Chapter I: Reality and Experience (2)

When this view comes to be worked out as a philosophical theory, it usually undergoes some transformation. The fact of illusion, and the experimentally ascertained subjective differences between individual percipients,[46] or between different states of the same percipient, make it hard for the realist who wishes to be scientific to maintain that _all_ the perceived qualities of experienced things are equally independent of the experiencing subject. Reflection usually substitutes for the “naïve” realism of everyday life, a theory of “scientific” realism according to which the existence and some of the known properties of the experienced world are independent of the experiencing subject, while others are regarded as mere secondary effects arising from the action of an independent reality on the subject’s consciousness. With the further differences between the various types of scientific realism, according to the special properties which are held to belong to things independently of the percipient subject, we are not at present concerned.[47]

It is, of course, clear that our general argument against the existence of any reality except as in an experience tells just as much against “naïve” realism and its more reflective outgrowth “scientific” realism as against Agnosticism. But the very plausibility and wide diffusion of realistic views of this type make it all the more necessary to reinforce our contention by showing what the truth Realism contains is, and just where it diverges from truth into fallacy. Nor is it specially difficult to do this. The important elements of truth contained in Realism seem to be in the main two. (i) It is certain that a thing may be real without being consciously present as a distinguishable aspect in my experience. Things do not begin to exist when I begin to be aware of them, or cease to exist when I cease to be aware of them. And again, the fact that I make mistakes and am subject to illusion shows that the qualities of things are not necessarily in reality what I take them to be. (2) Further, as is shown by the fact of my imperfect understanding of my own feelings and purposes, something may actually be an integral part of my own life as an experiencing subject without my clearly and consciously recognising it as such when I reflect on the contents of my experience.

But precisely how much do these two considerations prove? All that is established by the first is the point on which we have already insisted, that it is not _my_ experience which constitutes Reality; and all that is established by the second, that experience, as we have already repeatedly seen, is not merely cognitive. But the admission of both these positions brings us not one step nearer the conclusion which the realist draws from them, that real existence is independent of all experience. Because it is easy to show that the reality of a thing does not depend on its being explicitly recognised by any one finite percipient or any aggregate of finite percipients, and again, that there is more in any experience of finite percipients than those percipients know, the realist thinks he may infer that there are realities which would still be real though they entered into no experience at all. But there is really no logical connection whatever between the premisses of this inference and the conclusion which is drawn from them.

This may be made clearer by a couple of examples. Take, to begin with, the case of the mental life of my fellow human beings. And, to state the case in the form in which it appears most favourable to the realist conclusion, let us imagine an Alexander Selkirk stranded on a barren rock in the midst of the ocean. The hopes and fears of our Selkirk are independent of my knowledge of them just as completely and in just the same sense in which the existence and conformation of the rock on which he is stranded are so. I and all other inhabitants of the earth may be just as ignorant of Selkirk’s existence and of what is passing in his mind as we are of the existence and geological structure of his rock. And again, what Selkirk explicitly cognises of his own inner life may bear as small a proportion to the whole as what he explicitly cognises of the properties of his rock to the whole nature of the rock. Yet all this in no wise shows that Selkirk’s hopes and fears and the rest of his mental life are not experience or have a reality “independent of experience.” Hopes and fears which are not experience, not psychical matter of fact, would indeed be a contradiction in set terms. And what the argument fails to prove of Selkirk’s mental life, it fails, for the same reason, to prove of Selkirk’s rock.

