Chapter XVII: Part 17

4) Necessitarianism cannot logically stop short of making the whole action of the mind a part of the physical universe. Our notion that we decide what we are going to do, if as the necessitarian says, it has been calculable since the earliest times, is reduced to illusion. Indeed, consciousness in general thus becomes a mere illusory aspect of a material system. What we call red, green, and violet are in reality only different rates of vibration. The sole reality is the distribution of qualities of matter in space and time. Brain-matter is protoplasm in a certain degree and kind of complication,—a certain arrangement of mechanical particles. Its feeling is but an inward aspect, a phantom. For, from the positions and velocities of the particles at any one instant, and the knowledge of the immutable forces, the positions at all other times are calculable; so that the universe of space, time, and matter is a rounded system uninterfered with from elsewhere. But from the state of feeling at any instant, there is no reason to suppose the states of feeling at all other instants are thus exactly calculable; so that feeling is, as I said, a mere fragmentary and illusive aspect of the universe. This is the way, then, that necessitarianism has to make up its accounts. It enters consciousness under the head of sundries, as a forgotten trifle; its scheme of the universe would be more satisfactory if this little fact could be dropped out of sight. On the other hand, by supposing the rigid exactitude of causation to yield, I care not how little,—be it but by a strictly infinitesimal amount,—we gain room to insert mind into our scheme, and to put it into the place where it is needed, into the position which, as the sole self-intelligible thing, it is entitled to occupy, that of the fountain of existence; and in so doing we resolve the problem of the connection of soul and body.

5) But I must leave undeveloped the chief of my reasons, and can only adumbrate it. The hypothesis of chance-spontaneity is one whose inevitable consequences are capable of being traced out with mathematical precision into considerable detail. Much of this I have done and find the consequences to agree with observed facts to an extent which seems to me remarkable. But the matter and methods of reasoning are novel, and I have no right to promise that other mathematicians shall find my deductions as satisfactory as I myself do, so that the strongest reason for my belief must for the present remain a private reason of my own, and cannot influence others. I mention it to explain my own position; and partly to indicate to future mathematical speculators a veritable goldmine, should time and circumstances and the abridger of all joys prevent my opening it to the world.

If now I, in my turn, inquire of the necessitarian why he prefers to suppose that all specification goes back to the beginning of things, he will answer me with one of those last three arguments which I left unanswered.

First, he may say that chance is a thing absolutely unintelligible, and therefore that we never can be entitled to make such a supposition. But does not this objection smack of naïve impudence? It is not mine, it is his own conception of the universe which leads abruptly up to hard, ultimate, inexplicable, immutable law, on the one hand, and to inexplicable specification and diversification of circumstances on the other. My view, on the contrary, hypothetises nothing at all, unless it be hypothesis to say that all specification came about in some sense, and is not to be accepted as unaccountable. To undertake to account for anything by saying boldly that it is due to chance would, indeed, be futile. But this I do not do. I make use of chance chiefly to make room for a principle of generalisation, or tendency to form habits, which I hold has produced all regularities. The mechanical philosopher leaves the whole specification of the world utterly unaccounted for, which is pretty nearly as bad as to boldly attribute it to chance. I attribute it altogether to chance, it is true, but to chance in the form of a spontaneity which is to some degree regular. It seems to me clear at any rate that one of these two positions must be taken, or else specification must be supposed due to a spontaneity which develops itself in a certain and not in a chance way, by an objective logic like that of Hegel. This last way I leave as an open possibility, for the present; for it is as much opposed to the necessitarian scheme of existence as my own theory is.

Secondly the necessitarian may say there are, at any rate, no observed phenomena which the hypothesis of chance could aid in explaining. In reply, I point first to the phenomenon of growth and developing complexity, which appears to be universal, and which though it may possibly be an affair of mechanism perhaps, certainly presents all the appearance of increasing diversification. Then, there is variety itself, beyond comparison the most obtrusive character of the universe: no mechanism can account for this. Then, there is the very fact the necessitarian most insists upon, the regularity of the universe which for him serves only to block the road of inquiry. Then, there are the regular relationships between the laws of nature,—similarities and comparative characters, which appeal to our intelligence as its cousins, and call upon us for a reason. Finally, there is consciousness, feeling, a patent fact enough, but a very inconvenient one to the mechanical philosopher.

Thirdly, the necessitarian may say that chance is not a _vera causa_, that we cannot know positively there is any such element in the universe. But the doctrine of the _vera causa_ has nothing to do with elementary conceptions. Pushed to that extreme, it at once cuts off belief in the existence of a material universe; and without that necessitarianism could hardly maintain its ground. Besides, variety is a fact which must be admitted; and the theory of chance merely consists in supposing this diversification does not antedate all time. Moreover, the avoidance of hypotheses involving causes nowhere positively known to act—is only a recommendation of logic, not a positive command. It cannot be formulated in any precise terms without at once betraying its untenable character,—I mean as rigid rule, for as a recommendation it is wholesome enough.

I believe I have thus subjected to fair examination all the important reasons for adhering to the theory of universal necessity, and have shown their nullity. I earnestly beg that whoever may detect any flaw in my reasoning will point it out to me, either privately or publicly; for if I am wrong, it much concerns me to be set right speedily. If my argument remains unrefuted, it will be time, I think, to doubt the absolute truth of the principle of universal law; and when once such a doubt has obtained a living root in any man’s mind, my cause with him, I am persuaded, is gained.

