Chapter XI: Part 11

The other assumption is based upon the current doctrine of evolution. Our bodies have been evolved step by step out of inorganic matter, and we have before our eyes a line of organisms connecting man with the simplest atom of matter. In this series there is no hiatus between one form and another, no breach of morphological continuity, but one species arises by insensible gradation out of its predecessors. Now in the case of organisms of a certain complexity we cannot help inferring consciousness, and as we go back along the line we not only see the complexity of the organism and of its nervous system insensibly diminishing, but for the first part of our course we have reason to think that the complexity of consciousness insensibly diminishes also.[38] The conclusion is forced upon us that nature is animate from top to bottom and that the humblest atom has an elementary feeling or eject of its own as simple in comparison with the complex intelligence of man as the atom is itself simple in comparison with his very complex brain. Unless we admit this we are in a dilemma. The ejective facts which we cannot help inferring in the case of all animals must extend further down through vegetables to inorganic phenomena, or else there must be a point at which we could say: here the object begins to have an inner or ejective fact corresponding to it as my mind corresponds to my body. But the series of objective forms presents no sudden break anywhere, not even between animals and vegetables, such as to warrant our supposing that ejective facts extend thus far down in the series and no further.

Clifford is not quite as explicit about the nature of the elementary ejects, which answer to moving molecules, as we should like him to be. Of one thing however he is quite certain; they are elementary feelings which yet are neither modifications of a consciousness nor yet imply a consciousness in which alone they can exist. Every feeling may be part of a consciousness, but it need not be so. Consciousness is only a derivative and secondary result, following on the arrangement of feeling in a particular way and it is evolved at a very late period in the history of the world. In itself a feeling is an absolute _Ding-an-sich_, whose existence is not relative to anything else. _Sentitur_ is all that can be said of it.

Thus strictly speaking it is not _consciousness_ which extends throughout the series of objective forms from man down to the molecule. It is only feeling. Consciousness proper only belongs to the later and higher members of the series. “If we make a jump from man say to the tunicate mollusks, we see no reason there to infer the existence of consciousness at all.” Therefore the doctrine of evolution itself forbids us to regard all ejects as being of the _same_ substant as mind. They are only of like substance ὁμοιούσιον not ὁμοούσιον, only quasi-mental[39] and not in themselves either rational, intelligent, or conscious.[40]

Besides the evolutionist’s reason that it is absurd to attribute consciousness and personality to tunicate mollusks there is another reason drawn from human introspection for asserting elementary feelings to be absolute and unrelated existence. “A feeling, at the instance when it _exists_, exists _an und für sich_ and not as _my_ feeling.”[41] The self-perception of the ego, the sense that in all my various feelings it is _I_ who am conscious, this “unity of apperception” does not exist in the instantaneous consciousness which it unites, but only in subsequent reflection upon it. It consists further in the power of establishing a certain connexion between the memories of any two feelings which we had at the same instant.

There is one other point of extreme importance to be noticed in Clifford’s account of the elementary feelings or ejects. They are connected together in their sequence and coexistence by counterparts of the physical laws of matter. Were it not so their correspondence with motions of matter could not be kept up. That they should be thus connected with one another militates at first sight with the characteristic of absoluteness above ascribed to them by Clifford. We must suppose therefore that when Clifford says that their existence is not relative to anything else, he means no more than that they are not ultimately related to a personal consciousness. We must suppose that it is these laws of the sequence and coexistence of elementary feelings which, “when molecules are so combined together as to form the film on the under side of a jelly-fish, so combine the elements of mind-stuff which go along with them as to form the faint beginnings of sentience. The same laws combine feelings so as to form some kind of consciousness, when the molecules are so combined as to form the brain and nervous system of a vertebrate” (p. 85).

We are now after these preliminary explanations in a position to appreciate what is the gist and core of Clifford’s speculations. It is this, that the reality external to our minds which is represented in our minds as matter is in itself mind-stuff or elementary feelings. The universe consists entirely of mind-stuff. Some of this is woven into the complex form of human minds containing imperfect representations of the mind-stuff outside them and of themselves also, as a mirror reflects its own image in another mirror, _ad infinitum_. Such an imperfect representation is called a material universe. The two chief points therefore of the doctrine as summed up by Clifford himself are:

1) Matter is a mental picture in which mind-stuff is the thing represented.

2) Reason, intelligence, and volition are properties of a complex which is made up of elements themselves not rational, not intelligent, not conscious.

