THE GIFFORD LECTURES FOR 
 
 1902-1903. 
 
 THE F¥a''HWAy TQ: RE/ 
 
 R.B.HALDANE 
 
 A I ITV 
 
at^aca, Sieto fork 
 
 LIBRARY OF 
 
 THE SAGE SCHOOL 
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
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/cu31924009675343 
 
Cornell University Library 
 BD 331.H15 1903 
 
 The pathway to reality; being the Gifford 
 
 3 1924 009 675 343 
 
THE PATHWAY TO REALITY 
 
THE PATHWAY 
 TO REALITY 
 
 BEING THE GIFFORD LECTURES 
 
 DELIVERED IN THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF ST ANDREWS IN THE SESSION 
 
 1902-1903 
 
 BY THE RIGHT HONOURABLE 
 
 RICHARD BURDON HALDANE 
 
 M.P., LL.D., K;.0. "" 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 E. P. DUTTON & CO. 
 
 1903 
 
 T 
 
 
PREFACE 
 
 These Lectures contain the outcome of meditations, 
 extending over some years, about the meaning and 
 nature of Ultimate Reality. My chief ground for 
 hope about the conclusion arrived at is that in 
 substance it has been arrived at long ago. It 
 seems to me that the history of speculative 
 thought, properly read, is no record of discordant 
 hypotheses. It is rather the story of the elabora- 
 tion of a great conception, in the building up of 
 which, from time to time, construction has been 
 broadened by criticism, and criticism has then 
 been succeeded by more adequate construction. 
 But the main structure of the conception has 
 remained unaltered. Its foundations were laid, 
 more than two thousand years ago, by Aristotle, 
 and these foimdations were uncovered, and the 
 structure overhauled, by the great German thinkers 
 who began to interpret Aristotle at the beginning 
 of the last century. As the Time Spirit brings 
 fresh materials with which to work, that struc- 
 ture will have to be again overhauled and added 
 to. It is the legitimate work of ordinary mortals 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 to seek to understand and set forth the plan of 
 the building, and this is all that I have tried to 
 do. In a subsequent series of Lectures I hope 
 to deal with the meaning of that plan for Conduct 
 and Eeligion. 
 
 These Lectures were for the most part delivered 
 ex tempore, of course with assistance derived from 
 carefully prepared notes. I did not choose this 
 form from any indisposition to find time to write. 
 The reason was that experience in other voca- 
 tions, of the difl&culty of explaining remote and 
 obscure issues to those whom I had to assist to 
 grasp them, had taught me that one ought to 
 watch one's audience, to follow the working of its 
 mind, and to try to mould one's discourse accord- 
 ingly. I did not see why this should not be as 
 true of an Academic lecture hall as it seemed to 
 me to be of other places. Whether I have been 
 right I do not know. "What is printed in the pages 
 which follow is, at all events, just what the stenog- 
 rapher took down, with verbal corrections. 
 
 In conclusion, I wish to express my gratitude 
 to my friend Mr Kemp for reading the proofs of 
 the book, and for many suggestions made while 
 it was passing through the press. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 BOOK I 
 
 THE MEANING OF REALITY 
 Lecture I . . . . . Pages 3 to 33. 
 
 The purpose of Lord Gifford in founding his Trust may be 
 taken to have been to promote a thinking consideration of the 
 nature of God and of His relation to the world. 
 
 To such a purpose objection has been taken on the ground 
 that there is no way of applying a scientific criterion of truth, 
 such as we possess in the chronometer, or the balance, or the 
 measuring rod. But criteria of this kind have only a limited 
 application. We cannot apply them to art, or to morals, or to 
 history, or even to the simplest conception of development in 
 the region of life. Truth must, therefore, have a wider 
 meaning. The test of a conception must be, not mere 
 conformity to some external standard, but adequacy to the 
 facts which it has to explain. The history of philosophy 
 is no mere record of hypotheses rejected successively, but 
 the history of a development in which criticism has succeeded 
 to construction and again construction to criticism. God 
 cannot be defined as less than the Ultimately Real, in terms of 
 which all else can be expressed, while it cannot itself be 
 expressed in terms of any thing beyond. The development 
 of the theory of Ultimate Reality is the history of metaphysics. 
 Sometimes the work has been merely negative or critical, as 
 with sceptics like Hume. At other times it has been con- 
 structive, as with Aristotle and Hegel. But through it, if 
 ix « 2 
 
X CONTENTS 
 
 we confine our attention to the product of the great minds of 
 philosophy, we may observe the evolution, in ever deepening 
 form, of a single conception of Reality. This conception is 
 conditioned by the materials which the Time-Spirit provides. 
 The task of these Lectures will be to answer the question : 
 How, in the commencement of the Twentieth Century, ought 
 we to conceive God ? We may, of course, find that Ultimate 
 Reality bears no analogy to what is meant by "God" in 
 common parlance; but, if God cannot be less than the 
 Ultimately Real, a good deal of what is obscure is got rid 
 of at once. It is plain, for instance, that the Ultimately Real 
 cannot be described as a First Cause, for the relation of cause 
 and effect is a relation which can obtain only within the forms 
 of Time and Space, and these forms may turn out to fall within 
 the Real, instead of conditioning it. Nor can God be defined 
 as Substance. The deepest and most fundamental of aU 
 relationships appears to be that of being object for the subject. 
 Even the existence of a Universe of mere matter and energy 
 could have meaning only for the mind of a fully equipped 
 spectator. For a lizard it might seem something different 
 from what it does for us, and for an angel something not less 
 different, but in another direction. We must try first of all to 
 get at the meaning of subject as distinguished from substance, 
 for this appears to be the wicket-gate to the pathway to 
 Reality. 
 
 Lecture II . . . . . Pages 34 to 60. 
 
 Yesterday we made a first and tentative step, which took us 
 only a very little way. We rejected the conception of cause 
 and also that of substance, because they both fell within the 
 limits of being object for the subject. The subject is no 
 substance. For substance means the thing as distinguished 
 from its properties, an abstract inert identity, a mere pouit of 
 view in experience. Subject is more akin to life than to 
 substance. For in life we have the whole existing, not as 
 distinct from its parts but in and through them, and this 
 
 notwithstanding their apparent externality to each other but 
 
 in the thinking of the subject we have more than this. The 
 
CONTENTS xi 
 
 great advance made by Aristotle as against Plato was to show 
 that thought did not exist apart from its object, any more than 
 the object existed apart from the thought for which it was 
 object. He showed that the universal existed in and through 
 the particular, and that, not less, the existence of this particular 
 was in and for the universal. It was for him only by 
 abstraction, legitimate only provisionally and for special 
 purposes, that the individual object in experience could be 
 broken up into universals of thought as operating on particulars 
 of sense. This has been the view of modern metaphysics since 
 the time of Hegel, who first taught people to understand 
 Aristotle. So far as Mill's docti-ine of the nature of the 
 real as consisting in a system of permanent possibilities of 
 sensation goes, he is at one with this teaching. He shows that 
 a mere sensation, if it could be conceived, would not only be 
 a vanishing quantity, but would be indescribable. We have 
 none of us experience of our neighbours' sensations, nor can we 
 even reproduce our own past sensations for comparison. We 
 compare properties, universals, which are the outcome, when 
 abstracted, as abstracted they are at every instant of our lives, 
 of thinking and not of feeling. The system according to 
 which we think, and in which our feelings are set, is objectivity, 
 and on this system depends our conception of truth. Through 
 it we get our notions, not only of our neighbours, but of 
 ourselves as individual intelligences and personalities. Thought 
 is free to determine itself, and to choose the conceptions under 
 which, and the standpoints from which, it will abstract. The 
 hard-and-fastness of the world of experience which confronts us 
 is the outcome of the selection — unconscious, if sufficiently the 
 outcome of habit — of particular conceptions and standpoints. 
 Of this the stereoscope, the hypnotised subject, and the 
 madman may be taken as examples. Their world is for them 
 apparently immediately there. They have in it the sense 
 of satisfied meaning, and search for certainty. But their 
 worlds are untrue in so far as they conflict with the general 
 system of experience, and not from any want of the power to 
 produce conviction. The commonsense standpoint appears to 
 combine this power of producing conviction with compliance 
 with the system in which men and women agree in thinking 
 in experience. The hardness-and-fastness of that experience 
 
xii CONTENTS 
 
 is the outcome of common conceptions and standpoints under 
 which commonsense has abstracted and hypostatised its 
 abstractions. The aims, natm-e and meaning of these 
 abstractions we must examine as the next stage of the journey 
 along the pathway to Reality. 
 
 Lecture III . . . . . Pc^es 61 to 89. 
 
 The dilemma put is that either things make thought, or 
 thought makes things. Berkeley and Mill have shattered the 
 first alternative ; but the second is just as absiurd, if it means 
 that / make things. There must be a rational explanation of 
 the fallacy of solipsism. The dilemma on which it rests is 
 really founded on a false metaphor. When we speak of 
 "making" or "constructing" we are dragging in the notion 
 of processes in time and space, and this is out of the question, 
 for time and space are general relations -which have to be 
 accounted for as much as anything else. Further development 
 of the topic of last Lecture, the true relation of universal and 
 particular. Mind, the subject, is not a thing operating ah extra 
 in the construction of experience. Divest the object world of 
 experience of the incrustation of bad metaphysics which has 
 arisen through the standpoint of everyday life being taken as 
 a guide to more than what is true for practical purposes, and 
 the difficulties become gradually lessened. The " window " 
 theory of mind must be rejected, whether we approach it as 
 physiologists, or as psychologists, or as metaphysicians. The 
 notion of the self as a thing is a derivative and secondary one, 
 and is not adequate when we are inquiring into the founda- 
 tions of the system in the course of which it appears as such. 
 Kant was infected with a point of view which is of great 
 practical utility in psychology, but only provisionally valid, 
 the point of view from which knowledge is assumed to be 
 capable of being laid on the dissecting table and broken up 
 into faculties and separable elements. Modern psychologists 
 like Miinsterberg have carefully pointed out that this hypo- 
 thesis is to be made use of only for strictly limited ends, and 
 is a source of error when the inquiry is into the nature of 
 reality. The teaching of Aristotle ought never to be for- 
 gotten. 
 
CONTENTS xiii 
 
 Lecture IV .... Pages 90 to 114. 
 
 Having got rid of the "window" theory of the mind, 
 and of the notion of separate faculties of intelligence, we 
 must inquire what the true nature of experience is. It is 
 not put together out of atomic sensations, for these are what 
 they are only in so far as thought in universals. Their esse, 
 like all esse, is intelli^. Experience is rather to be conceived 
 as a living and indivisible proces.s, in which the activity of 
 intelligence proceeds from the indefinite to the definite, the 
 organisation by thought of an anrupov, which has no meaning 
 except as a stage in the entirety of experience. Experience 
 itself, the content of consciousness as immediately present to 
 us, is permeated in every supposed element by the universals 
 of thought, and has no meaning outside of or apart from 
 these universals. It is within this field and through these 
 universals that we frame our distinctions and evolve the 
 notion of the thinker as distinct from what is thought, a 
 distinction which cannot be adequate for the purposes of the 
 ultimate view of things. I can form no picture of myself as 
 distinct from its manifestations, from my body, my history 
 and relationships. I can, it is true, by a process of abstrac- 
 tion eliminate each of these in turn, and get further and 
 further towards the notion of the pure subject in knowledge ; 
 but as I do this I recede further and further from what, as 
 a plain commonsense person, I mean by myself. For practical 
 purposes I know well enough what I mean by myself, but 
 this does not help in metaphysical inquiry when these purposes 
 are neither in question nor relevant. The true view of experi- 
 ence would seem to be that it is for us what it is in all its 
 complexity as the result of habitual reflection at many and 
 different standpoints — scientific, ethical, aesthetic, religious, etc., 
 at each of which abstraction and hypostatisation take place 
 under different conceptions or categories, adopted because of 
 the pm'pose or end to be realised in each case. The ultimate 
 nature of reality can only be found when these conceptions 
 and categories have been carefully criticised and their limits 
 ascertained. When we have understood that the different 
 aspects of nature, such as mechanism, life, etc., are the outcome 
 
xiv CONTENTS 
 
 of abstraction under different categories, we perceive that 
 there is no conflict between the results of the sciences, and 
 that we have no title to reduce, e.g., life to mechanism, and 
 so contradict the commonsense of the plain man, for whom, 
 because he does not abstract and define in the same fashion, 
 these standpoints easily co-exist. Thus our belief in the 
 reality of the world as it seems may be restored to us, and 
 we may come to see that the way to get at the nature of 
 reality is by thinking experience at the highest of standpoints. 
 In this way the conception of experience as containing degrees 
 of reality becomes a legitimate one. 
 
 Lecture V. .... Page* 115 <o 139. 
 
 The outcome of the preceding Lectures may be expressed 
 in five propositions : — 
 
 1. That activity of intelligence which we mean when we 
 speak of the subject is not like the motion of a mechanism and 
 cannot be described by the analogy of cause and effect. It is 
 the self-determination of reason which acts on rational grounds, 
 and which can detach itself even from the most formidable 
 phase of experience, and abstract freely even when confronted 
 by its own negation, such as is pain. 
 
 2. The organisation of experience into a world is the result 
 of the purposes and standpoints which reason adopts. That 
 world may be quite different for the inhabitants of Saturn and 
 Jupiter, if they have different senses from ours and different 
 social relationships. They may bring into clear consciousness 
 and hypostatise as hard and fast appearances from which they 
 cannot get away in their daily existence, phases which are 
 unknown to us ; and they may be unconscious of phases, e.g., 
 those which depend on the sense of colour, which are for us 
 omnipresent. What must be common to them and us are, how- 
 ever, the universals of reflection. For these not only have no 
 locality in the time and space for which they form the very 
 conditions of possibility, but apart from them we cannot con- 
 ceive rational beings at all. Without them even scepticism 
 were impossible. 
 
CONTENTS XV 
 
 3. It is thus rather in ends than in causes that we must seek 
 the explanation of the world as it seems. 
 
 4. To all of the phases of this world as it seems must be 
 ascribed reality, but degrees of reality differ, and are higher 
 the more fuUy they manifest themselves as pertaining to the 
 standpoint at which the world is presented as the outcome of 
 thinking rather than of feeUng. 
 
 5. We could not, even if we would, deduce the imiverse, or 
 present it in terms of universals or thought relations. The idea 
 of doing so comes only from our not having got rid of the 
 notion that thought is some faculty of a thing, and that percep- 
 tion is a process in space and tiine. The self conceived as a 
 thing is only a secondary and derivative conception. Thai the 
 Universe shoidd be there is the very condition of self-conscious- 
 ness. We can disentangle in reflection the general nature of 
 what it is. But thought no more makes things, than things 
 make thought. Each contrasted with the other is a mere 
 abstraction. Aristotle and Hegel have both sought to exhibit 
 the work of Reason in the constitution of the Universe, the 
 pulsation of thought even in the That. But neither has 
 endeavoured to deduce the Universe, nor could consistently 
 have done so. Examination of the criticisms of Professor 
 Pringle Pattison and Professor Royce. 
 
 Lecture VI. .... Page* 140 <o 165. 
 
 The view of the process of knowledge which has been 
 developed in the last five Lectures goes beyond that of the older 
 text-books of logic and psychology; but the modern view is 
 closely akin to it. Modern writers do not draw the distinction 
 between thinking and willing which used to be drawn, and 
 instead of regarding thinking as a process of establishing 
 relations between individuals or classes, they regard the develop- 
 ment both of knowledge and of the soul as resting not on an 
 atomistic basis, but on a process of determination of what is 
 indefinite and abstract into what is more definite and concrete. 
 The influence of Schopenhauer and Lotze has prevailed against 
 the abstract view of intelligence which some of the disciples 
 of Hegel took, but which was not taken by Hegel himself. At 
 
xvi CONTENTS 
 
 the same time modern science has brought about great develop- 
 ments both in logic and in psychology. In modern text-books 
 of logic we are shown how the individual mind builds up its 
 world of reality. The judgment is the bringing of further 
 definitions into the subject of the judgment, which is the that 
 of reality, the qualification of the that by incorporating into it 
 a further what. In modern text-books of psychology what is 
 treated of are the events of a single soul considered merely as 
 events that happen, i.e., immediate experience taken as belong- 
 ing to something that has a past and a future. These are 
 limited standpoints, but they yield fruitful results, and in no 
 way conflict with the attitude of metaphysics. Fuller con- 
 sideration of the standpoint of logic and psychology, and transi- 
 tion to the standpoint of mathematical and physical science. 
 
 BOOK II 
 
 THE CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES 
 
 Lecture I . . . . . Pages 169 to 188. 
 
 Retrospect. A criticism of the conceptions or categories 
 which we employ in the daily business of life is essential, if we 
 are to avoid mistaking abstractions for reality. Such a criticism 
 is certainly not less essential in Science. Illustration from 
 Mathematics. The individual object in Nature, and Nature 
 herself. ' Her broadest characteristic is the relation of Exter- 
 nality. The method of scientific investigation, and the relation 
 to it of a criticism of categories. Character of a true " Natur- 
 philosophie." It must always be limited by the quality and 
 quantity of the material which the science of its age has pro- 
 vided for it to work on. This was the difficulty which Hegel 
 had to contend with when he tried to treat this part of his 
 system. Yet a careful criticism of the limits of the categories 
 employed in the various Sciences, and an examination of the 
 relation of these categories to each other, are duties unavoid- 
 able by those who search after final truth. 
 
CONTENTS xvii 
 
 Lecture II .... P(^es 189 to 237. 
 
 Science comprises every branch of knowledge which aims at 
 a better comprehension of experience by systematically con- 
 sidering its object under defined categories or abstract concep- 
 tions. Greatly as men of Science have benefited mankind, they 
 have also, at times, terrified it by treating reality as if it must 
 be brought under these conceptions to the exclusion of others. 
 How this has happened we must now try to discover in detail 
 by reviewing critically the procedure of various Sciences. 
 Illustration of the fashion in which applied Mathematics 
 abstracts from and ignores the real, as the price of its assistance 
 in enabling us to calculate distance. The difference between 
 the conceptions of Space and Time of the Geometer and the 
 Physicist. That of the former is much more abstract and 
 limited. The conception of quantity itself has two aspects — 
 •the discrete and the continuous. The second is the subject of 
 the Infinitesimal Calculus, the notions of which seem to contra- 
 dict those of ordinary Mathematics. The controversy between 
 the disciples of Newton and those of Leibnitz about Infini- 
 tesimals turned on language mainly. Geometry as the Science 
 of pure Externality can dispense with the conception of measure- 
 ment. What is called Projective Geometry does so, and thereby 
 gets rid of the assumptions which Euclid makes. Consideration 
 of the Euclidean assumptions, and of the dimensions which it 
 assumes to characterise space. Modern Physicists, like modern 
 Mathematicians, tend to a more abstract procedure than 
 formerly. They have eliminated the notion of Cause, and are 
 trying to eliminate that of Force. But Physics must always 
 be more than mere applied Mathematics, and consequently in 
 practice it combines several standpoints, and is thus a composite 
 Science. Difficulties arising out of the conception of action at 
 a distance. Differences between the conceptions of the mole- 
 cule of the Physicist and the Chemist. For the latter the 
 molecule means the smallest mass into which a substance can 
 be divided without changing its chemical nature. The Atomic 
 theory is an artificial and abstract view of things, and no more 
 than a valuable working hypothesis. The conception of the 
 living organism is quite different from the conceptions of the 
 
xviii CONTENTS 
 
 Mathematician and the Physicist and the Chemist. Commence- 
 ment of the consideration of its nature. 
 
 Lecture III ... . Pages 238 to 278. 
 
 In the organism the leading features are totally incapable 
 of reduction to these of mechanism. They belong to a different 
 plane of comprehension, at which it is natural to have experi- 
 ence of a whole which does not exist outside the parts and 
 yet determines their behaviour. The problem of "Abio- 
 genesis" is founded on a confusion of categories. We can 
 no more conceive an ultimate limit of life than we can 
 conceive an ultimately indivisible atom. Both are fictions 
 of reflection, and have and can have no place as individuals 
 of experience. The inability of uncritical theorists to accept 
 in its simplicity the experience of life as a whole existing 
 in its parts, and these as acting in consequence quasi- 
 purposively, gave rise to the old Vitalism. The notion of a 
 special vital force was mechanical, and is now exploded. 
 The cell theory : Johannes Muller and his work. The 
 influence on biology of Schleiden and Schwann. Schwann's 
 theory of cellular growth and his analogy of crystallisation. 
 The "intussusception" difficulty. Protoplasm. Qaaw-purpo- 
 siveness apparent throughout. There is no real difficulty 
 about the modern theory of Vitalism. It is the necessary 
 outcome of the criticism of biological categories. Between 
 those of mere life and those of conscious life there are inter- 
 mediate conceptions, such as that of Instinct. To the explana- 
 tion of these the categories of biology are inadequate, and 
 stUl more so to the phenomena of the soul. The definitions 
 of life by the philosophers and by the physiologists. Life 
 is the co-operative action of the parts in a common coui'se 
 of development. The nature of the action of the organism 
 in health and in disease. We cannot proceed further without 
 the use of categories under which man appears in experience 
 as a conscious and rational being. 
 
CONTENTS xix 
 
 Lecture IV ... . Pages 279 to 312. 
 
 The individuality of a human being is incapable of resolu- 
 tion into any single aspect. The nature of Consciousness. 
 The attempted regress in analysis to the self as mere subject. 
 The relation of the categories of Consciousness to those of 
 Life. Illustration from the case of the frog whose cerebral 
 hemispheres have been removed. There appears to be between 
 Consciousness and Life a borderland where action is quasi- 
 purposive. The higher the stage of an animal in evolution, 
 the more does its power of adapting itself to its environment, 
 and of displaying intelligent action, accord with the develop- 
 ment of its cerebral hemispheres, and appear to be distinct 
 from the functions of the lower centres and the spinal cord. 
 The phenomena of the soul are in close accord with those 
 of the action of the cerebral hemispheres, but the soul is not 
 a "thing," and has no "seat" there. It is the same real 
 individual in another aspect. Definition of psychology. It 
 is an abstract science which often transforms its object-world 
 to suit its own standpoint. The nature of this transformation. 
 The separation in psychology of thought and volition is 
 artificial. 
 
 The examination of the categories of Science ends with 
 those of psychology. Final retrospect. What has been 
 attempted in the last four Lectures does not cover the whole 
 ground, for it is only in the form of a system, such as Hegel 
 sought to construct, that the full truth can be exhibited. 
 Whether the truth can be so exhibited it is not necessary, 
 for the purpose of these Lectures, to determine. 
 
BOOK I 
 
 THE MEANING OF REALITY 
 
LECTURE I 
 
 The purpose of Lord Gifford in founding these 
 Lectureships may be said to have been to promote 
 a thinking consideration of the Nature of God and 
 of His relation to the actual world. He appears 
 to have believed in the possibility of what Cardinal 
 Newman called a " Science of God," and defined as 
 " the truths we know about God put into a system, 
 just as we have a science of the stars and call it 
 Astronomy, or of the crust of the earth and call it 
 Geology." * 
 
 Whatever conclusion we may arrive at as to 
 the possibility of its fulfilment, this purpose of 
 Lord Gifford was highly laudable. For every- 
 where we see the unhappy consequences which 
 have followed the neglect of Faith to seek support 
 from Reason. The Churches are to-day, in the 
 commencement of the twentieth century, still very 
 strong. The laity recognise them as the guardians 
 of certain phases of human nature, which they hold 
 to be real, and esteem as highly as ever. But 
 although the organisation of the Churches, as 
 practical agencies for raising and maintaining the 
 
 * Idea of a University, Discourse ii., 7. 
 
4 MEANING OF REALITY [i^^ct. i. 
 
 level of conduct, is held in high regard, the 
 authority of the Churches as exponents of a system 
 of truth has sunk somewhat low. The majority of 
 educated men and women, and, for that matter, the 
 bulk of the people generally, pay to the creeds 
 much less attention than was once the case. The 
 creeds and confessions of faith have come to be 
 looked on as containing a number of metaphors, 
 suggestive in a vague fashion of something which 
 their language does not adequately express. The 
 progress of Science has caused this language in 
 large measure to pass out of use in the daily dis- 
 course, even of the ministers of religion. Nothing 
 in their sermons is to-day more characteristic than 
 the absence of any attempt to place reliance on its 
 propositions as a guide to theoretical truth. They 
 seem to yearn for a region of scientific certainty 
 towards which they turn their eyes, as though 
 they felt themselves separated from it by a gap 
 which they know they fail to span. The words 
 in which Virgil, in the sixth book of the JEneid, 
 described the figures standing on the banks of the 
 Styx might have been spoken of them also : — 
 
 " Stabant orantes primi transmittere cilrsum, 
 Tendebantque manus ripse ulterioris amore." 
 
 It seems as though nothing but Reason herself 
 could span the gulf which Reason has made 
 between the Church and the ground on which 
 she longs to plant her feet with firmness and 
 the assurance of having reached final forms of 
 
FEELING AS A TEST OF TRUTH 5 
 
 truth. For the advance of Psychology in the last 
 twenty years has shaken to its foundation the alter- 
 native of depending on that immediate certainty 
 which is the foundation of Authority, and which 
 has been the refuge of many admirable men and 
 women. Of the genuineness of their conviction, 
 and of the depth of their feeling, there can be no 
 doubt. Of the value and validity of this convic- 
 tion and feeling as a foundation on which to build 
 a theory, there is unfortunately room for much 
 doubt. 
 
 My distinguished predecessor in the GifFord 
 Lectureship, Professor James, has published his 
 Lectures in the form of a book which he calls 
 The Varieties of Religious Experience, and in which 
 he has brought the results of the most recent 
 Psychology to bear upon the question of the 
 nature and origin of religious faith. He has 
 relegated the immediate certainty which rests on 
 feeling to an origin, the comprehension of which 
 he calls the most important step forward recently 
 taken in Psychology — the hidden background of 
 mental process to which we do not attend, and of 
 which we are not even aware, the subliminal self 
 which does not cross the threshold of ordinary 
 consciousness. For its existence he has accumu- 
 lated a great body of evidence. To it, to this 
 subliminal self, he traces alike the phenomena of 
 hypnotism, of neurosis, of the effects of nitrous 
 oxide, and of religious emotion even in its highest 
 form. He shows that the development of all 
 
6/ MEANING OF EEALITY [^-ect. i. 
 
 these is governed by the same psychological laws. 
 The fiinction, he says, of these invasions from a 
 sub-conscious region must be permanent. Their 
 peculiarity is that they suggest to the subject 
 external control. When we try to get further 
 than this psychological result, he declares that 
 what he calls the "overbeliefs," the inferences 
 which go beyond the facts, begin. So far as the 
 facts go, they do not warrant disbelief in one 
 infinite God, but they are just as consistent with 
 recognition of a plurality of finite gods. " Thus," 
 he says, "would a sort of polytheism return on 
 us." At this point he stops. His book forms a 
 powerful Critique of Pure Faith. It certainly is 
 in danger of being put on the "Index" of any 
 Church which bases itself on the appeal to right 
 feeling as the foundation of its claim to authority. 
 
 In these Lectures I shall place no reliance 
 upon feeling as such. Feeling would appear 
 to become valuable only after it has been justi- 
 fied by thought, and not before ; and I think the 
 facts which Professor James has collected put 
 that question very nearly beyond doubt. In the 
 twentieth centxiry in which we are living, it must 
 be recognised that apart from the sanction of 
 Science the foundation of a faith is impossible. 
 
 We have, therefore, to return to a thinking 
 consideration of the nature of God in the spirit 
 of Lord Gifibrd. If we are to find such a 
 foundation, and would see the truth, we must 
 not fear whither the pathway may lead us. We 
 
THE ORIGIN OF PHILOSOPHY 7 
 
 must tread it if we can. All men, who are 
 worth anything, feel that they have to know as 
 well as to live, that to eat, drink, and make 
 merry is not the end of existence. Most of them 
 have at some period of their lives had the faith 
 that somewhere there are bridges which span the 
 gulf that separates and isolates the various phases 
 of the world as it seems — that separates the con- 
 viction produced by the exact sciences from the 
 conviction of the reality of those other regions 
 of beauty, of moral worth, and of certainty in 
 religion, which concern the same world as it 
 seems when aspects wholly different from those 
 of scientific knowledge are considered : — 
 
 " Thoughts hardly to be packed 
 
 Into a narrow act, 
 Fancies that broke through language and escaped. 
 
 All I could never be, 
 
 All men ignored in me. 
 This was I worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped." 
 
 It is this sense of things unseen which is 
 the motive of such an undertaking as Lord 
 Giffbrd desired. This is the source of what Aris- 
 totle called "Wonder," and declared to be the 
 beginning of all Philosophy. 
 
 Yet this sense of things unseen is of value, as 
 modem Psychology has shown us, only if the 
 effort which it arouses can justify itself scientifi- 
 cally. And therefore the question at once- arises : 
 Is there any hope — since we must turn to Reason 
 —of finding in Reason the firm ground for which 
 
8 MEANING OF REALITY [''^ct. i. 
 
 we seek ? For does not the record of the efforts 
 of Reason, as set forth in the history of Philo- 
 sophy, afford us the spectacle of system succeed- 
 ing system, of hypothesis coming after hypothesis, 
 only to be rejected and laid aside in favour of 
 some new fancy ? The affirmative answer to this 
 question appears to me to turn on a very narrow 
 view of the history of Philosophy, and to rest 
 on a misconception of the nature of the standard 
 of truth. There are some sorts of truth to 
 which we can attain only by considering whether 
 a conception which we have formed agrees with 
 some external object or standard. For example, 
 when we wish to test a conclusion about size in 
 space or duration in time, it is necessary for us 
 to resort to the balance, the measuring rod, or 
 the chronometer. The standard in such a case is 
 external, but an external standard is not the only 
 test of truth. There is a form of truth which 
 deserves the name just as much as the truth 
 which measurement gives us, and that is the 
 truth which we recognise in the perfection, say, 
 of a great poem, of Shakespeare's Hamlet, of 
 Milton's Lycidas, of Wordsworth's " Lines written 
 near Tintern Abbey" — or the truth which we 
 recognise when we say of a great picture that 
 it is inevitably painted as it is, and not other- 
 wise — the truth which we find when we look 
 at the expression on the face of the Virgin 
 in one of Raphael's Madonnas, the conscious- 
 ness of her great calling as the Mother of 
 
DIFFEEENT KINDS OF TEUTH 9 
 
 God, and the profound feeling with which that 
 consciousness has filled her mind. Or take a 
 sunset painted by Turner. There, again, we feel 
 that to him Nature looked at that very instant as 
 he has shewn her, and not otherwise, and that 
 before us we have, in the deepest sense of the 
 word. Truth. Or again, if we turn to the sphere 
 of action, we find the truth in the conduct of 
 the men who charged at Balaclava, and who 
 preferred duty to life ; in the justice of Aris- 
 tides; or in the character of Socrates; or in the 
 surrender of self to God as manifested in the life 
 of Jesus ; or in the suppression of the will to 
 live as shown through the career of Buddha. 
 In all these facts there is that which appeals to 
 our minds, to reason as well as to feeling, as 
 indubitably the truth, and the truth in a sense 
 which compels assent just as much as did the 
 results we arrived at when we applied the balance, 
 or the measuring rod, or the chronometer. 
 
 In instances such as these, the test seems to 
 be the completeness of what is expressed — its 
 adequacy to the deepest conception in the light 
 of which it can be judged. The test is certainly 
 no measm-ement by a rigid external standard, 
 and the critics of art and conduct fail if they do 
 not recognise this. 
 
 Even in some departments of Science we find 
 that the notion of conformity between an external 
 standard and the conception to be scrutinised is 
 insufficient. Take, for instance, what we have 
 
10 MEANING OF REALITY [i^^ct. i. 
 
 in Biology, the development of a life. What 
 does a true development mean? It is the 
 development which fulfils the end or quasi- 
 purpose of the organism. According as the 
 development follows a course which leads to 
 such fulfilment, we pronounce it to be true. 
 Adequacy to an end is the test applied. 
 
 In Philosophy, in like fashion, a system is 
 true only in so far as it is adequate to its 
 subject-matter. The method of Philosophy, like 
 the method of every sort of science, is hypothesis. 
 When Newton said "Hypotheses non Jingo" what 
 he meant was that he did not make hypotheses 
 except for the purpose of verifying them by 
 experiment. So it must be with method in every 
 department of knowledge. We first frame an 
 hypothetical conception, and then, in the fashion 
 which is appropriate, test it by applying it to the 
 subject-matter. But the criterion of adequacy is 
 not necessarily an external one. In Philosophy 
 comparison by measurement is no more possible 
 than it is in Biology, or in Art, or in Conduct. 
 The adequacy of the conception is judged other- 
 wise. 
 
 All inductive method begins by hypothesis, 
 and accordingly in Philosophy the method is the 
 evolution of a conception — a conception taken up 
 and enriched and advanced at each stage by 
 some great man, who tests in the light of facts 
 the adequacy of what he has thought out. In the 
 history of Philosophy you find true evolution, a 
 
THE HISTOEY OF PHILOSOPHY 11 
 
 process in which criticism succeeds to construc- 
 tion, and again construction succeeds to criticism. 
 There have been different rates of progress at 
 different periods, and the form of the movement 
 has not been always the same. Hume and the 
 sceptics illustrate the negative or critical phase 
 of it. Their work was to show inadequacies in 
 current philosophical conceptions. But when you 
 turn to men like Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and 
 Hegel, you get the constructive phase. These 
 are men who have worked out the great con- 
 ception of the nature of reality a stage further, 
 to be tested, to be examined by the critics, by 
 the sceptics if you will, and as the result of that 
 testing and examination to emerge enriched and 
 a stage further on. 
 
 The process by which Philosophy progresses 
 has been described by Hegel in the introduction 
 to his History of Philosophy * in words which I 
 will quote to you : — 
 
 "The World Spirit does not sink into the 
 rest of indifference; this follows from its very 
 nature, for its activity is its life. This activity 
 presupposes a material already present, on which 
 it acts, and which it does not merely augment 
 by the addition of new matter, but completely 
 fashions and transforms. Thus that which each 
 generation has produced in science and in intel- 
 lectual activity is an heirloom to which all the 
 
 * Hegel, Lectures on The Hislory of Philosophy, Intro- 
 duction, English Translation, p. 3. 
 
12 MEANING OF REALITY ["-^ct. i. 
 
 past generations have added their savings, a 
 temple in which all races of men thankfully and 
 cheerfully deposit that which rendered aid to them 
 through life, and which they had won from the 
 depths of nature and of mind. To receive this 
 inheritance is also to enter upon its use. It con- 
 stitutes the soul of each successive generation, 
 the intellectual substance of the time ; its prin- 
 ciples, prejudices, and possessions ; and this legacy 
 is degraded to a material which becomes meta- 
 morphosed by mind. ... In this manner that 
 which is received is changed, and the material 
 worked upon is enriched and preserved, both at 
 the same time. This is the function of our own 
 and of every age : to grasp the knowledge which 
 is already existing, to make it our own, and in 
 so doing to develop it still further, and raise it 
 to a higher level." 
 
 This description seems to me to be an accurate 
 one of the movement of thought in Philosophy, 
 and to give a view of truth which, if we are in 
 earnest about it, will deliver us from the fear of 
 not being able to advance towards the truth 
 about the things with which we have to deal. 
 For Hegel shows that the great problem of 
 Philosophy has given rise to a conception which 
 has developed as generation has succeeded genera- 
 tion, until we have got it, in our time, in a form 
 adequate to the new materials which the Time 
 Spirit has brought to us. 
 
 What we have to do is to try in our humble 
 
DOGMATISM 13 
 
 fashion to grasp this conception in a form which 
 is adequate to the commencement of the twentieth 
 century. Many minds are at work upon this pro- 
 blem ; the minds of very different men, but men 
 who have like purposes. And the problem is one 
 worth solving, for through the solution, even if 
 the solution be such as is adequate only to the 
 materials of the time in which we live, we may 
 find, not only clearer ideas, but the way to rid 
 ourselves, in Science for example, of a great deal 
 of unconscious and bad metaphysics. 
 
 Whatever may be said against Philosophy as 
 an instrument for construction, it is certainly valu- 
 able when we come to deal with the unconscious 
 dogmatism into which men of science are apt to 
 fall — I mean dogmatism in the sense in which 
 Kant used the term. The truth is that in Science, 
 as in some other things, we have every now and 
 then to look for and lay aside our uncritical 
 assumptions, to " clean our slates," and the clean- 
 ing of the slates is not always an easy or wholly 
 agreeable process. But this at least is certain, 
 that the aim of Philosophy can be no less than 
 to reach a standpoint so comprehensive, so free 
 from particularism and narrowness, that from it, 
 with a clear light, we can detect and put aside 
 the analogies and metaphors that are inadequate 
 and therefore false. So only can we rid our- 
 selves of the dogmatic assumptions, most of them 
 unconsciously made, which obscure the view into 
 the ultimate and inmost nature of Eeality. Our 
 
14 MEANING OF EEALITY [i^^ct. i. . 
 
 everyday experience implies a system of beliefs 
 which, for the practical purposes of life, are neces- 
 sarily and properly assumed to be adequate repre- 
 sentations of the truth. But for Science and for 
 Philosophy, both of which go beyond the 
 phenomena of immediacy, and resolve their 
 apparent finality, the individual resting-places 
 of that experience disclose themselves as, in 
 fact, no resting-places at all, but as transient, 
 self-contradictory and self-abolishing. It is the 
 task of Philosophy to unravel the reasons for 
 this, and unless it can do so, it fails. 
 
 I shall try, therefore, to help you, with such 
 light as I can bring to bear on the problem, 
 towards the conception of which we are in search. 
 I shall try to set out that conception in simple 
 language, and I will begin by saying at once 
 that the thought which I have to lay before you 
 — what I may call the single thought which I 
 shall have to lay before you — is no new 
 tiiought. It is as old as the time of Aristotle, 
 and what we have to do is to try to express 
 it in the form which is most adequate to our 
 age. 
 
 Such will be the aim and spirit of my endeavour. 
 I must begin at the beginning, for I can only 
 hope to have even a chance of carrying out Lord 
 GiflFord's purpose, by trying to work out the truth 
 in a systematic form. Only at the end will the 
 meaning fully emerge. At present the important 
 thing is the foundation. The relationship of man 
 
SYSTEMATIC FOEM OF PHILOSOPHY 15 
 
 to God cannot be expressed in a sentence. It 
 can only disclose itself in its proper place in a 
 system of truth. It is one of the great difficulties 
 of the philosopher, that, from the very nature of 
 his subject-matter, he can never express things 
 epigrammatically or succinctly ; w^ith him a syste- 
 matic form is essential. 
 
 Well, two questions must confront a Gilford 
 lecturer who seeks to try to give effect to Lord 
 Gifford's purpose in the serious spirit in which it 
 was meant. The first is : What do we mean by 
 the word " God " ? The second is : How, in the 
 light that in the twentieth century philosophy 
 has cast on Reality, must we conceive and speak 
 of Him ? 
 
 Now, as regards both of these questions it 
 seems to me that people have embarrassed them- 
 selves with an assumption which has pervaded 
 much of the speculation. In Goethe's story of 
 Wilhelm Meister he tells us how Wilhelm, the 
 hero, listened to a conversation between two 
 characters who figure much in the book, Lothario 
 and Jarno, and how, in the course of that con- 
 versation, something was said that struck the 
 hero deeply and influenced the whole course of his 
 life. Wilhelm had been longing for some remote 
 sphere in which he might give free rein to his 
 abilities and aspirations. He had thought of 
 going to a foreign land, to America, to seek such 
 a sphere of untrammelled action, but he learns 
 from this conversation a principle which enters 
 
16 MEANING OF REALITY [i-^ct. i. 
 
 into his very soul — that in the duties that Ke 
 nearest to him is the true Infinite, and that here 
 or nowhere is his "America." Now, something 
 of the kind, it seems to me, ought to be told to 
 those, and they are many, who set out in the 
 search after the nature of God as if its truth must 
 lie in some sphere remote from the Here and the 
 Now. People are always looking for some other 
 and different world in which the balance of this 
 one may be redressed. And yet that involves a 
 dogmatic assumption which may turn out to be a 
 profound fallacy. It assumes that this world as 
 known by us, as in our everyday life it is taken 
 by us to be, has appeared to us in the fullest 
 phase of its reality, and that we have so entirely 
 comprehended it that, as we do not find the 
 notion of God within it, we may assume that 
 this notion must be sought elsewhere. And yet 
 it may be that it is just in the world that is 
 here and now, when fully comprehended and 
 thought out, that we ^hall find God, and in 
 finding God, shall find the Eeality of that 
 world in Him. 
 
 The same sort of fallacy, the same sort of 
 dogmatic assumption, manifests itself in such 
 controversies as that about life and mechanism. 
 People assume that the living organism and the 
 machine are two things, not only quite dififerent in 
 their nature, but external to one another, like two 
 marbles. But there remains a possible point of 
 view which these controversialists seem not to 
 
CHANGING APPEARANCE OF WORLD 17 
 
 have thought out, the point of view from which 
 mechanism and life disclose themselves, not as 
 separate things, but as appearances from diflFerent 
 standpoints, as different aspects of a single 
 Reality. That is a view which we shall have to 
 ask about further in the course of these lectures. 
 For the present the only observation that can be 
 made is that what separates mechanism from life, 
 and makes the broad and vast gulf that seems to 
 lie between them, miay quite as well be the ends 
 or purposes of the mind in organising its system 
 of knowledge, as some absolute separation between 
 the two. Just so it is at least possible that it may 
 turn out that the view of this world, as a world in 
 which God cannot be looked for, may have to give 
 place to a view in which it becomes apparent that, 
 seen at its highest, viewed from a different stand- 
 point, and with fuller insight, this world may turn 
 out to be but appearance and God the Ultimate 
 Reality disclosing Himself in that very appear- 
 ance. 
 
 Now the want of a comprehension of this point 
 of view as a possible one, the failure to realise 
 the dogmatic assumption which underlies its 
 exclusion, has prevented people from understand- 
 ing a great deal of what has been most notable in 
 the history of speculative thought. If they had 
 read and taken to heart the lesson, not of Kant's 
 Critique of Pure Reason so much as of his 
 Critique of Judgment, they would have learned 
 something, the lack of which has made it im- 
 
18 MEANING OF EEALITY ['-^t. i. 
 
 possible for them to read with understanding or 
 sympathy the bulk of Greek Philosophy. They 
 would have learned that the way in which the 
 world seems to us depends on the standpoint from 
 which we approach it ; that our ends and purposes, 
 consciously or unconsciously formed, determine the 
 conceptions under which the organisation in know- 
 ledge of what we call experience takes place ; that 
 this experience is always relative and shifting in 
 its signification. The Greeks used to teach this 
 truth, and Kant rediscovered it. To those who 
 are penetrated with it, it has seemed as if it was 
 at least possible that we human beings, with our 
 minds at the highest, might see and realise close 
 to us something of the nature of God. There 
 are even some, such as the Mystics, who have 
 believed that like Moses of old, they might view 
 Him ; perhaps be blinded in the process ; yet at 
 least -have found Him near. 
 
 We cannot go beyond our limits as human 
 beings, beyond the conditions under which alone 
 knowledge is possible for us. If we would rise 
 above the plane at which the world of experi- 
 ence discloses to us the meaning that contents 
 us in everyday life, it is to reflection that in the 
 main we must look. For direct vision we can 
 hardly hope. 
 
 Yet it seems that something more is possible 
 than merely abstract reflection. Something of 
 direct insight would seem to have come to great 
 men, to great artists, to great poets. One finds 
 
DEFINITION OF GOD 19 
 
 it in such lines as those of Wordsworth, when 
 he speaks of the 
 
 "Sense sublime 
 Of something far more deeply interfused. 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean and the living air. 
 And the blue sky and in the mind of man ; 
 A motion and a spirit that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought. 
 And rolls through all things." 
 
 Ah ! In the poets, when at their best, we have 
 the discernment of what has been the last, and 
 perhaps the highest, result of the greatest specu- 
 lative thinking in the history of Philosophy. 
 
 Let us then rid our minds of this dogmatic 
 presupposition which blocks the way. Let us 
 set out on the search after the nature of God 
 with our minds free. Let us begin by trying to 
 get some clear notion of that of which we are 
 in quest. To me it seems that by God we mean, 
 and can only mean, that which is most real, the 
 Ultimate Eeality into which all else can be 
 resolved, and which cannot itself be resolved 
 into anything beyond; that in terms of which 
 all else can be expressed, and which cannot 
 be itself expressed in terms of anything outside 
 itself. 
 
 But this definition, the only definition which 
 is at all adequate, enables us at the very com- 
 mencement to rule out a number of conceptions 
 which have often passed current, but which have 
 never been used without getting the people who 
 
20 MEANING OF EEALITY [l^ct. i. 
 
 used them into difficulties. For example, you 
 cannot talk of God, regarded as the Ultimate 
 Keality, as a First Cause. That proves to be a 
 totally inadequate metaphor, because cause and 
 effect is a relationship that obtains and can obtain 
 and have meaning only within the object world 
 of experience,, in the forms of Time and Space. 
 Your problem is in point of fact directed to the 
 existence and significance of that very object 
 world itself. It is, in Kantian language,, a trans- 
 cendental problem. For it cannot be assumed 
 that the explanation of Ultimate Reality can be 
 found within the field of the object world, the 
 nature and foundation of that field being one of 
 the very aspects of things which falls within 
 Reality. You cannot, therefore, speak of God 
 as a Lrifj.iovpy6s, as a Creator of the Universe 
 from the outside. He cannot stand to the 
 world in the relation of a Cause, For He 
 must be independent of Space and Time, and 
 we can attach no meaning to a Cause except- 
 ing as operative within Space and Time. We 
 must reject that conception as wholly inade- 
 quate. Nor do we fare any better if we define 
 God as a Substance. A substance is that which 
 we know only in distinction from its attributes 
 or its properties. The substance of that table 
 is what I mean when I have abstracted from 
 it in my mind all the properties by which I 
 recognise it. Substance is a conception arrived 
 at by negation, and has meaning in relation only 
 
THE MEANING OF SUBJECT 21 
 
 to accidents or properties. To define God as 
 Substance would, therefore, be to define Him as 
 something relative, and not in the deepest sense 
 of the word real. We must go further down 
 for our foundations. Now there is one concep- 
 tion which, provisionally at least, we may use, 
 because it is the one that does go deeper than 
 any of these — the conception of God not as 
 Substance but as Subject. 
 
 Let me try to make clear to you what is 
 meant by the expression Subject. Supposing the 
 Universe could be traced back to a point at 
 which we were contemplating it as matter in a 
 gaseous form at some enormous temperature, 
 ready, in course of time, to evolve itself in accord- 
 ance with well-known physical laws into the staiTy 
 heavens which we know, the solar system in those 
 starry heavens to which our globe belongs, and 
 the world on which we live as an appendage or 
 part of that solar system. Supposing that we 
 could trace our globe back to a condition in which 
 there was no life in it, at which it had only begun 
 to assume shape as the gaseous matter had begun 
 to solidify. What then ? We should have elimin- 
 ated life from the face of that globe ; but still that 
 globe, that solar system, that universe, that mass 
 of gaseous and incandescent matter, would be there 
 only as object for the subject. It could have no 
 meaning on any other footing. Its colour, for 
 colom* of some kind it would have, would import 
 the impressions called up in the brain of a 
 
22 MEANING OF EEALITY [^^^■'- '• 
 
 spectator by the waves of ether it caused travers- 
 ing space and striking the retina of the spectator. 
 Its time-duration would only have meaning to 
 somebody who could conceive and measure it — 
 ay, and remember it, so that past and present 
 might be brought together and contrasted with 
 the possible futtu-e. Its relations of space would 
 not have meaning for a lizard, nor even for a 
 more highly organised intelligence, but would be 
 intelligible only to a mind possessing the cate- 
 gories and conceptions of quantity, and able to 
 take them in. The appearance of that Universe 
 to a being endowed with totally different senses 
 would be wholly different from the appearance of 
 that Universe to a being endowed with the senses 
 that we possess. 
 
 Now, you do not get out of this difficulty by 
 saying : " Oh, but a human being, a man, is not 
 to be assumed to be there, because we have not 
 reached that stage." The question is, what is the 
 meaning of the object world in which such a 
 Universe would appear, excepting for a mind or 
 subject to which it was object ? And the answer 
 must be that it would have no meaning at all, and, 
 therefore, be nothing in any sense that we can 
 assign, except in relation to a percipient ijiind. 
 / And thus it comes about that even from the very 
 beginning of things you have to presuppose mind, 
 if you would speak in any language which is 
 intelligible or communicable, and the deepest 
 relation of all is that which you find when you 
 
BERKELEY'S QUESTION 23 
 
 go even to the very commencement of the Uni- 
 verse, the relation of being object for the subject. 
 If experience means that of which we have 
 been and are conscious and have arranged in our 
 mind — the systematised consciousness of our per- 
 ceptions, past and present, still it has no mean- 
 ing except as somebody's individual experience. 
 That deepest relationship of being object for the 
 subject, crops up at every turn. Professor Eraser 
 has shown what was the meaning of the new 
 question which Bishop Berkeley put to the 
 materialists. He asked what Locke meant by 
 the substance which was the foundation of the 
 supposed properties of matter, and his answer 
 was that it was a mere name significant of 
 nothing with an assignable meaning, significant 
 of nothing that could be described or spoken of, 
 that, in fact, it tvas nothing. And the conclusion 
 of Berkeley may be summarised, as Professor 
 Eraser points out, in the expression "To be is 
 to be perceived." Do not imagine that I am 
 suggesting that to be, means merely to be per- 
 ceived by me, as an individual. That, of course, 
 would be nonsense. I did not make the Universe, 
 the Universe has rather made me. But, on the 
 other hand, you will find that as we work that 
 out, in the dilemma which you can put you 
 have asked a question which does not arise when 
 its origin, which rests on a misapprehension, is 
 properly grasped, and you will see that the theory 
 of Bishop Berkeley, worked out in its fuller and 
 
24 MEANING OF EEALITY [i-^ct. i. 
 
 deeper meaning, does not in the least imply the 
 notion that the Universe is just a series of states 
 of my individual mind, or the doctrine known 
 as "Solipsism," the doctrine that the individual 
 mind which perceives is the only existence in the 
 Universe. 
 
 But I do not want to dwell upon Berkeley, 
 because I wish to quote to you what, to my mind, 
 is the still more remarkable utterance of John 
 Stuart Mill upon this very subject, in what I think 
 was the greatest of Mill's philosophical writings. 
 Mill goes very far down and gets very near to 
 the conclusions of the great thinkers who arose 
 in Germany a century ago, conclusions to which 
 many writers and thinkers in our time are now 
 tending. 
 
 Mill shows that the belief in an external world 
 arises in this fashion. There is no direct feeling 
 or perception of such a world. *"When," he 
 says, "we think of anything as a material sub- 
 stance or body, we either have had, or we think 
 that on some given supposition we should have, 
 not some one sensation, but a great and even 
 indefinite number and variety of sensations, gener- 
 ally belonging to different senses, but so linked 
 together that the presence of one announces the 
 possible presence at the very same instant of 
 any or all of the rest." Thus we get the belief 
 in permanent possibilities of sensation, and also 
 
 * Mill, Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, 
 p. 223. (Third Edition.) 
 
JOHN STUAET MILL 25 
 
 of a fixed order of succession among the groups. 
 Thus he says,* referring to the result of the laws 
 of association of ideas, "the sensations, though 
 the original foundation of the whole, come to be 
 looked on as a sort of accident depending on 
 us, and the possibilities as much more real than 
 the actual sensations, nay, as the very realities of 
 which these are only the representations, appear- 
 ances or effects." "The whole set of sensations, 
 as possible, form a permanent background to any 
 one or more of them that are, at a given moment, 
 actual, and the possibilities are conceived as stand- 
 ing to the actual sensations in the relation of a 
 cause to its effects, or of a canvas to the figures 
 painted on it, or of a root to the trunk, leaves 
 and flowers, or of a substratum to that which is 
 spread over it, or, in transcendental language, of 
 Matter to Form." 
 
 Aristotle might have written that sentence, or 
 Kant, or Hegel, just as well as Mill. He goes 
 on to speak of the permanent possibilities : — t 
 " Wien this point has been reached, the permanent 
 possibilities in question have assumed such unlike- 
 ness of aspect and such difference of apparent 
 relation to us from any sensations, that it would 
 be contrary to all we know of the constitution of 
 human nature that they should not be conceived as 
 and believed to be, at least as different from sensa- 
 tions as sensations are from one another. Their 
 groundwork in sensation is forgotten, and they are 
 
 * Idem, p. 225. t P. 225, 
 
26 MEANING OF REALITY [^-ect. i. 
 
 supposed to be something intrinsically distinct 
 from it. We can withdraw ourselves from any 
 of our (external) sensations, or we can be with- 
 drawn from them by some other agency. But 
 though the sensations cease, the possibilities 
 remain in existence ; they are independent of 
 our will, our presence, and everything which 
 belongs to us. We find, too, that they belong 
 as much to other human or sentient beings as 
 to ourselves. We find other people grounding 
 their expectations and conduct upon the same 
 permanent possibilities on which we ground 
 ours. But we do not find them experiencing 
 the same actual sensations. Other people do 
 not have our sensations exactly when and as 
 we have them ; but they have our possibili- 
 ties of sensation ; whatever indicates a present 
 possibility of sensations to ourselves indicates a 
 present possibility of similar sensations to them, 
 except so far as their organs of sensation may 
 vary from the type of ours. This -puts the final 
 seal to our conception of the groups of possi- 
 bilities as the fundamental reality in Nature. 
 The permanent possibilities are common to us 
 and to our fellow-creatures ; the actual sensations 
 are not. That which other people become aware 
 of, when and on the same grounds as I do, seems 
 more real to me than that which they do not 
 know of, unless I tell them. The world of possible 
 sensations succeeding one another according to 
 laws is as much in other beings as it is in me; 
 
HERACLITUS ON SENSATION 27 
 
 it has therefore an existence outside me ; it is 
 an external world." 
 
