Chapter IV (1)

THE WORLD OF THINGS—(1) SUBSTANCE,
QUALITY, AND RELATION

§ 1. The natural or pre-scientific view of the world regards it as a
plurality of “things,” each possessing _qualities_, standing _in
relation_ to others, and interacting with them. § 2. Hence arise
four problems: those of the Unity of the Thing, of Substance and
Quality, of Relation, of Causality. § 3. No simple answer can be
given to the question, _What is one thing?_ The Unity of the Thing
is one of teleological structure, and this is a matter of degree,
and also largely of our own subjective point of view. § 4.
_Substance and Quality._ The identification of the substance of
things with their primary qualities, though useful in physical
science, is metaphysically unjustifiable. § 5. Substance as an
“unknowable substratum of qualities” adds nothing to our
understanding of their connection. § 6. The thing cannot be a mere
collection of qualities without internal unity. § 7. The conception
of a thing as the law or mode of relation of its states useful but
metaphysically unsatisfactory. Ultimately the many can be contained
in the one only by “representation;” the unity in things must be
that of an individual experience. § 8. _Relation._ We can neither
reduce qualities to relations nor relations to qualities. § 9.
Again, the attempt to conceive Reality as qualities in relation
leads to the indefinite regress. §10. We cannot escape this
difficulty by taking all relations as “external.” And Professor
Royce’s vindication of the indefinite regress seems to depend on the
uncriticised application of the inadequate category of whole and
part to ultimate Reality. The union of the one and the many in
concrete experience is ultra-relational. SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE: Dr.
Stout’s reply to Mr. Bradley.

§ 1. When we turn from the inquiry into the structure of Reality as it must be conceived by a consistent Philosophy, to consider the aspect in which it appears to ordinary non-philosophical thought, the systematic unity which has demanded our attention in the two preceding chapters seems to be replaced by a bewildering and almost incalculable variety. According to the naïve pre-scientific theory of existence to which the experiences of practical life naturally give rise, and which serves as the point of departure for all the more scientific and systematic theories of the physicist, the psychologist, and the metaphysician, the world is composed of a multitude of apparently independent things, partly animated, like ourselves, partly inanimate. Each of these things, while in some sense a unit, is thought of as possessing an indefinite multiplicity of _qualities_ or _properties_, as capable of standing in a variety of _relations_ to other things, and as _acting_ upon other things and _being influenced_ by them in a variety of ways.

In all these respects, it should be observed, the naïvely realistic thought of the pre-scientific mind treats what from a more developed point of view would be distinguished as mental and physical existences alike. Human persons, like the other things of which my environment is composed, are thought of as being at once units and the possessors of diverse properties, as capable of a variety of relations to one another and to other things, and as interacting with each other and the rest of the environment. The recognition of the psychical as an order distinct from the physical, with its momentous consequences for general metaphysical theory, belongs to a later and much more sophisticated stage of intellectual development. Also, it must be noted, for the naïvely realistic intelligence, I am myself thought of as simply one object or thing in an environment of things of a similar nature, and my relations to that environment are conceived as being of the same type as the relations between its various component parts. I too am, for my own thought, so long as it remains at this primitive level, simply a thing with numerous properties, in various relations to other things, and interacting with them in diverse ways.[73]

We have called this exceedingly primitive way of conceiving the nature of existence “pre-scientific,” on the ground that both in the mental development of the individual and in that of a community of individuals it precedes even the most tentative conscious efforts to organise thought about the world into a coherent whole. All scientific and philosophical constructions may be regarded as so many artificial modifications of this earlier point of view, instituted and carried out for the purpose of rendering it more coherent and systematic. At the same time, our use of the epithet “pre-scientific” must not be allowed to mislead. The “pre-scientific” view may and does co-exist in the same mind with the various modifications of it which arise in the effort to think consistently. We are all of us habitually “naïve realists” in respect of those aspects of the world of experience which lie outside the limits of our personal scientific studies; and even as regards those aspects of existence in respect of which our theoretical views may be of a much more developed type, we habitually relapse into the “pre-scientific” attitude when our immediate object is practical[74] success in action rather than logical consistency in thinking. For the purposes of everyday life, the most “advanced” man of science is content to be a naïve realist outside his laboratory.

Again, pre-scientific as the primitive attitude towards existence is, in the sense of being unaffected by the deliberate effort after system and coherency of thought, it is so far scientific as to be a real though rudimentary and unconscious product of our intellectual need for order and system of some kind in our thought about things. It is a genuine though an unconscious result of our earliest reflection on the course of experience, and thus a true thought-construction, not a passive reproduction of a merely “given” material. It performs in rudimentary fashion, and without explicit purpose, the same task of systematising experience which the various scientific and philosophical theories of the more developed mind undertake more elaborately and with conscious intent. It is thus pre-scientific, but not properly speaking unscientific.

As the mass of ascertained fact accumulates and reflection upon it becomes more systematic and deliberate, our primitive conception of the systematic nature of the real inevitably proves unsatisfactory for two reasons. New facts are discovered which we cannot fit into the old scheme without modification of its structure, and, again, the concepts in terms of which the scheme was originally constructed prove on examination to be themselves obscure and ambiguous in their meaning. There is thus a double motive perpetually operative in bringing about reconstruction of the original scheme. To the various sciences it falls in the main to devise such alteration of the old schematism as is necessary for the inclusion of fresh facts; it is the special province of metaphysical criticism to examine the various terms both of the original scheme and its subsequent modifications, with a view to determining how far they form an ultimately intelligible and coherent system.

§ 2. When we scrutinise the original “pre-scientific” theory of the world from this point of view, we shall find that its four leading features give rise to four metaphysical problems of great generality and considerable difficulty. The conception of the world as made up of a multiplicity of things, each of which is one, gives rise to the problem of the unity of the thing; the plurality of the qualities, and again of the relations ascribed to the single thing, gives rise to the problems of _Substance_ and _Quality_ and of _Relation_; the belief in the interaction between different things finally gives rise to the exceptionally important and difficult problem of _Causality_. The four problems are not altogether disconnected; in particular, it is hard to discuss the sense in which a thing can be spoken of as “one,” without at the same time raising the question how the “one” thing stands to its many properties, and again discussing the general meaning of relation. And the problem of Causality may be raised in so general a form as to include the other three. Still, for the sake of having a definite order of discussion, it will be well to take them as far as may be separately, and to proceed from the simpler to the more complex. When we have indicated in outline our solution of these problems, we shall have to ask what is the general conception of a thing which our results establish, and whether and on what grounds we are warranted in believing in the actual existence of things answering to our conception. The present chapter will be devoted to the examination of the first three problems; in the succeeding chapter we shall discuss the meaning of Causality, and indicate our general conclusion as to the existence of “things.” With this result our survey of the general structure of Reality will be completed, and we shall then proceed in our third and fourth books to examine the most important of the special problems suggested by the existence of physical nature and conscious mind respectively.

§ 3. _The Unity of the Thing._—The problem we have to face is as follows: in what sense do we call any thing “one thing,” and what gives it its character as a unity? It is obvious that we may attack this question from either of two rather different points of view. We may ask either, why do we mark off just this portion of our environment from all the rest as a single thing among many things; or, again, how is the oneness which we predicate of any part of the environment so marked off compatible with the multiplicity of its properties? The question we propose to deal with in this section is the former of the two just propounded; the latter shall be dealt with next as the problem of substance and its qualities. What, then, do we mean by the unity which we ascribe to whatever we recognise as one thing among a multiplicity of others? We have, in a way, implicitly answered this question already by the result arrived at in our discussion of the character of the elements or constituents of the system of Reality. But whereas, in our former investigation, we started from the general notion of Reality as a systematic whole of experience, and went on to ask what character is imposed on the elements of such a system by their presence in it as its elements, we have now to raise the same question from the other side; starting with our everyday recognition of our environment as divided into things, we have to ask how far these things possess the character which must belong to the genuinely individual members of an individual whole of subordinate individuals.

For the purpose of the inquiry we must begin by taking the term thing in the same wide and ambiguous sense in which everyday thought and discourse use it. We must reckon among the things which are the topic of discussion, human persons, animals, plants, greater and smaller inorganic masses, in a word, whatever the most matter-of-fact common-sense thinking recognises as possessed of a character in virtue of which it can as a whole determine the course of experience at a given moment. The character or aspect in virtue of which such a whole determines the course of experience in this one special way rather than another, is by this definition excluded from our conception of a thing; it is not the thing itself but its quality or property or relation to some other thing, and forms the subject of our second and third problems. Thus we may say of a thing, in the sense in which we are using the term, that it is what has existence as a whole here and now in the series of experiences, though in saying so we must be careful to bear in mind that the here and now of the thing’s existence are not indivisible points of space or time, but continuous stretches of extension and duration. Now, when we ask in what sense such a thing is one, and why we mark off the limits which separate the one thing from the other things just where we do, it at once becomes apparent that the oneness is a matter of degree. We seem at first sight able with comparatively little difficulty to decide that the organism of a human being or of one of the higher animals is one thing; when we come to deal with the lower organisms which consist of loosely aggregated colonies of largely independently functioning cells, we begin to feel more diffidence in pronouncing what is one organism, though we still think we can say what is one cell. So, in dealing with inanimate masses, while we might be ready to say without much misgiving that a machine of our own construction is one, we should find it much harder to decide whether what we perceive as a mere inorganic mass is one or many, and harder still to give reasons for our decision in a particular case. And even in the cases where our decision is most unhesitatingly pronounced, subsequent reflection will show that the matter may not be so obvious as it seems. For instance, a pair of separated Siamese twins would undoubtedly be generally held to be two organisms and not one; but whether they were one or two before the severance is a question we should find it easier to ask than to answer.

When we try to detect some common principle in our various judgments as to whether a thing is one thing or several, the following results seem to emerge:—(1) A thing is clearly not made _one_, as is sometimes assumed, by the possession of an unbroken contour or an uninterrupted temporal existence. The succession of my mental states may make up one mental life, and again my organism from the cradle to the grave may be pronounced in some sense one, though no one can prove that there are no gaps in their temporal existence. Again, even if we leave out of account the corpuscular theories of body according to which every thing that looks to us like a spatially continuous whole with an unbroken contour is really composed of discrete particles with interstices between them, it is abundantly clear that common sense regards as one thing the parts of a system which works as a connected whole, quite independently of the existence or non-existence of immediate contact between them.

(2) Again, the unity of the one thing does not depend upon identity of material, whatever that phrase may mean. My organism still remains one thing, though its material is constantly changing by the loss of some elements and the acquisition of others.

(3) On the positive side, it is clear that the unity we attribute to one thing is that of teleological structure. A thing is one or many according to the point of view from which you look at it, _i.e._ according to the idea or purpose in the light of which you study it. That is one thing which functions as one, in other words, which is the systematic embodiment of a coherent scheme of structure. Thus, when we are considering the whole of an organism as subservient to the realisation of a unique individual aim or interest, the organism is necessarily judged to be one, because in respect of that interest it behaves as a whole; when we are studying the specific mode of reaction of a particular nerve, for instance, the same organism just as naturally appears to us a multiplicity of distinct but interconnected things. Similarly, a system of material particles appears one thing to us so long as our interest in the system is directed to those ways in which it behaves as one, _e.g._, the exchanges of energy between it and other systems external to it. Generally we may say that whatever is called one is called so because it is the systematic expression of a single aim or interest. A thing, in fact, is one just in so far as it has the character we ascribed, in our last chapter, to a finite individual. Its unity is never _merely_ numerical, but always qualitative, the unity of coherent structure.

Even in our rough-and-ready way of treating continuity of contour as evidence of oneness in inanimate and apparently structureless masses, we may detect the influence of this principle. We judge the sensibly continuous mass to be one rather than many things, because in many obvious respects it functions as one (_e.g._, in respect of its weight, the simultaneous displacement of its parts in rotation or translation through space). Also, no doubt, our judgment is influenced by the analogy of our own bodies, which are sensibly continuous. We project in imagination into the sensibly continuous inanimate mass the same kind of teleological unity which we find in our own mental life. The sensibly discontinuous, on the other hand (_e.g._, two inorganic masses separated by an apparently empty interval), is judged to be many things rather than one, because, in imagination, we project such an inner mental life into each of the discontinuous parts.

If all this is so, it would follow that the line of demarcation between one thing and another can never be drawn with hard and fast precision. For if one thing ultimately means one individual, the embodiment of a unique self-consistent idea, the only thing which is fully and absolutely one will be the infinite individual Reality itself. The extent to which any lesser portion of the whole can be pronounced one thing will depend on the extent to which it exhibits self-contained systematic individuality, and thus will be a matter of degree. The highest kind of finite unity we can conceive will be that of a life which is the conscious progressive realisation of coherent purpose. Such a life is one not merely for the outside observer who detects its underlying unity of aim, but for itself. Its oneness may thus be said to be both objective and subjective. Thus the more completely our own inner life is the systematic expression of consistent purpose, the greater the right with which we may regard ourselves as being each truly “one thing” and as such truly individual. But when we remember how far what any one of us calls “his” inner life is from exhibiting such complete internal coherency of structure, we shall realise that even in the highest case the unity is still a matter of degree.

This is still more palpably the case with the lower forms of organic life. Not to speak of the well-known puzzles which arise when we seek to determine whether a creature which is a colony of largely independent cells is one animal or many, our difficulties begin as soon as we have to deal with any type of life below the most fully self-conscious. We can say, to some extent, that a human character is one so long as it is the conscious expression of systematic purpose, but it is less easy to say in what sense we call an animal’s conscious life one. The absence of anything like systematic unity of aim and interest from the life of animal impulse makes it appear, at least at first sight, more reasonable to speak of it as a bundle or collection of distinct impulses and instincts rather than as one.[75] If, in spite of this, we still habitually speak and think of the particular higher animal as _one_ rather than many, the reason no doubt is that we tacitly ascribe to it something like the conscious unity of interest which we find in our own mental life, though with a diminished clearness.

When we come to the inanimate world, it seems to become purely a matter of our own subjective interest what we shall call one thing and what we shall call many. That is one which may be regarded as acting as one whole in respect of its bearing upon any interest of ours; that many which, in respect of our interests, does not behave as a whole. Thus, except where we are dealing with forms of life to which we can with more or less plausibility ascribe some degree of conscious unity of aim and interest, there seems no valid reason for drawing the line between different things in one place rather than in another, except reasons of convenience. It is important to bear this in mind in applying our idealistic theory of existence to the case of the inanimate world. If the foundations of the idealistic theory are sound, every real existence must be a finite individual experience of some order of individuality, and this must of course hold good of that part of existence which appears to us as the inanimate world. The inanimate world must be—as we shall see more fully in the succeeding book—a system of individual experiences, which appears to us lifeless and purposeless merely because the kind of life it possesses is too far removed from our own for us to recognise it. But we must most carefully observe that the line of demarcation between the different individual experiences which constitute the reality of that world need not in the least coincide everywhere with the line which we, for purposes of our own, draw between different things.

§ 4. _The Problem of Substance and Quality._—More important, in the history of metaphysical theory, has been the other aspect of the problem of the unity of things. What we call one _thing_ is said, in spite of its unity, to have many _qualities_. It is, _e.g._, at once round, white, shiny, and hard, or at once green, soft, and rough. Now, what do we understand by the _it_ to which these numerous attributes are alike ascribed, and how does it possess them? To use the traditional technical names, what is the _substance_ to which the several qualities belong or in which they inhere, and what is the manner of their _inherence_? The full difficulty of this problem may be most easily exhibited by considering the ways in which popular thought commonly tries to solve it.

(1) One of the commonest and most obvious solutions is to identify the “substance” which has the qualities (or, to use the more general scholastic expression, the _accidents_) with some one group of the thing’s properties which we regard as specially important or permanent. The “substance” is then taken to be just this group of “primary” qualities, and is said to have or possess the less permanent “secondary qualities.” For obvious reasons, the “primary” qualities have in modern Philosophy usually been identified, as by Galileo, Descartes, and Locke, with those mathematical properties of body which are of fundamental importance for the science of mechanical Physics.[76] And usually, though not always, the way in which the substance, as thus defined, _has_ the secondary qualities, has been further explained by saying that these latter are subjective changes in our sensibility produced by the action of the primary qualities upon our various sense-organs. Neither of these special views is, however, necessarily involved in the identification of the substance of things with their fundamental qualities. The essential principle of the theory consists simply in the recognition of some groups of qualities as of primary importance, and the identification of the one “substance” which has the many properties with this group.

Now, it would be impertinent for us to raise any objection to the use of such a theory as a working hypothesis in the physical sciences, so long as it does in those sciences the work for which it is required. The object of the physical sciences as a body is simply to enable us to describe and calculate the course of events in nature with the highest degree of accuracy and the least complicated set of formulæ. If this end is most successfully attained by treating a certain group of the properties of sensible things as of primary importance and all the rest as mere derivatives of them, this fact of itself affords sufficient justification for the scientific use of the distinction. For the special objects of physical science any group of properties which thus lends itself to the purposes of description and calculation is of primary importance. But it is no less true that its importance for physical purposes does not afford the least ground for regarding it as equally valuable as a solution of the metaphysical problem of the meaning of substance. For instance, one reason why the mathematical properties of body are of such supreme importance for Physics is that in respect of them bodies can be treated as differing not in kind but only in number. This is why they are of such inestimable service as the basis of our calculations as to the behaviour of things. But it might very well be that the true nature of things is most fully manifested just in those points in which they are different in kind; from the standpoint of the metaphysician, a view of non-human nature, however serviceable, which rests entirely upon the aspects in which things are most alike, may be as superficial as the statistical sociologist’s view of human nature. The true being of a concrete thing may be as inadequately expressed by its mathematical properties as the true character of an individual man by a list of anthropometrical results.[77]

In point of fact, we can readily see that the distinction between “primary” and “secondary” qualities, when propounded as an answer to the problem about substance, leaves us just where we were before. For (1) we ascribe the primary qualities to the “substance” of the thing in just the same fashion as the secondary. The thing _is_ of such and such a configuration, _is_ of such and such a mass, _is_ solid, etc.; just as it _is_ rough, or heavy, or green. Or, again, it _has_ configuration, mass, solidity; just as it _has_ weight, taste, colour. Hence the old problem breaks out again with respect to the primary qualities themselves, however the list of them may be constructed. Again we have to ask, what is the _it_ which possesses shape, mass, velocity, etc.?

(2) Moreover, the theory fails to explain the nature of that “possession” of the secondary qualities which it ascribes to the group of primary qualities. In what way, we ask, do the primary qualities have or possess the secondary? The only serious attempt to answer this question seems to be that of the numerous philosophers (Descartes, Galileo, Locke, etc.) who treat the secondary qualities as “subjective” effects of the primary qualities upon our sense-organs. Now, this familiar solution of the problem seems deficient in logic. For the one solid argument which has been advanced in favour of the subjectivity of secondary qualities seems to be the contention that they cannot be perceived without sense-organs of a special type. Colours, it is said, exist only for an eye, sounds for an ear, taste for a tongue, and so forth. And differences of structure or temporary condition in the sense-organ lead to the perception of different secondary qualities, as when, to take the stock examples, everything looks yellow to the jaundiced eye, the same water feels warm to one hand and cold to the other, and so forth.

But these considerations seem just as applicable to the supposed “primary” as to the “secondary” qualities of things. Geometrical form, for instance, is imperceptible apart from sight or touch; motion, again, and consequently change of configuration, and similarly mass, which is a ratio of accelerations, require either sight or touch for their perception. Of course, we can think of motions and masses which we are not actually perceiving, just as we can think of an absent colour or smell, and in both cases we can in reasoning about motions or masses or colours or smells abstract altogether from the presence of a percipient. But this does not affect the fact that the mathematical qualities of body are just as dependent for perception upon the presence of a percipient with suitable sense-organs as anything else. Configurations, extensions, and motions which no one perceives by sight or touch or any other sense are exactly in the same case as a colour which no one sees or a sound which no one hears. The argument from the indispensability of a perceiving organ ought logically to tell just as much in the one case as the other.[78]

Again, and this is a point of the first importance, experience never gives us the “primary quality” by itself. What we get in actual experience is always the conjunction of primary and secondary qualities in a concrete perception. Thus we never perceive extension apart from some special visual or tactual filling of the “secondary” kind. The extended has always some quality of colour, or texture, or resistance. An extension which is totally devoid of colour, tactual quality, and everything which belongs to the so-called sensible, non-mathematical, or “secondary” properties of body, is an unreal abstraction, got by leaving out an aspect which in actual experience appears inseparable from it, and therefore presumably illegitimate. Illegitimate, that is, when offered as an account of the fundamental reality of body, however useful for the special purposes of natural science. Thus the attempt to take the so-called primary qualities as the unitary “substance” which has or “possesses” the secondary qualities, and to dispose of these latter as “subjective,” leads to no satisfactory result. The former, too, must be merely qualities possessed by a more ultimate substance.

§ 5. Hence it constantly happens that the same writers who treat substance as identical with the primary qualities of things, alternate this view with another according to which substance is an unknowable unit of which we can say no more than that it, whatever it may be, is what is presupposed in all propositions about the behaviour of things as the “unknown substratum” of their various qualities. According to this view, the many qualities of the thing in some inexplicable manner “flow” either from the nature of its own unknown substratum or substance, or from the relations in which this substratum stands with that of other things.[79] Our knowledge is then held to be confined to these consequences of the unknown ultimate character of real things; we are ignorant, it is said, of the substance both of physical and of mental existence, we know only its attributes or manifestations. Or it is otherwise phrased thus: we do not know what things really are, we know only their effects on one another and on our own senses. This is, for instance, the view represented by those portions of Locke’s Essay in which emphasis is laid upon our inability in the last resort to know the true substance of things.

Now, such a general doctrine as this is manifestly open to grave objections. (1) If we are serious in maintaining the unknowable character of the substratum of a thing’s qualities, it is hard to see how the assertion of its existence can be any addition to our knowledge of the thing. To say that we are entirely ignorant of the nature of this substratum only amounts to saying in other words, that we have really no idea how the many qualities can be qualities of a single thing. If this is so, it does not appear what we gain by talking of the single thing at all as the owner or possessor of its qualities. It would, we might think, be better to abandon the confessedly unintelligible notion of a single substratum in which the qualities “inhere,” and say that the thing, for our intellect, is simply the many qualities themselves. How this view would have to be reconciled with the tacit assumption of the thing’s unity as a substance, which underlies all the judgments in which its attributes are predicated of it, we shall have to discuss more fully in the next section.

(2) A still more serious difficulty remains behind. Not only is an “unknowable substratum of qualities” a superfluous luxury in metaphysical theory, but the nature of the supposed relation between such a substratum and the attributes which “flow” from it is unintelligible. We can understand neither what a substance or substratum totally devoid of qualities could possibly be, nor yet how the various qualities of the world of things presented to our experience could “flow” as secondary consequences from one or more such substrata. We cannot conceive how things could first “be” without this being of theirs possessing any definite character, and then subsequently, in virtue of their relations among themselves, give rise to their qualities or characteristic modes of being. Nothing can be at all without being in some determinate way, and this “being in some determinate way” is precisely what we mean by the qualities of a thing. A thing cannot be without behaving in special ways towards its environment, and these special ways of behaving are the thing’s qualities. We cannot, therefore, divorce the being or _that_ of a thing from its determinate mode of being or _what_, and regard the latter as something which supervenes on or is derived from the former, or the former as something which can exist without and apart from the latter. Things are not first there and afterwards in some mysterious way clothed with qualities; their qualities are simply their special way of being there. As Lotze well puts it, all such attempts to formulate a theory of the way in which the _what_ of things flows from a mere _that_, are attempts to answer the absurd question how Being is made.[80] The notion that things have a _that_ or substance prior to their _what_ or quality, and consisting simply in “being” which is not this or that determinate mode of being, is thus unmeaning as well as superfluous.

§ 6. Accordingly the whole notion of a substantial unity in things behind the multiplicity of their states or qualities has been regarded with disfavour by many students of positive science. The qualities being all that interests us in things, and the notion of an indeterminate substratum contradictory, we ought, it is argued, to identify the thing and the series of its states and qualities without more ado. From this point of view the thing ceases to be an unknown somewhat, which in some mysterious way _has_ properties; it becomes the properties themselves thought of as a collection. It is no longer the unperceived _this_ which _has_ warmth, redness, etc., it is the warmth, the redness, and the rest of the sensible qualities taken collectively. For phenomenalist Metaphysics, as for associationist Psychology, the thing is a “bundle of attributes” and nothing more.

When we ask how, if a “thing” is merely the series or sum of its attributes, and possesses no underlying unity to which the attributes belong, the whole of our ordinary language about things comes to be constructed on the contrary assumption, how it is that we always talk and think as if every “bundle” of attributes were owned by something of which we can say that it _has_ the quality, we are met by the phenomenalist with a reference to Psychology. Owing to the fact, which Phenomenalism and Associationism are content to accept as ultimate, that sensible qualities are always presented to our perception in definite groups, it is argued that the thought of any one member of such a group is enough to revive by association the thought of the other qualities which have regularly been presented simultaneously with itself or in immediate succession to it. Hence, because thus associated in our perception, the group comes naturally, though illegitimately, by one of those mental fictions of which Hume treats so fully, to be thought of as one, though it is actually a discrete multiplicity. The unity of the thing thus lies not in itself, but solely in our way of perceiving and thinking.

A more recent version of the same doctrine, which avoids the old associationist mistake of treating perception as a merely passive reception of a given material, is that the unity of the one subject of many predicates is ultimately derived from the unity of our own acts of attention. The qualities appear to belong to “one” thing because _we_ attend to them together as one in a single moment of attention. Thus the unity of substance which common sense believes itself to find in its objects has really been put into them by the perceiving mind itself. What is “given” to it is a disconnected plurality of qualities; by attending to groups of them as one it makes those groups into the attributes of a single reality. This is the essence of the doctrine of Kant, according to which the concept of “substance” is simply one form of the “synthetic unity of apperception” _i.e._ the process by which we project the unity of our own acts of attention into their objects, and thus create an orderly world for our own thought out of sensations which as they are given to us are a chaos. In principle, Kant’s doctrine, though intended as a refutation of Hume’s Associationism, only differs from Hume’s in the stress it rightly lays on the element of subjective interest in perception; the two theories agree on the main point, that the bond which unites the many qualities of sense perception into one thing is a subjective one,—in Hume’s expressive phrase, a “fiction of the mind.”[81]

With the psychological aspects of this doctrine we are not directly concerned in the present inquiry. For us the problem is not by what precise steps the mind comes to “feign” a unity in its objects which is not really there, but whether this conception of a feigned or subjective unity imposed by the mind upon a number of actually disconnected qualities is itself ultimately intelligible. Thus the metaphysical issue may be narrowed down to the following question: Can we intelligibly hold that a thing is in reality simply a number of qualities, not in their own nature connected, which we arbitrarily regard for our own purposes as one?[82] In other words, can we say the thing is simply identical with its qualities considered as a mere sum or collection, and any further unity of the kind the old Metaphysics denotes by “substance” a mental addition of our own to the facts?

Now there are two considerations—both ultimately reducible in principle to one—which seem fatal to the identification of a thing with its qualities, considered as merely discrete. (1) There can be no doubt that it is largely true to say that a given group of qualities appear to us to be the qualities of one thing because we attend to them as one. And again, attention is undoubtedly determined by, or, to put it in a better way, is an expression of, our own subjective interests. But these considerations do not in the least show that attention is purely arbitrary. If we take any group of qualities to form one thing because we attend to it as one, it is equally true that we attend to it as one because it affects our subjective purposes or interests as one. That group of qualities is “one thing” for us which functions as one in its bearing upon our subjective interests. What particular interest we consider in pronouncing such a group one, in what interest we attend to it, may be largely independent of the qualities of the group, but the fact that the group does function as one in respect to this interest is no “fiction” or creation of our own thought; it is the expression of the nature of the group itself, and is independent of “our mind” in precisely the same sense in which the existence and character of any single member of the group of qualities is independent. There is no sense in assigning the single quality to “the given,” and the union of the qualities into a single group to “the work of the mind”; in one sense both are the “work of the mind,” in another both are the expression of the nature of the “given.”[83]

(2) Again, the insufficiency of the simple identification of the thing with its qualities considered as a mere collection, may be illustrated by considering what the group of qualities must contain. The group of qualities is obviously never present in its entirety at any moment of experience. For the majority of what we call the qualities of a thing are simply the ways in which the “thing” behaves in the presence of various other things, its modes of reaction upon a number of stimuli. Now, at any moment of the “thing’s” existence it is only actually reacting upon a few of the possible stimuli, and thus only exhibiting a few of its qualities. The vast majority of its qualities are at any moment what Locke calls “powers,” _i.e._ ways in which it _would_ behave if certain absent conditions were fulfilled. Thus the thing to which we ascribe a number of predicates as its qualities is never the actual group of predicates themselves. Grass is green, but its greenness is not a fact in the dark; the sun is capable of melting the wax, and this capacity qualifies it permanently, but it does not actually melt the wax unless the wax is there, and various other conditions are also given; a man is temperamently choleric, but he is not actually at every moment of his existence in a passion. He is only predisposed to fly into a passion readily on the occurrence of provocation. Most of a thing’s qualities thus are mere possibilities; the nature of the thing is to act in this or that way under certain definite conditions which may or may not be realised in actual existence. Thus the collection of qualities with which Phenomenalism identifies a thing has itself no real existence as a collection. The collection is just as much a “fiction of the mind” as the unity which we attribute to it. Yet the fact that the thing’s qualities are mainly mere possibilities does not destroy the existence of the thing. It actually is, and is somehow qualified by these possibilities. And for that very reason its existence cannot be identified with the actual realisation of these possibilities in a group or collection of events. We might add as a further consideration, that the number of such possibilities is indefinite, including not only the ways in which the thing has behaved or will behave on the occurrence of conditions at present non-existent, but also all the ways in which it would behave on the occurrence of conditions which are _never_ realised in actual existence. But the previous argument is already in itself sufficient, the moment its significance is fairly grasped, to dispose of the notion that anything can be merely identical with a group of actually existing sensible qualities. The being of the things must be sought not in the actual existence of the group of sensible qualities, but in the law or laws stating the qualities which would be exhibited in response to varying sets of conditions.[84]

§ 7. Considerations of this kind compel us to forego the attempt to find the substance or being of a thing in the mere sequence of its different states considered as an aggregate. To make Phenomenalism workable, we are forced to say at least that the thing or substance to which the various attributes are assigned is the “_law_ of its states,” or again is “the _mode of relation_ of its various qualities.” Such a definition has obviously a great advantage over either of the two we have just rejected. It is superior to the conception of the thing as an unknown substratum of qualities, since it explicitly excludes the absurd notion of a world of things which first _are_, without being in any determinate way, and then subsequently set up determinate ways of existing among themselves. For a law, while not the same thing as the mere collection of occurrences in which it is realised, has no existence of its own apart from the series of occurrences which conform to it. Again, every law is a statement of possibilities, a formula describing the lines which the course of events will follow _if_ certain conditions are operative; no law is a mere register of actually observed sequences.[85] Hence, in defining the thing as the “law of its states,” we avoid the difficulty dealt with in the last paragraph, that the collection of the thing’s states never actually exists as a “given” collection. Thus for ordinary practical purposes the definition is probably a satisfactory one.

Yet it should be evident that in calling the thing the “law” of its states, we merely repeat the metaphysical problem of the unity of substance without offering any solution of it. For, not to dwell on the minor difficulty that we might find it impossible to formulate a _single_ law connecting _all_ the ways in which one thing reacts upon others, and thus ought more properly to speak in the plural of the laws of the states, we are now left with two distinct elements or aspects of the being of the thing, namely, the successive states and the law of their succession, and how these two aspects are united the theory fails to explain. We have the variety and multiplicity on the one hand in the states or qualities of the thing, its unity on the other in the form of the law connecting these states, but how the variety belongs to or is possessed by the unity we know no better than before. Thus the old problem of substance returns upon us; the many qualities must somehow be the qualities of a single thing, but precisely how are we to conceive this union of the one and the many?[86]

