that it actually exists. Hence it is easy to deduce the futility of the dialectical treatment of things which lie beyond the range of experi- mental science, and therewith of all purely specu- lative reasoning. A fourth most vital weakness of logic lies in the necessary exclusion of all attributes which cannot be expressed in words. Many of our finest perceptions are too subtle for either definition or naming, and yet are perceived just as distinctly and certainly as the grosser namable qualities. I hope to show in a later essay that it is just from these subtle perceptions that the most valuable material for our life is drawn, and that the ethical value of life is directly measured by the extent to which they enter into the effective cognition. The neglect of them cannot fail to have a debasing influence upon human life and thought. A much less obvious, because deeper-lying mis- conception is the modern view of Universals. A sharp line of demarcation has been drawn between the Particular and the Universal, and owing to the emphasis laid under high conditions of civilization upon the principium individuationis^ the universal has come to be regarded as in some measure an 20 THE UNITY OF WILL artificial product of the mind. The antithesis is perhaps necessary in logic, but no such sharp boundary line exists in nature. The entire world, as well as each of its parts, is an organism, all working together towards a common end, each part dependent upon every other, and the whole upon each part ; it lives perpetually reproducing itself ; it is a unity amidst multiplicity ; its inner harmony is the outcome of inner conflict. In the strictest sense there is no such thing as a single individual ; all are parts of a whole. This is all that we can say at present, and I will add, that of the three possible positions : Universalia ante rerrij Universalia in re and Universalia post rem^ all equally defensible, the modern mind, under the sway of logic, has adopted the last, the lowest and most crass of the three ; for it founds religion upon reason ; it declares God to have been made by man. I have only been able to indicate some of the points on which I differ from the current views on logic ; most of them wiQ be more fully considered in the later essays. They may all be said to centre in the wrong conception of the definition, and this again originates in the desire to make logic the ruler, instead of the servant of our life, to look to it for the discovery of truth. The question is not whether logical inference is useful or not. Of its usefulness as a mental instrument there can be no doubt whatever. The very last thing that I wish to be understood to mean is that I would have logic set aside or abased. I wish the very con- trary, that it should receive more honour than it THE MISUNDERSTANDING 2t does now, should not be a term of reproach, but should be held in worth instead of being foolishly- worshipped, and as fooKshly denounced when in- convenient. Logic is to action what rhythm is to music ; it is its backbone, and the most powerful weapon that we possess against the intellectual vagabondism, which is one of the greatest evils of our time ; against sentimental pretence, im- posture, hypocrisy, SchwdrmereL The best evidence of the barrenness of modern philosophical thought, especially in England, is the representative literature, the text-books of Mental Science, Psychology, Logic, etc., which students and candidates for public examinations are con- demned to read, A more dismal wilderness than is presented by such literature could hardly be imagined. Very little is to be found in them beyond interminable strings of trivial technicalities, of no use to any one, and with a new term for every new relation supposed, however unimportant. The false and vicious method of these works is like that of a person trying to teach a language by means of a compendious Grammar, giving an exhaustive logical account of every trifling phrase or idiom, or turn of speech; the student is as little likely to gain a real insight, a living picture of the working of the mind from such books as he would be to learn a language from such a Grammar. Every one who has learned a language knows what a very little way grammar can bring him. It is a useful framework to rest the coarser members of the structure upon ; the finer details of a science 22 THE UNITY OF WILL teach themselves by familiar intercourse, and long practice ; their deKcate texture will not endure the rough treatment of a text-book. A science which is dull is false ; not only erroneous but mischievous. For example, if we want to know the goal of life we may read (I open a book at random) that : " The highest condition of well-being is to have as many actual delights as possible, interpolated by ideal satisfactions/' What could be more false or per- nicious ? Or again, an emotion which is surely of interest enough to deserve some attention from the philosopher, both for its own sake and because of the incalculable mischief which ensues from its being misunderstood, is that of sympathy ; so any one who wishes to know something about it may learn that, ** Sympathy is the vicarious and self- sacrificiQg impulse of our nature, in opposition to the self-seeking or seK-regarding impulse." This is a truly astonishing perversion ; it is difficult to find words to do justice to the attitude of mind which regards sympathy, the highest affirmation of existence, as a form of self-sacrifice ! Such is the result of a philosophy which views human life as an incoherent aggregate of single elements. But what shall we say to the following very simple directions for determining action, recommended by no less a man than Benjamin Franklin in a letter to Priestley? "My way is, to divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two columns ; writing over the one pro and over the other con ; then, during three or four days' consideration, I put down, under the different heads, short Mats of the different THE MISUNDERSTANDING 23 motives, that at different times occur to me, for or against the measure. When I have thus got them altogether in one view, I endeavour to estimate their respective weights ; and when I find two (one on each side) that sum equal, I strike them both out. If I find a reason pro equal to some two reasons con^ I strike out the three . . . and thus proceeding, I find out where the balance lies ; and if after a day or two of further consideration, nothing new that is of importance occurs on either side, I come to a determination accordingly." It is difficult to conceive how any man could seriously contemplate the possibility of actions being determined in such a way by any higher being than Goethe*s Homunculus. Where is such teaching likely to lead the young Indian civilian, or the young University graduate who receives it for his intellectual nourishment ? One of two things must necessarily happen ; either he will look upon the knowledge taught him as a mere meaningless pretence, — which, to do him justice, is what he generally thinks — ; or he wiU surely grow into a self-righteous, conceited prig. Can we say that this is contradicted by experience ? I am convinced that no philosophy can really live which does not recognize creation as a united whole, of which the different individuals, of what- ever kind, both " living " and " dead " are the parts, animated by the same breath, tending towards the same purpose. In this summum genus all classifica- tion must find its beginning. To treat the single individuals as separate, isolated beings, and