We shall do Clifford an injustice if we interpret the foregoing theory as a dualistic and not as a monistic view, i. e. as a view which postulates two ultimate principles of reality rather than one. Clifford however often speaks as if feeling and matter were two coördinate aspects of reality, irreducible to one another. For example he allows himself to speak of mind-stuff as going along with the material object, of laws connecting the elements of mind-stuff which are only _counterparts_ of the physical laws of matter and not those laws themselves. Again he writes (p. 78) as follows: “The distinction between eject and object, forbids us to regard the eject, another man’s mind, as coming into the world of objects in any way, or as standing in the relation of cause or effect to any changes in that world.” Such language reminds us of Spinoza’s doctrine that body alone can determine body to move and only thought determine thought to think, but we must not therefore suppose that for Clifford as for Spinoza the two rival kingdoms of thought and extended matter are irreconcilably severed or nominally united by the figment of a single substance of which they are attributes: What Clifford means is that the thing _is_ a feeling so far as it is anything at all and that, if things coexist or succeed each other according to laws, they only coexist and follow _as_ feelings and conformably to laws of feeling. Not only is the elementary feeling a thing itself, but things-in-themselves are elementary feelings.

It is incumbent therefore on us to ask if an elementary feeling is equal to the double burden put upon it by this theory of being the real universe of things and of creating the human intelligence. In answering this question we must be careful to divest feelings beforehand of any characteristics which they only possess as gathered up into the unity of a self, for at the stage in which we are considering reality selves have not yet arisen. It is hard to conceive what is left of feeling after these characteristics have been removed, nor does introspection help us here, for, as Clifford very truly says, the fundamental deliverance of consciousness affirms its own complexity and it seems impossible, as I am at present constituted, to have only one absolutely simple feeling at a time. Elementary feelings however could hardly constitute the cosmos without they follow one another, coexist, and connect themselves together in their groupings according to certain laws, i. e. by some inherent necessity always take up the same attitudes toward each other, and this much Clifford assumes that they do. Yet these assumptions will not bear examination. Let us examine first the postulate that feelings follow in a fixed order; call them _a_ _b_ _c_ _d_, _b_ succeeds _a_ and precedes _c_ and it makes a difference, which comes after or before the other. Now being absolute feelings, not only is _a_ past and non-existent before _b_ begins to be, so _b_ before _c_, but each is in turn the entire reality and there is no consciousness before which they pass in procession. The real would thus fall into disconnected and mutually indifferent moments _a_ _b_ _c_ _d_; and as each of these in turn exhausts reality and is also unconscious of what goes before and after, there would be no real succession at all. In a real succession it makes a difference whether _b_ comes before _or_ after _a_, but in the case we suppose it could make no difference. In truth there can be no relation of before and after between two terms except for a self, which takes note of the one disappearing and of the other appearing; and whenever we speak of things following one another we tacitly presuppose a self before whom the procession passes.

It is even more difficult to understand how elementary feelings can be grouped and complicated in a fixed order of coexistence. Mind has not yet emerged, so we must suppose that the grouping takes place in space. In that case one feeling must be right or left, above or below another. The futility of such speculation will come home to anyone who will try to realise how a feeling of smell can be above or below one of taste.

We have next to consider Clifford’s account of the genesis out of elementary feelings of personal consciousness. The hypothesis of mind-stuff, we must remember, was framed in order to preserve the same continuity of ejective facts as we see to exist in the case of objective facts, to provide, that is, a gradual development of the human mind out of the simpler feelings of amœbæ and even of atoms. It must be denied however that the hypothesis is a success if we retain the usual meanings of the words continuity and development. Properly speaking a thing can only be said to grow or develop when it remains the same with itself all through the process and unfolds therein capacities which were anyhow latent in it to start with. Thus a tadpole develops into a frog, a grub into a butterfly, and the child grows into the man. But in the series of ejects which begins from atoms and after running through amœba and ape finally culminates in the human intelligence there is no point of identity, no community between the first and last terms. The eject which is the molecule is denied by Clifford to be either conscious or rational, nor has it even will, like the philosophical factotum of Schopenhauer or Von Hartmann. It is a purely negative conception, the abstract opposite of that mind into which it is to ultimately develop. The hiatus between our intelligence and a thing in itself, which call it feeling, or mind-stuff, or what we will, is merely all that our intelligence is not, is none the less of a hiatus, because it is, with the help of apes and amœbæ, spread out thin, so to speak. It would be better frankly to avow the chasm that exists than to gloss over it with words like evolution and development.

“When a material organism,” writes Clifford, “has reached a certain complexity of nervous structure, the complex of ejective facts which goes along with its action reaches that mode of complication which is called consciousness. When a stream of feelings is so compacted together that at each instant it consists of (1) new feelings, (2) fainter repetitions of previous ones, and (3) links connecting these repetitions, the stream is called a consciousness. Consciousness is thus a relative thing, a mode of complication of certain elements, and a property of the complex so produced.” If we look into this statement we see that it only amounts to this: that feelings constitute a conscious self when they become the feelings of a conscious self and not before, for except as gathered up in the unity of a self which has memory and remains the same throughout its differences feelings can be neither new nor repeated nor joined by links.

1) That a feeling is new means that I attend to it, contrast it with former ones, and decide that I have not felt it before.