We may pass from the case of the mental life of a fellow-man to the case of unperceived physical reality. A recent realist philosopher, Mr. L. T. Hobhouse, has brought forward as a clear instance of an independent physical reality, the case of a railway train just emerging from a tunnel. I do not perceive the train, he says, until it issues from the tunnel, but it was just as real while it was running through the tunnel. Its reality is therefore independent of the question whether it is perceived or not. But, in the first place, the argument requires that the train shall be empty; it must be a runaway train without driver, guard, or passengers, if the conditions presumed in the premisses are to be fulfilled. And, in the second place, we may retort that even an empty runaway train must have been despatched from somewhere by somebody. It must stand in some relation to the general scheme of purposes and interests expressed in our system of railway traffic, and it is precisely this connection, with a scheme of purposes and interests, which makes the runaway train a reality and not a mere fiction of an ingenious philosopher’s imagination. If Mr. Hobhouse’s argument proves the independent reality of the train in the tunnel, it ought equally to prove, and does equally prove, the independent existence of Selkirk’s fluctuations from hope to despair and back again on his isolated rock. And precisely because it proves both conclusions equally, the sort of independence it establishes cannot be independence of experience. Like all realist arguments, it turns on the identification of experience with the cognitive aspect of experience, an identification too often suggested by the language of the “idealists” themselves.[48]

§ 8. The persistent vitality of Realism is due to its protest against the fallacies of an opposing theory which has of late especially found favour with some distinguished students of natural science, and which we may conveniently call Subjectivism.[49] Realism, as we saw, started from the true premisses, that there are real facts of which my experience does not make me explicitly aware, and that my cognition even of my own experience is incomplete, and argued to the false conclusion that there are therefore realities independent of any experience. Subjectivism reasons in the opposite way. It asserts truly that there is no reality outside experience, and then falsely concludes that I can know of no reality except my own cognitive states. Its favourite formula are expressions such as, “We know only the modifications of our own consciousness,” “All we know is our own perceptions,” “Nothing exists but states of consciousness.” These formulæ are not all obviously identical in meaning, but the exponents of Subjectivism seem to use them without any conscious distinction, and we shall probably do the theory no injustice if we criticise it on the assumption that the expressions are meant to be of identical signification.

Now it is clear that the logical consequences of the subjectivist doctrine are so subversive of all the practical assumptions upon which daily life is based, that they should require the most stringent proof before we give our assent to them. If Subjectivism is true, it follows immediately that not merely the “whole choir of heaven and furniture of earth,” but the whole of humanity, so far as I have any knowledge of its existence, is a mere subjective affection of my own “consciousness,” or, as the scientific subjectivist usually, for some not very obvious reason, prefers to say, of my own brain. Every argument which the subjectivist can produce to show that “things” are, for my knowledge at any rate, “modifications of my own consciousness,” applies to the case of my fellow-men with as much force as to the case of the inorganic world. The logical inference from the subjectivist’s premisses, an inference which he is rarely or never willing to draw, would be that he is himself the sole real being in a world of phantoms, not one of which can with any certainty be said to correspond to a real object. And conversely, any valid ground for recognising the existence of my fellow-men as more than “states of my own consciousness,” must equally afford ground for admitting the reality, in the same general sense, of the rest of the world of things familiar to us from the experiences of everyday life.[50] For if any one of the things composing the world of practical life has a reality which is not dependent upon its presence to my particular experience, then there is the same reason for believing that every other such thing has a like reality, unless there happen to be special grounds for regarding the perception to which it is present as an hallucination.

We must not, however, simply dismiss the subjectivist theory in this summary way. We must examine the doctrine in detail sufficiently to discover where the fallacy comes in, how it arises, and what modicum of sound philosophic insight it may possibly contain. To take these three points in logical order—

(_a_) The current arguments for Subjectivism are often so stated as to confuse together two quite distinct positions. When it is said that what we perceive is “our own subjective states,” the meaning intended may be either that there is, at least so far as I am able to know, no real existence in the universe except that of my “states of consciousness”; or again, that there are such realities, but that the _properties_ which I perceive do not belong to them in their own nature but are only subjective effects of their action upon my “consciousness,” or, if you prefer to speak in physiological language upon my nervous system. Now, many of the arguments commonly urged by the subjectivist would at most only prove the second conclusion, in which the subjectivist agrees to a large extent with the scientific realist. Thus it is an _ignoratio elenchi_ to reason as if the facts of hallucination, illusion, and discrepancy between the reports of different percipients or different sense-organs of the same percipient gave any support to the special doctrine of Subjectivism. These facts, which, as we have seen, are equally appealed to by scientific realists, prove no more than that we do not always perceive the world of things as it is, and as it must be thought of if we would think truly,—in other words, that there is such a thing as error.

