Where, in such a world as this, is there room for mind, and what can we mean by mind? Democritus finds a place for mind by conceiving it to consist of fine, smooth, round atoms, which are the same as the atoms which constitute fire. These are distributed through the whole body, and lie among the other atoms which compose it. They are inhaled with and exhaled into the outer air. While they are in the body their functions are different according as they are located in this organ or in that. In the brain they give rise to thought, in the heart to anger, and in the liver to desire.

I suppose no one would care, at the present time, to become a Democritean. The "Reason," which tells us that the mind consists of fine, round atoms, appears to have nothing but its bare word to offer us. But, apart from this, a peculiar difficulty seems to face us; even supposing there are atoms of fire in the brain, the heart, and the liver, what are the thought, anger, and desire, of which mention is made?

Shall we conceive of these last as atoms, as void space, or as the motion of atoms? There really seems to be no place in the world for them, and these are the mind so far as the mind appears to be revealed—they are mental phenomena. It does not seem that they are to be identified with anything that the Atomistic doctrine admits as existing. They are simply overlooked.

Is the modern materialism more satisfactory? About half a century ago there was in the scientific world something like a revival of materialistic thinking. It did not occur to any one to maintain that the mind consists of fine atoms disseminated through the body, but statements almost as crude were made. It was said, for example, that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.

It seems a gratuitous labor to criticise such statements as these in detail. There are no glands the secretions of which are not as unequivocally material as are the glands themselves. This means that such secretions can be captured and analyzed; the chemical elements of which they are composed can be enumerated. They are open to inspection in precisely the same way as are the glands which secrete them.

Does it seem reasonable to maintain that thoughts and feelings are related to brains in this way? Does the chemist ever dream of collecting them in a test tube, and of drawing up for us a list of their constituent elements? When the brain is active, there are, to be sure, certain material products which pass into the blood and are finally eliminated from the body; but among these products no one would be more surprised than the materialist to discover pains and pleasures, memories and anticipations, desires and volitions. This talk of thought as a "secretion" we can afford to set aside.

Nor need we take much more seriously the seemingly more sober statement that thought is a "function" of the brain. There is, of course, a sense in which we all admit the statement; minds are not disembodied, and we have reason to believe that mind and brain are most intimately related. But the word "function" is used in a very broad and loose sense when it serves to indicate this relation; and one may employ it in this way without being a materialist at all. In a stricter sense of the word, the brain has no functions that may not be conceived as mechanical changes,—as the motion of atoms in space,—and to identify mental phenomena with these is inexcusable. It is not theoretically inconceivable that, with finer senses, we might directly perceive the motions of the atoms in another man's brain; it is inconceivable that we should thus directly perceive his melancholy or his joy; they belong to another world.

56. SPIRITUALISM.—The name Spiritualism is sometimes given to the doctrine that there is no existence which we may not properly call mind or spirit. It errs in the one direction as materialism errs in the other.

One must not confound with this doctrine that very different one, Spiritism, which teaches that a certain favored class of persons called mediums may bring back the spirits of the departed and enable us to hold communication with them. Such beliefs have always existed among the common people, but they have rarely interested philosophers. I shall have nothing to say of them in this book.

There have been various kinds of spiritualists. The name may be applied to the idealists, from Berkeley down to those of our day; at some of the varieties of their doctrine we have taken a glance (sections 49, 53). To these we need not recur; but there is one type of spiritualistic doctrine which is much discussed at the present day and which appears to appeal strongly to a number of scientific men. We must consider it for a moment.

We have examined Professor Clifford's doctrine of Mind-stuff (section 43). Clifford maintained that all the material things we perceive are our perceptions—they are in our consciousness, and are not properly external at all. But, believing, as he did, that all nature is animated, he held that every material thing, every perception, may be taken as a revelation of something not in our consciousness, of a mind or, at least, of a certain amount of mind-stuff. How shall we conceive the relation between what is in our mind and the something corresponding to it not in our mind?

We must, says Clifford, regard the latter as the reality of which the former is the appearance or manifestation. "What I perceive as your brain is really in itself your consciousness, is You; but then that which I call your brain, the material fact, is merely my perception."

This doctrine is Panpsychism, in the form in which it is usually brought to our attention. It holds that the only real existences are minds, and that physical phenomena must be regarded as the manifestations under which these real existences make us aware of their presence. The term panpsychism may, it is true, be used in a somewhat different sense. It may be employed merely to indicate the doctrine that all nature is animated, and without implying a theory as to the relation between bodies perceived and the minds supposed to accompany them.

What shall we say to panpsychism of the type represented by Clifford? It is, I think, sufficiently answered in the earlier chapters of this volume:—

(1) If I call material facts my perceptions, I do an injustice to the distinction between the physical and the mental (Chapter IV).

(2) If I say that all nature is animated, I extend illegitimately the argument for other minds (Chapter X).

(3) If I say that mind is the reality of which the brain is the appearance, I misconceive what is meant by the distinction between appearance and reality (Chapter V).

57. THE DOCTRINE OF THE ONE SUBSTANCE.—In the seventeenth century Descartes maintained that, although mind and matter may justly be regarded as two substances, yet it should be recognized that they are not really independent substances in the strictest sense of the word, but that there is only one substance, in this sense, and mind and matter are, as it were, its attributes.

His thought was that by attribute we mean that which is not independent, but must be referred to something else; by substance, we mean that which exists independently and is not referred to any other thing. It seemed to follow that there could be only one substance.

Spinoza modified Descartes' doctrine in that he refused to regard mind and matter as substances at all. He made them unequivocally attributes of the one and only substance, which he called God.

The thought which influenced Spinoza had impressed many minds before his time, and it has influenced many since. One need not follow him in naming the unitary something to which mind and matter are referred substance. One may call it Being, or Reality, or the Unknowable, or Energy, or the Absolute, or, perhaps, still something else. The doctrine has taken many forms, but he who reads with discrimination will see that the various forms have much in common.

They agree in maintaining that matter and mind, as they are revealed in our experience, are not to be regarded as, in the last analysis, two distinct kinds of thing. They are, rather, modes or manifestations of one and the same thing, and this is not to be confounded with either.

Those who incline to this doctrine take issue with the materialist, who assimilates mental phenomena to physical; and they oppose the idealist, who assimilates physical phenomena to mental, and calls material things "ideas." We have no right, they argue, to call that of which ideas and things are manifestations either mind or matter. It is to be distinguished from both.

To this doctrine the title of Monism is often appropriated. In this chapter I have used the term in a broader sense, for both the materialist and the spiritualist maintain that there is in the universe but one kind of thing. Nevertheless, when we hear a man called a monist without qualification, we may, perhaps, be justified in assuming, in the absence of further information, that he holds to some one of the forms of doctrine indicated above. There may be no logical justification for thus narrowing the use of the term, but logical justification goes for little in such matters.

Various considerations have moved men to become monists in this sense of the word. Some have been influenced by the assumption—one which men felt impelled to make early in the history of speculative thought—that the whole universe must be the expression of some unitary principle. A rather different argument is well illustrated in the writings of Professor Hoeffding, a learned and acute writer of our own time. It has influenced so many that it is worth while to delay upon it.

Professor Hoeffding holds that mental phenomena and physical phenomena must be regarded as parallel (see Chapter IX), and that we must not conceive of ideas and material things as interacting. He writes:[1]—

"If it is contrary to the doctrine of the persistence of physical energy to suppose a transition from the one province to the other, and if, nevertheless, the two provinces exist in our experience as distinct, then the two sets of phenomena must be unfolded simultaneously, each according to its laws, so that for every phenomenon in the world of consciousness there is a corresponding phenomenon in the world of matter, and conversely (so far as there is reason to suppose that conscious life is correlated with material phenomena). The parallels already drawn point directly to such a relation; it would be an amazing accident, if, while the characteristic marks repeated themselves in this way, there were not at the foundation an inner connection. Both the parallelism and the proportionality between the activity of consciousness and cerebral activity point to an identity at bottom. The difference which remains in spite of the points of agreement compels us to suppose that one and the same principle has found its expression in a double form. We have no right to take mind and body for two beings or substances in reciprocal interaction. We are, on the contrary, impelled to conceive the material interaction between the elements composing the brain and nervous system as an outer form of the inner ideal unity of consciousness. What we in our inner experience become conscious of as thought, feeling, and resolution, is thus represented in the material world by certain material processes of the brain, which as such are subject to the law of the persistence of energy, although this law cannot be applied to the relation between cerebral and conscious processes. It is as though the same thing were said in two languages."