 In other words, reflection, not impression made 
 from without, is the source of our knowledge of 
 the object world, and only in so far as they 
 reflect in the same way, or have the same system 
 of thought about that world as we have, does 
 that world exist for other people and ourselves 
 in common. Our sensations they cannot experi- 
 ence ; nobody can penetrate into the feeling of 
 another being, or in the least realise it except 
 in its qualities or properties, — in other words, in 
 universals or general conceptions which can belong 
 only to thought. Our sensations they cannot 
 experience, nor can we experience theirs. Sensa- 
 tion is, as Heraclitus said long ago, by its very 
 nature perishing and incommunicable, the unique 
 and ' exclusive property of him who has it. The 
 real world lies in the common system of what 
 we think are sensations. If I have a feeling, for 
 instance, a feeling of heat in my finger, you cannot, 
 any of you, experience that feeling, but what you 
 can become possessed of is the description which,/ 
 I give of what I feel. But if you examine the 
 words of description they all convey not sensa- 
 tions to your mind but reflection, judgments about 
 sensations, general conceptions, what are called, / 
 in the language of Philosophy, universals. I say 
 "hot" of the fire; hot is a general conception. 
 I say of the light "bright"; bright is a general 
 conception. By enough of words, each of them 
 
28 MEANING OF REALITY [lect. i. 
 
 expressing a universal, I can give you sufficient 
 abstract thoughts to enable you to frame a 
 general conception, and in this sense I can com- 
 municate the actual feeling which I have. It is 
 something perishing which can only be fixed 
 and described by universals. That is what 
 Heraclitus meant to convey, and that is what 
 Mill meant when he said that the realities of 
 the world consist in the Permanent Possibilities 
 of sensations. 
 
 But Mill does not stop here. He applies his 
 psychological analyses to the Mind, which he 
 finds in like manner to be a series of present 
 feelings and possibilities of present feeling. Yet 
 he comes on a difficulty which he tells us his 
 analysis cannot resolve. The idea of a mind 
 substance he has got rid of, but, to quote his 
 own words : — * " Besides present feelings and 
 possibilities of present feeling there is another 
 class of phenomena to be included in an enumera- 
 tion of the elements making up our conception 
 of Mind. The thread of consciousness which 
 composes the mind's phenomenal life consists 
 not only of present sensations, but likewise, in 
 part, of memories and expectations. Now what 
 are these? In themselves they are present 
 feelings, states of present consciousness, and in 
 that respect not distinguished from sensations. 
 They all, moreover, resemble some given sensa- 
 tions or feelings, of which we have previously 
 
 * P. 241. 
 
MILL'S VIEW OF MIND 29 
 
 had experience. But they are attended with 
 this peculiarity, that each of them involves a 
 belief in more than its own present existence.- 
 A sensation involves only this, but a remem- 
 brance of sensation, even if not referred to any 
 particular date, involves the suggestion and belief 
 that a sensation of which it is a copy, or represen- 
 tation, actually existed in the past ; and an expec- 
 tation involves the belief, more or less positive, 
 that a sensation or other feeling to which it 
 directly refers, will exist in the future. Nor can 
 the phenomena involved in these two states of con- 
 sciousness be adequately expressed, without saying 
 that the belief they include is, that I myself 
 formerly had, or that I myself and no other shall 
 hereafter have, the sensations remembered or ex- 
 pected. The fact believed is that the sensations 
 did actually form, or will hereafter form, part of 
 the self-same series of states, or thread of con- 
 sciousness, of which the remembrance or expecta- 
 tion of those sensations is the part now present. 
 If, therefore, we speak of the mind as a series 
 of feelings, we are obliged to complete the state- 
 ment by calling it a series of feelings which is 
 aware of itself as past and future; and we are 
 reduced to the alternative of believing that the 
 Mind or Ego is something different from any 
 series of feelings, or possibilities of them, or of 
 accepting the paradox that something which, ex 
 hypothesi, is but a series of feelings, can be aware 
 of itself as a series." ..." The true incompre- 
 
30 MEANING OF EEALITY [i-ect. i. 
 
 hensibility perhaps is, that something which 
 has ceased, or is not yet in existence, can still 
 be, in a manner, present ; that a series of feelings, 
 the infinitely greater part of which is past or 
 future, can be gathered up, as it were, into a 
 single present conception, accompanied by a belief 
 of reality." 
 
 Now Mill endeavours to account, or assumes 
 rather that he can account, for this intellectual 
 system in which he places reality by the principle 
 of association of ideas on which he laid much 
 stress. But when you come to examine the 
 theory of the association of ideas, you will find 
 that Mill overlooked the fact that before you 
 can get associations growing up in the mind, 
 you must already, as the basis of the process, 
 have the system in which the ideas are arranged, 
 the expectations, the beliefs in the possibility of 
 recurrence of the past sensations or sensations 
 like them, the co-ordination of the feelings in 
 Time and Space, the very system which is to be 
 accounted for through association of ideas. The 
 system which gives its only meaning to the word 
 reality, cannot, therefore, itself be explained 
 through the theory of association, I shall have 
 to return to this in a later lecture, and I will 
 only mention it now, 
 
 " But, meanwhile, what is remarkable is that 
 Mill recognised quite completely, as completely 
 as any Hegelian idealist could do, that the 
 reality of the world around us, its externality, 
 
THE WORLD A SYSTEM 31 
 
 its independence, lies in this, that it is an 
 objective system in which the mere sensations 
 of the moment are in themselves transient and 
 have no abiding reality. Reality consists in the 
 fact that the mind in all men fixes and thinks 
 these sensations in like relations. Therefore, in 
 the universals of thought, and not in the impres- 
 sions of sense, are to be discovered the true 
 foundations of the world. 
 
 So far it is easy to get, but the important 
 question that arises is : What does this lead us 
 to? Berkeley and Mill agree that it is in the 
 recognition which our intellects must make of a 
 system of laws and principles according to which 
 sensations and feelings are actually and possibly 
 experienced, that the reality of the world, ex- 
 ternal and internal, lies. Thought rather creates 
 things than things thought. How is this possible ? 
 Well, we have got to dig deep down into what 
 is meant by the world being independent of our 
 individual wills, — in other words, what is meant 
 by the objectivity of the system of universals 
 which form the setting in which our impres- 
 sions and feelings arise. If it be true as they 
 think, and as, indeed, nearly all competent 
 thinkers agree, that the actuality of the world 
 around us, the reason why it is so and not 
 otherwise, and why I cannot alter it by my will, 
 lies not in some " thirig-in-itself, " the notion 
 of which I cannot express in words, and which 
 vanishes under Berkeley's question, but in the 
 
32 MEANING OF EEALITY ^^ct. i. 
 
 fact that my mind like the minds of other people 
 is compelled to think the world according to a 
 system of conceptions, to think it in what may 
 be called an objective system, then I am travel- 
 ling on a new road. It is in this conception, 
 along this road, that we have got a direction in 
 which to seek for the Ultimate Reality. The 
 relation of object to subject becomes in this sense 
 the deepest relation of existence, because existence 
 has now resolved itself into the fact that the 
 subject thinks the object, presents it in a 
 fashion which is not arbitrary but determined 
 by laws of thought. Well, that brings us to the 
 verge of a problem which is yet more difficult, 
 more remote, than any we have got to so far. 
 What must be the nature of the mind which 
 thinks thus objectively, and which, even as mani- 
 fested in individual form, compels the individual 
 to think thus objectively? 
 
 We have got so far a very little way on our 
 journey. To discover that the deepest relation 
 of existence is being object for a subject, is the 
 beginning of wisdom, but the beginning only. 
 We may liken ourselves to the pilgrim in whom 
 feelings of wonder and even alarm have been 
 excited by the tidings which have reached him 
 in the City of Destruction. He has begun to 
 look for a way of escape. He sees in the 
 distance the wicket-gate, but he must cross the 
 Slough of Despond before he can reach it. We 
 shall have, in the next Lecture, to endeavour to 
 
find some firm ground on which to keep our 
 footsteps, from what, to many of you, has 
 seemed a veritable Slough of Despond. To 
 change the metaphor, we are still in shallow 
 water — water too shallow to enable us to swim 
 properly in it, and we must trust ourselves 
 boldly into deeper water before we can learn to 
 swim properly. To-morrow, I hope to endeavour 
 to put before you some considerations which 
 may tempt you to think that the deeper water 
 is the safest place to swim in. 
 
LECTUEE II 
 
 We have to try this afternoon to get a stage 
 further on our journey and to make some definite 
 progress along the pathway to Reality. For this 
 purpose it is essential that we should bring the 
 method of thinking consideration to bear upon 
 the problem of the nature of mind, and of its 
 relation to the object world of its experience. 
 And before I enter upon that task, I think I had 
 better summarise shortly the results of yesterday's 
 lecture. 
 
 I began by speaking of the purpose which 
 Lord Gifibrd had before him in founding his 
 trust, and I said something of the spirit in which, 
 so far as I was concerned, I should try to carry 
 out his wishes. I pointed out that, in consequence 
 of a common but fallacious assumption, the history 
 of Philosophy was often taken to be no more than 
 a story of hypothesis after hypothesis being thrown 
 overboard in favour of new and inconsistent con- 
 jectures. I reminded you that, while such a pro- 
 cedure was inevitable when, with the aid of the 
 chronometer or the measuring-rod or the balance, 
 we were verifying conjectures about physical 
 
 84 
 
SUMMARY OF LECTURE I 35 
 
 occurrences, such as successions in time or com- 
 binations in space, it was neither necessary nor 
 possible when we were examining the relations 
 to each other of phases of art or morals or 
 history, or even when we were watching the 
 simplest course of development in animal life. 
 There, development was called true, not when it 
 accorded with some external standard, but when 
 it disclosed the fulfilment of the purpose or quasi- 
 purpose of the life of the organism. The true 
 type, for instance, of feminine beauty is not the 
 type which we should accept in the case of men. 
 In like manner, in the history of Philosophy 
 measurement was not a possible test. In this case 
 the truth was rather to be looked for in the 
 adequacy of a conception to the explanation of the 
 matter with which it had to deal. I pointed out 
 that you had only to read the best histories of 
 Philosophy to see that, from this standpoint, we 
 had been the witnesses of the growth of a con- 
 ception ever increasing in depth and breadth, 
 deepening and broadening as criticism succeeded 
 to construction, and again construction to criti- 
 cism ; developing itself, as experience discloses, at 
 different rates in different periods, with times of 
 apparent stagnation and times of obvious vitality, 
 adjusting its scope to the new materials and the 
 fresh science which the Time Spirit called into 
 being, but never going back on its traces. Vestigia 
 nulla retrorsum is the motto of the philosopher. 
 Our first task in these lectures must therefore be 
 
36 MEANING OF EEALITY [i-ect. h. 
 
 to get as clear a grasp as possible of this concep- 
 tion in a form appropriate to our age. The con- 
 tributions to it. in the past of some great minds, 
 such as Hume and the famous sceptics, had not 
 been the less valuable or in the common line 
 because they had been in the main negative, and 
 directed primarily to disclosing inadequacies and 
 abstractness in what had gone before. But it was 
 in the constructive work of the outstanding men of 
 metaphysical genius, men such as Plato and 
 Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, that, making allow- 
 ances for differences of time and place, we should 
 look with most hope for our materials. 
 
 Having so defined the spirit of the endeavour, 
 I insisted that no effort to get a view of the nature 
 of things could be adequate, which failed to take 
 account of all the phases of the world as it seems. 
 These, the common heritage of plain men, we 
 could neither rule out nor ignore. We had to 
 account for them. To this end, if we had to pull 
 the world as it seems to pieces, we were bound 
 to try to bring the pieces together again when we 
 had ascertained their meaning and relation to each 
 other. Our first business appeared to be to try to 
 find out as clearly as we could what we meant by 
 the word "Eeality." For God, the investigation 
 of whose nature was our purpose, could not be less 
 than the supreme reality ; that in terms of which 
 all else could be expressed, and to which all else 
 could be reduced, and which could not itself be 
 expressed in terms of anything beyond, nor reduced 
 
SUMMARY OF LECTUEE I 37 
 
 to any other level. This simple consideration ex- 
 cluded the notion of God as a Cause, first in time, 
 and acting ab extra, that is, in space. The think- 
 ing consideration of the nature of the real disclosed 
 that the popular accounts of His nature must be 
 looked on as metaphorical merely. Nor could He 
 be defined as Substance. For that again imported 
 a relation to properties distinguished from it. 
 What then could His real nature consist in if 
 the conceptions of Cause and Substance were 
 inadequate to it ? We had to try whether we had 
 better fortune if we spoke of Him as Spirit, as 
 Subject, and not as Substance. 
 
 If with the aid of Science we were to retrace 
 our steps, and get back to a Universe of atoms 
 and energy in the form of gas at a high tempera- 
 ture, that Universe, mechanical though its con- 
 ception, to the exclusion of mind as an object 
 within it, could still have meaning only as object 
 for the subject. To be this is the deepest, most 
 real and supreme of the relationships of experi- 
 ence. All others presuppose and are based on it. 
 If we take an experience even in the most limited 
 sense of the word, as meaning only what we have 
 personally perceived and arranged in our minds ; 
 the directly presented and systematised content 
 of our consciousness, the fundamental fact which 
 emerges is that it has meaning and exists only 
 as object for the subject. Apart from Mind and 
 except as for it, Matter is an absurdity. The 
 doctrine of Berkeley that esse is percipi, and Mill's 
 
38 MEANING OF REALITY [^-^ct. h. 
 
 theory of the system of permanent possibilities of 
 sensation as the reality of the worlds of Matter 
 and Mind alike signify just this fact. 
 
 In getting so far as this, we have not crossed 
 the pons asinorwni. For this result is_almost a 
 common-place. The question is what the con- 
 clusion implies as its premises. The first diffi- 
 culty is to get a working conception of the rela- 
 tion of subject and object. Short of this, there 
 can be no rest for the sole of the foot of the 
 searcher after truth. The world as it seems is 
 a hard-and-fast reality. It was not created or 
 even constructed by you or me as we perceived 
 it. It was there before we existed, and will be 
 there after we cease to exist. Nay, we form 
 but small parts in it, insignificant events in its 
 history; we are its creatures, at least as much as 
 its creators. 
 
 These results are, after all, mainly negative. 
 They have taken us away from an old crude con- 
 ception of the relation of Mind to Matter, the 
 conception of realism. Yet they have not brought 
 us very far. They have taught us, however, one 
 thing, and that is that we are very prone to 
 make an abstract separation of the mind from 
 its object, and to represent the two as if they 
 could be regarded as things different from one 
 another in space and time. People forget, when 
 they speak of object and subject, that they cannot 
 be talking of two separate things, because what 
 they are trying to do is to define the relation of 
 
MIND NOT A THING 39 
 
 the mind to its object world, an object world 
 which, as Berkeley and Mill have shown, has 
 meaning only as for it. Therefore, relationship 
 of the mind imaged as a thing existing indepen- 
 dently of another thing, its object, would be just 
 one of those relationships which fall within the 
 object world of experience, which have no mean- 
 ing except as falling within that object world, 
 and cannot be used to account for it. If 
 we are to throw any light upon the relation of 
 the mind to that object world, the nature and 
 origin of which is the very thing which we have 
 got to explain, it is clear that we must be in 
 earnest. We must divest our minds altogether of 
 the idea of mind as a thing, as properly described 
 under the category of substance. Substance, the 
 thing, I repeat, is the relationship of something to 
 its properties, a distinction between the properties 
 and the self-identical somewhat in which they 
 inhere, and which can never be the direct object 
 of perception. But the notion of this "somewhat" 
 is a product of a process of abstract reflection which 
 we enter upon only when we come to contemplate 
 relations within the object world of experience, and 
 which has no bearing when we are trying to find 
 terms apt to describe the mind, the subject, for 
 which that object world is there, and apart from 
 which it has no meaning. It is only in reflection 
 that the notion of the substance, as distinguished 
 from its properties, or of the cause as distinguished 
 from the effect, emerges. It is the result of a 
 
40 MEANING OF EEALITY [j-e^t. u. 
 
 system of thought analogous to that which Mill 
 described in tracing the origin of the notion of 
 permanent possibilities in relation to sensation and 
 feeling. 
 
 Now I am quite aware that while this line of 
 thought is very familiar to those of you who have 
 been students of Philosophy, it is very difficult for 
 people to follow who come to that study for the 
 first time. The truth is that in the everyday 
 world, in our daily life, we are able to use freely 
 certain conceptions which are useful and valid 
 when they are confiijed to their legitimate purpose 
 of guiding us, guiding our minds in their every- 
 day operation. On the other hand, when we 
 come to the exact sciences, such as mathematics, 
 we are constantly finding these conceptions quite 
 inadequate and having to be replaced by other 
 conceptions, the product of reflection. And when 
 we come to Philosophy we find this to be so 
 most of all, because language which is quite 
 adequate in everyday life, language in which we 
 describe ourselves as if we were things, living 
 beings assigned to a particular time and to a 
 definite place in space, and regarded, in this 
 aspect at any rate, as things, from the time of 
 birth to the moment when we are borne away in 
 our coffins — that kind of language which is useful 
 and legitimate for everyday purposes, becomes 
 altogether misleading when we get to the 
 problem of what is the true nature of reality. 
 And the great difficulty which the metaphysician 
 
CHANGING NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE 41 
 
 investigating the true nature of reality has to 
 face is just these incrustations of the everyday 
 point of view, the language which we get into 
 the habit of using, and the notions which pass 
 current, and which are for everyday purposes 
 sufficient, but which give rise to what we may 
 call superstitions of common sense based upon 
 them, such as that the mind may be properly 
 spoken of as a thing. 
 
 I need hardly remind you that the standard of 
 knowledge which we call common sense is some- 
 thing which is always changing as knowledge 
 gets deeper. To the superstitious Chinaman, an 
 eclipse is a source of terror. He regards it as 
 a divine event, and takes refuge in concealing 
 himself or in incantations. But, to the average 
 person living in the West, the eclipse is nothing, 
 is so familiar that he pays no special attention to 
 it but regards it as an ordinary occurrence. In 
 other words, the point of view of everyday life 
 about that phenomenon (as indeed about count- 
 less other phenomena) has changed. And so it 
 is when we pass from common sense to Science, 
 and from Science to Philosophy. We find oui" 
 point of view constantly changing, and we find 
 that we are dealing with material which involves 
 the use of new tools in digging down to the 
 foundations upon which we have to build. 
 
 Well now, the subject, the subject in know- 
 ledge, the mind, may be best understood in its true 
 nature if we begin by taking it negatively. First 
 
42 MEANING OF EEALITY ["-ect. n. 
 
 of all, let us contrast it with a machine. A 
 machine is an arrangement of external parts such 
 that, by means of an outside impulse, all the parts 
 can be set in motion. But the parts are external 
 to one another; they are separable. But now, 
 even in nature, we get away beyond the exter- 
 nality of the arrangement of mechanism. In life 
 we have in the organism this remarkable feature, 
 that the life of the whole is present in each of the 
 parts. Take, for instance, the body. The body, 
 as biologists tell us, is made up even in its 
 apparently simplest tissue, of countless units of 
 life, of what are called cells. But these cells act 
 together in maintaining the common life of the 
 organism. They form themselves and group them- 
 selves. We have the foot, the hand, the limbs, 
 the various other parts of the body, and all these 
 parts acting together, and permeated and domin- 
 ated by the life of the body as a whole. But 
 this whole of life does not in its work resemble 
 a cause operating, ah extra, upon the organism, 
 but is more like, more really analogous to, the 
 purpose which the soldiers in an army or the 
 citizens in a State are moved by when they act 
 together. The cells of the body, the cells which 
 make up the totality of the organism, act 
 together purposively, or quasi-purposively, which 
 is a better expression — and I refer to them in 
 order to illustrate to you how really the analogy 
 of the actual purpose of living beings, acting 
 together in a regiment or in a State, is a better 
 
THE CONCEPTION OF AN ORGANISM 43 
 
 analogy to the life of the organism than is the 
 analogy of a machine. In the body you have 
 got the quasi-pm"pose dominating the whole ; 
 but not only so; you have the organism pur- 
 suing a definite course from its embryo state to 
 birth, and from birth to death, and so fulfilling 
 an end. 
 
 Then again, you have got beyond that not 
 only the demonstration that the process shapes 
 itself for the benefit of the species, but, within 
 the life of the individual organism, the remark- 
 able feature which is called Metabolism. All 
 the materials of which the organism is made up 
 change in the course of a very short time. 
 There is not a particle in the body which was 
 there when the organism was born, but yet, by 
 the conservation of the End through this Meta- 
 bolism, the life of the whole is preserved, and 
 the course of development is maintained. Now, 
 under those circumstances, life discloses itself as 
 something totally different from mechanism. In 
 mechanism you have got mere externality and 
 separability of the parts from one another. In 
 life that externality is superseded, is overcome ; 
 the whole is present in each of the parts, and 
 this notwithstanding that the parts are in a 
 sense external to one another. The hand is 
 external to the foot. By abstraction it may even 
 be regarded as a separate thing. Certainly it 
 may be called a thing when it is cut off' and 
 dead. In other words, the parts of the organism, 
 
44 MEANING OF EEALITY [^-ect. n. 
 
 although they carry out a common quasi-piu-pose, 
 are yet in another aspect external to one another. 
 They resemble mechanical things in that other 
 aspect. 
 
 But now, when you come to the mind, you will 
 find that the mind is just as different from life, 
 as life is different from mechanism. The mind 
 manifests itself in its thoughts, in its activity, 
 and yet its thoughts, its feelings, its impressions, 
 its activity, are all there f(yr the mind and have 
 only existence in the mind. They are in no 
 sense separable, like the hand and the foot, from 
 one another. They have their existence in the 
 activity of the mind as a whole. The activity 
 of the mind manifests itself in its particulars 
 and differences, and its particulars and differ- 
 ences exist only for and in the conscious mind 
 in which they occur. In other words, the whole, 
 the mind as a whole, exists only in its manifesta- 
 tions ; and, on the other hand, the manifestations 
 have no meaning apart from the mind of which 
 they are the manifestations. My consciousness 
 cannot be broken up into what I am conscious 
 of, as one thing, and the self that^is conscious, 
 as a separate thing. My mind is a unity which 
 cannot be broken up — a unity of thought which 
 maintains itself amid boundless difference and 
 ceaseless activity. 
 
 When you have got to the notion of mind, 
 you have altogether transcended that conception 
 of things as external to one another with which 
 
THE CONCEPTION OF A MELODY 45 
 
 you are affected, to a certain extent, in con- 
 sidering the nature of the organism. Take, by 
 way of showing the contrast between the action 
 of an organism and a mental operation, the 
 example of a melody. What is a melody? A 
 melody is an arrangement of sounds which, com- 
 prehended in the light of a relationship that per- 
 vades and unites them, form for the mind a musical 
 whole. It is only, for instance, when the sounds 
 of a sonata of Beethoven take their places in the 
 sonata as a whole that they have any signifi- 
 cance. The sonata is nothing apart from its 
 course, and yet its course has only its meaning 
 through the musical conception which pervades 
 it, and gives it its utterance. Now that utter- 
 ance is only for a being that thinks. For a sheep 
 or a pig it is not there. It is the work of the 
 mind, present in every sound as apprehended, 
 and qualifying it in reflection. 
 
 You have in this work an illustration of a 
 great truth, that the universal is nothing apart 
 from the particular, and the particular is nothing 
 apart from the universal. If we look into our 
 own minds we shall see just the same thing 
 in countless other forms. Hume was quite right 
 when he pointed out in his "Treatise" that he 
 could not find what Bishop Berkeley seemed to 
 think he could find, some idea of the mind as 
 apart from its impressions and ideas. He could 
 not catch any perception of the self No, because 
 there is no perception of the self to catch. The 
 
46 MEANING OF REALITY [^-ect. h. 
 
 self is nothing apart fi'om the activity of its 
 mental life, and the mental life has no existence 
 except as in a self, as in a mind which gives it 
 its unity and its meaning, as the mental act of 
 musical conception gives its meaning to the 
 sonata of Beethoven. 
 
 If you look into your minds, you will find one 
 thing characteristic of them, which is quite different 
 from any phenomenon in the external world of 
 objects, and that is the power of free withdrawal. 
 You can withdraw your mind from its own ex- 
 periences. You can withdraw it to almost any 
 extent, as the martyrs at the stake, when under 
 the influence of a powerful enough faith, have 
 been able to withdraw it from their own pain 
 and even from their own death. If you try to 
 analyse the notion of self which you have there 
 into mere feeling, you will fail to grasp any feel- 
 ing of the self as a particular object. You will 
 find that what you at first take to be such a 
 feeling, on scrutiny recedes into mere corporeal 
 sense, the consciousness of the body as sentient. 
 And then it turns out that these sensations of 
 the body derive their significance only from the 
 previous conception of the body as that which 
 has them. Experience is just the manifestation of 
 mind disclosing itself in the organisation of its 
 object world — the object world which is for it — 
 and the mind as subject is just the other pole 
 in the process. It is only in reflection that we 
 separate the one from the other. We are outside 
 
THE NATURE OF MIND 47 
 
 the region of mechanism ; we are outside even 
 the region of life. Their real existence is in one 
 whole of activity. 
 
 Well now, this brings people to what looks 
 very like a Slough of Despond, for, say they, 
 the world is a hard-and-fast world, and it was 
 not made by us. It is all foreign, and in our 
 knowledge we have but a fragment of it. Now 
 we do not question this, those of us who reflect 
 along these lines. It is no business of Divine 
 Philosophy to disfigure her countenance by running 
 her head against brick walls. It is ridiculous to 
 suppose that my mind makes the Universe. But 
 then, as Mill showed in the passage which I 
 quoted to you yesterday, existence has no mean- 
 ing except for thought and through thought, and, 
 therefore, it is plain that in some sense reality is 
 simply the work of mind. We are reduced, 
 therefore, to this, that it is with regard to the 
 nature of mind that the difficulty comes in. 
 
 Then what is the " I " that does not make the 
 world ? Well, when you think of it, it is perfectly 
 plain that this "I" — this M. or N. as the case 
 may be, living in a particular period, in a par- 
 ticular place, with particular relations, with a 
 particular past and a possible future — cannot 
 be what makes the Universe, but discloses itself 
 only as a secondary and derivative conception 
 which we get by reflecting on it as something 
 within the object world of experience, the out- 
 come of a particular standpoint. But now we 
 
48 MEANING OF EEALITY [i-^ct. h. 
 
 must be careful about our metaphors, for 
 Philosophy has often got into disrepute by using 
 metaphors unreflectingly and uncritically. 
 
 It is plain to common sense that, in one mean- 
 ing of the word, at any rate, thought does not 
 make things. A distinguished writer, Mr Bradley, 
 has summed up the case against that doctrine in 
 the declaration that the Universe is "no unearthly 
 ballet of bloodless categories," and he, and that 
 acute critic, the present Prime Minister, have 
 directed heavy artillery against those who seemed 
 to suggest the contrary. Not least, at any rate 
 in the case of Mr Balfour, has the artillery of 
 common sense been directed against the late 
 Thomas Hill Grreen, a man to whom Philosophy 
 owes a great deal, but who certainly did give 
 countenance in some of his expressions to the 
 notion of a mind as constructing its object world, 
 as though ah extra. Mr Green, of course, knew a 
 great deal better than that, and I doubt whether 
 he has been properly understood. He has suffered 
 from a too copious use of metaphor in his writing, 
 always a dangerous thing. But there is no doubt 
 that there have been others who have proved too 
 zealous interpreters of what they believed the 
 great Germans to have laid down. I remember 
 that, when I was at the University, a distinguished 
 student of Philosophy, once, in an essay, described 
 the Universe as a " thick complexus of intelligible 
 relations," greatly to the disgust of the distin- 
 guished Professor who had to adjudicate on the 
 
REALITY AND UNIVEESALS 49 
 
 essay in which this phrase occurred. It suggests 
 a saying of which the late Master of Balliol was 
 fond : "A false quantity in a man is like a faux 
 pas in a woman." 
 
 We must abjure, therefore, crude metaphors 
 such as "making" and "constructing." Thought 
 does not make and construct, in the sense in which 
 making and constructing take place in the object 
 world of experience. We have to face the diffi- 
 culty that, on the one hand, there is no apparent 
 answer to Mill's argument for the doctrine that 
 esse is percipi, or intelligi; and that, on the other 
 hand, we cannot possibly regard the self as a some- 
 thing external to the world or independent of it, 
 and constructing it out of universals. We cannot 
 even express the rich, warm, concrete universe in 
 terms of the abstract universals of thought. There- 
 fore, we seem driven to the conclusion that the 
 nature of Ultimate Reality cannot be sought in a 
 world of mere universals. With this before our 
 minds we have to scrutinise the nature of experi- 
 ence. But we are forced to observe at the outset 
 that the object world of experience is always pre- 
 sented in reflection more or less abstractly. We 
 cannot even name the objects around us except 
 by fixing on some aspect which forms but one 
 feature in their individual actuality. The time, 
 for instance, is no sooner pronounced to be one 
 o'clock than it is past, and discloses its nature 
 as a mere vanishing point abstracted from what 
 is continuous and changing. " Now " is a imiversal, 
 
 D 
 
50 MEANING OF EEALITY ^^ct. n. 
 
 which is only true of each moment as it succeeds 
 to the one that has passed. To this consideration 
 we shall return later on. 
 
 Now, the problems which I have been discussing 
 to-day are no new problems, nor are the solutions 
 which I am going to suggest new solutions. We 
 are coming back, as others have come back, after 
 two thousand years, to the light furnished by the 
 Greeks, who thought about these things with a 
 singular freedom from the incrustations of mis- 
 placed metaphor which baffle us. The Greeks had 
 less difficulty than we in avoiding the suggestion 
 of the individual as a thing outside another 
 hard-and-fast thing, the universe with which the 
 individual was confronted. Perhaps it was the 
 influence of Christianity in raising to such a high 
 level the value of the individual that turned men's 
 thought into another channel; but this much is 
 clear, that the fruitful period of metaphysical 
 speculation ceased at the time when Greek 
 thought ceased to be dominant, and for a very 
 long period did not revive. 
 
 The other day, in looking into the latest 
 collection of the Fragments of Heraclitus, I found 
 a remarkable sentence, quoted, indeed, by the 
 earlier collectors of these fragments (such as 
 Bywater), but quoted in a different context where 
 it had less importance. In Hermann Diels' 
 new book Herakleitos von Ephesos, there is a 
 sentence which puts the teaching of Heraclitus, 
 I think, in a different light from that in which it 
 
THINKING ONE IN ALL MEN 51 
 
 is generally put. Most people think of Heraclitus 
 as having summed up his philosophy in the famous 
 phrase : " All things flow " ; the Universe is made 
 up of particulars which are in a constant state of 
 flux, and there is nothing real. But in the edition 
 of Hermann Diels is a remai-kable sentence,* stand- 
 ing by itself : " Thinking is what exists as one and 
 the same in all men." If you take that, and I 
 think you must, as meant seriously, it shows that 
 Heraclitus had a distinct notion of what it is that 
 imparts stability and objectivity to the flux of the 
 impressions of sense, the fleeting nature of which 
 he had clearly seen. It distinguishes Heraclitus 
 from Sophists like Protagoras, with whom Plato 
 deals, who declared that man was the measure of 
 things, and that there was no such thing as objec- 
 tive truth. 
 
 In the Thecetetus Plato first of all disposes of 
 Protagoras, and it is only later on in the Dialogue 
 that he turns to Heraclitus, and then through the 
 lips of Socrates he brings us to the verge of setting 
 up, what Plato ultimately did set up, just that 
 doctrine of Heraclitus, that "thinking is what 
 exists as one and the same in all men." Take, for 
 instance, in order to get at the meaning of Plato, 
 what by analysis of our minds we find our 
 "impressions" to be. We find that there is no 
 answer to Mill's reasoning as contained in the 
 passages which I quoted to you from the Examina- 
 tion of Hamilton, that all our impressions are in a 
 
 * p. 26 : " ^vvov i<TTi TToicri ro (jtpovteiv," 
 
52 MEANING OF REALITY [^-ect. i.. 
 
 state of flux ; that it is only in so far as they are, 
 so to speak, put into a system by reflection, in so 
 far as by the aid of memory, by judgments of 
 arrangement in space and time, they are set, that 
 you get the kind of " orderliness " which Berkeley 
 held to be the essential feature in the Eeality of 
 the Universe. Well, but that must be the work 
 of thought, if our analysis of the relation of the 
 mind to its object world is a true one. 
 
 Now Plato, accepting this conclusion, said 
 that what makes the world into an objective 
 system is just the universals of thought. But 
 in the abstract fashion which comes out in his 
 doctrine, he separated these universals from the 
 particulars of sense and set them apart as self- 
 subsisting realities, with the result that it is 
 very difficult to follow his reasoning. Then 
 after Plato came Aristotle, who was not 
 only a great speculative thinker but a great 
 crbserver of the actual. The actual was what most 
 of all interested Aristotle. The great step he took 
 was to show that the universal existed in and 
 through the particular, and that the existence of 
 the particular was in and /or the universal. He 
 saw clearly that the particulars of Heraclitus 
 were fleeting and perishing, and that they could 
 not even be named. To say, for instance, that 
 something is here and now is to use a universal, a 
 general name. This paper is here, but, as I move 
 away, the next moment it is there. That paper is 
 there, but again it is now here. It is plain that 
 
ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REALITY 53 
 
 the expression " here " signifies a universal relation 
 which is significant only for abstract thought, for 
 reflection, and whether you take the "here" or the 
 "now," or the "this" or the "that," you will find 
 all these names indicative merely of universals. 
 Still, as Aristotle saw, while its "thisness" is a 
 universal, what is "this" cannot be constructed 
 out of universals. You cannot deduce the Uni- 
 verse out of the universals of thought, any more 
 than you can divide or divorce thought from its 
 object or from the particulars of sense. Aristotle 
 came to the conclusion, therefore, that in the 
 indissoluble union of the two, of the universal 
 of thought and the particular of sense, the Real 
 was to be found, and to be found always as an 
 individual. The individual, then, of experience, 
 and all experience is in its nature individual, is in 
 this light what is ultimate, that behind which we 
 cannot go, what we can separate into universal and 
 particular moments in abstract reflection only, and 
 not in reality. It is the ultimate phase to which 
 you come back. But for Aristotle the individual 
 was what it was only in virtue of — I do not 
 like to use the word "coalescence," — the union 
 in the individual of what I have called two 
 "moments," the universal and the particular, which 
 you can only divorce by abstraction. I am para- 
 phrasing Aristotle into my own words, but that 
 is the substance of his teaching. In reading 
 Aristotle you are embarrassed partly by the want 
 of a complete collection of his works, and, I am 
 
54 MEANING OF EEALITY [i-^ct. n. 
 
 afraid, also by a certain confusion which one 
 cannot explain away. In his Logic, he seems to 
 treat the universal as if it were the same thing as 
 a whole of extension, as a class, and the result is 
 that his Logic is mainly concerned with the 
 discovery of the common properties of individuals, 
 the formation on the basis of these of a class or 
 whole, followed by a return from the class to the 
 individuals which were aggregated in it. 
 
 But though in the Logic the universal appears 
 in the main as the class or whole of extension, 
 in his Metaphysics, and, most of all, in his 
 Psychology, he is thoroughly clear about his 
 great doctrine of the relation of the universal to 
 the real. People misunderstand Aristotle very 
 much when they think it odd that there should 
 be ascribed to him the doctrine that there is 
 "hothing in intellect which was not first in 
 sense." Perception gives you the individual ; 
 the universal you only get by abstraction. But 
 then, he also says there is nothing in sense 
 which was not first in the intellect. The 
 particular of sense only gets its meaning, its 
 distinction from nothingness, its existence, in 
 qualification by the universals of thought. 
 
 Now, what makes Aristotle so great is his 
 freedom from the narrowness which appears in 
 the use of such bad metaphors as "make" and 
 "construct" when applied to the relation of 
 thought and its object. Such expressions, and 
 the expression "the relation of subject and 
 
FOEM AND MATTER 55 
 
 object," are apt to be very misleading. They 
 are the outcome of an abstraction, relatively and 
 provisionally necessary for certain purposes, but 
 abused when made outside of these purposes. 
 Our purposes and the plane of reflection which 
 we occupy in following them, colour our view of 
 reality, and limit the aspects it presents to us. 
 Look at the table in front of me. A being who 
 had no accumulated human experience — a baby, 
 for instance, and still more, one of the lower 
 animals, such as a lizard — would not know that 
 it was a table. For such a mind, at such a 
 plane of intelligence, it would not be a table. It 
 is only because of conceptions with which the 
 mind has become informed that I recognise this 
 as a table, distinguish it from other things, and 
 arrange my conduct accordingly. But, even so, 
 I take a very abstract view of the table. If a 
 carpenter were to cut down a tree, and, while 
 the wood was still fresh, make a table of it, we 
 should still look upon it only as a table. But 
 the wood would have another aspect in its 
 reality. It would still be living; it might still, 
 like the Rod of Tannhauser, develop and burst 
 into blossom. Yet by abstraction the whole 
 world, until its attention was directed to the 
 other point of view, would determine it, fix it, 
 as a table, and as nothing else. 
 
 Aristotle called the universal "form" as dis- 
 tinguished from "matter." The matter is the 
 raw material of sensation. The conception under 
 
56 MEANING OF EEALITY ^^ct. n. 
 
 which we identify the object and pronounce it 
 to be a table is the form, the universal, the 
 activity of thought, the position and setting 
 which gives it its meaning, and, as we shall see 
 presently, its reality. The universal, the form, 
 what he called " Eidos," is, as distinguished from 
 the matter, the definite aspect; it is what intro- 
 duces determination and character into the 
 matter, which is an indefinite which requires 
 specification and determination before it can be 
 recognised as an individual. 
 
 Well now, matter can only be regarded as 
 coming before form in the course of the building 
 up of the world of experience of an individual 
 regarded, as in one aspect every human individual 
 must be regarded, as having a history in time and 
 a knowledge which develops in time. You begin 
 in individual experience, in your mental history, 
 in time, with the indefinite, and make it definite 
 But then you can perceive that in making it 
 definite you have been guided by these very 
 conceptions and categories which afterwards 
 turn out to be the form, the "Eidos," as 
 Aristotle called it — the form which gives its 
 meaning to the particulars of sense, and gives 
 its reality to the world of things. 
 
 Matter, in that point of view, has real existence 
 only in the light of the form which gives it its 
 character as individual, although in the history 
 of the individual struggling after the light and 
 guided by what one may call the objective neces- 
 
ARISTOTLE'S DE ANIMA 57 
 
 sities of thought in the process, the matter is 
 presented as coming first, and the form as 
 coming second. 
 
 Now that may seem to you to be a very modern 
 sort of analysis of the problem, but I should like 
 to quote to you just a few sentences of the De 
 Animd of Aristotle, because they show in a very 
 striking way how far Aristotle had got in this 
 direction. In the fourth chapter of Book III., he 
 says : * " In the case of immaterial objects " (that 
 is general conceptions or abstract universals, such 
 as Mill's Permanent Possibilities of Sensation) 
 "the subject thinking and the object thought are 
 one and the same ; just as speculative science is 
 equivalent to the objects and ideas of speculative 
 knowledge (a fact, it is true, which leaves the 
 question, why we do not always think, to be 
 investigated). In the case, on the contrary, of 
 those objects which are imbedded in matter, each 
 of the ideas of reason is present, if only potentially, 
 and implicitly. And thus reason is not to be 
 regarded as belonging to and governed by the 
 things of sense (reason being a faculty independent 
 of the matter of such objects), but the world of 
 thought must be regarded as belonging to and 
 regulated by reason." t " The forms of reason," he 
 goes on to say in the eighth chapter of the same 
 book, "are not something different from the 
 
 * Aristotle, De Animd, Book III., end of Chapter iv. 
 Wallace's Translation, p. 159. 
 
 f Aristotle, De Animd, Book III., Chapter viii. Wallace's 
 Translation, p. 171. 
 
58 MEANING OF EEALITY [i-^ct. n. 
 
 forms of sense. As there is, according to the 
 common opinion, no object outside the magnitudes 
 of sense, it follows that the ideas of reason are 
 contained in the forms of sense, both the so-called 
 abstract conceptions and the various qualities and 
 attributes that determine sensible phenomena." 
 
 Thus Aristotle refuses to listen to any attempt 
 to show that the concrete riches of immediacy are 
 put together out of universals which exist outside 
 and apart from them. And yet he holds equally 
 firmly that it is only in and through the intelli- 
 gible notions which are imbedded in sensations and 
 which give them their substance that these sensa- 
 tions have reality. We shall see that Hegel 
 asserted the same position as against Kant. 
 
 There has been a very great deal of discussion 
 on these matters since Aristotle's day. _The im- 
 portance of the doctrine that thought makes things 
 in the limited sense I have indicated, is that it 
 gives you an explanation of what we mean by 
 "objectivity" and the "reality of the world." 
 Mill has declared that reality can lie only in a 
 system of permanent possibilities of experience of 
 sensation, of feeling. But that is a hard thing to 
 grasp; it is a hard saying. Yet, I think, I can 
 show you, by way of conclusion to this lecture, 
 very shortly and simply, that the mere hard-and- 
 fastness of this world as it seems, the mere being 
 beyond the control of our wills, is not the test of 
 its reality, or what makes it a real world for us. 
 If you look into a stereoscope, you will see what 
 
THE TEST OF EEALITY 59 
 
 is really a series of lines in two dimensions assum- 
 ing the aspect of being in three dimensions — you 
 have what is called a stereoscopic view. There 
 you have got the conviction of the hard-and-fast- 
 ness o~f the supposed three dimensions borne in upon 
 you, and yet you know it is not true because it does 
 not consist with the rest of experience. In the 
 same way, the hypnotised person has a world of 
 his own, hard, fast, and beyond the control of his 
 will, a world produced out of his subconscious self 
 under the influence of suggestion. It is not the 
 real world, and yet it is a world which seems 
 absolutely real and genuine, and the only real and 
 genuine world, to the hypnotic subject. The mad- 
 man, again, believes firmly in the reality of his 
 world, although that world has no reality from the 
 larger point of view of sane intelligence. 
 
 The test of hard-and-fastness cannot there- 
 fore be the criterion of reality. That reality 
 cannot be found merely in the circumstance that 
 the world is beyond the control of our wills. 
 It must lie in something deeper down than that, 
 something the nature of which we now begin to 
 divine, something I shall endeavour to analyse 
 in my next lecture. So far, all we can say is 
 that we have got a new light on the relation of 
 the universal and particular. We have found that 
 the individual phenomena of experience are in- 
 separable wholes, not to be broken up or resolved 
 into any aggregation of independent things, but 
 uniting and giving reality to the moments of uni- 
 
60 MEANING OF EEALITY [i-ect. h. 
 
 versality and particularity. We have found that 
 the universal and particular are only abstract 
 aspects of a single and indivisible reality which 
 is alvt^ays individual in character. We have found 
 that in the individual, the mind, by abstract reflec- 
 tion, separates out and describes in language those 
 universals vv^hich are the forms of its own activity 
 in combining and setting the particulars of sense, 
 and so finds itself there. But we have got to 
 swim in yet deeper water if we would get at the 
 truth about these matters, and in the next lecture 
 I will try to clear away a mass of weeds which 
 seem to impede the swimmer. 
 
LECTUEE III 
 
 I AM afraid that yesterday some of you may have 
 found that portion of the pathway to reality which 
 we had to tread, stony and dry. And yet it was 
 essential that we should tread it. I had to show 
 you how Aristotle refused to go behind the 
 individual, how he recognised in the individual the 
 ultimate form of reality, in the sense that indi- 
 viduality could not be deduced from any premises 
 or shown to be brought about by any ground or 
 cause, and, at the same time, could not be resolved 
 into terms of anything beyond itself. Individuality 
 was for him, as it was for Hegel after him, the 
 ultimate form of actual experience. 
 
 Indeed, it is not necessary, and not only is not 
 necessary, but is not rational, to ask how individu- 
 ality is made. Such metaphors as " making " and 
 "constructing" belong to that object world of 
 space and time which is itself individual in form. 
 They therefore cannot, as I have already more 
 than once pointed out in these lectures, be used 
 to explain it. Individuality is neither the result 
 of a putting together in space, nor the outcome of 
 any process in time. It is just what we indicate 
 
62 MEANING OF REALITY [i-^ct. m. 
 
 and do not define when we point and say "that 
 is." It is the present reality with which we are 
 in direct contact, and from which we start and 
 must always start — the form of the ultimate 
 reality to which we always come back. 
 
 I showed you that while Aristotle, like Hegel, 
 takes the individual to be the true form of the 
 actual, he still recognises that in reflection you do 
 separate in the individual two moments, which you 
 try by abstraction to keep apart from each other, 
 the universal and the particular. The " that," the 
 " is," what I mean when I speak of my immediate 
 experience, is what confronts the mind as ultimate, 
 but yet has for reflection these two moments of the 
 activity of thought. In my immediate experience 
 alone do they gain existence. Now, my immediate 
 experience has meaning only for my mind, and 
 my mind has meaning only in experience. The 
 individual, therefore, is only as the form in which 
 the mind and its experience exist, a form which 
 mind alone can resolve by its power of abstract 
 reflection about its own processes. But if this 
 form be the form of mind, it must be like mind 
 itself — not inert, lifeless identity, substance, but 
 changing, living, self-resolving, and self-sustaining 
 subject. The view I have of the sea out there is 
 complete in itself, self-subsisting, unique. Thought 
 rests in it satisfied that it has found immediately 
 presented individual existence. Yet it is only 
 there for me in virtue of an infinity of judgments, 
 of relationships, of universals, and these are in 
 
THE PROBLEM OF PHILOSOPHY 63 
 
 their nature self-altering and self-developing. The 
 horizon looks to me bounded as it does because 
 there is implied in my recognition of it, and of the 
 entire view, a reference to myself as a spectator in 
 a particular position. If this changes the view 
 changes. The simplest individual perception, even 
 what seems to approximate to the barest feeling, 
 involves, as part of its nature, an infinity of 
 relationships which can be established only reflec- 
 tively. The simplest individual perception is 
 determined by potential relationship to everything 
 else in the Universe. Nay, more, it is implicitly 
 the Universe itself When I judge about the 
 poorest of subjects, whatever it may be and how- 
 ever bare its nature, it occupies for me a unique 
 place exclusive of all other reality, and yet poten- 
 tially inclusive of it. I cannot say "this book" 
 without a reference to surroundings, which are not 
 to be restrained from extending over the entirety 
 of space and of time. In other words, the subject 
 of every judgment, as we shall see later on, is just 
 reality, and potentially the whole of it, and the 
 work of the judgment is to make explicit what is 
 implicit. The sea view is not less the entire 
 Universe to me, because in reflection I qualify it 
 as limited by an infinite Beyond. 
 
 The problem of Philosophy may be defined to 
 be to find the highest categories under which to 
 think individual actuality, and to get the most 
 adequate and complete conception of it. So alone, 
 by this method and by no other, does it seem as 
 
64 MEANING OF REALITY [lect. m. 
 
 though we could reach a view of God. At the 
 plane of experience of our everyday lives we do 
 not use the highest categories, because we are not 
 in search of ultimate truth. Our necessities, our 
 purposes, our standpoints, are provisional and 
 finite only, and we have no need to go beyond 
 them in the organisation of our view of experi- 
 ence. 
 
 The great fallacy in speculative inquiry of look- 
 ing upon the mind as a thing arises from not 
 keeping this in view. We find it in our every- 
 day parlance very convenient to speak as though 
 the mind could be regarded as *a thing, as though 
 human beings, with souls as well as bodies, could 
 be talked of as things in space. This uncritical 
 way of speaking is very convenient and perfectly 
 legitimate for everyday purposes, but when you 
 take what is an everyday useful tool and divert 
 it to other purposes, use it as a speculative 
 instrument, you get into all sorts of trouble. 
 
 Let me give you one illustration of this. 
 The nature of the mind is to be free, active, 
 with the power of withdrawing itself from its 
 own associations. I instanced to you yesterday 
 the martyr at the stake, who is capable of with- 
 drawing his mind from what he endures, by 
 virtue of a great conception which he has before 
 him. The nature of the mind is to be capable 
 of abstracting itself from any or all of the parti- 
 culars in which it is manifesting itself; and, that 
 being so, the freedom which the mind possesses 
 
FREE WILL 65 
 
 is the freedom of the universal which is in the 
 particulars, which transforms the paiticulars, 
 which gives them their meaning, gives them their 
 existence, although it does not exist apart from 
 them. And the mind, with an activity of this 
 nature, is obviously wholly outside the category 
 of cause and effect, which has only signifi- 
 cance if we are talking of relationships within 
 space and time. Consequently it becomes at 
 once plain, when we think about it, that the old 
 controversy about free will, the old speculation 
 as to whether volition was an uncaused some- 
 thing, or whether, as philosophers used to main- 
 tain, the operations of the mind are only a series 
 of causes and effects making up a single and 
 unalterable chain, was really beside the point. 
 We are dealing with mind, and controversy is 
 needless, as soon as, in the light of criticism, 
 we get rid of our dogmatic presupposition that 
 the mind can be regarded as a thing, or as sub- 
 ject to the relationship of cause and effect. The 
 nature of the mind is to be free. It has the 
 power of acting rationally, or for that matter 
 irrationally, but its choice is free, and it can 
 abstract from any particular, and follow the indi- 
 vidual form with which it is concerned. Therefore, 
 a little bearing in mind of the lesson which Aris- 
 totle taught might have rid theology of a great 
 many controversies which arose from dogmatic 
 assumptions on which the theory of Determinism, 
 the theory of the impossibility of free will, was 
 
66 MEANING OF EEALITY [^-ect. ..i. 
 
 based ; while I need not tell you that the deduc- 
 tion drawn from the notion of God as a First 
 Cause, the outcome of which was to make 
 freedom of will impossible to an individual, who 
 is represented uncritically as a something distinct 
 in the object world of Space and Time, is another 
 fallacy equally apparent. 
 
 Thought and sense, the subject and the object, 
 cannot be taken apart from one another; neither 
 of them is what the Greeks called a " x'^p^'^'rov," 
 a thing apart. 
 
 Well, the individual as we saw assumes forms 
 in reflection, which vary according to the points 
 of view and purposes which reflection brings to 
 bear on it. If you allow thought to turn in 
 upon itself and watch its own operations, you will 
 see how this is. Take, for instance, the illustra- 
 tion of the stereoscope. What we see in the 
 stereoscope is really only a flat surface in two 
 dimensions of space, but it appears in three 
 dimensions. We are, so far as mere observation 
 goes, presented with an object in three dimen- 
 sions, The reason of this is, that the instru- 
 ment has made a powerful suggestion to us to 
 bring to the organisation of the experience which 
 we have to interpret the conceptions or cate- 
 gories which are determinative of space of three 
 dimensions. It is difficult to overcome this 
 suggestion even when we have learned to refer 
 the illusion to its proper place in the context of 
 experience. It is suggestion and the belief which 
 
UNIQUENESS 67 
 
 follows after it, and the conviction that the con- 
 ceptions which we are employing are the right 
 conceptions, and the true modes of organisation 
 of the aspects of experience which are present 
 to us, that give that form and fixity alike to 
 the world of the stereoscope, and to that in 
 which we say that we really live and move and 
 have our being. If thought be allowed to play 
 freely, we find these appearances resolving their 
 own fixity, just as it easily dispels the convic- 
 tion which makes us interpret the plain flat 
 surface which we see in the stereoscope, as an 
 object standing out in three dimensions. 
 
 The test of what is real, the test of what is 
 actual, cannot be found in the mere appearance 
 of immediacy. The picture in the stereoscope, 
 or the delusion of the madman, also present the 
 same aspect of immediacy. The criterion of 
 reality cannot, moreover, be looked for, as has 
 been suggested, in what has been called the 
 uniqiieness of the individual, or our sense of 
 purpose satisfied in it, because, after all, the 
 picture in the stereoscope is an individual picture 
 in which our purpose of searching for reality rests 
 satisfied that it has reached reality. What seems 
 to be essential is — that the conception we have 
 formed should fit in with the context of experience. 
 
 The truth is that the individual, the pheno- 
 menon of experience, gets its fixity and definite- 
 ness from the universals of reflection — derives 
 fi'om these what the Germans call its " Dasein" — 
 
68 MEANING OF EEALlTY [^^ct. m. 
 
 the being there and as it is of the individual 
 thing. The being of that tumbler, for instance, 
 standing there on the table, is definite and fixed 
 for me, because I interpret its appearance through 
 a system of everyday and very familiar concep- 
 tions. It is the system of these conceptions 
 which gives me the table and the tumbler, and 
 a vast variety of other things to which habit has 
 made me assign meanings and uses so regularly, 
 that I have ceased to be conscious of the pro- 
 cesses of doing so. For a dog, or even an infant, 
 that tumbler would not have the significance 
 which it has for you and me, nor stand out 
 with the reality which it does to our minds. 
 The analogy of the stereoscope repeated on a 
 huge scale is the key to the fixity which the 
 outside world seems to present. I shall have to 
 develop this further and make it more intelligible 
 a little later on. 
 
 The individual in which thought can rest satis- 
 fied satisfies thought only for a moment, and 
 when thought passes to another point of view, 
 to another set of conceptions, it takes up another 
 aspect of the individual and so transforms it, 
 and gives it another meaning. I gave you as 
 an illustration yesterday the man who cuts 
 down a tree and makes a table. The wood is 
 living wood in his hands, but when he makes 
 it into a table he passes away from the living 
 tree and thinks only of dead matter. He has 
 come to the conception of the table as a purely 
 
PKOFESSOR ROYCE 69 
 
 mechanical arrangement of parts, and of the wood 
 as something dead and inert. 
 
 We cannot resolve the truth and reality pos- 
 sessed by individual being, by the "that," into 
 the mere satisfaction that we have in it, the 
 mere conviction of its reality, or the notion that 
 our purpose of seeking Reahty is complete in 
 it. If so, the stereoscope would give us real 
 things. But as I will presently show you, that 
 is not the test of Reality. The resolution into 
 something beyond, into the satisfaction of the 
 purpose of my mind, as an explanation of the 
 meaning of Reality and of the individual, would 
 simply, if we relied upon it, prove, as it seems 
 to me, a broken bridge, because we should then 
 be confronted with the question, What does the 
 "is" mean when it is applied to the mind, and 
 the purpose of the mind which is so satisfied ? 
 