Now the problem “How is it possible for us to think or perceive falsely?” is, as the student of Greek philosophy knows, both difficult and important. But the existence of error in no way shows that the things which I perceive are “states of my own consciousness”; on the contrary, error is harder to explain on the subjectivist theory than on any other. For if what I perceive has some kind of existence distinct from the mere fact of my perceiving it, there is at least a possibility of understanding how the reality and my perception of it may be discrepant; but if the existence of a thing is only another name for the fact that I perceive it, it seems impossible that I should perceive anything except as it is. On the subjectivist theory, as Plato showed in the _Theaetetus_, every percipient being ought, at every moment of his existence, to be infallible.

We may confine our attention, then, to the grounds which the subjectivist alleges for the former conclusion, that nothing can be known to exist except my own “states of consciousness,” and may dismiss the whole problem of erroneous perception as irrelevant to the question. Now the general argument for Subjectivism, however differently it may be stated by different writers, consists, in principle, of a single allegation. It is alleged as a fact in the Psychology of cognition, that things are immediately perceived by us as modifications of our own sensibility, or “states of our own consciousness,” and that it is therefore impossible to get behind this ultimate condition of all perception. Against this psychological doctrine we have to urge (1) that it is in flagrant contradiction with the certain facts of actual life; and (2) that, as a doctrine in Psychology, it is demonstrably false.

(1) There are certain realities, admitted by the subjectivist himself, which are manifestly _not_ “states of my consciousness,” and of which I yet, as the subjectivist himself admits, have a genuine though imperfect knowledge; such realities are, _e.g._, the ends and purposes of my fellow-men, and again many of my own ends and purposes. It is allowed on all hands that I can know not only the fact of the existence of other men, but also, to some extent at least, the character of their various purposes and interests. This is involved, for instance, in the simple fact that when I read a letter it is normally possible for me to understand the writer’s meaning. It is equally involved in the fact that I can know the truth of any ordinary historical matter of fact, _e.g._, the date of the great fire of London. Neither the date of the fire of London nor the meaning of my correspondent’s sentences is a “state of my consciousness” in any intelligible sense of the words, yet both are typical instances of the kind of facts of which our ordinary knowledge of the world of everyday life and practice wholly consists. And what is true of facts relating to the deeds and purposes of others is equally true of my own deeds and purposes. The facts which make up my own life cannot, without violence to language, be reduced to “states of my consciousness.” For instance, I may know that I have a certain temperament or disposition, _e.g._, that I am irascible by temperament or of a sentimental disposition; but though my knowing these truths about myself may in a sense be called a state of my consciousness, the truths themselves cannot be called “states of my consciousness” without a serious logical fallacy of equivocal middle term.