Some monists are in the habit of speaking of the one Being to which they refer phenomena of all sorts as the "Absolute." The word is a vague one, and means very different things in different philosophies. It has been somewhat broadly defined as "the ultimate principle of explanation of the universe." He who turns to one principle of explanation will conceive the Absolute in one way, and he who turns to another will, naturally, understand something else by the word.

Thus, the idealist may conceive of the Absolute as an all-inclusive Mind, of which finite minds are parts. To Spencer, it is the Unknowable, a something behind the veil of phenomena. Sometimes it means to a writer much the same thing that the word God means to other men; sometimes it has a significance at the farthest remove from this (section 53). Indeed, the word is so vague and ambiguous, and has proved itself the mother of so many confusions, that it would seem a desirable thing to drop it out of philosophy altogether, and to substitute for it some less ambiguous expression.

It seems clear from the preceding pages, that, before one either accepts or rejects monism, one should very carefully determine just what one means by the word, and should scrutinize the considerations which may be urged in favor of the particular doctrine in question. There are all sorts of monism, and men embrace them for all sorts of reasons. Let me beg the reader to bear in mind;—

(1) The monist may be a materialist; he may be an idealist; he may be neither. In the last case, he may, with Spinoza, call the one Substance God; that is, he may be a Pantheist. On the other hand, he may, with Spencer, call it the Unknowable, and be an Agnostic. Other shades of opinion are open to him, if he cares to choose them.

(2) It does not seem wise to assent hastily to such statements as; "The universe is the manifestation of one unitary Being"; or: "Mind and matter are the expression of one and the same principle." We find revealed in our experience mental phenomena and physical phenomena. In what sense they are one, or whether they are one in any sense,—this is something to be determined by an examination of the phenomena and of the relations in which we find them. It may turn out that the universe is one only in the sense that all phenomena belong to the one orderly system. If we find that this is the case, we may still, if we choose, call our doctrine monism, but we should carefully distinguish such a monism from those represented by Hoeffding and Spencer and many others. There seems little reason to use the word, when the doctrine has been so far modified.

58. DUALISM.—The plain man finds himself in a world of physical things and of minds, and it seems to him that his experience directly testifies to the existence of both. This means that the things of which he has experience appear to belong to two distinct classes.

It does not mean, of course, that he has only two kinds of experiences. The phenomena which are revealed to us are indefinitely varied; all physical phenomena are not just alike, and all mental phenomena are not just alike.

Nevertheless, amid all the bewildering variety that forces itself upon our attention, there stands out one broad distinction, that of the physical and the mental. It is a distinction that the man who has done no reading in the philosophers is scarcely tempted to obliterate; to him the world consists of two kinds of things widely different from each other; minds are not material things and material things are not minds. We are justified in regarding this as the opinion of the plain man even when we recognize that, in his endeavor to make clear to himself what he means by minds, he sometimes speaks as though he were talking about something material or semi-material.

Now, the materialist allows these two classes to run together; so does the idealist. The one says that everything is matter; the other, that everything is mind. It would be foolish to maintain that nothing can be said for either doctrine, for men of ability have embraced each. But one may at least say that both seem to be refuted by our common experience of the world, an experience which, so far as it is permitted to testify at all, lifts up its voice in favor of Dualism.

Dualism is sometimes defined as the doctrine that there are in the world two kinds of substances, matter and mind, which are different in kind and should be kept distinct. There are dualists who prefer to avoid the use of the word substance, and to say that the world of our experiences consists of physical phenomena and of mental phenomena, and that these two classes of facts should be kept separate.

The dualist may maintain that we have a direct knowledge of matter and of mind, and he may content himself with such a statement, doing little to make clear what we mean by matter and by mind. In this case, his position is little different from that of the plain man who does not attempt to philosophize. Thomas Reid (section 50) belongs to this class.

On the other hand, the dualist may attempt to make clear, through philosophical reflection, what we mean by the matter and mind which experience seems to give us. He may conclude:—

(1) That he must hold, as did Sir William Hamilton, that we perceive directly only physical and mental phenomena, but are justified in inferring that, since the phenomena are different, there must be two kinds of underlying substances to which the phenomena are referred. Thus, he may distinguish between the two substances and their manifestations, as some monists distinguish between the one substance and its manifestations.

(2) Or he may conclude that it is futile to search for substances or realities of any sort behind phenomena, arguing that such realities are never revealed in experience, and that no sound reason for their assumption can be adduced. In this case, he may try to make plain what mind and matter are, by simply analyzing our experiences of mind and matter and coming to a clearer comprehension of their nature.

As the reader has probably remarked, the philosophy presented in the earlier chapters of this book (Chapters III to XI) is dualistic as well as realistic. That is to say, it refuses to rub out the distinction between physical phenomena and mental phenomena, either by dissolving the material world into ideas; by calling ideas secretions or functions of the brain; or by declaring them one in a fictitious entity behind the veil and not supposed to be exactly identical with either. And as it teaches that the only reality that it means anything to talk about must be found in experience, it is a dualism of the type described in the paragraph which immediately precedes.

Such a philosophy does not seem to do violence to the common experience of minds and of physical things shared by us all, whether we are philosophers or are not. It only tries to make clear what we all know dimly and vaguely. This is, I think, a point in its favor. However, men of great ability and of much learning have inclined to doctrines very different; and we have no right to make up our minds on such a subject as this without trying to give them an attentive and an impartial hearing.

59. SINGULARISM AND PLURALISM.—There are those who apply to the various forms of monism the title Singularism, and who contrast with this Pluralism, a word which is meant to cover the various doctrines which maintain that there is more than one ultimate principle or being in the universe.

It is argued that we should have some word under which we may bring such a doctrine, for example, as that of the Greek philosopher Empedocles (born about 490 B.C.). This thinker made earth, water, fire, and air the four material principles or "roots" of things. He was not a monist, and we can certainly not call him a dualist.

Again. The term pluralism has been used to indicate the doctrine that individual finite minds are not parts or manifestations of one all-embracing Mind,—of God or the Absolute,—but are relatively independent beings. This doctrine has been urged in our own time, with eloquence and feeling, by Professor Howison.[2] Here we have a pluralism which is idealistic, for it admits in the universe but one kind of thing, minds; and yet refuses to call itself monistic. It will readily be seen that in this paragraph and in the one preceding the word is used in different senses.

I have added the above sentences to this chapter that the reader may have an explanation of the meaning of a word sometimes met with. But the title of the chapter is "Monism and Dualism," and it is of this contrast that it is especially important to grasp the significance.

[1] "Outlines of Psychology," pp. 64-65, English translation, 1891.

[2] "The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays," revised edition. New York, 1905.



CHAPTER XV

RATIONALISM, EMPIRICISM, CRITICISM, AND CRITICAL EMPIRICISM

60. RATIONALISM.—As the content of a philosophical doctrine must be determined by the initial assumptions which a philosopher makes and by the method which he adopts in his reasonings, it is well to examine with some care certain broad differences in this respect which characterize different philosophers, and which help to explain how it is that the results of their reflections are so startlingly different.

I shall first speak of Rationalism, which I may somewhat loosely define as the doctrine that the reason can attain truths independently of observation—can go beyond experienced fact and the deductions which experience seems to justify us in making from experienced fact. The definition cannot mean much to us until it is interpreted by a concrete example, and I shall turn to such. It must, however, be borne in mind that the word "rationalism" is meant to cover a great variety of opinions, and we have said comparatively little about him when we have called a man a rationalist in philosophy. Men may agree in believing that the reason can go beyond experienced fact, and yet may differ regarding the particular truths which may be thus attained.