 My distinguished predecessor in this Lecture- 
 ship, Professor Royce of Harvard, has written a 
 very able book upon Idealism, and he appears to 
 suggest that the true meaning of being, of the 
 actuality of the individual, is to be found in the 
 satisfaction of purpose. But it seems to me that 
 this is only to push the controversy a little further 
 back, and to leave you to ask what he means by 
 the being of a purpose. Can this be resolved into 
 satisfaction of purpose in having such a purpose ? 
 I venture to doubt whether this analysis, if true, is 
 helpful. It seems as though it left us with an 
 endless regress, and no further on. I prefer to 
 
70 MEANING OF EEALITY [^ct. m. 
 
 say that you must start with the individual form. 
 Satisfied purpose, fulfilled meaning, are rather 
 features of individuality, than explanations of it. 
 So, at least, it seems to me. 
 
 We must have a belief in the real world ; that, 
 of course, we must start with. We must believe 
 in the appearance, whether it be in the stereoscope 
 or in anything else, as real. But what is the test 
 of its reality ? Not the mere fact of our belief in 
 it, but something else ; its harmony with our own 
 other experience, that is the main feature. I will 
 show you what I mean. I go into a room, and I 
 think I see a chair in it. The room is dark, with 
 only the moonbeams playing in. If I trust only 
 to my sense of sight, I may make a mistake in 
 thinking I see a chair. I may try to sit down on 
 it. If I do so, I shall speedily and eflFectively find 
 out whether it is real or not. Other senses have 
 corrected the impressions of the sense of sight. 
 But it is not enough that my present impressions 
 should agree in telling me that the chair is not 
 real. A madman might believe he saw a chair, 
 even if he had sat down and had painfully found 
 there was no chair there. Even if another element 
 came in he might still remain under his delusion. 
 He might be deceived about his past impressions 
 as easily as about those of his present experience. 
 If I look round, and think that I see a chair 
 before me, and then remember that a moment 
 before the space was empty, I may conclude that 
 my present impression is illusory. But the mad- 
 
THE CONTEXT OF EXPERIENCE 71 
 
 man may have quite a different impression. His 
 whole experience, what he remembers as much 
 as what is immediately present to him, may be 
 distorted. Yet another element must come in 
 before the test of reality can be satisfied. My 
 personal conviction is not enough. My experience, 
 if it is to be true, must harmonise with the 
 experience of the other people in my world. All 
 men must see and feel in such a fashion that 
 the universals in which their descriptions are 
 recorded are the same, if the impression is to be 
 given the title of real. The context with which 
 there is to be agreement must be that, not merely 
 of my own experience, but of the experience of 
 the rest of mankind. It is not enough that the 
 entirety of my personal experience should be 
 self- consistent. The madman may pronounce 
 self- consistency of his own experience. There 
 must be correspondence of what I believe 
 with the beliefs of other men about what their 
 senses tell them. The image of the chair 
 must be there for the experiences of all other 
 people ; it must fit in not only with the general 
 context of my individual experience as this 
 particular A.B. existing at a particular time and 
 on a particular spot ; but it must consist with the 
 experience of all other individuals, and fit in to 
 the general context and harmony of the general 
 experience. If it does so completely, then I come 
 to the conclusion that it is a real chair. My will 
 is then satisfied, has been convinced. In other 
 
72 MEANING OF REALITY [i-'^ct. m. 
 
 words, I assent. In fact, I have accepted the 
 perception of the chair as part of the real world. 
 But my belief in its reality is. not enough unless 
 the reality is in fact in harmony with the experi- 
 ence of myself and other persons alike. That is 
 what Mill meant by the system of Permanent 
 Possibilities which he said made the reality of the 
 object world. 
 
 Such harmony with a system is a conception 
 which we get only through reflection, only through 
 judgments, which we fix and make definite and 
 preserve in the mind, in universals such that we 
 can remember them and speak about them and 
 communicate them to others through language. 
 They do not give you the actual "is" of these 
 things. That is the unique experience of the mind 
 that ha,s it. What is communicated is a descrip- 
 tion of a system which you can put in language 
 which deals with universals, and universals alone, 
 and it is in the objectivity of that system, that is 
 to say in the fact that it is the system of the 
 similar experience of everybody, that you get the 
 test of reality. You do not make reality ; you do 
 not make the world. You do not construct, or 
 deduce, or put it together, but you have a test of 
 the presence or absence of that which is meant 
 when we speak of reality. It is very difficult to 
 grasp this rather elusive point, but it is very 
 important to keep hold of it, and we shall come 
 back to it later in another form. 
 
 Our characters and our outlook on life change 
 
OTHER EXPEEIENCE THAN OURS 73 
 
 as our purposes and our standpoints change with 
 changing time and circumstances. With enough 
 of variation of purpose and standpoint, our con- 
 ceptions may so alter that experience itself may 
 become organised quite differently. Insanity is 
 the best illustration of this truth. We may, too, 
 conceive a whole world of people whose experi- 
 ence has grown in forms different from that of 
 human beings. I am quite unable to figure to 
 myself what the world of experience of a lizard 
 or a dog may be. I can to some extent by 
 watching its motions guess what sort of mind a 
 lizard or a dog has. But if there be such a 
 being as an angel, how does an angel think? 
 Again, those who live, if they do live, in Jupiter 
 and Saturn, may construct quite a different world 
 for themselves from any we know. Their senses 
 may be wholly different from ours. They may 
 have no perception through sight, for example. 
 But it is plain that when you get to the uni- 
 versals of their experience, these must be the 
 same, because we could not otherwise attach 
 any meaning to their worlds or to themselves as 
 inhabiting them. It is only on the basis of a 
 common system of thought, of the validity of 
 Reason as the basis and foundation of any 
 possible kind of knowledge, that Scepticism can 
 even raise its head. 
 
 Now the poets have sometimes very clearly 
 set before themselves this fact, that the mind 
 does not really discover in the world which lies 
 
74 MEANING OF REALITY ^ect. m. 
 
 in front of it something hard-and-fast which does 
 not vary. They have penetrated, by the power of 
 genius, over and over again to the fact that the 
 external world which confronts us is only appar- 
 ently permanent and impenetrable, and may be 
 transformed by thought. I think it is something 
 of that kind which Shakespeare has in his mind 
 when he makes Prospero in the Tempest tell 
 Ferdinand that 
 
 " Like the baseless fabric of this vision 
 The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces. 
 The solemn temples, the great globe itself. 
 Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve. 
 And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded. 
 Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff 
 As dreams are made on and our little life 
 Is rounded with a sleep." 
 
 Or again, when Browning talks of 
 
 " Life for ever old yet new, 
 Changed not in kind but in degree, 
 I The instant made eternity." 
 
 He is speaking of the power of the mind 
 to transform the world — to turn it into a 
 system which may have a reality quite different 
 from that of the world of Mr Worldly Wise- 
 man. 
 
 Again, when the author of the Book of Revela- 
 tion tells us of Him who sat on a great white 
 throne, from whose face the earth and the 
 heavens fled away so that there was found no 
 place for them, he seems to me to have had in 
 
THE UNIVEESE OF SENSE 75 
 
 his mind the unreal and transitory and relative 
 character of the universe of sense. 
 
 Perhaps one of the most striking and most 
 remarkable breaks-away in our poetry from the 
 standpoint of the hard-and-fast finality of every- 
 day immediacy to another point of view, is to be 
 found in that extraordinary poem, I think, too 
 little recognised in its greatness, that was written 
 — the day before she died — by a Yorkshire girl 
 in a country parsonage. She lived among the 
 moors, far away from learned society — that girl 
 of whom Mr Swinburne somewhere tells us that 
 she takes rank as the direct descendant of the 
 Titans, as in the line of Shakespeare and of 
 Milton. I will quote Emily Bronte's "Last 
 Lines " to you entire : — 
 
 " No coward soul is mine, 
 
 No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere 
 I see Heaven's glories shine 
 
 And faith shines equal, arming me from fear. 
 
 " O God, within my breast 
 
 Almighty, ever present Heity ! 
 Life that in me has rest 
 
 As I — undying Life — have power in Thee. 
 
 " Vain are the thousand creeds 
 
 That move men's hearts, unutterably vain ; 
 Worthless as withered weeds, 
 
 Or idlest froth amid the boundless main. 
 
 " To waken doubt in one 
 
 Holding so fast by Thine infinity, 
 So surely anchored on 
 
 The steadfast rock of immortality 
 
76 MEANING OF EEALITY [^-^^t. m. 
 
 " With wide-embracing love, 
 
 Thy spirit animates eternal years. 
 Pervades, and broods above. 
 
 Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears. 
 
 " Though earth and man were gone. 
 
 And suns and universes ceased to be, 
 And Thou wert left alone. 
 
 Every existence would exist in Thee. 
 
 " There is not room for Death, 
 
 Nor atom that his might could render void. 
 Thou, Thou art Being and Breath, 
 
 And what Thou art may never be destroyed." 
 
 Matthew Arnold speaks of these lines as the 
 too bold dying song of her 
 
 " Whose soul 
 Knew no fellow for might. 
 Passion, vehemence, grief, 
 Darmg, since Byron died." 
 
 I do not think he exaggerated. Certainly specu- 
 lative poetry has rarely reached a higher intel- 
 lectual level than in this dying outburst. It 
 contains the teaching of Aristotle transferred 
 from the abstract to the concrete. 
 
 Now the poets have the power of suggesting, 
 of making us feel what is real. It may be that 
 what they tell us is the outcome of promptings 
 from what Professor James calls the "subliminal 
 self." That is probably true. But none the less 
 is it equally true that these feelings fall within 
 the world as it seems and belong to reality, and 
 
THEEEFOLD TEST OF EEALITY 77 
 
 the result of our investigation may be just to 
 show that they are better pictures of things 
 than the pictures that the commonplace man 
 presents, in that they exhibit the individual with 
 equal reality, but presented at a higher plane. 
 
 Well, we must return for a moment from this 
 digression to our threefold test of what we mean 
 by reality : Agreement furnished by (1) Our own 
 present senses — of every kind ; (2) Our past sense 
 experience; and (3) The sense experience of 
 others. That these afford only a relative test we 
 have seen. But they throw light upon what we 
 mean by reality and unreality in human knowledge, 
 or, for that matter, in human perception. It 
 means the assignnient of the phenomenon to its 
 proper place in the context of experience. If I am 
 standing on a hillside looking across the valley at 
 the hilltops opposite, behind which the sun is 
 setting in a red glow, I may be tempted to believe 
 that the hills are on fire. Now that is a Wrong 
 inference. Why? Because I know that if I go 
 over there I shall not find them red at all, that the 
 apparent redness arises from the falling of the 
 sun's rays upon them. Everybody standing at my 
 point of view would find them apparently on fire, 
 but the phenomenon of appearing to be on fire 
 would not agree with the general context of 
 experience, with the place to which the rest of 
 humanity assigned the phenomenon in its reflec- 
 tion. Accordingly, I come to the conclusion 
 when I reflect on it, that what I did when I 
 
78 MEANING OF EEALITY b-^-^T. m. 
 
 thought the hills were on fire was, not to make 
 a mistake about mere sense impression, but to 
 assign the phenomenon to a wrong place in the 
 context of experience. 
 
 In other words, it is wrongly construed experi- 
 ence that makes the difference as regards reality. 
 When people agree about a thing, and so give 
 ground for saying that a phenomenon has appeared 
 in the same way in the common system of their 
 varying perceptions, the accord or correspondence 
 between these experiences is an accord or corre- 
 spondence for reflection, and not for mere per- 
 ception. I cannot experience your sensations any 
 more than you can experience mine, but what we 
 can do is to communicate to one another common 
 judgments, identical judgments, which we have 
 formed about these sensations. We can describe 
 them in language, and if you search the language 
 you find that it speaks only in universals. If I say 
 that a thing is here, it is to you, looking at it from 
 a distant point of view, there. Language is 
 entirely taken up with universals, and conveys 
 them, and describes a system of intellectual con- 
 structions which are not events in Space and Time, 
 but are judgments under conceptions which give 
 their meaning, and the only meaning they have, to 
 what are called the individuals of experience. 
 
 In knowledge we rise by abstraction, by 
 isolating these universals, and therefore knowledge 
 as such is never reality, because the universal is 
 nothing apart from the individual out of which it 
 
COERESPONDENCES OF EXPERIENCE 79 
 
 has been taken by abstraction. On the other 
 hand, the individual emptied of universals, the 
 particular as such, is never real, because it is only 
 as determined by the universals of knovpledge in 
 the individual, a transitory resting place which 
 varies as the universals vary, that the individual 
 has its reality. 
 
 Very often the correspondence that is of the 
 essence of reality is correspondence between 
 diflFerent points of view. Suppose one man eats 
 a loaf and another watches him doing it, and 
 recognises what he does as a real event. The 
 experience is different in the case of the first man 
 from what it is in the case of the second ; but they 
 recognise a common social system, which is the 
 foundation of their common interpretation of what 
 takes place. Therefore, what is real must not 
 only be assented to, which is a matter of will, 
 for belief is an act of will, but it must formally 
 accord with the criterion afforded by a system 
 of common conceptions, and that is what gives 
 it its objectivity. 
 
 Well, when in abstract reflection we dis- 
 tinguish thought from its object, we. get what we 
 have called the subject, and we have now learned 
 that the subject as distinguished from the object is 
 not reality. It will be convenient to get a phrase 
 to express the view of the ultimate reality of things 
 which insists on the indissoluble union, so far as 
 existence is concerned of subject and object, of 
 universal and particular. We may call what we 
 
80 MEANING OF EEALITY [i-ect. ni. 
 
 come to as the basis of reality Mind, or we may 
 call it Spirit (Geist). At any rate it is what is 
 individual, and it holds in a union which is 
 irresoluble, because it is presupposed as the 
 basis of all analysis, the two moments of the 
 universal and the particular which cannot exist 
 outside of it. We cannot deduce it, or the 
 universe which exists in it, in its unique indi- 
 vidual form as a "This." You presuppose it in 
 the subject of every judgment. Yet the perma- 
 nent element is the miiversal which is isolated, 
 it is true, in reflection only, and which gives us 
 the system in which alone permanence is to be 
 found. 
 
 All language is abstract, even the lahguage 
 of poetry. But poetry suggests — its art is to 
 suggest to us — individuals which embody the 
 universal in a highly concrete and sensuous form. 
 Philosophy gives us more permanent light than 
 poetry does. Philosophy moves in the region of 
 abstract thought. But it pays for so doing by 
 being cold and lifeless. Therefore, we want in 
 our world, not only the cold mind of the 
 philosopher, but the feeling of the artist, the 
 moral sense of the good man, the self-surrender 
 of the religious soul. Without these aspects of 
 reality our world would be a very poor one. 
 
 We may now consider that we have provision- 
 ally defined our ultimate reality as Mind or 
 Spirit. How then do we proceed to view the 
 ordinary world as we have it before us? We 
 
KNOWLEDGE PURPOSIVE 81 
 
 have already seen that its hard - and - fastness 
 to a large extent arises from the conceptions 
 which we bring to bear, and the purposes or 
 ends under which we organise our knowledge. 
 Take, as another example of this, what is called 
 an explosion. Nobody can define what an ex- 
 plosion is. In the book of the great French 
 chemist, Berthelot, there are attempts at a 
 definition; but they come only to this, that an 
 explosion is nothing more than a very rapid 
 burning, and its consequences. But rapidity is 
 a relative word. What appeared to a giant 
 to be an instantaneous detonation, might seem 
 to a gnat to take a very long time — to be 
 almost a slow burning. Their tempo is dif- 
 ferent. So it is with space. From the point 
 of view of the cell, the organism of the body, 
 which is just made up of all the cells acting 
 together, may look very much like what the 
 starry heavens look to us — something very 
 remote and of which we form a mere isolated 
 unit. But it is conceivable — and the speculation 
 has often been entertained — that there may be 
 an organic and conscious life in which we are 
 but as cells in a larger organism, to the intelli- 
 gence of which we appear in a similar fashion to 
 that in which we view the cells of our own body. 
 In that way the appearance of the universe 
 would be quite transformed by reflection. In 
 other words, the standpoint, or the purpose, or 
 the end for which we are organising knowledge, 
 
 F 
 
82 MEANING OF REALITY [i-ect. m. 
 
 and which determines the conception under which 
 we attend and abstract, is what really gives its 
 meaning and hard - and - fastness to the world 
 which confronts us. 
 
 As another example, take the extreme trans- 
 formation which thought makes in the case of 
 sound. Suppose a man, A.B., comes into my 
 room. A person who had never seen him before 
 might think him uninteresting or even repulsive 
 to look at. Another person, who knew that the 
 disfigurement of his face was the result of an 
 accident which he met with in saving his friend's 
 life, and that his short-sighted look was the result 
 of constant study, might think his face expressive 
 of all that is best. He takes up a book and 
 reads a few lines of G-erman. The one man 
 recognises the words as forming one of Goethe's 
 lyrics. A person who did not know German 
 would have one kind of impression, a person 
 who did know it quite another. A.B.'s voice 
 conveys to the one man a mere succession of 
 unintelligible sounds. To the other man it 
 suggests a vast wealth of images and reflec- 
 tions. He forgets the sounds — ceases to dis- 
 tinguish them, thinks only of the sense and 
 the feelings which are awakened. " Ueher alien 
 Gipfeln ist Ruh." From the standpoint of the 
 mere student of acoustics, these sounds form an 
 experience for the listener complete in its indi- 
 viduality. His purpose rests satisfied and seeks 
 nothing beyond. He has brought it under his 
 
EFFECT OF STANDPOINT 83 
 
 special conceptions, converted it by abstraction 
 into universals, and is satisfied. But to the other 
 man, who knows nothing, and cares little about 
 acoustics, the bare sounds cease at once to be 
 bare sounds. They are merged in the thoughts 
 which they awaken. The result is two totally 
 divergent experiences, arising from the fact that 
 the two observers, in whom respectively these 
 experiences have arisen, have different mental 
 furnishings and different purposes. So far as 
 each recognised a man, they had a common im- 
 pression. But even this was only the outcome 
 of common conception and standpoint. A wild 
 animal might not have even recognised a man. 
 A lizard might not have even recognised a living 
 object. So deep down does the penetrating work 
 of thought reach, and so much does the constitu- 
 tion of experience depend upon conception and 
 purpose. It is the exclusiveness of the standpoint 
 at which I am, and of my abstraction under its 
 conceptions and for its purposes, that make the 
 world seem hard-and-fast. In other words, the 
 world as it seems is determined in its form rather 
 by ends and purposes than by causes. 
 
 Now, the German book which awoke such 
 a mighty response in the mind of the man who 
 appreciated the meaning and form of the thoughts 
 expressed in it, would to the dog be only so 
 much paper and ink, and the dog would know 
 no better even after he had chewed it. The 
 reality is thus very different in the case of the 
 
84 MEANING OF EEALITY [l^ct. m. 
 
 dog and in that of the person with an instructed 
 and developed mind, although so far the basis 
 may be a common one. 
 
 It is the necessities of social intercourse 
 among individuals with like purposes to fulfil, 
 purposes ethical and other, which have really 
 made our common world; and in order to 
 fashion, each for himself, the common ethical 
 and general world in which we live, we have 
 adopted certain common ends, and these common 
 ends have developed our common language, our 
 common standpoints, and determined us to 
 abstract from all aspects of the world except 
 those which fit in with these standpoints and 
 purposes. 
 
 Suppose somebody asks what is the cause of 
 the fire. The scientific man would say that the 
 fire was caused by the uniting of the atoms of 
 oxygen with the atoms of carbon, but the house- 
 maid would say that the cause of the fire was the 
 putting of the match to it, and from her point of 
 view she would be right. Her business is to 
 apply the match, and with the chemical side of 
 the question she has nothing to do. Thus what 
 is real and true in the world, however important, 
 depends upon its harmony with the context of 
 experience, and is always in a sense relative. 
 
 Thought, reflection, is free and self-determining, 
 and can and does select its purposes and ends and 
 the conceptions under which it will work. It is by 
 following certain purposes and ends that the notion 
 
OBJECTIVE CONSTRUCTION 85 
 
 of the hard-and-fastness of the world which eon- 
 fronts us becomes evolved. But, of course, this 
 valuable faculty has its dangerous tendencies. We 
 tend to hypostatise those abstract views which 
 everyday life gives us, so that what are really 
 abstractions become mistaken by us for real things. 
 We can see how this constantly happens. It is 
 enough for me to remind you of the way in which, 
 in even the exact sciences, such abstractions as 
 force and atoms have arisen ; working hypotheses 
 which the man of science has hypostatised into 
 notions of real individuals, of which he talks 
 as though they could conceivably be reached 
 through the senses. They are really nothing 
 of the kind, but, as we shall find later, only 
 the outcome of abstraction under certain cate- 
 gories. 
 
 What it comes to is this — thought does not 
 make things any more than things make thought. 
 That kind of notion, with its implication of 
 causality, belongs to the old theory of the mind 
 as a thing which looks out from windows of 
 sense at other things in the outside world. 
 This window theory is inadequate from every 
 point of view. It breaks down physiologically, 
 because, if my optic nerve is destroyed, I do 
 not see the outside world. A race of people 
 born without optic nerves would have no sense 
 of sight at all. The realities of things arise 
 by objective construction. Psychologically the 
 window theory is just as inapt, for the reasons 
 
86 MEANING OF REALITY [i^ct. m. 
 
 which Berkeley and Mill have given us at 
 length. 
 
 Do not be misled by the difficulty which arises 
 from the notion of separate minds, existing out- 
 side each other in space and time, on the footing 
 of each one being among many like it. That, 
 again, is only the result of the organisation of our 
 experience under certain categories. I interpret 
 myself as one among many, as one individual 
 among a multitude of individuals in a world in 
 which we all live. I cannot penetrate into your 
 minds or experiences, but by a knowledge of my 
 own I can form a conception of their nature. 
 Professor Ward, in his admirable Gifford Lectures, 
 discusses what a distinguished continental psycho- 
 logist, Richard Avenarius, used to call "Intro- 
 jection." It means that my picture of you comes 
 from interpreting. I interpret you in a way 
 which I get by considering myself. Now the 
 notion of myself as the basis from which I do 
 this is only a secondary and derivative notion in 
 the system which is presupposed as the founda- 
 tion upon which we build up our ideas of separate 
 individuals, each standing to the rest as one among 
 many. 
 
 I may observe that the critical philosophy of 
 Kant, one of the greatest systems which the world 
 has ever seen, breaks down just at this point. 
 Kant had to account for experience. He said, 
 "What I have to do is to ask, how is experience 
 possible ? " and his view of it was that the activity 
 
KANT 87 
 
 of mind, not of mind conceived as an individual 
 with a locality in space and time, because that 
 for Kant was only a derivative conception, but 
 the activity of mind, taken simply as the pure 
 activity of thought constructing its object world, 
 operated upon a certain raw material of sense 
 which he refused to attempt to deduce. Kant 
 never would try to deduce the particulars of 
 sense. But he thought that the activity of intel- 
 ligence, operating upon the particulars of sense, 
 arranged them in two pure forms of Space and 
 Time. And so the world of experience was con- 
 structed, and beyond the limits of the twelve 
 categories which Kant took from the Logic of 
 Aristotle and regarded as exhaustive, he did not 
 allow the categories of experience to go, and he 
 limited the real world to the world of experience 
 so constructed. 
 
 Now there are many criticisms to be made on 
 Kant's philosophy. We shall have to deal with 
 the Aristotelian Logic at a later stage. The 
 main criticism which I wish to make — and, 
 indeed, the last word I have to say to you 
 to-day — is that Kant was infected with the 
 psychological point of view, the notion that you 
 can break up experience, that you can treat the 
 particulars of sense as if they could be converted 
 into individuals of experience by the synthetic 
 activity of pure intelligence working from outside 
 them, and, as part of the process, welded together 
 in the independently existing forms of Space and 
 
88 MEANING OF EEALITY ["-ect. m. 
 
 Time. How far this point of view will carry you, 
 the modern psychologist Munsterberg has shown 
 in his admirable little volume Psychology and Life* 
 There the author points out that Psychology, like 
 all other sciences, has got its own categories and 
 conceptions, and that, adopting these categories 
 and conceptions for its own purposes, it views 
 the individual abstractly, busying itself only with 
 certain universal features which it selects by 
 abstraction, and consequently gives rise to the 
 notion that the mind consists of a series of 
 separate feelings or impressions or sensations — in 
 other words, that what is called atomism is the 
 basis on which the mind is built up. 
 
 Even by looking into our own minds we can 
 see that this is not true. In watching the de- 
 velopment of a child's mind, we see that knowledge 
 grows by the further development of an aireipov 
 by the gradual introduction of definite organisation 
 into a vague continuum. The truth is that Kant, 
 like many other people, illustrates the dangers of 
 those metaphors which make the path of the 
 philosopher at once so easy and so difficult. 
 Experience is no onion, the coats of which can 
 be peeled off one by one. Experience is not a 
 thing to be laid on the dissecting table and taken 
 to pieces. It is the ultimate reality behind which 
 you cannot get if you once realise that it means 
 and is just the individual as the presupposition of 
 knowledge. That is a point of view in which 
 
 ■''■ Munsterberg, Psycholo^ and Life, 
 
HEGEL AND KANT 89 
 
 Hegel had to correct Kant, in the same way as 
 Aristotle had to correct Plato. 
 
 I think that we have now cleared our way so 
 far, and that we may feel that we have got some 
 firm ground on which to tread in making our 
 ascent to a further, and, I am afraid, not less 
 difficult stage of the pathway which we shall have 
 to tread to-morrow. 
 
LECTUEE IV 
 
 At the commencement of these lectures I told you 
 that my task would be to develop a single thought, 
 and that no novel one. I have in each lecture 
 reiterated the doctrine that the real is the indi- 
 vidual, and that it is a fallacy to think that we 
 can divorce the universal from the particular, or 
 find either of them elsewhere than in the con- 
 crete experience in which we men and women 
 live and move and have our being. Those of 
 you who are theologians may be thinking of the 
 old Scottish preachers who made a point of 
 expounding in each discourse the scheme of 
 salvation in its completeness. They had a reason 
 for this, and, like them, I have a reason for my 
 reiteration. 
 
 My reason is that the acceptance of the doctrine 
 which I have just stated, purified from the language 
 of false metaphors and bad metaphysics, is nothing 
 short of our ttov o-tw, and is the basis on which 
 alone we can build up an intelligible view of the 
 Cosmos, and our place in it. Yet we have found 
 that the individual of perception, the real, as we 
 insist that it is, behaves in a way that is unsatis- 
 
 90 
 
RECAPITULATION 91 
 
 factory when we try to keep it in the rigid bonds 
 in which for everyday purposes we seek to bind it. 
 Under reflection it discloses itself as full of contra- 
 dictions, as self-developing, in as much as the 
 thought which seems to fix it is really self- 
 developing thought of which the conceptions are 
 constantly altering. 
 
 When by abstraction we try to hypostatise the 
 individuals of experience into a final and fixed 
 shape, these forms always turn out to be menda- 
 cious, to disclose inherent contradictions. Yet 
 they point to fuller and more adequate views of 
 themselves which lie beyond. There was an 
 English judge who was fond of saying that the 
 truth lurks even in an affidavit and will come out, 
 and we may say of the individuals of sense that 
 even in them there unfolds itself a higher view of 
 things. The truth shines through them, as, indeed, 
 the poets have shown us in illustrations such as 
 those which I quoted to you in my last lecture. 
 
 Well, at the close of my second lecture I said 
 that I should endeavour to clear the way a little 
 more — to get rid of the weeds which might impede 
 the strokes of the swimmer progressing from the 
 shallow water from which we started to the deeper 
 water in which we must swim if we are to make 
 progress. We have cleared away in the course 
 of these lectures several masses of weeds. We 
 have got rid of the "window" theory of the 
 mind; the metaphor of making or constructing 
 things by thought ; the atomism of the old Psycho- 
 
92 MEANING OF EEALITY ['■''ct. iv. 
 
 logy; the notion, which misled even Kant, that 
 experience could be divided into elements, and the 
 mind into faculties. All these we have more or 
 less got rid of, and we find ourselves in agreement, 
 not only with great teachers of speculative science 
 like Aristotle, but in this matter with the great 
 critics of life, the great poets and the great artists 
 also. 
 
 Goethe, for example, is never tired of telling us 
 that we cannot break up experience, that we must 
 take life as a whole ; that even in Science we fail 
 utterly when we forget that we cannot break up 
 the living thing into a mechanism. When the 
 student in Faust goes to interview Faust, and 
 finds Mephistopheles dressed up in his gown, 
 Mephistopheles gives him some very wise counsel. 
 Among the wise things which Mephistopheles says 
 to the student is this : 
 
 " Wer will was Lebendig's erkennen und beschreiben, 
 Sucht erst den Geist herauszutreiben, 
 Dann hat er die Theile in seiner Hand, 
 Fehlt leider ! nur das Geistige Band. 
 Encheiredn nature^ nennt's die Chemie, 
 Spottet ihrer selbst, und weiss nicht wie." * 
 
 But the name of Goethe and the thought of 
 the scheme of Faust suggest to my mind the yet 
 
 * " The man who seeks a living thing to know 
 First seeks to drive the soul out — so, 
 Then the parts he can hold in his hand and class, 
 But the soul and the spirit are gone, alas ! 
 Encheiresin naluroe this Chemistry names, 
 Nor knows how hei'self she thus mocks at and blames." 
 
GOETHE'S FAUST 93 
 
 wider way in which Goethe put this great truth. 
 Indeed, it underlies and forms the scheme and 
 basis of the whole drama of Faust. Let me try 
 to describe it in a few sentences. Faust, as you 
 all remember, is a man who has spent his life in 
 the acquisition of abstract knowledge. He grows 
 old. He is dissatisfied with the want of the 
 richness of life in the universals, the abstract uni- 
 versals, among which he moves. He summons 
 up first of all the Earth Spirit, but he finds 
 between it and himself no affinity. He has cut 
 himself off too completely from the fulness and 
 immediacy of nature. The Earth Spirit tells him 
 that he, Faust, resembles the spirit that he com- 
 prehends, and not him, the Earth Spirit. Then 
 Faust goes farther; he is willing to make a 
 bargain with the Powers of Darkness by which 
 he is to get back youth in its freshness and rich- 
 ness, to quaff the full goblet of the senses, and 
 so to make up, as it seems to him, at any rate 
 at the moment, for what he has lost. But then 
 comes in the subtlety, as it has always seemed 
 to me, of the whole poem. Faust's mind is a 
 completely furnished mind; he has lofty cate- 
 gories and perceptions; he knows what truth is; 
 his is the highest point of view. His only 
 mistake has been that he has divorced the world 
 of knowledge too much from the concrete riches 
 of immediacy, and so has won it in an abstract 
 and unsatisfying shape. Well, he makes his 
 bargain with the Power of Darkness, and in the 
 
94 MEANING OF KEALITY [i-ect. iv. 
 
 first part of the play you find the preliminary 
 working out of the tragedy. The bargain is that 
 when Faust shall say to the passing moment, 
 "Stay, thou art fair," he shall then pass into the 
 hands of Mephistopheles. But although in the 
 first part Mephistopheles puts within the reach 
 of Faust, not only the youth which he bargained 
 for, but every kind of delight of the senses, 
 every kind of extravagance of youthful life, Faust 
 remains unsatisfied. The large conceptions of 
 his mind find in the riches of the sense world 
 which are offered to him something divorced 
 from thought, divorced from his own large ends 
 and purposes, and so what is profoundly unsatis- 
 factory. His great mind cannot find itself, to 
 use a German expression, in the world which 
 is now opened up to him, and accordingly the 
 first part ends in disaster and misery. 
 
 Then comes that second part, which Goethe 
 wrote after the meditation of a quarter of a 
 century. We are introduced to the spectacle of 
 Faust, now a middle-aged man, after the wild 
 career of his youth, lying on a flowery bank, 
 sprinkled by the spirits with the waters of Lethe, 
 in order that he may forget the disappointments 
 of the past. He awakes, goes out into the 
 world of men, just as a middle-aged man in the 
 full strength of his powers would do. He thrusts 
 himself into the life of courts, of state-craft. He 
 endeavours, not from any high or lofty purpose, 
 but merely to give himself the sense of power 
 
GOETHE'S FAUST 95 
 
 satisfied, to control the affairs of his fellow 
 creatures; he succeeds, and yet he is not satis- 
 fied. He seeks to bring back by magic power 
 the spectacle of Greek art and of Greek beauty 
 in its noblest form. He gains experience. Still 
 he is not satisfied. For he is desiring these 
 things, not in the light of any large and lofty 
 purpose, but for the mere satisfaction of his 
 individual wishes. Thus his mind still remains 
 divorced from the true object world in which 
 alone it can find reality, find itself again. 
 His universal is not combined with the par- 
 ticular in an individual whole in which it can 
 rest. 
 
 The situation remains abstract. But time 
 passes, and there comes a moment when Faust, 
 full of years, but also rich and powerful, sees 
 some poor people on a property of his own, try- 
 ing to keep out the sea which is breaking through, 
 and destroying their little village. He directs 
 that they should be assisted. He watches them 
 struggling day after day, and struggling at last 
 through his aid successfully, to keep out the 
 waters which have been ruining their land. A 
 new sense, new altogether, is awakened in him. 
 He feels now not only that he is using his 
 power for an unselfish end; he realises that he 
 has found objectivity — he has found a world in 
 which his mind is face to face with what it 
 recognises as real and akin to its own ends and 
 purposes. He feels, too, that here is the real 
 
96 MEANING OF REALITY i^^^-^- 'v. 
 
 learning of which he has been in search. And 
 then he says, looking up : — 
 
 " Ja ! diesem Sinne bin ich ganz ergeben. 
 Das ist der Weisheit letzter Schluss : 
 Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben, 
 Der taglich sie erobern muss. " * 
 
 Or, translating these things into the thought that 
 underlies the whole, he only can gain life and 
 freedom who looks upon them, not merely as 
 goods to be desired from outside, and as indepen- 
 dent in their nature of his own energies, but as 
 that highest experience which comes to Will and 
 Intelligence only through constant striving to 
 realise themselves at their highest level. 
 
 Faust now sees that the former alternative is 
 an untrue view, and that it is only when the 
 mind daily works out for itself, daily earns for 
 itself again its life and freedom through its own 
 exertions, that it can really gain and keep 
 them. 
 
 And so it is that in Faust you have at the 
 end just what we learn in the Prologue. The 
 Deity in the Prologue, after allowing Mephisto- 
 pheles to have his will and telling him that, while 
 he may go forth and tempt Faust, he will in the 
 end fail, because Faust is of the higher order 
 
 * " Yes, to this thought I hold with firm persistence, 
 The last result of wisdom stamps it true, 
 He only earns his freedom and existence. 
 Who daily conquers them anew ! " 
 
GOETHE'S FAUST 97 
 
 of the sons of men, speaks these significant 
 words : — 
 
 "Doch ihr, die echten Gotter-sohne, 
 Erfreut euch der lebendig reichen Schone ! 
 Das Werdende, das ewig wirkt und lebt, 
 Umfass' euch mit der Liebe holden Schranken, 
 Und was in schwankender Erscheinung schwebl, 
 Befestiget mit dauernden Gedanken." * 
 
 This is the last injunction of Philosophy, the 
 lesson that Faust is to learn. So the great 
 tragedy of Faust is worked out. So it is that 
 Faust's mind at its highest, having found itself 
 again in this the highest conviction, that it must 
 work out its own life and freedom in the larger 
 sphere of action on behalf of others — passes into 
 the Eternal. So it is that when Faust says to 
 the Moment, "Stay, thou art fair," and at that 
 same instant dies, his soul is saved, the bargain 
 notwithstanding; and the Devil, whose categories 
 of comprehension are of a limited order and cannot 
 take in the true meaning of what has happened, 
 finds that his prey has escaped him. 
 
 Well, one sees in these illustrations from the 
 poets how if you take the greatest minds in litera- 
 ture, the greatest critics of life, that same thought 
 which underlies Philosophy is constantly repro- 
 
 *"But ye the only real Sons of God 
 Enjoy the rich, the ever living Beauty, 
 The self-creative changing forms that work and live. 
 Hold these in bonds of love that never weaken 
 The self-dissolving shapes that ever move before you 
 Fix and make iirm through thought that stands for ever." 
 
 G 
 
98 MEANING OF EEALITY [i-ect. iv. 
 
 ducing itself. The highest is not to be looked for 
 in some world beyond. It lies in the Here and 
 Now, in just this world comprehended at a loftier 
 plane. We have not to try to deduce the Universe 
 around us. What we have to do is to clear 
 away from our minds the rubbish of hypostatised 
 abstractions, which hinder us from apprehending 
 the nature of reality under adequate conceptions 
 and categories. 
 
 Now the Greeks were probably less hampered 
 than we are in thinking after this fashion, because 
 their minds were free from some at least of the 
 abstractions that trouble us. For example, take 
 the great distinction which runs through modern 
 Philosophy, and which I started with in the first 
 lecture, the distinction between subject and object. 
 Scarcely a trace of it is to be found in definite 
 form anywhere in Greek Philosophy. Aristotle, 
 who was systematic if anybody was, makes it 
 clear that in the individual nature of actuality he 
 does not recognise a divorce between what we 
 should call subject and object, nor yet a divorce 
 between the universal and the particular. He is 
 perfectly aware that there is an aspect in which 
 the mind appears as the mind of a particular 
 person, and in which nature confronts the mind 
 in that form as something foreign. He knows 
 that Philosophy has to take account of the fact 
 that the world itself belongs to the field of 
 nature, and that in the object world the mind 
 finds itself as a thing in time and space with a 
 
ARISTOTLE'S NOYE 99 
 
 history and a body. For mind in this aspect the 
 particulars of sense come first. Yet these par- 
 ticulars, and the individual intelligence, and the 
 system which is the outcome of thinking of it a 
 this standpoint, presuppose a deeper view of mind 
 in which the categories of the particular self are 
 transcended. 
 
 In the Third Book of the De Animd, in the 
 fifth chapter, Aristotle, after dwelling on the 
 double character of NoO? or Reason, which, he says, 
 can perceive and so become all things, and also 
 create all things, goes on : — 
 
 "This phase of reason is separate from and 
 uncompounded with material conditions, and, 
 being in its essential character fully and actually 
 realised, it is not subject to impressions from 
 without : for the creative is in every case more 
 honourable than the passive, just as the originat- 
 ing principle is superior to the matter which it 
 forms. And thus, though knowledge as an actu- 
 ally realised condition is identical with its object, 
 this knowledge as a potential capacity is in time 
 prior in the individual, though in universal exist- 
 ence it is not even in time thus prior to actual 
 thought. Fiirther, this creative reason does not 
 at one time think, at another time not think [it 
 thinks eternally], and, when separated from the 
 body, it remains nothing but what it essentially 
 is : and thus it is alone immortal and eternal. 
 Of this unceasing work of thought, however, 
 we retain no memory, because this reason is 
 
100 MEANING OF REALITY [i-^ct. iv. 
 
 unaflFected by its objects ; whereas the receptive 
 passive intellect (which is affected) is perishable, 
 and can really think nothing without the support 
 of the creative intellect." * 
 
 In other words, putting aside metaphors, which 
 Aristotle uses and understands, he is drawing the 
 distinction between intelligence as taken at two 
 planes, the passive reason, intelligence viewed 
 abstractly and at a standpoint from which it 
 exhibits itself as within nature ; and, on the other 
 hand, the active reason or intelligence conceived as 
 the mind or spirit within which the universal and 
 particular fall, combined in the individual within 
 which they are inseparable except by abstrac- 
 tion. 
 
 Now, another remarkable thing about Aristotle 
 is the way in which he realises that when we 
 get to the standpoint of the active reason, of 
 mind or spirit, as we should call it in modern 
 parlance, we have got away from the embar- 
 rassing conception of the relationship of the one 
 and the many. It has always been a great 
 difficulty to those who looked at these things 
 uncritically to understand how, if idealism is true, 
 the mind can be one thing among many. Aris- 
 totle sees perfectly plainly that the mind can be 
 regarded as one thing among many only when 
 it is looked at from the point of view of a stage 
 of thought which is not that of speculative 
 knowledgd, 
 
 * Wallace's Translation, p. 161. 
 
EVERYDAY EXPEEIENCE 101 
 
 Now, we have always to bear in mind the 
 difference between these two planes of thought 
 or ways of looking at the individual. The stand- 
 point of A.B. as a person in this world, with a 
 name and a history and relationships, is one that 
 we cannot possibly get away from. The very 
 basis of my being here and speaking to you, and 
 myself thinking and reflecting, is that I am just 
 this particular individual with a particular mental 
 and physical history, surroundings, and relation- 
 ships. It is on that very basis that I proceed. 
 But then, it is just because we have learned that 
 mind, in so far as it is the ultimate reality, is 
 not a thing distinct from mind looked at from 
 the point of view of individual experience, but a 
 fuller thinking out of what already is potentially 
 there in the individuals of first experience, that 
 the gulf which has so embarrassed people who 
 approach the consideration of Philosophy is 
 bridged over. We find in everyday life that the 
 individual of experience is not taken as final. 
 We do not either in theory or in practice limit 
 our consideration by the assumption that the 
 individual so taken is an end in himself The 
 soldier on the battle-field who goes to death 
 without a doubt for his country, transcends the 
 individual standpoint. The martyr at the stake 
 does so likewise. And in the field of Science 
 the mathematician who goes beyond immediacy, 
 and reasons about the relations of space in the 
 region of remote worlds, has also transcended 
 
102 MEANING OF EEALITY [i^=ct. iv. 
 
 the immediacy of the senses, and has carried 
 the power of reflection, through abstract methods, 
 to a point which has enabled it to break through 
 the limits of his powers of direct perception. 
 Then again, the mathematician gives us other 
 illustrations of the extraordinary power of 
 thought to transcend itself. He can use the 
 symbols in mathematics of impossible quantities 
 — quantities of which he cannot predicate exist- 
 ence, but which are yet symbolical of relation- 
 ships which, in mathematics, are not only real- 
 ised, but made practical use of. 
 
 The poet, again, who makes us realise the 
 overwhelming presence of what eye hath not seen 
 nor ear heard, teaches us, in Matthew Arnold's 
 phrase, "to see life steadily, and to see it 
 whole." 
 
 In our everyday life we, at every moment, 
 transcend the point of view of mere individuality. 
 However much the plain man may find that the 
 standpoint of individuality is a necessary and 
 useful one, it is a standpoint which is necessary 
 and useful only within the limits of the purposes 
 for which it is made available. Without it we 
 could not get on. Unless I, by an abstraction, 
 which, for the purposes of social intercourse, is 
 essential, looked upon myself as a thing with a 
 particular mind and history attached to it, as a 
 being standing in social relationships, it would 
 be impossible for me to conduct any conversa- 
 tion with you or to live in a common social 
 
SOCIAL PURPOSES 103 
 
 world. It is only on the basis of the relation- 
 ship of the one and the many, it is on the 
 basis of assuming this relationship as our work- 
 ing hypothesis, that we can make any progress 
 at all, and the assumption is, I need not say, a 
 legitimate one. Of course, even on that foot- 
 ing, the assumption is only valuable and 
 legitimate when used for everyday purposes, and 
 it is certainly an assumption which will not 
 stand when we come to the purposes of specu- 
 lative thought. 
 
 For social purposes we must regard men, 
 women, and children as beings with histories and 
 names, and look upon them as things with minds 
 in them which peer through the windows of the 
 senses and possess faculties. It is necessary for 
 everyday life. It is a common way of looking 
 at things which we have evolved and use in 
 social life. 
 
 But in social life we have got complex points 
 of view. Even the everyday person, in his 
 everyday conduct, is constantly coming upon 
 a standpoint which transcends these purposes. 
 The moral law, religion and the chm-ch, the state 
 and the duties of the citizen, these all carry you 
 beyond the individual, and they carry you beyond 
 the individual in the very midst of an experience 
 which we treat as single and do not break up, 
 because it is our everyday life, in which we have 
 no need to distinguish the purposes and stand- 
 points which combine in focussing it. All these 
 
104 MEANING OF REALITY [lect. .v. 
 
 standpoints and purposes seem to combine and 
 lie side by side in producing the complex whole 
 of what we call social life. 
 
 I showed you that the relation of cause and 
 effect would not bear looking at in the case of the 
 housemaid putting a match to the fire. I pointed 
 out to you that what she did was not in any 
 intelligible sense a cause, that the potential energy 
 in the wood was just as much the cause of the fire 
 as the putting of the match to it. But it was for 
 the social purpose of responsibility to those who 
 had the direction of the affairs of the house, that 
 the housemaid, in explaining the cause of the fire, 
 selected this conception — over which she had con- 
 trol. Well, cause and effect is just an illustration 
 of that rough-and-ready kind of conception which 
 we use in everyday life and which we hypostatise. 
 We talk of a "cause" as though it were some 
 event which we could separate off from other 
 events and consider by itself; whereas, when we 
 look scientifically at the burning of the fire we 
 find that the cause is only the totality of the 
 conditions, and that the effect is nothing else but 
 these taken as a whole. But we hypostatise the 
 one feature which we have selected and called 
 the cause. We tend in consequence to apply 
 this category where it has no application at all 
 — to apply it to the nature of ultimate reality, 
 to apply it to the nature of God, to apply it in 
 the symbols and forms which the poets and 
 artists in their own way use. Only the poets 
 
LANGUAGE UNIVEESAL 105 
 
 and artists see, shining through these images, 
 that higher aspect of the truth which discloses 
 the contradictory and transient nature of all 
 these hypostatised individuals which, by abstract 
 conceptions, we figure to ourselves. 
 
 It is, of course — as I have often said in the 
 course of these lectures — our social pm-poses which 
 develop this way of looking at things. The desire 
 to communicate with those around it develops the 
 child's intellect more than anything or anybody 
 else. Language enables us to think and compare 
 our conceptions, and yet if there is anything which 
 has become plain it is that language conveys, not 
 the experience of the individual, because that is 
 unique and incommunicable, but universals, con- 
 ceptions which enable other people to view their 
 individual experience from just the same plane or 
 standpoint as our own. There is not a single word 
 in language which does not import a universal. 
 We talk in universals, and it is our social neces- 
 sities which have caused us to develop our faculty 
 of communicating in this fashion to an extent of 
 which we are wholly unconscious. 
 
 What we have to do, starting on the basis of 
 the view of the self as an individual being in the 
 world, is to disentangle the highest plane of com- 
 prehension which is implicit in that individuality, 
 and which emerges when we let thought play upon 
 itself. Of course Philosophy, when it does this 
 systematically, is abstract. Philosophy is always 
 abstract, but art and religion, which operate sym- 
 
106 MEANING OF REALITY [i-ect. iv. 
 
 bolically, help to a closer grasp, and they have 
 their justification from Philosophy even though it 
 must at times criticise them. But apart from the 
 test of Philosophy, which never can give you the 
 full richness which you have in art or religion, but 
 which can give you a test of their truth, they are, 
 as Professor James has pointed out, no safe guides 
 to truth. 
 
 Well, we have got to deal with the individual 
 self in this light, that it is a conception which is 
 never wholly thought out, and in which we cannot 
 really rest. People talk as if they knew what they 
 meant by their individual selves, but if they 
 analyse there is nothing more difficult than to say 
 what they mean when they use the phrase. The 
 world thinks of A.B.'s particular appearance, 
 name, family, body, clothes even, and so on. But 
 he may change his name, may ignore his relation- 
 ships, may go to a country where he is not known, 
 and still remain himself He is identified for new 
 reasons, and a self with different particulars is 
 attributed to him. Now what is his real self? 
 Not his body, because his hand, for instance, he 
 can cut off", and still remain himself Not his 
 memory even, because although his memory fails 
 him, he will still be recognised as a self Certainly 
 not his history and relationships, because if these 
 were unknown or had been forgotten, he would 
 still be credited with his selfhood. It is very 
 difficult really to come to any other conclusion 
 than that the word "self" is like the word 
 
SELF-IDENTITY 107 
 
 " cause," one of these outcomes of half thought out 
 standpoints which are useful in everyday life, but 
 which will not bear the dry light of Science. 
 
 The self may be taken to mean the corporeal 
 feeling — the feeling of the body that one has as 
 something distinct from outside things in which 
 one does not feel, but which can make the body 
 feel. But even that is a vanishing conception if 
 we understand the process of Metabolism. The 
 body is always changing its substance, and tak- 
 ing in new material. The truth is, that you can 
 extrude, one by one, the particulars which you try 
 to hypostatise as the elements in the self. You 
 find that they are merely made part of the Ego, 
 and that the notion of the self as comprising them, 
 although a necessary and valuable working hypo- 
 thesis, is a notion that will not stand the test of 
 reflection even at the level at which we mean by 
 the self an individual in space and time, one 
 among others. If, on the other hand, I try to 
 confine the identification of the self to what 
 belongs to pure thought, I find that I am in a 
 difiiculty of another kind, because if I abstract 
 from all my internal experience, if I distinguish 
 my emotions, feelings, experiences, from the 
 subject for which they are, I get back to the 
 pure abstraction of mere thinking, and that again 
 is so unreal that, divorced from its particulars, 
 divorced from its manifestation in an object 
 world, I cannot even name it, so completely 
 have I eliminated all reality from it, 
 
108 MEANING OF REALITY [i^^ct. iv. 
 
 The truth is, that in order to get the real 
 meaning of self, you must go to a more complete 
 view of mind than the one with which we have 
 just been dealing. We have been chasing a 
 supposed individual which we cannot find just 
 because it is an abstraction, and have been try- 
 ing to identify it with reality. Its notion dis- 
 closes itself as full of contradictions, as a notion 
 which has only emerged because people are 
 forced to go beyond the old "window" theory 
 of the mind as a thing with faculties. Hume 
 was perfectly right in declaring that he could 
 catch no separate idea of the self when he 
 looked into his mind. If your method is to 
 look into the mind, regarded as a stream of 
 psychical occurrences, you will find no presenta- 
 tion of a substance which manifests itself in 
 them. It is only when you realise that there is 
 another aspect of mind that you cease to trouble 
 yourself. Knowledge, final reality, is Mind; for 
 the final reality is always in an individual form. 
 Your self, your personality, is a phase of final 
 reality which it is a fallacy to seek to find as 
 existing independently of that in which it mani- 
 fests itself. It is that on which the entirety of 
 experience is dependent. Your self is not the 
 final and ultimate fact, the individual which 
 only discloses itself as free from contradictions, 
 when you have brought to the understanding 
 of it the highest categories. Your self spoken 
 of in everyday parlance is only that same 
 
THE MOVEMENT OF THOUGHT 109 
 
 ultimate reality viewed from the lower stand- 
 point at which it is presented as one among 
 many. You are on a wild-goose chase when 
 you try to identify it with any particulars of 
 experience, divorced from the movement of 
 thought in which they are set, and in which 
 they have their being. It is the abstractness 
 of your point of view that has given rise to the 
 difficulty. 
 
 Now, it is easy to state these things, and it 
 is extremely difficult to get a concrete concep- 
 tion of them before the mind. We are in a 
 region where we have passed beyond the con- 
 ceptions of everyday life; but it is well for any- 
 body who is discouraged by such a reflection to 
 remember that we have exactly the same sort of 
 difficulties in the Sciences. In pure mathematics, 
 fo,r instance, and particularly in the calculus, there 
 is the same turning upside down of our everyday 
 conceptions. But the view which I have put 
 before you is the view not of one system only, 
 but of every concrete system of Idealism. 
 
 In his Logic, Hegel gives a description which 
 I should like to quote, as putting, in other words, 
 just what I have been trying to state to you. 
 He says : — 
 
 * " If thought never gets further than the 
 universality of the Ideas, as was perforce the 
 case in the first philosophies (when the Eleatics 
 
 * Hegel's Enaiflopiidie, par. 12. The Logic of Hegel ; 
 WaUace's Translation, Second Edition, p. 21. 
 
no MEANING OF REALITY [^-ect. iv. 
 
 never got beyond Being, or Heraclitus beyond 
 Becoming), it ' is justly open to the charge of 
 formalism. Even in a more advanced phase of 
 Philosophy we may often find a doctrine which 
 has mastered merely certain abstract propositions 
 or formulae, such as ' In the absolute all is one ' " 
 — (elsewhere he likens Schelling's Absolute to 
 the night in which all cows look black) — 
 " ' Subject and object are identical,' — and only 
 repeating the same thing when it comes to par- 
 ticulars. Bearing in mind this first period of 
 thought, the period of mere generality, we may 
 safely say that experience is the real author of 
 growth and advance in Philosophy. For, firstly, 
 the empirical sciences do not stop short at the 
 mere observation of the individual features of a 
 phenomenon. By the aid of thought they are 
 able to meet Philosophy with materials prepared 
 for it, in the shape of general uniformities, i.e., 
 laws and classifications of phenomena. When 
 this is done, the particular facts which they con- 
 tain are ready to be received into Philosophy. 
 This, secondly, implies a certain compulsion on 
 thought itself to proceed to these concrete specific 
 truths. The reception into Philosophy of these 
 scientific materials, now that thought has removed 
 their immediacy and made them cease to be mere 
 data, forms at the same time a development of 
 thought out of itself. Philosophy then owes its 
 development to the empirical sciences. In return 
 it gives their contents, what is so vital to them. 
 
THE WOEK OF THINKING 111 
 
 the freedom of thought." . . . "The fact as 
 experienced thus becomes an illustration and 
 a copy of the original and completely self- 
 supporting activity of thought." 
 