(2) This will be made clearer by a consideration of the psychological principle invoked by the subjectivist. What the subjectivist means when he says that in perception I am aware only of the states, or subjective modifications, of my own consciousness, is that the object of which each perceptive state is aware is simply itself as a perceptive state; the perception perceives itself and nothing else. _E.g._, when I say I see red, what I am really aware of is that I am in a state of perceiving red; when I say I hear a noise, what I am aware of is that I am in a state of hearing a noise, and so universally. Now this is so far from being a truth, that it is absolutely and demonstrably false. We may, in fact, definitely lay it down that the one thing of which no one, except the introspective psychologist, is ever aware is his own perceptive state in the act of perceiving, and that, even in the case of the psychologist who sets himself purposely to study his own states, no perceptive state ever perceives itself. What I am aware of when I look at a red surface is not “myself-as-perceiving-red,” but the splash of red colour itself. When I see a man, I do not perceive “myself-as-seeing-a-man,” but I perceive the other man. So when I take a resolution to act in a certain way or realise that I am in a certain mood, what I am directly aware of is not “myself-as-forming-the-resolution” or “myself-as-in-the-mood,” but the resolution or the mood. Even when, as an introspective psychologist, I sit down to study the formation of resolutions or the peculiarities of emotional moods by reflection on my own experience, the state in which I study the formation of a resolution or the nature of a mood is not itself the state of resolving or of experiencing the mood in question. We cannot too strongly insist that, if by “self-consciousness” is meant a cognitive state which is its own object, _there is no such thing, and it is a psychological impossibility that there should be any such thing, as self-consciousness. No cognitive state ever has itself for its own object. Every cognitive state has for its object something other than itself._[51]

Even where I make an assertion about my subjective condition, as when I say “I know I am very angry,” the state of knowing about my feeling is as distinct from the feeling itself as the state of knowing that I see red is from the red colour that I see. What the subjectivist does is to confuse the two. Because the act of knowing is itself a state of the knowing subject, and because in some cases the knowledge may again have reference to some other state of the same subject, he infers that what I know at any moment is my own subjective condition in the act of knowing. In other and more technical words, he confuses the cognitive act or state with its own object. To what absurd results this confusion would lead him, if he were logical in the inferences he makes from it, we have already seen. We can now see that psychologically the confusion is a double one. (1) The subjectivist confuses experience with mere awareness of a presented content. He ignores the presence of the true “subjective” factor of selective attention throughout experience, and is thus led to forget that all experiences imply an element which is in the experiencing mind but not _presented to it_. (2) And in confining his attention to the presentational aspect of experience, he goes on to confound the presented content with the fact of its presentation. As against this second confusion it is essential to a true theory of knowledge to emphasise three points of distinction between the presented content or object of a cognitive state and the state itself, considered as a process in the history of an experiencing subject. (1) The cognitive state is never its own object, it _refers_ to or _cognises_ an object distinct from its own existence as a psychical occurrence. This is the truth which Realism distorts into the doctrine that the object of knowledge must have a reality of “independent of” experience. (2) The object of knowledge is never created by the occurrence of the psychical state in which a particular percipient becomes aware of its existence. This is just as true of so-called “merely ideal” objects as of physical things. The properties of the natural logarithms or of the circular functions in trigonometry are just as independent of my knowledge of them as the qualities of the trees and animals I should see if I turned from my writing desk and looked out at the window. (3) The object of knowledge has always a character of which only a fragment is ever presented to my perception or reflection in any cognitive state. Every cognitive state _refers to_ or _stands for_ a great deal more than it directly means to me.

(3) The origin of the subjectivist fallacy, as has been brilliantly shown by Avenarius,[52] is to be found in the “intrasubjective intercourse” of a plurality of percipients capable of communicating their experience to each other. So long as I am dealing solely with myself as an experiencing being and my relation to my own environment, there is no possibility of a subjectivist interpretation. In my own direct experience I have to do neither with “mental states” nor with mere “objects of cognition,” but with _things_ which in various ways by their interference assist or hinder the accomplishment of my various purposes, and of which I have therefore to take note, so as to adapt my ways of reaching my ends to their ways of behaviour. Hence the “natural” view of the world, for a single experiencing being, would be that of “naïve realism,” to which the things forming my environment are real in precisely the same sense in which I am real myself. But as soon as I have to take account of the experiences of other percipients, there arises an inevitable fallacy which leads to philosophical consequences of the gravest kind. Starting with the assumption that the things I perceive are the real things, I feel a difficulty as to how the same things can be perceived by the other percipients around me. _E.g._, if the sun I see is the real sun, what about the sun seen by some one else? Instead of finding the true explanation, that all the percipients are in relation to a common environment which is independent of its presence to any one percipient’s experience, I very naturally fall into the mistake of thinking the things perceived by other men to be “ideas” or “percepts” of the real things perceived by me. These perceptual copies of the real things I, for obvious reasons, locate somewhere “in” the organisms of my fellow-percipients. Then I go on to interpret my own experience in terms of the theory I originally devised to meet the case of my fellow-men, and infer that what I myself perceive is a set of “percepts” or “ideas” produced “in” my organism by a reality “outside” all experience. And it is then an easy step to the final conclusion that, inasmuch as all known and knowable things are mere “ideas in some one’s head,” nothing else exists. Subjectivism is thus the last step in the development of the fallacy which begins with what Avenarius calls “introjection.” Just as we learned that the existence of our fellow-men is the cardinal fact of experience which affords the most immediate refutation of the subjectivist theory, so the original source of the subjectivist fallacy is failure to recognise their experience as being on the same level of reality as our own.