account 24 THE UNITY OF WILL for them by a bald enumeration of their character- istics and relationships, is not philosophy at all, and gives no help to any one ; it throws no light upon human life. The starting-point of philosophy must be the knowledge that all things are one. Of that universe each individual is, through his mind, his cognition, the centre for himself; and the further proceeding of philosophy will be to trace the relations of each phenomenon to the whole by first observing their relations to himself. Then we shall have living thought instead of dead doctrine. The Hamiltonian ^ctum will assume a humbler form : — " Man exists only as a part of the great Universe ; in hiimelf he is nothing. In Creation there is nothing real hut Will" The craving to understand the world around us is rooted very deep in man; because there is no act of our lives which does not involve and illustrate the deepest principles, or that can be rightly executed where the foundations are insecure. In a word, you must understand if you would love. I know that a whole army of lovers and enthusiasts will rise up against me, but I repeat it with surest confidence, that where you do not understand you are loving a mere phantom of your own creation, and your love, however vehement, is mere affecta- tion, sentimentality ; it will break down under the stress of actual life. This is the sublime moral of Lohengrin. Blsa is too truthful, too noble to love where she does not understand. II PHILOSOPHIC STANDPOINTS All truth is relative to a standpoint. Ontology, the notion of fundamental reality, is not a science, but a point of view, a basis for philosophy to rest upon. Charles Darwin, at the opening of his work on the Origin of Species ^ cites a passage from Aristotle's Physics, where the doctrine seems to be advanced that the continued action of natural forces working through chance is able to bring forth organisms fitted to an end, as we see them in nature. The conception of Chance as an active creative force is, I need hardly say, of great antiquity, and was definitely accepted as a doctrine by more than one philosophical school, especially those who drew, or at least tried to draw, the data from their thought directly from the phenomena of nature. It is what we should expect ; for no one can watch nature attentively without becoming convinced that at least a great many of the most important and striking achievements are accomplished by circumstances altogether fortuitous. So we find in later Greek and Eoman statues Tyche, or 25 26 THE UNITY OF WILL Fortuna, is represented as holding a cornucopia and a rudder, emblematic of productiveness and guidance. In modern times most of the funda- mental phenomena of physical science are explained by a hypothesis of chance events taking place, and certain in the long run to ensue by the law of probability, the most certain of all law, even though it is perfectly understood that nothing is physically uncaused, and that Chance is a function of the human mind.^ And when we want to know something more about this all-powerful Creator, Aristotle will perhaps tell us that it is jSiv Kara crv/t^e^T^fcos atrtW, which is like saying in English : Chance is Accident. Identical propositions of this sort are not uncommon in Aristotle ; the explana- tion is to be found in his standpoint, which I will contrast with that of Plato. It has been said that Aristotle looked towards the outer world, while Plato drew upon his own mind, and evolved his philosophy therefrom. This is scarcely a correct description. Plato, also, like his master Socrates, looked to the world around him, but in a different way from Aristotle. For we may notice how Plato in the course of his argument is always turning to interrogate the objective world, as for example in the superb passage in the Timaeus (29 A) where he asks the decisive question: Is this world beautiful or the reverse? On this depends everything. It is beautiful; therefore . . • etc. It is true that his Ideas are mental abstractions, but they do » Mill, Logic, in. ch, 17. PHILOSOPHIC STANDPOINTS 27 not remain mental, and his philosophy is in one sense as objective as that of Aristotle. On the other hand Aristotle very frequently draws upon his own mind, as for example when he makes politics a branch of ethics, in defiance of facts which must have been as well known to him as they were to Macchiavelli or Buckle. Any object — for instance a ship — may be observed in two different ways. One person may watch her approaching into sight from a distance, always seeing the entire ship more and more distinctly, but never able to distinguish her parts very clearly. Another wiU go on board and examine her timbers, decks, cabins, can if he please count every nail in her, without ever seeing the entire ship. One will infer the details from the whole ; the other will construct the whole from its parts. Each observer, although con- templating the same object, sees quite different things ; but there is a certain common ground on which they meet, the borderland between percep- tion and inference, or reason, that is between certainty and uncertainty, and here it is not un- likely that they wUl seem to conflict. The two observers represent respectively the standpoints of Plato and Aristotle. Plato always looks at the world as a whole, often seeming to overlook, perhaps purposely, a hundred practical details which would cloud or confuse the general view, but which are very obvious to us from our more commonplace standpoint. Aristotle, on the other hand, looks first to these particulars, endeavouring 28 THE UNITY OF WILL by classification and judicious systemization of them to arrive at general statements of universal validity. The two travel as it were from opposite sides, to meet or approach each other in the middle, and we often feel that Aristotle is perhaps not so far from his master as he himself supposes. Our own physical universe is enclosed and hemmed in on every side by the Eternal. Every object of our knowledge, every impulse of our lives, every science, every art begins and ends in Infinity. The chemist's Atoms^ the physicist's Force^ the biologist's Life are alike incompre- hensible; all attempts to accoimt for them fail. History begins with the gods. The aims of our lives are unknown and infinite, we tend we know not whither ; the end of Ethics, the definition of the word Ought, is ineffable. Priests and prophets, speaking the universally understood language of myth, tell of a future life of justice and retribu- tion; but it is beyond our knowledge; what we see is but the shadow of Something^ eternal, incom- prehensible. The world is like a garden encircled by a dark, impenetrable pathless jungle, out of which it has been cleared, and whence its flowers and its soil have come. Plato stands on the margin of the forest, peering into its depths, hoping somewhere to descry the eternal Ideas whence the things of the garden have sprung, that he may add to and ennoble the strains with new blood drawn from their ancient home. But dazzled with the glory of what lies beyond, he will sometimes be in doubt. Aristotle, on the other PHILOSOPHIC STANDPOINTS 29 hand, remains in the clear light of the garden ; whenever he finds himself approaching the bonnds of the trackless region beyond he stops short and retraces his steps. Often he must return to the spot whence he started, and accordingly we find him abruptly closing his argument with an identical proposition, bending it back upon itself. Hence the lesson may be drawn that if you determine