2) That a feeling is a previous feeling now repeated means that I recognise it as having already occurred.

3) If feelings are joined by links of what nature are these links? Clifford does not say that they also are feelings, so presumably they are not; in that case no link is left save a connecting self. But even if the link is a feeling it cannot be less than a feeling of the togetherness of two other feelings, but such a feeling would involve memory of those feelings and memory involves self-hood. It is really, however, an abuse of words to apply the term feeling in such a case. We might with Hume ask of this feeling which links other feelings “Is it a taste, a smell, a sound, an impression of sight or touch?”

Clifford makes a reference to Haeckel’s treatise upon “Zellseelen und Seelenzellen.”[42] Haeckel’s view is that every protoplasmic cell has a soul of its own and that when a number of these are combined under certain conditions, as in the human brain, they generate as their resultant the human soul. He helps out his theory by pointing to such phrases as national spirit, a nation’s conscience, a people’s will. Nothing, he contends, could be more real than these entities, which are yet only resultants of the wills, spirits, and consciences of the separate individuals who compose the nation.

This is an interesting speculation, which it would be a pity to dismiss abruptly merely because it is groundless. No doubt our bodies and brains may be regarded as colonies of protoplasmic units of which each has an independent life of its own, of which each is born, nourishes itself, reproduces itself, and at last breaks up and dies. The colorless cells especially in our blood are such units and have as good a claim to be called individuals as the amœba which we find swimming about by itself in any pond. These units are certainly alike and must be allowed to have inner states of their own. It may also be freely conceded that the existence of certain inward states in these cells of which my brain and nerves are composed is the condition of certain states of feeling and emotion arising in me. But all these admissions fail to advance us a step toward Haeckel’s conclusion. That any number of atoms of protoplasm have souls and soul-states is not enough _per se_ to produce an extra soul which is none of them, yet _like_ their souls and possessed of a life of its own. Even if the molecules of my brain were each in possession of a self-consciousness as ample as my own, their mere juxtaposition could not give rise to my self-consciousness. From first to last their soul-states remain theirs, mine remain mine. The reasoning employed by Haeckel involves a fallacy of composition:—because each of a colony of cells _a_, _b_, _c_, _d_, has a soul of its own, therefore the colony as a whole has a soul of its own, which is not the soul of any one of them. Nor do the analogies Haeckel invokes help him at all, for the life of a nation does not exist at all except as the lives of the individuals composing that nation, nor do we expect to find any traits in our so-called national spirit which are not ultimately contributed by individuals; Haeckel however would have us believe that the mere composition of the primitive and simple souls of separate amœbæ results in a _human_ soul with its wealth of intuitions and interests. The utmost we are entitled to say is that given a certain collocation of cells in the brain there may by an entirely new act of the infinite be generated a human soul. It is only by playing fast and loose with words that we can deduce this new soul from an aggregate of other souls either like or unlike itself.

It is surprising that Clifford should have recognised that the reality underlying so-called matter is akin to mind and yet have identified it rather with the quasi-mental facts of an amœba or of an atom than with the intelligence of man. The argument by which he arrives at this conclusion is as follows: You as a face, a voice, a touch, as an object to my senses in short, are a mere phantasm or appearance in my consciousness, part and parcel of myself and not distinct from me in any way. But I cannot help inferring an eject, to wit feelings and a consciousness like my own, behind the sensible show of your person; and this consciousness of yours which I address as _you_, is the truth of the object or appearance, which I have. _You_ are the reality which I really perceive, so far as I perceive anything more than my own feelings. Similarly when I watch an amœba, what I perceive as a somewhat formless mass of protoplasm is really in itself the struggling life within. Lastly what I handle and perceive as a crystal or metal is really the eject. If here we read force or unconscious will instead of eject or mind-stuff, Clifford’s view would practically coincide with Schopenhauer’s; for force is truly an eject in Clifford’s sense, not an object or appearance to me.

Now the human intelligence arises late in the history of things and is altogether a secondary and derivative thing. Consequently the world is not really what it is for my consciousness. My _Weltanschauung_ is false in proportion as my mind is complex and derivative. Conversely, the _Weltanschauung_ of each being approximates to truth and becomes less and less illusive in proportion as the eject which it in reality is approaches the primitive simplicity of mind-stuff. I am _really_ very little of what I am _consciously_. If you want a truer exponent of the truth of things you must go to the amœba or lower still. It, as compared with me, is _consciously_ most of what it is _really_. The absolutely simple atom is probably the only being who is quite free from delusions. The conclusion then to which Clifford conducts us is this: that the universe is not really such as it appears to our intelligence, still less, I presume, such as it would appear to a higher intelligence than ours. It is really such and such only as it would appear to the being whose eject is the lowest rung in the ladder of mind-stuff. Our universe spread out in space and time, with all its splendours and harmonies, is a delusion; nay, more, the human soul with its æsthetic and moral sensibilities, its fears and aspirations, is the parent delusion which breeds the delusion of a cosmos. “We are such stuff as dreams are made of.”