(4) We need not say much on the element of truth which Subjectivism preserves in a distorted form. We have seen that, as against Realism, Subjectivism is right in maintaining the indissoluble unity of real being with experience, though it twists this truth into an absurdity by first identifying experience with my own limited and imperfect experience and then giving a false psychological interpretation of the nature of that experience itself. How a reality can be independent of presentation in _my_ experience and yet be in its very nature dependent upon experience for its existence and character, has already been sufficiently illustrated. But we may perhaps say that even in the identification of experience with my own experience there is an underlying substratum of genuine philosophic truth. For, as we have more than once insisted, there is manifestly a great deal more in my own experience than what is at any time present as the object of conscious cognition. Or, as Mr. Bradley is fond of putting it, there is always more _in_ my mind than _before_ it. I am never fully aware at any moment even of the full nature of my own purposes and feelings. This is why the deceitfulness of my own heart has become a common-place of religious self-examination as well as of worldly wisdom.

Again, every increase of insight into our own real feelings and purposes involves increased insight into the feelings and purposes of the other feeling beings with whom we stand in the various relations of social intercourse.[53] Hence it might fairly be contended that fully to know your own meaning, fully to understand what you want, would imply complete insight into the structure of the whole world of reality,—in fact, that self-knowledge and knowledge of the universe must ultimately be the same thing. The systematic unity of the whole world of experience may be so complete that there is nothing in it anywhere which does not correspond to some element in the experience of every one of its members. Each member may, like the monads of Leibnitz, represent the whole system though at very different levels of coherency and from very different points of view. But such a conception, though it would concede to Subjectivism that whatever forms a part of the system of real being somehow falls within my individual experience, would take as the foundation of its assertion that very distinction between what is implicitly present _in_ my experience and what is explicitly _before_ it which Subjectivism consistently ignores. Whether the doctrine as thus re-stated can be affirmed as more than a fascinating possibility, we shall be better able to judge when we have discussed in our next chapter the systematic unity of Reality.

_Consult further_:—F. H. Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, chaps. 13, 14; T. Case, _Physical Realism_, pt. 1; L. T. Hobhouse, _The Theory of Knowledge_, pt. 3, chap. 3, _The Conception of External Reality_; H. Lotze, _Metaphysic_, bk. i. chap. 7 (pp. 207-231 of vol. i. in Eng. trans.); J. S. Mackenzie, _Outlines of Metaphysics_, bk. i. chap. 3, _Theories of Metaphysics_; J. Royce, _The World and the Individual_, First Series (Lecture on the First Conception of Being).

-----

Footnote 31:

See, in particular, Royce, _The World and the Individual_, Second
Series, Lecture 1, for a telling elaboration of this thought. I should
note that I do not myself use the term “existence,” as is sometimes
done, with special restriction to the sense of presence as a sensible
event at a particular point of space and time. When so used, it is, of
course, much narrower in scope than the term “Being.”