Now, when Descartes found himself discontented with the philosophy that he and others had inherited from the Middle Ages, and undertook a reconstruction, he found it necessary to throw over a vast amount of what had passed as truth, if only with a view to building up again upon a firmer foundation. It appeared to him that much was uncritically accepted as true in philosophy and in the sciences which a little reflection revealed to be either false or highly doubtful. Accordingly, he decided to clear the ground by a sweeping doubt, and to begin his task quite independently.

In accordance with this principle, he rejected the testimony of the senses touching the existence of a world of external things. Do not the senses sometimes deceive us? And, since men seem to be liable to error in their reasonings, even in a field so secure as that of mathematical demonstration, he resolved further to repudiate all the reasonings he had heretofore accepted. He would not even assume himself to be in his right mind and awake; might he not be the victim of a diseased fancy, or a man deluded by dreams?

Could anything whatever escape this all-devouring doubt? One truth seemed unshakable: his own existence, at least, emerged from this sea of uncertainties. I may be deceived in thinking that there is an external world, and that I am awake and really perceive things; but I surely cannot be deceived unless I exist. Cogito, ergo sum—I think, hence I exist; this truth Descartes accepted as the first principle of the new and sounder philosophy which he sought.

As we read farther in Descartes we discover that he takes back again a great many of those things that he had at the outset rejected as uncertain. Thus, he accepts an external world of material things. How does he establish its existence? He cannot do it as the empiricist does it, by a reference to experienced fact, for he does not believe that the external world is directly given in our experience. He thinks we are directly conscious only of our ideas of it, and must somehow prove that it exists over against our ideas.

By his principles, Descartes is compelled to fall back upon a curious roundabout argument to prove that there is a world. He must first prove that God exists, and then argue that God would not deceive us into thinking that it exists when it does not.

Now, when we come to examine Descartes' reasonings in detail we find what appear to us some very uncritical assumptions. Thus, he proves the existence of God by the following argument:—

I exist, and I find in me the idea of God; of this idea I cannot be the author, for it represents something much greater than I, and its cause must be as great as the reality it represents. In other words, nothing less than God can be the cause of the idea of God which I find in me, and, hence, I may infer that God exists.

Where did Descartes get this notion that every idea must have a cause which contains as much external reality as the idea does represented reality? How does he prove his assumption? He simply appeals to what he calls "the natural light," which is for him a source of all sorts of information which cannot be derived from experience. This "natural light" furnishes him with a vast number of "eternal truths", these he has not brought under the sickle of his sweeping doubt, and these help him to build up again the world he has overthrown, beginning with the one indubitable fact discussed above.

To the men of a later time many of Descartes' eternal truths are simply inherited philosophical prejudices, the results of the reflections of earlier thinkers, and in sad need of revision. I shall not criticise them in detail. The important point for us to notice is that we have here a type of philosophy which depends upon truths revealed by the reason, independently of experience, to carry one beyond the sphere of experience.

I again remind the reader that there are all sorts of rationalists, in the philosophical sense of the word. Some trust the power of the unaided reason without reserve. Thus Spinoza, the pantheist, made the magnificent but misguided attempt to deduce the whole system of things physical and things mental from what he called the attributes of God, Extension and Thought.

On the other hand, one may be a good deal of an empiricist, and yet something of a rationalist, too. Thus Professor Strong, in his recent brilliant book, "Why the Mind has a Body," maintains that we know intuitively that other minds than our own exist; know it without gathering our information from experience, and without having to establish the fact in any way. This seems, at least, akin to the doctrine of the "natural light," and yet no one can say that Professor Strong does not, in general, believe in a philosophy of observation and experiment.

61. EMPIRICISM.—I suppose every one who has done some reading in the history of philosophy will, if his mother tongue be English, think of the name of John Locke when empiricism is mentioned.

Locke, in his "Essay concerning Human Understanding," undertakes "to inquire into the original, certainty, and extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent." His sober and cautious work, which was first published in 1690, was peculiarly English in character; and the spirit which it exemplifies animates also Locke's famous successors, George Berkeley (1684-1753), David Hume (1711-1776), and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). Although Locke was a realist, Berkeley an idealist, Hume a skeptic, and Mill what has been called a sensationalist; yet all were empiricists of a sort, and emphasized the necessity of founding our knowledge upon experience.

Now, Locke was familiar with the writings of Descartes, whose work he admired, but whose rationalism offended him. The first book of the "Essay" is devoted to the proof that there are in the mind of man no "innate ideas" and no "innate principles." That is to say, Locke tries to show that one must not seek, in the "natural light" to which Descartes turned, a distinct and independent source of information,

"Let us, then," he continues, "suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it, with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer in one word, from experience; in that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation, employed either about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring." [1]

Thus, all we know and all we ever shall know of the world of matter and of minds must rest ultimately upon observation,—observation of external things and of our own mind. We must clip the erratic wing of a "reason" which seeks to soar beyond such knowledge; which leaves the solid earth, and hangs suspended in the void.

"But hold," exclaims the critical reader; "have we not seen that Locke, as well as Descartes (section 48), claims to know what he cannot prove by direct observation or even by a legitimate inference from what has been directly observed? Does he not maintain that the mind has an immediate knowledge or experience only of its own ideas? How can he prove that there are material extended things outside causing these ideas? And if he cannot prove it by an appeal to experience, to direct observation, is he not, in accepting the existence of the external world at all, just as truly as Descartes, a rationalist?"

The objection is well taken. On his own principles, Locke had no right to believe in an external world. He has stolen his world, so to speak; he has taken it by violence. Nevertheless, as I pointed out in the section above referred to, Locke is not a rationalist of malice prepense. He tries to be an empiricist. He believes in the external world because he thinks it is directly revealed to the senses—he inconsistently refers to experience as evidence of its existence.

It has often been claimed by those who do not sympathize with empiricism that the empiricists make assumptions much as others do, but have not the grace to admit it. I think we must frankly confess that a man may try hard to be an empiricist and may not be wholly successful. Moreover, reflection forces us to the conclusion that when we have defined empiricism as a doctrine which rests throughout upon an appeal to "experience" we have not said anything very definite.

What is experience? What may we accept as directly revealed fact? The answer to such questions is far from an easy one to give. It is a harder matter to discuss intelligently than any one can at all realize until he has spent some years in following the efforts of the philosophers to determine what is "revealed fact." We are supposed to have experience of our own minds, of space, of time, of matter. What are these things as revealed in our experience? We have seen in the earlier chapters of this book that one cannot answer such questions off-hand.

62. CRITICISM.—I have in another chapter (section 51) given a brief account of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. He called his doctrine "Criticism," and he distinguished it from "Dogmatism" and "Empiricism."

Every philosophy that transcends experience, without first critically examining our faculty of knowledge and determining its right to spread its wings in this way, Kant calls "dogmatism." The word seems rather an offensive one, in its usual signification, at least; and it is as well not to use it. As Kant used the word, Descartes was a dogmatist; but let us rather call him a rationalist. He certainly had no intention of proceeding uncritically, as we shall see a little later. If we call him a dogmatist we seem to condemn him in advance, by applying to him an abusive epithet.

Empiricism, according to Kant, confines human knowledge to experience, and thus avoids the errors which beset the dogmatist. But then, as Hume seemed to have shown, empiricism must run out into skepticism. If all our knowledge has its foundations in experience, how can we expect to find in our possession any universal or necessary truths? May not a later experience contradict an earlier? How can we be sure that what has been will be? Can we know that there is anything fixed and certain in our world?

Skepticism seemed a forlorn doctrine, and, casting about for a way of escape from it, Kant hit upon the expedient which I have described. So long as we maintain that our knowledge has no other source than the experiences which the world imprints upon us, so to speak, from without, we are without the power of prediction, for new experiences may annihilate any generalizations we have founded upon those already vouchsafed us; but if we assume that the world upon which we gaze, the world of phenomena, is made what it is by the mind that perceives it, are we not in a different position?