The loose way in which Clifford used the word feeling, as equivalent to any form of consciousness, blinded him to the fact that a qualified thing as such is not given in feeling at all and led him to suppose that the universe as we know it would continue to stand in the absence of all complex ejects whatever. Mr. Green has shown that all theories of the object which ignore the workmanship of thought manifest therein and identify the _esse_ of things with their _percipi_ lead straight to nihilism. To such nihilism Clifford’s doctrine, like Hume’s which it resembles, immediately bring us. But Hume did not take seriously the demolition of reality involved in his theory that things are only real as they are felt and that feelings are “entirely loose and separate” (Treatise I, 559) while the solid framework of reality is an illusion bred of a propensity of our minds to feign connections and relations where there are none. Hume tells us that he regarded his own speculations as “philosophical melancholy and delirium,” as “clouds to be dispelled” (Treatise I, 501). He writes “I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse and am merry with my friends; and when, after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find it in my heart to enter into them any further.” But Clifford, like Huxley, took Hume _au grand serieux_, forgetting that feeling as such does not reveal an object at all. There is a passage in a letter of Clifford’s written to Professor Pollock in September, 1874, à propos of Green’s introduction to Hume, which evinces pretty clearly that Clifford did not discern the true drift of Hume’s speculations in the way Hume did himself. “I hope,” he writes, “you have seen Sidgwick’s remarks on the introduction; he points out that to prove Hume insufficient is not to do much at the present day.... Green, for instance, points out that Hume has no complete theory of the object;—to find fault with Hume for the omission is like blaming Newton for not including Maxwell’s electricity in the Principia.” Here Clifford hardly writes as if he saw that his own theory of the object as e. g. an unrelated feeling is open to exactly the same criticisms as Hume’s, as if he understood, what Hume had an inkling of, that, in proving the ego to be a relative thing instead of the heart and centre of reality, you dissipate the universe into nothing. There are several other features in Clifford’s doctrine that call for criticism. It should for example be pointed out that the entire view that ejects are the truth of objects is in the first instance a deliverance of consciousness itself. I only transcend my individual feelings, says Clifford, so far as I infer a consciousness more or less like my own to underlie them; and this underlying eject is the sole reality. “How this inference is justified, how consciousness can testify to the existence of anything outside of itself, I do not pretend to say; I need not untie a knot which the world has cut for me long ago.” (Vol. II, p. 73.) But if consciousness is but the property of a temporary conjunction of unconscious feelings, what value shall we attach to its assurances? They are certainly not valid except for itself; they do not hold good for the atomic feelings of which the world ultimately consists. But my belief that the real is in the last resort an atom of feeling is simply an extension of my conviction that ejects are the truth of my feelings. Prove this conviction an illusion—and Clifford does prove it to be such, when he declares consciousness to be a relative thing—and you prove the entire theory an illusion. Thus the tail of Clifford’s theory is bitten off by the head.

The hypothesis that feelings can be felt, without being felt as my feelings, is a very noteworthy one. “A feeling at the instant when it _exists_, exists _an und für sich_, and not as my feeling.” This is why a Greek said δέδορκα in the sense of I see, because the act of perception is necessarily over, when we become conscious of it. “When,” continues Clifford, “I remember the feeling as _my_ feeling, there comes up not merely a faint repetition of the feeling, but inextricably connected with it a whole set of connections with the general stream of my consciousness.” This is very truly and acutely observed but it is an admission that the unrelated feeling is no element in our experience, that in our cosmos at least there is no ὕλη whatever, but that every corner of it is illumined by the presence of a relating self. _My_ consciousness never directly testifies at all to the existence of an absolute feeling. To be _my_ feeling a feeling must already be brought by connections of content into the web of my experience, but what do I know of feelings which are not mine. Are not “absolute feelings” an inference based on observation of low organisms like the amœba, which we are convinced have no self and yet feel? It should be also noticed that this supposition that we are not directly but only _ex post facto_ conscious of our feelings ἔξεισιν εις ἄπειρον. Thus Clifford writes: “This memory (of a feeling which existed _an und für sich_ as _my_ feeling) is, _qua_ memory, relative to the past feeling, which it partially recalls; but in so far as it is itself a feeling, _it_ is absolute, _Ding an sich_.” That is to say, I am not directly but only _ex post facto_ conscious even of what I remember. To be conscious of the content of a memory I must _remember_ that I remember it. Surely this new memory in turn cannot be known _ex post facto_ and so I must _remember_ that I remember that I remember _et sic ad infinitum_, before I become really _conscious_ of anything at all.

One other point might be raised. What is the nature and origin of the laws which govern the sequence and coexistence of feelings. We have already seen that feelings as such neither follow nor coexist apart from a self.