 In other words, he says, that the work of 
 thinking is to transform the individual of experi- 
 ence by setting it in new lights at the standpoint 
 to which thought has now attained. One might 
 multiply illustrations of this. What he says is 
 as true of the Sciences as of Philosophy. The 
 illustration which I gave you of the fire shows 
 how thought carries you beyond mere immediacy 
 to the conceptions which give to mere immediacy 
 its meaning, and it shows the play of thought with 
 the individual. We always start from a "that." 
 The judgment of knowledge is always about a 
 "that." My recognition as such of that glass of 
 water standing on the table is a judgment which 
 starts from a " that " — a " that " which is indefinite, 
 which I qualify and make definite by the con- 
 ceptions which I bring to bear on it. The " that " 
 is always relative and transient. With new stand- 
 points, with further insight, the "that," the glass 
 of water, gets a new meaning for me. It may be 
 that I am thinking of it now with the knowledge 
 of certain chemical combinations. The process of 
 developing the content is always going on. Water 
 may mean the same to you and me so long as 
 we look at it from the same point of view, but' 
 water means a very dififerent thing from the point 
 of view of the chemist from what it does from the 
 
112 MEANING OF EEALITY [i-ect. iv. 
 
 point of view of the man who merely drinks it. For 
 the chemist the " that " has had a further " what " 
 incorporated in it, and is enriched. If we say that 
 the Esse of the subject in judgment is Intelligi, that 
 is true in a sense, provided that we are careful 
 that we understand and eliminate the metaphor, 
 which represents the subject as separable from 
 the entirety of reality, and the predicate as separ- 
 able from it otherwise than by abstraction. It 
 is a very useful phrase for making plain the 
 dependence of the "that" of individual actuality 
 on the universals of thought, and the nothingness 
 of mere feeling. But we cannot, as I have often 
 said, separate thought from things except by 
 abstraction. 
 
 The picture of a pure self-consciousness regard- 
 ing things from the highest standpoint, finding 
 itself in its objects and no longer troubled by 
 any distinction between the object world and 
 itself, because it has got rid of all the abstractions 
 of lower standpoints, such a picture we cannot 
 present to ourselves, because we are compelled 
 to view the universe from the standpoint of the 
 particular individual. But by reflection we may 
 get towards the grasp of the concrete truth that 
 this is the final conception of the self, the real 
 foundation and meaning of experience, and that 
 it is really actualised in experience. 
 
 Well, from this standpoint we eliminate the 
 notion of nature as being related to intelligence 
 as an effect to a cause, and we cease to attempt 
 
REALITY AND APPEAEANCE 113 
 
 any deduction of nature. This is expressed in a 
 passage in Hegel where he speaks of* "the one 
 living Mind whose nature is to think, to bring 
 to self-consciousness what it is, and, with its 
 being thus set as object before it, to be at the 
 same time raised above it, and so to reach a 
 higher stage of its own being." The "that" of 
 mind so regarded confronts us in self-conscious- 
 ness as the ultimate fact, the finally real, and 
 the business of Philosophy seems to be just to 
 allow reflection, freed from wrong categories 
 and metaphors, to allow the movement of mind 
 to disentangle its own nature, and to bring it 
 to self-consciousness. As Goethe said ; — 
 
 " Natur hat weder Kern noch Schale, 
 Alles ist sie mit einem Male." 
 
 "Nature has no kernel as apart from husk." All 
 aspects cohere in it and are inseparable. We 
 cannot break them up, and the test of whether 
 we have successfully disentangled the movement 
 of thought, comprehended and grasped its con- 
 crete nature, seems to be this : — Can we show 
 that the world seen from the higher standpoint is 
 disclosed as reality, as compared with the world 
 seen from the lower standpoint which by contrast 
 is appearance only ? 
 
 In the realm of feeling we know that the great 
 artist does this, and that the good man does it, 
 
 * Hegel's Encyclopadie, par. 13. The Loffx: of Hegel; 
 Wallace's Translation, Second Edition, p. 22. 
 
 H 
 
114 MEANING OF EEALITY ['ect. iv. 
 
 and he also who is in the deepest sense religious. 
 They may give us no detailed picture of what 
 they see. But their ideal worlds shine through 
 immediacy, and disclose themselves to the eye of 
 faith as its truth. The task of Philosophy is to 
 make the ideal actual for the eye of knowledge. 
 There is only a single actual universe, the 
 imiverse which, in one abstract aspect is thought, 
 in another, nature, in its concrete, individual, living 
 actuality, mind. This same actuality presents to 
 us its different aspects according to the plane of 
 intelhgence at which we approach it. With the 
 categories we employ its degrees of appearance 
 vary and arrange themselves. These degrees of 
 appearance, degrees not of substance but of com- 
 prehension, give us the differing and changing 
 aspects of the world as it seems, and, it may be, 
 the justification for our faith in their several titles 
 to places in reality. 
 
LECTURE V 
 
 We may now pause for a moment to look back 
 on the road whicli we have trodden. If it be 
 true that the divorce between the mind and the 
 object world of experience has disclosed itself as 
 provisional only, and in fact and in truth no 
 longer exists for us, then we have reached 
 ground from which a new view of what lies 
 ahead of us must begin to unfold itself. The 
 end, the final form of reality, can no longer be 
 sought for as mere mechanism, or as the last 
 link in a chain of temporal evolution. That 
 end, that form, must have been implied and 
 present at the very beginning, and hidden from us 
 only by a veil woven out of abstractions. If our 
 purposes determine the aspect for us of the world 
 as it seems, then moral ideals have played a large 
 part in shaping and fashioning that world. If 
 the cause presupposes for its own existence the 
 effect, if in the law of nature mind is only redis- 
 covering and dragging into the light its own 
 activity, then what we take to come last must 
 really be first. If the truth of the universe be my 
 individual experience thought out to the point 
 
116 MEANING OF REALITY [l^ct. v. 
 
 at which my finite individuality becomes disclosed 
 as the outcome of a distinction which mind itself 
 has brought about, there is no longer any reason 
 why I should hold my world to be cut off from 
 God as from Another. 
 
 The objective world, and the system of uni- 
 versals which give to it reality, disclose themselves 
 as but the workings of a mind which is not another 
 than mine, but the mind in which all reality, my- 
 self included, has its place. The development of 
 my own knowledge is but the struggle towards a 
 plane of comprehension, which, just because it is 
 the presupposition and basis of finite experience, 
 compels my reason to accept it as the truth, as 
 what intelligence, at the standpoint of the indi- 
 vidual, did not make and cannot alter. "From 
 the goblet of our spiritual kingdom our infinity 
 foams back to us," and we learn that the world 
 can only be fully comprehended when it is 
 viewed sub specie astemitatis. We are compelled 
 to throw off the abstract " either, or " of the finite 
 understanding, and cease to take it as a garb in 
 which full knowledge can disclose itself Reality 
 has its degrees of appearance, and to one among 
 these degrees belongs the human mind and the 
 object world with which it is boimd up, in the indis- 
 soluble unity of what is individual. 
 
 Within that object world the self appears, 
 appears as human, as, if you please, the outcome 
 of a process of evolution through boundless time 
 and in unending space, but yet for thought, for 
 
SUMMARY OF EESULTS 117 
 
 itself. Think out the content of this individual 
 experience, and its sharp lines give place to yet 
 other distinctions, which drive us from causes to 
 laws ; from laws to ends ; from nature to spirit, 
 the last in reflection, the first in the system of 
 reality, presupposed by and determining the course 
 of reflection. "What was always implicit is thus 
 made explicit. The "this" is qualified by the 
 incorporation in it of a further "what," and so, 
 while still the "this," has become richer. The 
 judgment in which the universe is sustained now 
 discloses itself as the very presupposition of time 
 and space, and as in nowise presupposing them. 
 
 In the last three Lectures I have tried to bring 
 out certain truths, and these truths I may now 
 summarise in- propositions. The first of these 
 propositions is that intelligence is free and self- 
 determining. Now, I do not need to elaborate 
 the meaning of the word freedom, because I dealt 
 with it in a former Lecture. I need only remind 
 you that negatively its definition implies that the 
 relation of cause and effect is totally inapplicable 
 to the relation of motive and volition, and that, 
 therefore, the problem of free will, which has 
 given occasion for so much discussion and so 
 much troubling of spirit, is founded upon a false 
 metaphor, and disappears. The mind is free to 
 choose its course of action. It acts rationally, 
 with the power to abstract from any phase of its 
 content, and in that sense it is completely free 
 from the chain of necessity which is expressed by 
 
118 MEANING OF EEALITY [i-^cx. v. 
 
 the word "causation." The dilemma about free- 
 will is just one of those applications of what 
 Hegel was fond of calling, in the words just 
 quoted, the "either, or" of the abstract under- 
 standing; the understanding which says that 
 things must come either within species "A" or 
 within species " not A," and so creates a dilemma 
 which turns out to have no application, as soon 
 as you see that the genus is too narrow for the 
 subject matter which you are trying to bring 
 under it. 
 
 In the second place, we may take as a leading 
 proposition of these lectm-es that the foreignness 
 and hard-and-fastness of our everyday experience 
 of the world that confronts us, is the outcome of 
 a system of social and other purposes with refer- 
 ence to which we have been forced to organise 
 our knowledge in order to fulfil them. The 
 abstractions made for these purposes, have given 
 rise to what I have called "superstitions of 
 common sense," superstitions which arise when 
 you try to apply what you have got in this 
 fashion to speculative problems, which lie outside 
 the scope of everyday reflection. Individual experi- 
 ence, the knowledge that I have of the world as 
 it stretches out before me, is always relative ; 
 that is to say, however definite it may seem, it 
 turns out to owe its definiteness to my adherence 
 to a standpoint, with the result that when that 
 standpoint changes, the form of this individual 
 experience changes with it. The only element in 
 
SUMMARY OF RESULTS 119 
 
 knowledge which is permanent and abiding and 
 never alters, is the system of the conceptions and 
 categories of thought, which must be the same 
 for all individual minds. Otherwise, we could 
 raise no question of any kind, not ieven the 
 question of the sceptic, which, like every other, 
 assumes that reason is able to raise doubts 
 which, for the very statement of their validity, 
 depend on her own capacity for truth. 
 
 Then, as a third proposition, I may take this, 
 that ends and not causes make the world seem as 
 it does. That is a corollary of the last proposition, 
 and I need not further explain it. 
 
 Passing to the fourth proposition, this, I think, 
 may be taken to be that we ought to be prepared 
 to believe in the different aspects of the world as it 
 seems — life, for example, as much as mechanism ; 
 morality as much as life ; religion as much as 
 morality — for these belong to different aspects of 
 the world as it seems, aspects which emerge at 
 different standpoints, and are the results of different 
 purposes and different categories in the organisa- 
 tion of knowledge. And if Philosophy gives us 
 back what Science threatens to take away, and 
 restores to plain people their faith in the reality 
 of each of these phases of the world as it seems, 
 then Philosophy will have gone a long way to 
 justify her existence. 
 
 Finally, and as a fifth proposition, we may say 
 that it is a fallacy to imagine that there can be any 
 question of trying to deduce nature. All experi- 
 
120 MEANING OF EEALITY [i-^ct. v. 
 
 ence is individual in its form, as I have already 
 endeavoured to show you. We start from the 
 individual. It is the "that" vrith regard to 
 which every judgment is made, and it is the 
 foimdation and presupposition of self-conscious- 
 ness — the ultimate form of experience from 
 which we cannot get away, and which closes 
 for us the circle. The work of thought is 
 merely to examine, develop, and further define, 
 what is implicit in that experience. The notion 
 of deducing the imiverse, of showing it as con- 
 struction of thought, is really a remnant of that 
 old notion, which, I trust, I have succeeded in 
 expelling, the "window" theory of the mind as 
 a thing with faculties of diflFerent kinds through 
 which it reaches out to a world independent of 
 it. What is called the finite self, a thing with 
 a proper name, manifesting itself in a body, one 
 day to be carried off in a cofl&n, exists only 
 within the system of experience, and the notion 
 of it is a secondary and derivative one. 
 
 Well, it remains open to Philosophy, taking 
 individuality as in this sense ultimate, and only 
 by abstraction resoluble into the moments of the 
 particular and the universal, to exhibit the work 
 of abstract reflection in forming the "that" at 
 each particular stage in reality. Now, as the 
 "that" is always relative, and as its aspect varies 
 with the standpoint from which we approach 
 it, we may thus show the pulsation — if I may 
 use a metaphor — of thought in the shaping of 
 
PEOFESSOE PEINGLE PATTISON 121 
 
 individuality. We may even try to disentangle 
 and arrange the abstract conceptions which go to 
 this shaping to the extent of throwing them into a 
 system, as Hegel sought to do. But Hegel never 
 tried to deduce the "that" — although he has 
 been misinterpreted as doing so, and abused in 
 consequence. The very foundation of his Philo- 
 sophy was that you could not deduce the 
 "that," and, agreeing with Aristotle in this con- 
 clusion, what he endeavoured to do was to 
 unfold the "what," the characterisation of the 
 "that" with which he had to start. 
 
 Now, there have been many critics who have 
 attributed to Hegel doctrines which he never put 
 forward, just as others have attributed to Aris- 
 totle things which he never said. Even distin- 
 guished men like Trendelenburg seem to treat the 
 Hegelian system as though it should be looked 
 at as being an attempt to resolve experience into 
 universals, and nothing else. But there is a much 
 more sympathetic and understanding critic of 
 Hegel, one whom you all know here, Professor 
 Pringle Pattison. Professor Pringle Pattison, in 
 his last work, Man's Place in the Cosmos, has 
 given a view of the Hegelian Philosophy, which 
 is, to my mind, such an admirable piece of work, 
 that really I have little comment to make upon 
 it, except that I would like to have more from 
 the same pen. In an earlier book, however, 
 Hegelianism and Personality, he has made some 
 criticisms with which I feel myself not wholly 
 
122 MEANING OF REALITY [i-ect. v. 
 
 able to agree; because I do not think he has 
 done the Hegelian system full justice. There 
 are, even in his last book, some points on which 
 Professor Pringle Pattison seems to separate 
 himself from the Hegelian conclusion, but they 
 are so minute compared with those which he 
 raises in the earlier book, that I will only allude 
 to them very shortly. 
 
 For instance. Professor Pringle Pattison takes 
 this ground. Hegel, he says, rightly declared 
 that it was impossible to go beyond the indi- 
 viduals of experience ; with that experience you 
 must start, and can only re-think experience and 
 recognise in it degrees of reality. But then, he 
 asks, what did Hegel regard as the highest view 
 of reality ; what does he give us as the final view 
 of ultimate reality? And, alluding to Hegel's 
 doctrine of the development of the World Spirit, 
 Professor Pringle Battison says that it is difii- 
 cult to avoid the conclusion that Hegel meant 
 to take human self-consciousness, as it appeared 
 in the nineteenth century, and with that to 
 identify the highest manifestation of absolute 
 mind. "Well, in this view Professor Pringle 
 Pattison is following Lotze, who made the same 
 criticism of Hegel, and declared that it was 
 impossible to think that the movement of the 
 absolute mind could have culminated in what 
 he called "a dialectical idyll on the shores of 
 the Mediterranean." I notice that most of those 
 who demur to the shores of the Mediterranean, 
 
HEGEL'S PEOBLEM 123 
 
 seem anxious to suggest that the culmination of 
 the manifestation of absolute mind is rather to 
 be found upon the banks of the Jordan. But 
 neither Lotze nor Professor Pringle Pattison say 
 this, and my own view is that Hegel would not 
 have recognised that there was any real issue 
 which could legitimately be raised between his 
 point of view and theirs. 
 
 Hegel took human experience as he found it, 
 and sought to think it out again in the light of the 
 science of his age. He set himself to solve the 
 very same problem which Aristotle put before him- 
 self — how to present as a system human experi- 
 ence taken in the light of the highest conceptions 
 which could be brought to bear upon it. Hegel 
 never, as I think, meant to identify the absolute 
 mind with human consciousness; or to say that, 
 because the absolute mind manifested itself at a 
 particular plane of its development in what we 
 call human consciousness, you had, therefore, got 
 an adequate picture of the absolute mind. What 
 I understand him to have meant is that you 
 must always deal with the "that," with an indi- 
 vidual, and that in the stage of history which in 
 our time has been reached^ — we have got what 
 for us is the highest picture of it, with the 
 certainty that as knowledge gets richer we shall 
 get to a conception yet more adequate, and that, 
 if human thought were not subject to the limita- 
 tions of human weakness, we might have a con- 
 ception of absolute mind beyond any which 
 
124 MEANING OF EEALITY [^^ct. v. 
 
 discloses itself in even the very highest contem- 
 porary manifestation of human self-consciousness. 
 And, therefore, it seems to me that Professor 
 Pringle Pattison, in the countenance he lends 
 to Lotze's criticism, is hardly doing justice to 
 Hegel, because, although I agree that there are 
 ambiguous passages in Hegel, commentators like 
 Dr Hutchison Stirling have pointed to other 
 passages in which his (Hegel's) conclusions on 
 this point are in a different sense. 
 
 Novr, in his book Hegelianism and Personality* 
 Professor Pringle Pattison takes another point. 
 He says that Hegel " deprives man of his proper 
 self by reducing him, as it were, to an object of 
 a Universal Thinker," and "leaves the Universal 
 Thinker also without any true personality." Then 
 he goes on, t " If we speak of God at all, there 
 must be a divine centre of thought, activity, and 
 enjoyment, to which no mortal can penetrate," 
 + " The point of my criticism has been that in 
 its execution the system breaks down, and ulti- 
 mately sacrifices these very interests to a logical 
 abstraction styled the Idea, in which both God 
 and man disappear." 
 
 It is no business of mine to stand up here as 
 the apologist of Hegel or of any other philosopher, 
 but I think that the Hegelian conception is so 
 closely akin to the conception which we have been 
 
 * Hegelianism and Personality, Second Edition, p. 233. 
 t Ibid., p. 224. 
 X Ibid., p. 242. 
 
CRITICS OF HEGEL 125 
 
 discussing through these Lectures that it is right 
 to point out that this conclusion of Professor 
 Pringle Pattison seems to be founded upon a too 
 narrow view of what is the outcome of this way 
 of looking at things. It seems to assume that 
 very separation of the universal of thought from 
 the particular which we have been combating. Of 
 course, Professor Pringle Pattison's standpoint 
 is very different from that of Professor James 
 and Mr Arthur Balfour. He accepts the entire 
 Hegelian criticism and most of the construc- 
 tive side of the system, and only stops short 
 at the end; and in the later book, Man's Place 
 in the Cosmos, in his admirable critique of Mr 
 Bradley's Appearance and Reality, he does not 
 even stop short at the point where he stops in 
 the earlier work, but pronounces himself frankly 
 Hegelian. 
 
 In his little book on Theism, Professor Pringle 
 Pattison again illustrates the gulf which separates 
 him from Professor James and Mr Balfour. Agree- 
 ing with the Hegelian criticism upon those who 
 deny or ignore the immanence of reason in the 
 world, he doubts* whether Hegel did not assign 
 to reason too important a part. "It is well, as 
 Hegel does, to insist on the rational character of 
 the Universe, but to make Thought the exclusive 
 principle is either to fall into a one-sided extreme 
 or to use 'thought' in a non-natural sense. 
 Thought cannot fairly be made to include will, 
 
 * Theism, p. 45. 
 
126 MEANING OF EEALITY ["-ect. v. 
 
 and any theory of the Universe which neglects 
 the fact of will omits that which seems to com- 
 municate a living reality to the whole. A system 
 which, like Hegel's, lays exclusive stress on thought, 
 is always in danger of reducing the Universe to a 
 phantasm of the intellect — an impersonal system 
 of thought harmony — or, in Mr Bradley's vivid 
 phrase, 'an unearthly Ballet of bloodless cate- 
 gories.' 'In the purposive "I will" each man 
 is real, and is immediately conscious of his own 
 reality.' " * 
 
 That is Professor Pringle Pattison's criticism, 
 and if Hegel had really laid down the doctrine 
 against which he is contending, I should agree 
 with that criticism. But whatever shortcomings 
 in expression there are here and there in Hegel, 
 they seem to me to arise, not from a want of 
 desire to insist on the " that " in self-consciousness, 
 but from a habit he had of constantly using his 
 own special terminology in description. He is 
 perfectly well aware of the limitations which 
 language imposes on him. Does he really differ 
 from the conclusion arrived at by Professor Pringle 
 Pattison? Let us see. I will quote first from 
 the Introduction to his "Logic" in the Encyclo- 
 pcedia^ : — "The content, of whatever kind it be," 
 writes Hegel, "with which our consciousness is 
 taken up is what constitutes the qualitative char- 
 
 * Theism, p. 46. 
 
 t Hegel's Encyclopadie, par. 3. The Logic of Hegel; 
 Wallace's Translation, Second Edition, p. 6. 
 
HEGEL'S VIEW OF MIND 127 
 
 acter of our feelings, perceptions, fancies, and ideas ; 
 of our aims and duties ; and of our thoughts and 
 notions. From this point of view feeling, per- 
 ception, etc., are the forms assumed by these 
 contents. The contents remain one and the same, 
 whether they are felt, seen, represented, or willed, 
 and whether they are merely felt, or felt with 
 an admixture of thoughts, or merely and simply 
 thought. In any one of these forms, or in the 
 admixture of several, the contents confront con- 
 sciousness, or are its object. But when they are 
 thus objects of consciousness, the modes of the 
 several forms ally themselves with the contents ; and 
 each form of them appears in consequence to give 
 rise to a special object. Thus what is the same 
 at bottom may look like a different sort of fact." 
 Now let us pass on to the third part of the Encyclo- 
 pcedia and see what Hegel says of the nature of 
 mind when he comes to deal with it : * " The 
 essential but formally essential feature of the 
 mind is Liberty," he says, "i.e., it is the notion's 
 absolute negativity or self-identity. Considered 
 as this formal aspect it may withdraw itself from 
 everything external and from its own externality, 
 its very existence ; it can thus submit to infinite 
 pain, the negation of its individual immediacy; 
 in other words, it can keep itself affirmative in 
 this negativity, and possess its own identity." 
 "The distinction of Intelligence from Will is 
 
 * Hegel's Encyclopiidie, par. 382. Hegel's Philosophy of 
 Minds Wallace's Translation, p. 6. 
 
128 MEANING OF EEALITY [^-ect. v. 
 
 often incorrectly taken to mean that each has 
 a fixed and separate existence of its own," — 
 (the very point which Professor Pringle Pattison 
 falls foul of; Hegel has the very distinction 
 which Professor Pringle Pattison deals with 
 clearly in view) — " as if volition could be without 
 intelligence, or the activity of intelligence could 
 be without will. The possibility of a culture of 
 the intellect which leaves the heart untouched, 
 as it is said, and of the heart without the intel- 
 lect — of hearts which in a one-sided way want 
 intellect, and heartless intellects — only proves at 
 most that bad and radically untrue existences occur. 
 But it is not Philosophy which should take such 
 untruths of existence and of mere imagining for 
 truth — take the worthless for the essential nature. 
 A host of other phrases used of intelligence, e.g., 
 that it receives and accepts impressions from out- 
 side, that ideas arise through the causal operations 
 of external things upon it, etc., belong to a point 
 of view utterly alien to the mental level or to the 
 position of philosophic study." * 
 
 Now Hegel does not here deny the distinction 
 between will and intellect. What he says is that 
 it turns out to have been provisional merely when 
 it is examined from a standpoint at which neither 
 will nor intellect is reducible to the other, but is 
 shown to have been distinguished only by abstrac- 
 tion, legitimate for the purposes of everyday life, 
 
 * Hegel's JEmyclopddie, par. 445. Hegel's PMlosophy of 
 Mind,- Wallace's Translation, p. 64. 
 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 129 
 
 but not legitimate when the ultimate nature of 
 reality is being sought. The objection to his 
 language is like the objection to the language of 
 the mathematician, who is sometimes forced by 
 the necessities of usage to speak of dy as if it 
 could be separated from doB. 
 
 If Hegel were reducing the Universe to self- 
 subsisting substance, as Spinoza did, there would be 
 room for the charge that he reduces God, not only 
 to a bare identity, but to human self-conscious- 
 ness. But the human self - consciousness is only 
 an aspect, a stage, a plane, a degree in Reality. 
 The dog and the angel disclose other degrees of 
 the logical evolution of the categories of mind. 
 And human self-consciousness, like all that is 
 individual, transcends itself. In art, morality, 
 religion, when we come later on to deal with them, 
 we shall see that this is so, and that their prophets 
 have told us the truth. 
 
 There is no warrant in the mere fact that 
 human self-consciousness is our "that" — our 
 ■Kov a-Tw — the basis upon which we conduct not 
 only the whole of our everyday intercourse with 
 our fellow creatures, but our most abstruse and 
 scientific thinking — there is no warrant in this, 
 I say, for regarding human self-consciousness as 
 more than a finite and relative presentation of 
 Eeality. The great doctrine of Hegel, and, as 
 I read him, of Aristotle, is that when the imme- 
 diacy of our world of self-consciousness is thought 
 out, its "that" discloses a new significance, a 
 
130 MEANING OF EEALITY [iect. v. 
 
 fuller "what," seen to be its meaning at a plane 
 on which intelligence and will are no longer 
 separated by the appearance of pertaining to 
 different faculties. Personality may in one sense 
 be said to be the highest of all categories — the 
 conception in which the transcending of subject 
 and object takes place, and the mind is in its 
 object and the object is for the mind. Now if 
 the universal and the particular are indissolubly 
 united in the individual, you have equally got 
 the union in that highest conception of individual 
 experience which you have in personality. In 
 personality the whole manifests itself in the parts 
 as it does in life, but in personality there is a 
 great deal more. You have got the relationship 
 at that level which I pointed out to you when 
 I was examining the distinction between con- 
 sciousness and life, a level at which the self 
 excludes nothing, but comprises the entire Uni- 
 verse. For the objectivity of this Universe is, 
 as we have seen, wholly the work of the mind, 
 and is thus for it; while, on the other hand, 
 the mind is only in so far as it realises itself, or, 
 in other words, only in so far as the universal and 
 particular have reality in their union in this work. 
 The self, the spirit, is the totality of a process, 
 which, so far from taking place in time, is pre- 
 supposed as the condition through which experi- 
 ence in time becomes possible. Thus the self is 
 free, and in so far as it comprehends itself as free, 
 it is a person. It is then difficult to see how we 
 
PEESONALITY 131 
 
 get rid of the conception of mind as personal. 
 Personality is just the basis on which we proceed 
 as soon as reflection has overcome for us the 
 apparent foreignness of the 'object world, and even 
 when thought out at its highest, it would seem 
 as though the mind must still be characterised 
 by what we call self-conscious personality. It 
 may be that along these lines there is possible a 
 conception of personality, so much above the plane 
 of human experience, that it must properly become 
 an object of what we call worship. In relation to 
 such a personality, our own separate minds may 
 turn out to be, when the provisional nature of the 
 level at which they are for us is fully grasped, mere 
 appearance. At such a standpoint, the categories 
 of the One of the Many, would, of course, be trans- 
 cended. But I will not linger over the conception 
 of personality in this highest sense, because I shall 
 have to return to it in the second course of these 
 Lectures. 
 
 What hampers us is that we start in the 
 hard-and-fastness of common perception from the 
 level of the particular individual, and that it is 
 only in the universals of reflection that we are, 
 at that level, able to transcend it. If I am to 
 remain a human being, if I am to continue to 
 stand as I do to my kind, I must, even in my 
 philosophy, be human ; that is to say, it is only in 
 reflection, and occasionally in the apergus of art, 
 that, at- least on the theoretical side, I can trans- 
 cend my standpoint. And yet in various phases of 
 
132 MEANING OF REALITY [i-ect. v. 
 
 life which are not theoretical, I do .transcend my 
 standpoint. The artist, the poet, the moral being, 
 the religious man — they seem to escape from the 
 closed circle. They touch a higher level ; it seems 
 as if they could comprehend at a higher plane of 
 intelligence, and thereby they show us how even 
 finite beings can approach near to God. 
 
 Hegel has a sentence which is worth quoting 
 in this connection, because he shows in it how 
 essential reason, the power of thinking, is to 
 religion. He points out that the beast which 
 does not think, in the sense in which we are 
 using the word, is not religious; and that the 
 higher you go in the scale of capacity to think, 
 the more distinctly do art, morality, and religion 
 emerge, so that it becomes plain that these are 
 just phases in which thought is manifesting 
 itself. He says : * " Man — and that just because 
 it is his nature to think — is the only being that 
 possesses law, religion, and morality. In these 
 spheres of human life, therefore, thinking under 
 the guise of feeling, faith, or generalised image, 
 has not been inactive : its action and its produc- 
 tions are there present and therein contained." 
 
 Now, in connection with this topic, my pre- 
 decessor in one of these Lectureships, Professor 
 Royce of Harvard, has made some striking 
 contributions to the treatment of the subject. 
 In the chapter headed "The Union of God and 
 
 * Hegel's Encychpiidie, par. 2. The Logic of Hegel; 
 Wallace's Translation, p. 5. 
 
INTELLIGENCE AND WILL 133 
 
 Man," in the second volume of the series of 
 Gifford Lectures which he calls The World and 
 the Individual, he asks the question : How can 
 I know my finite nature? He answers that, 
 rightly viewed, I am linked, even in my weak- 
 ness, to the life of God, and the whole Universe 
 is linked with the meaning of each individual. 
 In God, he says, I possess my individuality. 
 The human self is not a substance, it is not a 
 thing, but a life with a meaning. No one can 
 more strenuously than Eoyce refuse to separate 
 Intelligence from Will. The individual is for 
 him the embodiment of a meaning, a purpose, 
 an end, in which Intelligence and Will are found 
 to be one. 
 
 * " Personality, to our view, is an essentially 
 ethical category. A person is a conscious being 
 whose life, temporally viewed, seeks its comple- 
 tion through deeds, while this same life, eternally 
 viewed, consciously attains its perfection by 
 means of the present knowledge of the whole 
 of its temporal strivings. Now, from our point 
 of view, God is a Person. Temporally viewed, 
 His life is that of the entire realm of conscious- 
 ness in so far as, in its temporal efforts towards 
 perfection, this consciousness of the universe 
 passes from instant to instant of the temporal 
 order, from act to act, from experience to experi- 
 ence, from stage to stage. Eternally viewed, 
 however, God's life is the infinite whole that 
 
 * Royce, The World and the Individual, vol. ii., p. 418. 
 
134 MEANING OF REALITY [^-ect. v. 
 
 includes this endless temporal process, and that 
 consciously surveys it as one life, God's own 
 life. God is thus a Person, because, for our 
 view, he is self-conscious, and because the Self 
 of which he is conscious, is a Self whose eternal 
 perfection is attained through the totality of these 
 ethically significant temporal strivings, these pro- 
 cesses of evolution, these linked activities of finite 
 selves. "We have long since ceased, indeed, to 
 suppose that this theory means to view God's 
 perfection, or his self - consciousness, as the 
 temporal result of any process of evolution, or 
 as an event occurring at the end of time, or at 
 the end of any one process, however extended, 
 that occurs in time. The melody does not come 
 into existence contemporaneously with its own 
 last note." *" God in His totality as the Absolute 
 Being is conscious, not in time, but of time, and 
 of all that infinite time contains." And again : 
 t" Every fragment of life, however arbitrarily it 
 may be selected, has indeed its twofold aspect. 
 It is what it temporally is, in so far as it is 
 this linked series of events, present in experience, 
 and somehow contrasted with all other events in 
 the universe. It is what it eternally is, by virtue 
 of those relations which appear not now, in our 
 human form of consciousness, but which do 
 appear, from the divine point of view, as pre- 
 cisely the means of giving their whole meaning 
 
 * Royce, The World and the Individual, vol. ii., p. 419. 
 t Ibid., p. 429. 
 
ROYCE'S HEGELIANISM 135 
 
 to these transient deeds of ours. To view even 
 the selfhood that passes away, even the deeds 
 of the hour, as a service of God, and to regard 
 the life of our most fragmentary selfhood as the 
 divine life taking on human form, — this is of the 
 deepest essence of religion. From this point of 
 view it is indeed true that now, even through 
 these passing deeds, we are expressing what has 
 at once its eternal and its uniquely individual 
 being." 
 
 I have quoted Royce to you, because I wanted 
 to show you that the notion that the ultimate 
 reality is nothing but abstract thought or reason, 
 is not the conclusion to which some of the most 
 thoughtful students of Hegel have come, as the 
 result of applying his methods. Royce is distin- 
 guished among those whom Hegelian concep- 
 tions have influenced, by the extent to which the 
 notion of will is prominent in his system. He has 
 viewed, in the book which I have quoted, the 
 ultimate reality as a mind, active on the practi- 
 cal side as will, quite as much as active on the 
 theoretical side as reason, and he has proposed to 
 identify each individual human life as a purpose, 
 as one among the purposes or manifestations of 
 the divine mind. He has no difficulty in getting, 
 upon this footing, to a notion of reality in which 
 will, the moral element, is certainly quite as 
 prominent as the intellectual ; and we may set 
 Professor Royce against Professor Pringle Patti- 
 son in the controversy as to the outcome of the 
 
136 MEANING OF EEALITY [^ect. v. 
 
 Hegelian system. I must say for myself that I 
 think that Professor Royce goes to the other 
 extreme, and that to be logical he would have 
 to try to deduce, as he almost seems to do, the 
 individual of experience itself out of what he 
 calls purpose or meaning. I think we are safer 
 in simply taking the individuals of experience as 
 they come before us, not trying to explain them 
 as resoluble into anything beyond, but recognising 
 in the satisfaction of the will, a valuable test, but 
 no more than a test, of whether we have actually 
 got to the bed rock of real unique individuality. 
 It is because of narrow categories that we get 
 into the dilemmas which frighten philosophers. 
 We keep on with our pictorial representations 
 of what cannot be pictorially represented under 
 these narrow categories, at a level of concep- 
 tion too low to enable us to get any adequate 
 comprehension of reality. It may be that as 
 finite human beings we can never fully rid our- 
 selves of this tendency, which our daily social 
 life seems to require. Goethe says somewhere 
 that "man is hotn not to solve the problem of 
 the universe, but to^ find out where the problem 
 begins, and then to restrain himself within the 
 limits of the comprehensible." That is true, no 
 doubt, if he means that man, finite as he is, living 
 at a standpoint from which he cannot tear himself 
 away without ceasing to be a man among his 
 fellow-men, can never present to himself, with 
 the fulness of immediate knowledge, a conception 
 
SUPREMACY OF EEASON 137 
 
 of reality to which he can only attain by abstract 
 thought. But to say, as Professor Pringle Patti- 
 son does, that we must recognise that there is a 
 region which we cannot penetrate, and as to 
 which a wise agnosticism is the only judicious 
 attitude, is, if we take the words literally, to 
 assert that there is some gap in the fabric of 
 reason, some mystery in reality which reason 
 cannot penetrate. But if there be such a gap, 
 if there be such a mystery, then surely it is itself 
 the creation of reason, and reason — to use a 
 metaphor which I have used before — must be 
 adequate to bridge over the gulf which reason has 
 made. No doubt the spectres which are raised 
 by the narrowness of our categories disappear, 
 when we once realise that they are due to narrow 
 categories. We are not in the difficulty in which 
 the theologians are when they talk as if they had 
 to set up another world to redress the balance 
 of this one. We are really breaking down the 
 hard-and-fastness of the world in which we live, 
 and disclosing its true and deepest reality as 
 belonging to a standpoint relatively to which our 
 present standpoint is mere appearance. 
 
 Then, besides this difficulty which I have 
 alluded to in Professor Pringle Pattison's criticism, 
 it seems to me that when he offers us a con- 
 structive alternative, he falls into the very short- 
 coming which he criticises. When he speaks of 
 a "divine centre of thought activity into which 
 no mortal can penetrate," and enjoins an attitude 
 
138 MEANING OF REALITY [i-^ct. v. 
 
 of tempered agnosticism, he is really no agnostic. 
 For he is surely setting up once again the category 
 of substance and the relation of the One and the 
 Many. If he seeks to do more than to call a halt 
 to the arrogance of some of Hegel's disciples, we 
 must put to him Berkeley's new question, and 
 ask. What do the words mean? If no answer 
 can be given, then following Berkeley, we may 
 apply the old maxim : — " De non apparentibus et 
 de non existentibus eadem est ratio." "Things 
 to which we can attach no meaning are things 
 of which we cannot say that they exist." And 
 it is no answer to refer us to Faith. He who 
 does so comes at once within the range of the 
 guns of critics like Professor James. For Pro- 
 fessor James tells us that, in the light which 
 modern Psychology has cast on the functions 
 of the subliminal self, the attitude of the man 
 of faith, the man of immediate certainty, is 
 one which "antedates theologies and is inde- 
 pendent of philosophies. Mind cure, theosophy, 
 stoicism, ordinary neurological hygiene, insist on 
 it as emphatically as Christianity does, and it 
 is capable of entering into closest marriage with 
 every speculative creed."* Therefore, it would 
 seem that the only safe place, the only founda- 
 tion upon which we can build a faith in things 
 unseen, is the foundation of Reason itself, which 
 must be capable of spanning the gulf which 
 Reason has created. 
 
 * The Vaiieties of Religimis Experience, p. 289. 
 
FOEECAST 139 
 
 In the next Lecture I shall complete this 
 first part of the series, the part which deals with 
 the ultimate nature of reality, and then a new 
 topic rising out of the one we have just con- 
 sidered will have to be dealt with. 
 
LECTUEE VI 
 
 In the course of the last five Lectures, a view of 
 knowledge has been developed which is, in many 
 respects, very different from that which was 
 current in the old text-books of Logic and 
 Psychology. 
 
 Of late years thinkers have given very much 
 more prominence to the ideas of life, of growth, 
 and of volition or will, than was formerly the 
 case. Even in connection with the problem of 
 knowledge, the practical aspect of the self in 
 volition has come to be much dwelt on. This 
 has been due in part to a negative reason, to 
 reaction against the extreme formalism of the 
 disciples of the great German thinkers of last 
 century, and to dislike of the very extreme and 
 one-sided representations of their systems which 
 were afterwards pressed forward. 
 
 On the affirmative side, however, there have 
 been two streams of tendency in speculative 
 science, both of German origin, which account 
 in great measure for the change. The first of 
 these is the influence of Schopenhauer. Schopen- 
 hauer, as you know, made his point of departiire 
 
SCHOPENHAUEE 141 
 
 take place over the teaching of Kant. He 
 insisted that a true reading, a true development, 
 of the conclusions of the Kantian system would 
 lead to the recognition of the Kantian Thing- 
 in-itself as Will, and he dwelt upon the notion 
 of Will as the truth of reality, and upon know- 
 ledge as a pain-giving illusion which the wise 
 man, the philosopher, would seek to get free 
 from. 
 
 Well, Schopenhauer had this great merit in 
 a philosophical writer, that he had the instinct 
 for facts very intensely developed in him, and as 
 one consequence of that quality, he put forward 
 his case with a freshness and fulness of detail 
 which caused it to exercise a profound influence 
 upon people about him. But he, too, comes under 
 the guns of Professor James. The immediate 
 experience to which he appeals, the direct know- 
 ledge which he invokes, might be labelled any- 
 thing just as accurately as will, and the founda- 
 tion upon which he built his system has turned 
 out to be one of shifting sand. He was apt to 
 use phrases uncritically, and he fails to explain 
 how he gets to Will as the nature of the Thing- 
 in-itself. 
 
 The other stream of tendency to which I 
 allude took its rise with Herbart, a very acute 
 thinker, and was still more developed in its 
 modern form in the hands of my old master at 
 Gottingen, Lotze. Lotze was one of those whom 
 nobody who has seen can ever forget. He was 
 
142 MEANING OF EEALITY [--ect. vi. 
 
 a man, not merely of great intellectual stature, 
 but of high moral worth ; and you could not be 
 in his presence without being dominated by the 
 sense of his personality. I have often thought 
 that Lotze resembled Kant in that respect. We 
 have nowadays broken away in great measure 
 from the Kantian teaching, so far as its theo- 
 retical side is concerned; but the influence of 
 Kant's personality still remains, because the 
 moral figure of Kant appeals to all students of 
 Philosophy. So it has been with Lotze. He 
 was just one of those people whose personality 
 is greater than their work. It is apparent in 
 almost every line of his writings, and the conse- 
 quence is that he has had an influence out of 
 proportion to the value of his theoretical teach- 
 ing. His principle was that knowledge was not 
 adequate as a presentation of reality. He frankly 
 divorced reality and knowledge altogether, and, 
 although he did not degrade knowledge to the 
 extent that Schopenhauer did, or treat it as a 
 mere veil of illusion, still he resolutely insisted 
 that you could not, through knowledge, attain 
 to the nature of reality. The consequence has 
 been that scrutiny has tended to show that 
 Lotze, like Schopenhauer, proceeded per saltum. 
 Herbart and he have turned out to have been 
 relying upon a bridge which will not bear the 
 weight which they both tried to impose upon it. 
 But the close scrutiny of the » actual facts of 
 the process of knowing to which men like 
 
HERBAET AND LOTZE 143 
 
 Herbart and Lotze called subsequent thinkers, 
 has led to one great result. The science of 
 Psychology and the science of Logic have been 
 revised under their influence. If, for example, 
 you take Logic as meaning the science of the 
 construction by the individual mind of its world 
 of reality, taken as a process in time — a defini- 
 tion which I think would fit the text-books of 
 the most modern type — you find that there have 
 been co-operating, in producing the view of Logic 
 which these text-books show, a series of modern 
 writers of great distinction, largely influenced by 
 Herbart and Lotze. Men like Sigwart, Bradley, 
 and Bosanquet, have done work which stands at 
 a very high level indeed. 
 
 Well, there has been another result of this 
 revision of cmrent logical and psychological 
 notions, and the consequent development of these 
 two sciences. There has been a demand for a 
 restatement of the thesis of idealism on a basis 
 more close to concrete facts. Modem Science 
 has disclosed a great deal which was not in men's 
 minds in the early days of idealism, and the 
 apparent rebuff which idealism has suffered has 
 turned out to be a rebuff" which has caused it to 
 retire for a moment, only to reappear with in- 
 creased vigour. " Reculer pour mieux muter " has 
 been its motto. 
 
 What has tended most to bring about the 
 restatement and reconstruction of idealism is the 
 fresh material which the modern idealists have had 
 
144 MEANING OF EEALITY [lect. vi. 
 
 to deal with. Aristotle wrote at a time when the 
 results, which for modern Science are common- 
 places, were non-existent. And although Hegel 
 wrote less than a century ago, we see to-day that 
 he was in a position not altogether dissimilar. He 
 scrutinised the facts of experience, and investigated 
 the broad features which distinguish nature as 
 such, before the development of modern Science 
 had put his material on a new footing. There was 
 no Dedekind to work out for him the science of 
 number; there was no liobachewski to throw 
 new light on the assumptions of the Euclidean 
 geometry. Joule and Helmholtz and Kelvin had 
 not yet elaborated the theory of Energy; nor 
 had biologists, like Schleiden and Schwann 
 and Johannes Mliller, revised the conception of 
 the living organism and the methods of Botany 
 and Physiology. No Darwin, bringing to his 
 facts the insight of genius, had yet given to the 
 world the conception of the origin of species 
 and the view of evolution which came with it. 
 The work of a Hegel was, therefore, necessarily 
 abstract. It had to be done without the insight 
 which these great minds have given to a later 
 generation into nature and her processes. He was 
 without the materials which we should consider 
 absolutely necessary, and when criticism is brought 
 to bear upon his work — the criticism of those to 
 whom all those things have become matters of 
 everyday knowledge — we can only feel that this 
 was bound to be so, and that it gives the oppor- 
 
AMEEICAN PHILOSOPHY 145 
 
 tunity for doing over again a great deal of work, 
 which must necessarily be done over again from 
 time to time, as the subject matter on which it has 
 to operate varies and becomes enriched. The 
 critical attitudes of men like Professor James, 
 Professor Royce, Professor Pringle Pattison, and 
 Mr Bradley, are all to the good. It is to the good 
 that there is so much of what one may call an 
 independent re-thinking taking place in our time. 
 There is no more striking feature in modern 
 Philosophy than the way in which, across the 
 Atlantic, in Harvard University, you have men 
 like James, Royce, and Miinsterbe'rg, examining 
 all over again the old problem, restating the old 
 questions of Philosophy with a keenness of insight 
 that gives one the feeling that the next great step 
 forward in the history of speculative thought may 
 come, not from this old side of the world, but 
 from the United States of America. 
 
 Well, the standpoint which we have been trying 
 to work out in these Lectures discloses that for 
 knowledge the essence of the real world lies in 
 its aspect as dependent on a system of universals, 
 that is to say, upon mind ; and that alike in thought, 
 in perception, in feeling, so far as these are indi- 
 vidual and definite, the process is a process of 
 self-recognition, or of the finding of itself, if we 
 may call it so, by mind. This, as we have seen 
 and as I have insisted over and over again in these 
 Lectures, does not mean that the object can be 
 resolved into the universals of thought. But it 
 
 K 
 
146 MEANING OF EEALITY ["-ect. vi. 
 
 does mean that when we reflect we separate out 
 these universals, and preserve and label them in 
 language which deals with and can record nothing 
 but universals. In the system which is so estab- 
 lished lies the real objectivity of the world, as 
 distinguished from the mere hard - and - fastness 
 which has been shown to be nothing more than 
 the outcome of abstraction at certain standpoints 
 and for certain purposes. The modern develop- 
 ments of the Sciences of Psychology and Logic 
 bear this out. 
 
 Let me take Psychology first. Psychology we 
 may define in a modern fashion, following Bradley 
 arid Bosanquet on this point, as the Science which 
 is concerned with the facts experienced by a single 
 soul considered as events which happen — that is to 
 say, as an immediate experience taken as belong- 
 ing to something that has a past and a future. 
 Now, there is a preliminary observation which one 
 has always to make in using a definition of this 
 kind. It necessarily involves presuppositions, 
 because this is a Science which professes to take 
 things at a definite standpoint, and that is what 
 distinguishes Psychology from Metaphysics, which 
 is not concerned with the merely relative aspects 
 of things, but always must have as its object the 
 ultimate natiu-e of reahty. Psychology starts, and 
 professedly starts, with the assumption that the 
 soul is known as an individual in time ; in other 
 words, it presupposes the entire system of the 
 object world in which the soul is just an event, 
 
PSYCHOLOGY 147 
 
 or a series of events. This is the outcome of 
 reflection at an abstract point of view, and Psycho- 
 logy itself discloses this characteristic when you 
 follow out its teaching. The child, the infant, 
 does not distinguish itself from the world that 
 confronts it. The notion of itself as distinct from 
 the world confronting it is only evolved by degrees 
 as the result of its education — I mean education 
 in the most elementary sense, the tuition which 
 nature gives — and as the outcome of certain pur- 
 poses, consciously or unconsciously formed, which 
 guide the child in the organisation and building up 
 of its experience, and teach it to look upon itself 
 as belonging to the social whole of which it really 
 forms a part. At first it does not know itself 
 as distinct from the world. Probably one of the 
 earliest ideas borne in upon its consciousness is 
 that there is a part of its outside surroundings 
 — the part which ultimately it comes to recognise 
 as its body — which has a capacity for feeling 
 which other outside things do not possess, and 
 through this power of feeling it distinguishes, for 
 example, its finger from the table on which the 
 finger presses. The child's knowledge is not a 
 process which begins with a definite system of 
 experience and then by abstraction builds up 
 from this the knowledge of a world, but a 
 process of making more and more definite what 
 is at the outset an indefinite continuum. I use 
 this word " continuum " because I want to impress 
 upon you that for the psychologist there is no 
 
148 MEANING OF REALITY [i^^ct. vi. 
 
 warrant for the assumption that experience, even 
 in its simplest form of feeling or sensation, begins 
 with isolated units. There can be no such thing 
 as a separate feeling or sensation, unless thought 
 has first been there with its universals to qualify 
 the particular into an individual. The beginnings 
 of mind, the beginnings of intelligence, rather dis- 
 close themselves as an indefinite which by degrees 
 is made more and more definite. 
 
 Now, while that is perfectly true as regards 
 the general result of psychology, the psychologist 
 has at times to use methods which ignore this 
 origin of the furnishing of the mind. The psycho- 
 logist above everything wants to bring his science 
 into definite relation with other sciences, and we 
 consequently hear a great deal nowadays of what 
 is called Psychophysics — the bringing of Psycho- 
 logy into systematic connection with Physiology 
 and with Physics. The outcome of Psychophysics 
 is a tendency on the part of the modern psycho- 
 logist to look more and more at the stream of 
 events in his mind, the subject-matter with which 
 he has to deal, as though it consisted of definite 
 units of feeling or sensation which could be 
 separated and pieced together. It was very much 
 upon this footing that Hume was proceeding when 
 he said he could not find a separate impression 
 of the self. But such a procedure is artificial, 
 and is not a natural mode of regarding the mind. 
 Modern psychologists know this very well. I 
 will quote only one of them, Professor Mlinster- 
 
PROFESSOE MUNSTERBERG 149 
 
 berg, who puts the matter in the following words 
 in that very suggestive little book of his, Psycho- 
 logy and Life:* "This is the point which even 
 philosophers so easily overlook : as soon as we 
 speak of psychical objects, of ideas and feelings 
 and volitions, as contents of consciousness, we 
 speak of an artificial transformation to which the 
 categories of real life no longer apply, — a trans- 
 formation which lies in the direction of causal 
 connection, and which has, therefore, a right to 
 existence only if the right to extend the causal 
 aspect of nature to the inner life is acknowledged." 
 . . . t " The working hypothesis of Modern Psycho- 
 logy. — that every mental state is a complex of 
 psychical elements, of which each is the accom- 
 paniment of a physical process in time and space, 
 and influences others or is influenced by others 
 merely through the medium of physical processes, 
 — is then not an arbitrary theory. It is the 
 necessary outcome of the presuppositions which 
 the human will has freely chosen for its logical 
 purposes, and to which it is bound by its own 
 decision." 
 
 Observe how, in the last sentence, this dis- 
 tinguished psychologist insists on what I have 
 been pressing on you in these Lectures, although 
 he approaches it from quite another quarter. He 
 points out that it is purposes or ends which 
 organise our immediate experience, and give to it 
 its appearance of reality. 
 
 * Munsterberg, Psychology and Life, p. 267. t Ibid., p. 271. 
 
150 MEANING OF EEALITY [lect. vi. 
 
 Again,* explaining the artificial basis of the 
 psychophysical standpoint, he says : " Psychical 
 states must be described somehow ; otherwise the 
 possibility of psychology would be excluded. If 
 they are not directly communicable, we must take 
 refuge in indirect methods; if the psychical facts 
 are never object for two, and thus strictly indi- 
 vidual, we must link them with physical processes 
 which belong to all." 
 
 What he means may be explained thus : If I 
 look into my mind, and become conscious, first, of 
 an act of attention, a concentration of thought, and 
 then of a movement of my lips in expressing the 
 result of my thoughts in words, there are present 
 two distinct sets of phenomena, of one of which 
 I myself alone am conscious, of the other of 
 which you are all conscious. You can all see 
 my lips move. You could even, if the contents 
 of my brain could be dissected without putting 
 an end to these Lectures, see the physical con- 
 comitants of the process of the development of 
 my thought and its expression going on in such 
 a fashion that every individual in the room could 
 have experience of them. But the working of my 
 own mind exists only for me. In the same way, 
 while I cannot dive into the inner experience of 
 those of you who sit there before me, I can 
 receive communications from you about it, through 
 those universals of language which are the main 
 medium of intercourse between human beings. 
 
 * Miinsterberg, Psychologi/ and Life, p. 49. 
 
PEESENTATIONISM 151 
 
 Miinsterberg points out that Psychology can only 
 give us direct experience of what is going on in 
 our own minds, and that, in order to get what 
 is common to ourselves and other people, we 
 must resort either to mere abstract descriptions 
 in language founded on the imiversal element 
 which has been separated out by reflection, 
 or to the physical processes which accompany 
 mind. Therefore, the physiological psychologist 
 endeavours to transform the presentation of his 
 mental experience into that kind of abstract 
 atomism of which Miinsterberg speaks. It helps 
 him to connect psychical with physical pheno- 
 mena, the latter of which he can subject to 
 exact measurement, and so indirectly measure the 
 former. But when you are trying to trace the 
 genesis of the development of a child's conscious- 
 ness, you are driven away from the point of view 
 which we have been discussing, and which is some- 
 times called " Presentationism." Because of its 
 double method, Psychology is a complex science. 
 No doubt the first method is the natural one. 
 But this method of presentation of which I have 
 spoken is a very characteristic feature of the 
 Psychology of our time ; and in reading books 
 upon Psychology, and in making use of the 
 results which we get in them, we must always 
 remember the transformation of which Miinster- 
 berg speaks as having taken place, and which 
 exists only from standpoints and for purposes 
 which are not the standpoints or purposes of 
 
152 MEANING OF REALITY [^^-^■'^- v«. 
 
 the investigator into the ultimate nature of 
 reality. 
 
 Passing from this phase of things, and going 
 on, the only other observation which need be 
 made here about the presentational method in 
 Psychology is that it takes a course which is 
 justified only by the presupposition of a system* 
 If it be said, for instance, that a change in the 
 self must be antecedent to any knowledge of 
 that change, the answer is, that this view pre- 
 supposes an abstract knowledge of a system in 
 which the process takes place, a system in which 
 the self has a position, and that the conscious- 
 ness or knowledge of the mere change is in 
 time antecedent to this abstract knowledge of a 
 system in which it occurs. In other words, you 
 have an inversion of the natural order of things 
 when you are at the psychological point of view. 
 The fact first in time is really the last in reflec- 
 tion, and in the abstract system of knowledge 
 which Psychology creates the natural sequence is 
 just inverted. Even acute writers often forget 
 this, and confuse the order of things, overlooking 
 the artificial nature of the science with which 
 they are dealing. 
 
 Modern Psychology has brought out a number 
 of important results of which the earlier writers 
 knew very little. The notion of subconscious 
 processes, which Professor James has so fully 
 discussed, and the notion of corporeal feelings, 
 organic sensations, which has more than any- 
 
ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS 153 
 
 thing else to do with what the ordinary man 
 means when he speaks of his body and identifies 
 it with his individuality, — these cast light upon 
 what we mean by the expressions we use in 
 our everyday life. But, like all conceptions 
 of the kind, as soon as we try to make use 
 of them for other pm-poses, they disclose them- 
 selves as self-contradictory and vanishing. And 
 it is quite clear that if we simply let thought 
 play naturally upon itself and look at what 
 the genesis in time of the life of the soul 
 is, apart from artificial presentation, we shall 
 find that the origin of the soul's life is not a 
 series of atomic feelings, as Hume thought, but 
 the making more definite of an indefinite and 
 changing continuum. 
 