Suppose, for example, we take the statement that there must be an adequate cause of all the changes that take place in the world. Can a mere experience of what has been in the past guarantee that this law will hold good in the future? But, when we realize that the world of which we are speaking is nothing more than a world of phenomena, of experiences, and realize further that this whole world is constructed by the mind out of the raw materials furnished by the senses, may we not have a greater confidence in our law? If it is the nature of the mind to connect the phenomena presented to it with one another as cause and effect, may we not maintain that no phenomenon can possibly make its appearance that defies the law in question? How could it appear except under the conditions laid upon all phenomena? If it is our nature to think the world as an orderly one, and if we can know no world save the one we construct ourselves, the orderliness of all the things we can know seems to be guaranteed to us.

It will be noticed that Kant's doctrine has a negative side. He limits our knowledge to phenomena, to experiences, and he is himself, in so far, an empiricist. But in that he finds in experience an order, an arrangement of things, not derived from experience in the usual sense of the word, he is not an empiricist. He has paid his own doctrine the compliment of calling it "criticism," as I have said.

Now, I beg the reader to be here, as elsewhere, on his guard against the associations which attach to words. In calling Kant's doctrine "the critical philosophy," we are in some danger of uncritically assuming and leading others to believe uncritically that it is free from such defects as may be expected to attach to "dogmatism" and to empiricism. Such a position should not be taken until one has made a most careful examination of each of the three types of doctrine, of the assumptions which it makes, and of the rigor with which it draws inferences upon the basis of such assumptions. That we may be the better able to withstand "undue influence," I call attention to the following points:—

(1) We must bear in mind that the attempt to make a critical examination into the foundations of our knowledge, and to determine its scope, is by no means a new thing. Among the Greeks, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the Skeptics, all attacked the problem. It did not, of course, present itself to these men in the precise form in which it presented itself to Kant, but each and all were concerned to find an answer to the question: Can we know anything with certainty; and, if so, what? They may have failed to be thoroughly critical, but they certainly made the attempt.

I shall omit mention of the long series of others, who, since that time, have carried on the tradition, and shall speak only of Descartes and Locke, whom I have above brought forward as representatives of the two types of doctrine that Kant contrasts with his own.

To see how strenuously Descartes endeavored to subject his knowledge to a critical scrutiny and to avoid unjustifiable assumptions of any sort, one has only to read that charming little work of genius, the "Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason."

In his youth Descartes was, as he informs us, an eager student; but, when he had finished the whole course of education usually prescribed, he found himself so full of doubts and errors that he did not feel that he had advanced in learning at all. Yet he had been well tutored, and was considered as bright in mind as others. He was led to judge his neighbor by himself, and to conclude that there existed no such certain science as he had been taught to suppose.

Having ripened with years and experience, Descartes set about the task of which I have spoken above, the task of sweeping away the whole body of his opinions and of attempting a general and systematic reconstruction. So important a work should be, he thought, approached with circumspection; hence, he formulated certain Rules of Method.

"The first," he writes, "was never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such; that is, carefully to avoid haste and prejudice, and to include nothing more in my judgments than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all reason for doubt."

Such was our philosopher's design, and such the spirit in which he set about it. We have seen the result above. It is as if Descartes had decided that a certain room full of people did not appear to be free from suspicious characters, and had cleared out every one, afterwards posting himself at the door to readmit only those who proved themselves worthy. When we examine those who succeeded in passing muster, we discover he has favored all his old friends. He simply cannot doubt them; are they not vouched for by the "natural light"? Nevertheless, we must not forget that Descartes sifted his congregation with much travail of spirit. He did try to be critical.

As for John Locke, he reveals in the "Epistle to the Reader," which stands as a preface to the "Essay," the critical spirit in which his work was taken up. "Were it fit to trouble thee," he writes, "with the history of this Essay, I should tell thee, that five or six friends meeting at my chamber, and discoursing on a subject very remote from this, found themselves quickly at a stand, by the difficulties that rose on every side. After we had a while puzzled ourselves, without coming any nearer a resolution of those doubts which perplexed us, it came into my thoughts, that we took a wrong course; and that before we set ourselves upon inquiries of that nature, it was necessary to examine our own abilities, and to see what objects our understandings were, or were not, fitted to deal with."

This problem, proposed by himself to his little circle of friends, Locke attacked with earnestness, and as a result he brought out many years later the work which has since become so famous. The book is literally a critique of the reason, although a very different critique from that worked out by Kant.

"If, by this inquiry into the nature of the understanding," says Locke, "I can discover the powers thereof, how far they reach, to what things they are in any degree proportionate, and where they fail us; I suppose it may be of use to prevail with the busy mind of man to be more cautious in meddling with things exceeding its comprehension; to stop when it is at the utmost extent of its tether; and to sit down in a quiet ignorance of those things which upon examination are found to be beyond the reach of our capacities." [2]

To the difficulties of the task our author is fully alive: "The understanding, like the eye, whilst it makes us see and perceive all other things, takes no notice of itself; and it requires art and pains to set it at a distance, and make it its own object. But whatever be the difficulties that lie in the way of this inquiry, whatever it be that keeps us so much in the dark to ourselves, sure I am that all the light we can let in upon our own minds, all the acquaintance we can make with our own understandings, will not only be very pleasant, but bring us great advantage, in directing our thoughts in the search, of other things." [3]

(2) Thus, many men have attempted to produce a critical philosophy, and in much the same sense as that in which Kant uses the words. Those who have come after them have decided that they were not sufficiently critical, that they have made unjustifiable assumptions. When we come to read Kant, we will, if we have read the history of philosophy with profit, not forget to ask ourselves if he has not sinned in the same way.

For example, we will ask;—

(a) Was Kant right in maintaining that we find in experience synthetic judgments (section 51) that are not founded upon experience, but yield such information as is beyond the reach of the empiricist? There are those who think that the judgments to which he alludes in evidence of his contention—the mathematical, for instance—are not of this character.

(b) Was he justified in assuming that all the ordering of our world is due to the activity of mind, and that merely the raw material is "given" us through the senses? There are many who demur against such a statement, and hold that it is, if not in all senses untrue, at least highly misleading, since it seems to argue that there is no really external world at all. Moreover, they claim that the doctrine is neither self-evident nor susceptible of proper proof.

(c) Was Kant justified in assuming that, even if we attribute the "form" or arrangement of the world we know to the native activity of the mind, the necessity and universality of our knowledge is assured? Let us grant that the proposition, whatever happens must have an adequate cause, is a "form of thought." What guarantee have we that the "forms of thought" must ever remain changeless? If it is an assumption for the empiricist to declare that what has been true in the past will be true in the future, that earlier experiences of the world will not be contradicted by later; what is it for the Kantian to maintain that the order which he finds in his experience will necessarily and always be the order of all future experiences? Transferring an assumption to the field of mind does not make it less of an assumption.

Thus, it does not seem unreasonable to charge Kant with being a good deal of a rationalist. He tried to confine our knowledge to the field of experience, it is true; but he made a number of assumptions as to the nature of experience which certainly do not shine by their own light, and which many thoughtful persons regard as incapable of justification.

Kant's famous successors in the German philosophy, Fichte (1762-1814), Schelling (1775-1854), Hegel (1770-1831), and Schopenhauer (1788-1860), all received their impulse from the "critical philosophy," and yet each developed his doctrine in a relatively independent way.

I cannot here take the space to characterize the systems of these men; I may merely remark that all of them contrast strongly in doctrine and method with the British philosophers mentioned in the last section, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Mill. They are un-empirical, if one may use such a word; and, to one accustomed to reading the English philosophy, they seem ever ready to spread their wings and hazard the boldest of flights without a proper realization of the thinness of the atmosphere in which they must support themselves.