“These laws are counterparts of the laws which govern physical phenomena.” Clifford in writing thus conducts his speculation Without prejudice to his common-sense belief in a world of necessarily and rationally related things. He does not see that with the reduction of the real to a feeling physical facts disappear and with these facts the laws to which laws of feeling shall correspond. He is evidently confusing the laws of feeling with the psychological laws of association which depend upon the environment of the individual’s senses by a world already real. He does not see that the problem he really imposes on himself is this: starting from no world at all to arrive at one, or starting from the world as it may be supposed to picture itself in the feelings of an amœba to arrive at it as it exists for the human intelligence. We must not concede to Clifford any more than to Hume this postulate of a real cosmical order which shall give the cue to feelings when and how to follow and coexist. Huxley only allows it to Hume, because not having passed the threshold of Idealistic philosophy he cannot divest himself of it. If, however, this postulate be denied, then the doctrine that the _esse_ of things lies in their _percipi_ will recommend itself to no one.

F. C. CONYBEARE.

FOOTNOTES:

[37] On the whole, however, it is probable that in dealing such hard blows as he did at priests and dogmas he was actuated by sheer love of truth, and those who knew him best assure us that he was entirely free from bitterness and from the vanity which sets some people upon beating their grandmother in public by way of showing that they are grown up in their opinions.

[38] _Clifford’s Essays_, Vol. ii, p. 83.

[39] Vol. ii, p. 61.

[40] Vol. ii, p. 87.

[41] P. 80.

[42] _Deutsche Rundschau_, July, 1878.

ARE THERE THINGS IN THEMSELVES?

The proposition that things in themselves cannot be known, has often, and perhaps justly, been proclaimed as the central idea of Kant’s philosophy. Kant concludes the first section of his “Transcendentale Elementarlehre” with this “critical admonition”:

“That in general nothing which is intuited in space is a thing
in itself, and that space is not a form which belongs as a
property to things; but that objects are quite unknown to us
in themselves, and what we call outward objects are nothing
else but mere representations of our sensibility, whose form
is space, but whose real correlate, the thing in itself, is
not known by means of these representations, nor ever can be.”
(“Kritik d. r. V.” § 4.)

The term “thing in itself” means originally the object as it is, independent of the thinking subject’s cognition. For instance: A rainbow appears in the clouds; the rainbow is not a thing in itself, but the appearance of a thing in itself. The rainbow exists in man’s sensibility only. The colors of the spectrum, indeed all colors, the colors of the sky, of the clouds, of trees, of living beings, are sensations only; they are subjective phenomena, they are certain kinds of feelings representing objective realities, but they are not these objective realities themselves. They are perceived in the brain and are projected to a place outside the organism. The rainbow, as it is seen, is not a thing, but it is something seen, it is an appearance only. And this is true of all things seen and heard and perceived by any one of the senses. The sense-pictures are localised in space, they are projected outside to a spot where the combined experience of the senses has taught a sentient being to expect them. But all the objects of the objective world as they are perceived are and remain subjective sense-perceptions. The world of our senses around us is woven of our sensations. It is mere appearance. This is not a question concerning which there is any doubt, this is simply a matter of fact. But the question arises, “Can we know things as they are independent of sensation? Can we know things in themselves?”

The physicist and every scientist is engaged with the problem, What are natural phenomena independent of sensation? Light is a sensation of vision, but what is the objective process that takes place when a human eye perceives light? The physicist answers this problem by eliminating in his mind the sense-element and by describing the facts of the process in terms of matter and motion. His answer is that light, objectively considered, is a certain vibration of the ether. If we can rely upon physical science, the thing in itself of a rainbow would be a certain refraction of ether-waves. These vibrations of the ether-waves are transmitted from the sun, and being broken in the falling raindrops actually take place independent of cognition, they are real whether we look at them or not.

The ultimate aim of science is a description of the natural phenomena not in terms of sense-elements, but in terms of form. That feature of a thing which we call its matter, constitutes its reality, but the form of a thing, of a motion, or of a process makes the thing that which it is; every act of causation is a change of form, and the forms of things are determined with the assistance of the operations of purely formal thought, i. e. through measuring or counting. Such is science, not only as it ought to be, but also as it actually is. All our scientists, each one in his field, are consciously or unconsciously working out a solution of this problem. And a solution of this problem means, in our conception, the objective cognition of the world—i. e., a description of the natural processes as they are independent of sensibility.

Kant knew very well that a description of things and of natural processes in terms of form was possible. He clung, nevertheless, to the proposition that things in themselves are unknowable. And why? A description of things and of natural processes in terms of form was in his opinion not as yet a description of things in themselves, for—and here we are confronted with the original idea and the fundamental error of Kantian thought—Kant did not consider the forms of things as an objective quality of theirs, he maintained that the formal element is purely mental and merely subjective. The thinking mind, he declared, attributes them to the object. Space and time, the pure forms of existence, together with all other forms, such as causation, are, according to Kant, not qualities of the objective world, but of the thinking subject. The thinking subject cannot help viewing the world in the form of its own cognition, it transfers these forms to the objects. Therefore the thing in itself according to Kant would not be represented in a description of the thing purely in terms of form, the thing in itself would mean the thing as it would be, independent of time and space.