 Now look at one or two of the fallacies that 
 people have fallen into by neglecting this very 
 plain fact. We hear a great deal of the laws 
 of association as being the real reason why one 
 idea gets associated in memory with the image 
 of another, and so on. But before you can have 
 any association of ideas you must have the ideas 
 already juxtaposed in some relation, and that you 
 can only have if you have already got the very 
 system of the object world, the genesis of which 
 you are trying to account for by association. 
 Association depends on identity of content, and 
 presupposes, as the condition of its possibility, 
 the very system of associated psychical events 
 which it is called in to account for. It is of 
 
164 MEANING OF EEALITY [i-^ct. vi. 
 
 very little use to the searcher after the ultimate 
 nature of reality. 
 
 Again, take the notion of the Ego. If you 
 look quite simply into your own bosom and try 
 to find out what your Ego is, you will find that 
 you have embarked upon a very difficult task. 
 You first eliminate corporeal feeling; you then 
 eliminate all the contents of memory, and your 
 position as a particular "this" in the general 
 world, and the result is that yoiu" Ego comes to 
 disclose itself as a mere asymptotic regress towards 
 a notional pure subject of knowledge, — a thinker 
 without thoughts, an abstraction, nothing at all. 
 The truth is that you cannot get, by this method, 
 any abiding conception of the- individual. The 
 individual eludes you, just because when you pass 
 from the rough and practical, though complex, 
 way of looking at things, in which, in daily life, 
 individuality comes directly before you, and take 
 to looking into yourself psychologically, you have 
 passed from the standpoint of practice, at which 
 the self had a definite meaning, and are putting 
 that conception to a use which goes far beyond 
 the practical purposes of life. When, for instance, 
 in daily intercourse we use expressions that import 
 personal identity, our meaning is always relative 
 to some special standpoint. We really have some 
 social reference in our minds. There is a basis 
 of presupposition in the very phrase, and unless 
 we know what that presupposition is, it is clear 
 that we shall entangle ourselves. 
 
SOUL AND BODY 155 
 
 The same kind of confusion exists about the 
 notion of the soul as distinct from the body. If 
 there is any truth in what has been said in the 
 preceding Lectures, it is ridiculous to suppose that 
 the soul is a thing existing apart from the body. 
 When we take the word " soul " quite simply, and 
 ask what we mean by the use of the expression, 
 it is plain that what we are talking of is just the 
 life of the individual looked at from a higher stand- 
 point than that of mere life. When we speak of 
 the soul of a man, what we mean is just the 
 man considered as rational, as responsible, as a 
 free moral agent, as capable of the experiences 
 of a human being. We are really taking the 
 notion of the individual, which in everyday life 
 we do not analyse or fix precisely without 
 making any attempt at an exhaustive definition 
 of it. When we speak of a man's soul, we 
 really mean the highest aspect in which the man 
 appears in everyday experience. The relation of 
 the soul to the body is much better expressed 
 as the individual regarded from the highest stand- 
 point, and in the aspect in which the rest of his 
 life finds its completion, than in any metaphor 
 that suggests a thing distinguished from another 
 thing. Soul and body are related as higher and 
 lower, and it is just one of the advantages of 
 the idealistic standpoint that it can accept the 
 common-sense way of looking at the matter, 
 quite fully and simply, and so avoid many of the 
 consequences which follow from the adoption of 
 
156 MEANING OF REALITY [•''=ct. vi. 
 
 other standpoints. We are not in any danger of 
 materialism when we take things so, because we 
 are not regarding the world as made up of 
 separate phases, each of which represents an 
 independent reality. We are looking upon the 
 world as containing a series of aspects, and, 
 when we come to the aspect of the soul, we 
 have got an aspect of the human being just as 
 real as the bodily aspect, and one in which we 
 rise to a standpoint from which the consequences 
 of identifying the individual with his body no 
 longer trouble us, because they have no longer 
 any terrors for us. 
 
 Now I think one thing has been made pretty 
 clear, and that is, that the notion of the particular 
 self is a derivative conception which appears far 
 on in the course of the development of knowledge, 
 and which cannot be taken as its foundation. 
 With that observation I turn to Logic. 
 
 Logic starts with this derivative conception of 
 an individual mind which is supposed to be, in 
 its everyday life, somehow in contact with reality. 
 Just as Psychology, when you work it out, finds 
 for you no resting-place, so Logic works away 
 from the standpoint from which it started, the 
 notion of the mind as somehow different from 
 reality. Logic shows how the world is built up 
 by the individual mind, how the individual con- 
 structs his object-world of experience. It is not 
 Uke Metaphysics, because it is looking at this as a 
 process of an individual mind; and it is not like 
 
LOGIC 157 
 
 Psychology, because it is considering this process, 
 not as a series of events, but as the connected 
 process of thought by which the world becomes 
 what it is for the individual mind. That is the 
 view of modern Logic. There is a great gap 
 between this view and that of the old Logic. 
 Before people had applied their minds to the 
 criticism of the categories they used, they took 
 Logic to be a science which could be dealt with 
 by itself, and isolated from the rest of Philosophy. 
 Looking at Logic in the light of what we now 
 know to have been a misconstruction of the 
 spirit of the Aristotelian system, there is no 
 doubt that it was erected into what was con- 
 ceived to be a very simple science, but was 
 really a most artificial one. The result has been 
 that the science of Logic has stood still. 
 Though in Aristotle we find something like the 
 hard definitions of the subsequent formal Logic, 
 still we must not assume that Aristotle did not 
 know a great deal better than his would-be 
 interpreters. Aristotle's Logic, as has been 
 observed, may be taken to be the method by 
 which he taught his pupils to commence their 
 metaphysical investigations, and it may well be 
 that Aristotle adopted only provisionally what 
 is really an artificial view of things because he 
 found it the best introduction to the study of 
 Philosophy. 
 
 Well, Logic, as we conceive it nowadays, carries 
 us beyond the self into an objective system — just 
 
158 MEANING OF REALITY [i-^ct. vi. 
 
 such a system as Mill's Permanent Possibilities 
 came to be — and that objective system consists 
 of what we are obliged to think. The mind is 
 free, but the nature of the mind is to be rational, 
 and the mind, following out its own processes, 
 is accordingly logically obliged to think in sub- 
 jection, as it were, to certain principles which 
 give us the objective world. In that way 
 the Te\os, the end, the universe as a completed 
 whole, is presupposed in every attempt to make 
 what is indefinite in knowledge more definite. I 
 will follow this out in a moment, but what I want 
 to keep before you is that, as has been pointed out 
 in the earlier Lectm^s, reality consists in an objec- 
 tive system, — that is to say, a system in which the 
 subject of the judgment is made definite and made 
 permanent by making explicit in the individual 
 the union of the universal with the particular. It 
 is on the universal aspect of the individual that 
 thought in its abstraction dwells, and Logic is just 
 the building up and the ascertainment of the system 
 of these universals. In that light many notions, so 
 familiar that we seem to be passive in apprehend- 
 ing them, such notions as present and past and 
 future, are all found to be constructions of 
 thought which belong to the universal. The 
 general conceptions of a "Here" and a "Now" 
 are likewise constructions of thought. When 
 one man says to another that he sees the same 
 world as the man to whom he speaks, and that 
 other understands him, they both mean a 
 
CORRESPONDENCE 159 
 
 common objective system of relations ; and what 
 is communicated is the universals of thought 
 which language deals with and embodies, and 
 thus makes possible the establishment of a 
 certain correspondence between the views of 
 each particular mind. These correspondences 
 are not mere abstract identities. One man eats 
 a loaf, and another, seeing him do it, under- 
 stands what he is doing, and understands it by 
 means of a common system of universal concep- 
 tions, through which their experiences correspond 
 in a fashion that makes to each real what the 
 other is doing. 
 
 The modern theory of the judgment starts with 
 the individual. The self is taken as, to use a 
 metaphor, in contact with a "this," an individual 
 of knowledge. The mere fact of "thisness" is a 
 universal of thought, but the judgment does not 
 start with a universal thought. It starts just with 
 reality, and reality is a particular qualified by a 
 universal, and is therefore always individual. The 
 reality of the two is only to be found in the indi- 
 vidual, and it is only by abstraction that you can 
 break them up. When I say "this tumbler," I 
 describe it as " this " by an abstraction of thought, 
 dragging out the universal element in it ; but none 
 the less I start in my judgment with an actual 
 individual of experience, which I cannot construct 
 in thought, and which I cannot get away from. 
 The judgment then starts with the "this," and 
 the "this," when we follow it out, is found to be 
 
160 MEANING OF REALITY [i-ect. vi. 
 
 related to, and inseparable from, the Universe 
 taken as a whole. In the individual I have got 
 a potential and implicit relationship to the whole 
 universe, and the judgment, starting with this, 
 proceeds to unravel the system of reality. I 
 amplify this present perception by adding an ideal 
 content, and, looking at it, I say, " A tumbler full 
 of water." I have qualified my "this" by a 
 " what." 
 
 Knowledge is thus a continuous judgment, 
 proceeding always by the qualification of what is 
 real, that is to say its subject, and the subject 
 is just the phase of the reality of the universe 
 with which we are in contact. Every judgment 
 begins with an individual "this" or "that." The 
 "this" or "that" can never be deduced. The 
 judgment can qualify it, and does quahfy it by 
 bringing it into a new relationship which can only 
 be expressed as a universal, and so we get back 
 the "this" or "that" enriched with a new 
 meaning. 
 
 Take, for example, the 47th Proposition of 
 Euclid : The squares of the sides of a right- 
 angled triangle equal the square of the hypo- 
 thenuse. — I start with the right-angled triangle, 
 and taking it as a "this," I proceed to qualify 
 it by judgment after judgment, dragging out its 
 implication, the reXos which is presupposed in it, 
 and I thereby continuously enrich the concep- 
 tion of this right-angled triangle with which I 
 started. I give it new meaning and a new 
 
THE JUDGMENT 161 
 
 significance until I arrive at the conclusion. It 
 is this consideration that has led people to say- 
 that the judgment is not really an act in time. 
 It is presupposed by the reality of things in 
 time, and, viewed even as a process of the indi- 
 vidual mind, it is a bringing to light what was 
 implicitly there at the beginning. 
 
 Now, the concept and the syllogism on this 
 footing become mere aspects of judgment. The 
 judgment is the radical form of thought, and is 
 the activity which develops the object world for 
 us. This view of the nature of the judgment 
 was no doubt retarded by the language used by 
 Aristotle. I will not dwell on that because 
 you will find an admirable account of it in an 
 article* written by the late Mr T. H. Green, in 
 which he deals with the Aristotelian Logic in 
 its relation to the rest of Aristotle's Philosophy. 
 He shows that Aristotle concerned himself in his 
 Logic with universals in the form of classes, with 
 wholes of extension, and that formal Logic per- 
 sisted in this view, with the result that the 
 revolt of Bacon against formal Logic became 
 inevitable. Even Kant thought that the old 
 formal Logic was final, and had made no progress 
 since the days of Aristotle; for even he believed 
 the Aristotelian forms to represent exhaustively 
 the categories of conception. 
 
 I have dwelt in this Lecture upon the tenden- 
 
 * T. H. Green, " Philosophy of Aristotle," North British Revieiv 
 for September, 1866. Reprinted in his collected works. 
 
 L 
 
162 MEANING OF REALITY [^^^- v- 
 
 cies of recent Psychology and Logic, because 
 they illustrate in yet another fonn the single 
 thought which I have been trying to set before 
 you. These sciences, although not properly meta- 
 physical, have the closest bearing on Metaphysics. 
 They belong to the borderland of the region in 
 which we have to seek for Reality; and they 
 point to a path which, when followed, leads into 
 that region. They leave the student with the 
 conviction that neither in mere reflection nor in 
 mere feeling is the ultimately Real to be found. 
 They, like other forms of inquiry, point to a 
 different conception of the Universe, the con- 
 ception of it as, in final analysis, the unique 
 Individual that ultimately discloses itself as the 
 totality of Experience, or as all-embracing Mind, 
 according as it is looked at from one side or 
 the other. If we take it from the standpoint of 
 Logic, we have it on the one side, but put before us 
 as the subject of judgment, the "this" or "that" 
 which the judgment determines and qualifies, with 
 the result that it is presented in reflection as the 
 identically same individual, but under new uni- 
 versals. If we take it from the standpoint of 
 Psychology, we get it as the self, which, when 
 we have removed the artificial scaffolding of 
 " presentationism," erected by ourselves for con- 
 venience of treatment, discloses the totality of 
 existence, and nothing short of this, as its 
 content. Whichever, then, of these several paths 
 we elect to follow, we find that they all lead to 
 
HISTOEY OF PHILOSOPHY 163 
 
 the same point, to the Individual which, more 
 than two thousand years ago, Aristotle declared 
 to be the ultimate and irresoluble nature of 
 Reality. This view, once accepted and steadily 
 adhered to, makes plain the final stages of the 
 pathway. If the student will but adhere to it 
 and keep the broad lesson which it unfolds 
 firmly in his mind, he will have little difficulty 
 in following its development in the history of 
 thought. He will see and understand how the 
 great thinkers of more recent times have advanced 
 each of them a fresh stage along the road which 
 the Greeks mapped out for them, have hesitated, 
 have stopped, have even, under the influence of 
 metaphor, strayed, but have not the less improved 
 the way for those who came after them. He 
 will see and understand how in our own day 
 the tendency of philosophic reflection, whether 
 critical or constructive, is steady in the same 
 direction. The history of Philosophy will be 
 for him who so reads it no longer a tale of 
 miserable failure in the search after truth, but 
 a record of genuine progress towards more 
 adequate definition, 
 
 I have now got to the end of the first part 
 of this series of Lectures. I have endeavoured 
 to show in it how much the organisation of the 
 world as it seems, is due to the ends or 
 purposes which we have in our minds. I shall 
 pass in my next set of Lectures to the special 
 sciences, and I shall show that the special 
 
164 MEANING OF REALITY [i-^ct. vi. 
 
 sciences transform the world of reality for their 
 own purposes, in virtue of a yet more abstract 
 set of conceptions than those of the plain man. 
 But Science gains greatly in so doing. It gets 
 rid of the Here and the Now. It takes the 
 world from a standpoint which is independent 
 of the individual, and it amplifies and extends 
 the abstract world which it so creates, far 
 beyond the limits within which the senses of the 
 individual are confined. It places the same ab- 
 stract xmiverse before each individual, whatever 
 may be his particular circumstances. This is 
 again an illustration of the great truth that in 
 ends and purposes, and not in causes, is to be 
 found the shaping of the world as it seems. 
 
 And now we have traversed the first stages of 
 the pathway to Eeality. We have seen something 
 of how Knowing and Being stand to one 
 another. The everyday world no longer confronts 
 intelligence as something remote from its moulding 
 power. The Cosmos begins to disclose itself as 
 the manifestation of mind and the revelation of 
 purpose. 
 
 But in front of us lies a valley which to him 
 who seeks for God has but too often proved a very 
 Valley of Humiliation. We have to descend from 
 the open ground of the plain man to the more 
 obscure and difficult region where the sciences 
 reign. There we shall find ourselves confronted 
 with serious hindrances, and the path barred by 
 notions of reality which present more difficulties 
 
THE SCIENCES 165 
 
 than any we have yet encountered; such notions 
 as atoms, energy, force, molecules, the very hob- 
 goblins of materialistic method. 
 
 Yet we need not lose heart. For if we grasp 
 firmly the sharp weapon of criticism with which 
 we have put to rout the metaphors of the plain 
 man, we may find it a weapon with which we can 
 dispel as easily the spectral figures that haunt the 
 traveller over the ground that lies in front. 
 
 In the next part of this first series of Lectures, 
 I shall invite your attention to the categories of the 
 Sciences. 
 
BOOK II 
 
 THE CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES 
 
LECTUEE I 
 
 In the first part of this course of Lectures I 
 endeavoured to work out a view of the ultimate 
 nature of Reality which would afford firm ground 
 upon which to tread in following the difficult 
 pathway that lies before us. It is one of the 
 chief recommendations of that view that it is by 
 no means novel. We find traces of it in Hera- 
 clitus of Ephesus ; further traces in the Socratic 
 questionings; a yet further development in the 
 Ideas of Plato ; and something hardly to be 
 distinguished from the most modern form of the 
 doctrine in the teaching of Aristotle about Meta- 
 physics and Psychology. When Hegel first taught 
 the world how to read the Aristotelian Philosophy, 
 he rendered a great service to men ; for he showed 
 them that the history of Philosophy is not a vain 
 rejection of hypothesis after hypothesis, but is, in 
 truth, the working out, with the fresh materials 
 which the Time-Spirit brings with it, of a single 
 solution of a single great problem. 
 
 The main featm-e of the answer which Aristotle 
 and Hegel alike gave to the question as to the 
 ultimate nature of Reality was, that we can never 
 
170 CEITICISM OF CATEGORIES ["-^ci- 1. 
 
 get behind the form of Individuality, that the 
 ultimately real is an experience in an individual 
 form which contains nothing but what is individual 
 — a form in which the particulars of sense can no 
 more be divorced from the universals of thought 
 than can the universals of thought have any 
 subsistence except as setting, fixing, and giving 
 their meaning and existence to these vanishing 
 particulars. It is owing to the poverty of 
 language, which is always derived from the familiar 
 standpoints of everyday life at which this kind of 
 problem does not arise, that we have not ready to 
 hand words adequate to express the proper rela- 
 tionships and conceptions to which this doctrine 
 points, and that the metaphors and analogies into 
 which we slip are thoroughly misleading. At the 
 standpoint, for instance, of everyday life, for the 
 purposes of daily practice and social intercourse, 
 we speak and act as though the things of experi- 
 ence were permanent and had a fixed nature; 
 whereas, as Wordsworth points out in the last of 
 his sonnets to the Eiver Duddon, the form alone 
 is unchanging : 
 
 " For, backward, Duddon ! as I cast my eyes, 
 I see what was, and is, and will abide ; 
 Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide ; 
 The Form remains, the Function never dies." 
 
 When we let thought turn in upon its own 
 operations and watch its own movement, we find 
 that the individuals of experience are no more 
 fixed and permanent than the water of the flowing 
 
THE EXTEENAL WOELD 171 
 
 Duddon. It is only in knowledge, and particu- 
 larly by reason of the purposes or ends which have 
 to be fulfilled in organised knowledge, that the 
 external world gets its fixity of aspect. It is only 
 relatively that the individual is conceived as a 
 hard-and-fast entity. When we think out its 
 nature, even at our everyday standpoint, we 
 discover that it is our reflection that has intro- 
 duced orderliness and definiteness into what at 
 another standpoint would be but a confused blur. 
 Between the organism, for instance, ever taking 
 in and giving out in the metabolism of its material, 
 and the environment which surrounds it, we could, 
 if we looked minutely enough, discover no hard- 
 and-fast line. 
 
 Again, the tempo of the sharpest explosion may 
 seem, for anything we know to the contrary, a long 
 time to a gnat, while the explosion appears instan- 
 taneous to the less discriminating senses of a 
 giant. The individual phenomenon seems, in 
 short, to be rescued in the general flux of 
 experience through the categories or conceptions 
 which we bring to bear in developing knowledge — 
 a knowledge which therefore depends for its form 
 on the ends or purposes which determine the 
 choice of these categories. This is true not only 
 in everyday life, where what we call the same 
 experience presents difierent aspects to different 
 individuals, but still more strikingly so in different 
 kinds of knowledge. In mathematics, for example, 
 we abstract under a set of conceptions far sur- 
 
172 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES [^^ect. i. 
 
 passing in definiteness any which we apply in 
 daily life, where the rough standards of common- 
 sense suflBce. Nowhere in our daily experience 
 do we witness a perfect square or a perfect circle. 
 Yet, the mathematician, by abstracting from every 
 other property, has definite conceptions of these 
 upon which he bases his science. It is plain, 
 therefore, that since experience must present 
 different aspects according to the difference 
 between the categories employed, a critical ex- 
 amination of these categories must be an essential 
 part in any complete theory of knowledge. Such 
 a criticism is required, for, if it does not exist> the 
 world of imagination will soon teem with fallacies 
 and spectral illusions, such as those forced on us 
 when we look through the stereoscope and think 
 that we see things in three dimensions, when we 
 are only under the influence of an incomplete view 
 of the conditions of our knowledge. The imcon- 
 sciousness of the limitations of that knowledge, 
 and of the relativity of our notions and purposes, 
 gives rise to the view that what is in truth only 
 a mere aspect of reality is the manifestation of its 
 exclusive and ultimate nature. In this way the 
 working ideas of everyday life become hyposta- 
 tised, and we slip into talking of God as though 
 He could be a cause in the physical sense, or into 
 speaking of atoms and forces as if they were real 
 individuals, which we could envisage. Thus there 
 come upon us abstractions, arising out of the 
 application of the working common-sense stand- 
 
SUPEESTITIONS OF COMMON-SENSE 173 
 
 point to speculative problems, where it has no 
 application. The ideas of this standpoint are 
 hypostatised, and the very habits of thought which 
 are such useful guides in our rough-and-ready 
 intercourse with fellow human beings who have 
 in the main like social purposes with ourselves, 
 give rise to superstitions of common-sense. These 
 superstitions tend to destroy the reality of the 
 rich concrete world, by letting some of its aspects 
 dominate and even negative the other aspects. 
 And yet for us, remaining simply at our ordinary 
 point of view, these various aspects of that world 
 as it seems have an equal title to the appellation 
 of real. 
 
 Such a criticism is essential in Science as well 
 as in Philosophy, for the Sciences also operate 
 by means of abstraction under sets of categories 
 which are peculiar to each of them, and by 
 their use of which the various Sciences are dis- 
 tinguished and ought to be classified. By means of 
 these categories each Science strips the individual 
 (for instance, the triangle or the circle, or what the 
 plain man would call a triangle or a circle) of the 
 immediacy in which many points of view uncriti- 
 cally converge. The mathematician abstracts, in 
 order to get clear knowledge, by concentrating his 
 attention upon relationships, which by this means 
 he presents to himself with great distinctness. He 
 transcends the immediacy of his surroimdings, the 
 limitations of his physical body and his organs of 
 sense, and is able to traverse the whole field of 
 
174 CRITICISM OF CATEGOEIES [i-^ct. i. 
 
 space and time, as, for instance, in the science of 
 Astronomy. Wliat he presents to himself as the 
 result of his reasoning, a result come to through 
 the mediation of abstract knowledge, is again 
 an individual, but an individual hypostatised by 
 imagination upon an abstract foundation. He 
 cannot guide us to any aspects of reality that lie 
 outside the limits of his own science, but, by 
 separating off these aspects in abstraction, he can, 
 as we shall see hereafter, enormously extend our 
 knowledge. 
 
 Let us turn then to a thinking consideration 
 of the methods of Science. First of all, we must 
 look at the nature of the field in which the Sciences 
 operate, before we enter upon a detailed criticism 
 of their respective categories. The physical Sciences 
 deal with the realm of nature. By this realm we 
 mean the world as it appears in space, as well as 
 in time, that aspect of reality which is most foreign 
 to abstract thought. Yet even this aspect is not 
 really foreign, for the world in space and time 
 turns out — like every other individual in experience 
 ■ — to be a self-dissolving and self-disintegrating con- !^ 
 ception, when the light of reflection is turned in 
 upon it. This topic we shall have to pursue further 
 on. At present a simple illustration of how little 
 meaning even an ordinary thing in space has apart 
 from the abstract universals of reflection, wiU suffice. 
 What is it that I recognise when I look at a tree ? 
 The tree is a self-identical individual and remains 
 so amid all its changes of foliage, and notwith- 
 
IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE 175 
 
 standing the alterations of substance which are 
 constantly taking place in it. The leading idea 
 which we have about it, the idea which dominates 
 us, is that of identity in all these differences, not 
 only identity of form and life in the metabolism of 
 its material, but in its distinction from the other 
 things which surround it. Its leaves may fall, its 
 branches may be cut off, but yet it remains this 
 tree, different from the others which are near it. 
 Thus we have identity and difference, conceptions 
 which belong to the xmiversals of thought, playing 
 a vital part in giving us our knowledge of the tree. 
 Again, the tree means for us the union of experi- 
 ences through totally different senses — colour, touch, 
 taste, smell, resistance, muscular effort, etc. — and 
 this union is not perceived through sense, but is a 
 concept of reflection, again a universal. In the 
 supposed hard-and-fast image of the tree which 
 we have really thus fixed through the universals 
 of thought, there is an infinity of relations and pre- 
 dicates which we have incorporated in the " This " 
 of the tree, and they have meaning only as related 
 and harmonised in reflection. An infant does not 
 know what a tree is and cannot distinguish it; 
 and in a universe which was known only to a mind 
 at the stage of that of an infant, the existence of 
 a tree would have no meaning. 
 
 Now this is true of the whole of nature, this 
 union of a multiplicity of aspects in reflection. We 
 do not, in knowledge at our daily standpoint, 
 separate them. It is only by abstraction for the 
 
176 CEITICISM OF CATEGORIES [lect. i. 
 
 purposes, say, of the mathematician, that we con- 
 fine ourselves to the relations of space ; and these 
 relations of space, excepting when hypostatised by 
 abstraction, lie in our perception alongside of other 
 relations with which for the purposes of daily life 
 they are in no conflict. The tree, for example, is 
 a living organism following a course of develop- 
 ment, determined by the quasi-purposive mani- 
 festation of the whole in the parts in which it 
 exists. The tree, in other words, is a life, and the 
 relation of the whole to its parts in this life is not 
 a mechanical relation, and cannot be expressed as 
 spatial. Hence, when we speak of the tree as a 
 thing in space, we really shut out, for the moment, 
 our view of it as a living whole, and by abstraction 
 regard it from another standpoint, which comes 
 into our language about it in daily life — the stand- 
 point of a mechanical arrangement occupying a 
 part of space, a standpoint, moreover, which cannot 
 either be reduced to that of life, or permit of life 
 being expressed in its own terms. If, therefore, 
 the world of natm"e were strictly limited to what 
 can be presented as spatial, it would shut out all 
 life and organisation. But in the case even of things 
 which are more naturally looked at as arrange- 
 ments which do not transcend the merely spatial 
 view — such as a rock or a machine, although their 
 parts are naturally and properly conceived in the 
 relationship of complete externality and mutual 
 exclusiveness, they have other aspects — beauty, 
 utility, and so on — aspects which have no meaning 
 
NATUEE 177 
 
 for the mathematician, and very little for the 
 physicist. When we look at nature in the popular 
 sense of the word it seems, as soon as we try to 
 divorce it from the manifold aspects which it 
 receives through the different kinds of reflection, 
 to be a mere abstraction, the creation of reflection 
 working under categories which exclude, or at 
 least for the moment shut out of consciousness, 
 the relationship to the subject for which it is. 
 The system of nature seems to start from a 
 point which is itself a vanishing point, the con- 
 trast of the not-self with the self as separated 
 from it. Yet when we ask what we mean by such 
 a self, we find that in everyday parlance we vaguely 
 indicate the sentient body with its organs — a 
 meaning which partly abolishes itself as soon as 
 it is realised that this sentient body is itself an 
 object in nature. Thus we find that we are dealing 
 in such language with abstractions, with an indi- 
 vidual appearance which can only be sustained 
 through the very construction which we wish to 
 eliminate. The conception of nature is part of the 
 conception of a system which emerges on reflec- 
 tion, and things are in nature only in so far as 
 they belong to this system. When scrutinised, 
 the standpoint of nature turns out to be an 
 abstract standpoint, the character of which is 
 externality — externality to the mind which per- 
 ceives it, and, at first sight at any rate, externality of 
 its own parts each to the other. In the language 
 of the German metaphysicians, and for that matter 
 
 M 
 
178 CRITICISM OF CATEGOEIES [i^ct. i. 
 
 of the Greeks, it discloses itself as the Other from 
 which thought, as hypostatised in abstraction, is 
 distinguished, and to which thought, similarly dealt 
 with in abstraction, is itself related only as the 
 Other. The divorce is only for and through 
 reflection; in the real individual natiu-e of mind 
 there is no such divorce inherent. It is a dis- 
 tinction which emerges at a late stage in know- 
 ledge. In the early life of the soul there is no 
 distinction drawn between nature and the self. 
 It comes only with the development of reasoning, 
 and as part of the general intellectual system. 
 
 We may say that nature stands to thought as 
 the particular stands to the universal. It is within 
 the individuality of spirit that the distinction falls, 
 and the two may be said to be abstract ways of 
 regarding what are the moments in this individu- 
 ality. As we have already seen, our knowledge as 
 human beings is knowledge from the standpoint of 
 a particular self, conscious of itself as finite. We 
 are, as it were, shut up within a closed circle of 
 self-conscious knowledge ; the self emerges only as 
 contrasted with the not-self It is true that under 
 analysis these distinctions turn out not to be 
 absolute, but in our ordinary proceedings we 
 reflect on the basis and assumption of their 
 validity, and for the purposes of our social inter* 
 course with each other, we regard ourselves also 
 from the standpoint of the one among the many, 
 and, in this sense, as ourselves falling within 
 the sphere of externality. We can by means of 
 
PLANES OF INTELLIGENCE 179 
 
 abstract thought conceive an absolute intelligence 
 with which it would be otherwise ; that is to say, 
 an intelligence at a higher plane than ours, and it 
 may be that our own intelligence, as viewed in 
 daily practice, has meaning only as a stage towards 
 or a degree in such a mind. It may be that when 
 our plane of intelligence is thought out it pre- 
 supposes mind so conceived as its beginning, end, 
 and ultimate reality. Yet in the world as it seems 
 we accept the lower plane of knowledge as our 
 working basis, and as the degree of reality with 
 which we are concerned. 
 
 In the light of these remarks let us take an 
 illustration of the procedure of one of those 
 sciences which, in the next three Lectures, we shall 
 examine in more detail. What does a physicist do 
 when he has to investigate, say, an explosion? 
 His procedure is to inquire into its cause. He 
 begins by talking of this as though it were a mere 
 antecedent or outside event, for example, the 
 setting of a match to gunpowder. But reflection 
 carries him much further as he proceeds towards 
 scientific knowledge. He begins by reasoning and 
 experiment to get a clear conception before his 
 mind of the composition of the gunpowder ; of the 
 structure of the molecules containing the atoms of 
 oxygen which are held in a loose grasp by the 
 atoms of nitrogen ; of the proximity of the carbon 
 which is required for the production of the 
 carbonic oxide and dioxide ; and of the presence of 
 the sulphur, which is a useful adjunct in the 
 
180 CEITICISM OF CATEGORIES [i-ect. i. 
 
 production of the chemical change. He then 
 realises the necessity of an infinity of other 
 conditions, the dryness which is essential to enable 
 the separate chemical substances to get at each 
 other, and many facts equally important. In the 
 end he sees that the setting of the match was 
 really only one out of an inexhaustible multitude of 
 conditions, and that the reason why an tmreflecting 
 person — such as, say, the schoolboy who put the 
 light to the powder — singles it out and names it as 
 the cause, is merely because that schoolboy is 
 guided in his reflections by a certain purpose or 
 point of view. What gives to the setting of the 
 lighted match to the powder its importance, is the 
 notion that it is a freely done act, for which some- 
 body is responsible and may be punished. The 
 reality, the explosion, the effect, turns out to be 
 the sum of an infinity of conditions. More than 
 this, if you had the whole of the conditions, 
 including the passing of the potential energy into 
 kinetic energy, you would find that the explosion 
 was not distinguishable in time from the aggregate 
 of these conditions, assuming that the aggregate of 
 these conditions could be presented together in 
 an individual form. Thus the physicist, the man 
 of science, whose object is clear knowledge, who 
 seeks to isolate the underlying relations of things 
 by means of conceptions which will enable him to 
 put aside everything that is immaterial, and to 
 reason on the basis of what alone can advance 
 knowledge beyond the mere immediacy of experi- 
 
FEOM CAUSE TO LAW 181 
 
 ence through the senses, can pass away from the 
 notion of cause. Cause turns out to be a self- 
 abolishing and vanishing conception. The cause, 
 when thought out, is not really distinguishable 
 from the effect, which is just the aggregate of its 
 conditions viewed from another standpoint. The 
 physicist gets as the result of his work, not the 
 mere abstraction called a cause, but a more in- 
 structive set of relations which constitute the law 
 of the phenomenon. He is now deeper down than 
 the mere appearance. He has got into the region 
 of what logicians call the Essence. The man of 
 science does not stick to the mere facts of things. 
 He believes in laws which are manifest only to 
 reflection; and so nature, in those aspects of it 
 which alone are interesting to the physicist, turns 
 out to depend, not upon her otherness from 
 thought, her exclusion of mind, but upon the 
 capacity of the reflective mind to discover its own 
 universals, to find itself in nature. In this very 
 same nature, which we started by taking to be the 
 immediate presentation of the senses, confronted 
 with which the mind seemed merely passive, we now 
 become aware that reflection is everywhere opera- 
 tive in the characterisation of it. We discover in 
 nature yet higher relations, which take us beyond 
 those of which the pure physicist can alone take 
 cognisance — the relations of life and organisation. 
 It is only for limited purposes and through con- 
 ceptions which turn out to be self-contradictory 
 and therefore self-abolishing, that the living 
 
182 CEITICISM OF CATEGOEIES [^^- '• 
 
 organism can be regarded as a thing. In the 
 relation of the whole to the parts as manifestiag 
 itself in them and in the quasi-pm-posive nature 
 of the parts, we reach a relation which is nearer 
 to that of a regiment to the soldiers composing it, 
 or of a state to its citizens acting together for 
 the fulfilment of a common purpose consciously 
 set before their minds, than to the relation of 
 mere externality which we see in the parts of a 
 machine. It is when we hypostatise these different 
 aspects arrived at by abstraction from different 
 standpoints, that we get into such vain contro- 
 versies as those about Abiogenesis, the reduction 
 of life to mechanism. There is no such con- 
 tinuity in actual experience as enables us to 
 develop the aspects of one standpoint into those 
 of another, without a change of the categories 
 we employ. The tendency to hypostatise, here 
 as elsewhere, has given rise to countless fallacies, 
 and tormented the minds of men with innum- 
 erable spectres. The physicist passes away, by 
 means of his group of conceptions, from the seem- 
 ing disconnected externality to one another of 
 the properties of things, to the essence which 
 underlies their appearance in the form of their 
 law. The biologist in investigating life passes 
 away from the mere appearance of mechanism; 
 and the psychologist, who regards the organism 
 as not merely living, but conscious, passes to a 
 view of things in which consciousness transcends 
 life, just as completely as life transcends the 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE 183 
 
 categories of mechanism. Thus, in the results 
 which the sciences give us from their abstract 
 points of view, the appearances which nature 
 presents seem to us to be degrees of reality. 
 A true Philosophy of Nature does not question 
 the validity of the results won by the various 
 sciences. It simply for its own purposes dis- 
 entangles and arranges the categories of the 
 various aspects, and by a criticism of these 
 categories — that is to say, by an examination of 
 the limits of their application — gets rid of con- 
 fused thinking, and as far as it can, of bad meta- 
 physics. 
 
 As Hegel says : * " The first thing that has to 
 be established against experimental physics is 
 this, that in it there is much more of thinking 
 than it admits or knows, that it is better than 
 it believes itself to be, or if in physics thinking 
 must be taken as something bad, then, that it is 
 worse than it imagines. Physics and Philosophy 
 of Nature are distinguished from each other, not 
 as observation is distinguished from thinking, but 
 only in the mode and fashion of their thinking; 
 they are each of them a thinking science of nature." 
 In other words, each of the two, Philosophy of 
 Nature as meaning the entirety of the sciences, 
 and Philosophy of Nature as meaning the account 
 which the metaphysician, who is investigating the 
 ultimate nature of Eeality, has to give of nature 
 as an appearance within the field of knowledge, 
 
 * Hegel, Natur-Pkilosopkie, p. 6, 1842 edition. 
 
184 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES [i-ect. i. 
 
 has a totally different aim. Science proceeds on 
 the basis of its own ends and purposes, the exten- 
 sion of its own kind of inquiry beyond those limits 
 of his immediate surroundings, within which the 
 plain man is restrained. It is true that the know- 
 ledge even of the plain man is more or less 
 abstract, that he too hypostatises under concep- 
 tions. But he does not abstract to the extent of 
 the man of science, nor is it necessary for him, nor 
 would it be useful to him in the fulfilment of his 
 social ends, to make the distinctions or employ the 
 conceptions of the man of science. In the same 
 way it is not to the purpose of the man of science 
 to make use of the comprehensive categories which 
 are required by him who cannot rest at any stage 
 short of the ultimate nature of things. The know- 
 ledge which this last may attain to, will, indeed, if 
 he attains to it, in all probability turn out to be in 
 its own fashion more abstract than that of the man 
 of science, as the knowledge of the man of science 
 is more abstract than that of the plain man. 
 Yet each is necessary for the fulfilment of its 
 own end, and none can fulfil the ends of the 
 others. 
 
 It appears to have been a want of clear per- 
 ception of the real nature of the problem of 
 Philosophy which has led in the past to the violent 
 condemnation of what the Germans call Natur- 
 Philosophie. It is perfectly true that under the 
 name of Natur-Philosophie there has been given 
 to the world a great deal of what will not bear 
 
HEGEL'S NATUR-PHILOSOPHIE 185 
 
 scrutiny. The reasons for this are partly to be 
 found in an inadequate conception of the ultimate 
 nature of Reality; but partly also, and not less 
 frequently, in the fact, which people are apt to 
 forget, that those who were endeavouring, even 
 less than a century ago, to work out a view of the 
 system of the different degrees of appearance in 
 nature and of the relations of these degrees to each 
 other and to mind as their foundation, were im- 
 perfectly furnished with what to-day, in the 
 twentieth century, we properly regard as indispens- 
 able material. When, for example, Hegel wrote 
 the book which made that distinguished physicist, 
 the late Professor Tait, so angry, the principle of 
 the conservation of energy had not yet been 
 discovered; chemistry was in a very imperfect 
 condition; mathematical analysis had not been 
 pushed forward to anything like the point which 
 it has reached in our time ; and the great doctrine 
 of biology, evolution, was still in a rudimentary 
 condition. The result was that Hegel, who had 
 to work with such materials as the Time - Spirit 
 furnished to him, could not do more than work 
 out the outlines of a very general view of science 
 as it existed in his day. His Natur-Philosophie 
 is no doubt open to criticism by the men of 
 science of our day, but if anyone were to under- 
 take a similar task now, his work would be found 
 to be just as defective if looked at in the light 
 of the knowledge of three or four generations 
 later. Just because science changes, and changes 
 
186 CEITICISM OF CATEGOEIES ^^ct. i. 
 
 by way of advance more rapid and more certain 
 than that in any other department of knowledge, 
 the great principle that the ultimate view of 
 things can only be expressed in the language of 
 a particular period is more obviously true here 
 than at any other point. Shakespeare has spoken 
 to the world in language that is true for all time. 
 He deals with the individual images of sense, and 
 these remain unchanged, though his art heightens 
 their significance. But men like Newton and 
 Darwin fight only the battles of their own period, 
 and, though their figures will stand out prominent 
 in the Walhalla of the heroes of the spiritual 
 world, their work becomes in large measure 
 absorbed and superseded, as more adequate con- 
 ceptions take the place of those which their 
 abstract reflection has elaborated. 
 
 Then again, pausing for the moment to speak 
 of Hegel, we have to bear in mind that we never 
 got from Hegel's own pen any completed account 
 of his view of Natur-Philosophie. All that we 
 have is a collection of fragments, consisting at 
 the best of the Hefte, or short paragraphs, written 
 by himself after the fashion of a German professor, 
 to form the text, each of them, for the lecture of 
 a day, and the notes taken down by the students 
 who heard his oral discourses upon these texts. 
 As the editor of his Natur-Philosophie, Michelet, 
 tells us, he lectured no less than eight times 
 upon this subject, between the year 1804 and the 
 year 1830, in different forms, in which the arrange- 
 
HEGEL'S NATUR-PHILOSOPHIE 187 
 
 ment and substance of the lectures varied. We 
 have not, for the most part, Hegel's own con- 
 nected discourses, or even the context of many of 
 his expressions. He died suddenly, of cholera, in 
 the end of 1831, before he had time to write 
 out or even edit these lectures in their final 
 form. Had he lived, he might have avoided 
 many mistakes of detail, which he shared with 
 some of the prominent men of science of his 
 time. For example, at page 304 of the 1842 
 edition of the Natur-Philosophie, he, like many 
 others at that time, follows Goethe's theory of 
 colour in preference to that of Newton, The 
 result is that in dealing with a topic where 
 form is very much affected by substance, he 
 gives us conclusions which are of little help, 
 even for philosophical purposes, in a region 
 where exact and accurate knowledge of true 
 scientific principle is essential. Indeed, as I 
 have already suggested to you, in that part of a 
 system of the science of ultimate Reality which 
 is concerned with the criticism of the categories 
 of science, the work has constantly to be done 
 over again. The contribution which reflection 
 under abstract categories has made to the science 
 of the time, and the investigation of the nature 
 and limits of these categories, can only be ade- 
 quately estimated and taken in hand by those 
 who have full knowledge of the results attained 
 by the people who are competent judges of results, 
 the men of science themselves. This is the reason 
 
188 CRITICISM OF CATEGOEIES [i-^ct. i. 
 
 why I approach the consideration of the topics 
 which I shall have to try to develop in the three 
 following Lectures, with unfeigned diffidence. I 
 feel that I cannot be sure that, as an outsider, 
 I have correctly appreciated the meaning of the 
 statements of the experts. Practical life has 
 taught me that there is no temptation so insidi- 
 ous as the temptation of the outsider to yield 
 lightly to the mistaken belief that he under- 
 stands where he does not understand. And yet, 
 just as the plain person has to do the best he 
 can in the practical business of life with such 
 knowledge as he can get, so we who wish to 
 find out the truth about reality must do the best 
 we can with such light as we can obtain. We 
 must crave the indulgence of those who know 
 better if we make mistakes in our estimates of 
 their work, and we must beg them to believe 
 that it is no want of humility or of sense of 
 the limitations of our knowledge, but the convic- 
 tion of the necessity of trying to get clear notions 
 about the meaning of the universe as a whole, 
 that has led us to pursue the pathway towards 
 reality through so difficult and obscure a valley. 
 On one side of the path through that valley lies 
 the quagmire of error in estimating the work of 
 science ; on the other, the ditch of acquiescence 
 in uncritical metaphor. We must do our best 
 to keep in the centre. 
 
LECTUEE II 
 
 " If, Thesetetus, you have a wish to have any more 
 embryo thoughts, you will be all the better for the 
 present investigation, and, if not, you will be soberer 
 and humbler and gentler to other men, not fancying 
 that you know what you do not know." We may 
 take to ourselves the words which Plato makes 
 Socrates address to his pupil after leading him to 
 a place very like that we have now reached on the 
 Pathway to Eeality. Even if we were to get no 
 further, and to give up the goal of clear know- 
 ledge as unattainable, we should have gained. For 
 we have learned that the old uncritical attitude 
 was all wrong, and that we remained so long 
 in it only because of a happy ignorance of its 
 dangers. Looking backwards, we can see that 
 the searcher after truth has escaped from a 
 region where he ran the risk at every step in 
 his search of being overpowered by some evil 
 metaphor. But now he has learned to be on 
 his guard against those who approach him with 
 such suggestions as that mind is a thing, or man 
 a machine, or God a physical cause. He has been 
 
 189 
 
190 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES [i-^ct. h. 
 
 armed with a weapon of defence, the power to 
 criticise his categories, with which he can now cut 
 such dangerous figments of confused thinking into 
 pieces. If he will keep this always in his hand, 
 he may continue to descend into the valley that 
 lies in front, without fear of the spectres that will 
 throng his path. 
 
 Let us take a view of the prospect that lies 
 before us. Experience has turned out to be an 
 aireipov, an indefinite manifold made definite only 
 in so far as it is arranged by reflection under 
 general conceptions, bound together and deter- 
 mined as here and now, then and there, this and 
 that. Science has turned out to be the mode of 
 reflection which, by isolating and confining itself 
 to certain abstract aspects of reality, gets away 
 from the here and the now, and transcends the 
 apparently immediate experience by which in self- 
 consciousness we find our minds confronted. We 
 have used the word "science," but we have not 
 confined its meaning, as is sometimes done, to. 
 what has the balance, the measuring rod, and 
 the chronometer, and these alone, for its ultimate 
 standards. Every branch of human knowledge 
 which, by systematically bringing objects in experi- 
 ence under certain defined abstract conceptions, aims 
 at a better comprehension of the aspects, present 
 and future, of the kind of experience with which it 
 deals, is science in the sense in which the word is 
 here used. The instinct of a dog or a mother is 
 not science, nor is the shrewdness of the common- 
 
THE PROPHETS OF SCIENCE 191 
 
 sense man. But if there be any general principles 
 upon which the procedure of, say, the moralist, or 
 the artist, can be shown to be founded, these may 
 belong to its domain. What this stage of our 
 journey necessitates is a closer examination of the 
 character of the abstract conceptions which certain 
 of the sciences employ, and of their relations to 
 one another. We have already found in the 
 indications we have discovered of the ultimate 
 nature of reality, that the claim to finality and 
 exclusive domination, with which the prophets of 
 some of these conceptions threaten to block the 
 way, cannot prevail against the pilgrim who keeps 
 ready in his hand that weapon of criticism with 
 which he is furnished. Theae prophets have taught 
 mankind a great deal that is of the utmost use. 
 They have cleared from the pathway of life the 
 weeds of superstition and of prejudice, which are 
 the outgrowth of unreflecting common opinion. 
 They have vastly extended human knowledge, and 
 may extend it in the future yet more vastly. Even 
 when they have at times magnified their oflSce, 
 and raised terrifying spectres, they have afibrded 
 a new subject of interest for those who have no 
 fear, and have faith in the power of human reason. 
 How these spectres came to be raised, it will be 
 our business to try to find out as we encounter 
 them one after another at the various stopping- 
 places where we shall find them. Our task will 
 involve some sort of attempt at a general view of 
 the various sciences, and the marking out on our 
 
192 CEITICISM OF CATEGOEIES [i-ect. ... 
 
 map of the regions which they have appropriated 
 and rule over. 
 
 Let us begin by trying to get a clear notion 
 of what is the most general aspect of things 
 with which Science concerns itself, and of how 
 it goes to work. We will begin with a very 
 simple example. I will suppose that I am stand- 
 ing on a lawn looking at the view. I see in the 
 distance a railway signal-box, and further along 
 the line, which runs across the field of my view, 
 another signal-box. I want to find out the 
 distance of the one box from the other. I could, 
 by taking a long time and great deal of trouble, 
 go to the railway with the measuring rod which I 
 have by me, and measure the distance. But the 
 little instrument lying by my side which can be 
 used for measuring angles, enables me to do better. 
 I take my rod, and mark off a distance of, say, 
 sixty yards along the lawn, between two points on 
 it. I then, from one of these points, measure the 
 angle which this line makes with the straight line 
 got by looking through the instrument at the box. 
 Afterwards, I go to the other point on the lawn, 
 and measure the angle of the straight line got by 
 looking at the box from that point. I have now 
 got a triangle, and I know the measurement of the 
 base and of the angles at the base. A simple 
 calculation gives me the lengths of the sides. I 
 next ascertain by similar observations and calcu- 
 lation the distances to the other signal-box. Then, 
 knowing the length of a straight line drawn from 
 
MEASUEEMENT 193 
 
 one of my points to each of the boxes, I obtain, 
 by subtraction of the already observed angles,, the 
 angle which these lines, taken from that point to 
 the two boxes, make with each other. I have now 
 got the measurement of each of the two sides of 
 a triangle, and the measurement of the angle which 
 they enclose. The base is the very distance 
 between the boxes that I wanted, and a simple 
 mathematical calculation gives it to me. In this 
 way abstract reflection on the materials afforded 
 by two or three easy measurements, made without 
 leaving the lawn, has enabled me to transcend the 
 immediacy of the surroundings which confront me, 
 and to anticipate the result of what would have 
 been my experience had I journeyed to the distant 
 railway and measured it piece by piece. 
 
 But what price have I paid for the power 
 thus to annihilate the limitations of immediate 
 experience? From how much of the riches of 
 nature have I been forced to avert my eyes ? Let 
 us ask what it was that we measured. Not any- 
 thing that we can see or feel. Not the length 
 of any actual roads, or strings, or bullet flights, 
 for none of these would ever be precisely straight. 
 We have shut out from consideration the uneven- 
 ness of the ground, the curvature of the earth's 
 surface, the deflection of rays of light by the 
 atmosphere, and a countless multitude of other 
 things which make a great gulf between what 
 comes into actual experience and mathematically 
 straight lines. We have put before our minds 
 
 N 
 
194 CEITICISM OF CATEGORIES ["-ect. n. 
 
 an ideal construction, which can never be a real 
 object of perception, a triangle conceived as made 
 up of the absolutely shortest distances from point 
 to point, with sides that have neither breadth 
 nor depth, but are pure measures of the extent 
 to which these points must be thought of as out- 
 side and away from each other. Such a presenta- 
 tion of points and their distances, and the angles 
 of these distances, is one which thought can only 
 make through a special kind of abstraction, and 
 is no object to be found in actual experience. 
 Yet it is a very valuable presentation of thought. 
 It does not guide us to real things, but it does 
 guide us to aspects which real things always 
 present when we regard them under the cate- 
 gories of this kind of abstraction. In our social 
 intercourse, language, as we have seen, expresses 
 aspects such as these, and is found to be a 
 sufficient means for the description of our indi- 
 vidual experiences. The knowledge and record- 
 ing of these aspects enable us to predict how 
 the aspects of other future and remote experi- 
 ences will be found to present themselves when 
 reflected on. The intervening life, the beauty of 
 the scenery, the details of the landscape, all these 
 we have for the moment blotted out, and we pay 
 this price for what we get in return, far clearer 
 and more definite knowledge than any which so- 
 called passive observation through the senses can 
 furnish to us, knowledge which teaches us to make 
 more of even such present observation than we 
 
MEASUREMENT 195 
 
 otherwise could. Truly a remarkable instance this 
 of the wonderful power of thought to overcome 
 the foreignness of nature ! Even if we had gone 
 to the railway and measured with our rod, we 
 should have gained no greater victory, nor got 
 any substantially more exact result. We should 
 indeed have found that a truly exact ascertain- 
 ment of the facts was impracticable, because in 
 that case, just as in the former one, it was only 
 in our conception of them that there were exact 
 facts to ascertain. We proposed, in the loose 
 language which for everyday purposes is suffi- 
 cient, to measure from signal-box to signal-box. 
 We spoke as if these were two definite points 
 which our perceptions would disclose to us when 
 we went to them. But what is the real truth? 
 The signal-box is a wooden structure twelve feet 
 odd in breadth. To what point in it does the 
 supposed demand for adequate and exact know- 
 ledge make it proper that we should measure? 
 Here is a new difficulty. It is only for the 
 mathematician that a point — position without 
 length, breadth, or depth — exists. It is only from 
 a different, but also limited and abstract, point of 
 view, that the signal-box itself has any meaning. 
 Mathematically speaking, it has no actual nearest 
 edge to which we can measure. Even to the naked 
 eye, that edge is rough and uneven. To the micro- 
 scope, it is yet more so. The wood is always, even 
 on the stillest day, parting with its particles ; and 
 if we considered closely enough, it would be 
 
196 Ceiticism of categories Kt. ,i. 
 
 impossible to say whether a particular loose 
 particle, itself far short of being for the mathe- 
 matician a definite point, belonged to the box, 
 or had ceased to be within its edge. It is only 
 from the point of view of practice, and special 
 practice, that there is any distinction between 
 the box and its surroundings. For the practice 
 of the horse which shies at it, or even the baby 
 that looks at it, there might be a wrong distinc- 
 tion, or none at all. For the highly developed 
 reflection of the person who knows what a rail- 
 way is, or what carpentering is, it exists. But 
 that means that the distinction is derivative 
 and secondary, the creature of reflection, hypo- 
 statised into a reality only as the outcome of 
 selective attention from a special standpoint. 
 What, apart from thought, would be an empty 
 and indefinite manifold is worked up by thought 
 into a part of the presenta,tion of a real world. 
 But even this real world here again turns out to 
 be real only through a special phase of reflective 
 activity. The theory of the senses as windows 
 through which the mind looks, breaks down once 
 more. If the mathematician's point turns out to 
 be a construction of thought, so does the rail- 
 wayman's signal-box. So does the individual 
 observer himself. They are all figments of 
 thought, whether they be the objects of the most 
 active or the most passive reflection. Reality 
 will be found to lie at least as much in the uni- 
 versals of thought as in the particulars of sense, 
 
MATHEMATICS 197 
 
 whether the object be considered from the stand- 
 point of the observer or of the observed. 
 
 These considerations seem to throw some light 
 on what the science of Mathematics really is, and 
 on the extent as well as the limitations of its 
 claims. Excepting as the creatm-e of reflection, 
 there is no world which can be adequately 
 described in the language of geometry and arith- 
 metic. The axioms and figures of Euclid are 
 legitimately to be treated as of real validity, only 
 if we are confining ourselves to certain conceptions 
 in the business of bringing definiteness into the 
 manifold immediacy that confronts us. If we so 
 confine ourselves they are legitimate modes of 
 expression, as legitimate as those which obtain 
 in other branches of knowledge which employ 
 different conceptions. It is only by blotting 
 out for the moment the rest of the phases of 
 experience and confining ourselves to particular 
 categories, that our experience can be raised into 
 clear knowledge. Here, as elsewhere, the saying 
 of Goethe is true, that, " he who would accomplish 
 anything must limit himself." 
 