to remain entirely within the sphere of the physical world you must contradict yourself in the end; a doctrine entirely verified by experience. Aristotle, however, lived at too early an epoch of science to establish his position. The stand- point which he represents needs to rest upon a large accumulation of well-established facts, such as we only possess in modern times. The true antithesis to Plato is Charles Darwin, whose thought is the outcome of a minute, long continued scrutiny of a vast multitude of correlated particular facts, all securely established and so overwhelming in their number that to them the facts known to Aristotle must seem as a Child's Guide to a Cyclopaedia. The first fact which the modern naturalist notices on examining the endless array of pheno- mena before him, is that each seems to have a special function in the mechanism of the universe ■ a function to which its organs are perfectly adapted, so that the conclusion at first forces itseK upon him that the whole must have been contrived by a divine artificer of infinite know- ledge and technical skill. The mythic language of ancient thought called this demiourgos a Mind so THE UNITY OF WILL and philosophers have ever since striven to empha- size a notion so favourable to their own authority ; the important point is not whether the construc- tive agency is a Mind, that is to say something analogous to a human brain, but that it is One. The fact that this was recognized in the very beginning, and that mythology in its wildest flights has never departed from it, is supremely important. The second observation which the modern inquirer will make is that all these phenomena are linked together by common attributes in practically unbroken succession. Further, they are observed to be, by virtue of these bonds, massed in numerous groups, so disposed that the smaller groups are again comprehended under larger ones, these again under still larger, and so on, until at last all are united into a few capital Orders. From these facts, and others of a similar character, Darwin has constructed his well-known history of creation. His special doctrine only concerns "living" organisms, but we may extend the field when con- sidering the universe at large. Science has drawn a sharp line of distinction between " living " matter and " dead," thereby hampering itself with a most unnecessary and troublesome limitation. It is only of late years that the hard and fast barrier drawn between the psychic life of animals and that of man has been partly given up. In the early stages of science such artificial classifications are often useful and necessary, but they may become a hindrance if too much reliance is placed PHILOSOPHIC STANDPOINTS 31 on them, and it is often diflficult to get rid of pre- conceived notions which we have been accustomed to regard as fundamental. When we look at the extremes, no doubt the life of an animal and the deadness of a stone are very different things ; but it is not possible to draw a line where the one begins and the other ends, and the distinction does not lie in the eternal order of things ; like all conventions it must be discarded when not ' required. There is no break in nature. Herbart calls it a misuse of words to speak of the world as being alive ; it is no more than that ; a matter of the use of a word. It is true that no indubitable instance of the production of living beings from dead matter has yet come within our experience, but that does not disprove abiogenesis. Science has only shown that in the very limited means at our disposal, and within the, very minute periods of time over which our experiments extend, we have no results to show ; but abiogenesis has cer- tainly not been proved impossible by the grand methods of nature, nor in the seons through which she operates. The standpoint of modern science, so extended, with respect to ontology is therefore thus : Although we have no right on scientific grounds alone to assume as an estabhshed fact the origin of the entire physical world in an ultimate unit, or to use a very common mythic metaphor, a world-egg, yet we may say that scientific thought starting with objectivity will unmistakably tend towards some such conclusion ; the exact nature of that 32 THE UNITY OF WILL unity and the processes through which it gave birth to a world are inscrutable, since they lie within that outer metaphysical region, of which scientifically we know nothing. The order of nature in the objective world precisely corresponds to that of the mind or human brain, in its power of classification; each particular of nature is ranged as one of a species or as a concept under a higher or wider group or concept, this again under one still higher, until we arrive at a first origin which is the Unity of Nature on the one hand, and the sjmthetic Unity of Apperception on the other. Unity is as fundamental in the creed of the Darwinian as it is in that of the Platonist. We may, however, take up different ground and start from the Unity itself. Let us sup- pose an original primordial immaterial pattern, an Idea contemplated by a mind, as a rhythmic movement. Further, let this primordial Idea be capable of reproducing itself in offspring which shall again be self-reproductive in the same way without limit. The rhythmic offspring will be completely and easily intelligible to the mind through its forms of Time and Space, but, con- tinuing to multiply, the different Ideas will coUide with each other, producing cross-rhythms, then conflict, and at last discord — for the present only potential, since there is no material vehicle to give them body. Each is a member of an ideal hierachy or genealogical tree, traceable through complex ramifications back to an original parent of all, which is One. The rhythms of the generator PHILOSOPHIC STANDPOINTS 33 and of its first offspring will necessarily be those known as simple harmonic vibrations^ differentiated in only two respects: (1) periodicity, ;' (2) ampli- tude. But with the collisions and consequent cross-rhythms, there appears a new feature, (3) wave-form, and through this last arise innumerable varieties of new forms in endless perplexity, but orderly and intelligible to an organism designed to receive the impression. Hence the variations. The world we have now reached is not yet the objective universe, but music, in the wider Greek sense of the word, potentially entire, with all its multifold wealth of melody, dissonance resolved, and harmony, as we know it in nature. We do not need to follow it now, since it remains resting upon itseK and unproductive. We have merely to note the fact, already recognized by many, that the roots of the objective world lie in musical relations, in harmony and melody, just as the roots of language lie in song.