Let us here point out a distinction between the thing in itself and noumenon. Noumenon means “a thing of thought.” The noumenal world is the world of thoughts in a thinking being’s mind. The noumenon must not be identified with the thing in itself. The two terms are often confounded, but they have to be distinguished. The idea of reflected ether-vibrations is a “noumenon,” but the reflected ether-vibrations themselves, the objective process are a thing, i. e. an objective reality, and in so far as they are a reality, considered as being independent of sensation, we may call them “a thing in itself.” Now when Kant denies the objectivity of time and space, he must, implicitly, also deny the objective validity of a description made in terms of measuring and counting. The pictorial world of our sense-perception is subjective, it is built up of sensations, it is not objective; and the world of thought is the attempt to reduce the subjective world of sense-imagery to terms of objective validity, i. e. to terms of form. But this world of thought is according to Kant purely mental, it is purely noumenal, or, in other words, noumena do not represent things independent of cognition, they represent things as our mind thinks them. The sensory world is mere appearance, it is a subjective phenomenon, but the world of thought, says Kant, is no less subjective, it is a world of thought which describes things in terms of purely mental properties and not in properties of the things themselves. This is tantamount to the proposition, that things in themselves cannot be known.

The term “thing in itself,” in the sense of a thing as it is independent of sensibility, would better be called “the objective thing,” and we shall so call it when we wish to distinguish it from Kant’s thing in itself. The objective thing is the thing, not expressed in terms of subjective elements, such as feelings or sensibility, but in terms of objective elements, i. e. in terms of form. That a description of things in terms of forms is possible has never been denied either by Kant or by any Kantian; but they deny that these descriptions are anything more than mere noumena; Kant and the orthodox Kantians deny that they represent the things as they are in themselves. Thus the term thing in itself in the Kantian sense comes to mean the thing as it is independent of space and time.

That every noumenon is a mental sign is a matter of course; the noumenal world is ideal. But we maintain that these mental signs represent real qualities of the objective world; they have a meaning; the things represented by them are actual features of reality. Kant denies this. To him the noumenal world is purely noumenal. To Kant there is no space outside the space-conception, and so he declares that space is ideal; it is not an objective quality of things. However, we maintain, that our space-conception describes, i. e. depicts, or represents space, our space-conception is ideal, yet space is not ideal but real; it is an objective quality of the world.

Kant’s view is dualistic, or at least necessarily leads to dualism, and it appears to rest on an unpronounced dualistic assumption. Kant treats “the subject” as something quite distinct and separate from “the object.” If he had borne in mind that the subject is always at the same time an object, he would have treated both subject as well as object as mere abstractions of one and the same reality. Resting upon this erroneous presupposition, Kant’s most consequential mistake, in our opinion, was his conception of what he called “the ideality of time and space.” If time and space were purely ideal, purely mental, purely subjective, then indeed, the things as they are would forever remain unknown to us, then indeed the thinking mind would be as if shut up within a hollow globe out of which it could never escape, then indeed the world would be divided into two parts, the objective world, and the subjective world; and the gap between both could never be bridged over. The thinking mind would have within itself a noumenal world built upon the subjective elements of sense-impressions. This subjective world would possess no objective value, it would not describe realities, and the objective world would thus be unknowable, inscrutable, and mystical.

The idea of a thing in itself found another support in a mistaken conception of the unity of certain things, especially of organisms. The unity of a combination of parts is not merely the sum of the parts, it consists in their peculiar combination which makes an harmonious co-operation possible. This unity is an additional element; it is an entirely new creation which exhibits features not contained in any of its parts. There is no latent watch contained in a heap of little wheels and cogs, the watch is created through the combination of these wheels and cogs. The unity of a thing is its form, consisting in a special arrangement of its parts; and this form although not material is nevertheless real.

The materialistic conception overlooks the importance of form; but the spiritualist and also the transcendentalist materialise it as some spiritual substance, as entities or independent existences. They are in this way as much materialistic as the materialist.

The question has seriously been asked, What is a melody in itself. The question has sense when we understand by it, What are those new qualities which appear through a certain combination of sounds? Those qualities are not nothing, they are something quite peculiar. We call one of them rhythm, another one is the fixed succession of notes of a different pitch. The qualities of a melody as a whole are not qualities of its separate parts; yet therefore the melody is not a thing in itself. We might just as well speak of a watch in itself, meaning thereby that peculiar unity of the combination of its parts which makes of them a watch. But if we thus speak of “the watch in itself,” we must be aware that this idea has not somewhere in a transcendental fairy-land an independent existence above space and time, and outside of its parts. The unity of a certain interacting group of parts is, on the one hand, no mere addition of the thinking subject, it is not purely noumenal, it is real and objective; on the other hand it is not a thing in itself, independent of its parts, it is the product of the relations in which its parts affect one another.