 Legitimate as they are, the conceptions of the 
 geometer are not, even from a mathematical point 
 of view, final resting-places. They indicate rela- 
 tions in space and time, but our notions of 
 space and time are not always the same. The 
 physicist, for example, when he talks of these, has 
 images in his mind difierent from those of the 
 mathematician. He thinks of them, not as mere 
 
198 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES b-^-^- "• 
 
 forms or relations of externality, as does the 
 mathematician, but as fields in which forces 
 operate, and which are to be conceived as thereby 
 filled. He regards Time and Space as the stage 
 on which what occupies them plays its part, as 
 vortex rings, it may be, in a frictionless physical 
 medium. Such a medium seems to give him a 
 resting-place for his pictorial imagination in the 
 midst of a sea of abstractions. Space means a 
 definite space filled with such a content. But for 
 the mathematician this meaning has to be put 
 aside. His space and time are yet more abstract, 
 and even more remote from what is discernible by 
 the eye. They are abstractions as pure as he can 
 make them. The senses cannot isolate pure out- 
 ness or pure succession. In everyday life we talk 
 as if they could. " It is three miles to London." 
 Here we do not really mean to be exact, and it 
 is not any such loose description of experience that 
 the mathematician aims at. For him, the asser- 
 tion of such a distance would mean a straight line 
 composed of so many units of distance. But he 
 knows, or ought to know, that he is not dealing 
 with a real thing. If his assertion meant that such 
 definiteness is to be actually experienced in the 
 manifold immediacy which confronts him, he would 
 find himself at once in difiiculties to which 
 attention has already been drawn in the illustration 
 of the signal-box. It is only at the cost of 
 eliminating the bulk of what makes it real for 
 us, what gives it its individual form, that experi- 
 
REFLECTION 199 
 
 ence can be represented in mathematical forms. 
 When we are reasoning about such forms, we 
 are dealing with thoughts and not with what, 
 in everyday parlance, we mean by things. It is 
 not sight or touch that tells us that figures which 
 coincide in space with the same figure, coincide 
 with one another. Of a perfect coincidence, our 
 senses cannot tell us. They can furnish the proof 
 of no axiom of geometry. It is not for our senses 
 that the world is an aggregate of self-subsisting 
 parts, possessing independent reality. It is only 
 for thought, and as relations in thought, that these 
 parts exist. Language leaves out of account that 
 being made what it is through reflection which is 
 of the essence of reality, and speaks as though the 
 object were exhaustively defined apart from this 
 relationship. That is why language seems to have 
 been inaccurate as soon as, even in common life, 
 we pass to another point of view. "Nothing," 
 said the Sophists, "is true, for its opposite is 
 always true." "Nothing," said Heraclitus, "is, 
 for everything is in a state of becoming." 
 
 "Nur scheinbar," wrote Goethe, "steht's Momenta still." 
 " Das Ewige regt sich fort in alien ; " 
 " Denn AUes muss in Nichts zerfallen," 
 " Wenn es im Sein beharren will." 
 
 What is characteristic of the speech of humanity 
 at large is characteristic also of that of the most 
 profound mathematician. We cannot, any of us, 
 from whatever standpoint, resolve the immediacy 
 whiph confronts us into the universals of thought. 
 
200 CEITICISM OF CATEGORIES [^-ect. n. 
 
 "When we have tried our best to do so, we find that 
 we are always setting these universals up again in 
 a pictorial guise, as individuals, and as something 
 else than they are meant to be. The pure space 
 of the mathematician he talks of as a thing, and 
 tells us to draw a straight line in it, regardless of 
 the fact that if so pictured it ceases to be the pure 
 space in which alone he dare assimie that his 
 axioms will be self-evidently true. The physicist 
 with his atom, the biologist with his self-conserving 
 organism, and the psychologist with his subject 
 introspectively made object, does the same. Each 
 hypostatises into an individual of experience what 
 is really an abstraction. This is why there is an 
 apparent though no real contradiction in mathe- 
 matical science. Its subject is exteraiality, the- 
 aspect of the world which is disengaged when the 
 relations of things, as outside each other in space 
 and time, are brought by reflection into clear con- 
 sciousness by means of a set of categories of which 
 magnitude and number are examples. We can 
 estimate the cost of building a house by calculating 
 the number of bricks required to build it. In 
 doing so we make use of the conception of quantity 
 as discrete, and properly to be exhibited as addition 
 of finite parts. But there is quite another aspect 
 of quantity, upon which is founded quite a different 
 side of mathematics, which treats quantity as con- 
 tinuous. Now, if the view of reality which has 
 guided us thus far be right, there are not two sorts 
 of quantity, existing side by side, but distinct in 
 
THE CALCULUS 201 
 
 experience, like red and yellow apples, but two 
 aspects of one and the same fundamental relation- 
 ship. The understanding of this would save many 
 a student from confusion. To try to teach him the 
 Calculus without explaining that it does not really 
 contradict the aspect of quantity that has become 
 familiar to him, but simply deals with quantity 
 under another aspect, is like trying to show him 
 how to waltz without first teaching him to count 
 the time of the steps. Most of the text-books give 
 no warning, but go on as if the writer was still 
 occupied with the discrete side, whereas in truth it 
 has been put away. This is how an American 
 wi'iter, who has seen the difficulty clearly, describes 
 the state of mind of the unhappy student when he 
 begins the Infinitesimal Calculus. "He finds 
 himself required to ignore the principles and 
 axioms that have hitherto guided hi& studies, and 
 sustained his convictions, and to receive instead a 
 set of notions that are utterly repugnant to all his 
 preconceived ideas of truth. When he is told that 
 one quantity may be added to another without 
 increasing it, or subtracted from another without 
 diminishing it ; that one quantity may be infinitely 
 small, and another infinitely smaller still, and so on 
 ad infinitum ; that a quantity may be so small that 
 it cannot be divided, and yet may contain another 
 an indefinite and even an infinite number of times ; 
 that Zero is not always nothing, but may not only 
 be something or nothing, as occasion may require, 
 but may be both at the same time in the same 
 
202 CEITICISM OF CATEGOEIES [i-ect. .i. 
 
 equation, it is not surprising that he should become 
 bewildered and disheartened." . . . "To clear the 
 way for a logical and rational consideration of the 
 subject, we must begin with the fundamental idea 
 of the conditions under which quantity may exist. 
 We must, for the purposes of the Calculus, consider 
 it not only as capable of being diminished, but also 
 as being actually in a state of change. It must 
 (so to speak) be vitalised so that it shall be endowed 
 with tendencies to change its value, and the rate 
 and direction of these tendencies will be found to 
 constitute the groundwork of the whole system. 
 The differential Calculus is the science of rates, 
 and its peculiar subject is quantity in a state of 
 change." * 
 
 Once upon a time there was a very bitter 
 controversy as to the respective merits of Newton 
 and Leibnitz, in the discovery and elaboration of 
 the infinitesimal method. Much of the dispute 
 was due to the use of language appropriate 
 only to the discrete aspects of quantity for 
 the purpose of describing it when regarded as 
 continuous. Newton, at all events, saw very 
 clearly that what he had to do was to conceive 
 quantity as continuous. Thus he treated of geo- 
 metrical magnitudes as springing from continuous 
 motion, the line as arising from the motion of a 
 point, the surface as generated by the motion of a 
 line, and the solid by that of a surface. He shows 
 
 * Buckingham, Elements of the Differential and Integral 
 Calculus. Chicago, 1881. Preface. 
 
NEWTON AND LEIBNITZ 203 
 
 that if we conceive a point as moving along a 
 curve which is referred to co-ordinate axes, the 
 velocity of the moving point can be resolved into 
 two velocities, one parallel to the axis of X, the 
 other to that of Y. These velocities he calls the 
 "fluxions" of X and Y respectively. Reversing 
 the process, he calls the arc the fluent of the velocity 
 with which it is described, and the abscissa the 
 fluent of the component velocity parallel to OX. 
 In this, the fundamental conception of his method, 
 he is dealing with what are essentially continuous 
 aspects of space and time, and is abstracting under 
 what was in his age a novel set of conceptions. 
 The difiference between Newton and Leibnitz 
 appears to have been that while the former 
 regarded his continuous quantity as in a state of 
 continuous growth, the latter regarded that growth 
 as taking place by means of infinitesimal increments. 
 This difference was probably much more important 
 in form than in substance. In the hands of both 
 of these thinkers, all quantities, except mere con- 
 stants, are regarded as changing from one value to 
 another by continuous growth. In the hands of 
 both we get a new and powerful way of dealing 
 with quantity. It depends on two new notions. 
 First, that of a rate of change of a function with 
 respect to what is called its independent variable ; 
 secondly, that of a fixed magnitude to equality 
 with which we conceive a variable magnitude as 
 approaching indefinitely near, without our ever 
 being able to present the case as one of coinci- 
 
204 CEITICISM OF CATEGOEIES i^^- "■ 
 
 dence. The fixed magnitude is called the limit. 
 The method based on these notions enables us, 
 whether we use the language of Newton or that of 
 Leibnitz, to solve problems which lie beyond the 
 grasp of mathematics on its other side. We can 
 solve, for instance, problems as to the areas pro- 
 duced by points moving in cm-ves. The ascertain- 
 ment of the limit brings us to something about 
 which ordinary calculations can be made, and a 
 relationship is in this way established between the 
 varying quantity and a fixed one, through which 
 we can measure things that would be otherwise 
 immeasurable. The substance of the method was 
 the same with these great men, and it was the 
 unavoidable inaccuracy of ordinary language, when 
 applied to ideas that are not ordinary, that gave rise 
 to most of the controversy about their work, and 
 divided their commentators into hostile camps. 
 
 Mathematics deals with the most abstract 
 of all the relations of reality, and because these 
 relations are the most abstract, they are after a 
 fashion the simplest and most easy for reflec- 
 tion to grasp and reason about. When reduced 
 to the skeleton figures of geometry, space 
 becomes a simple subject of study, and its 
 relations can be described with plainness and 
 precision. We do not really know what we 
 mean when we talk of a straight road between 
 London and Bedford, but most of us think 
 we know what we mean when we talk of a 
 straight line connecting two points. In a sense 
 
MATHEMATICS 205 
 
 we present it to ourselves as an image. We 
 think of a concrete case of a figure of some- 
 thing which has many other properties. It is 
 black, and heavy, and hard. But from the colour, 
 and weight, and resistance, we divert our atten- 
 tion. Its surface is irregular, so that a line 
 drawn on that surface would be crooked. This 
 also we ignore. We thus construct an image 
 which is very indistinct, and corresponds to no 
 general experience. But it is an image, and as 
 such. We have experience of it. Those of the 
 relations of the concrete thing which we want 
 are clearly before our minds, isolated by ignoring 
 the others. In this way the mathematician gets 
 a kind of experience with which he can compare 
 his conceptions, and by which he can test the 
 outcome of his inferences, applying the method 
 of verifying hypotheses which is common to all 
 science. And in his case, if the experience is 
 dim, at least its outlines and relations, just be- 
 cause they are the most abstract, are the 
 simplest and most easy to isolate and appre- 
 hend. The result is that the method of mathe- 
 matics is the most far-reaching of all the 
 methods of science. Its concern is not the. 
 individuals of perception, but the general rela- 
 tions of these individuals in space and time, and 
 it is in no way limited by the "here" and "now," 
 which have no meaning for it. It was this 
 unrivalled range of the science of quantity that 
 led the Pythagoreans to take number to be of 
 
206 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES [i-^cr. n. 
 
 the very substance, as well as of the form, of 
 things; in other words, to identify reality with 
 number. But number, like all other relations 
 of quantity, is just one of those general concep- 
 tions under which reflection brings the object 
 world of things in space and time. It is the 
 work of mind, but is not the whole of the mind's 
 work. And it soon becomes apparent that 
 quantity, if in one sense the most fruitful, is in 
 another the most barren of the aspects of the 
 object. In^ it the play of abstraction has removed 
 us the furthest from the concrete richness of 
 immediacy. 
 
 We ought not to pass from this topic without 
 noticing that the power of the mind to absteact, 
 by means of mathematical reasoning, has taken 
 it into a region lying beyond even magnitude and 
 measurement. Recent mathematical research has, 
 for example, led to the discovery that we can build 
 up a science of abstract externality from which the 
 notions of magnitude and measurement, essential 
 parts of the geometry of Euclid, are totally 
 excluded. The space with which Euclid deals 
 is the space of our ordinary experience with its 
 three dimensions. It is assumed to be always 
 the same, so that a straight line is in every 
 sense the shortest distance between two points, 
 and parallel straight lines can never meet in it, 
 as they might do if one of its dimensions had 
 a twist in it. Let us try to get into our heads 
 what is meant by saying that Euclid makes this 
 
SPACE DIMENSIONS 207 
 
 assumption, and what difference it may occasion 
 if he does so without warrant. 
 
 Suppose a shadow to be thrown on to the 
 sin-face of a smooth sphere. Suppose next that 
 the shadow could become conscious of its own 
 existence. Being a shadow it would have and 
 take cognisance of but two dimensions of space, 
 length and breadth. But the curvatm-e of the 
 sphere would really constitute a third, in which 
 the shadow had its existence, though it could not 
 know it. For the length and breadth would be 
 length and breadth on a curve of a certain radius. 
 Such a shadow would believe that the straight line 
 along which it was moving could be projected to 
 infinity, unconscious of the fact that the line would 
 come round the sphere to the point from which it 
 had started. Such a shadow would have notions 
 of geometry which would turn out to be erron- 
 eous. For, in the first place, certain lines that 
 the shadow would take to be straight lines, would, 
 if produced sufficiently, come round to the point 
 from which they started. Euclid shows that the 
 three angles of a triangle are together equal to two 
 right angles. But to the shadow this would only 
 be true of very small triangles. As the triangles 
 became bigger, the demonstration would be more 
 and more untrue. Now is it not logically quite 
 conceivable that we ourselves, whose faculties 
 preclude us from presenting to our imaginations 
 more than three dimensions, are, like the shadow, 
 deceived, and that we really exist in more? A 
 
208 CEITICISM OF CATEGOEIES [i-ect. h. 
 
 writer on spiritualism once pushed this possibility 
 to a comical point when he suggested that to such 
 a shadow as we are considering, a simple loop in 
 a string would appear as a knot and a simple 
 plane figure as a closed box ; that the knot could 
 be untied without loosening the ends of the string, 
 and an object put into the box without opening it, 
 by a power that could get off the surface of the 
 sphere and move in a third dimension. 
 
 Science can only tell us that the real space in 
 which we exist, and the real time which is based 
 on motion in that space, may be quite different 
 from what we take them to be. As a consequence 
 it is quite possible that Euclid may be wrong ; that 
 parallel lines may ultimately meet; and that two 
 straight lines may enclose a space. And it may be 
 that a square which coincides with another square 
 in one kind of space, may chance to coincide with 
 a quantitatively different figure when removed to 
 another kind of space, with the result that the 
 axiom which lies at the foundation of quantita- 
 tive or metrical geometry, that things which are 
 equal to the same thing are equal to one 
 another, ceases to be universally true. The only 
 principle, then, which must remain true how- 
 ever the nature of space may change, will be one 
 from which the notion of quantity has been 
 eliminated, and which depends on distinction 
 of quality alone. We may make a beginning 
 in this direction by simplifying oxu- preliminary 
 datum or assumption of fact, and confining it 
 
PROJECTIVE GEOMETRY 209 
 
 to this, which we may assume without bringing 
 in the notion of measurement at all, that we 
 can recognise difference of position. This we do 
 always assume, because it is of the very essence 
 of that fact of externality which we are to 
 endeavour to treat under categories which do 
 not go beyond it. Thus, if we take a number 
 of points on a line which joins them, we can 
 distinguish them as found in the line on which 
 thgy lie. Their distance from each other we 
 must put out of account, for this would require 
 tiu3 category of measurement for its recognition. 
 It follows that if all that is given is the mere 
 fact of several points on a straight line, they 
 cannot have any different quality from any other 
 points on that line. We have, therefore, in 
 order to construct a geometry apart from measure- 
 ment, to get further, and to find out how to 
 describe qualities of points and lines and figures 
 which will enable us to distinguish and reason 
 about them without bringing in that notion. 
 This is done by a new and highly abstract 
 branch of mathematical science which is called 
 "Projective Geometry." It takes a point out- 
 side the line on which the original set of, say, 
 four points lies, and draws lines from the new 
 outside point, intersecting the original line at the 
 four old points. Now suppose that across the 
 pencil of four new lines so drawn we draw other 
 lines, they vdll each intersect the foxu" new lines 
 at points which will have a certain relation to the 
 
210 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES [i-ect. n 
 
 old points, in virtue of which they can be dis- 
 tinguished and described. In this fashion a quaU- 
 tative equivalence may be got at which becomes 
 the object of this new geometry, in place of the 
 quantitative equality which was the object of 
 demonstration with Euclid. Space is treated as 
 nothing but a set of qualitative relations. From 
 two points we cannot, without the category of 
 quantity, describe and determine a third, unless 
 that third lies in a different line. But given three 
 points joined by different lines, we can construct 
 figures, such as that referred to, which will enable 
 us to determine descriptively or projectively any 
 number of fresh points, and to distinguish them, 
 and the lines and planes resulting from them, 
 qualitatively. 
 
 A science confining itself to such abstract 
 conceptions as does Projective Geometry, may not 
 be an instruixient very well adapted for practical 
 application. Its use is to disengage from out of 
 ordinary mathematics certain assumptions which 
 confine the latter, in some, at least, of its branches, 
 to the limited experience with which we are 
 familiar, and which prevent it from being used for 
 the attainment of a still wider reaching knowledge. 
 Its advantage is that its propositions are true, not 
 merely for space of three, but for space of n 
 dimensions. We have stopped to look at it here 
 because it enables us to see very clearly the truth 
 that Science can extend itself only by sacrificing 
 the great bulk of what concrete experience gives 
 
PHYSICAL SCIENCE 211 
 
 us, and that the more wide reaching are the 
 conceptions of Science, the less do they present us 
 with an adequate description of the concrete reality 
 of experience. Beyond the science of measurement, 
 barren as that turned out to be, we have seen that 
 there lies, in a region yet more barren, a science of 
 mere externality. We had better now pass on from 
 the merely ideal constructions of mathematics, and 
 next consider how far the conceptions of what is 
 called physical science do justice to real things. 
 
 Of the conceptions of physical science, it is not 
 easy to pronounce with accuracy what is their 
 broad characteristic. One view is that they are 
 invariably mechanical, and that if they represent 
 actual physical changes at all, they represent them 
 as effected by causes operating from without in 
 space and time. If this be so, their aim must be 
 to present to reflection the manifold of the depart- 
 ments of nature with which they deal, as combina- 
 tions of the simplest and most homogeneous 
 mechanisms. They must seek to represent the 
 universe as an aggregate of atoms, of which the 
 leading characteristic is that they attract each 
 other from a distance, and so produce such 
 phenomena as that of gravitation, according to a 
 law which is one of the best known of the results 
 of physical science. But such a description is not 
 wholly accurate. Some of the standpoints of the 
 modern physicist are much more abstract, and 
 have little to do with the old-fashioned notions. 
 Indeed, the tendency of the most distinguished 
 
212 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES [i-ect. u. 
 
 men of science of our time is to try to do with- 
 out the category of Cause altogether in discussing 
 the phenomena of nature, and, for the purposes of 
 their science, to confine themselves to descriptions 
 of motion. Even when they come to the forces of 
 nature they refuse to look at force in any other 
 aspect than as the direction and rate in and at 
 which change of motion takes place, instead of 
 calling it, what the older physicists and the man 
 in the street call it, the cause of the change. 
 When we consider the motion of a point in 
 space, we are considering a mere abstraction. 
 When we pass to the question of what is moved 
 and how, we seem to have got to something 
 real for physics to consider. But the modern 
 physicist sternly sets his face against us. He 
 tells us not only that we know nothing of matter, 
 even in the sense in which Locke spoke of it, as 
 the substance which underlies phenomena, but 
 that his science rejects every definition of it 
 except as "that which can have its motion 
 changed by the application of force. Two bodies 
 are of equal mass if equal forces applied to these 
 bodies produce in equal times equal changes 
 of velocity. This is the only definition of equal 
 masses which can be admitted in modem dynamics, 
 and it is applicable to all material bodies, whatever 
 they may be made of." * When we bear in mind 
 the scientific conception of force just given, we find 
 that matter and energy are, at all events for some 
 
 * Maxwell, Matter and Motion, p. 40. 
 
PHYSICAL CATEGOEIES 213 
 
 of the modern physicists, merely two of the 
 abstractions of one of the most abstract methods 
 by which experience is investigated, and apparently 
 cannot be themselves further reduced. But if 
 physics be defined, as it has been and must be if 
 it is to cover the whole field without leaving 
 huge gaps, as an inquiry into the causes of the 
 changes in the modes or qualities of dead matter, 
 it is a Science which, both in its theories "and 
 on its experimental side, will go far beyond 
 such abstract definitions as we have been 
 speaking of. Modern physics is in short a com- 
 posite science, in which the methods of the mathe- 
 matician are called largely in aid in dealing with a 
 subject matter which is much more concrete and 
 individual than that of the mathematician proper. 
 We are forced in this new region to go beyond the 
 categories of the mathematician, and to look for 
 causes and effects, do what we will to turn our 
 faces in a different direction. We may try to 
 confine ourselves to mathematical conceptions, 
 but we cannot. Our definitions of force and of 
 mass, of matter and of energy, will turn out to 
 be circular if we do. These conceptions are really 
 fundamental. They make physical science what it 
 is, and cannot be extruded from it. They are, in 
 short, the special categories which lie at its founda- 
 tion. The failure to realise this fact has made 
 many a good physicist degenerate into a bad 
 metaphysician. 
 
 Now, we have already, in the first Book, 
 
214 CKITICISM OF CATEGOBIES [j-^ct. n. 
 
 asked the question how far the conception of 
 cause and effect, the principle that every change 
 is due to some event anterior to it in time and 
 separate from it in space, is adequate to reahty. 
 We saw that while this conception is less abstract 
 than those which mathematics offers, it still can 
 take no account of the bulk of what the world 
 of phenomena appears to be. If we are justified 
 in the hope that we may yet come to believe in 
 the reality of that world as it seems, we shall 
 apparently have to get beyond the category of 
 cause. We will begin, however, as usual, by 
 trying from a concrete example of its application 
 to get a clear notion of how phenomena are dealt 
 with through that category when we abstract 
 under it. If I put a lighted match to gunpowder 
 it explodes, and if I ask someone, to whom I 
 have to justify my conduct, what was the cause, 
 the answer is, "Why you, to be sure, who put 
 the lighted match to the powder." But while 
 for ethical or popular purposes this view may 
 do, it is, as was earlier pointed out, plainly 
 insufficient for any scientific purpose. For if 
 the gunpowder be wet, it will not. go off. We 
 must, therefore, ask what, from a scientific stand- 
 point, is the cause. Now Science tells us that 
 gunpowder consists of a mechanical mixture of 
 particles of saltpetre, carbon, and sulphur. The 
 saltpetre contains in its chemical molecules oxygen, 
 in loose combination with nitrogen and potash. 
 When the oxygen is shaken loose from the nitro- 
 
CAUSALITY 215 
 
 gen and potash, as it is, among other methods, 
 by ignition, it rushes to the carbon, for which 
 it has a strong chemical afl&nity, and its atoms 
 unite with those of the latter, and form car- 
 bonic acid and carbonic oxide gases. These 
 gases, which increase their volume as heat is 
 developed, produce great pressure, so violent 
 that an explosion is the result. Now what 
 was, scientifically speaking, the cause of this 
 explosion? Which one of the conditions, the 
 loose combination in the nitrogen group, the 
 greater affinity of the oxygen for the carbon, 
 the dryness of the mixture which made com- 
 bustion possible, or what else, are we to pick 
 out and designate as the cause ? Plainly it 
 was only in a popular sense that putting the 
 light to the powder was the cause. For the 
 practical purpose of finding who was to blame, 
 it was convenient to fasten on that particular 
 one among a multitude of conditions which 
 were necessary if we were to witness the 
 explosion. But if our contemplations are to 
 be scientific, we may not import outside and 
 irrelevant considerations to guide our choice. 
 The man of science will tell us, that the most 
 accurate answer he can give to the question is, 
 that the cause of the explosion was the libera- 
 tion of the potential energy stored up in the 
 gunpowder. But this only shows that our 
 selection of the cause varies with our stand- 
 point. We should never let off the man who 
 
216 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES [i-ect. n. 
 
 applied the match and blew up the house, and 
 arrest the manufacturer of the gunpowder. The 
 notion of cause seems to be, like that of quantity, 
 one by means of which we pick out for some 
 special purpose certain abstract aspects of reality, 
 in order to get a clear view of them. It is 
 always a relative term, and is always loose. 
 There is no such thing as one independent event 
 which precedes the effect, and is for all purposes 
 its cause. The only antecedent we can name 
 which could be so described with any truth, 
 is the entire sum of the conditions, includ- 
 ing, in the case of the powder, not only the 
 potential energy and the active force which turned 
 it into kinetic energy, but every other condition 
 the presence of which contributed to the explosion. 
 And then a new difl&culty at once arises as to 
 the point at which the cause so understood 
 ceased to be a cause, and the effect began to be 
 an effect. In nature there seems to be nowhere 
 any such line of division between the event and 
 the entire sum of its conditions, though for loose 
 practical purposes it is convenient to ignore one 
 or more of the conditions, and speak as if it 
 were otherwise. The laws of nature seem to 
 exclude the breach in the continuity which would 
 be involved in aflBrming seriously that the energy 
 which already existed, and which science says 
 can never be either destroyed or increased, ceased 
 to be one thing, and subsequently became another 
 really independent thing. When we try to find 
 
CAUSALITY 217 
 
 such a breach of continuity, we find ourselves 
 face to face with another conception, that of 
 something which is incapable of diminution or 
 increase, and is indestructible except in form or 
 appearance, the conception of substance. For it 
 becomes plain that all the chemical atoms which 
 make up the gas of the explosion were already 
 in the powder. It is true that their relative 
 positions in space have changed. But that is 
 all that has happened, and the energy which 
 efifected the change was likewise there in the 
 powder. In the end we are driven to the 
 conclusion that not only is the cause not a 
 thing nor an event distinguishable in time or 
 space from the effect, but that if we try to 
 define it accm-ately, we can come to no other 
 result than that it is just the sum of the con- 
 ditions ; in other words, is just the effect itself. 
 Now, of course, the word "cause" has a legiti- 
 mate use. But that use is a popular and pro- 
 visional, and not a scientific one. It means an 
 aspect under which, for practical purposes, and 
 in order to get a clear view for some special 
 end, we separate out some one antecedent and 
 lay exclusive stress on it. That is to say, the 
 word imports a mere abstraction, and is wholly 
 inadequate to reality. Here, again, we are con- 
 fronted with that disintegrating work of reflection, 
 which brings despair to the orthodox upholder 
 of the "room with windows" idea of the per- 
 ceiving mind. 
 
218 CEITICISM OF CATEGORIES [i-ect. h. 
 
 The obscurity which we have observed in the 
 conception of cause and effect is, of coxu-se, well 
 known to the modern physicist. He, indeed, has 
 put the words under a ban, and he refuses to talk 
 in such language. He confines himself at the 
 outside to such phrases as matter and energy. 
 But have we here, any more than in the former 
 terminology, anything beyond an indication of an 
 aspect of phenomena, separated out by abstract 
 reflection, as distinguished from the indication of 
 reality itself? Can we for a moment suppose that 
 the word "matter," to begin with, means a self- 
 subsisting reality, without falling into hopeless 
 difficulties ? Let us commence by supposing it to 
 fill space continuously and homogeneously. If it is 
 of this nature, then not only is the conception of 
 bodies as numerically separate impossible, but 
 some of the simplest phenomena cannot be 
 accounted for. How can it be, for instance, that 
 when an electric spark is passed through a 
 mixture of the gases oxygen and hydrogen, they 
 combine to form an enormously diminished volume 
 of water? Space siirely cannot be continuously 
 filled with the material of which they consisted. 
 On the other hand, suppose this not to be so! 
 We are then face to face with another difficulty. 
 We have to make clear to ourselves that the action 
 at a distance on each other of the atoms which are 
 in space, is intelligible. Now action through a 
 void interval, at a distance, as a fact which they 
 accept, has been a standing puzzle to physicists 
 
ACTION AT A DISTANCE 219 
 
 since the days of Newton. Newton himself 
 appears to have thought it to be an ultimate and 
 irresoluble property of the particles of matter, of 
 which no account could be given. And modern 
 physicists have struggled hard, only to find that 
 they can get no further than he did. They cannot 
 accept the first alternative that space has a con- 
 tinuous and homogeneous content. Yet when they 
 are driven to the second, even if they are content 
 to take the atom as something which, in a fashion 
 that is inexplicable, acts at a distance, they are 
 driven to hold that the word atom is itself a mere 
 abstract expression for a centre of force without 
 content or dimensions. In the words of a brilliant 
 modern mathematician : * " We come to see that 
 action at a distance is something ultimate, which 
 we cannot reduce to any simpler conception of the 
 action of substance. It is indeed the final con- 
 ception of substance in general, for all the 
 mechanical activity of substance consists in action 
 at a distance. That which exercises action at a 
 distance, which we have now allowed to reduce 
 itself to the mere point which is sufiicient to 
 account for it, ceases to be interesting to us, and 
 action at a distance steps into its place." The old 
 notion of Lucretius and Newton that matter is 
 made up of inelastic and indivisible atoms, is 
 hardly tenable by the modern man of science. If 
 it were true, we should have found, what Science 
 
 * Paul du Bois-Reymond, Veher die Grundlagen der Erkennt- 
 niss in den Exacten Wissemchaften, 1890, p. 101. 
 
220 CEITICISM OF CATEGORIES [i-ect. n. 
 
 does not disclose, some indication of a limit to the 
 compressibility of matter. For this reason men 
 like Boscovich and Faraday passed to the notion 
 of the so-called atom as no more than a centre 
 from which attractive and repulsive force is 
 exercised. But the question then arises what 
 force is. In popular acceptance what is meant 
 by the word is a subjective experience, the sensa- 
 tion of force. If we try to find a purely objective 
 significance, we find that we have got, not a thing, 
 but the mere name of a measure or relation, the 
 rate at which work is done. It turns out that the 
 notion of a point from which force is exercised, is 
 a convenient mathematical abstraction, but that 
 it does not indicate any conceivably actual 
 experience. Driven by difficulties such as this, 
 physicists have turned to another hypothesis, that 
 which is associated with the name of Lord Kelvin. 
 This is the famous theory of vortex rings, the 
 theory that the atoms into which matter, for the 
 physicist, must be taken to be finally resoluble, 
 consist of portions, rotating as do rings of smoke, 
 of some medium which fills the whole space. If 
 such a medium be conceived as a frictionless fluid, 
 and if it can be conceived that in such a fluid there 
 are everywhere present vortex rings, there results 
 a view of the nature of matter which avoids a good 
 many difficulties. Such a view enables us to 
 understand how it is that every atom of every one 
 element is, so far as the spectroscope can tell us, 
 possessed of the same properties. It would seem 
 
GRAVITATION 221 
 
 even to lend, itself to the mechanical explanation of 
 gravitation which was propounded, nearly a century 
 ago, by Lesage of Geneva. Lesage proved mathe- 
 matically that gravitation could be accounted for, 
 if it were assumed that, besides ordinary and 
 larger particles of matter, there is an infinitely 
 greater number of smaller ones, which dart about 
 in all directions with immense velocity. When 
 two of the larger particles are placed near each 
 other, the one screens the other from the impact 
 of a number of the smaller particles, and the 
 consequent excess of battering on the outmost 
 sides over that on the inmost, produces a tendency 
 of the particles to approach each other. He 
 showed mathematically that the result of such a 
 process is equivalent to an attraction varying 
 inversely as the square of the distance ; in other 
 words, to gravitation. 
 
 But even if we adopt this hypothetical explana- 
 tion of gravitation, and with it the conception of 
 space as filled with larger and smaller vortex rings 
 in a perfectly frictionless and continuous fluid, we 
 do not seem to be any further forward. In the 
 first place, we have no idea what such a fluid 
 means. There is no analogue of it in experience. 
 So far as that experience is concerned, such a 
 medium is, in the literal sense, metaphysical. In 
 the second place, even if we could present some 
 image of it to . our mind's eye, we must find our- 
 selves face to face with the old difficulties. In 
 experience we never do reach, and, indeed, we 
 
222 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES [^^ct. n. 
 
 cannot conceive ourselves as reaching a ne plus 
 ultra, an ultimate limit. Everything in experience 
 is and must always be, capable of being viewed as 
 divisible, and further resoluble. Were it not so, 
 the continuity of nature would be broken. Apply- 
 ing this to the conception of a frictionless fluid, 
 continuously occupying space, and not itself further 
 resoluble, we see that it is self -contradictory. As 
 a thing in space, we cannot think of it as com- 
 pressible, unless it consists of parts ; and this, by 
 hypothesis, it cannot be, for otherwise it would not 
 be continuous. But if it be not compressible, how 
 can vortex rings be formed and motion take place 
 in it ? These are but illustrations, which might be 
 multiplied indefinitely, of the fact that this theory 
 has only put back one stage further the diflSculties. 
 which attended the other theories about the 
 ultimate nature of matter. The truth is, that in 
 setting up these conceptions, we have passed 
 beyond the region of what can belong to any 
 possible experience. We are making use, not of 
 concrete facts such as those to which men of 
 science sometimes profess and erroneously profess 
 to confine themselves, but of abstract conceptions 
 which are really metempirical, and whose only 
 justification is that they are the means by which 
 we can shut out all that is irrelevant to the 
 purpose of the moment, and by a process of 
 reasoning get clear knowledge of the structure and 
 characteristics of certain phases of experience, and 
 of their place in the really indivisible whole of 
 
CONCEPTIONS OF PHYSICS 223 
 
 knowledge. Such conceptions correspond to 
 methods of abstraction under certain definite 
 categories, and represent the outcome of those 
 methods. They possess a vahdity no greater, and 
 a utility no less than the abstract conceptions of 
 mathematics. Most useful they certainly are, for 
 they have helped us, for instance, in astronomy, 
 to a knowledge which far transcends that which is 
 immediate. Yet, if we attribute to them any 
 validity other than that which attaches to the mere 
 figments of abstract thought, and jump to the con- 
 clusion that, if we could indefinitely magnify our 
 senses, we should experience real things corre- 
 sponding to them, we fall into hopeless self-contra- 
 diction. Whether we are speaking of matter, or of 
 energy, or of force, or mass, or momentum, or of 
 any of the other great physical conceptions, we are 
 dealing with abstractions reached by employing 
 categories such as cause and substance, to guide 
 our process of reflection. What the categories of 
 quantity, discretion, continuity, and, further back 
 still, of bare externality, have done for us in the 
 region of mathematics, these others have done for 
 us in that of physical science. It is by the 
 categories which each of these sciences employs, 
 that its scope and method, and the limits of its 
 results, are determined. These categories for the 
 time confine him who employs them, with the 
 intensity of concentration that Science requires, to 
 certain phases of the world as it seems, and to 
 certain phases only. Of the others, they, rightly 
 
224 CEITICISM OF CATEGORIES [^-ect. n. 
 
 interpreted, can neither affirm nor deny the reality. 
 For it is inherent in the nature of these categories, 
 as only partial and fragmentary manifestations of 
 the activity of reflection, that they should take 
 no cognisance of these other aspects. 
 
 Over the interesting sights which are to be seen 
 in the region through which our pathway is leading 
 us, we must not linger. Our purpose has been 
 merely to find out what sort of claim to forbid our 
 further progress is set up by the various menacing 
 forms which beset the region of Science. Over all 
 the varieties of each species of these forms, it is 
 not an object of our journey to pause. What we 
 wish to find out is, whether they have any title or 
 any real power to prevent us from getting to higher 
 ground beyond the valley of abstraction in which 
 they dwell. For, if we can reach such higher 
 ground, perchance we may have a view of the 
 distant things of which we are in quest, which may 
 enable us to believe them and that world of which 
 they are the highest appearances to be what they 
 seem. But so far, we have only been face to face 
 with the mathematician, with him who would bid 
 us limit ourselves, in our search for the real, to 
 quantity, if not to externality; and with the 
 physicist, who tells us that beyond these lie causes, 
 substances, and the like, but nothing more. We 
 have spoken in friendly language with these 
 captains of a spectre world, for we have xmderstood 
 the immense value of their methods, as aids to 
 human knowledge. It was only when certain of 
 
CHEMICAL CATEGORIES 225 
 
 them sought to bar the path, that we quarrelled. 
 Let us now make a step further, and get acquainted 
 with another master of the method of applying 
 abstraction to the concrete universe. 
 
 The methods of the physicist rule out fewer of 
 the phases of nature than do those of the mathe- 
 matician; the methods of the chemist rule out 
 fewer than do those of the physicist. When the 
 physicist defines matter and energy, in terms which 
 will enable him to use these conceptions in his 
 methods, he knows that he is thinking abstractly, 
 and without reference to any conceivable particular 
 experience. For him the atom is, as we have 
 seen, in the last resort but an ideal point to or 
 from which motion proceeds. He is really, at 
 least in his theoretical as distinguished from his 
 experimental methods, under the domination of 
 mathematical categories. The chemist, on the 
 other hand, does not require to regard the atom 
 so abstractly. For him, at least as he talks, the 
 atom might conceivably be seen, if a microscope 
 powerful enough could be got, and he discourses 
 of atomic weights and afiinities in language which 
 suggests that the atom may be a real thing. 
 Modern chemistry has, indeed, passed beyond the 
 idea of elementary substances to that of diverse 
 elementary atoms of which all its substances 
 consist. For it all substances are, in a special 
 sense, composite, and their qualities and differ- 
 ences depend on the fundamental attributes of 
 elementary atoms, or on molecular structure aris- 
 
226 CKITICISM OF CATEGORIES [^^- "• 
 
 ing from the chemical union of the various kinds 
 of atoms. Chemistry deals with experience from 
 the point of view of change of substance so con- 
 ceived. Its main category is the molecule. For 
 the physicist, the molecule, if he used the word, 
 would mean the point of application of the forces 
 which determine the physical state of bodies, the 
 small particle which, for the purpose of consider- 
 ing the action of these forces, may be taken as a 
 unit. For the .chemist the molecule has quite a 
 different significance. He thinks of it only as 
 the smallest mass into which a substance can be 
 divided without changing its chemical nature. 
 Take, for example, a piece of sugar. I dissolve 
 it in water. The sugar is now divided up ever 
 so finely, but the imperceptible particles suspended 
 throughout the water are still sugar, and nothing 
 else. Now add to the water sulphuric acid. The 
 solution blackens, and presently there is evolved 
 out of the sugar, charcoal. The sugar has as 
 such ceased to exist. Its constituent elements 
 have become separated, and some of them have 
 gone into combination with some of the con- 
 stituent elements of the sulphuric acid. We have 
 got a new set of substances. Take, again, water. 
 It can be subdivided almost indefinitely without 
 alteration of its chemical nature. Indeed, no 
 mechanical subdivision of it that we know will 
 change its chemical nature. Just before it bursts, 
 the film of a soap-bubble is less than loooooo 
 of an inch in thickness. When it is converted 
 
THE MOLECULE 227 
 
 into vapour the water is divided up yet more 
 finely, still without any change of chemical 
 character. By means of heat we can separate 
 the particles of the vapour to an extent which, so 
 far as the senses aided by the finest instruments 
 can tell, is incapable of limit. But we can make 
 a still greater subdivision. If we pass through 
 the water an electric current, bubbles of gas arise 
 round the two poles of the battery. The bubbles 
 which surround the one pole turn out to be quite 
 different from those at the other. For one set 
 of bubbles encloses hydrogen, the other oxygen. 
 Here we have, arising from a new sort of opera- 
 tion, products equivalent in weight to the amount 
 of water that has disappeared, while enormously 
 exceeding it in volume. The chemist tells us 
 that each molecule of the lost water, described, in 
 his abstract terminology, as H2O, has been resolved 
 into three constituent atoms, two of hydrogen and 
 one of oxygen. This is his atomic theory. Yet 
 valuable as are the atomic theory and the processes 
 based on it, processes which enable him accurately 
 to foretell phenomena of experience, and so to get 
 beyond the immediate, this theory is but a method 
 of regarding nature abstractly, a set of general con- 
 ceptions through which it is useful to approach the 
 facts. No one has ever seen a molecule : no one 
 has ever seen an atom. They are convenient 
 expressions in which to record chemical changes 
 that cannot be envisaged in space and time. "I 
 wish," writes a distinguished modern chemist, "to 
 
228 CEITICISM OF CATEGOEIES Kt. n. 
 
 declare my belief that the atomic theory, beautiful 
 and consistent as it appears, is only a temporary 
 expedient for representing the facts of chemistry 
 to the mind. Although, in the present state of 
 the Science, it gives absolutely essential aid both 
 to investigation and study, I have the conviction 
 that it is temporary scaffolding around the im- 
 perfect building, which will be removed as soon 
 as its usefulness is passed." * In other words, it 
 is a method which we justify, because it gives us 
 residts which we can check with experience, and 
 which fit into the context of what we see and feel. 
 But it is the results which are verifiable, and not 
 the conceptions which form the foundation of the 
 method. And if chemists find any other method, 
 more adequate in the sense of being yet more finit- 
 ful in results, they will throw overboard the atomic 
 theory, just as they have thrown overboard the 
 notion of Imponderables; that is, of attenuated 
 forms of matter which could be added to or sub- 
 tracted from bodies without altering their weight, 
 and which at one time were put forward in all the 
 text-books as the explanation of the phenomena 
 of heat and electricity. It is by means of hypo- 
 thetical and abstract conceptions that we are able, 
 not to describe what we experience, but to isolate 
 in thought such aspects of it as we vsash to bring 
 into clear knowledge, for the purpose of extending 
 that knowledge yet further. The test which we 
 accept of the legitimacy of the conceptions is the 
 
 * Cooke, The New Chemistry, p. 118. 
 
THE ATOMIC THEORY 229 
 
 correctness, as shown by subsequent experience, 
 of the concrete results to which they guide us. 
 The conceptions themselves we cannot and do not 
 seek to verify. 
 
 Chemistry deals with the composition and 
 changes of substance. Its leading conception is 
 the atomic theory, and this has led to gi'ouping 
 the so-called elements according to their atomic 
 weight, and affinities, and structure. It deals 
 with topics which, on the face of them, are 
 less remote from what we see and feel in 
 the concrete than those of physics. The latter 
 takes no account of most of the conceptions of 
 chemistry, because they are beside its purpose. 
 By way of contrasting the methods of the phy- 
 sicist and the mathematician with those chemical 
 methods to which we have been referring, it is 
 worth while quoting the description of the field 
 of physical science given by a well-known writer; 
 "That which is properly called Physical Science 
 is the knowledge of relations between natural 
 phenomena and their physical antecedents, as 
 necessary sequences of cause and effect; these 
 relations being investigated by the aid of mathe- 
 matics — that is, by a method in which processes 
 of reasoning on all questions that can properly be 
 brought under the categories of quantity and space 
 conditions, are rendered perfectly exact, simplified, 
 and made capable of general appUcation to a 
 degree almost inconceivable by the uninitiated, 
 through the use of conventional symbols. There 
 
230 CEITICISM OF CATEGOEIES [^^t. u. 
 
 is no admission for any but a mathematician 
 into this school of Philosophy. But there is a 
 lowei' department of natural science, most valu- 
 able as a precursor and auxiliary, which we may 
 call scientific phenomenology, the office of which 
 is to observe and classify phenomena, and by 
 induction to infer the laws that govern them. 
 As, however, it is unable to determine these laws 
 to be the necessary results of the action of physical 
 forces, they remain merely empirical until the 
 higher science interprets them."* Chemistry is 
 a department of what, in the passage just quoted, 
 is called "scientific phenomenology," diifering 
 from experimental physics in its conceptions and 
 hypotheses, but yet akin to it. The fields over- 
 lap. Mathematics comes to the aid of chemistry 
 in a much less degree than it does to that 
 of physics. If it is called in by the chemist 
 to render assistance, the assistance is of a 
 comparatively simple kind. Still it is most 
 useful in the application of the atomic theory. 
 When we passed our electric current through the 
 water, mathematics enabled us to calculate the 
 weights of hydrogen and oxygen respectively 
 which were evolved, from the data afforded by 
 the weight of water lost. In this fashion, and 
 in connection with the chemical law of Avo- 
 gadro, that equal volumes of all substances, when 
 brought into a gaseous state and Tinder the like 
 
 * Tait, Recent Advances in Physical Science, 2nd edition, p. 
 348. 
 
THE CHEMICAL EQUATION 231 
 
 conditions, contain equal numbers of molecules, 
 it tells us what to expect as the results of a vast 
 variety of processes. But, perhaps, the best illus- 
 tration of all is the chemical equation, where the 
 molecules, with their atomic structures, appear 
 on one side ; while the other side not merely tells 
 us what new substances and in what quantity we 
 may expect as the result of reaction in accord- 
 ance with chemical laws, but enables us to test 
 whether we have correctly analysed the products 
 of the reaction when it has taken place. 
 
 Let us pause for a moment in our journey, and 
 cast a glance back at that group of sciences which 
 we are just parting from. They all deal with those 
 relations of things which are regarded as external to 
 one another, and as being acted on from without. 
 They all belong to the region of externality in 
 space and time. Physics is more abstract than 
 chemistry, and mathematics than physics; but 
 with whatever class of conception they deal, it is 
 invariably one which is conditioned by the notion 
 of some abstract relation of things outside each 
 other in space or time, or both. Whether it be 
 the projection of the metageometer, the proposi- 
 tions of Euclid, the numbers of the arithmetician, 
 the continuous variation of the Calculus, the 
 principle of the conservation of energy, the law of 
 gravitation, the atomic theory, or the chemical 
 equation, we are conceiving relations between 
 things regarded as outside each other, and standing 
 in no other relationship. This relationship falls 
 
232 CEITICISM OF CATEGOEIES [^ect. .i. 
 
 into many categories and derivative conceptions. 
 It might be very useful work to try to make some- 
 thing like a comprehensive table of these categories 
 and their derivatives, which should disclose them 
 in logical order, and exhibit their relations to each 
 other. A clear understanding of these relations 
 might save a great deal of confusion. But such 
 a purpose, however meritorious, is outside the 
 business of these Lectures, which is simply to 
 thread the way among these categories. For this 
 purpose we have had to try our hands at some 
 criticism of them, and it would probably be part of 
 a complete system of Philosophy to make that 
 criticism exhaustive. Such a system ought to be 
 able to display to us, approximately at least, how 
 much, amid the gain which Science yields us, we 
 shut out and lose by the assumption, often made as 
 unconsciously as it is dogmatically, that the cate- 
 gories which take cognisance only of what can be 
 expressed as relationship in space and time, are 
 the only categories that can guide us in the search 
 after reality. For us here it is sufficient if further 
 inquiry has convinced us that this is not so. We 
 do not need to go into details, if we have once seen 
 clearly that the fact that the categories of exter- 
 nality have been of immense service to the reflec- 
 tion of mankind is no reason for confining that 
 reflection to their use. There has so far appeared 
 no reason why we should not in the end be able to 
 believe in the reality of the world as it seems. 
 That world is no mere net- work of the abstractions 
 
CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT 233 
 
 which in point of time not only do not precede, 
 but, in fact, are quarried out of it by reflection. 
 Nor have we found any reason to compromise our 
 faith in the world as it seems, by conceding, what 
 is taught by Kant in his Critique of Judgment, 
 that so far as our experience of the world cannot 
 be expressed in terms of space and time relations, 
 and of external conceptions such as those of cause, 
 substance, reciprocity, and the like, it has but a 
 secondary order of reality with an origin refer- 
 able to the observer as such. Such a distinc- 
 tion is no more capable of being justified than 
 is that "of Locke, between primary and secondary 
 qualities. All the relationships of the phenomena 
 of the object world are by their very origin 
 and nature, as products of reflection, there for 
 reflection and for reflection alone. They are 
 abstractions secondary in time to the experience 
 out of which they are separated. So much we 
 can discover by the simple process, which Locke 
 tried to pursue, of looking into our own breasts. 
 Only let us be warned by his example. Just as 
 he went wrong when he thought he had found 
 an abstract idea of matter, so shall we go wrong if 
 we think we can present to ourselves a universe 
 consisting of, say, vortex rings in a perfect fluid 
 in motion. Such a universe is a possible and 
 proper working conception for abstract reflection 
 to make use of, but not a possible or proper 
 subject for a pictorial presentation of reality. 
 Nor do we better the case by making the 
 
234 CEITICISM OF CATEGORIES [i-ect. h. 
 
 addition of what we call a mind operating from 
 without upon such a universe. The conception of 
 such action belongs, as has already been pointed 
 out, exclusively to the field of space and time, and 
 by these it is conditioned. It is but the conception 
 of a cause, which can operate only within that field. 
 To talk of such a cause as antecedent to space and 
 time, or as a First Cause, is to use language which 
 has no clear meaning. Causality is descriptive 
 only of the relationship between phenomena pre- 
 sented as external to one another, and, just 
 because it is a mere relationship that is described, 
 we can conceive no cause that is not, in another 
 aspect, effect. Nor do the difficulties end here. 
 Such a mind, operating in such an external 
 fashion, is meaningless, excepting as object for 
 the subject. It turns out, when scrutinised, to 
 be itself an abstraction, to yield, like all else of 
 the kind, to the analysis of that reflection of 
 which its notion is the product. We are face 
 to face here not only with one of those meta- 
 physical figments which the man of science seeks 
 to expel, but with a figment of what is even 
 worse, of bad metaphysics. A wrongful applica- 
 tion of the categories of the physical sciences 
 has raised this shadowy apparition. Do not let 
 us follow it down the bye-path along which it 
 beckons us. For that bye -path will but bring 
 us round again to the slough of despond. 
 
 But it is not only in the quest after a so-called 
 First Cause that these categories have been mis- 
 
THE GOLDEN SECTION 235 
 
 applied. We have seen of what enormous service 
 they are in assisting us to the fulfilment of a 
 purpose, most of all necessary in the exact sciences, 
 the measurement of quantity. In most branches of 
 knowledge the measuring rod and the balance and 
 the chronometer are useful. In the exact sciences 
 they are of the essence. But when we look around 
 us, we behold aspects of nature, in relation to 
 which the importance of measurement dwindles. 
 For the man whose thoughts are engrossed with 
 the beauty of the hills under the glow of the setting 
 sun, the measuring rod and the balance and the 
 chronometer have no meaning. For the moralist, 
 who is contemplating conduct, they are irrelevant. 
 It is true that the psychologist may occasionally, 
 and not wholly without some result, bring them 
 into sesthetical inquiries under such guises as the 
 law of what has been called the " Golden Section." 
 Fechner, who gave a great impulse to the quanti- 
 tative study of Esthetics, found that when he 
 consulted a large number of persons as to which 
 out of a number of different rectangular figures 
 they preferred, there was a marked preference for 
 those in which the short side stood to the long side 
 in the same proportion as did the long side to the 
 sum of both. Many investigations of analogous 
 kinds are taking place in the psycho-physical 
 laboratory to-day, and good may come of them. 
 
 The statistician, too, armed with the categories 
 of measurement, may come to the assistance of the 
 moralist. But while throughout the whole of the 
 
236 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES [i-^ct. h. 
 
 fields of nature there are possible applications of 
 the principle of measurement, it can be made use 
 of, in such instances as those indicated, only in a 
 subordinate fashion, which allows it no pretence of 
 being adequate to reality. Now besides these clear 
 cases there is a kind of phenomenon as to which it 
 has never been so willingly conceded, that the con- 
 ceptions of the exact sciences are inapplicable. 
 The phenomenon in question is that of life. Our 
 first observation of its nature and its distinction 
 from other aspects of existence is probably sug- 
 gested by our consciousness of ourselves, as exclud- 
 ing what is not ourselves. In the consciousness 
 of the self as object we have, of course, phases 
 which go beyond mere life— phases such as those 
 moral and intellectual aspects which go to make up 
 personality. The consciousness even of sensation 
 is more than the consciousness of mere life. For 
 this phase of the object world has, as such, nothing 
 to do with consciousness. A thing is living when 
 it is a self-conserving whole, preserving its identity 
 through a course of development in which the 
 material in which it is embodied may be wholly 
 changed. That material can always be represented 
 as consisting of parts external to each other. 
 But as so presented it is not the living organism, 
 but a lower aspect of the material which the 
 organism uses for its embodiment. For life does 
 not appear as a cause operating externally to the 
 substance which it animates. Its relation to that 
 substance requires for its recognition and compre- 
 
CONCEPTION OF LIFE 237 
 
 hension a set of conceptions of its own, the leading 
 feature of which is that of a whole, controlling 
 and conserving its parts. Now of such a self- 
 conserving whole, we seem to get om- first notion 
 in the recognition of our own bodies, as something 
 distinct from the rest of what is outside us. They 
 are the embodiments of our personalities, and of 
 life as a feature of these personalities. We speedily 
 transfer the conceptions so derived to other living 
 people and to living things, and we abstract in 
 reflection under them. What for our more careful 
 reflection really does mark off" from the rest this 
 portion of the external world in which our self and 
 our life is embodied, is not any mathematical line 
 of demarcation, to be got at by measurement or 
 calculation, but, among other facts, this fact that it 
 is absorbing and giving ofi" material, and yet re- 
 maining identically ours through the change. The 
 substance in which life is at any given moment 
 embodied, is no more quantitatively divided from 
 the substance which surrounds it than is the French 
 nation from the Spanish. It is only in a wholly 
 secondary fashion that we can make use of the 
 measurement of quantity in this connection. We 
 cannot even tell whether the air we are breathing, 
 or the food we are eating, or the perspiration our 
 skins are exuding, are at any given moment part 
 of us or not. We talk as though there were a line 
 of demarcation only loosely, and because it does 
 not at the time matter, whether we are or are not 
 using accurate language. 
 
LECTUEE III 
 
 In this Lecture we shall have to pursue yet more 
 closely the topic which has already engaged our 
 attention, the nature of the phenomena of life. 
 In the living organism, the life of the whole 
 determines the parts, and develops until a certain 
 course has been accomplished. So much common 
 observation makes certain. This life is self-con- 
 serving, and it is not imparted by any cause 
 outside the organism. Indeed, the act of deter- 
 mination and conservation amid the change of 
 substance is not one in which we can perceive 
 any relation like that of cause and effect, or 
 which is capable of being expressed in terms of 
 space and time relations. That it is there, that 
 these are living beings, and that they are objects 
 in nature in which this self-determining and con- 
 serving property predominates, is a patent fact. 
 To say that such a property is an illusion, and 
 that the supposed life of these objects is merely 
 a confused and imperfect idea of what is really 
 the interaction, according to physical and chemical 
 laws, of particles of matter, is to darken counsel. 
 