Footnote 32:

Compare the brilliant but not altogether convincing argument of
Professor James, in _The Will to Believe_.

Footnote 33:

See the whole treatment of question of feeling in Dr. Stout’s _Manual
of Psychology_. I do not, of course, mean that “consciousness of
activity” successful or thwarted as a fact precedes and conditions
pleasure-pain. On the contrary, it is a familiar fact of experience
that we often learn what our purposes are for the first time by the
pain which attends their defeat. _E.g._, a man may first realise that
he is, and has been, in love by his pain at his mistress’s preference
of a rival suitor. And nothing seems more certain than that many
pleasures are quite independent of “actual conation,” as Plato long
ago recognised.

I must take this opportunity to guard once for all against some
plausible misconceptions. (_a_) When I speak of feeling as “purposive”
or “teleological,” I do not mean to make what, to my own mind, would
be the monstrous assumption, that it necessarily presupposes
_conscious_ anticipation of its guiding end or purpose. All that I
mean is that the processes of conscious life are as a matter of fact
only intelligible with reference to the results in which they
culminate and which they serve to maintain; or again, that they all
involve the kind of continuity of interest which belong to attention.
(_b_) If attentive interest is not necessarily actual conation, actual
conscious effort, still less is it necessarily actual _will_. For me,
as for Mr. Bradley (see his article in _Mind_ for October 1902), where
there is no ideal anticipation of the result of a process there is
neither actual desire nor actual will. And since I cannot see that all
attention implies ideal anticpation, I certainly could not agree with
Prof. Royce that ultimate Reality is simply the “internal meaning of
an _idea_.”

My own meaning will be made clearer by reference to the illustration
given at the beginning of this note. A man first realises that he has
been in love because he feels pained at a rival’s success. So far as
this is so, I should say, there has been no actual conation, and _a
fortiori_, no actual will or desire. But—and this is my point—he would
not feel the pain unless the success of the rival thwarted the
successful issue of a specific psychophysical tendency of an
essentially forward-reaching or teleological kind. The failure may for
the first time make him aware of the presence of the tendency, but it
must previously have been there as a condition of its own failure.

Footnote 34:

This qualification has to be added to avoid prejudging the very
difficult question whether “position” itself is “relative” or
“absolute.” Fortunately our argument is independent of the
determination of the problem. Even if there should be differences
between points as “absolute” as the difference between red and blue,
our contention would retain its force.

Footnote 35:

For otherwise the facts which lay outside the purposes or interests of
the Absolute would be “foreign” facts “given” from without and not in
systematic harmony with its experience as a whole. The complete
systematic unity of all facts would thus fall outside what was to be,
_ex hypothesi_, an all-containing experience. _Q.E.A._

Footnote 36:

For further reflections upon the unsatisfactoriness of such a
conception of the Absolute as the “union of Thought and Will,” see Bk.
IV. chap. 6, § 1, where it is shown that knowledge and will alike, as
actual knowledge and actual will, belong only to finite beings.

Footnote 37:

_I.e._ if _will_ be taken strictly to mean an actual volition, love
and a “will to love” cannot co-exist; if we take will improperly to
mean a “standing” interest of purpose, the case is different.

Footnote 38:

The student of the history of Philosophy will be reminded of the
grounds on which Spinoza objects to ascribe “intellect” and “will” in
the proper sense of the terms to his God, as well as of the “knowledge
of the third or intuitive kind” and the “infinite intellectual love”
of God for Himself which are so prominent in the fifth part of the
_Ethics_. Similar considerations have sometimes led to a preference
for the term “organic” rather than “purposive” or “teleological,” as
expressive of the ultimate unity of experience. The word “organic,”
however, might suggest biological conceptions of growth, dependence on
an external environment, etc., which would be out of place. But the
student may compare with what has been said of the “purposive”
character of individuality Spinoza’s conception of the being of a
thing as a _conatus in suo esse perseverandi_.