However, no matter what may be one's opinion of the actual results attained by these German philosophers, one must frankly admit that no one who wishes to understand clearly the development of speculative thought can afford to dispense with a careful reading of them. Much even of the English philosophy of our own day must remain obscure to those who have not looked into their pages. Thus, the thought of Kant and Hegel molded the thought of Thomas Hill Green (1836-1882) and of the brothers Caird; and their influence has made itself widely felt both in England and in America. One cannot criticise intelligently books written from their standpoint, unless one knows how the authors came by their doctrine and out of what it has been developed.

63. CRITICAL EMPIRICISM.—We have seen that the trouble with the rationalists seemed to be that they made an appeal to "eternal truths," which those who followed them could not admit to be eternal truths at all. They proceeded on a basis of assumptions the validity of which was at once called in question.

Locke, the empiricist, repudiated all this, and then also made assumptions which others could not, and cannot, approve. Kant did something of much the same sort; we cannot regard his "criticism" as wholly critical.

How can we avoid such errors? How walk cautiously, and go around the pit into which, as it seems to us, others have fallen? I may as well tell the reader frankly that he sets his hope too high if he expects to avoid all error and to work out for himself a philosophy in all respects unassailable. The difficulties of reflective thought are very great, and we should carry with us a consciousness of that fact and a willingness to revise our most cherished conclusions.

Our initial difficulty seems to be that we must begin by assuming something, if only as material upon which to work. We must begin our philosophizing somewhere. Where shall we begin? May we not fall into error at the very outset?

The doctrine set forth in the earlier chapters of this volume maintains that we must accept as our material the revelation of the mind and the world which seems to be made in our common experience, and which is extended and systematized in the sciences. But it insists that we must regard such an acceptance as merely provisional, must subject our concepts to a careful criticism, and must always be on our guard against hasty assumptions.

It emphasizes the value of the light which historical study casts upon the real meaning of the concepts which we all use and must use, but which have so often proved to be stones of stumbling in the path of those who have employed them. Its watchword is analysis, always analysis; and a settled distrust of what have so often passed as "self-evident" truths. It regards it as its task to analyze experience, while maintaining that only the satisfactory carrying out of such an analysis can reveal what experience really is, and clear our notions of it from misinterpretations.

No such attempt to give an account of experience can be regarded as fundamentally new in its method. Every philosopher, in his own way, criticises experience, and seeks its interpretation. But one may, warned by the example of one's predecessors, lay emphasis upon the danger of half-analyses and hasty assumptions, and counsel the observance of sobriety and caution.

For convenience, I have called the doctrine Critical Empiricism. I warn the reader against the seductive title, and advise him not to allow it to influence him unduly in his judgment of the doctrine.

64. PRAGMATISM.—It seems right that I should, before closing this chapter, say a few words about Pragmatism, which has been so much discussed in the last few years.

In 1878 Mr. Charles S. Peirce wrote an article for the Popular Science Monthly in which he proposed as a maxim for the attainment of clearness of apprehension the following: "Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object."

This thought has been taken up by others and given a development which Mr. Peirce regards with some suspicion. He refers[4] especially to the development it has received at the hands of Professor William James, in his two essays, "The Will to Believe" and "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results." [5] Professor James is often regarded as foremost among the pragmatists.

I shall not attempt to define pragmatism, for I do not believe that the doctrine has yet attained to that definiteness of formulation which warrants a definition. We seem to have to do not so much with a clear-cut doctrine, the limits and consequences of which have been worked out in detail, as with a tendency which makes itself apparent in the works of various writers under somewhat different forms.

I may roughly describe it as the tendency to take that to be true which is useful or serviceable. It is well illustrated in the two essays to which reference is made above.

Thus, Professor James dwells upon the unsatisfactoriness and uncertainty of philosophical and scientific knowledge: "Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?"

Now, among those things regarding which it appears impossible to attain to intellectual certitude, there are matters of great practical moment, and which affect deeply the conduct of life; for example, the doctrines of religion. Here a merely skeptical attitude seems intolerable.

In such cases, argues Professor James, "we have the right to believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our will."

It is important to notice that there is no question here of a logical right. We are concerned with matters regarding which, according to Professor James, we cannot look for intellectual evidence. It is assumed that we believe simply because we choose to believe—we believe arbitrarily.

It is further important to notice that what is a "live" hypothesis to one man need not tempt the will of another man at all. As our author points out, a Turk would naturally will to believe one thing and a Christian would will to believe another. Each would will to believe what struck him as a satisfactory thing to believe.

What shall we say to this doctrine? I think we must say that it is clearly not a philosophical method of attaining to truth. Hence, it has not properly a place in this chapter among the attempts which have been made to attain to the truth of things.

It is, in fact, not concerned with truths, but with assumptions, and with assumptions which are supposed to be made on the basis of no evidence. It is concerned with "seemings."

The distinction is a very important one. Our Turk cannot, by willing to believe it, make his hypothesis true; but he can make it seem true. Why should he wish to make it seem true whether it is true or not? Why should he strive to attain to a feeling of subjective certainty, not by logically resolving his doubts, but by ignoring them?

The answer is given us by our author. He who lives in the midst of doubts, and refuses to cut his knot with the sword of belief, misses the good of life. This is a practical problem, and one of no small moment. In the last section of this book I have tried to indicate what it is wise for a man to do when he is confronted by doubts which he cannot resolve.

Into the general question whether even a false belief may not, under some circumstances, be more serviceable than no belief at all, I shall not enter. The point I wish to emphasize is that there is all the difference in the world between producing a belief and proving a truth.

We are compelled to accept it as a fact that men, under the influence of feeling, can believe in the absence of evidence, or, for that matter, can believe in spite of evidence. But a truth cannot be established in the absence of evidence or in the face of adverse evidence. And there is a very wide field in which it is made very clear to us that beliefs adopted in the absence of evidence are in danger of being false beliefs.

The pragmatist would join with the rest of us in condemning the Turk or the Christian who would simply will to believe in the rise or the fall of stocks, and would refuse to consult the state of the market. Some hypotheses are, in the ordinary course of events, put to the test of verification. We are then made painfully aware that beliefs and truths are quite distinct things, and may not be in harmony.

Now, the pragmatist does not apply his principle to this field. He confines it to what may not inaptly be called the field of the unverifiable. The Turk, who wills to believe in the hypothesis that appeals to him as a pious Turk, is in no such danger of a rude awakening as is the man who wills to believe that stocks will go up or down. But mark what this means: it means that he is not in danger of finding out what the truth really is. It does not mean that he is in possession of the truth.

So I say, the doctrine which we are discussing is not a method of attaining to truth. What it really attempts to do is to point out to us how it is prudent for us to act when we cannot discover what the truth is.[6]

[1] "An Essay concerning Human Understanding," Book II, Chapter I, section 2.

[2] Book I, Chapter I, section 4.

[3] Book I, Chapter I, section 1.

[4] "Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology," article "Pragmatism."

[5] Published in 1897 and 1898.

[6] For references to later developments of pragmatism, see the note on page 312.



V. THE PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES

CHAPTER XVI

LOGIC

65. INTRODUCTORY: THE PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES.—I have said in the first chapter of this book (section 6) that there is quite a group of sciences that are regarded as belonging peculiarly to the province of the teacher of philosophy to-day. Having, in the chapters preceding, given some account of the nature of reflective thought, of the problems touching the world and the mind which present themselves to those who reflect, and of some types of philosophical theory which have their origin in such reflection, I turn to a brief consideration of the philosophical sciences.

Among these I included logic, psychology, ethics, and aesthetics, metaphysics, and the history of philosophy. I did not include epistemology or "the theory of knowledge" as a separate discipline, and my reasons for this will appear in Chapter XIX. I remarked that, to complete the list, we should have to add the philosophy of religion and an investigation into the principles and methods of the sciences generally.

Why, it was asked, should this group of disciplines be regarded as the field of the philosopher, when others are excluded? The answer to this question which finds the explanation of the fact to lie in a mere historical accident was declared unsatisfactory, and it was maintained that the philosophical sciences are those in which we find ourselves carried back to the problems of reflective thought.

With a view to showing the truth of this opinion, I shall take up one by one the philosophical sciences. Of the history of philosophy I shall not speak in this part of the work, but shall treat of it in Chapter XXIII.