 23B 
 
LIFE AND MECHANISM 239 
 
 Observation and experiment, the two great criteria 
 of Science, certainly afford us no warrant for so 
 pronouncing. If they disclosed to us matter and 
 energy as real things, existing independently of 
 our reflection, instead of as useful working hypo- 
 theses, we might be driven to doubt our senses, 
 and to say that our vision of the life that 
 siuTOunds, was but a dream. But we are not 
 driven into either trying to reduce life to mechan- 
 ism, or to regarding the two as independent and 
 self-subsisting realities, lying side by side in 
 experience, like the leaves of an artichoke. Both 
 possess, what is the mark of all the construc- 
 tions of thought, the capacity of being indefinitely 
 resolved into simpler parts. Just as the machine 
 can be regarded as made up of parts external 
 to each other, so the most complex self-conserv- 
 ing organism is found to consist of simpler units 
 of life, called cells, each of which is a self-con- 
 tained and complete living organism. 
 
 Nowhere does experience disclose to us a point 
 where the cell is constructed by the operation of 
 energy upon matter, according to mechanical 
 principles. Nowhere do we come to a boundary 
 line at the other side of which mere mechanism 
 lies. The result is analogous to what we found 
 when we sought for a final division of matter. 
 An ultimate unit of life put together out of 
 atoms and molecules, is no more conceivable 
 than the ultimate atom. Nor is it any more to 
 be regarded as a logically possible notion, the 
 
240 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES [i-^ct. m. 
 
 necessity of which is forced on us by natural 
 law. 
 
 The problem of abiogenesis, of the necessity 
 for getting back to a stage at which life is pro- 
 duced by physical and chemical action, disappears 
 when we realise that experience gives us no 
 warrant for thinking that anything of the kind 
 can possibly be perceived by the senses, and that 
 abstract reasoning does not necessitate it either. 
 We were not troubled because we could not 
 conceive the physical atom as either indefinitely 
 divisible or as definitely indivisible. For both 
 notions we understood to represent not things, 
 but thoughts. And so it is with the unit of 
 life. So long as it is a living organism it cannot 
 be a mechanism, because the abstract conception 
 of life, through which alone it is presentable, is 
 different in kind from the abstract conception of 
 an external relationship. 
 
 Into the history and progress of Biological 
 Science, it is not the business of an inquiry of 
 this kind to try to enter. It is sufficient if we 
 are able to ascertain the nature of the methods 
 and categories of that Science, and to illustrate 
 by examples of them the truth which these 
 Lectures aim at setting forth. Nowhere do we 
 see more clearly than we do here the proof that 
 Science, like Philosophy, really progresses by 
 means of a priori hypotheses, tentatively applied, 
 and afterwards tested by and adapted to the facts 
 of experience. Nowhere do we witness more 
 
VITALISM 241 
 
 distinctly the embarrassment which the prepos- 
 sessions of an unconscious and therefore crude 
 metaphysic have caused to those eminent men 
 who of all others desired to be free from anything 
 of the sort. These men appear to have been 
 under the domination of the conviction that the 
 science of Biology could make no progress except 
 by exhibiting the phenomena of life as mere illus- 
 trations of mechanical and chemical principles. 
 They refused to accept the view of the plain 
 person, drawn from everyday observation, that 
 life was something sui generis, as much entitled 
 to be credited with reality as mechanism. They 
 could not bring themselves to believe in the 
 world as it seemed. And why! Because they 
 thought that to do so was to give up the faith 
 in the universality of the great laws of matter 
 and energy, which had brought them so far on 
 their way. They were not without an excuse. 
 Vitalism, the alternative view, had up to their 
 time for the most part been put forward as an 
 exception to these laws. The phenomena of life 
 had been sought to be explained as caused by a 
 vital force, resembling the known forms of energy 
 in everything except conformity to the great 
 principle of conservation. If such a force has 
 seemed to most of the best intellects of our time 
 a symbol for the stultification of Science, can we 
 wonder? The old vitalism was simply a new 
 mechanism. It was no more to be reconciled with 
 modern Science than was the notion of Jupiter, 
 
 Q 
 
242 CEITICISM OF CATEGOEIES [i-ect. m. 
 
 sitting on Olympus, and causing thunderstorms 
 by willing them, with modern views of electrical 
 disturbances in the atmosphere. 
 
 As the mists of controversy roll away under 
 pressure of more complete observation and research, 
 we begin to realise that, if Biology is to be rested 
 on the observation of facts, the days of the old 
 vitalism and of the mechanical theory of life are 
 alike numbered. Both notions must be labelled 
 " unconscious metaphysic " and be relegated to the 
 lumber-room, where repose the discarded failures 
 of Science. We now know that there is no trace 
 of evidence that the laws of the conservation and 
 degradation of energy suffer any exception in the 
 region of life. We know not less certainly that 
 Science is making no progress towards the exhibi- 
 tion of life as a specimen of mechanical or chemical 
 action. The great result which modern Biology 
 has achieved, lies in the demonstration that the 
 living organism is an aggregate of the living units 
 which are often called cells. But the aggregate is 
 no mechanical aggregate. The cells are less like 
 marbles in a heap than like free citizens living in 
 a state. They act for the fulfilment of a common 
 end, which continues so long as the life of the 
 organism continues, and the fulfilment of which 
 appears to be just that life. The impulse which 
 moves them so to act, cannot, as far as observation 
 and experiment teach us, be brought under the 
 mechanical category of physical causation. That 
 the embryos of individuals of the same species 
 
UNCONSCIOUS PUEPOSE 243 
 
 should grow into new and yet similar indi- 
 viduals, that the foot of the newt when cut off 
 should replace itself again, these, and countless 
 other illustrations of purposive development and 
 behaviour, are in vain referred to the analogy of 
 crystallisation. Yet not the less is it unwarrant- 
 able to conclude that here we are in the presence 
 of conscious purpose or intelligence in the cells. 
 What we have to do is not to theorise, not to 
 assume that we are face to face with what must 
 be either mechanism or intelligence. We have to 
 disabuse our minds of all a priori limitation of the 
 possible aspects of experience, and to trust our- 
 selves to careful observation, and to that alone. If 
 the criticism of which the earlier part of these 
 Lectures consists be true, there is no reason why 
 we should hesitate to do so, or refuse to believe 
 the evidence of our senses, when they assure us 
 that what experience discloses cannot be shut up 
 within any limited set of categories. When we say 
 that life consists of purposive action and develop- 
 ment, we do not mean that there is a conscious 
 and purposive application, ab extra, of mechanical 
 force by some independent agency. Such a con- 
 clusion would only signify the reintroduction, under 
 another form, of the old mechanical theory. We 
 mean rather to record that we have observed 
 phenomena which present no analogy to the 
 mechanical or chemical action on each other of 
 independent atoms, and which do present a certain 
 but very limited resemblance to the action of a 
 
244 CRITICISM OF CATEGOEIES [i-ect. m. 
 
 number of intelligent individuals working together 
 to fulfil a common end. There are in nature other 
 and much more remarkable resemblances to the 
 conscious and intelligent common purpose of the 
 citizen. The behaviour of a colony of ants or a 
 hive of bees; the common instinct which makes 
 the shoal of herrings or pilchards seek particular 
 waters at particular times ; the phenomena of that 
 instinct which, in the case of animals, achieves 
 results far transcending in range and accuracy 
 what conscious intelligence could do under similar 
 circumstances, all warn us of the danger of saying 
 that the world is confined in its reality to this or 
 that class or category of phenomena, and that all 
 others are reducible to them. 
 
 If we turn to the other side of the inquiry, we 
 find a like result. We saw that the idea of a final 
 and indivisible atom was not only without founda- 
 tion in experience, but was inconceivable, and that 
 the notion of finality in the subdivision of matter, 
 however useful in practice, was only justifiable as a 
 provisional working hypothesis. In the same way, 
 we have not the slightest reason to think that if 
 our microscopes were increased in power in- 
 definitely, we should be any the nearer reaching a 
 particle of living matter which could be seen to be 
 constructed mechanically. Such a result is as 
 inconceivable as that such microscopes should 
 disclose to us an ultimate and indivisible atom. 
 What for our observation characterises living 
 matter, even in its simplest form, is the capacity, 
 
CRYSTALLISATION 245 
 
 already referred to, of quasi-purposive action, in 
 which the particular material is indifferent, is taken 
 in, passed away, and changed, while the character 
 of the whole remains. Now this is the very anti- 
 thesis of what we find in crystallisation, where the 
 form is not the reason but the result of the 
 affinities of particular particles of matter, which, 
 because of these affinities, arrange themselves, 
 without metabolism, in a particular way. In life, 
 the material is changing, while what lives pre- 
 serves its identity ; in mechanism, this is never so. 
 To witness the transition from one to the other, 
 would be to witness each contradict its nature. 
 We can no more resolve quasi-purposive action into 
 the result of molecular arrangement, than we can 
 so resolve conscious purposive action, or morality 
 or beauty. Life and mechanism are related, not as 
 fields lying side by side in space and time, but as 
 different points of view, disengaged, by the concen- 
 tration of attention under definite categories, out of 
 the infinite complexity of concrete experience. In 
 contemplating life, we are so disengaging the 
 realisation of very simple and apparently sub- 
 conscious purpose in utilising changing material for 
 the fulfilment of an end. The word purpose is 
 used here because, although properly meaning 
 intelligent purpose, it indicates by an analogy the 
 broad feature which is in view, and which dis- 
 tinguishes even the simplest forms of life. Any 
 other expression which would serve as a common 
 name for the phenomena we wish to mark off 
 
246 CKITICISM OF CATEGORIES [i-^cx. m. 
 
 would do as well, better, too, if it were free from 
 the suggestion of that intelligent action which 
 properly pertains only to another and yet higher 
 field of experience. 
 
 It is worth while in this connection to follow 
 out the growth of the new idea of modern Biology, 
 known as the cell theory. About half a century 
 ago, while the old and really mechanical notion 
 of a vital force operating ah extra still prevailed, 
 the leading figure among biologists was the great 
 physiologist, Johannes MuUer. He thus stated 
 the difficulty which attends every mechanical 
 conception of vital processes : — * " Some have 
 believed that life — the active phenomena of 
 organised beings — is only the result of the 
 harmony of different parts, of the mutual action, 
 as it were, of the wheels of the machine, and 
 that death is a consequence of a disturbance of 
 this harmony. This reciprocal action of parts on 
 each other evidently exists. . . . But the harmoni- 
 ous action of the essential parts of the individual 
 subsists only by the existence of a force, the 
 operation of which is extended to all parts of the 
 body, which does not depend on any single organ, 
 and which exists before the harmonising parts, 
 these being in fact formed by it during the develop- 
 ment of the embryo. A complicated piece of 
 machinery, constructed in adaptation to an end — for 
 example, a watch — may present an action resulting 
 
 * Elements of Physiology, by Johannes Miiller, English 
 Translation Edition of 1840, p. 24. 
 
JOHANNES MIJLLER 247 
 
 from the co-operation of individual parts, and 
 originating in one cause; but organic beings do 
 not exist merely by virtue of an accidental com- 
 bination of elements ; but, on the contrary, by the 
 vital force inherent in them, they generate from 
 organic matter their essential constituent organs. 
 This rational creative force is exerted in every 
 animal strictly in accordance with the nature of 
 what each part requires; it exists already in the 
 germ, and creates in it the essential parts of the 
 futto-e animal. The germ is 'potentially' the 
 whole animal; during the development of the 
 germ the essential parts which constitute the 
 actual whole are produced." Miiller found no 
 evidence of a special force directed from without, 
 and operating mechanically to set and keep the 
 parts of the organism in motion. But he did 
 suggest some kind of internal force operating 
 alongside of other forms of energy. The theory of 
 such a force had no warrant from observation, and 
 was presently found to be inconsistent with the 
 doctrine of the conservation of energy which was 
 about to be established as the new and grand 
 principle of physical science. Yet Miiller had 
 laid hold of the truth under one aspect. He was 
 too close an observer not to see clearly that the 
 mechanical laws, which were quite adequate to 
 account for the phenomena of crystallisation and of 
 chemical combination, were hopelessly inadequate 
 to the realm of life. The fact of quasi-purposive 
 action had to be faced. No doubt, men of science 
 
248 CEITICISM OF OATEGOEIES [^-ect. m. 
 
 would have been more ready to credit the evidence 
 of their senses, and to record what they saw 
 without twist or bias, but for one circumstance. 
 Then, as to-day, they were under the domination of 
 an a priori point of view. They thought, and one 
 side of the teaching of Kant had confirmed them in 
 this dogma, that the real was the mechanical, and 
 the mechanical the real, and that Science could 
 not properly admit any higher categories. The 
 result was a long period of torturing the facts, to 
 make them fit into this modern bed of Procrustes. 
 The notion of a designing force, operating ah ewtra, 
 being laid aside, other hypotheses had to be devised, 
 within which the facts could be brought, and which 
 would dispense with the necessity of assuming the 
 presence of a designer. It was as one of these 
 hypotheses that the early form of the cell theory 
 was first brought forward by Schwann, a famous 
 disciple of Miiller. 
 
 Before Schwann's time some curious facts 
 had been ascertained by the botanists. They 
 had found, by examination, that vegetable tissue 
 was made up of minute cavities or cells, separated 
 from each other by thin walls. Schleiden, 
 another distinguished German investigator, had 
 reached the conclusion that a plant, taken as a 
 whole, might be regarded as an aggregate of such 
 cells, and that it was to the study of the cells of 
 plants that he had to look for light upon their 
 essential characters. 
 
 In 1831 the British botanist Brown had ob- 
 
SCHLEIDEN AND SCHWANN 249 
 
 served that within many cells there was present 
 a round body, subsequently called the nucleus. 
 In the case of the developing cells of embryo 
 plants Schleiden found that a nucleus was always 
 present, and he not unnaturally drew the inference 
 that, somehow, the nucleus was specially connected 
 with cell development. As the result of further 
 observation, he drew the inference that cells were 
 formed from a generative fluid which filled the 
 cavities of the old cells, and mechanically precipi- 
 tated granules that increased in size by accretion. 
 Schwann was struck with this notion, and pro- 
 ceeded to apply it to animal structure. He came 
 to the conclusion that the tissues of animals might 
 be found to develop in the same way as those of 
 plants, and observations which he made led him 
 to formulate the proposition that all tissues have 
 one common principle of development, and arise 
 out of a nucleus or nuclei, which assume the form, 
 first of cells, and then of tissue. 
 
 Because all tissue elements are originally 
 cellular, Schwann thought that the conditions of 
 growth and development are probably everywhere 
 the same, and to be looked for in the nature of 
 the growth and development of the cell. The 
 ovum, for example, of the animal (and in the plant 
 world there are analogous cases), is a single cell, 
 and yet it lives by growing. How does it grow 1 
 It must grow, argued Schwann, in this case quite 
 independently of other cells, and if this be true, does 
 it not furnish the key to the real principle of the 
 
250 CRITICISM OF CATEGOEIES ["^ect. m. 
 
 growth and development of the organism ? " The 
 cause," he said, " of nutrition and growth resides, 
 not in the organism as a whole, but in the separate 
 elementary parts, the cells." This phenomenon of 
 growth and nutrition he held to be similar to the 
 process of crystallisation, and to require only a 
 physical explanation. He saw, of course, certain 
 differences. The new molecules of a crystal are 
 deposited only on the surfaces ; whereas the cell 
 walls not only thicken, but expand from the inside. 
 Certain cell molecules must therefore be acquired 
 by " intussusception," The power, which observa- 
 tion showed him that the cell possessed, of 
 chemically changing the liquid in which it grows, 
 he likened to the action of the galvanic pile. 
 Anyhow, he said, there was no reason to look for 
 a meta-mechanical explanation. 
 
 Schwann's doctrine had the great merit of 
 leading Biology away from the notion of an out- 
 side and non-natural mechanical influence. Such 
 a notion had become more and more difl&cult to 
 reconcile with the new theories of energy, as put 
 forward by the great physicists of the middle of 
 last century, and with that of development as 
 suggested by Kant and Goethe, and placed on 
 a scientific basis by the embryologists. But almost 
 from the first his theory of cell development had 
 to encounter difficulties. It was soon found that 
 new cells are formed only by the division of 
 previously existing cells. " Omnis cellula," said 
 Virchow, "e cellull" It turned out that no case 
 
VIECHOW 251 
 
 could be found of living matter being derived 
 directly from a lifeless plasma, or from anything 
 except living matter. New cells, it appeared, 
 vrere related to old ones, not as in the case of 
 crystals by mechanical division, but by descent. 
 Common descent was found, in point of fact, to 
 be the real explanation of biological similarity. 
 Epithelial cells, for instance, always gave origin to 
 epithelial cells, and never to connective tissue, or 
 muscle cells. Virchow further found that the 
 growth of the cell is unlike that of the crystal in 
 this, that it does not always take place according 
 to the quantity of molecules of its own kind 
 supplied to it. The assimilation of material by 
 a cell, he observed to depend on a number of 
 associated processes in the cell itself We now 
 know that growth is regulated by the cell itself, 
 and not by the abundance of any particular nutrient 
 material in the surrounding liquid. Cells similar 
 to each other may grow in different liquids, and 
 cells of different kinds in the same liquids. If 
 the supply of oxygen be varied within certain wide 
 limits, the organism absorbs the same quantity, 
 and the same is true of the cells. In the words 
 of a distinguished modern physiologist. Professor 
 Pfltiger, "the living cell, and not the amount of 
 oxygen in the blood, regulates the consumption of 
 oxygen." 
 
 The next great step in advance of the point 
 reached by Schleiden and Schwann was made when 
 the nature of the cell was further defined. These 
 
252 CRITICISM OF CATEGOEIES [i-^cr. m. 
 
 inquirers had laid stress on the nucleus and the 
 cell wall as the two important elements of the cell, 
 and they had not attached much significance to the 
 intervening liquid. But the discovery of proto- 
 plasm, as the common basis of life in the animal 
 and vegetable worlds alike, changed all this. The 
 intervening liquid turned out itself to have the 
 characteristics of the living cell, and the cell to be 
 no more than a nucleated mass of living proto- 
 plasm, endowed with the power of altering its 
 own configuration. This conception proved fertile. 
 A muscle fibre came to be regarded as a family of 
 cells, the protoplasm of which had never been 
 definitely apportioned ofi) but had become differ- 
 entiated into striated material, the peculiar con- 
 tractility of which was but a special development 
 of the contractility of the original protoplasm. The 
 most various structures and kinds of material found 
 in the organism came to be regarded as either pro- 
 ducts from the living protoplasm, or as modified 
 protoplasm. When we trace back the develop- 
 ment of the tissues of an animal, we arrive at last 
 at a single cell — the ovum. Little is known of the 
 nature of the protoplasm out of which this ovum is 
 formed. But even in the lowest forms of life, in 
 the. amoeba, and in the simplest manifestations of 
 protoplasm in the vegetable world, there are traces 
 of quasi-purposive action. Not of purposive action, 
 as the older vitalists conceived it, in the form of an 
 impulse from without, but as a movement from 
 within. The living organism can always, however 
 
METABOLISM 253 
 
 highly developed, be regarded, by abstraction, from 
 a purely mechanical or chemical point of view. 
 The substances it takes in, and its kinds of 
 energy, are all known, and it presumably gives 
 them out in the same quantity, changed only 
 in form. What physics and chemistry do not 
 explain to us, is the principle of its metabolism, 
 the preservation of its identity in changing 
 material, as the state preserves its identity while 
 generation succeeds generation of its subjects. 
 For this, the essence and characteristic of life, 
 physical science has no formula, no name even. 
 On the one hand, this may be a fact which we 
 observe and cannot get behind, in which case we 
 had better agree with Johannes Miiller, and dis- 
 abuse our minds of the prejudice which either denies 
 to the organism any existence as a self-conserving 
 whole, or, if it looks on the cell as something sui 
 generis, yet insists that the organism is a mere 
 mechanical aggregate of these cells. On the other 
 hand, the quasi-purposive aspect conceivably may 
 be an illusion of our senses which it remains for 
 science to dispel, and to exhibit to us as a form 
 of mechanical relationship, cognisable under cate- 
 gories which rise no higher than those of physics 
 or chemistry. But why should we start, as so 
 many men of science have done, with the precon- 
 ception that this last alternative is the true one? 
 Is it more than one of Bacon's idola theatri, a 
 current notion which we adopt without proper 
 reflection, just as the theologian adopts, at the 
 
254 CEITICISM OF CATEGORIES [i-^ct. m, 
 
 other extreme, the notion of an outside designer 
 as being a notion without which there is no option 
 but to turn to materialism? If the standpoint of 
 these Lectures be a true one, we are free to believe 
 in the world as it seems, and not driven to sacri- 
 fice any aspect of it on one altar or another. 
 If the supposed facts of observation which we 
 indicate by our names life and development are, 
 what all plain people assume them to be, real 
 facts, why should we strain every faculty to 
 explain human beings away into automata, or 
 quiver with excitement when some one writes that 
 he has found that protoplasm may apparently be 
 reduced to a condition of chemical inertness {e.g., 
 in resting seeds), devoid of metabolic activity, and 
 yet conserving through generations the potentiality 
 of life. If a thousand such results were really 
 established, we should yet be as far as ever from 
 exhibiting life as a mechanical arrangement of 
 molecules. We should be just as near that result 
 as we are to exhibiting at one extreme a world 
 made up of geometrical figures, or, at another, to 
 displaying the sense of duty as depending upon 
 a quantitative estimate of sensuous pleasure. Let 
 us at least be careful to learn to criticise our 
 categories before we embark on such enterprises. 
 We have just been considering a particular set 
 of the fundamental forms in which the content of 
 the object is arranged in knowledge. We have 
 found that in the presentation in thought of a 
 whole which is self-conserving amid changing 
 
COMMUNITY OF ACTION 255 
 
 material, the categories of life, development, and 
 organisation are just as much fundamental as are 
 the categories we first considered, and as little 
 capable of being explained away by them as they 
 in their turn are capable of being explained through 
 each other. We naturally abstract under such 
 fundamental conceptions, because they are just 
 the fixing in abstract knowledge of fundamental 
 relations of thought which pervade the constitution 
 of our experience. 
 
 So far we have had no cause to reject as unreal 
 any aspect of the world as it seems. We have found 
 ourselves bound to turn a deaf ear to the appeal of 
 the physicist and the chemist about life. Now 
 there is another appeal which we may have to 
 reject, and of which we hear a little even at this 
 stage of our journey. Conceded, it is said, that 
 the living organism is a real and irresoluble 
 phenomenon of nature, there is at least no ground 
 for saying that any other than a derivative reality 
 is to be ascribed to such appearances as the com- 
 munity, or the nation, or the state. This assertion 
 marks off" for exploration a region which we cannot 
 neglect if our inquiry is to be complete. But the 
 assertion also suggests that we cannot satisfactorily 
 undertake that inquiry without in the first place 
 ascertaining a good deal more about the individual. 
 Is its reality to be limited to that of life, with its 
 quasi-purposive manifestations ? Or .must we not 
 recognise as equally real that higher type of the 
 action of living beings, in which they not only act 
 
256 CEITICISM OF CATEGORIES ["-^ct. in. 
 
 quasi-purposively in conserving their individual 
 identity and development as organic wholes amid 
 the metabolism of material, but act quasi- 
 purposively as members of a community. The 
 ant-heap and the bee-hive afford illustrations of the 
 habits of animals vrhich exhibit such action in an 
 extraordinary degree. The process of reproduction 
 of the species, and the quasi-recognition of this 
 duty to the species even at the cost of life, is 
 another striking illustration of it. And then, 
 beyond the field of all this lies the vast region of 
 conscious purposive action, attended by the recog- 
 nition of a moral duty owed to the community, the 
 assertion of which is embodied in the laws and 
 other institutions of the state. This we find in a 
 variety of forms, some rudimentary, others of a 
 high order of development. We see something 
 analogous to it even in the animal world, lying 
 between the regions of instinct and those of 
 developed intelligence. It is plain that the 
 actions of living beings endowed with any of these 
 attributes, even at their lowest stages, must be 
 widely difierent from those of machines. And it 
 may be, also, that our modern notions of evolution, 
 and the interpretations put on the principles of 
 Darwinism, have been in consequence of too narrow 
 an order. The realisation of other ends than those 
 only of natural and sexual selection may have 
 guided the evolution of species. 
 
 In the course of the further journey that lies 
 in front of us, we shall have to pause to consider 
 
THE LIVING OEGANISM 257 
 
 what we see of two new sets of phenomena, the 
 higher aspects of the individual, and the exist- 
 ence of the community. Before, however, we 
 proceed to the first of these kinds of phenomena, 
 there are one or two things which are suggested, 
 as bearing on the second, by the consideration of 
 the categories of life, and which deserve a glance, 
 even at the risk of anticipating. We saw that 
 the living organism is conceived as a self-con- 
 serving whole, embodied in, but controlling, its 
 parts. We saw that this organism is made up 
 of living units, themselves possessing all the attri- 
 butes of living beings, and, in addition, acting 
 quasi-purposively in fulfilment of the common 
 end. Not only is this so, but the organs of the 
 living being act also quasi-purposively. If a 
 kidney be removed, the other kidney will com- 
 mence to do double the amount of work, repudi- 
 ating the characteristic of a mere machine. The 
 eye and the ear adapt themselves in like manner 
 to the necessities of new surroundings in the mine 
 or the forest. If there be one thing plainer than 
 another, it is the reality of the living body as a 
 whole, as distinguished from its reality as a mere 
 numerical aggregate of the cells and organs of 
 which it is made up. The conception of this 
 relationship between parts and whole, a relation- 
 ship which, as akeady pointed out, more nearly 
 resembles that of citizens to a state, or soldiers 
 to an army, than that of an arrangement of 
 mutually external things grouped together by 
 
 R 
 
258 CKITICISM OF CATEGORIES [i-^ct. m. 
 
 external action, as in a machine, seems just as 
 mucli fundamental as any other we have yet come 
 across. If so, there is no reason to suppose that 
 we shall have to yield to the doctrine of atomism 
 when we get to the higher aspects of living things. 
 If the organism be real as a whole, why not also 
 the state as a whole? 
 
 It would hardly have been necessary to raise 
 this question at this point, were it not for the 
 circumstance that it is one which arises naturally. 
 Our plane of intelligence as human beings is, as 
 has already been several times remarked, the 
 plane of individuals, whose situation is that not 
 only of being confronted by a not self, but of 
 being one among many. We naturally enough 
 incline to take our plane or stage as final, because 
 it is the plane or stage at which the Universe, 
 with ourselves in it, happens to be presented to 
 us. It is easy to recognise our bodies as really 
 living wholes controlling the units of which they 
 consist. But it is quite another matter to present 
 the other relations, such as those of the individual 
 to the state, or even the family, as real in the same 
 sense. That they must be regarded as such, we 
 may find. But the witness of their reality is, 
 for intelligence of our order, the result of cogent 
 inference rather than of direct perception. A 
 view from a higher standpoint than that of rnan 
 might find the family and the state presented as 
 wholes in perception, just as plainly as it could 
 find the organism so presented. But for us, the 
 
THE FAMILY AND THE STATE 259 
 
 limits of whose capacity of what passes for direct 
 presentation are restricted through a medium 
 which has already been discussed, no such view 
 is possible. History and sociology, not to speak 
 of morals and jurisprudence, no doubt recognise 
 its possibility, and speak in language which 
 suggests such a direct presentation. But we 
 shall find, when we come to them, that these 
 sciences, like the others which we have already 
 considered, speak in the language of abstraction, 
 and proceed by putting the individual, and there- 
 fore, for the moment, what in everyday parlance 
 is meant by reality, out of account. Throughout 
 the series of the sciences, one seems to feel the 
 necessity for a criticism of categories, were it 
 only for the sake of trying to introduce order 
 and precision into the use of words. 
 
 These observations, however, are made at this 
 stage only for the sake of getting rid of any 
 preliminary prejudice. They will have to be 
 developed in their proper place. Meantime, in 
 pursuance of the general plan, the next step on 
 our pathway must be taken in the direction of 
 the living individual, and with a view of getting 
 a closer notion of its nature. 
 
 In the ciystal we have what is fixed and 
 unchanging. The form is the result of the rela- 
 tionship of particles standing in a definite and 
 permanent conformation. In the living organism, 
 from the cell upwards, the material is constantly 
 changing. The form of the organism cannot 
 
260 CRITICISM OF CATEGOEIES [i-ect. m. 
 
 possibly be the outcome of the action on each 
 other of the molecules of its substance, for these 
 molecules are constantly changing, chemically as 
 well as physically, and giving place to fresh 
 material. More than this, the form of the 
 organism is itself in a course of continuous change 
 from birth to death, and of change in accordance 
 with a definite principle, first of growth, and then 
 of decay. If ^^e held any longer the window 
 theory of the mind, and looked upon the senses as 
 simply transmitting the images of things that are 
 there independently of thought, we should be at a 
 loss how to reconcile the experience of life with the 
 rule of mechanical law. But life and mechanism 
 we found in the first Book to be but abstract 
 dispositions in reflection of the particulars of sense, 
 self-contradictory, if taken even for a moment as 
 final and self-subsisting, and legitimate only as 
 modes of abstraction. To those who have suc- 
 ceeded in crossing the Asses' Bridge of Philosophy, 
 and have so got away from the region of super- 
 stition, the difficulty of recognising the living 
 organism as equally real with the machine, has 
 disappeared. Both are points of view which of 
 necessity emerge in reflection, and go to the 
 making of the riches of the world of experience. 
 Just as we found that we could define the 
 characteristics of the machine or of the chemical 
 molecule or the crystal, so we find that we recognise 
 at once those of the living organism. Its exist- 
 ence is not, as with these, of a statical order. It 
 
DIFFERENTIA OF OEGANISM 261 
 
 preserves itself through a complete alteration of its 
 substance. It not only preserves, but develops 
 and produces itself according to the law of its 
 being. It has a form that varies, but varies in 
 strict accordance with this law, and in such accord- 
 ance and the continuity of behaviour which flows 
 from it lies the identity of the organism, of which 
 the varying characteristics are produced, not by 
 forces acting from without, but by development 
 from within. We never find it as an aggregate 
 of particles of mere matter. The harmonious co- 
 ordination of such particles into one life would be, 
 not a miracle, not even a triumph of the laboratory, 
 it would be as much a self-contradiction as the 
 discovery of a round square. Life, when we 
 analyse it, ever turns out to be the co-ordination of 
 living units or cells, themselves no more final or 
 fixed in their existence than the organism to which 
 they belong. We are in this region at a stand- 
 point which is entirely different from that of the 
 mathematician, or the physicist, or the chemist, 
 and we are arranging our materials under a wholly 
 new set of categories. The differentia of the 
 individuality of the organism is not the principle 
 on which its parts externally act on each other, but 
 the dominating law of its own development. As 
 a living being, I am what I am, in that I exhibit 
 the characteristics of my time of life, and of my 
 relationship to other living beings, from whom I am 
 descended. 
 
 Every point of view we have examined has 
 
262 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES [^^^- "•• 
 
 proved to be abstract, and therefore insufficient. 
 As soon as its general conceptions were isolated 
 and treated as though they could be exhaustive 
 of reality and more than a useful but temporary 
 and provisional mode of approach, the point of 
 view turned out to be self -contradictory, to 
 exhibit what Plato called "Dialectic." The 
 individual as qualified through it proved to be 
 no resting - place. From the conception of 
 abstract externality to that of subject and 
 object, we found ourselves safe so long only 
 as we regarded the ground we were for the 
 moment treading as only provisionally sound. 
 And, like the rest, the conception of the living 
 organism turns out to be abstract and provisional 
 only. When by means of it we try to express 
 what nature presents to us in the case of the 
 bee that unerringly returns to its hive from miles 
 away, of the dog that barks with joy at the return 
 of its master, of the human being that feels and 
 knows and acts, this conception turns out to be 
 inadequate. It has taken us above the still less 
 adequate standpoint of mere externality, to which 
 the mathematician and even the physicist is 
 confined. It has shown us control of parts other- 
 wise than from without. It has taken us no 
 distance towards the notion of the great fact 
 which confronts us, the existence of conscious, 
 purposive, freely self - directing mind. The 
 relation of mind to its object is not one of 
 externality, for externality, exclusiveness, whether 
 
THE CONSCIOUS INDIVIDUAL 263 
 
 in space or time, is but one of the relationships 
 which obtain and have meaning within the object 
 world. It is not like the relation of the living 
 organism to its changing substance, for it is 
 only as embodied in that changing substance 
 that the living individual exists ; and although 
 raised above mere externality, the conception of 
 life is not wholly independent of it. But the 
 mind neither is external to its object nor exists 
 in it. From that object it can wholly withdraw, 
 detach, distinguish itself It stands to that object, 
 not as a thing outside another in space, but as that 
 /or which that object is. When it is itself made 
 object, it becomes such through conceptions which 
 not only are incapable, like that of life, of being 
 expressed in relations of space and time, but are 
 different from all those which belong to the 
 externality of nature. Of the conscious indi- 
 vidual our conception is highly composite. His 
 individuality is, as has been already pointed out, 
 dependent on a multitude of considerations, some, 
 at least, of which belong to the province of the 
 outside world. He exists as a this, here and 
 now, or as a that, there and then, in virtue of 
 his situation in space and in time, and of his 
 relation to other individuals. His height and 
 his weight are made definite in knowledge 
 through the physical categories. His organism 
 belongs to those of life. But beyond all these 
 lie his intellectual and moral peculiarities, pecu- 
 liarities which exist only for a mind applying 
 
264 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES [i-^cr. m. 
 
 categories which transcend those of the external 
 object world. When we speak of his soul we 
 mean, if we attach meaning to our words, not a 
 substance somehow in contact with the brain, not 
 an entity separate from the body, but those aspects 
 of the individual which transcend his aspects as a 
 physical object or even as a living object, and in 
 which he appears as an intelligent and moral being. 
 To speak of the soul of an automaton, or a rose- 
 bush, or a lobster, is to use language of more 
 than questionable application. We perceive in 
 the lower animal world little, if anything, higher 
 than life. Man lives, but he does more. He is 
 conscious, and thinks, and acts freely. In the 
 object world it is this or that man, determined 
 through, among other things, a definite physical 
 organism, that is so conscious, and thinks, and acts. 
 His soul is bound up with nature to the extent of 
 being an aspect of the natural individual. But it 
 is an aspect of the individual that passes beyond 
 nature. Body and soul are not two things some- 
 how bound together. They are different aspects 
 of one and the same object. Just as the life of 
 the body is the harmonious working together for 
 the fulfilment of a common end of a multitude 
 of parts, each of which consists of independently 
 living units, so the existence of the soul is 
 the harmonious self-direction of the body for 
 the realisation of intellectual and moral ends. 
 Between mere life and mere intelligence there lie 
 intermediate stages, above the categories of the 
 
INSTINCT 265 
 
 first, below the categories of the second. There 
 is, for example, the sub-conscious quasi-intelligence 
 of the dog who, never having seen them before, 
 avoids the poisonous reptiles, or eats grass as a 
 medicine. Such phenomena as these lie between 
 life and mind, as the relations of chemistry lie 
 between mechanism and life. All of them enter 
 into the structure of the individual man. But the 
 highest and most distinctive of his characteristics, 
 those that make him for us just this individual 
 like unto ourselves and no other, are the character- 
 istics which are recognised by the application of 
 categories higher than those through which mere 
 nature becomes an object in our preception. It 
 is through these categories that the living being 
 becomes something more than merely living. It 
 is finally through them that the externality of 
 space and time is transcended, and we recognise 
 him as equally with ourselves the subject for 
 which an object world which includes ourselves 
 is there. It is so that, in regarding him in 
 his aspect of a moral and intellectual being, 
 we have transcended space and time. When this 
 stage in the logical scale is reached, we are 
 thinking fi'om the standpoint of the subject dis- 
 tinguishing itself from the object, and conscious 
 of itself as spontaneous and free in the process. 
 What we perceive of the individual so imaged in 
 the world of nature around us is, in one point of 
 view, not directly this, for it never can be bodied 
 forth in the relations of externality, but the 
 
266 CEITICISM OF CATEGOEIES [i-^ct. m. 
 
 suggestion of it, the things which indicate and 
 suggest it as the blotches of paint on the canvas 
 indicate and suggest the conception of the artist. 
 Just as they can be looked at as mere blotches of 
 paint, so can the actions of the conscious individual, 
 so far as they are manifested in the world of 
 externality, be regarded as mere life, or even as 
 mere mechanism. But in both cases the truest 
 as well as the most appropriate and ordinary 
 significance would be lost. The complex stand- 
 point of the common sense of the plain man 
 assumes the highest just as much as the lowest. 
 And if they are not disentangled in everyday 
 perception, it is because it is not necessary for the 
 purposes of everyday life to disentangle them. 
 The incrustations of the habitual assumptions of 
 our common intercourse and language form the 
 ground on which we tread our daily path. The 
 ground is firm and satisfactory enough for ordinary 
 use. It is only when we seek to drive along it the 
 heavy coach of philosophical inquiry that it proves 
 to be yielding. , 
 
 Above mere life, instinct ; above mere instinct, 
 the intellectual and moral harmony of the body 
 which we call the soul; above and beyond the 
 soul, mind, transcending the categories of the one 
 and the many; between them all a multitude 
 of minor phases; the individual emerging as 
 the result of a combination of aspects and 
 standpoints; this is the result to which analysis 
 brings us. Let us pause at the lower aspects of 
 
DEFINITION OF LIFE 267 
 
 individuality, and look for a moment at life as 
 the physiologist's microscope discloses it. 
 
 To define life has always been a difficulty. 
 Every one knows what it is, no one can explain 
 it in terms of anything but itself. The reason of 
 this may be that its conception is so far funda- 
 mental that it can only be resolved from the 
 standpoint of a yet higher conception towards 
 which it is a stage. This at least is clear, 
 that the attempts at definition in terms of 
 physical forces have been conspicuous by their 
 failure. To call life, as Mr Spencer does, "the 
 definite combination of heterogeneous changes, 
 both simultaneous and successive, in correspond- 
 ence with external co-existences and sequences," 
 is not to define, but to describe, and to describe 
 pedantically and insufficiently. If we are to go to 
 the philosophers for definitions, it is better to turn 
 to Kant and Hegel. "Life," said Kant, "means 
 the capacity of a substance to set itself in action 
 by virtue of an internal principle."* "Animal 
 nature," said Hegel,t "is characterised by that 
 subjective unity through which all the organic 
 parts are subordinated to a whole that is a unity. 
 The physiology of the animal organism deals with 
 the functions of the parts which co-operate in the 
 continuous development of the whole, and are 
 themselves developed and conserved in the pro- 
 
 * Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschaft, edited 
 by Rosenkranz, 1838, p. 408. 
 
 t Propcedentik, 1840 Edition, p. 176. 
 
268 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES [i-ect. i„. 
 
 cess." Hegel, it will be observed, does not try, 
 like Mr Spencer, to define the unity mechanically, 
 as a "definite combination." Rather does he 
 regard it as something pointing for its explanation 
 to a set of conceptions beyond mechanism alto- 
 gether. It is interesting to compare this with a 
 popular description of the life of an organism given 
 by a recent writer on physiology.* "Just as an 
 organism is a collection of cells, each having its 
 own life, yet all bound together for mutual service, 
 so is a nation a collection of individual men and 
 women. And as the perfection of an animal is 
 measured by the completeness of the division of 
 labour among its cells, so is the civilisation of a 
 nation measured by the harmony of organisation 
 of its labour. Further, just as there have been 
 many species of animals which have appeared, lived 
 for a time, and then given place to higher species, 
 so there have been civilisations which have 
 flourished for a time, and then died away. Any 
 fairly complex civilisation will serve as a type of 
 the division of labour in the body of one of the 
 higher animals. First there are the persons con- 
 cerned in the getting of food, like the limbs and 
 mouth of an animal. Then the food is prepared 
 for use by other labourers ; such are the digestive 
 organs of the animal. The food has to be dis- 
 tributed to all members of the community by 
 merchants and carriers; the blood and blood- 
 vessels perform this function. The whole com- 
 
 * Article on Physiology in Chambers's Encyclopcedia, 1891, 
 
PHYSIOLOGY 269 
 
 munity has to be warned of dangers, directed and 
 governed, and made to act harmoniously by the 
 statesmen of a nation; the same things are done 
 by the sense organs, brain, and nervous system of 
 an animal." Here we have " subjectivity " brought 
 in with a vengeance. It is analogy merely, and 
 not truth. But it is at least more like the truth 
 than those descriptions of the physicists which fall 
 further short of the facts than this goes beyond 
 them. What we know for certain is that if we are 
 to look at facts and not to allow our faculty of 
 observation to be distorted by theories, we must 
 recognise that the body of the living man con- 
 sists of a great number of living parts, or organs, 
 each of which has its own special work to 
 do. Each organ not only does its own special 
 work, but acts in harmony with other organs. 
 The relationship between the organs groups them 
 into systems. Thus we have the circulatory 
 system, that is, the group of organs (heart, arteries, 
 veins, etc.) concerned in the circulation of the 
 blood ; the respiratory system, that is, the group of 
 organs (air passages, lungs, etc.) concerned in the 
 act of breathing ; the digestive system, which deals 
 with the digestion of food ; the excretory system, 
 which gets rid of waste products; the muscular 
 system, which deals with movement; the skeletal 
 system, which has to provide for the support of the 
 softer parts of the body ; and last, but not least, the 
 nervous system, the great master system of the 
 body, which presides over, controls, and regulates 
 
270 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES [^-fct. m. 
 
 the other systems. If we go further with our 
 analysis, we find that each organ consists of 
 elementary tissues. These are of four principal 
 kinds : epithelial, connective, muscular, and 
 nervous. If we go yet further, we find that the 
 individual tissues are built up of structures which 
 require the microscope for their study. The 
 tissues, when scrutinised, turn out to consist of 
 living units called cells, bound together by more 
 or less intercellular material according to the 
 natvu'e of the tissue. The cells have common 
 characteristics. They originate in a living material 
 called protoplasm, and may be described as small 
 masses (varying in the case of the human body 
 from siiT to Tinnr of an inch) of protoplasm, con- 
 taining in each case a nucleus. The simplest 
 animals, such as the amoeba, consist of one cell only, 
 the most complicated of many millions. All cell 
 life originates from cell life. Even the higher 
 animals and plants are uni-cellular to start with, 
 but the original cell, in dividing, instead of 
 forming, as is the case with the lowest forms of 
 animal and vegetable life, another complete and 
 independent animal or vegetable, forms cells which 
 stick together and subsequently become diflFerenti- 
 ated and altered according to a definite principle of 
 development. When a certain stage of develop- 
 ment has been reached, the different descriptions 
 of cell reproduce their own kind, and their own 
 kind only. Thus epithelial cells produce epithelial 
 cells, and no others. Every cell, of whatever kind, 
 
PHYSIOLOGY 271 
 
 possesses five great powers : movement, assimilation 
 (the power to convert nutriment into protoplasm), 
 growth, reproduction, and excretion. But, although 
 in a sense living beings with an independent life, 
 the higher forms of cells live only as component 
 parts in higher unities. The cells of the more 
 complicated organisms tend to differentiate in 
 function. Certain sets predominate in irritability, 
 others in contractility, others in storage, others in 
 secretion, and so on. In such cases, one function 
 predominates over the others, which become sub- 
 ordinate, or even mere dormant possibilities. In 
 this fashion there arise muscle cells, nerve cells, fat 
 cells, and the like. 
 
 We see now what life is, from the point of 
 view of the physiologist. It is the co-operative 
 action of the various parts of the organ, and of 
 the cells which build up the structure of the 
 organ, in the bringing about of a common course 
 of development. This course of development has 
 a beginning, a highest point, and an end. Its 
 efficiency depends on the co-operation of the 
 parts for the fulfilment of a common function. 
 The perfectly developed function is not attained 
 at once, nor does it last for ever. The reason, 
 the final cause of this, is seen when we turn to 
 the species, the whole in which the individual in 
 its turn functions for the attainment of an end 
 beyond its own life. In the process of its greatest 
 function, the one of which it is capable only in 
 its perfection, reproduction, the individual exhausts 
 
272 CEITICISM OF CATEGORIES [^-ect. ..i. 
 
 itself. This exhaustion may take the form of 
 instant death in the act, as is the case with 
 some of the lower organisms, or it may assume 
 the form of the tax which family life forms in 
 the case of the man and the woman. The species 
 in each case requires fresh individuals for the 
 fulfilment of its end, and this requirement is 
 facilitated and room is provided by death, or the 
 dissolution of the individual, in which, after a 
 period, the parts cease to co-operate. In the 
 lowest forms of organism, where the common 
 life of the species is but little apparent, this is 
 much less strikingly so. In the case of the 
 uni-cellular Protozoa, it has been suggested by 
 eminent biologists that they may, so far as any 
 reasons or indications to the contrary go, be 
 immortal. But in the higher organisms, the 
 break-up and ending, after the course of develop- 
 ment has been run, of the common life of the 
 organism, is as much a part of nature as the 
 beginning of that life in birth. The ground of 
 both beginning and end is to be sought in no 
 physical cause, but in the tendency towards the 
 realisation of an end which may be called ideal, 
 meaning thereby that it cannot be found in any 
 physical or chemical relation, and operates from 
 within and not from without. This ground is 
 not a cause, nor on the other hand is it the kind 
 of internal ground that we know when we 
 distinguish the mental phenomena of conscious 
 purpose. There is no more reason to connect it 
 
PHYSIOLOGY 273 
 
 with consciousness than to seek for a special vital 
 force to account for it. It is simply a funda- 
 mental featiu-e of that sphere of the organic 
 which lies midway between mechanism and mind 
 in the forms under which the object is known. 
 The human body has mathematical, mechanical, 
 chemical aspects, but not as living. It has 
 aspects which belong to the sphere of conscious- 
 ness, but these, again, it has not merely as living. 
 To mere life belong the phenomena of the 
 individual in its relation to the species. But 
 what in life, as compared with mere mechanism, 
 is spontaneous action from within and not 
 causation from without, is still something 
 entangled with externality. The stimulation of 
 the physiologist is more than the causation of 
 the physicist. The consequent, be it movement, 
 or secretion, or sensation, is not just the energy 
 of the antecedents in another form. It is different 
 from this, on the one hand, and from motive and 
 consequent volition on the other for there the 
 phenomena are purely subjective, so far as 
 directly presented in consciousness. There is no 
 room for the suggestion of identity. In the rela- 
 tion of nerve stimulus to its consequent, although 
 the change which travels along the substance of 
 the nerve is in some sense physical, as is shown 
 by the electrical phenomena which accompany it, 
 it is not this change, nor yet a mere liberation 
 of energy in the nerve centre, which is the effect. 
 
 For the nerve and the nerve centre both adjust 
 
 s 
 
274 CRITICISM OF CATEGOEIES ["ct. m. 
 
 and restore themselves. They act, in other words, 
 not as machines, but as parts of living beings; 
 and they show all the phenomena of self-con- 
 servation in change, which are characteristic of 
 life. 
 
 In the Times newspaper of 11th October 
 1902, there was reported an address delivered by 
 a distinguished surgeon, Sir Frederick Treves. 
 Speaking of the advance of Surgery since the 
 time, 260 years before, of the author of the 
 Religio Medici, he gave a description of disease 
 as the surgeon of to-day comprehends it, which 
 is so relevant an illustration of what we have 
 been discussing that I am going to quote the 
 report without comment : — 
 
 "In the days of Sir Thomas Browne a con- 
 ception of disease was current which still influ- 
 enced the minds of many, although that conception 
 should have vanished with the advance of scientific 
 knowledge. The old idea of disease was, that it 
 was a malignant entity, a something vaguely indi- 
 vidualised as evil in origin, evil in intent, and evil 
 in effect. It was the roaring lion going about seek- 
 ing whom he may devour. The conception went 
 further, and made of disease a Prince of Dark- 
 ness vindictively hostile and potent only for ill. 
 His minions fell upon the land like a hideous 
 blight, and covered a smiling country with the 
 shadow of death. Primitive people regarded 
 disease as the work of a malignant spirit, who 
 entered into a man, and who was to be propitiated 
 
CONCEPTION OF DISEASE 275 
 
 by gifts and flattery on the one hand, or driven 
 out by the beating of tom-toms, or by strident 
 incantations, on the other. To the author of 
 Religio Medici, disease was still the outcome of an 
 influence which was outside the body and quite 
 distinct from it. There was nothing natural in any 
 of its processes, and nothing beneficent in any of 
 its manifestations. It followed from this that every 
 symptom of disease was of necessity regarded as 
 wholly noxious, and as needing to be stamped out 
 by unconsidered violence. If the patient vomited, 
 the vomiting must be stopped ; if he coughed, the 
 cough must cease ; if he failed to take food, he must 
 be made to eat. Not for a moment could it be 
 considered that there was any benevolent purpose 
 in these phenomena. The physician of the present 
 day could not include this conception among the 
 articles of his faith. In the new Religio Medici 
 this matter of belief must follow some such lines 
 as these : — The human body is highly organised, is 
 frail, is finite, and is, of necessity, prone to decay 
 and dissolution. It grows, it reaches its maximum 
 power, it declines, and its capacities fail. In the 
 progressive enfeeblement, and in the slow elimina- 
 tion of the evidences of life which attend old age, 
 there was nothing preternatural, and nothing which 
 could be considered to be due to other than the 
 simplest natural influences. The inherent decay of 
 the human body rendered it liable to accident, and 
 there was no reason why it alone — of all other 
 organic structures — should be exempt from injury. 
 
276 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES [lect. m. 
 
 The body also — like other living fabrics — was prone 
 to be infested by parasites, and upon the action 
 of these parasites very many maladies depended. 
 Not only was there nothing preternatural in disease, 
 but it was the outcome of natural processes, and, 
 more than that, there was evidence to show that 
 many of its manifestations and of its methods were 
 marked by a purpose, and that that pxu-pose was 
 beneficent. The time had come when it would 
 rather appear that many of the so-called symptoms 
 of disease were expressions of a natural effort 
 towards cure. Having enlarged on the relation to 
 specific diseases, he said this matter might be 
 followed out a little more in detail in connection 
 with the sjTnptoms of the disease familiar by the 
 uncouth name of appendicitis. In this malady a 
 trouble occmred in the appendix. The wall of 
 the little tube became perforated, and an acrid 
 poison found its way into the sensitive cavity of 
 the abdomen. This, at least, was the essential 
 calamity in many instances. The perforation was 
 sudden, w^as accidental, and might be preceded by 
 no warning sign of any kind. The manifestations 
 which followed the perforation were termed the 
 symptoms of peritonitis. They were distressing 
 and urgent, but they were all benevolent in intent, 
 and were the outcome of nature's vigorous effort 
 to minimise the calamity, and save the patient's 
 life. The intense pain and collapse imposed upon 
 the victim absolute rest, and, more than that, 
 enforced rest in the most advantageous posture 
 
CONCEPTION OF DISEASE 277 
 
 — that, namely, of recumbency. He was rendered 
 helpless at a moment when any movement might 
 be attended by disaster. The sickness and the 
 utter nausea which attended it secured some empty- 
 ing of the alimentary canal, and forbade the intro- 
 duction of any fresh material into an intestine 
 which was best placed for recovery when it was 
 least occupied. The skin of the abdomen became 
 acutely sensitive, and so protected the damaged 
 parts from disturbance and pressure, and this most 
 necessary end was further secured by another 
 symptom — the remarkable rigidity of the abdominal 
 wall. Even should the affected area be accident- 
 ally pressed upon, the firmly-contracted muscles 
 which covered it would shield it like a protecting 
 cuirass. Thus was brought about that state of 
 absolute rest which was essential as the very first 
 step towards the repair of the injury. At the 
 same time, the condition of the circulation was so 
 modified as to render absorption of septic matter 
 from the affected district as little ready as possible. 
 Within the abdomen the manifestations of peri- 
 tonitis are appearing. Peritonitis had commonly 
 been spoken of as one of the most deadly and most 
 malignant of calamities. Never was a condition 
 more unjustly abused. The phenomena of peri- 
 tonitis should be hailed with thankfulness. Peri- 
 tonitis was concerned only in effecting good. 
 Many of the symptoms of disease, instead of being 
 pounded out of the body by violence, as wholly 
 pernicious, should rather be regarded as means 
 
278 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES [i>ect. m. 
 
 for guiding the physician in the treatment he 
 should adopt." 
 
 We have now seen what life means, from 
 the point of view of the physiologist and the 
 physician ; and we have also seen the importance, 
 in giving a clue to the meaning of death, of the 
 position of the individual, as belonging to a species. 
 There are other relationships of the individual, not 
 to the species, which is a biological conception, but 
 to such higher social wholes as the family and the 
 state. But the meaning of these can only be 
 appreciated when man has been considered as a 
 conscious and rational being, for it is to these 
 aspects of his nature that his social relations are 
 linked. We must, therefore, pass from the sphere 
 of the physiologist, that of life as such, to the 
 sphere of the psychologist, that of consciousness. 
 