^ And music in its own peculiar method of variation affords us a picture of the world of the highest scientific and educational value. When this rhythmic world of Ideas is awakened by the magic touch of Matter, the objective physi- cal world springs into being. Ehythmic vibration now becomes Causality, for all action is rhythmic,^ although the vibrations have become so blurred and disturbed as to be hard to recognize. Each * Darwin, Descent of Man^ ch. xix. 2 Spencer, First Principles^ II. ch. x. See also Dr. Karl Bucher, Arbeit und Ehythmus, Leipzig, 1899. D 34 THE UNITY OF WILL Idea, the more simple and primary as well as the complex and derivative, will project itself objec- tively, producing many forms, all reflections of the pattern, but differing again with the cross-rhythms and modifications which they receive from colli- sions with other ideas, and so tending to vary themselves, and in their offspring, in accordance with their environment. According to whichever of these two stand- points we adopt the things immediately seen will be different, but as the search advances they will draw nearer until at last they meet. The con- summation of knowledge would be when both parties see alike. Science is only at present begin- ning from the objective side, as is evident from its destructive and critical attitude towards the other side, theology. For physical science at the present day is far more concerned to destroy theology altogether than to purify it and find a common meeting-ground. And so it may be noticed that many of the arguments upon which it reHes for its authority are only valid as against current theology, and lose their truth when stated abso- lutely, as for example that nature must be studied objectively, by observation and experiment ; that tradition is of no account, and much more. It is the same world which we contemplate ideally hprioriy and empirically through the senses from the particular objects. However different they may at first appear, we at last come to the same reahty. The question, What is Eeality ? must precede every other ; one might be tempted PHILOSOPHIC STANDPOINTS 35 to suppose that until it had been answered no philosophy would be possible. Yet there is scarcely any word of which the meaning is more uncertain. It must be held in mind throughout these studies that Eeality appears different according to the point of view from which things are regarded, but that the difference is not fundamental, and dis- appears when we contemplate things as they are in themselves, and see beneath their delusive appearances. To assert that the reality of the world is only that which can be seen from one standpoint, or from another, is unphilosophical and untrue, and it is the mistake made by the Ist-ites and party leaders of our day. The hypo- thesis that mankind has lived in utter darkness and ignorance ; that all its knowledge was self- delusion; that it has been under the ban of a hideous and wicked monster called Eeligion, con- jured up from nowhere by priests, a monster which it has been the special merit of our own time to drive from the earth, is, I do not hesitate to say, the most preposterous and gigantic absurdity that was ever believed. Yet it is the fashionable doc- trine of modern science ; openly, even clamorously asserted by some ; tacitly, perhaps unwillingly accepted by others, who feel indeed that some sort of theology or metaphysic is needed, but make it of no account by declaring it for ever excluded from human knowledge. It may be that Christi- anity is doomed, it may be that we are all to be- come rationalists ; or it may be that the twentieth century will demohsh both and offer something 36 THE UNITY OF WILL new. In any case the declarations of science will not alter the course of nature, but can only in- terpret what has happened. What the world has now to seek is a position from which it may survey all the standpoints and find their common factor ; a higher ground than that of party contention. APPENDIX TO II ON THE NOTION OF LIFE As I foresee the likelihood of considerable difficulty arising in the minds of some readers through my hypothesis — from which I see no way of escape — that everything in the world, including those objects which we are accustomed to look upon as " inanimate," is in a certain sense alive; that no recognizable gap exists between the rock, the plant, and the animal, it will be well for me to explain more fully than I was able to do in the text, the sense in which this is meant. My view is now commonly regarded as " ex- ploded; " I am aware that — like perhaps much more that I have written — it is unfashionable ; and it is right that I should give clear reasons why I feel it necessary to depart from the orthodox doctrine. First let us well understand that the issue only concerns the meaning of a word, i.e, a convention ; for there is no natural law to prescribe the use of a word in one way rather than in another. In general those who wish to em- phasize the agreements between any groups of phenomena PHILOSOPHIC STANDPOINTS 37 will include them under a common name, while those who wish to dwell upon their differences will separate them by using different names. To a writer, therefore, who expressly wishes to elucidate the Unity of all creation, who believes that modern thought has erred disastrously through having neglected that underlying unity, it may be permitted to depart somewhat from the accepted terminology. The strongest objection in the minds of most readers will be that the word "life" is already in common use, and well understood ; the right of any person to put his own connotation upon a familiar word will be questioned. To this as a general principle I am willing to attach very great weight indeed, and wish that it were more generally observed. But I reply that in the present case : fiirst, the words "life '* and " death " are not well understood ; biology itself can give me no definition of them ; secondly, that I have a deliberate purpose in wishing to extend their range, because I believe that great confusion is caused by their present misuse. The reason why the extension of our concept of "life" to include the action of stones, moun- tains, rivers, races of men, institutions, religions, customs, to everything that comes into being, acts and perishes — appears objectionable to many, is that it is unfamiliar ; but I deny that in actual practice it is so strange and unusual as is generally supposed. The very finest and most subtle minds, especially the poets, habitually speak and act as if everything appeared to them to be alive, and the technical language of the skilled artisan is full of anthropomorphic expressions, betraying how such men really feel towards the materials of their art; so true it is that artificial formulas and logic, though they may alter the expression, are powerless to permanently deceive the mind. But we have under the teaching of science learned to look upon poetry as a gilded plaything : to believe that a thing may be untrue and yet poetically beautiful. For those who can after full consideration and due understanding of all its 38 THE UNITY OF WILL bearings, deliberately accept this position, I write in vain. For myself no weight of scientific authority could ever persuade me to admit such a contradiction. I hope it will not be supposed that I am trying to foist any notions of occult powers into our views of creation. I have stated what it is that I wish to show, and the unity of things is plainly visible to all who look for it. In saying that the issue is merely one of the meaning of a word, I do not in the least intend to undervalue its importance. A word, it is true, is only a convention, but so are all the practical data of our social life conventions. The broad rule is that a convention may be abrogated provided that the advantages to be thereby gained greatly outweigh those of its retention. I do not, however, wish the present scientific meanings of the words to be abrogated. That would be absurd ; they are most useful as they are. But words are elastic, and may be used with different meanings, according to the purpose of the speaker. Science calls it an abuse of language to use them in any other sense than its own, that it may bring the mind of men into subjection by gaining the control of its most powerful weapon, and we