66. THE TRADITIONAL LOGIC.—Most of us begin our acquaintance with logic in the study of some such elementary manual as Jevons' "Lessons in Logic."

In such books we are shown how terms represent things and classes of things or their attributes, and how we unite them into propositions or statements. It is indicated at length what statements may be made on a basis of certain other statements and what may not; and emphasis is laid upon the dangers which arise out of a misunderstanding of the language in which we are forced to express our thoughts. Finally, there are described for us the experimental methods by which the workers in the sciences have attained to the general information about the world which has become our heritage.

Such books are useful. It is surely no small profit for a student to gain the habit of scrutinizing the steps by which he has come into the possession of a certain bit of information, and to have a quick eye for loose and inconsistent reasonings.

But it is worthy of remark that one may study such a book as this and yet remain pretty consistently on what may be called the plane of the common understanding. One seems to make the assumptions made in all the special sciences, e.g. the assumption that there is a world of real things and that we can know them and reason about them. We are not introduced to such problems as: What is truth? and Is any knowledge valid? Nor does it seem at once apparent that the man who is studying logic in this way is busying himself with a philosophical discipline.

67. THE "MODERN LOGIC."—It is very puzzling for the student to turn from such a text-book as the one above mentioned to certain others which profess to be occupied with the same science, and which, yet, appear to treat of quite different things.

Thus, in Dr. Bosanquet's little work on "The Essentials of Logic," the reader is at once plunged into such questions as the nature of knowledge, and what is meant by the real world. We seem to be dealing with metaphysics, and not with logic, as we have learned to understand the term. How is it that the logician comes to regard these things as within his province?

A multitude of writers at the present day are treating logic in this way, and in some great prominence is given to problems which the philosopher recognizes as indisputably his own. The term "modern logic" is often employed to denote a logic of this type; one which does not, after the fashion of the natural sciences generally, proceed on the basis of certain assumptions, and leave deeper questions to some other discipline, but tries to get to the bottom of things for itself. The tendency to run into metaphysics is peculiarly marked in those writers who have been influenced by the work of the philosopher Hegel.

I shall not here ask why those who belong to one school are more inclined to be metaphysical than are those who belong to another, but shall approach the broader question why the logicians generally are inclined to be more metaphysical than those who work in certain other special sciences, such as mathematics, for example. Of the general tendency there can be no question. The only problem is: Why does this tendency exist?

68. LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY.—Let us contrast the science of arithmetic with logic; and let us notice, regarding it, the following points:—

It is, like logic, a general science, in that the things treated of in many sciences may be numbered. It considers only a certain aspect of the things.

Now, that things may be counted, added together, subtracted, etc., is guaranteed by the experience of the plain man; and the methods of determining the numerical relations of things are gradually developed before his eyes, beginning with operations of great simplicity. Moreover, verification is possible, and within certain limits verification by direct inspection.

To this we may add, that there has gradually been built up a fine system of unambiguous symbols, and it is possible for a man to know just what he is dealing with.

Thus, a certain beaten path has been attained, and a man may travel this very well without having forced on his attention the problems of reflective thought. The knowledge of numbers with which he starts is sufficient equipment with which to undertake the journey. That one is on the right road is proved by the results one obtains. As a rule, disputes can be settled by well-tried mathematical methods.

There is, then, a common agreement as to initial assumptions and methods of work, and useful results are attained which seem to justify both. Here we have the normal characteristics of a special science.

We must not forget, however, that, even in the mathematical sciences, before a beaten path was attained, disputes as to the significance of numbers and the cogency of proofs were sufficiently common. And we must bear in mind that even to-day, where the beaten path does not seem wholly satisfactory, men seem to be driven to reflect upon the significance of their assumptions and the nature of their method.

Thus, we find it not unnatural that a man should be led to ask; What is a minus quantity really? Can anything be less than nothing? or that he should raise the questions: Can one rightly speak of an infinite number? Can one infinite number be greater than another, and, if so, what can greater mean? What are infinitesimals? and what can be meant by different orders of infinitesimals?

He who has interested himself in such questions as these has betaken himself to philosophical reflection. They are not answered by employing mathematical methods.

Let us now turn to logic. And let us notice, to begin with, that it is broader in its application than the mathematical sciences. It is concerned to discover what constitutes evidence in every field of investigation.

There is, it is true, a part of logic that may be developed somewhat after the fashion of mathematics. Thus, we may examine the two statements: All men are mortal, and Caesar is a man; and we may see clearly that, given the truth of these, we must admit that Caesar is mortal. We may make a list of possible inferences of this kind, and point out under what circumstances the truth of two statements implies the truth of a third, and under what circumstances the inference cannot be made. Our results can be set forth in a system of symbols. As in mathematics, we may abstract from the particular things reasoned about, and concern ourselves only with the forms of reasoning. This gives us the theory of the syllogism; it is a part of logic in which the mathematician is apt to feel very much at home.

But this is by no means all of logic. Let us consider the following points:—

(1) We are not concerned to know only what statements may be made on the basis of certain other statements. We want to know what is true and what is false. We must ask: Has a man the right to set up these particular statements and to reason from them? That some men accept as true premises which are repudiated by others is an undoubted fact. Thus, it is maintained by certain philosophers that we may assume that any view of the universe which is repellant to our nature cannot be true. Shall we allow this to pass unchallenged? And in ethics, some have held that it is under all circumstances wrong to lie; others have denied this, and have held that in certain cases—for example, to save life or to prevent great and unmerited suffering—lying is permissible. Shall we interest ourselves only in the deductions that each man makes from his assumed premises, and pay no attention to the truth of the premises themselves?

(2) Again. The vast mass of the reasonings that interest men are expressed in the language that we all use and not in special symbols. But language is a very imperfect instrument, and all sorts of misunderstandings are possible to those who express their thoughts in it.

Few men know exactly how much is implied in what they are saying. If I say: All men are mortal, and an angel is not a man; therefore, an angel is not mortal; it is not at once apparent to every one in what respect my argument is defective. He who argues: Feathers are light; light is contrary to darkness; hence, feathers are contrary to darkness; is convicted of error without difficulty. But arguments of the same kind, and quite as bad, are to be found in learned works on matters less familiar to us, and we often fail to detect the fallacy.

Thus, Herbert Spencer argues, in effect, in the fourth and fifth chapters of his "First Principles," as follows:—

We are conscious of the Unknowable, The Unknowable lies behind the veil of phenomena, Hence, we are conscious of what lies behind the veil of phenomena.

It is only the critical reader who notices that the Unknowable in the first line is the "raw material of consciousness," and the Unknowable in the second is something not in consciousness at all. The two senses of the word "light" are not more different from one another. Such apparent arguments abound, and it often requires much acuteness to be able to detect their fallacious character.

When we take into consideration the two points indicated above, we see that the logician is at every turn forced to reflect upon our knowledge as men do not ordinarily reflect. He is led to ask: What is truth? He cannot accept uncritically the assumptions which men make; and he must endeavor to become very clearly conscious of the real meaning and the whole meaning of statements expressed in words. Even in the simple logic with which we usually begin our studies, we learn to scrutinize statements in a reflective way; and when we go deeper, we are at once in contact with philosophical problems. It is evidently our task to attain to a clearer insight into the nature of our experience and the meaning of proof than is attainable by the unreflective.

Logic, then, is a reflective science, and it is not surprising that it has held its place as one of the philosophical sciences.



CHAPTER XVII

PSYCHOLOGY

69. PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY.—I think I have said enough in Chapter II (section 10) about what we mean when we speak of psychology as a natural science and as an independent discipline. Certainly there are many psychologists who would not care to be confused with the philosophers, and there are some that regard philosophy with suspicion.

Nevertheless, psychology is commonly regarded as belonging to the philosophical group. That this is the case can scarcely be thought surprising when we see how the psychologist himself speaks of the relation of his science to philosophy.