Footnote 39:

For a full examination of the relation between reality and scientific
symbolism, consult Ward, _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, part 1. The
more clearly it is realised that scientific hypotheses are essentially
a system of mathematical symbolism, the more impossible it becomes to
suppose that they deal directly with the concrete nature of things.

Footnote 40:

In _Principles of Human Knowledge_, §§ 70-75, Berkeley indeed seems on
the very verge of denying that God Himself “perceives” the “ideas”
which by His action He excites in us. But at § 139 we find that a
“spirit” means “that which perceives ideas, and wills and reasons
about them,” and in the third Dialogue it is expressly stated that
sensible things are “perceived by God” [Works, Edit. in Bohn’s
Libraries, vol. i. p. 368]. In fact, from the psychological standpoint
of Berkeleian sensationalism, to deny God’s possession of “ideas”
(_i.e._ sense-contents) would have been tantamount to denying His
spirituality.

Footnote 41:

Unfortunately Berkeley, like so many philosophers, thought of
“activity” as primarily an external relation between a “cause” and the
material on which it “works.” This is probably why he failed to
realise the “active” character of the perceptual process.

Footnote 42:

The reader will do well to compare with the whole of the foregoing
section the treatment of perception as essentially teleological in Dr.
Stout’s _Manual of Psychology_,^3 bk. iii. pt. 1, chap. 2.

I need hardly observe that recognition of the fundamental significance
of purpose and selection for mental life does not of itself entail the
adoption of “voluntarist” views in Psychology. What is fundamental for
real mental life may perfectly well admit of analysis into
hypothetical simpler elements for the purpose of the psychologist.
Thus the admission that all mental life is teleological and selective
need not involve the adoption of such metaphysical theories of
activity as are adversely criticised by Mr. Bradley in his _Appearance
and Reality_, chap. 7, or the introduction of a peculiar
“consciousness of activity” as an unanalysable datum into Psychology.
The antithesis between the actualities of life and the data of
Psychology maintained by Prof. Münsterberg in his _Psychology and
Life_, and _Grundzüge der Psychologie_, if untenable in the extreme
form in which he states it, is important as a corrective of the
opposite tendency to treat as ultimate for psychological analysis
whatever is of supreme importance for life.

Footnote 43:

Thing-_in-itself_, _i.e._ not affected by the—according to this
doctrine—extraneous conditions imposed upon it by relation to an
experiencing mind.

Footnote 44:

The inconsistencies of both Kant and Spencer will illustrate the
reluctance of the human mind to acquiesce in a genuine Agnosticism. In
the _Critique of Pure Reason_ itself Kant so far contradicts himself
as to treat the Thing-in-itself as the cause of sensation, though it
is a fundamental doctrine of his system that the concept of causal
relation can only be legitimately applied to connect facts inside
experience; and in a later work, the _Critique of Judgment_, he
tentatively suggests its identity with Will. Of Mr. Spencer it has
been truly said (I believe by Mr. F. C. S. Schiller in _Riddles of the
Sphinx_) that in the course of his ten volumes of Synthetic Philosophy
he speaks much more positively about the nature of the Unknowable than
dogmatic theology ventures to speak about the nature of God.

Footnote 45:

The sceptics of antiquity, who were more alive to this contradiction
than most of our modern Agnostics, tried to evade the difficulty by
saying that they maintained the unknowability of things not as a
demonstrated certainty, but as a “probable opinion.” But this
distinction is itself illogical, for unless some propositions are
certain there is no ground for considering any one proposition more
probable than another. _E.g._ if I know that a die with six faces has
four pips on each of two faces, and five pips on only one, I can
logically say “it is probable that with this die four will be thrown
oftener than five.” If I am totally uncertain what number of pips is
marked on the various faces, I cannot regard one throw as more
probable than another.