have learned to look upon " dead " things as having only calculable properties ; to suppose that we can press them into our service, and by purely mechanical means force them to do whatever we wish; to forget that each thing, even the deadest, has a character of its own, in some respects incalculable, and must therefore be treated in so far as living. Every engine-driver, every watch- maker, every cook or blacksmith knows that his material must be "humoured;" that it will not always yield to simple mechanical handling, but must be treated in some sort as if it were living. And just in the appreciation and intelligent humouring and coaxing of these subtle qualities lies the higher art of managing things, and getting them to work smoothly and harmoniously. The skilled engine-driver feels towards his engine and speaks of it as the sailor does of his ship, as if it were a living thing, PHILOSOPHIC STANDPOINTS 39 and in doing so adds not to the picturesqueness alone, but also to the accuracy and intelligibility of his language. This truth will hold good however words be used or misused, and it is this that I am trying to enforce. There is in everything an element of mystery, a manifest tie binding it to the metaphysical world which, though we recognize, we cannot fully understand nor speak about ; and I hope in the course of these papers to show that this incommunicable mystery and living force in things is just that which is important for the higher action of our lives, and to the neglect of which Eationalism owes its bhghting influence. Ill PHYSICAL REALITY The objects of philosophical enquiry are three : — 1. The existing order of nature ; that which is and acts. 2. Perception ; our knowledge of the action, 3. Language ; our expression of the knowledge. The second and third of these are functions of the human subject. The second cannot exist without the first ; we cannot perceive what is not there. But Illusion is a shadow imitating the form of perception without its substance- The third, Language, is not dependent upon either of the other two ; it is unsafe to infer either existence or the perception of existence from words alone. This might perhaps be taken for a truism, were it not that we are bound by the conditions of human existence to leave it in some degree neglected. Under the circumstances in which we live we cannot help very often inferring both knowledge and existence from words. Thought and Mind are not elementary con- cepts of existence. Thought is a function of the animal mechanism, and a philosophy which mixes 40 PHYSICAL REALITY 41 up cogitan with esse must for ever remain incom- prehensible. Nor do Mind and Intellect exist in the sense understood by many philosophers. There is a Braiuy with its dependent nervous organism, an elaborate mechanism for the transformation of energy, i,e. for converting an impression into a different action, a focus of causality ; and Thought is its activity, consisting of three parts : Percep- tion, Eeason (or Syllogizing) and Action, one lead- ing to the other and inseparable. Through its forms — Time, Space, and Causality — the mind contemplates the world as an orderly and intelli- gible whole. The deepest consciousness of the human soul is of something which is not in time, but endures unscathed through Eternity, and this, from the first dawn of reflection, it calls Eeal. But on turning to the things of the world around, the enquiring mind finds nothing that answers to this condition. It investigates the elements from which the things are supposed to be made, but with better knowledge water, air, earth, fire, all have in turn to be discarded as perishable and fleeting. So it flnds itself before the paradox that Reality does not exist, a paradox which has never been solved, for however the thought be obscured in its expression, it contains a profoimd truth, perplexing enquiry throughout its whole course, and threatening its results directly they are established. If this is really the final answer, the only solu- tion of which the problem of existence is capable. 42 THE UNITY OF WILL then, indeed, we are nothing; then heaven and earth, and all the universe, and ourselves, are a mere delusion of sense. The human mind has never been able to rest satisfied with such a con- clusion. Never in history have nihihsm and atheism been able to hold their own for any length of time — for the pristine atheism of Buddhism never had any life.^ Something men will ever seek, some stable First Cause and Final Cause of the seething action ; and this, under whatever form conceived, they will call God, and will worship in such way as they find most natural ; some by ritual and sacrifice, others by purity of life and strict obedience to duty, others again by enthu- siasm and burning love. For the question of real Being is the question of God and of revelation. I presume that a truth which was perfectly clear to so very unmetaphysically-minded a people as the ancient Jews in the time of Moses {Exodus iii. 14) does not need any demonstration. The shirking of the question is full of peril. For the restless human mind, with its feelers always spread for new food, will not be content to starve itself with innutritions negatives, but having once resigned itself to agnosticism will infallibly pass on to sophism, the most deadly disease of philosophy, raging at the present day as it did in Athens, and perhaps in an even more insidious form, since it does not show itself openly, and infects not alone ^ I mean that it did not remain Atheism^ but soon became unconscious worship of the personality of the Blessed One, and at last the crassest idolatry. PHYSICAL REALITY 43 the recognized leaders of thought, but also the current thought of society at large, and especially those more richly gifted among private individuals who to-day exercise an intellectual authority over their fellows which the schools have lost. Yet deep as we must acknowledge the problem of real Being to lie, intimately as it enters into every thought of our lives, into every notion of ethics and cognitioUj we must not mistake its significance, nor attribute to it an authority different from that which it really possesses. Its scope does not extend beyond our own minds. It is sometimes not imnecessary to remind philo- sophers that the course of nature is not dependent upon our cognition, and that the world will con- tinue to revolve whether we predicate reality of it or not. We saw in our comparison of Plato and Aristotle that either ideas or particulars may be taken as the fixed starting-point of the enquirer ; whichever he choose all other things will in his thought he urireal^ which sufficiently explains why we find the question so troublesome, when treated as one of absolute truth. It is not a question of absolute, but of relative truth, of obtaining a fixed point of departure. The physicist who has to deal with a number of complex forces acting in different directions and in different points, in order to bring them into a convenient and intelligible form before his mind, and to judge of their net result, assumes conven- tionally a point of origin through which every force is supposed to act. He is free to choose it 44 THE UNITY OF WILL wherever he pleases ; the action of the forces and their resultant will be the same. He does not suppose the reality or unreality of his forces to depend in any way upon his choice of an origin. But for the calculation it makes a very great differ- ence whether the origin be a point round which all the forces group themselves simply and natu- rally