"I have kept," writes Professor James[1] in that delightful book which has become the common property of us all, "close to the point of view of natural science throughout the book. Every natural science assumes certain data uncritically, and declines to challenge the elements between which its own 'laws' obtain, and from which its own deductions are carried on. Psychology, the science of finite individual minds, assumes as its data (1) thoughts and feelings, and (2) a physical world in time and space with which they coexist, and which (3) they know. Of course, these data themselves are discussable; but the discussion of them (as of other elements) is called metaphysics and falls outside the province of this book."

This is an admirable statement of the scope of psychology as a natural science, and also of the relations of metaphysics to the sciences. But it would not be fair to Professor James to take this sentence alone, and to assume that, in his opinion, it is easy to separate psychology altogether from philosophy. "The reader," he tells us in the next paragraph, "will in vain seek for any closed system in the book. It is mainly a mass of descriptive details, running out into queries which only a metaphysics alive to the weight of her task can hope successfully to deal with." And in the opening sentence of the preface he informs us that some of his chapters are more "metaphysical" than is suitable for students going over the subject for the first time.

That the author is right in maintaining that it is not easy to draw a clear line between philosophy and psychology, and to declare the latter wholly independent, I think we must concede. An independent science should be sure of the things with which it is dealing. Where these are vague and indefinite, and are the subject of constant dispute, it cannot march forward with assurance. One is rather forced to go back and examine the data themselves. The beaten track of the special science has not been satisfactorily constructed.

We are forced to admit that the science of psychology has not yet emerged from the state in which a critical examination of its foundations is necessary, and that the construction of the beaten path is still in progress. This I shall try to make clear by illustrations.

The psychologist studies the mind, and his ultimate appeal must be to introspection, to a direct observation of mental phenomena, and of their relations to external things. Now, if the observation of mental phenomena were a simple and an easy thing; if the mere fact that we are conscious of sensations and ideas implied that we are clearly conscious of them and are in a position to describe them with accuracy, psychology would be a much more satisfactory science than it is.

But we are not thus conscious of our mental life. We can and do use our mental states without being able to describe them accurately. In a sense, we are conscious of what is there, but our consciousness is rather dim and vague, and in our attempts to give an account of it we are in no little danger of giving a false account.

Thus, the psychologist assumes that we perceive both physical phenomena and mental—the external world and the mind. He takes it for granted that we perceive mental phenomena to be related to physical. He is hardly in a position to make this assumption, and then to set it aside as a thing he need not further consider. Does he not tell us, as a result of his investigations, that we can know the external world only as it is reflected in our sensations, and thus seem to shut the mind up within the circle of mental phenomena merely, cutting off absolutely a direct knowledge of what is extra-mental? If we can know only mental phenomena, the representatives of things, at first hand, how can we tell that they are representatives? and what becomes of the assumption that we perceive that mind is related to an external world?

It may be said, this problem the psychologist may leave to the metaphysician. Certainly, it is one of those problems that the metaphysician discusses; it has been treated in Chapter IV. But my contention is, that he who has given no thought to the matter may easily fall into error as to the very nature of mental phenomena.

For example, when we approach or recede from a physical object we have a series of experiences which are recognized as sensational. When we imagine a tree or a house we are also experiencing a mental phenomenon. All these experiences seem plainly to have extension in some sense of the word. We appear to perceive plainly part out of part. In so far, these mental things seem to resemble the physical things which we contrast with what is mental. Shall we say that, because these things are mental and not physical, their apparent extension is a delusion? Shall we say that they really have no parts? Such considerations have impelled psychologists of eminence to maintain, in flat contradiction to what seems to be the unequivocal testimony of direct introspection, that the total content of consciousness at any moment must be looked upon as an indivisible, part-less unit.

We cannot, then, depend merely on direct introspection. It is too uncertain in its deliverances. If we would make clear to ourselves what mental phenomena really are, and how they differ from physical phenomena, we must fall back upon the reflective analysis of our experience which occupies the metaphysician (section 34). Until we have done this, we are in great danger of error. We are actually uncertain of our materials.

Again. The psychologist speaks of the relation of mind and body. Some psychologists incline to be parallelists, some are warm advocates of interactionism. Now, any theory of the relation of mind to body must depend on observation ultimately. If we had not direct experience of a relation between the physical and the mental somewhere, no hypothesis on the subject would ever have emerged.

But our experiences are not perfectly clear and unequivocal to us. Their significance does not seem to be easily grasped. To comprehend it one is forced to that reflective examination of experience which is characteristic of the philosopher (Chapter IX).

Here it may again be said: Leave the matter to the meta-physician and go on with your psychological work. I answer: The psychologist is not in the same position as the botanist or the zooelogist. He is studying mind in its relation to body. It cannot but be unsatisfactory to him to leave that relation wholly vague; and, as a matter of fact, he usually takes up with one theory or another. We have seen (section 36) that he may easily adopt a theory that leads him to overlook the great difference between physical phenomena and mental phenomena, and to treat them as though they were the same. This one may do in spite of all that introspection has to say about the gulf that separates them.

Psychology is, then, very properly classed among the philosophical sciences. The psychologist is not sufficiently sure of his materials to be able to dispense with reflective thought, in many parts of his field. Some day there may come to be a consensus of opinion touching fundamental facts, and the science may become more independent. A beaten track may be attained; but that has not yet been done.

70. THE DOUBLE AFFILIATION OF PSYCHOLOGY.—In spite of what has been said above, we must not forget that psychology is a relatively independent science. One may be a useful psychologist without knowing much about philosophy.

As in logic it is possible to write a text-book not greatly different in spirit and method from text-books concerned with the sciences not classed as philosophical, so it is possible to make a useful study of mental phenomena without entering upon metaphysical analyses. In science, as in common life, we can use concepts without subjecting them to careful analysis.

Thus, our common experience reveals that mind and body are connected. We may, for a specific purpose, leave the nature of this connection vague, and may pay careful attention to the physiological conditions of mental phenomena, studying in detail the senses and the nervous system. We may, further, endeavor to render our knowledge of mental phenomena more full and accurate by experimentation. In doing this we may be compelled to make use of elaborate apparatus. Of such mechanical aids to investigation our psychological laboratories are full.

It is to such work as this that we owe what is called the "physiological" and the "experimental" psychology. One can carry on such investigations without being a metaphysician. But one can scarcely carry them on without having a good knowledge of certain sciences not commonly supposed to be closely related to psychology at all. Thus, one should be trained in chemistry and physics and physiology, and should have a working knowledge of laboratory methods. Moreover, it is desirable to have a sufficient knowledge of mathematics to enable one to handle experimental data.

The consideration of such facts as these sometimes leads men to raise the question: Should psychology affiliate with philosophy or with the physical sciences? The issue is an illegitimate one. Psychology is one of the philosophical sciences, and cannot dispense with reflection; but that is no reason why it should not acknowledge a close relation to certain physical sciences as well. Parts of the field can be isolated, and one may work as one works in the natural sciences generally; but if one does nothing more, one's concepts remain unanalyzed, and, as we have seen in the previous section, there is some danger of actual misconception.

[1] "Psychology," Preface.



CHAPTER XVIII

ETHICS AND AESTHETICS

71. COMMON SENSE ETHICS.—We may, if we choose, study the actions of men merely with a view to ascertaining what they are and describing them accurately. Something like this is done by the anthropologist, who gives us an account of the manners and customs of the various races of mankind; he tells us what is; he may not regard it as within his province at all to inform us regarding what ought to be.

But men do not merely act; they judge their actions in the light of some norm or standard, and they distinguish between them as right and wrong. The systematic study of actions as right and wrong yields us the science of ethics.

Like psychology, ethics is a special science. It is concerned with a somewhat limited field of investigation, and is not to be confounded with other sciences. It has a definite aim distinct from theirs. And, also like psychology, ethics is classed as one of the philosophical sciences, and its relation to philosophy is supposed to be closer than that of such sciences as physics and mathematics. It is fair to ask why this is so. Why cannot ethics proceed on the basis of certain assumptions independently, and leave to some other discipline the whole question of an inquiry into the nature and validity of those assumptions?