LECTURE IV 
 
 Let us make a start by again trying to disentangle 
 what is meant by a man's personality. It must 
 not be forgotten that the individuality of a human 
 being depends on no single aspect. His physical, 
 his physiological, his psychical idiosyncracies, all 
 go to make this up. He is just this, and no other 
 man, from the standpoint of everyday life, w^hich is 
 never very abstract, and therefore never very 
 precise, and which brings in, without distinguishing 
 them, a number of wholly distinct aspects. It is 
 another of these aspects which we have now to 
 consider. Man not only lives, but knows and 
 wills. His existence is not only that of a self- 
 conserving whole, but of a consciously self-con- 
 serving whole. As a being who knows and wills, 
 and is conscious of himself as knowing and willing, 
 he is an intelligent and morally responsible member 
 of society, standing in relations to the family and 
 the state as real as those of his organism to the 
 species. It is at the nature of this aspect of man's 
 existence as a conscious being, that we must now 
 try to get. The problem is a baffling one, yet 
 we are not without some clue to its solution. We 
 
280 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES [^^ct. iv. 
 
 have found it impossible to regard the world as it 
 seems, as made up of the relationships of exter- 
 nality. The notion of a whole conserving itself in 
 changing material through a course of develop- 
 ment, cannot be expressed in terms that are 
 mathematical, or physical, or chemical. We found 
 ourselves driven to invert the usual process, and 
 instead of trying to construe the world as it seems, 
 in terms of these sciences and as unreal so far as 
 it pretended to be anything beyond them, we found 
 it easier to exhibit all such terms as the names 
 given to abstractions from the concrete and indi- 
 vidual facts of experience. Let us begin, then, by 
 getting an idea of what we mean by consciousness, 
 for it may turn out to be just as absurd to try to 
 reduce it to mere life, as it proved to be to try 
 to reduce life to mere mechanisifi. Now, it is 
 generally best when one wants to find out the 
 nature of a particular experience, to begin by 
 asking what it means to the plain man. If we 
 ask the plain man what he means when he speaks 
 of his consciousness, he will say that it is what he 
 has before his mind when he is not in a profound 
 sleep. When his mind is awake, that is when he 
 knows, and knows that he knows, he is aware of 
 two sorts of object — the one, the world which he 
 perceives, the other, himself perceiving it. Of the 
 perceiving self, he will probably add that, so far as 
 he has any clear idea about it, it is an individual 
 among other individuals, with feelings and faculties 
 which are directly and intimately known to him as 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS 281 
 
 pertaining to himself as, in a fashion, at the centre 
 of the universe. Pressed as to what he means by 
 the centre of the universe, he may be got to say 
 first, that it is the centre, in so far as it is the only 
 here and now, and carries with it memories of 
 what has been here and now, and expectations of 
 what will be here and now. All else is, has been, 
 or will be, there and then. Pressed further, he 
 will, as was pointed out in the first Book, trace 
 all this back to a foundation which he cannot 
 see, or hear, or feel, or taste, or smell, a subject 
 of knowledge which can never as such be 
 presented as object, towards which he can go 
 back indefinitely by abstracting from the object 
 world, but which he can never reach in percep- 
 tion. In perception, the nearest approach to the 
 perceiving self is found by the plain man in the 
 particular object of knowledge which is most 
 nearly here and now, the feelings and activities of 
 which are experienced in a direct fashion in which 
 the feelings of no other self can be perceived. It 
 would seem as though at times he was seeking 
 to isolate the subject and make it an object of 
 perception, and that the only result of the attempt 
 was a constant failure. 
 
 When he tries to ascertain precisely the nature 
 of this subject self, he does it by means of abstrac- 
 tions, which represent not the real, but only aspects 
 of it, and which yield truth in a form which is 
 provisional only. The here-ness and now-ness, 
 which are characteristic of the approach to the 
 
282 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES [•>'='^t. iv. 
 
 standpoint of the knower as distinguished from 
 the known, are, after all, abstract conceptions 
 belonging to that externality in space and time, 
 which is transcended even in life, and much 
 more in thought. We gannot say of the life of 
 the body that it acts upon the body at any 
 particular place or any particular moment. It 
 is neither here and now, nor there and then. 
 When we speak of it in such terms, we have 
 really ceased to speak of life, and have passed 
 to another standpoint from which the body is 
 conceived as a mechanism. Now, in the plain 
 man's world of experience, all these standpoints 
 are adopted indiscriminately, and without being 
 distinguished. His habit of passing unconsciously 
 to whatever plane of abstraction is most con- 
 venient for the moment, enables him to talk of 
 mind, and life, and mechanism, as though they 
 were so many separate things lying side by side 
 in space, instead of being so many different points 
 of view from which he unconsciously analyses 
 and arranges experience. Just as he talks, in a 
 fashion that cannot be justified, of himself and his 
 fellow-men as receiving the same impressions from 
 without, and as this idea, useful and necessary 
 for everyday intercourse, has become embedded 
 in the language by which it was created, so 
 when he talks of himself he indicates a highly 
 complex and derivative conception, drawn from 
 more standpoints than one, embracing features 
 that are physical, organic, intellectual, sesthetic, 
 
THE SELF 283 
 
 and moral, all unconsciously combined. One of 
 the reasons why it is so difficult to define what is 
 meant by self in common speech, is the enormous 
 complexity and intricacy of what is indicated, a 
 complexity and intricacy which are latent in our 
 words, and which only do not come to conscious- 
 ness because attention has been long since diverted 
 from the process by which even in childhood the 
 idea began to be built up. A man's self includes, 
 in a sense, even his clothes. In a more precise 
 use of the word, it excludes these, but includes 
 his finger. But his finger is only relatively here. 
 From another point of view it is there and 
 outside him. It may be cut off", and yet he 
 remains the same self. He remains himself, 
 though his moral character changes, and although 
 he is temporarily unconscious. Surely we have 
 here just one of those practically useful but only 
 provisionally true constructions of language, such 
 as we became aware of in the ease of the supposed 
 identical object world perceived in common by A 
 and B and C, but which turned out to be merely 
 a figment of the practical activity of common 
 sense. The word self seems in this connection 
 to indicate an asymptotic approach to the con- 
 ception of the subject, and a vast accumulation 
 of material picked up and stored in memoiy in 
 the course of the journey. 
 
 Just as the conceptions of life, inexplicable 
 and unreal if the principles of mechanism were 
 taken to be final, proved to be both explicable 
 
284 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES [i-^ct. iv. 
 
 and real when the latter were seen not to 
 be final, so the conceptions which belong to the 
 region of what we term consciousness are in 
 their turn valid within the sphere of their 
 application. Mechanism, life, and conscious- 
 ness are not separate things, but are standpoints 
 interwoven in the practical whole of experience. 
 Consciousness perplexes us only if we insist on 
 making reality stop short at something below 
 consciousness, instead of seeking for it in some- 
 thing above. Pass to the standpoint of conscious- 
 ness, and we find a whole region of characteristic 
 conceptions which we make distinct to ourselves by 
 abstraction. In the region of mechanism the parts 
 are external and independent. Their position 
 relatively to each other, their action among them- 
 selves, is determined from without. In the field 
 of life the parts are controlled through their 
 course of development by a whole which is ideal 
 in the sense that it is neither external to or 
 separate from its parts. That this control is con- 
 sciously purposive we have no reason to believe. 
 The frog or the pigeon whose cerebral hemi- 
 sphere has been removed continues to live and 
 to act. But the action is always in response to 
 some stimulation from without. There is none 
 of that self-determination which is characteristic 
 of the intact animal, '-and makes its action impos- 
 sible to foresee in advance. The plant lives, but 
 it shows no sign of voluntary self-adaptation. It 
 develops and moves its parts in accordance with 
 
WILL 285 
 
 rules that can be ascertained. The phenomena 
 of reflex action, and even those of instinct, do 
 not seem to be consciously directed. There is 
 between mere life and purposive action a border- 
 land, where what takes place is g'Masi-purposive, 
 yet not, so far as the observer can get evidence, 
 actually purposive. But when we get to the 
 region of consciousness, the phenomena are of 
 an entirely different order. Here we experience 
 the will to act, and the nearer we get to com- 
 pletely voluntary self-determination, the further 
 we have penetrated into the region of conscious- 
 ness. Into the simplest feeling there enters an 
 element of comparison with some other feeling, 
 present or past, from which it is distinguished. 
 Such an act of comparison is essentially an act 
 of will, of what is inward and self-determined. 
 My body is what is mine, what I have control 
 over. The process of selective attention, the 
 foundation of all abstraction, and therefore of all 
 knowledge, is an act of the will. The more one 
 reflects upon the phenomena of this region of 
 consciousness, the less does it seem possible to 
 separate or even distinguish intelligence and voli- 
 tion. They are different aspects of one reality. 
 What in ultimate analysis that reality would 
 disclose itself to be, is difficult to ascertain, 
 because it does not seem iffielf to- belong to the 
 object world of which alone introspection can 
 take cognisance. If it be only through an act of 
 attention that some feature of that object world 
 
286 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES [^^^t. iv. 
 
 can be brought into consciousness, it is difficult 
 to see how the act of attention itself, as dis- 
 tinguished from what it has brought about, can 
 be observed. We are here again face to face 
 with that unending regression towards the sub- 
 ject as such, of which so much has been already 
 said. But if we cannot in introspection present 
 to ourselves intelligence and volition, if, as psycho- 
 logists, we can but infer that they are, without 
 being able to say from introspection what they 
 are, we can at least bring into the light the pheno- 
 mena in which their action is most apparent. 
 When I distinguish the object from the subject 
 for which it is object, I find that, as a fact, I have 
 set up another object which I call myself. This 
 turns out, as we have seen, to be a fleeting and 
 indefinite presentation whenever we try to submit 
 its nature and limit to scientific scrutiny. The 
 question, what it embraces and what it excludes, 
 proves incapable of a precise answer. But from 
 the point of view of the plain man, the rough dis- 
 tinction is clear enough. My self, so taken, is in 
 the closest way identified with my body ; not with 
 my body looked at as merely living, but with my 
 body viewed as also a sentient, intelligent, respon- 
 sible, and free being. For the plain man there is 
 no such entity as a soul separate from this body. 
 That notion comes only to the mind that has 
 passed into the wilderness of theory. But no more 
 does he think of himself as having a body without 
 a soul. The soul is, for him, the body in its highest 
 
BODY AND SOUL 287 
 
 aspects, and the body is the soul in those aspects 
 that are lower. When he speaks of feeling, he 
 speaks of a feeling in his finger or his heel or his 
 head. One thing that distinguishes the portion of 
 the objective world which he claims as his body 
 from the rest is, that it feels, while the rest does not. 
 It is a sort of projection of the subject into expe- 
 rience. Other things are felt, the body feels. In 
 so far as it does so the body is a self, interpreted 
 as such through categories which are those of the 
 subject. It is the manifestation of will, as well as 
 feeling. Its movement is self-determined. It 
 thinks as well as wills. If I am standing on a 
 mountain top, the circle of my surroundings is a 
 limited one, but I am the centre. It is here that 
 I stand localised and perceiving, and the I that 
 perceives, so far as I can present it as object to 
 myself, has a local situation, I can even place the 
 organ or physical manifestation of my thinking in 
 my brain. If I turn to Physiology, I find an 
 unmistakable relationship between the activity of 
 the mind and that of the brain. The fluctuations 
 of the blood-supply to the cortex correspond to the 
 increase or diminution of mental activity. The 
 higher the stage of the animal in evolution, the 
 more does its power of adapting itself to its 
 environment, and of displaying intelligent action, 
 accord with the development of its cerebral hemi- 
 spheres, and appear to be distinct from the 
 functions of the lower centres and of the spinal 
 cord. If one may for the moment speak in 
 
288 CKITICISM OF CATEGORIES [i-^ct. iv. 
 
 language which mixes up two points of view, it 
 may be said that in these higher animals the lower 
 centres appear to act from present stimuli alone, 
 while the hemispheres act from what physically 
 represents conscious processes of reflection, and 
 what is only set in operation by external stimula- 
 tion. The disease called Tnotor aphasia results 
 from injury to a part of the left frontal lobe of the 
 brain. The patient's voice is all right ; he can utter. 
 But he cannot arrange his words. It seems that 
 in most people the left hemisphere of the brain is 
 the seat of control, not only of the power of orderly 
 speech, but also of that of orderly writing. If the 
 part of the hemisphere which controls these powers 
 is out of order, not only the power of consecutive 
 utterance, but capacity to write and spell, is affected. 
 The faculty of vision in man appears similarly to 
 be dependent on the health of his occipital lobes. 
 Alexia, or inability to read, and general want of 
 capacity to understand, results from injuries to 
 other portions of the hemispheres in which these 
 functions have been localised by recent psycho- 
 physiological research. Lesion of the temporal 
 lobe may affect or even destroy the faculty of 
 hearing ; such lesions have been known, so great is 
 the indication of localisation of brain function, to 
 leave the patient able to read, write, talk, but not 
 to understand what is said to him. It was ob- 
 served, in some recent investigations, that if the 
 lesion was in the left lobe, the side which with 
 most people — with all, indeed, who are right- 
 
BODY AND SOtJL 289 
 
 handed — is the most important in direction and 
 control, the mere hearing sense did not disappear, 
 for that was provided for by the centres on 
 the other side. But the power of translating the 
 soimds heard into conceptions, and the conceptions 
 into words, had disappeared, a result which points 
 to the conclusion that the nerve stimulations which 
 are the conditions of the sensations of hearing, do 
 not innervate our motor centres directly, but only 
 do so after arousing what corresponds to the mental 
 equivalent of the words. 
 
 Not only do we seem to localise the physical 
 concomitants of our mental functions, but it seems 
 impossible, in the region of the object self, to 
 separate the two excepting in thought. The body 
 may, by abstraction, be regarded as a machine. 
 But in another and equally real aspect it is 
 living. So when we turn to the mind we may, 
 but again only as the result of abstraction from 
 all but certain features, regard the individual 
 as a living organism, and his brain as exercising 
 the functions of life in an immensely high degree. 
 But it is none the less true that, in the experience 
 of the plain man, the individual whom he sees and 
 hears has a higher aspect than that of mere life. 
 That individual is conscious and knows and wills, 
 presents, in fact, the attributes of the subject of 
 knowledge, so far as these can be made object to 
 the subject itself. It is through categories which 
 are as far above and beyond those of life as the 
 categories of life are above and beyond those of 
 
290 CRITICISM OF CATEOOEIES [i-bjct. iv. 
 
 mechanism, that these higher aspects which go to 
 make up the individual are alone possible. Thus 
 the true view of the relation of soul and body 
 would seem to be, not one in which they appear 
 as two things, but another in which they disclose 
 themselves as two aspects. So far from pointing 
 to the conclusions of materialism and mechanical 
 or causal determination, such a result points to 
 just the reverse. It is only because we will 
 assmne that the mechanical aspect is the only 
 real one that we think of living beings as 
 really automata. Whenever we are rid of this 
 superstition, a vista that is entirely new opens 
 up. 
 
 Psychology is the science of the mind as directly 
 presented object in knowledge, and its methods are 
 partly introspective and partly physiological. Just 
 as mathematics and physics and chemistry can be 
 made of immense use in the study of that region of 
 life to which their conceptions are none the less 
 wholly inadequate, so physiology is brought to the 
 aid of psychology. By abstraction, we represent to 
 ourselves the phenomena of mental life as broken 
 up into separate elements, which elements are 
 emptied by still further abstraction, until we have 
 reduced them in our presentation to the abstractions 
 which we call mere feelings. These feelings we 
 find to have, as their concomitants, physiological 
 processes, and these physiological processes, again 
 by abstraction, we make available for the chrono- 
 meter, the measuring rod and the balance. In 
 
PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY 291 
 
 this fashion we indirectly bring mental pheno- 
 mena into relations of quantity. But just as 
 this reduction of the mental to the physical is 
 but an artificial construction of reflection, so 
 the view of mind as an object from which we 
 start is itself abstract and unreal. We never, as 
 psychologists, get before our mental vision the 
 mind or subject as such ; what we do get is the 
 endless process of regression towards it. We are 
 constantly, as it were, baling out contents which 
 have turned out to be indifferent to the self, and 
 not really to belong to it, but we never get com- 
 pletely rid of them. The limitation of human 
 faculty steps in, and tells us that so far and no 
 ■ further shall we see, and that beyond we can only 
 proceed symbolically, or by means of indirect 
 metaphysical methods, the results of which are 
 shadowy and bloodless. What we have done, 
 when we have made the mind our object, is to 
 abstract from the supreme relationship of reality 
 as object for the subject. We break up and 
 isolate the parts of a phenomenon which from 
 the standpoint of common sense is neither broken 
 up nor consists of parts. For the ordinary man 
 his personality is one and indivisible. He does 
 not separate soul and body. The body, which is 
 the man himself, feels, and no one but he himself 
 can be directly conscious of this feeling. This fact 
 separates off what he calls his body from the rest 
 of the external world. Yet, just because he does 
 not separate soul and body, he regards other people 
 
292 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES [^^- iv. 
 
 as having bodies that feel, notwithstanding that he 
 cannot himself experience their feelings. His 
 standpoint, when examined scientifically, turns out 
 to be complex and merely provisional, incapable 
 indeed of accurate statement, and the product of 
 conventions adopted for purposes that are of the 
 most limited validity. But such as it is it lands 
 him in no doubts or difficulties. These arise only 
 from the abstractions of Science, not from those of 
 a common sense which is willing to admit every 
 aspect of the world as it seems. Now Psychology 
 like other sciences is forced, in order, through 
 selective attention, to get clear knowledge, to 
 make violent exclusions of the aspects of reality 
 which for its own purposes it does not happen 
 to require. It begins by shutting out in the 
 first instance the reference of mind to body, 
 though it may afterwards talk as though a great 
 thing had been accomplished in the rediscovery 
 of this relationship. It pictures the contents of 
 consciousness, all that is loosely spoken of as 
 known through internal sense, as consisting of 
 streams of isolated impressions and ideas. It 
 attributes to the mind in dealing with these 
 impressions and ideas separate faculties, such as 
 memory, association, perception, conception, judg- 
 ment, volition. All these are but the outcome 
 of an artificial and abstract procedure, justified 
 only by the clear though limited knowledge 
 which is obtained through it. Of the contents 
 so abstracted and arranged, some are more com- 
 
SUBJECT AND OBJECT 293 
 
 pletely than others pushed out, as it were, into 
 the field of the object world. A mere sensation, 
 for instance, does not exist. The qualifying work 
 of memory, comparison, judgment in general, is 
 always present. But it suits the purpose of 
 gaining clear though artificial knowledge, say of 
 the proportion which the increase of the external 
 stimulus bears to the increase of the so-called 
 internal sensation, to treat the sensation as if it 
 were merely passively received, and could be held 
 out at arm's-length and inspected. When we 
 pass to such so-called faculties as memory, or 
 conception, or judgment, the relationship of object 
 and subject becomes more difficult to ignore. We 
 cannot present the subject, but we can go a lon^ 
 way in presenting the object of knowledge as 
 actual only in the act of knowing, that is, as mere 
 object for the subject. The process of such 
 construction we call thought, but as the limita- 
 tions of our plane of intelligence preclude our 
 presenting it to ourselves in its entirety, we, by 
 abstraction, cut off thought from its aspect as 
 activity of the subject, and represent and speak 
 of it as the thought of an abstract and vaguely 
 conceived psychological object-self. In this way 
 we get to the standpoint of what it has been 
 usual to call formal logic, the logic of the old- 
 fashioned text-books. It is really the science of 
 thought, transformed by abstraction into an object 
 of introspection, and represented as a faculty of 
 a particular thinker. None the less on this 
 
294 CRITICISM OF CATEGOEIES [i-ect. v.-. 
 
 account does such logic form a transition to 
 what lies beyond mere Psychology. 
 
 When we scrutinise our procedure as finite 
 minds confronted by an object which we cannot 
 wholly take in or exhaust, we find that we proceed 
 by concentrating attention on aspects which we 
 select. Such selection is an act of will, and the 
 motive which impels it is the particular purpose 
 we happen to have in view. The man in the 
 street concentrates attention on certain aspects; 
 the mathematician, the moralist, and the artist on 
 others. In this way, the characteristics of the 
 world as it seems, are determined for us by the 
 ends which we will. The fundamental form of 
 the activity of selective attention is judgment. As 
 we saw in the first Book, a judgment is a true one 
 when it harmonises with experience generally. It 
 is only by a process of abstraction which removes 
 us further fi^om, and not nearer to, reality, that we 
 split up the judgment into the subject, the copula, 
 and the predicate. For the judgment is the ele- 
 mental and characteristic form of the activity of the 
 subject, and though it be true that where intelli- 
 gence is only being considered as at a plane at 
 which the subject is confronted by the object as 
 something foreign to it, the judgment as the 
 activity of the subject apparently does no more 
 than unravel what is presented, this is a view 
 which, as we have already seen, is not only not 
 final, but, on scrutiny, discloses itself as vanishing 
 to an extent which is indefinite, As soon as we 
 
OTHEE HUMAN BEINGS 295 
 
 have penetrated the hard crust of everyday con- 
 ventions and metaphors with which language has 
 overlaid reality, this becomes apparent. There is 
 only a single experience, that which is ours. 
 Other human beings have neither the same ex- 
 perience, nor a different experience. For a plur- 
 ality of experiences is, as we have already found 
 out, a totally unintelligible and self-contradictory 
 notion. The other human beings are, as other 
 human beings, but parts of that experience, and 
 the observer himself, so far as he observes himself, 
 is likewise but part of it. If we pass to a higher 
 point of view there is but one subject in know- 
 ledge, and this manifests itself in a plurality of 
 individual minds, not like light through a number 
 of glasses, but rather as a plurality of images 
 which the light creates. Yet this simile is no 
 more than a simile. It is just because such similes 
 and metaphors are all drawn from a region of 
 direct presentation of concrete objects in the 
 externality of space and time that they are 
 inadequate, and useless, and misleading, and have 
 been the occasion in Philosophy of difficulties far 
 greater than those they were called in to explain. 
 When we form a judgment we start from some- 
 thing which is an actual object to our minds, and 
 is in this sense real. " Croquet is a tqdious game." 
 Here, although there is no such thing in reality 
 as a game of croquet in the abstract, I am refer- 
 ring to what is a fact of the real world, my 
 generalised experience of the game. Keality is 
 
296 CEITICISM OF OATEGOEIES [i-ect. iv. 
 
 the logical subject of my judgment. But this 
 presentation of reality is indefinite, so far as my 
 impressions about the quality of croquet as an 
 amusement go. I proceed to connect it with a 
 multitude of impressions of long hours and damp 
 grass, and I frame a general conception, the predi- 
 cate, and by means of this render definite and 
 apparent what was before indefinite. If my judg- 
 ment is a right one, I have so far unravelled experi- 
 ence and extended its connotation. The present 
 conception is amplified, and receives Content. Now 
 if, as we have seen it must be, experience is a 
 continuous system confronting the individual mind, 
 and knowledge is the making parts or phases of 
 this system definite by selective attention, we can 
 understand the true nature of the process of reason- 
 ing. When we reason inductively, we are in search 
 of the general principles on which the system of 
 experience is there for us. We frame imaginative 
 hypotheses, and apply conception after conception 
 until we find one that, after testing, emerges as in 
 harmony with the rest of experience. We thus 
 infer a general principle, having started with par- 
 ticulars. This is induction. Or having got the 
 system before our minds, we wish to find out 
 whether a particular case belongs to it, "Games 
 that involve standing about in the rain are tedious " ; 
 here we have a principle that binds certain experi- 
 ences into a system, "Croquet involves standing 
 about in the rain " ; here we have the minor pre- 
 miss, with a middle term asserting a harmony 
 
SELECTIVE ATTENTION 297 
 
 between a general feature of croquet and the special 
 system of tedious experiences with which we want 
 to know whether it is connected. "Croquet is 
 tedious"; here we have the conclusion of the 
 syllogism, making explicit a feature of croquet 
 which was not explicit before, because the game 
 had not been assigned a place in my system of 
 tedious experiences. It will be observed how 
 abstract, subjective and selective, both these pro- 
 cesses of reasoning are. Abstract they are, 
 because they fasten on a single feature arbitrarily. 
 The keen croquet player does not attach any im- 
 portance to the dampness of the atmosphere. His 
 impression of this is disregarded as wholly inferior 
 in interest to the pleasure derived from the game. 
 But set the same man to walk up and down the 
 grass reading a book, and he will complain bitterly, 
 and, without waiting, draw the inference that 
 reading on damp grass belongs to the system of 
 the tedious. Thus the subjective element comes 
 in. Now this is the result of selection, probably 
 in this case of habitual selection. He has con- 
 centrated attention in the second case on a 
 feature which he did not select for attention in 
 the first. Thus it is that thinking passes into 
 willing, and willing into thinking, and we find 
 that it is only artificially and by abstraction 
 that they are represented as different kinds of 
 mental acts. The world is will just as much 
 as it is idea, and idea just as much as it is will. 
 Assent, and its subjective aspect belief, is the 
 
298 CEITICISM OF CATEGORIES C^^cr. iv. 
 
 manifestation of this will. It is only the per- 
 sistent attempt of some psychologists to treat 
 thought and volition as though they were funda- 
 mentally distinct, and not merely provisionally 
 separated, that has led to the difficulty which has 
 puzzled people when looking for light on the 
 nature of the act of assent or belief. The will is 
 not free in so far as it is confronted by a world of 
 objects which hem it in, and are foreign to it. But 
 if we could conceive intelligence which in the act 
 of knowledge, of being subject, was aware of itself 
 as one with its object, and of its object as one with 
 it, then we should have likewise conceived a will 
 that was wholly free. The analysis of the nature 
 of reality which we have pursued up to the stage 
 we have reached in our journey seems to have 
 shown that experience discloses an infinite regress 
 towards such a conception as the unseen foundation 
 of all that is. Even in experience we seem to have 
 found that no limit can be set to the penetrating 
 power of thought or to its work in the construction 
 of reality, and now the same appears to be true of 
 will, which by its selection seems to sustain, alter, 
 and, to an extent which is for us limitless, create 
 the experience amid which we live. What has 
 obscured this truth is only the hypostatised abstrac- 
 tion from the action of the subject which both the 
 man of science and the plain man are forced to 
 make, in order to save time and energy. Even at 
 the standpoint we have been considering, it seems 
 as though the final explanation of reality were to 
 
RETEOSPECT 299 
 
 be sought in a system of Ends rather than of 
 Causes. 
 
 I will now ask you to look back over the road 
 that has been travelled through the region of the 
 special sciences. Not external compulsion, but 
 the end, the purpose, of the observer, determines 
 the method of his investigation. The essence of 
 the method is abstraction, under a particular set of 
 categories. The point of departure is always the 
 world as it seems, the world of concrete fact, 
 which is thus stripped of its wealth and diversity. 
 In a sense, too, the subject-matter is, throughout, 
 concrete fact. But it is fact under selected aspects 
 only. When I set myself to solve the problem of 
 whether the square of the hypothenuse of a right- 
 angled triangle is equal to the squares of the other 
 two sides, I start with what I treat as an actual 
 thing, the idealised pictorial construction of a 
 right-angled triangle, which I look on as a fact, 
 notwithstanding that such a fact is never to be 
 found in an exact form in nature. I can reason 
 from its properties, because I have got the clearest 
 and most exact notion of them. In the course of 
 my reasoning, I pictorially construct again, and in 
 the end, I construct the result. Thought is in this 
 fashion made adequate to reality. It constructs 
 its object. It is free in so doing, to go right or 
 to go wrong ; but if, in such a case, the free self- 
 determining activity of thought is to go right, it 
 must follow the principles which make up the 
 system of intelligence in the region in which it is 
 
300 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES [i-ect. .v. 
 
 operating. By so doing, and only by so doing, is 
 it possible to construct, as the outcome of the 
 reasoning process, an ideal fact, individual, in the 
 sense that with it the subject is satisfied, satisfied 
 on the theoretical side as intelligence, because it 
 finds the ideal individual fit into the context of 
 experience, satisfied on the practical side, as will, 
 because the self is content to rest in the final 
 outcome, and has no desire to seek anything 
 beyond. In other words, what has been attained 
 complies with the test of what is individual, and so 
 is unique. In geometry, in short, we experiment 
 on, and mould, the fact with which we start, just 
 as we do in chemistry. The perfect square is as 
 much, and as little, a fact as the molecule made up 
 of two atoms of hydrogen, and one of oxygen. In 
 both cases, we make experiments which we could 
 not make, without materials purified and rendered 
 definite by abstraction. When we have thus 
 idealised a fact of experience, we go on to reason 
 to a result which, if true, must disclose itself as 
 another idealised fact. 
 
 That this should be possible, suggests again the 
 conclusion already reached by other ways, that it 
 is in the reflective activity of thought that the 
 nature of things as known, lies. Truth and error, 
 the difference between the reality and the chimera, 
 have been already discussed in the second and 
 third Lectures, and there is no need of repetition 
 of what was there found, in order to prove that the 
 proposition, Esse is Intelligi, in no way conflicts 
 
FALSE METAPHORS 301 
 
 with the common-sense view of the plain man. 
 Much of the hesitation in accepting such a result, 
 frankly, and without reserve, arises from a view of 
 the relation of thought to its object, which I have 
 been trying to get rid of in these pages. Even Kant 
 could not help speaking as though the mind were 
 a thing which built up the object out of sensations. 
 Now, so long as we talk of building up, or even 
 of construction, without making plain what we 
 really mean, we shall be apt to give a false 
 impression. These are metaphors drawn from the 
 picture galleries of time and space. It is, how- 
 ever, for the world in time and space, and for time 
 and space themselves, that we have to account, 
 and we shall only fail if our metaphors seem to 
 beg the very point on which we employ them to 
 throw light. In truth, thought no more exists 
 apart from its object, than does the object exist 
 apart from thought. It is in self-conscious mind 
 that the two are distinguished, and, except as 
 aspects within self-conscious mind, they seem to 
 have no meaning or reality. It is within this field 
 that the whole universe is comprised, lives, moves, 
 and has its being. Within it, we must look for 
 truth and error as well as everything besides. It 
 is the whole field of reality, because it is the whole 
 field of mind. And mind creates reality only in 
 the sense that reality has no meaning, save as a 
 distinction within mind, while, on the other hand, 
 mind cannot become a distinct object for self, save 
 in contrast to an object, conceived as real and self- 
 
302 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES [j-^ct. iv. 
 
 subsisting. That the distinction of the one from 
 the other exists only in thought, is plain. The one 
 is just the other, under a diflferent aspect. I see 
 that chair! What makes its reality, its actuality, 
 for me ? Differences, the distinctions through the 
 medium of which what is first formless comes into 
 consciousness as an object, the categories, if you 
 please, which I have applied. And yet I cannot 
 exhibit the chair as a deduction, in the fashion 
 in which I exhibited the special content of the 
 square of the hypothenuse of the right-angled 
 triangle as a deduction. In both cases we are 
 dealing with hard facts, hard in the sense that 
 they are independent of the imaginings of my 
 mind looked at under the aspect of a finite indi- 
 vidual. But in the geometrical case, I, though 
 finite, though confronted by a reality which was 
 beyond my control and independent of me, was 
 able, by abstraction, to take one of its relation- 
 ships or aspects, and mould, control, and experi- 
 ment with it within much wider limits than my 
 position as here and now in the concrete world 
 of actuality enabled me to do with the real 
 things of that world. That was how I set 
 immediacy at naught, and could take flight on the 
 wings of inference to the most distant regions of 
 space and time. Now, Philosophy, while recog- 
 nising this process, does not deal so with the 
 universe that confronts it, for it has to give an 
 account of that universe as a whole containing 
 all its boundless fulness; and the philosopher is 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL SPECTATOR 303 
 
 but an individual spectator, reflecting upon what 
 confronts him, and for him, what confronts him 
 not only exists independently of any particular 
 spectator, but includes the very self in certain 
 aspects in which that self appears. Yet, in other 
 aspects, the spectator is the thinker, the subject 
 in self-consciousness, and as such his individu- 
 ality may be subjected to the free investigation 
 of reflection, of thought, and turned in on its 
 own operation. So looked at, his limitations, 
 at first sight impenetrable and baffling, disclose 
 themselves as mere appearances. From the every- 
 day working standpoint from which the onlooker 
 must be taken as a thing of which his thought is 
 a property or activity, these appearances are final 
 reality. But pass from the practical standpoint 
 even for a moment. He sees the branches of a 
 tree waving in the wind. The branches with 
 their leaves are now with their leaves here, but, 
 in a moment, while his eyes have been shutting 
 and opening again, they are in a new position. 
 Just as we found earlier that the individual man 
 could have no direct experience of his neighbour's 
 sensations, and could recognise in their descrip- 
 tions no more than universal elements, that is 
 to say, elements which exist for thought only, 
 and are not passively received sense impres- 
 sions, so he has no direct experience of his own 
 individual sensations of the moment before. He 
 cannot even reproduce them in memory. All he 
 can do is, like the geometer, to construct an 
 
304 CRITICISM OF CATEGORIES ["^ct. iv. 
 
 image embodying those general features of them, 
 which thought alone can apprehend and retain 
 in an act which is not one of passive reception, 
 but an active identification in difference through 
 general conceptions. In this fashion he forms a 
 judgment, he determines the concrete object of 
 perception in the present moment by reference 
 to the conception which he has constructed of the 
 past moment. He determines a certain identity 
 or continuity in the change of form of the tree 
 as the wind moves its branches, and he so 
 enriches and expands its present actuality for 
 himself. But the work done is obviously not 
 accomplished by passive reception. However 
 proper a matter for attention the aspect of 
 passive reception may be at another standpoint, 
 there can be no question of it here, where the 
 inquirer has to get at the truth about the rela- 
 tion between his mind and its content. That 
 content can be described by him to himself and 
 to others only in terms of the universals which 
 mind establishes, and which give meaning, nature, 
 and actuality to that content. The object world 
 of nature has sometimes been called externalised 
 thought. Such a name is good enough if we 
 bear in mind what we mean by the words. We 
 do not mean that in the aspect in which John 
 Smith appears as a reasoning animal, an indi- 
 vidual among other individuals, whose reason is 
 the soul of what otherwise would be a soulless 
 body or thing, his thinking faculty can be shown 
 
EESULTS OF IDEALISM 305 
 
 to put together the universe of which he is part. 
 It is only when in reflection we have transcended 
 John Smith, the observer, as well as what he 
 observes, that we find the two and the difference 
 between them to be distinguished only within 
 knowledge. Such a view of reality is far 
 removed from subjective idealism, and even from 
 the modified doctrine of the Critique of Pure 
 Reason. If the distinction between subject and 
 object emerges at a plane of intelligence, which 
 is neither the only plane nor the highest plane, 
 the doctrine for which this is so is more 
 analogous to realism than to the old subjec- 
 tive idealism of Berkeley and Hume. Nature it 
 treats as real just as much as the individual 
 percipient. For a percipient, who is in many 
 aspects part of nature itself, and conditioned 
 by it, the nature from which he has emerged 
 must always be impenetrable and uncontrollable, 
 expanding itself in a contingency which is 
 boundless, and disclosing itself at every turn as 
 inexhaustible by the intelligence of its creature. 
 But the individual is more than an individual. 
 He is a thinker, and in thinking of his own 
 limits he transcends them. These limits become 
 disclosed as falling within thought itself. He 
 who in one aspect is a creature, is on another 
 side more than a creature. He is also the mani- 
 festation and embodiment of mind, and distin- 
 guished therefrom in appearance only. Finite 
 
 as he appears, he can, by letting intelligence 
 
 u 
 
306 CEITICISM OF CATEGOEIES [^^^- "■ 
 
 analyse and pick and choose among the aspects 
 of that whose esse is after all readily discovered 
 to be intelligi, transcend the limits of his own 
 immediacy, and cause its foreignness to disappear. 
 The use of the limited categories of mathematics 
 and physics can help him to get far in this direc- 
 tion. The use of the higher categories of life 
 and soul bring him still further along the path 
 which leads to the discovery that the reality 
 and actuality of nature are simply intelligence. 
 The final result, achieved only when the whole 
 series of the categories is made use of, and 
 their full application realised, is the disclosure that 
 the truth and very substance of nature is to be 
 sought in mind, which thus rediscovers itself in 
 its own object. 
 
 It has been truly said that such a doctrine can 
 only be convincingly presented if it is possible to 
 exhibit it as a complete system, a system in 
 which the three aspects of ultimate reality would 
 appear somewhat as follows : — First, mind under 
 the abstract aspect of its categories in their 
 relation to each other; second, mind in the 
 abstract aspect in which, as object in nature with 
 attention abstracted from the work done by intelli- 
 gence operating through universals even in bare 
 perception, intelligence has appeared as externality ; 
 and, third, mind as the concrete and final activity 
 in which not only do the categories and nature 
 appear as but abstractions, so far as independent, 
 but intelligence and volition disclose themselves as 
 
SYSTEM IN PHILOSOPHY 307 
 
 one. In such a presentation, nature would figure 
 as characterised by the feature of atomism, in other 
 words self-subsistence, and mutual exclusion of 
 its components. For it would be distinguished 
 from its counter abstraction, intelligence taken 
 fer se, only by appearing as not-thought, the 
 background against which intelligence is dis- 
 tinguished and made conscious of itself as in 
 appearance other than nature. This distinction 
 falls within the self-consciousness, in which each 
 side of it is but a moment, nevertheless the dis- 
 tinction is essential to self-consciousness, although 
 thus produced within it. A complete system of 
 Philosophy would set intelligence the task of 
 tracing its own movement in the detail of the 
 various forms implied and contained within the con- 
 crete and final reality of self-consciousness. Self- 
 consciousness would at the end stand disclosed to 
 itself as Reason, aware of itself as such, and with 
 a complete view of the entire logical chain of its 
 own categories and their distinctions, and of the 
 dialectic through which these distinctions were 
 related. Now it is no part of the purpose of these 
 Lectures to attempt the display of the movement 
 of Reason in such a system. My observations 
 form but an introduction to Philosophy, to the 
 thinking about these things of the great minds in 
 the history of speculative thought. Their pm-pose 
 is merely to try to help towards an xmderstanding 
 of what the function of speculative thought has 
 been, and of the work which it has accomplished. 
 
308 CKITICISM OF CATEGORIES [i-^ct. iv. 
 
 He who wishes to go beyond the limits of these 
 discourses, and, having travelled the pathway 
 which leads to reality, to approach yet more closely 
 to the problem of its nature, will find guidance 
 waiting for him in both Ancient and Modern 
 Philosophy. Plato and Aristotle between them 
 have given to the world attempts at a systematic 
 display of the work of Reason. In modern times 
 Hegel has done the work still more thoroughly. 
 How far he has succeeded is still matter of con- 
 troversy. But just as no one can properly count 
 himself a mathematician who has not mastered 
 the calculus, so no one is properly equipped as a 
 philosopher who has not subjected himself to the 
 hard work necessary for the understanding of the 
 Hegelian system as a whole. Hegel is very hard 
 to read. For that matter, so are the books on the 
 higher mathematics. Yet people do not turn aside 
 from the books on higher mathematics on that 
 account, or pronounce their contents nonsense. 
 They know that the reason of their difficulty is 
 that their own imagination is not yet familiarised 
 with a wholly novel set of conceptions about 
 quantity, or freed from the superstitions which are 
 adequate for everyday life. The incrustations of 
 common sense are hard to break through, but in 
 every science we have to break through them, and 
 we cheerfully set about the task. Why in the case 
 of Philosophy should it be different! There is 
 not likely to be any royal road here any more than 
 in Science. The incrustations which have to be 
 
HEGEL 309 
 
 removed by patient study and reflection are not 
 less but greater. Conceptions of the nature of 
 ultimate reality, which are the outcome of the 
 labour of successive generations of men working 
 through two thousand years, are not likely to prove 
 easy to grasp without preparation. When we are 
 told by the most distinguished thinkers in this 
 country, on the Continent, and in the United States, 
 that they get more from Hegel than from any one 
 else, and when we see how profoundly his teaching 
 has modified studies such as those of history and of 
 logic, to mention no others, it seems as though the 
 main preparation for the would-be philosopher 
 must still be to find out what Hegel really meant, 
 and to learn to read him. The best assurance 
 that I can give you of my own conviction on the 
 subject is to tell you that all that is in these Lectures 
 I have either taken or adapted from Hegel, and 
 that in Hegel there is twice as much again of 
 equal importance which these Lectures cannot even 
 touch. We may not to-day be satisfied with all 
 the details of the dialectic of the notion as set out 
 in the Encyclopcedia. Perhaps no single intellect, 
 not even the gigantic intellect of a Hegel, could 
 be equal to the task of displaying in its totality 
 the inmost movement of Eeason. We may think 
 that the meagre and inadequate knowledge which 
 Hegel possessed of Science, as Science has since 
 his time become, has made his attempt to trace 
 the presence of the reflection of universals of 
 thought in nature, their correlation and counter- 
 
310 CEITICISM OF CATEGORIES [i-^ct. iv. 
 
 part, in large measure a failure. We may be 
 dissatisfied with some points of the system, and 
 feel that the development of nearly a century since 
 the Encyclopcedia was written necessitates its being 
 rewritten and the doing of much of the work anew. 
 We may be grateful for the work which remark- 
 able men of our own time, men such as Mr 
 Bradley and Professor Royce, have done in recast- 
 ing many of the Hegelian results. But none the 
 less are we bound to realise that in labouring 
 through the text of the Encyclopcedia, with its 
 unfamiliar terminology, as vmfamiliar and as un- 
 couth as the terminology of the calculus, we are 
 in face of the greatest master of speculative 
 method that the world has seen since the days 
 of Aristotle. It often happens that Hegel will 
 not pause to give the struggling reader kindly 
 help in places where he needs it badly. He is 
 no enthusiast like Fichte. He holds close to the 
 concrete. He damps and disappoints the student 
 by successive and deliberate refusals to fire his 
 imagination. Himself a master of rhetoric, he 
 seems to despise it even where it woiild serve 
 to give relief by lightening for a moment the 
 pressure of the iron chain of his logic. He is 
 at times, to all appearance, deliberately obscure. 
 He will not stop to explain that questions 
 with the answer to which he likes to play, are 
 questions to which he has no answer to give, 
 for the simple reason that they are, from his 
 point of view, irrational. He prefers in such 
 
THE HEGELIAN PHILOSOPHY 311 
 
 cases to amuse himself by assuming the part 
 of a humorist. Herr Krug thinks that Hegel 
 ought, if his philosophy were true, to be able to 
 deduce his, Herr Krug's, pen. Hegel only hints 
 a doubt whether the pen be worth deducing. So 
 with the question as to the difference between the 
 idea and the reality of a hundred dollars; the 
 difference does not matter. Yet it is not the 
 language which Hegel uses that is the real diffi- 
 culty. It is the mode of thinking. If we have 
 once grasped his fashion of thought, the language 
 presents but little difficulty. We come to see 
 that it is in the nature of things that it should be 
 special, special as is and must be the language 
 of the mathematical calculus. The Hegelian 
 Philosophy will always be difficult. Its truths 
 do not lie on the surface of the pictorial aspect 
 of things, but beneath it. You have to break up 
 that surface in order to get at what this great 
 mine of Philosophy holds buried beneath a ter- 
 minology necessarily novel, but not necessarily as 
 difficult as its creator has chosen to make it. 
 None the less no one else has so much to tell 
 to the searcher after truth who will make the 
 effort to grasp what he has to say. No other 
 is so helpful. Far away, across the German 
 Ocean, there is a quiet spot shut off from the 
 busy traffic of the streets of Berlin. You go 
 along the Invaliden Strasse, and turn through a 
 gateway which leads into the now deserted 
 cemetery of the old Dorotheen Kirche. There, 
 
312 CKITICISM OF CATEGORIES [^^^- 'v. 
 
 under a simple stone, lie the mortal remains of 
 the greatest master of abstract thought that 
 the world has seen since the day when Aristotle 
 died. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abioqenesis, 182, 240. 
 
 ^Esthetics, 235. 
 
 Alexia, 288. 
 
 Amoeba, the, 270. 
 
 Aphasia, 288. 
 
 Appearance and Reality, Mr Brad- 
 ley's, 125. 
 
 Aristotle, 11, 36, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 
 57, 58, 61, 62, 65, 89, 98, 99, 100, 
 121, 123, 129, 144, 169, 308 ; Logic 
 of, 157, 161. 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 76, 102. 
 
 Association, 30, 153. 
 
 Atoms, 219, 220, 225 et seq. 
 
 Avenarius, Richard, 86. 
 
 Avogadro, the law of, 230. 
 
 Bacon, 161, 253. 
 
 Balfour, Et. Hon. A. J., 48, 125. 
 
 Berkeley, Bishop, 23, 31, 37, 39, 45, 
 
 52, 138, 305. 
 Berthelot, 81. 
 Biological Science, 240. 
 Body, the, 286-292 ; organism of, 
 
 42,43. 
 Bois-Reymond, Paul du, 219 (note). 
 Bosanquet, 143, 146. 
 Boscovich, 220. 
 
 Bradley, Mr, 48, 143, 145, 146, 310. 
 Bronte, Emily, "Last Lines" of, 
 
 75. 
 Brown, the Botanist, 248. 
 Browne, Sir Thomas, 274. 
 Browning, Robert, 74. 
 Bywater, Ingram, 50. 
 gis 
 
 CATEaoBiES, the criticism of, 169 et 
 
 seq. 
 Cause, the conception of, 20, 37, 
 
 104, 181, 212, 214, 234. 
 Cell Theory, the, 246 et seq. 
 Cells, life, 239, 242, 270, 271. 
 Chemistry, 225 et seq. 
 Churches, the, position of, 3, 4. 
 Common sense, 41. 
 Consciousness, 123, 126, 127, 149, 
 
 150, 279 et seq. 
 Cooke's The New Okemistry, 228 
 
 (note). 
 Creeds, influence of, 4. 
 Critique of Judgment, Kant's, 17, 
 
 273. 
 Critique of Pure Reason, Kant's, 17. 
 
 Darwin, Charles, 144, 186. 
 
 Be Animd, Aristotle's, 57, 99. 
 
 Dedekind, 144. 
 
 Determinism, the theory of, 65. 
 
 Diels, Hermann, his Herakleitos von 
 
 Ephesos, 50, 51. 
 Disease, 274. 
 Dogmatism, 13. 
 
 Encyclopadie, Hegel's, 126, 127, 128, 
 309, 310. 
 
 EacUd, 206, 208. 
 
 Experience, 46, 49, 86, 87, 88, 92, 
 110, 118, 120, 122, 123, 148, 190, 
 295 ; Kant's view of, 86, 92. 
 
 Faith, the origin of religious, 5. 
 
314 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Faraday, 220. 
 
 Fechner, 235. 
 
 Feeling, the value of, 6. 
 
 Fiohte, 310. 
 
 Form, as distinguished from 
 
 Matter, 55. 
 Fraser, Professor, 23. 
 Free Will, 64, 65, 66, 177. 
 
 German Thinkers, 140, 177. 
 
 Gifford, Lord, 6, 7 ; purpose of, in 
 founding the GiflFord Lecture- 
 ship, 3, 14, 34. 
 
 God, and Man, 133. 
 
 God, What we mean by, 15, 16, 17, 
 18, 19, 20, 36, 37, 124, 189 ; Hegel's 
 view of, 129. 
 
 Goethe, 113, 136, 197, 250; and 
 experience as dealt with in his 
 Faust, 92. 
 
 Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, 15, Faiiet, 
 92. 
 
 Gravitation, 221. 
 
 Greets, the, metaphysical specula- 
 tion of, 50, 98, 178. 
 
 Green, Thomas Hill, 48, 161. 
 
 Hbsel, 11,12, 36, 58, 61, 62, 89, 118, 
 123-129, 132, 144, 169, 183, 185, 
 186, 187, 308, 309, 310, 311 ; his 
 Logic, 109, 113, 126 ; the founda- 
 tion of his Philosophy, 121 ; hia 
 definition of Life, 267. 
 
 Hegelianism and Personality, 121, 
 i24. 
 
 Helmholtz, 144. 
 
 Heraclitus, 27, 28, 169, 199 ; the 
 teaching of, 50, 51, 52. 
 
 Herbart, 141, 142, 143. 
 
 History of Philosophy, Hegel's, 11. 
 
 Hume, 11, 36, 45, 108, 148, 153. 
 
 Hypothesis, the method of Philo- 
 sophy, 10. 
 
 Idealism, the thesis of, 69, 143. 
 Ideas, the association of, 30. 
 
 Imponderables, the notion of, 228. 
 Individual, the, 53, 54, 62, 66, 67, 
 
 68, 90, 101, 106, 120, 163, 170, 
 
 255, 259 et seq., 305. 
 Individuality, 61. 
 Instinct, the phenomena of, 285. 
 Intelligence, 117, 264, 307; as 
 
 distinct from WUl, 127, 128, 285. 
 Introjection, 86. 
 
 Jame8, Prof., 5, 6, 76, 106, 125, 138, 
 
 141, 145, 152. 
 Joule, 144. 
 
 Jowett, Prof, a saying of, 49. 
 Judgment, 161, 294. 
 
 Kant, 11, 13, 18, 36, 58, 86, 87, 88, 
 89, 141, 142, 161, 248, 250, 301 
 his Critique of Judgment, 17, 233 
 his Critique of Pure Reason, 17 
 his definition of Life, 267. 
 
 Kelvin, Lord, 144, 220. 
 
 Knowledge, 108, 142, 160, 178 ; of 
 the Child, 147. 
 
 Language, 80, 105, 199. 
 
 Leibnitz, 202, 203, 204. 
 
 Lesage, 221. 
 
 Life, the phenomenon of, 236, 238 
 
 et seq., 261, 267. 
 Life and Mechanism, Controversies 
 
 about, 16, 241, 242-245, 260. 
 Lobachewski, 144. 
 Locke, 23, 233. 
 Logic, formal, 293. 
 Logic, the Science of, 143, 146, 
 
 156-162. 
 Lotze, 122, 123, 124, 141, 142, 143. 
 Lucretius, 219. 
 
 Man, 189 ; the relationship of, to 
 God, 15 ; the personality of (see 
 Personality). 
 
 Man's Place in the Goamos, 121, 
 125. 
 
 Mathematics, the Science of, 197. 
 
INDEX 
 
 315 
 
 Matter, the conception of, 37, 38, 
 55, 56, 218 et seq., 244. 
 
 Maxwell's Matter and Motion, 212 
 (note). 
 
 Mechanism and Life, the gulf be- 
 tween, 17, 42, 43, 284. 
 
 Melody, a, the nature of, 45. 
 
 Metabolism, 43. 
 
 Metaphysics, as distinguished from 
 Psychology, 146, 162. 
 
 Michelet, 186. 
 
 Mill, John Stuart, 24, 28, 30, 31, 
 37, 39, 40, 47, 51, 58 ; and " Per- 
 manent Possibilities," 72. 
 
 Mind, the conception of, 28, 29, 30, 
 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 46, 47, 64, 
 65, 80, 100, 101, 108, 123, 127, 
 131, 158, 162, 189, 262, 263, 289, 
 301. 
 
 Molecules, 226 et seq. 
 
 Motion, 212. 
 
 MuUer, Johannes, 144, 246, 247, 
 253. 
 
 Munsterberg, 145 ; his Psychology 
 and Life, 88, 149, 150, 151. 
 
 Mystics, the, 18. 
 
 Nature, the object world of, 304. 
 Nature, the realm of, 174. 
 Natur-Philosophie of the Germans, 
 
 184-188. 
 Newman, Cardinal, and the 
 
 "Science of God," 3. 
 Newton, 186, 203, 204, 219. 
 
 Object, the relation of, to Subject, 
 
 32, 37, 38, 57, 79, 98, 305. 
 Objectivity, meaning of, 58. 
 
 Pattison, Prof. Pringle, 121, 122, 
 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 135, 137, 
 145. 
 
 "Permanent Possibilities of Sensa- 
 tions," 26 ; Mill's system of, 72, 
 158. 
 
 Personality, 130, 131, 133, 279. 
 
 Pfluger, Prof., 251. 
 
 Philosophy, 80 ; the progress of, 10, 
 
 11, 12, 110 ; the aim of, 13, 63, 
 
 114. 
 Physical Science, the conceptions of, 
 
 211 ; the field of, 229. 
 Plato, 11, 36, 52, 89, 169, 308 ; the 
 
 Thecetetus of, 51, 189. 
 " Presentationism," 151. 
 Projective Geometry, 209. 
 Protagoras, 51. 
 Protoplasm, 252. 
 Protozoa, 272. 
 Psychology, the advance of, 5, 143, 
 
 146 et seq. 
 Psychophysics, 148. 
 Purposive action, 256, 285, 
 Pythagoreans, the, 205. 
 
 Quantity, 200 et seq., 235. 
 Quasi-purposive action, 252, 257, 
 285. 
 
 Reality, the nature of, 3 et seq., 77, 
 
 80, 135. 
 Reason, 7, 8, 57, 73, 99, 125, 137, 
 
 138 ; essential to religion, 132. 
 Reasoning, the process of, 296. 
 Reflection, 84 ; the source of our 
 
 knowledge of the object world, 
 
 27, 131, 171. 
 Reflex action, the phenomena of, 285. 
 Beligio Medici, Sir Thomas 
 
 Browne's, 274, 275. 
 Royce of Harvard, Prof., 145 ; and 
 
 idealism, 69 ; and reason, 132, 
 
 133-136, 310. 
 
 Scepticism, 73. 
 
 Sceptics, the, 36. 
 
 Science, 190; the progress of, 4 ; the 
 
 methods of, 174, 192. 
 Schleiden, 144, 249, 251. 
 Schopenhauer, the influence of, 140, 
 
 141. 
 Schwann, 144, 248, 249, 251. 
 
316 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Self, the, 106, 107, 108, 130-136, Thought, 48, 49, 84, 85, 109-111, 120, 
 
 125, 168, 293, 297, 298, 300, 301. 
 Time, 197 et seq. 
 Trendelenburg, 121. 
 Treves, Sir Frederick, 274. 
 Truth, nature of the standard of, 8, 
 
 9, 10. 
 
 148, 154. 159, 283, 286. 
 
 Self-Consciousness, 112, 113, 129, 
 236,307. 
 
 Sensations, the, 24, 25, 26 ; the 
 nature of, 27, 28, 29. 
 
 Shakespeare, 186. 
 
 Sigwart, 143. 
 
 " Solipism," the doctrine of, 24. 
 
 Soul, the, 264, 286, 287, 290 ; Universe, the, nature of, 48, 49, 
 origin of the life of, 153, 155. 
 
 Space, 197 et seq. 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, 267. 
 
 Spinoza, 129. 
 
 Spirit, 80. 
 
 Stirling, Dr Hutchison, 124. 
 
 Subject, meaning of the expression, 
 21, 57, 79. 
 
 Substance, meaning of the expres- 
 sion, 20, 37, 39. 
 
 Superstitions of common sense, 118, 
 173. 
 
 Universal, the, 52-56, 59, 60, 80. 
 
 Varieties of Religious Experience, 
 
 the, 5. 
 Virchow, 250, 251. 
 Vitalism, 241. 
 Vortex rings, the theory of, 220. 
 
 Tait, Prof., 185; his "Recent 
 
 "Ward, Prof., 86. 
 
 Will, 141, 298. 
 
 WUl and the Intellect, distinction 
 
 between, 127, 128, 133, 285. 
 Willing, 297. 
 " Wonder," the source of Aristotle's, 
 
 7. 
 
 Advances in Physical Science," Wordsworth, 19, 170. 
 
 230 (note). World around us, the, reality of, 22, 
 Tempest, Shakespeare's, 74. 30, 31, 58, 119, 145, 214. 
 
 Theism, Prof. Pringle Pattison's, 125. World spirit, the, 122. 
 
 FBHiTXS BT OLIVER AND BOYD, BDIHBUBOH.