so as to be easily compounded, or whether it be one from which they appear even more confused and perplexing than they were before. So with the reality of the world. Things themselves care nothing how we define their names. The defi- nition is only important for the investigation immediately in hand, and so long as this continues it must be kept stable. Many writers of our time, neglecting this truth in their endeavours to effect a meaningless compromise between things opposed and incompatible, compound a mixture, with now a little Idealism, now a little Eealism, as each may be required, reminding one of the prescrip- tions of druggists for the woes of the body, and about equally useful. The whole difficulty of the problem rests upon a misunderstanding. It assumes that stable Being is itself an object of enquiry. It never can be in science ; we do not know things in themselves, but only their changing attributes. In ancient times the assumption of static existence as a known reaHty ended in the paradoxes of Zeno, said, though it seems scarcely credible, to have been taken quite seriously even by some eminent minds in modern times. To us they possess importance of PHYSICAL REALITY 45 another kind ; we must view them as barriers marking the end of thought along that path of enquiry. Zeno's paradoxes, so far as they mean anything at all, are the logical expression of the fact that static existence, whether we choose to call it real or unreal^ is not a proper subject of scientific enquiry, and the attempt to draw any inferences from it will fail. Soon after Zeno another school of thinkers struck out a new path, still of the same enquiry into substantial existence, conceiving material bodies to be made of minute grains or atoms. Whether there be atoms or not, the enquiry in this direction has certainly been fruitful in modem chemistry and physics. But already light had appeared from another side. Herakleitos of Ephesos, surnamed by the people **the Obscure," but profoundly studied by Plato, was the first to formulate the doctrine of movement and change as the universal character- istic of things ; to show that their essence lies in action and reaction, that Strife is the true father and sovereign of the world. How entirely he realized the full consequences of his position is evident from his censure of Homer's prayer that strife might vanish among gods and men, on the ground that "then all things would pass away/' Wherever philosophical or scientific enquiry has since been productive, it has followed this great thought of Herakleitos ; for even modem theories of atoms are not static, but dynamic. Whether we prefer to regard them as centres of force, or as vortices, still we are only considering their action. 46 THE UNITY OF WILL Of what the force ? of what the vortex ? These questions still remain, and we are not one step nearer to their solution now than when we were content to accept them as grains of " matter ; " we know no more than did Demokritos what they are. The physical world is active and ever-changing ; its work is accompKshed by Strife — Struggle for Existence, Victory, and the Survival of the Fittest ; and though we see its pristine unity split up into numberless individuals of more or less permanence, the permanence is only relative, never real ; indi- viduality is as transient as the wave on the surface of the waters. Existence is in our order secondary ; its final cause is action. Things do not act, men do not labour primarily in order to exist, but they exist in order that they may act. Steam in a boiler is not in the first instance oxygen and hydrogen, but an elastic medium under pressure. Gunpowder is not a mixture of nitre, sulphur, and charcoal, but an accumulation of gases in a small volume in unstable equilibrium ; man is not bom a moral being, but a very elaborate machine for transforming energy; human life is not a state, but a course of training; every animal, every plant, is in a process of development, and never at two periods in every respect the same. In no other way is it possible to comprehend the world in which we live than as a complex of action, a machine for transforming energy, in which each part contributes its shares in different ways, each working restlessly within the sphere PHYSICAL REALITY 47 of its individual abilities, in strife with its neigh- bours, and sustaining the action of the whole. Nothing endures; each carries out its allotted task, and then dies ; its form ceases to live while the matter of its dead body remains to be inspired with new life, in new combinations, and towards new ends. And this, I think, whether it be philo- sophically formulated or not, is the view commonly held by men iu the practical affairs of their lives. Men only look to action, and a thousand common phrases of language betray that we acknowledge nothing to be real unless it is active. We hear, for instance, that " A is the managing director of the Company, but the real manager is his secre- tary," Le. he who does the work and guides its action while the other sleeps. A child will ask, " Is this a real watch ? " meaning quite strictly, does it perform the work of a watch ? does it keep the time? or is it a sham, a thing with face and hands pretending to be a watch, while it does nothing ? It is very different when we come to consider the verbal propositions of men. In the earnest- ness of active life they reason quite naturally from action to action ; but in our theories, in every case where we give an account of our doings in words, which are in general a sort of sophistical comment prepared for the sake of communicating to others, not our thoughts, but what we wish them to think are our thoughts, the point dwelt upon is always Being. This is not intentional lying; it is in the very nature of language. 48 THE UNITY OF WILL Hence the unaccountable discrepancy, always observable to those who live with open eyes, i between words and deeds. Hence, also, the in- ordinate fondness of men for formulas, and the importance attributed to them, as may be illus- trated by a number of examples drawn from familiar life. In public examinations the osten- sible object is to find out how much a candidate knows — static therefore ; accordingly, degrees and diplomas are conferred to mark the stage at which he has arrived ; they are to enable him to make an impression upon the public; because the real question of a man's life is not what he knows, but what he can do, and no one who is seeking an eflScient workman ever lays any value upon an examination. It is sophistical only. With every Church the thing always insisted upon, the dogma, is also static and sophistical. The only attitude which a Church could rightly hold towards its members would be a moral one, ie. as regulating actions. Were this observed, as there is only one morality there would be only one Church, but the Churches are based upon dogma, not upon morality. However sublime and profound such doctrines as those of the Incarnation, of Grace, of Atonement, in our own Church for instance, may be, they must become sophistry when they are enforced. For how would it be possible that every one, what- ever the degree of his education or the capacity of his mind, should really believe them, or even under- stand what they mean ? It is not necessary ; no Church ever thinks of requiring it. AU that is PHYSICAL REALITY 49 asked of the layman is that he shall say he helieves them, of the priest that he shall subscribe to them. He is then stamped with the formula ; he belongs to the party, which is all that was