About half a century ago Dr. William Whewell, one of the most learned of English scholars, wrote a work entitled "The Elements of Morality," in which he attempted to treat the science of ethics as it is generally admitted that one may treat the science of geometry. The book was rather widely read a generation since, but we meet with few references to it in our time.

"Morality and the philosophy of morality," argues the author, "differ in the same manner and in the same degree as geometry and the philosophy of geometry. Of these two subjects, geometry consists of a series of positive and definite propositions, deduced one from another, in succession, by rigorous reasoning, and all resting upon certain definitions and self-evident axioms. The philosophy of geometry is quite a different subject; it includes such inquiries as these: Whence is the cogency of geometrical proof? What is the evidence of the axioms and definitions? What are the faculties by which we become aware of their truth? and the like. The two kinds of speculation have been pursued, for the most part, by two different classes of persons,—the geometers and the metaphysicians; for it has been far more the occupation of metaphysicians than of geometers to discuss such questions as I have stated, the nature of geometrical proofs, geometrical axioms, the geometrical faculty, and the like. And if we construct a complete system of geometry, it will be almost exactly the same, whatever be the views which we take on these metaphysical questions." [1]

Such a system Dr. Whewell wishes to construct in the field of ethics. His aim is to give us a view of morality in which moral propositions are "deduced from axioms, by successive steps of reasoning, so far as to form a connected system of moral truth." Such a "sure and connected knowledge of the duties of man" would, he thinks, be of the greatest importance.

In accordance with this purpose, Dr. Whewell assumes that humanity, justice, truth, purity, order, earnestness, and moral purpose are fundamental principles of human action; and he thinks that all who admit as much as this will be able to go on with him in his development of a system of moral rules to govern the life of man.

It would hardly be worth while for me to speak at length of a way of treating ethics so little likely to be urged upon the attention of the reader who busies himself with the books which are appearing in our own day, were it not that we have here an admirable illustration of the attempt to teach ethics as though it were such a science as geometry. The shortcomings of the method become very evident to one who reads the work attentively.

Thus, we are forced to ask ourselves, have we really a collection of ultimate moral principles which are analogous to the axioms of geometry? For example, to take but a single instance, Dr. Whewell formulates the Principle of Truth as follows: "We must conform to the universal understanding among men which the use of language implies";[2] and he remarks later; "The rules: Lie not, Perform your promise, are of universal validity; and the conceptions of lie and of promise are so simple and distinct that, in general, the rules may be directly and easily applied." [3]

Now, we are struck by the fact that this affirmation of the universal validity of the principle of truth is made in a chapter on "Cases of Conscience," in a chapter concerned with what seem to be conflicts between duties; and this chapter is followed by one which treats of "Cases of Necessity," i.e. cases in which a man is to be regarded as justified in violating common rules when there seems to be urgent reason for so doing. We are told that the moralist cannot say: Lie not, except in great emergencies; but must say: Lie not at all. But we are also told that he must grant that there are cases of necessity in which transgressions of moral rules are excusable; and this looks very much as if he said: Go on and do the thing while I close my eyes.

This hardly seems to give us a "sure and connected knowledge of the duties of man" deduced from axiomatic principles. On what authority shall we suspend for the time being this axiomatic principle or that? Is there some deeper principle which lends to each of them its authority, and which may, for cause, withdraw it? There is no hint of such in the treatment of ethics which we are considering, and we seem to have on our hands, not so much a science, as a collection of practical rules, of the scope of which we are more or less in the dark.

The interesting thing to notice is that this view of ethics is very closely akin to that adapted unconsciously by the majority of the persons we meet who have not interested themselves much in ethics as a science.

By the time that we have reached years of discretion we are all in possession of a considerable number of moral maxims. We consider it wrong to steal, to lie, to injure our neighbor. Such maxims lie in our minds side by side, and we do not commonly think of criticising them. But now and then we face a situation in which one maxim seems to urge one course of action and another maxim a contrary one. Shall we tell the truth and the whole truth, when so doing will bring grave misfortune upon an innocent person? And now and then we are brought to the realization that all men do not admit the validity of all our maxims. Judgments differ as to what is right and what is wrong. Who shall be the arbiter? Not infrequently a rough decision is arrived at in the assumption that we have only to interrogate "conscience"—in the assumption, in other words, that we carry a watch which can be counted upon to give the correct time, even if the timepieces of our neighbors are not to be depended upon.

The common sense ethics cannot be regarded as very systematic and consistent, or as very profound. It is a collection of working rules, of practical maxims; and, although it is impossible to overestimate its value as a guide to life, its deficiencies, when it is looked at critically, become evident, I think, even to thoughtful persons who are not scientific at all.

Many writers on ethics have simply tried to turn this collection of working rules into a science, somewhat as Dr. Whewell has done. This is the peculiar weakness of those who have been called the "intuitionalists"—though I must warn the reader against assuming that this term has but the one meaning, and that all those to whom it has been applied should be placed in the same class. Here it is used to indicate those who maintain that we are directly aware of the validity of certain moral principles, must accept them as ultimate, and need only concern ourselves with the problem of their application.

72. ETHICS AND PHILOSOPHY.—When John Locke maintained that there are no "innate practical principles," or innate moral maxims, he pointed in evidence to the "enormities practiced without remorse" in different ages and by different peoples. The list he draws up is a curious and an interesting one.[4]

In our day it has pretty generally come to be recognized by thoughtful men that a man's judgments as to right and wrong reflect the phase of civilization, or the lack of it, which he represents, and that their significance cannot be understood when we consider them apart from their historic setting. This means that no man's conscience is set up as an ultimate standard, but that every man's conscience is regarded as furnishing material which the science of ethics must take into account.

May we, broadening the basis upon which we are to build, and studying the manners, customs, and moral judgments of all sorts and conditions of men, develop an empirical science of ethics which will be independent of philosophy?

It does not seem that we can do this. We are concerned with psychological phenomena, and their nature and significance are by no means beyond dispute. For example, there is the feeling of moral obligation, of which ethics has so much to say. What is this feeling, and what is its authority? Is it a thing to be explained? Can it impel a man, let us say, a bigot, to do wrong? And what can we mean by credit and discredit, by responsibility and free choice, and other concepts of the sort? All this must remain very vague to one who has not submitted his ethical concepts to reflective analysis of the sort that we have a right to call philosophical.

Furthermore, it does not seem possible to decide what a man should or should not do, without taking into consideration the circumstances in which he is placed. The same act may be regarded as benevolent or the reverse according to its context. If we will but grant the validity of the premises from which the medieval churchman reasoned, we may well ask whether, in laying hands violently upon those who dared to form independent judgments in matters of religion, he was not conscientiously doing his best for his fellow-man. He tried by all means to save some, and to what he regarded as a most dangerous malady he applied a drastic remedy. By what standard shall we judge him?

There can be no doubt that our doctrine of the whole duty of man must be conditioned by our view of the nature of the world in which man lives and of man's place in the world. Has ethics nothing to do with religion? If we do not believe in God, and if we think that man's life ends with the death of the body, it is quite possible that we shall set for him an ethical standard which we should have to modify if we adopted other beliefs. The relation of ethics to religion is a problem that the student of ethics can scarcely set aside. It seems, then, that the study of ethics necessarily carries us back to world problems which cannot be approached except by the path of philosophical reflection. We shall see in Chapter XX that the theistic problem certainly belongs to this class.

It is worthy of our consideration that the vast majority of writers on ethics have felt strongly that their science runs out into metaphysics. We can scarcely afford to treat their testimony lightly. Certainly it is not possible for one who has no knowledge of philosophy to understand the significance of the ethical systems which have appeared in the past. The history of ethics may be looked upon as a part of the history of philosophy. Only on the basis of some general view as to nature and man have men decided what man ought to do. As we have seen above, this appears sufficiently reasonable.

73. AESTHETICS.—Of aesthetics, or the science of the beautiful, I shall say little. There is somewhat the same reason for including it among the philosophical sciences that there is for including ethics.