C. S. PEIRCE.

FOOTNOTES:

[53] _Continuous_ is not exactly the right word, but I let it go to avoid a long and irrelevant discussion.

PSYCHICAL MONISM.

In modern thought, ever since Descartes introduced into the conception of all-comprising nature that perplexing distinction between thinking and extended substance, the problem of reconciling so radical a dualism has formed the main task of those who have busied themselves with philosophical interpretation.

In the light of the Cartesian system there seemed to exist two entirely disparate, independent worlds; the one in individual consciousness, the other outside of it; the one made of mental, the other of material stuff.

How to conceive these two antithetical worlds, as interdependent constituents of one and the same unitary nature is, after many discarded attempts, still the principal endeavor of systematic thinking.

Every student of philosophy knows how Descartes himself ascribed the evident concordance and intercommunication of the two worlds to the miraculous decree and intervention of the Deity; how Spinoza sought to overcome the distracting dilemma by proving that the two substances are but attributes of one single absolute substance; how Leibnitz made both realms, that of inwardness and that of outwardness, form a consistent universe and keep consonant time by means of a divinely pre-established harmony; and how numbers of less illustrious devices likewise failed to gain general acceptance.

A more important part in the development of modern thought was played by those other attempts, which strove to reach a monistic interpretation by showing that nature in all its manifestations is constituted, either solely by mind and its original endowments; or, on the contrary, solely by matter and its original endowments. Thinkers versed in physical science felt inclined to look upon the material world as the matrix of all natural occurrences; while those versed in psychical science were apt to conceive the mental world as containing within itself all there is of nature.

The physical hypothesis has proved its eminent efficiency by leading to a vastly more correct and faithful knowledge of the perceptible universe than had ever been previously attained.

Still, from the psychical standpoint it became nevertheless evident beyond contention, that all so-called qualities of matter, all that in any way enters into our perception of it, is composed of nothing but mental constituents. And this means simply, that, whatever we are actually conscious of, must of necessity form part of our own consciousness, and not of anything outside of it.

As to the truth of this fundamental psychological conception there is no longer any dispute among philosophers. But there remains to be solved the all-important question, whether or not there exists outside this consciousness of ours, either beyond its peripheral, perceptual range, or beyond its central, conceptual sphere, another world which it merely symbolically reveals. And in case such another extra-conscious world is found actually to exist, how it comes to constitute, together with the world of consciousness, that unitary system of being of which we mentally and bodily seem to form part.

Professor Dewey in a series of articles in _Mind_ (Nos. 41, 42, 49, 57) and in one recently published in this journal (Vol. II, No. 1) advocates—more profoundly and consistently than has been done before by any Neo-Kantian or Neo-Hegelian—the view, that consciousness itself intuits all phenomena of nature by force of its own intrinsic activity, imparting to them their significance as knowledge by discriminating their specific position and value within its own all-comprising organic totality of being. He believes thus in no other world than that of self-consciousness; asserting that neither its perceptual nor its conceptual content are significative of any reality beyond.

The editor, though an ardent defender of cosmic Monism, is by no means a convert to such purely psychical monism. He maintains, on the contrary, in the same issue of _The Monist_ (p. 85), that, “The mental picture of a tree becomes a symbol for a special object outside of us, and is projected to the place where experience has taught us to expect that object.” Consequently, the mental picture refers as knowledge to something outside of us, to something not forming part of our consciousness.

The present writer believes likewise, that the perceptual tree is merely a mental symbol signalising an extra-mental, sense-stimulating existent; and that the value of this symbol as knowledge consists altogether in its implication of the existence of an entity subsisting outside our own being and its consciousness, and having power to affect our sensibility in definite more or less recognised ways.

The editor and the present writer assert then, that the content of perceptual consciousness forms merely a symbolical representation of a corresponding reality subsisting outside consciousness; while Professor Dewey acknowledges as really existent only self-consciousness, and nothing outside of it, either peripherically stimulating the senses, or centrally imparting universality to individual intelligence.

The former view frankly admits duality in nature, so far as conscious and extra-conscious existence are concerned. And in order to overcome this dualism of _ordo idearum_ and _ordo rerum_—essentially the same dualism as bequeathed to us by Descartes—it has to show how the world within consciousness with its “mental picture,” and the world “outside of us” containing the existent symbolically represented; how these totally disparate worlds come to constitute a unitary nature, whose divers modes of existence are throughout interdependently connected.

It is clear that the reality symbolised by the “mental picture”—if any such reality actually exists—can be known to us solely as thus mentally symbolised, and not known to us in any way as it subsists extra-mentally “outside of us,” as it subsists in itself when not thus symbolically represented by our casual and intermittent perception of it.

The mental picture being a mere representative symbol must needs differ _toto genere_ from the non-mental existent symbolised thereby. We know only what as mental representation is forming part of our consciousness. We cannot possibly know anything we are not conscious of. The entity “outside of us,” the “thing in itself”—if it at all exists—is therefore as such of necessity unknown to us. This confession of ontological ignorance is unavoidably involved in the acceptance of a symbolised reality “outside of us.”

The complex and prodigious difficulties in the way of a monistic interpretation, when we start with the dualistic presupposition of a conscious and an extra-conscious world, are all effectively circumvented, as soon as with Professor Dewey we deny altogether the existence of a world of “things-in-themselves” or sense-affecting existents, and roundly assert that consciousness as such constitutes, comprises, and has direct knowledge of ultimate reality; that it is in fact itself the absolute all-sufficient and all-efficient entity.

To understand the philosophical strength and influence of a position so strangely at variance with that of current common sense, which holds as self-evident the existence of body as well as mind, we have somewhat to probe its deep-laid foundations in the history of modern thought.

It was rendered plausible through Descartes’s, Locke’s, Berkeley’s, and Hume’s philosophical argumentation, that what we are consciously aware of, what is actually present to us as perception or “idea,” and therewith as the world at large, is altogether made up of a more or less complex combination of our own actual and remembered sensations.

The conscious content itself was thus necessarily held to constitute the exclusive object of philosophical research. And by starting with sensations as its primordial elements, and taking all “ideas,” or facts of memory, to be but faint reproductions of such elements, it became the task of investigators “of the human mind” to analyse the given content of consciousness into these its assumed elements, and to discover the “laws” or general ways of their combination.

Proud of its purely experiential method, concerned about nothing but what is actually found present in consciousness, this mode of philosophising disclaimed, in consequence, all knowledge of any “power” giving rise from without to sensorial “impressions” and their order of conscious emergence. And it ignored likewise the existence of any “power” combining and systematising them from within; and, moreover, of any entity for whom the sensorially constituted experience had intelligent significance.

Such nominalistic, sensorial idealism has until lately reigned supreme in English philosophy. Previous to the new departure introduced by it philosophical interpretation had always followed the method of conceptual evolution, carried on according to the rules of formal or deductive logic. It took some widely inclusive, ready-made concepts as its starting points or major premises, and extracted therefrom all knowledge that seemed to be implicitly contained in them.

Even Kant in his younger days had no idea that valid knowledge or truth could possibly be attained in any other way than by logically deducing it from ready-made premises. At a later period he learned from Hume to distinguish between what he termed analytical and synthetical propositions, and what had been called by the former thinker connection between vivid impressions or matter of fact on the one side, and connection between their faint copies or the so-called ideas on the other side.

The discovery on the part of Kant, that our knowledge of the actual connection of matters of facts has in every instance to be learned from direct experience and cannot be ratiocinatively deduced from ready-made general notions, was a complete revelation to him. It changed his entire way of thinking, and became the starting-point of his system of critical or transcendental philosophy. He saw clearly, that, if all instructive cognition is gained, and has always been gained, solely by means of actual experience, if it has been synthetically built up bit by bit as directly given to us, without our being able to construct a valid system of knowledge transcending in any way actual experience; that reason then as a knowledge-constituting faculty is impotent, and that metaphysics, as the science of a realm of intelligible existence, must be ever more rejected as a pure illusion.

Kant’s thought, like that of most of our own rationalistic thinkers, was however predominantly swayed by the belief in an intelligible world, the veritable home of man’s spiritual being, where it eternally abideth in close communion with a supreme creative intelligence. After a brief attack of Humian scepticism, the theologically trained, though rationally wide-awake and profound thinker, set out to examine the faculties of reason with a view to discover a philosophically legitimate ingress into that cherished realm of intelligible subsistence. Hitherto reason had been effectively used in philosophy only as an analytic instrument. Real knowledge being, however, as proved by Hume, a matter of synthesis, it would evidently be making proper way toward a rationally conceived intelligible world, if it could be proved that reason is itself in possession of synthetical powers.

After many years of profound meditation in this direction, Kant gave its results to the philosophical world. He had become convinced that mathematical truth, instead of being analytically derived as hitherto believed, is on the contrary built up synthetically by intelligence itself, and this without the aid of externally imparted experience; that intelligence is therefore efficient to form synthetical propositions _a priori_. It followed, as a matter of course, that time and space in which mathematical figurations take shape, are not conditions of existence outside of us, but original forms of our own perceptive faculty, and that intelligence by dint of its synthetical powers constructs mathematical figurations within these perceptual forms. And finally the conclusion was reached that time and space, the empty forms of perception, being themselves wholly deficient of any kind of activity, it must be intelligence alone which possesses synthetical efficiency, which exercises in fact whatever activity is operative in the conscious world.

But though Kant enthroned intelligence as the creator of pure mathematics, and endowed it with the exclusive gift of synthetical efficiency, he did not see his way to constitute it also the creator of the sense-given material that comes experientially to fill the empty and passive forms of perception. Against all denunciations of his system as purely idealistic, he insisted that there exists outside our being and its consciousness a world of things-in-themselves, having power to affect our sensibility, so that time and space, its receptive forms, become filled with experiential, though wholly unsynthetised material.

Reluctantly, though in faithful adherence to the unbiassed results of his investigation, he was at last led to declare that intelligence or reason as an instrument of knowledge—called by him theoretical reason in contradistinction to practical reason, conceived as the leading principle of moral conduct;—that such theoretical reason has power only over sensorially given material, and is incapable of attaining knowledge of the intelligible sphere.

Still Kant regarded his so-called categories or synthetical functions of reason as modes of activity, belonging not only to individual reason, but to reason in general. And on the strength of this realistic generalisation he attributed to them the power of imparting necessity to synthetical propositions, such propositions—otherwise merely subjective or empirical—being rendered thereby objective or universally valid. He showed, moreover, that the relation of every kind of knowledge to a common centre of all-inclusive awareness,—that this “synthetic unity of apperception” as he called it,—presupposes an intelligible ego, whose veritable nature becomes however nowise manifest within our time-and-space-conditioned experience. And he taught that an all-comprehending intelligible being had to be hypostatised in order to complete the totality of rational knowledge.

Thus, instead of giving us a monistic philosophy, Kant’s theoretical speculations disclosed, on the contrary, a tripartite world. At the centre the non-manifest intelligible ego in communion with a supernatural sphere, and conceived as the veritable bearer of the synthetical reason. In the median and only known region the synthetical reason itself, constructing and cognising nature, by synthetically elaborating the chaotic manifold in time and space. And at the periphery, beyond our own being and its perception, an unknowable realm of things-in-themselves affecting our sensibility.

So complex an appearance did existence assume under Kant’s critical inspection. Contemplative man, however, never ceases to hanker after a monistic world-conception. Though individualised, he feels himself one with universal being, and strenuously strives to understand how those bonds of union are established, and what part he in verity is playing in this stupendous drama of being and becoming.

To most philosophers, before Kant, knowledge seemed to be given to us ready-made, first conceptually as innate ideas or universal notions; and then perceptually as the finished image of an outside world.

Kant has exerted, and still exerts, a controlling influence over thinkers by having systematically demonstrated, that not only knowledge, but nature itself as we know it, is constructed by powers inherent in our own being. He taught that we ourselves, by force of our combining and ordering intellectual organisation, fashion out of meaningless sense-material the wondrous world we know. And, moreover, that by force of our intelligible being we have power to bend the otherwise rigorously mechanical course of nature in compliance with moral injunctions.

No wonder that so inspiriting a philosophy electrified to new vigor and valiant self-reliance the dogmatically slumbering life of German thought. And it was Fichte, above all other followers of Kant, who by his fervent exposition kindled in crowds of hearers the vivifying spark of this “new philosophy” of all-efficient intelligence.

Fichte is the real father of such psychical monism as has recently found so proficient an expounder in Professor Dewey. Fichte understood, what Kant failed to see, that the “dynamical idealism” of nature-constituting reason involves, not merely the _elaboration_ of sense-given material, but the _out and out production_ within consciousness of the entire world of perception. For perception undeniably takes place within our own being, and must therefore be, as regards matter as well as form, the outcome of powers inherent in ourselves. Between a consistent dream and the apperception of reality the difference lies merely in our feeling, in the latter instance, compelled in a peculiar manner to perceive what we perceive. But this feeling of compulsion is likewise a constituent of our own consciousness, and, moreover, under the influence of hallucinations even this test of reality fails us.

According to Fichte’s matured thought, our being consists altogether in intellectual activity, an activity rendering explicit by means of self-consciousness what it already implicitly contains. And it is universal being that becomes thus self-conscious in us. Infinite reason, constituting a system of ideas, a spiritual organisation, is the fount and origin of all existence, its own self-revelation becoming manifest in finite beings.

Thus, by force of logical consistency, was eliminated from Kantian transcendentalism the world of things-in-themselves as superfluous to all-constituting intelligence. And the unification of individual self-consciousness with universal intelligence was established by considering individual self-consciousness as partaking in the self-revealing activity of universal intelligence.

Hegel elaborated systematically the psychical or idealistic monism thus foreshadowed in Fichte’s later writings. Philosophical interpretation turns principally upon the source and import of consciousness. And from the recognition of the fact, that all constituents of perception form part of this consciousness of ours, it obviously follows that objects, and indeed the entire objective world realised in perception and solely as perception; that the realisation of this entire world of perceptual objects is in verity realisation of a world contained in our own being or subject. Subject and object are therefore, from this point of view, at bottom identical; the objective world—our human bodies included—being a self-revelation of our all-comprehending subject. Mind as well as matter, that which we call mental and that which we call material, are thus mere abstract terms denoting the subjective and objective sides of one and the same reality.

This reality transcendental idealism declares to be “intellectual activity.” It is intellectual activity which—from its point of view—is revealing itself in the conscious content, becoming thus self-conscious. This process of recognition of one’s self as subject-object, as the unitary essence and completion of both, is what Hegel calls the “Idea.” And with him theoretical or logical self-recognition and practical or ethical self-realization coincide as “Absolute Idea.” For to think absolute truth and to will its realisation are but two sides of one and the same activity. Thought, intelligence, reason, knowing itself as in every sense veritable being is thus the absolute One and All.

Such out and out psychical monism is the legitimate outcome of a conception which takes the content of consciousness to be ultimate reality, signifying nothing beyond itself; and which then constitutes a spiritually conceived entity, called thought, intelligence, or reason, as the originator and bearer of such consciousness.

After a period of glorious triumph the Hegelian philosophy of self-evolving intelligence became a general laughing-stock at home and abroad. This ignominious fate overtook it, first in consequence of its fawning prostitution by the master himself to the reactionary service of Church and State; and then also in consequence of the ridiculous “pyrotechnical” abuse of its dialectical method by the “Young-Hegelians.”

However, by “going back to Kant,” the teachings of transcendental idealism have in our time once more gained the ascendency, and have succeeded not only in conquering materialism, but also in invading and almost supplanting English experientialism.

In Germany, after a season of complete estrangement between science and philosophy, a re-approachment was effected by the Neo-Kantian movement. It originated principally in the recognition on the part of science, that sense-perception is above all a psychical and not a purely physiological process, a mental not a material fact; that therefore the effort to arrive at a correct “theory of knowledge” is by no means a vain endeavor, and that psychics as well as physics deserves a place in the hierarchy of sciences.

In England and America the Neo-Kantian movement owed, on the other hand, its success, above all, to such theistic rationalism as found popular expression in “Robert Elsmere.” In Professor Caird’s words it is said to afford a means for the “vindication of the religious consciousness.” And this it accomplishes “by an objective or absolute synthesis,” which establishes “the indivisible unity of the intelligence and the intelligible world,” “the unity of man as spiritual with an absolute spirit.”

Dr. Hutchison Sterling’s “Secret of Hegel” gave the first effective impulse to this transcendental mode of thinking among university men of a speculative turn. The late Thomas Hill Green of Oxford and Prof. Edward Caird of Glasgow became its foremost exponents, and made numerous converts. The former by elaborately disclosing, by force of Kant’s principle of synthetical reason, the insufficiency of the sensorial experientialism generally accepted in England since Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” The latter by consistently developing the idealistic and transcendental implications of this same principle of synthetical reason.

As repeatedly noticed, and never to be lost sight of, transcendental idealism derives its convincing force from the undeniable truth, that whatever we are directly aware of forms part of our own consciousness. This involves the indivisible unity of such fact as we are directly conscious of and the faculty through which we are conscious of it. This unity of the realising self and the realised world, of object and subject as content of consciousness; or rather the unity of the objective and subjective factors of it, this subject-object oneness of conscious states and occurrences is an irrefutable truth, from which one has to start, whatever direction one may take. You assert, then, that that which exists thus interblended as consciousness is itself ultimate reality, and you will encounter but little difficulty in deducing therefrom a pretty plausible psychical monism. For the power through which and as which this ultimate reality exists is then immanent in us individually. And when this power is conceived as intelligence or spirit, and the world at large as existing solely as content of this spirit’s consciousness, or indeed as such consciousness itself, it is clear that our own self-and-world-awareness must be—according to this view—identical in essence with the spiritual power which is ultimate and universal Reality.

In self-consciousness, when regarded as a totality of all actual and potential awareness, our feelings as well as the perceptual objects composed of them constitute an organically completed order. They all stand in definite and interdependent relations to our unitary being. This all-comprising being has time and space as modes of gradual self-realisation, but is not—according to transcendentalism—itself in time and space. And this is undeniably true, so far at least as the being that combines all transient events of experience into a unitary system of permanent knowledge cannot possibly itself form part of the ephemeral flux of conscious states experienced by it.

Still the multifold individuations of the ultimate reality into separate personal self-consciousnesses and deciduous bodily organisms forms the great, if not insuperable, obstacle in the way of psychical monism. If, on the one hand, we take with Green and Professor Caird individual self-consciousness as a “reproduction,” and not as a mere phase of universal consciousness; and on the other hand admit a natural and gradual development “of man as an animal organism,” instead of proving such natural development to be a misconception of our time and space bound recognition, we are far from having as yet succeeded in establishing a consistent psychical monism on Kantian lines. His tripartite world remains ununified.

To achieve its unification is, however, after a profound study and appreciation of the difficulties to be encountered, the arduous task Professor Dewey has courageously undertaken. To accomplish his purpose he has to show how individual consciousness proves itself to be ultimate reality, and as such identical with universal consciousness; how man, appearing among other perceptible objects in multifold individuated specimens as a gradually developed organism, is nevertheless in reality a complete, all-comprising entity, not essentially subject to time, space, or numerical limitations. And he has to make clear how all conscious content, including the external world as well as the feeling and thinking subject, has no other existence and significance than in and for consciousness.

Professor Dewey maintains that individual consciousness is in reality one with universal consciousness, because it comprehends within itself subject-and-object-consciousness; the abiding consciousness of oneself as an ever-changing individual, and that of the world at large, though figured in transient groups of sensations. This being so, that which is thus the bearer and realiser of all being and becoming in nature, cannot itself form part of this becoming, but must—according to Professor Dewey’s view—be eternal and absolute. The all-comprehending consciousness—and there is no existence outside of it—is thus identical with universal intelligence, identical with that eternally active intelligence which is everlastingly creating the organic synthesis of all being and becoming.

“Consciousness the ultimate fact reveals itself as reason.” Sensations have no self-existence, no meaning in themselves. They exist only as intellectually apprehended and for intelligence alone. It is from intellectual interpretation that they receive their entire significance. On solicitation of sensations the ideal content of universal intelligence becomes partially and interruptedly revealed to individual consciousness. The sole office of sensations is to give in us occasion to this self-realisation of the eternal content of intelligence.

Professor Dewey establishes his psychical monism by discovering self-consciousness as the Absolute, the One and All. Individual idealism or so-called solipsism, such as expounded by Fichte in his earlier writings from the side of intellect, and in the writings of English experientialists from the side of sensation, this individual idealism presents itself likewise as a psychical monism, but as an absurdly narrow one. Professor Dewey points out how it fails to understand that by constituting mind, as such, the ego or subject for which all experience exists, it artificially divides our unitary consciousness into two separate constituents, and takes the subjective constituent to be the bearer and realiser of the objective constituent; while in reality both constituents are but elements of consciousness in general; are in fact completely unified in eternal and absolute consciousness.

Now it is perfectly true, that during conscious awareness object and subject-consciousness are inextricably interblended so as to constitute a unified experience. It is true also, that the veritable subject that thus consciously experiences, and that furthermore imparts intelligent meaning to such experience, cannot itself form part of these its own fragmentary and transient moments of awareness. Comprehending them all, it must evidently be an enduring, at least a relatively persistent being. It is undoubtedly to such a persistent being or subject that experience gradually accrues, and in whom it is all retained and organised into more or less systematic order.

But is there the least warrant for assuming that this persistent subject, weaving thus intelligent experience out of its transient conscious states, is itself “consciousness” or “intelligence”?

Intelligent consciousness is very obviously only one of the functions of the persistent subject, and by no means its being or essence. And the experience accruing to it, that at least of the external world, bears nowise the characteristics of Platonic reminiscence, does nowise consist in self-revelation, in the becoming explicitly aware of what already implicitly existed within itself. We may indeed say, that our emotions, when aroused, constitute such self-revelation. But, for instance, yonder visual figuration, consisting of nothing but colored forms, though intelligently interpreted as a landscape with plains, woods, and creeks; interpreted thus by the aid of no end of former experience; this landscape now perceived by me for the first time was certainly not implicitly immanent in my consciousness previous to all my individual experience. Its conscious realisation does assuredly not render explicit as objective experience what for ever has been an organic member of my self-consciousness. What is immanent in my being—not in my consciousness—is the sensorial faculty of symbolically picturing whatever sense-affecting agent is placed before me. The conscious picture itself is an evanescent phenomenon, having no steadfast existence or reality.

To assert—as is usually done by transcendentalists and by Professor Dewey among them—that our individual experience, when—as mostly occurs—not actually conscious to ourselves, exists then nevertheless as conscious content of a universal being; to venture such an utterly gratuitous assertion, even when merely hypothetically advanced, transcends all legitimate inference from given facts. When declared to be positively justified by given facts, it all too obviously betrays the theological bias by which it is inspired, the set purpose of vindicating the religious consciousness which has faith in “the unity of man as spiritual with an absolute spirit.”

Through consciousness we indeed become aware of the divers faculties of our being, together with their functionally accruing experience. All this, however, rises into conscious awareness only at times, when casually awakened. To give to the vast system of consciously latent being and experience the name of “consciousness,” to call that “consciousness” whose principal distinction is to constitute a persistent subject with an organised system of experience abiding for the most part in extra-conscious latency; to do this only because all this extra-conscious existence may and does at times become more or less conscious; this is surely committing the fatal error of denoting a state of things by its outright opposite.

There is no denying that most of the content of our being is usually not present in consciousness. Consequently, abiding thus outside consciousness, it cannot possibly form part of consciousness either individual or universal.

Nothing could be more to the point than Professor Dewey’s statement, that “only a living actual fact (let us say existent instead of fact) can preserve within its unity that organic system of differences in virtue of which it lives and moves and has its being.” There is not the least doubt that the subject, who at times is conscious of more or less of his experience, is exactly such an existent as here described. But consciousness, though the medium in which and through which everything is realised, is itself but an intermittent function of that living actual subject which preserves within its unity the organic system of differences in virtue of which it lives and moves and has its being. The consciousness of the subject conveys information to it only interruptedly and in broken bits. These become organically unified into a more or less consistent totality of experience. But this process of unification takes place, not in the dream like stuff which makes up consciousness, but in the persistent, extra-conscious matrix whence our ever lapsing, ever renewed moment of conscious awareness emerges ready-made.

The subject capable of thought and feeling becomes thinkingly and feelingly manifest to _itself_, when its functions through which consciousness arises are in operation; becomes manifest as bodily active to _other sentient beings also_, when its functions through which such activity arises are in operation.

But if the real nature of the experiencing subject is not self-consciousness or intelligence, what then can it be?

Idealists, and with them Professor Dewey, become such by believing that the perceptually realised objects are themselves veritable reality, and not mere symbols of extra-conscious reality. Now can they in all sincerity bring themselves to believe that a baby—to use one of Professor Dewey’s illustrations—which experiences a sensation, say a pain caused by the prick of a pin, that this pain-experiencing baby is no other than that colored form within the perceptual consciousness of may be half a dozen spectators; and that it is the perceptual pin within the consciousness of each of them that has pricked the baby and caused the pain?

Does the pain-experiencing baby derive its existence from the fact that the intellect of the spectator interprets the perceptual form within his consciousness to signify a baby, which has forever implicitly formed part of the organic content of his own self-consciousness?

Surely the pain experienced by the baby is not experienced by the perceptually realised baby, not by the baby existing as interpreted perception in the consciousness of him who perceives it. The pain experienced by the baby does nowise form part of the consciousness of the perceiver. Consequently and incontestably, the subject that experiences the sensation, that experiences in fact any kind of feeling or thought, is itself an extra-conscious being, a being only casually and symbolically realised in consciousness.

And if the perceptual baby is merely a conscious symbol signalising an extra-conscious existent, then all perceptual existence, all that constitutes what we perceptually realise as nature, symbolises likewise an extra-conscious reality, a reality that has power so to affect our sensibility as to arouse in us perceptual representations of itself and its characteristics.

The matter stands then exactly as denied by Professor Dewey. It is indeed the “baby thing-in-itself which is affected,” and it is “a world thing-in-itself which calls forth the sensation.” It is not, as maintained by Professor Dewey the baby known to him as his own perception which experiences the sensation by having been pricked within the beholder’s consciousness by a perceptually constituted pin.

But if the entity, which affects the beholder’s sensibility and awakens in him the percept of a baby, exists in verity outside his, the beholder’s, consciousness, and is known to him only as thus symbolically pictured by his own percept; such sense-affecting entity is, on the other hand, nowise to be construed as the unknowable “First Cause,” nowise as that protean Persistent Force, which Mr. Spencer imagines capable of assuming every kind of mental or material appearance.

The so-called material or physical modes which constitute in the beholder the perceptually realised baby, and the so-called immaterial or mental modes which are experienced by the baby as his sensations and emotions; these material and mental modes are in no sense the manifestation of an “Absolute Force” or “inscrutable Power,” as our Spencerians would lead us religiously, and almost theologically to believe.[54]

The material modes that constitute the perceptually realised baby are awakened in the beholder by a definite sense-affecting existent, which is thus revealing not only its bare presence, but most vividly and minutely also its perceptible and distinguishing characteristics. And in the same manner it makes also known that it is interdependently connected with the vast system of sense-affecting entities, that constitutes nature in general.

All reality is interdependently conditioned. The “Unconditioned Reality” of the Hamiltons, Mansels, and Spencers, has nowhere any existence, either in consciousness or outside of it. It is altogether a fictitious, superfluous, and most misleading conception.

As regards the mental modes experienced by the baby, they are evidently exclusively his own affections as a highly and most specifically organised being, and not by any means are they modes of appearance of that most empty abstraction “The Unknowable,” that has with so many believers usurped the throne of their former anthropomorphic Deity.

This coiled up thing over there, is it a rope or a snake? I see it move, and my intellect interprets it to be a snake. Surely the significance of the interpretation does not consist in my realising what was already implicitly contained in my consciousness, but in knowing that in contact with the being out there, which forms no part whatever of myself though perceptually realised by me, I shall become affected in certain additional ways taught by former experience.

Will any unbiassed and competent judge assert that the far-fetched idealistic interpretation is more in accordance with what we really experience, than the very simple one here given?

No doubt the immediate object of physical observation is not the thing-in-itself, but its perceptual realisation. It is such, however, only as symbolical representation of something subsisting outside consciousness, only as a conscious affection awakened with compulsory force in the observer from without. The observer offers his diversely differentiated and delicately attuned sensibilities to the outside world and carefully notices its specific modes of reaction upon definite modes of stimulation. This in truth is the method of scientific observation, from which all conclusions regarding the characteristics of nature are drawn.

The conscious subject phylogenetically evolved in constant interaction with the medium in which he lives and moves and has his being, possesses realising faculties so adjusted as to correctly subserve his needs in relation to such a medium. He then furthermore uses these faculties in order to gain a fuller and more accurate knowledge of further perceptible characteristics of this same medium.

A monistic interpretation of nature cannot possibly be reached by assuming consciousness or intelligence to be ultimate reality, and as such the One and All. It can be reached only by recognising that consciousness is a function of subjects that stand in definite relations to the rest of nature, and have power along with the other constituents of nature so to affect the sensibility of other sentient beings as to cause to arise therein the symbolical representation of themselves.

Systematised experience consists in the organised totality of such symbolical representations. And this organised totality of experience exists as potential possession of the subject in extra-conscious latency, in what we figuratively call memory. Emerging on occasion into consciousness it reproduces more or less faithfully the order and connection of the manifold that constitutes the sense-affecting universe.

In highly developed sentient subjects self-realisation or the “inner life,” which arises from the activity of their emotional and above all their social nature, gains predominant influence over their sensual and perceptual experience, urging them so to transform the given aspect of the outer world as to render it subservient to the aspirations of that inner life.

EDMUND MONTGOMERY.

FOOTNOTES:

[54] Mr. Spencer grapples with the problem of ultimate reality from three different and widely divergent standpoints. First, by assuming that our out and out conditioned nature and knowledge presupposes the existence of an “Unconditioned Reality,” he arrives at the conception of an “Absolute Cause.” Second, by attributing—in keeping with the principle of the Conservation of Energy, all physical and psychical activity to the interconvertible play of modes of force, he arrives at the conception of an “Absolute Force,” whence all these manifest modes proceed; hinting, moreover, that, as our experience of force-manifestation is of a psychical nature, the “Absolute Force” may rather be conceived as psychical than as physical. Third, besides explaining at times that the psychical and physical modes, instead of being interconvertible, are only two different aspects of one and the same reality—and contrary to his assumption of the interconvertibility of psychical and physical modes proceeding from an Absolute Force, he advocates in his _Transfigured Realism_ the view, that our perceptual consciousness figures representatively the corresponding characteristics of a world of things-in-themselves. No wonder that Spencerians are getting somewhat mixed, as the saying is.

THE CONSERVATION OF SPIRIT AND THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

The consideration of the relation that subsists between body and mind is a topic that has led to several theories, one of which has found favor with many on account of its supposed monistic implications. Dr. Carus in his work “The Soul of Man” seems to adopt that theory, and his method of explaining the matter is one of notable superiority. He says:

“Matter and mind (the elements of feeling) are to be considered
as one—not the same, but one. They are as inseparable as are
the two sides of a sheet of paper. If we look at it from the
mind side its activity represents itself as elements of feeling
and all kinds and degrees of actual feelings. If we look at it
from the matter side its activity represents itself as motions
or as all kinds of potential and kinetic energy.”

This doctrine of a double-faced unity has no doubt been favored because it has seemed the best and perhaps the only refuge available against the various forms of dualism. Still this same doctrine is very far from inducing that final pacification of mind which we rightly expect from a competent theory. It is open to the charge of being arbitrary, and it brings no access of insight.

The expressions of those whom we must suppose to be well affected towards any doctrine that gives promise of a monistic issue show this to be the case. Thus Tyndall says:

“I do not think that he (i. e. the materialist) is entitled
to say that his molecular groupings and his molecular motions
explain everything. In reality they explain nothing. The
utmost that he can affirm is the association of two classes
of phenomena of whose real bond of union he is in absolute
ignorance. _The problem of the connection of body and soul is
as insoluble in its modern form as it was in the prehistoric
ages._”

And Huxley protests that,

“How anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes
about as a result of irritating nervous tissue is _just as
unaccountable_ as the appearance of the Djinn when Alladin
rubbed his lamp.”

In truth those who might be expected to speak with considerable reserve in regard to the inabilities of human attainment have emphasised without due sobriety the insuperable aspects of the problem. The past history of culture should have counseled caution, especially in view of the certainty that consciousness is _somehow_ dependent upon nerve action.

It is submitted that the recent progress of science should induce a hopeful temper of mind on this question. Not only have physiology and psychology brought to light more results in the last decades than in centuries past, but in positive monism and formal thought philosophy has also attained to a clearness of method which will prove beneficial to all special investigations. A clear and concise statement of the new positivism is found in the chapter Form and Formal Thought of “Fundamental Problems” by Dr. Carus. Any one who has watched the development of the algebra of thought and the philosophy of logic, will naturally expect signal aid towards the solution of the world-questions from a proper consideration of form and the laws of form. In Dr. Carus’s book and especially in the above mentioned chapter will be found a most popular exposition of that subject.

Those who hold that form and formal thought is the very constituted means by which our information with respect to real existence may be improved, ought to regard it a decided step towards the solution of any hitherto apparently inexplicable problem, if we only but find ourselves able to _formulate_ an idea or process that mediates between the known and the unknown, and represents to our insight how it is possible to think of a phenomenon in accordance with notions that yield perceptible imagery.

Riemann in what has been well characterised as his “stupendous” essay on “The hypotheses that lie at the basis of geometry” remarks:

“We are quite at liberty to suppose that the metric relations
of space in the infinitely small do not conform to the
hypotheses of geometry; _and we ought in fact to suppose it if
we can thereby obtain a simpler explanation of phenomena_.”

So also Jevons in his “Principles of Science” commenting on “The Character of the Experimentalist” refers to the audacity of speculation that characterised Faraday and that was the leading of his efforts towards some of his most brilliant discoveries. He says:

“We have only to notice the profound conviction in the unity of
natural laws, the active powers of inference and imagination,
_the unbounded license of theorising_.”

Theory must precede experiment. We must formulate before we can verify. The words of Faraday: “Let us encourage ourselves by a little more imagination prior to experiment,” shows us the method he followed.

Recent developments in connection with the study of electricity supply us with at least an analogy that may instruct us as to how we may _suppose_ the appearance of consciousness as a result of nerve action.

The nature of electricity has long been an unformulated thesis. That it may be produced by the motion of matter is proved by every dynamo in operation: indeed the oldest experiments in static electricity are to the same effect.

At the present time it seems to be an acceptable doctrine or at least a good working hypothesis that electricity and magnetism are manifestations of that once hypothetical medium called _the ether_.

Prof. G. F. Fitzgerald in his opening address before Section A of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1888 made these very important remarks:

“In a presidential address on the borderlands of the known,
delivered from this chair, the great Clerk Maxwell spoke of it
as an undecided question whether electro-magnetic phenomena are
due to direct action at a distance or are due to the action of
an intervening medium. The year 1888 will ever be memorable as
the year in which this great question has been experimentally
_settled_ by Hertz in Germany. Henceforth I hope no learner
will fail to be impressed with the theory—_hypothesis no
longer_—that electro-magnetic actions are due to a medium
pervading all known space.”

That the ether really exists: that it is a proved fact and that it is the substantial basis out of which electricity and magnetism arises, are pretensions too momentous to remain unchallenged if they lacked good evidence in their favor. Yet instead of awakening dissent among the critical hosts of science, these utterances of Professor Fitzgerald have not only been received as voicing the convictions of the scientific world but they are confirmed from time to time by the sometimes tacit and sometimes express assent of all who discourse upon the matters involved.

Prof. Oliver Lodge, one of the leading scientific men of England and an acknowledged authority upon the subject has recently published a work entitled “Modern Views of Electricity.” In his preface he says:

“Few things in physical science appear to me more certain than
that what has so long been called electricity is a form or
rather a mode of manifestation of the ether.”

He supposes the ether as a compound of two constituents corresponding to positive and negative electricity. Each of these constituents has affinities, cohesions, or entanglements with the various kinds of matter, which affinities, cohesions, or entanglements are greater or less according to the kind of matter involved, so that by the motions of certain sorts of matter under proper conditions the two constituents of the ether are torn apart or separated, or in the language of dynamics, strained. But at the same time these constituents also tend with unceasing persistence to reunite and saturate one another into a state of absolute neutrality. Separate, these constituents show an existence and an energy towards one another. United neither of them shows any existence at all nor any efficacy whatever. They are as though they did not exist.

It is of small moment to the present purpose whether or not this electrical theory is well grounded. In either case its very formulation supplies us with a suggestion as to how it is possible to think of consciousness as a product of nerve action.

Just as the ether is supposed as the substantial basis out of which in consequence of the motion of matter electricity and magnetism becomes manifest, so may we suppose an analogous (perhaps the same) basis surrounding and permeating all things, and out of which in consequence of nerve action, consciousness becomes manifest.