wanted. But the insistence upon barren static formulas is not confined to ecclesiastical minds ; it is quite general in science, A specialist will, by almost incredible feats of memory, acquire a knowledge of the direction, course, position, connections of the myriad nerve-centres and fibres which seems to the uninitiated almost miraculous. But of their action he can tell you next to nothing, nor can he provide a remedy when the action is from some cause diverted from its proper course. Of what use, then, is his knowledge? To pass ex- aminations, obtain degrees, write books, deliver lectures ; for the action of the world outside the limits of an academy it is too barren, while the science of the sailor, the surgeon, the engineer, the architect, of all who study action, is acknow- ledged to be realj i.e. it is itseK productive of action. The world is living, and the essence of the art of life, as of every art, lies in the activity of the artist himself, not in the circumstances and the books which he uses. But in the life of most the first aim is always to be something, to gain some state, wealth, ofl&cial position, popularity, marriage, etc., from which all future welfare is to flow. Few look within themselves to rely upon their own free action, to realize that neither wel- fare nor happiness depend upon these conditions. 50 THE UNITY OF WILL They are the fruits of Chance, of that of which we know nothing, of which there is no science. These it is that Agnosticism contemplates ; for the know- ledge of them is no knowledge ; there is no science that can teach how to grow rich and popular, nor how to make a good marriage. But of the real inward impulse of our lives, the true morality which urges us to do the work which falls to our hands skflfully and well, the reality which Agnos- ticism overlooks, of that we know everything. Action is opposed to reaction, but they are really the same thing, regarded in the one case as positive, in the other as negative. One cannot be without the other; hence we may deduce, even when the circumstances are not fully before us, that when the reaction is impossible, for instance, when the vehicle for an opposing force is wanting, the action cannot exert itself. The bird could not fly without a viscous air opposing the strokes of its wings ; locomotive engines are made more powerful by adding to their weight; impulse is imparted to the arrow by pulling it backwards, etc. ; and, since moral processes rest upon the same principles as physical, if a powerful character is to exert its full strength it must be placed in circum- stances of diflSculty, where it will meet with strong opposition. Similarly, a philosophy which would penetrate to men's hearts is helped, not impeded, by frank doubt and intelligent criticism. The greatest force cannot act except in a resisting medium, and however mighty, only to the extent of that resistance. PHYSICAL REALITY 51 It remains to say what position must be assigned to existing objects in this scheme of action as the only physical reality. They are storage places of action, or to use the phrase familiar in physics, potential action; that is to say, action which is for the present quiescent, but ready to be drawn off for use when the needful conditions are presented. The magazine becomes exhausted with time, and we say it is "worn out; " Le. the action used up is no longer replaced by a new supply. It is in a strict and hteral sense dead^ for there is no other definition of death than cessation of the power to take up new energy in the place of that expended. AU the objects of the varied world contain action, each in some form suited for a special purpose. Many have been, as we say, manufactured, Le, the action has been directly put there by our- selves, and it very often happens that the same object supplies action of different kinds, so that we must regard it as a different thing^ according to the circumstances in which it acts. The sun, for instance, is the source of heat and Hght, but it is also our timekeeper. It makes the plants grow, but it will also kill them. Those qualities, or potential activities of an object which con- tribute to a given end are called essential to that end, and so we arrive at the curious but very important result that in things physical the essence of anything is always relative, i.e. directed to some purpose, and changes with that purpose. It is not a stable substance. 52 THE UNITY OF WILL Logic has hitherto sought to be an end in itself, Thought and Reason being reckoned as the highest function of man, his final purpose. Out of this has arisen a whole world of misconception, falsehood, and disaster, which it is our duty first of all to recognize, but which ages will scarcely suffice to clear away. Our first step must be to raise up the skilful worker of every grade. Be he prince or labourer he must understand that his work, if he do it skilfully, thoroughly, artistically, confers on him a dignity which is high above that of thought; that thought derives its credentials from his work, and that if the work be right the thought is surely so. Not ignorance wiU then be thought despicable, but indolence, and want of earnestness or of skill. Yet I am very far indeed from wishing to remove the difficult and necessary work of philosophy in its narrower sense from the trained and skilled thinker. His position will not be abased by his becoming a responsible instead of an irresponsible being. He will seek his honour and his reward there where the greatest and noblest have always sought theirs, not in being the leader of an academical school, but in being the faithful servant of mankind. IV THE SEARCH FOR BEING In contemplating the World as orderly action, or Causality, we have turned away from Being. The varied activities which our senses perceive carry us further away from Unity. The need for a stable foundation of things, independent of our minds, i.e. of what we see and think, is as pressing as ever. Action is in time; Being endures for ever, and is independent of time. Action is cognizable by the senses. Being in itself is not, since the sense-organs are only apparatus for receiving the actions of the outer world, and so the Brain, or Mind, can only contemplate action. But the reason can approach the frontier of Being, and show in active Creation what it is not. Since it is not in time it cannot have number; there cannot be one, two, or three real Beings; the differences which we observe in objects lie in their actions upon the sense-organs, not in the things themselves ; in their fundamental Being they are eternally One. Lastly, Being can never be expressed in words, since words only connote the attributes of things. 53 54 THE UNITY OF WILL There are two ways in which men have usually tried to approach the question of Being. One is to search out every corner of physical creation and see whether anywhere the signs can he detected of something amid the whirl of action that endures through all changes. This is the course usually followed at the present day by the more civilized races, when amidst the pressure of surroimding circumstances the harrowed mind turns in despair to seek delivery from the tempest, or plunges with hysterical bewilderment into its depths. The second is the dialectical method, where a pseudo- concept is artificially produced, designated G-od, and treated as a reality; the way of scientific theology and all purely speculative thought. We shall consider each of these methods of enquiry, beginning with the first, where the vestiges of stable Being are sought among the things of the senses. The action of the world is not one of random disorder, but all is arranged and adjusted in the orderly scheme of Causality. Harmony and adaptation are the first and most conspicuous feature of the universe, the primary fact of Nature in its orderly beauty. The forms of action are thousand-fold, and a continual trans- formation is going on as they collide together, acting and reacting in birth, life, death of every object or centre of action. Ceaseless change, coming and going, brought about by the struggle between opposing forces typified in the Vedic Samsara and in the ipi^ of Herakleitos, all in rhythm and harmony, are the only reality of which THE SEARCH FOR BEING 55 the senses and reason take cognizance. Whatever the object may contain beyond its action, Matter, Substance, supposed to be the bearer of action, or even by some to be its reality, is unknown to us, a mere conventional hypothesis and unreal.^ Every action is directed ; it comes from some- where and tends somewhere. Whence and whither we know not. We only see the boiling tempest as it passes, beginning and ending in Infinity. Let us follow it in a particular example. A scientific engineer who had to enquire into the action of steam in a boiler would begin by observing that it does work, and he would therefore look upon it as essentially^ i,e. in all that concerns his enquiry, potential energy. Any other qualities it might possess, whether it were hard or soft, or white or black, etc., would not trouble him ; they would lie outside his purposes. Turning to the work that it does he would see the energy always being trans- formed ; now it lifts a weight, now it becomes heat, light, electricity, sound, etc., and in these trans- formations lies its usefulness for action ; they form the working material for the attainment of his ends. It is the same with each particular purpose ; its usefulness Hes in the transformation. If, for example, the purpose of the machine be an electric light, then such a light is not a stable existence which, when once produced, endures, but is a con- tinued transformation of electricity into light, * II S'{f\7j ayvwffros Kaff avriiv — Aristotle. " Die Materie ist nichts Anderes als eine blosse Form, oder eine gewisse Vorstellungaart eines uns unbekannten Gegenstandes." — Kant, quoted by Forel, Gehim und Seele, 56 THE UNITY OF WILL brought about by the struggle of the electric current against resistance. Continued transforma- tion, exhaustion and renewal of energy, are the elementary facts of science. Now suppose the engineer to ask what lies behind the process and causes all the activity; he would find that it is ultimately brought about by Pressure. He has here already arrived at a metaphysical notion; for Pressure, which causes all the action, is present in every part of the machine, and yet in no particular place or moment of time. It is every- where and always, and lies beyond the cognizance of the senses ; we know nothing of it in itself, but only see its effects. We have considered the engine itself as a single individual, a unit or centre ; but its single activity branches out into innumerable trains of further action. Employed in a factory it may drive a thousand wheels, each destined to work out some special purpose, while every article manufactured goes forth itself to become the starting-point of a new train of action. In the same way countless factors united to produce the machine, and we may regard it as a contrivance for gathering together a number of impulses into one focus and emitting them again in altered form. Every machine lies within the scheme of physical causality, and is fully calculable ; that is to say, when the different forces are all given, the result may be inferred with certainty. Conversely, every- thing within the scheme of physical causaHty is a machine. THE SEARCH FOR BEING 57 The action began in the case of the steam- engine with a difference in temperature between the boiler and the condenser ; this again was caused by the chemical action of the combustion of carbon, the coal when taken from the mine being, for our purposes^ nothing more than a magazine of potential energy stored up in the mine, where it was once accumulated by means of vital processes ; its ultimate origin being the sun that drew forth the life of the plants, and separated their carbon. In all this we are treading the firm ground of experimental science ; every step in the process being in accordance with well-understood laws of physics. Only it will be observed that as we pass into those remote epochs the ground becomes less secure, our science less calculable and more tainted with speculation. Of the passage of the radiant heat and light from the sun to the planets very little indeed is certainly known ; but if we go still further and ask whence the heat of the sun was derived we are altogether lost in speculative theory. Or if the action be similarly followed forwards, it will be found to end just as it began, in heat, ultimately dissipated into the space whence it arose. To attempt to theorize as to what happens in those boundless regions is to commit the car- dinal error of science, that of speculating where there is no experimental evidence. All around is Infinity; the physical world begins and ends in the Unknown. The steam-engine which I have taken as my 58 THE UNITY OF WILL example is a type of everything. Every object that has physical existence, from the highest organism, the human brain, down to the appa- rently deadest of all, the rocks and the soil, is a machine, a contrivance for transforming energy of one kind into energy of another kind. With the higher organisms, animals and plants, this needs no demonstration ; they are obviously con- structed upon purely mechanical principles, and differ from our machines in no essential particrdar, but only in complexity, dehcacy, and finish. The life of the rocks is essentially the same, only far simpler. It, too, consists of reaction to a stimulus, and they carry on the causal action of the world just in the same way as the engine, only without the specially contrived organs of the machine or the animal, and with less marked individuality. All life is mechanical causality, conversion of energy ; and everything is alive. And if we turn to the wide universe, here also we find a vast machine continually engaged in transforming energy. The earth, the sun, and the planets are the aggregate of the smaller centres, their work the resultant of the energies of the parts. The steam-engine is the type of all the world, coarse and clumsy if you will, but in its essential features an exact repetition of the universe. And as in the engine we found the ultimate fact of its life to be pressure, so in the machines of nature it is a metaphysical force, either me- chanical pressure, or tension, attraction, chemical affinity, cohesion, solubility, or one of the other THE SEARCH FOR BEING 59 forces which science studies as the originators of action. Further we cannot go. We cannot en- quire what are pressure, chemical ajB&nity, etc., in themselves, or experiment upon them, for directly we begin we find ourselves dealing with some particular pressure, that is to say, with the action that it produces in things, not with the pressure itself. We are no nearer to an intelli- gible solution of the problem of Being. For, even when we knew what pressure was, there would still remain to be asked why it acts in just such a way, that it shall build up the world so beauti- fully and so perfectly. Men have imagined a vov