Footnote 46:

_E.g._, peculiarities of the individual’s colour-spectrum, total and
partial colour-blindness, variations in sensibility to musical pitch,
etc., etc.

Footnote 47:

The best known and most popular version of the theory is that of Locke
and of a great deal of our popular science, according to which the
“primary” qualities of matter, _i.e._ those which have to be treated
as fundamental in the physical sciences, are independently real, while
the rest are mere effects produced by their action on our
sense-organs. The more thorough-going metaphysical doctrines of
realists like Leibnitz and Herbart, being much further removed from
the “naïve realism” of unreflective common sense, have never enjoyed
the same currency.

Footnote 48:

Compare Ward, _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, vol. ii. p. 178 ff., and
Royce, _World and Individual_, First Series, Lect. 3. Prof. Royce’s
treatment of Realism, though interesting and suggestive, is perhaps a
little too much of a “short and easy way” with the antagonist to be
quite convincing. Mr. Hobhouse’s anti-idealistic argument (_Theory of
Knowledge_, 517-539) seems to me only to hold good against the
“Subjectivism” discussed in our next section, but the reader will do
well to examine it thoroughly for himself.

Footnote 49:

We might also suitably call it Presentationism, if the name were not
already appropriated in a different sense as distinctive of certain
psychological theories. The English reader will find a confused but
typical exposition of Subjectivism in the opening chapters of Prof.
Karl Pearson’s _Grammar of Science_. Subjectivist writers usually call
themselves “idealists,” and regard themselves as disciples of Berkeley
and Hume. Berkeley was, however, a subjectivist, if at all, only in
respect to the physical world, while Hume’s conclusions are purely
sceptical. The reader of Prof. Pearson must carefully observe that the
“descriptive” theory of physical science has no special connection
with Subjectivism, and is, in fact, held by philosophers like Profs.
Ward and Royce, who are not subjectivists.

Footnote 50:

On the existence of my fellow-men as the one real proof of the
objective existence of the physical world, see Royce, _Studies in Good
and Evil_, essay on “Nature, Consciousness, and Self-Consciousness,”
and “Mind and Nature,” by the present writer, in _International
Journal of Ethics_ for October 1902. In the latter essay I have, I
think, sufficiently exposed the flimsy reasoning by which
subjectivists attempt to justify belief in the existence of other
human beings from the subjectivist point of view.

Footnote 51:

The self-knowledge which is a fact in real life, as distinguished from
the fictitious self-consciousness of some psychologists, is quite a
different thing and involves two distinct acts of cognition: (1) the
awareness of certain objects of cognition, and (2) the recognition of
those objects as in some way qualifying my “self.” And the “self”
which I recognise as thus qualified is again no immediate datum of
experience, but a largely hypothetical intellectual construction, as
we shall have opportunity to see later on.

This is perhaps the place to add the further remark, that if we would
be rigidly accurate in psychological terminology, we ought to banish
the very expression “consciousness” or “state of consciousness” from
our language. What are really given in experience are attentive
processes with a certain common character. We abstract this character
and give it the name of “consciousness,” and then fall into the
blunder of calling the concrete processes “states” or “modifications”
of this abstraction, just as in dealing with physical things we first
make abstraction of their common properties, under the name of
“matter,” and then talk as if the things themselves were “forms” of
“matter”. _Properly speaking, there are physical things and there are
minds, but there are no such things in the actual world as “matter”
and “consciousness,”_ and we do well to avoid using the words where we
can help it.

Footnote 52:

See _Der Menschliche Weltbegriff_, pp. 21-62; and, for the merely
English reader, Ward, _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, vol. ii p. 168 ff.

Footnote 53:

This is true even in what seems at first the the exceptional case of
advance in mere theoretical insight. The more clearly you realise the
character of the problems which your own intellectual pursuits lead up
to and the nature of their solution, the clearer becomes your insight
into the problems and purposes of other workers in the same field.

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