Is not perhaps the basis of these vagaries a mistaken conception of language? We call a certain sensory picture a tree and we say, the tree has roots, a stem, branches, leaves, and fruits. Autumn sets in and the wind shakes the leaves off the branches. Now we speak of a leafless tree. We cut the tree down and we speak of a rootless tree. We burn the trunk and the branches, and the tree as a phenomenon is gone, all its properties are taken away. What remains? The tree in itself is left, but the tree in itself does not exist. If all the property of a person is taken from him, the person himself is still left. The properties of a tree, however, are not properties in the same sense; they are qualities. If all the qualities and parts of a tree are gone, if only the tree in itself is left—then there is left nothing but the empty word tree, the idea of a tree.

II. KANT’S VIEW OF SPACE AND TIME.

Let us briefly consider the ground upon which Kant bases his view of the ideality of space and time. Kant asks:

“What then are time and space? Are they real existences? Or are
they merely relations or determinations of things, such however
as would equally belong to these things in themselves, though
they should never become objects of intuition; or _are they
such as belong only to the form of intuition, and consequently
to the subjective constitution of the mind_, without which
these predicates of time and space could not be attached to any
object?”[43] (Kr. d. r. V. § 2; “Meiklejohn,” p. 23.)

We should say, to state our opinion briefly, that space and time are not “real existences,” i. e. they are not concrete objects, but they are real nevertheless; they are not material things; not thingish realities, yet they are objective properties of things. They are the forms of things and processes, and belong to the things whether they become objects of cognition or not. In this sense, they actually belong to the things in themselves, viz. to the objective things.

Kant argues that space and time are not conceptions derived from outward experience; they have not been abstracted from sense-impressions. They are necessary representations _a priori_, they are not discursive ideas or generalisations, for there is but one space and one time, space being represented as infinite and time as eternal.

From these arguments Kant draws the conclusions that space and time do not represent qualities of an object but that they are the form of all sensory phenomena, space being the form of the external, time of the internal sense. In other words, space and time belong to the subjective condition of the sensibility and not to the objective world.

We answer that our conceptions of space and time are after all derived from experience. Space and time are abstractions. There is no time in itself. There is no space in itself. Space and time are not directly derived from outward experience, nor are they derived from the sense-elements of experience. Inner experience, i. e. reflection to the exclusion of sense-impression, the experimenting with pure forms, will lead to the construction of the concepts of space as well as of time. Space and time, magnitudes and numbers having been constructed in the mind of a thinking subject are applied to practical experience. When counting three trees we do not abstract the number “three” from the three trees, but we apply to them the system of numbers in our possession.

Says Kant:

“We never can imagine or make a representation to ourselves
of the non-existence of space, though we may easily enough
think that no objects are found in it. It must therefore be
considered as the condition of the possibility of phenomena and
by no means as a determination dependent upon them and is a
representation _a priori_, which necessarily supplies the basis
for external phenomena.”

Space being the generalised concept of extended form, and time that of motion without reference to any contents, it is naturally impossible to think the non-existence of space and time. Thinking is an act, it is a process; and any act, any process, any event, is a reality which implies or presupposes the existence of the forms of reality. We can think of matter without reference to form, i. e. we can have the abstract idea of matter; but we cannot think that there is any matter void of form. This does by no means prove that form has nothing to do with matter. On the contrary, it proves that form and matter are inseparable. The form of existence need not therefore be called “the basis” of existence, it is simply one universal feature of existence. And the form of existence being bound up with existence itself, it is necessary that any thinking existence in so far as it is real, in so far as it is at the same time an object and part of the objective world should also be in possession of the conditions to evolve the idea of form out of itself through inner experience.

This inner experience of experimenting with pure forms is also a kind of experience. It is not a purely subjective process; it is a subjective process to the thinking subject, which to other subjects, however, would appear as an objective process. The laws of pure form as stated in the sciences of purely formal thought, are not merely subjective; they possess objective validity. It is true and from our standpoint a matter of course that the laws of form are _a priori_, which means, they hold good for any pure form.

Modern positivism, such as we defend it, is monistic. We consider the entire world as one great whole and do not forget that all noumenal representations of certain features of the world, of matter, mind, form, even of things and our own souls included, are mere abstractions. Reality itself remains undivided and indivisible. Abstract concepts are mental symbols invented to represent certain features of reality. But although we can in our mind separate these features and distinguish them from other features, in the world of reality they cannot be cut out or thought of as things in themselves. Granting the oneness of reality which dawns upon us instinctively before consciousness is fully matured, we are inevitably led to the conception that there is but one form of reality, which implies that there is but one space and one time.