At this point light seems to be thrown on the puzzle by the doctrine of Leibnitz,[87] that the only way in which a unity can, without ceasing to be such, contain an indefinite multiplicity is by “representation.” Experience, in fact, presents us with only one example of a unity which remains indubitably one while embracing an indefinite multiplicity of detail, namely, the structure of our experience itself. For the single experience regularly consists of a multiplicity of mental states, both “focal” and “marginal,” simultaneous and successive, which are nevertheless felt as one single whole because they form the expression of a coherent purpose or interest. And this conscious unity of feeling, determined by reference to a unique interest, is the only instance to which we can point when we desire to show by an actual illustration how what is many can at the same time be one. If we can think of the thing’s qualities and the law of their connection as standing to one another in the same way as the detailed series of acts embodying a subjective interest of our own, and the interest itself which by its unity confers a felt unity on the series, we can in principle comprehend how the many qualities belong to the one thing. In that case the thing will be one “substance” as the embodiment of an individual experience, determined by a unique subjective interest, and therefore possessing the unity of immediate feeling. Its many qualities will “belong” to it in the same sense in which the various constituents of an experience thus unified by immediate feeling are said to “belong” to the single experience they constitute. And thus our idealistic interpretation of the general nature of Reality will be found to contain the solution of the problem of Substance and Quality.

Now it is fairly clear that some such idealistic solution is already contained in germ in the pre-scientific view of the world of things. There can be little doubt that our original notion of the unity of the thing as contrasted with the multiplicity of its qualities has been obtained by “introjectively” ascribing to whatever groups of qualities act upon us as one in respect of some interest of our own, the same conscious unity of feeling which we know in ourselves and our fellows. We shall have frequent opportunities, as we proceed, of discovering the enormous extent to which the whole pre-scientific view of the world is based upon the interpretation of all existence in terms of our own. Systematic Idealism will thus gradually be found to be no more than the consistent and deliberate carrying through of that anthropomorphic interpretation of Reality which lies at the bottom of all man’s attempts to make his surroundings intelligible to himself. It will follow, if our general attitude towards the problem of substance is tenable, that only what we have already defined as an individual experience can truly be called a “substance,” and that such experiences are “substances,” if the word is to be retained in our philosophical vocabulary, to the same degree to which they are truly individual. And thus we should be led in the end to the distinction between the one infinite substance which forms the whole of Reality and the finite and imperfect substances which are its components.

Again, we should have once more to remember that since, in general, we call that group of qualities one which acts on our interests as one, and our insight into those interests themselves is limited and confused, the boundaries assigned by us to the group of qualities we ascribe to a single substance as “its” states will be more or less arbitrary, and dependent upon the degree of our actual insight. It is possible for us to group together as states of the same thing qualities which a profounder insight would have disjoined, and _vice versâ_. And in the end, if all that is is contained in a single coherent self-determined system, it is clear that, speaking rigorously, there will ultimately be only one “substance”—the central nature or principle of the system itself—of which all subordinate aspects or parts of existence will be the attributes.

§ 8. _The Problem of Relation._—More perplexing than the problem of Substance and its Qualities is the question to which the pre-scientific assumption that the world consists of a number of _interrelated_ things gives rise. This problem of Relation becomes still more prominent when reflection upon the problem of Substance and Quality has made it manifest that what we call the qualities of things are one and all dependent upon their relations either to our perceptive organs or to other things. Put quite simply the problem is as follows: Things stand in a variety of relations to one another, and what we commonly call the qualities of each are dependent on (_a_) its modes of relation to other things, (_b_) its relation to our percipient organism. Again, the various qualities of one thing stand in relation among themselves. To begin with, they all exhibit the relations of identity and difference. They all so far possess a common nature as to be capable of being compared in respect of the special ways in which they manifest that nature, and are thus so far identical; again, they can be discriminated and distinguished, and are so far in the relation of difference. Further, the qualities of one thing are interconnected, as we have already seen, by various special laws or modes of relation, which exhibit the changes in the behaviour of the thing corresponding to changes in the surrounding circumstances.

Thus Phenomenalism, when it has banished the notion of a substantial unity in things, has to identify the world of things, as we have already seen, with qualities in relation to one another. But now the question arises, How are we to understand the conception of qualities in relation? Can we, on the one hand, reduce all qualities to relations or all relations to qualities, or, on the other, can we form an intelligible idea of the way in which a single whole or system can be formed by the union of the two? There are, of course, other questions of great though relatively secondary importance connected with the problem of relation, _e.g._, the question as to the number of ultimately irreducible kinds of relation, but the scope of the present work will permit of nothing beyond a brief discussion of the central difficulty. We will take the various alternatives in order.

(1) Philosophers have often been tempted to evade the difficulty of showing how qualities _and_ relations together can make up a system by suppressing one member of the antithesis altogether. Thus it has been maintained, on the one hand, that the world of real things consists entirely of simple unrelated qualities, and that what we call relations between these qualities are merely our own subjective ways of apprehending them. On the other hand, it has been suggested that there may be nothing in the real world except relations, and that what we call qualities of various kinds are nothing but forms of relation. But neither of these views seems seriously tenable.