III. FORM NOT IMPORTED BY THE MIND INTO REALITY.

Kant says, and in this we agree with Kant, that “all thought must directly by means of certain signs relate ultimately to _Anschauungen_.” The word _Anschauung_ (the “onlooking,” generally translated by “intuition”) means the immediate presence of sense-perception. Says Kant: “The effect of an object upon our faculty of representation is called sensation, and that intuition which refers to an object by means of sensation is called empirical intuition.” For instance, I see a rose: The image of the rose which I see is the appearance or the phenomenon. Kant continues:

“That which in the phenomenon corresponds to the sensation I
term its _matter_, but that which effects that the contents of
the phenomenon can be arranged under certain relations, I call
its _form_.”

In other words matter is that which affects the senses and form is to be expressed in relations. The difference between the formal and the material is obvious. The formal is of great importance, nay, it is of paramount importance, but the formal is neither anything apart from the material nor is it a substance. Both concepts are disparate, but they have been derived by mental abstraction from the same reality.

We fully agree with Kant when he continues:

“That in which our sensations are merely arranged, and by which
they are susceptible of assuming a certain form, cannot be
itself sensation.”

But we do not agree with Kant when from this proposition he derives the following conclusion:

“It is, then, the _matter_ of all phenomena that is given to us
_a posteriori_; the _form_ must lie ready _a priori_ for them
in the mind, and consequently can be regarded separately from
all sensation.”

Here lies the great fallacy of Kant, which rests upon an erroneous statement and an actual distortion of fact. The phenomenon of a rose which I see before me is not merely sensory, but also formal. The phenomenon, i. e. the image of the rose (_die Anschauung_) is a sensation of a special form. The term sensation as it is generally used implies its having a special form. Accordingly the form does not, at least not from the beginning, lie ready _a priori_ in the mind; the form is given together with the sensation.

Kant speaks of “that which is annexed to perception by the conceptions of understanding,” as if our understanding added the formal out of the mind to the sensory elements given by experience. What is the mind? The mind is a product of the world; it is a system of symbols representing the things of the world and their relations including such possible relations as are worthy of aspiring for. In short, the mind consists of ideas and ideals.[44]

It has often been said that the mind is the creator of the sensory and noumenal world. This is incorrectly expressed, for mind _is_ the sensory and noumenal world itself. The sense-pictures, the thought-symbols, and the ideals of a man are actual parts of his mind. They are not products but constituents of his mind. Their organised totality is his mind itself. The activity which takes place in a mind, i. e. the combining, the separating, and recombining of memories, thoughts, and ideals are the actual realities, and if we speak of a man’s understanding, or reason, or any other so-called faculty, we have to deal with abstractions. The activity of mentally separating form and matter might be called by the general term understanding. However the faculty of understanding is not a distinct mental organ, it consists in the single acts of understanding, and the word understanding is a mental symbol representing them all together as if they were one thing.

And certainly these acts of understanding as little import the formal into the world of sensation as the miner carries the metals into the mines. The formal, the relational, or the _a priori_, is first extracted out of the data of experience not otherwise than iron is gained out of the ores. The ore is not iron but it contains iron, the phenomenon of a rose is not purely a sense-impression, it is a sense-impression of a certain form. We are aware of the fact that mind is an entirely new creation different from the non-mental world, yet at the same time we maintain that the elements from which mind develops are the same as the elements of the non-mental world. Nature furnishes the entire raw material and whatever new creation the product of a new development is, nothing can be added to the raw material, of which the formal is the most indispensable part.

The raw material of sensory phenomena as soon as it is worked out, and also the activity of working it out are called mind. Mind accordingly originates with the appearance of sentient substance as the organisation of feelings and the memories of feelings—these memories being conditioned through the preservation of the form of sentient substance. Mind is not something different from the world but must be considered as its product and highest efflorescence. Mind is made of the same substance as the universe and the mind-forms are the forms of objective existence.

As soon as a system of forms has developed in a sentient being, thus constituting its mind, this system can again be referred to the objective forms of things. In this sense we can say with Kant, that the understanding imports form into phenomena; and this re-importation, this referring the objectively formal to the subjective system of formal thought, is an essential element in cognition.

IV. PROFESSOR JODL’S VIEW OF THE THING IN ITSELF.

The idea of a thing in itself independent of space and time and the unknowableness of the thing in itself are the basis of all agnosticism. And an agnostic tendency is at present predominant even among positive workers and thinkers. Agnosticism is still the philosophy of the day even among those who have surrendered its basis (which is Kant’s transcendental idealism) and accept the monistic world-conception. Friedrich Jodl, professor at the University of Prague and author of the well-known “History of Ethics,” in answer to a letter of mine formulates in concise terms this modernised view of a thing in itself. He writes: