Chapter II: Later Views (1)

(_a_) LEIBNITZ

To minds of a certain type works such as those of Gassendi are irritating. They continually arouse the question ‘Is this philosophy?’ and cause a vague unrest which it is difficult to assign to any one feature or characteristic. It is in fact due to the way in which Gassendi and men of his class stop short of the goal for which they seem bound, stop short of the unity which is demanded by our aesthetic nature. Their reason for so doing is a conscientious recognition that they have not succeeded in making their universe truly a One. No unity of the type required was possible until the objective sphere of experience was united to the subjective by such recognition of unity as Kant was able to reach. The influence of Kant will be considered when we come to Lotze: the point is introduced here because we have in Leibnitz, as compared with Gassendi, a most significant point of difference, the logical element.

Gassendi follows the tradition of his school. His logic is a book of canons. We feel that when it is closed its power is at an end. In Leibnitz, on the contrary, the logical principles are the essence of a logical aspect of all things, and analysis and synthesis as applied to things are so intimately related to the forms of judgment that it would seem as though we might say of the world of Leibnitz that it is a translation of logic into ontology.

There is still some doubt apparent in the literature of philosophy as to whether Leibnitz is to be called an idealist or a realist. This is due probably to the way in which the suppressed logic of Leibnitz gives his realism an idealistic character. What Leibnitz actually does is to talk of a world of real objects whose whole existence depends upon their being given, as though that fact of being given were not in itself as important a characteristic of things as any other. Leibnitz is therefore clear on the point that there are realities and on the individual worth of each separate reality; but in so far as he inadequately recognises the point of contact between self and not-self, he naturally fails to give sufficient consideration to its significance. The origin of this error on the part of Leibnitz is to be found in the fact that he comes to his world of objects with a conceptual attitude—a desire to analyse, and consequently a tendency to say what a thing is without asking _how_ it is.

At this point the reader will perhaps pause, recalling the words of Lotze: ‘_What_ things are is thus not incomprehensible to us, for that which is in them they exhibit in their outer manifestation; _how_ they can exist and can manifest themselves anyhow is the universal enigma.’ It would seem then that we ask too much in demanding from Leibnitz more information as to _how_ the thing becomes. But it is not because Leibnitz gives us no answer that we complain; it is because his answer is given from a prejudicial standpoint. Spinoza had dissipated the individual: his assertion ‘omnis determinatio est negatio’ left the logical activities of the mind with no focus and deprived conception of its material. Leibnitz, as compared with Spinoza, seems to restore to us our real world. It may not be very hard, or very solid, or very matter of fact—it may indeed be ‘idealistic’ in a sense—but it is at any rate pluralistic and active. Where then is the ground for complaint?

In his treatment of the doctrine of induction Leibnitz shows that he wholly underrated the philosophic value of the moment of perception. The consequence of this is that he is capable of treating as a subjective construction what he has never shown to be subjective in its nature: he invades the whole region of the not-self with an army of notions whose success depends entirely on accurate information as to the character of the opposing realities. In spite of the appearance of remaining within the legitimate sphere of analysis, and evolving in the closed cell of the monad a mental panorama of reflected Being, Leibnitz really does no such thing; he goes forth into the world of syntheses, and absorbs the advantages of experience without acknowledgment or appreciation.

If it is ever possible to keep two parallel lines of Reality and unite them in a pre-established harmony, it must at least be done with the clear recognition that all the predicates of reality are only predicates of experiences, that the experiences may be real, but the reality may, none the less, remain aloof, a thing-in-itself. This would only be possible after an analytic of experience: it is _not_ possible if the basis of the position is no more than analytic forms of judgment, because the judgment and the mental machinery employed in it all presuppose a given.

To justify Leibnitz in treating the world of physics as he did we require from him some analysis of the given. We assert that he did not furnish this, that in place of analysing the given he treated it as knowable deductively, as an existence to which we can dictate what it must be. He thus gets beyond Gassendi very rapidly, but not very securely. The preponderance given to logic promises us a more penetrative insight into experience as a subjective construction based upon real activities: we hope for just that element which was lacking in Gassendi, a deeper comprehension of the extent to which the understanding makes nature; but in this we are disappointed, for the logical standpoint gives us nothing but categories that we vainly and uncritically re-apply to a world of objects already manufactured and passed without question.

Further attention must be given to this point, because it is the centre of our discussion of the relations between Gassendi and Leibnitz. This can be shown if we return to those categories of experience which are implicit in Gassendi’s work.

The category of substance (_v._ p. 264) is used by Gassendi as a form for the classification of what are commonly called ‘things’; it includes also those objects to which experience testifies that they are ‘outer.’ Gassendi goes so far as to ignore anything that falls beyond the focus of experience: that which the thing does is the actuality of it, and therefore the same as that which the thing is. But it does not follow that my limitations are limitations of the given: the more a writer insists that the being of a thing is the same as its doing, the more strictly is he compelled to admit that the existence of all things is a matter of relations, and in a relation only those capacities can be developed for which _both_ the terms are qualified.

In this connexion it is necessary to remember that the post-Kantian philosopher usually works on a method the inverse of that which the pre-Kantian naturally took. _Now_ it would be natural to regard the whole _X_ as the given from which _A_ and _B_ might be analytically eliminated. _Then_ it was more natural to start with _A_ and _B_ and regard _X_ as the resultant of their relations. The consequence is that the philosopher is compelled to work with terms never completely defined. Spinoza provides for this incomplete exhaustion of the relatum in the case of God: the infinite with infinite possibilities stands over against the other term of the relation as something transcendent and overlapping. If we have in place of a monism a pluralism of reals, every real entity must have these same characteristics so long as it is presupposed as a possibility of relations and not merely regarded as the explicit recognition of what out of the relation is nothing.

Atomism is, on the face of it, a theory of real ultimates capable of relation and composition. As objects they have no right to such qualities as are regarded as peculiarly subjective. It will therefore not be possible to assert that the atoms as such have any power of appreciating the relations in which they stand: their ‘elective affinities’ must be inner states, but not perceptions. Gassendi often speaks as though the analogy between attraction in the magnet and the animal was a ground for speculation: he does not use it as a proof that perception has rudimentary forms below the level of animal life. In converting the atom into the monad Leibnitz commits himself to a position he cannot defend, for he asserts that powers or qualities found in aggregates are also found in simple bodies, and thereby destroys at a blow the value of organisation as the ground of functions.

The notion of ‘organism’ is used by Leibnitz in a purely occasionalistic manner. He is obviously prepared to recognise degrees of organisation as connected in some manner with degrees of functioning power, and graduates his scale of real things in the form of a scale of substances in which new and higher powers are correlated with complexity of structure. But the fact of being organised was never given by Leibnitz due importance and rank among the perceptual facts which make up the world of physics. The reason for this is to be found in the work of Leibnitz as a whole.

Criticism of Leibnitz seems at present to be in vogue. A glance at contemporary literature will show us science and philosophy are both in arms against him. It will be sufficient if we note here a few salient points.

We have already noted that the atomism of Leibnitz differs from that of Gassendi in so far as the former suffuses his whole doctrine with a logical tone and colours it with rationalism. The result is that facts are ignored in the interests of forms of thought. Hence (1) the law of continuity combined with the notion of substance enables Leibnitz to pass from perceived perceptions out to unperceived perceptions, without recognising that thought can thus overrun its material in _any_ direction and must curb its tendencies within the limits of the given. (2) The monad is an atom qualified by irrelevant adjectives. The logical process which begins in stripping off predicates from a subject leaves the subject bare: it does not follow that there can be in nature a substance stripped of qualities. The monad which we are thus wrongly led to think of as simple, appears on reflection to require to be complex. We are always tempted to think that our ultimate element must be capable of entering into all relations, and therefore be itself simple and indeterminate. On the contrary, the possibility of relations is, from the point of view of the thing, not a negative but a positive quality, and that which can enter into all relations, like a man capable of occupying any post, must be ‘highly qualified.’ The intensive quality of the monad may have appeared to Leibnitz to anticipate this difficulty. It is however difficult to conceive how inner or outer qualities are of use to beings whose actuality is not affected though all relations are destroyed.

The last word on Leibnitz must be a recognition of his genius with a confession of his failure. If he could have reduced his thought to a system it would have been chastened to its advantage. As it is, different lines of thought perpetually open up, and no one of them is fully worked out. For this reason we find flaws and chasms in the structure: matter is one thing physically (prima materia) and another thing psychically: continuity of kind as in the derivation of consciousness from petites perceptions is linked with discontinuity of being in the real world: subjective idealism is perpetually breached by that going-beyond-itself which is the one thing their rationalistic author has denied the monads.

But if the whole fails to exhibit cohesion it has never lacked inspiration and the power to inspire. This I attribute to one quality which it exhibits,—the grasp of unity as required for the being and the understanding of a world. This unity Leibnitz does not attain: his pluralism produces want of unity both in the world as an objective existent and in our thoughts as a reconstruction of it; but he never loses sight of it as a guiding principle, and is only prevented from working it out by the notions of substance and of concepts by which he was incessantly hampered.

As the thought of a unity is the thought of a whole which implicitly contains many parts capable of being themselves brought into prominence, so the thought of the world as a unity has an implicit content whose nature is irrelevant so far as the unity is concerned. There has for so long been a rooted tendency to confine unity to material unity that it may not be out of place to elaborate this point.

The unity of the individual is not affected by the diverse nature of its parts. The possibility of self-unification may be grounded in one or more characteristics. It may be asserted that I could not be a unity unless I had a nervous organism so developed as to have one supreme centre. To this the reply is that the genesis of a unitary being may thus lie in a condition which must first be fulfilled, but the unity, when there is unity, includes its plurality without reference to anything but the possibility of co-operation. A human organism is a unity whose parts are different: not only is a heart not a liver, but one corpuscle is not another: yet the reality of the unity cannot be denied. The fact is that when we speak of a unity we must hold it over against a plurality, and all we require of the parts of a unity is that they should not be capable of collapsing one into another: they must retain what we require of them, namely the power to fill out the whole to which we refer the unity.

Thus ultimate identity of nature, if it meant identity of being, would ruin both concepts, of unity and of plurality: if it does not mean identity of being it means nothing, for two ‘identical’ natures must always differ by one simple quality, that of not being each other.

Many of these points Leibnitz adumbrates. He seems, however, never to have grasped the relation of conceptual unification to the unity of the perceptually given world. In a word, the idea of unity ran away with him in the form of continuity or persistence of identical natures: a reference to experience as perceptual knowledge of the world around us would have shown that unity is not translatable through substance into being (giving an ultimate One in kind), but only through co-operation into cohesion. It is useless to assert that unity of nature is presupposed in unity of action: that heart and liver are not different but only distinct, being really qualified to belong to the unity by virtue of unity of nature. This is pure inversion: it is from the effects that we must judge the nature: kinds are only subdivisions of the unity which is not material but formal, which embraces all kinds in the unity of co-operation constituting the organism of nature.

(_b_) LOTZE

The philosophy of Leibnitz appears both disjointed and distorted. Lotze gives us a far more systematic view of things, and the advance he makes is considerable.

Among the advantages which he enjoyed over his predecessors, that of inheriting the results of Kant’s labours must necessarily be ranked high. With Kant the opposing tendencies of rationalism and sensationalism were to some extent reconciled: the perceptual order regained the importance rationalism had striven to take from it, and the conceptual order lost none of its significance as organisation of our inner conscious life. Kant gave to his followers two main points: primarily, the necessity for a point of contact between the knower and that which was destined to be known: secondarily, the necessity of recognising that the origin of the object is to be looked for in a relation. This second point implies that henceforth the term ‘object’ must be taken in a new sense: it can no longer denote that which is given for consciousness, but only that which is given in consciousness as being outer.

This view of the object is however not satisfactory if we confuse the idea of a reality capable of relations with the idea of qualities as potential or germinal relations. So far as concerns the distinction of substantia phenomenon from its ground, Kant seems to have allowed this confusion to arise. He clearly thinks of our conscious life as a vessel filled from the greater vessel of the Universe: our limitations are the reason why there is a surplus of being over and above the known. The distinction of Being (Beënt) from Existent does not save the situation: for Being cannot be thought of as relationless being, and is therefore either merely undiscovered existence or pure nothing.

It would not be necessary to labour this point if it were not that our thought naturally inclines to regard development as an unfolding of a unitary existence. Whether the thinker regards development as ultimately timeless, or believes that all development is in a real time, he rarely if ever gets to the idea that continuity of development is not the same as unity of being. It is however not less a ‘rational’ dogma to assert that the seed is the plant than to assert that all development is timeless, more geometrico. The crux in either case is the regress to the Whole. But in the case of the plant our statement does not really concern the whole plant but the whole life-history of the plant, and obviously omits for its own purposes the continuous natural synthesis involved in the real development expressed in the perceptual order. But if we cannot fix the plant as a Whole, on account of its _length_, so to speak, in respect of time, we feel we can fix the Universe as a Whole because it is always itself. To properly combat this view requires more digression than is here justifiable. I merely state that there is primarily the notorious difficulty of saying the Universe is at all (of course if it is a _Universe_ we beg the question of its unity by naming it thus), and secondly, that our right to omit the element of real time is very dubious. If we do not omit it, we come to the other view, that all things are a co-existent unity which maintains itself by perpetual re-adjustment of its parts, and moves on from state to state through time. It would be easy at this point to say progresses rather than moves, but there is no need to beg the question as to whether the movement is for better or for worse.

Kant’s analysis of the object, then, we regard as faulty in so far as it implies that ‘we only know phenomena.’ We consider that the phrase appearance of the real should be abolished, and our world should be called not an appearance of reality but the real as it appears. None the less the work of Kant leaves its abiding effect in the impossibility of going back to naïve realism; and not acknowledging that the percipient mind is a real factor in the process of appearing, is in fact the complementary element which allows the real to express itself in the terms of knowledge.

Lotze’s philosophy interests us in many ways: the form and matter of the _Mikrokosmus_ in particular challenge comparison with the _Syntagma_ of Gassendi. We now desire to see especially how the details are handled in the light of the progress made between the days of Gassendi and Lotze. For in a sense Lotze returns to the standpoint of Gassendi: he eliminates in many ways the rationalistic elements which Leibnitz had introduced, and his line of thought can in the main be regarded as continuing that of Gassendi. Leibnitz had tried to ‘unite Democritus and Spinoza’: subsequent workers had to eliminate the Spinozistic element, and thus free from its encumbrances the Democritian line of development.

The atoms of Democritus were meant to be physical points. The elaboration of the idea of ‘points’ into a theory of physical, metaphysical, and mathematical points was retrograde. The mathematical points are not points in any relevant sense, and the metaphysical points are physical points interpreted through the concept of mathematical points. The idea that they must be indivisible for thought is irrelevant, because they are perceptual entities. We may think of any unit as twice its own half, but it does not follow that the perceptual datum can be given as a plurality: if, on the contrary, it is never so given we are right in declaring it to be indivisible, _i.e._ a real unit.

Granted that the atom is a real unit, the question arises, How are we to interpret this reality? Our reality as a whole will naturally be regarded as the sum of its parts, allowing that it is not a mere aggregation but rather an organic totality. Consequently we shall expect the characteristics predicated of the totality to be predicated of the parts. Now Lotze’s idea of the totality is coloured with the notion that our aesthetic demands are a reality, and the necessity of regarding the Universe as a whole is not to be divided from the necessity of regarding it as a whole of a certain kind. He therefore finally concludes that the atom is unextended, because this hypothesis alone enables us to regard it as animated throughout.[127] This however, besides being highly conjectural, seems also unnecessary. We have already been told that atoms do not require to be homogeneous, but may enter into composition equally well if they are heterogeneous.[128] From this it has been correctly deduced that unity does not imply identity in the elements: unity is the form in which we interpret the cohesion of heterogeneous elements through elective affinity in any single apparent whole. It is therefore clearly possible that different natures may so combine that the resultant has a nature which belongs to none of its parts. The emergence of this new functional value is dependent on the recognition of something more than mechanical relations. The something more which is thus required is provided by substituting chemical for mechanical laws.

The influence of chemistry upon constructive thought is extremely important for this one reason, that it forces into recognition the fact that, regarded as we must regard it from the point of view of its _doing_, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Man is thus no more to be regarded as a machine. Lotze rightly recognises that vitality is grounded in a synthesis of co-operating elements: it is not a separate entity to be imported into a mechanical organism at birth and exported at death. It is out of this aspect of functional activity as dependent on organisation that Lotze gets the right to some of his most pregnant assertions, such _e.g._ as the assertion that the soul _is_ where it _acts_. He formulates it most definitely when he opposes the idea that Life is something permanent, ‘a higher force’ controlling the changes of the body. On the contrary, he says, life and death are not opposed realities: ‘for why should we not from this phenomenon (_i.e._ of corruption) rather draw the other conclusion, that the activity of life can last only so long as the chemical composition of the body yields the necessary conditions and that the corruption of death is nothing else than a disturbance of that composition which has now become visible, but by which perhaps long since, though less obviously, the conditions of life have been affected?’[129]

The phraseology of this passage clearly indicates that we are to regard the ‘composition’ as the ‘condition of life.’ On another page[130] Lotze states this more definitely. He speaks of life as maintaining itself through ‘motive shocks,’ which are ‘yielded by the processes of constant forming and reforming’: it is like burning coal, developed ‘not through what it was or through what it is to be, but through the motion of the transition itself.’ There is therefore no longer any room for a ‘vital force’: ‘in the living body every chemical change that takes place sets to work forces not before in existence and brings others to a pause; thus at each moment there is laid for subsequent development a new foundation, such as gives occasion sometimes for a continuance of prior states, sometimes for an evolution into new ones, sometimes by a combination of both, for expansion into a far fuller manifestation of character and activity.’[131]

These passages show clearly the view taken of life. We may now enquire into its degrees and their relation. In the inorganic sphere we have no development and no power of self-maintenance.[132] Plant and animal life are of one kind in this respect: they exhibit reactions which may be described as expressions of their natural conation toward self-preservation. But animal life is distinguished by sentiency and human life by the presence of mental powers. We might then expect a scale of the form _a_, _a_ + _b_, _a_ + _b_ + _c_; but what we are actually given is a scale of the form _a_, _x_(= _a_ + _b_), _y_(= _x_ + _c_). This form of the scale implies that each stage is more than the lower stage plus a quantitative addition: it is emphatically a _new_ stage.

Lotze denies that we can construct the scale upward: we cannot start from the lower form and deduce the higher form from a consideration of the possible combination of elements. On the contrary, mental life forms a new datum: our culture ‘shows the interval between the two spheres of existence [animal and human] to be so vast that apparently the addition of a wholly new germ of development is absolutely necessary to explain the superiority of human culture.’[133] Mind is thus set over against soul, but ‘we cannot return to the naïveté of conception that sees in psychic life and mind two different and separate entities.’[133] We must not think of body, soul, and mind as three entities of independent value: our only reason for distinguishing one from the other in the highest unity, that of man, is the fact that they are given separately in the universe, that animals have sentience without mind, and plants have living bodies without either.[134] A real connexion for these must therefore be found, ‘for, in whatever reason may consist, it is clear that the soul cannot receive the gift of a new faculty, unless it be so grounded in its constitution that it either must of necessity be evolved from it, or else might be evolved should favourable conditions supervene.’[135]

The ‘new faculty’ is not a new entity. A psychic substance Lotze rejects: such a phrase implies the reification of what is only given as a group of unique reactions, a living content that ‘by its own specific nature directly acquires the capacity to act and be acted on,’ and so masquerades as a substance for ‘the unwary thinker.’ But the idea of a group of reactions has its dangers also. We may be led to ignore the agent itself, whereas ‘we cannot make _mind_ equivalent to the infinitive _to think_, but feel that it must be _that which thinks_; the essence of things cannot be either existence or activity; it must be that which exists and that which acts.’[136]

This doctrine of mind shows clearly the three phases of Lotze’s philosophic thinking, namely the occasionalistic, the idealistic, and the realistic. It will be necessary to make a few remarks on these separately.

(1) Crude occasionalism is self-condemned by its abstractness. Over against a world in itself purely material stands the purely psychical: their unity of action is a parallelism of simultaneous action: the ground of the coincidences is in a third nature. This line of thought may be regarded as wholly antiquated, and its many faults require no resurrection. Among others, it overlooked the fact that a given simultaneity of action is normally a proof of reciprocity unless we have some a priori reasons for assuming reciprocity impossible. In that case we modify our view in the direction of a pre-established harmony. This gives us a certain degree of concreteness in so far as we reduce our sphere of enquiry to the actually given agents: ultimate questions however bring us to a third factor, the creative activity in whose Will we ground all unity of action. But here still the whole necessity of an explanation lies in the presuppositions with which we approach our subject; and this presupposition is, in these cases, the belief that substances are in themselves opposed to relations.

The occasionalism which Lotze offers us is still further modified by continuing the process which makes the view concrete. To do this it is necessary to merge the abstractions into a more and more comprehensive unity. The differences in the given must first of all be modified so that we no longer oppose one kind of being to another: then the unifying agency must be vested in the totality thus formed, so that we are able to account for all relatedness or reciprocity of action as possible when the totality admits of it, and impossible when it does not so admit of it.

I consider that Lotze makes a great advance on the position of Leibnitz in many respects, but principally in those directions in which his scientific training made him a more judicious and comprehensive thinker. The effect of scientific training is obvious in—(1) those elements of thought which are due to biological and chemical studies; (2) in the truly scientific unwillingness to blur distinctions, and call the higher the same as the lower, or the lower itself ‘potentially’ a higher form; and (3) in the concept of unity, as somehow requiring to be expressed in terms of action and not substance. But while progress is manifest in these points, the results cannot be of permanent value unless the principles which are used bring us safely to the end.

(2) In occasionalism proper all action, looked at by itself, is disjointed. In the doctrine of Leibnitz it is so connected as to form chains of parallel activities. The series of actions start from points that have a fixed amount of separation, and they maintain this separation throughout. But we refuse to accept this parallelism as ultimate: we do not want to think of one rail as merely accompanying another, but of two rails as so accompanying each other that they form what we rightly call _one_ railway line. The unity we require is not approximation, rather the maintenance of the distance is essential to it. If our lines converge when produced ‘ever so far,’ they cannot serve our purpose: they destroy their own reality by destroying their significance. And as our rails cease to be a railway line if they converge, so our self and our not-self can only come to insignificance and unreality if they lose their distance and merge.

This metaphor, though quite a legitimate adaptation of Leibnitz’s idea of the two clocks, is not perhaps very clear. It is intended to make thinkable the notion of a unity which holds together a plurality in such a way as does not contradict the plurality, but rather insists on the plurality as the one thing essential to the unity. This I take to be the proper meaning of unity if taken concretely or in direct relation to a content which it makes no attempt to annihilate.

It seems to me that in his advance from Occasionalism Lotze reached an idealism which was not compatible with the fundamental idea of the occasionalistic phase of thought. That fundamental idea is that activity of one kind cannot become activity of another kind: lines of activity do not cross: material activity is never mental activity. To this fundamental idea Occasionalism was itself faithless more than once when it tried to run the lines back to that ‘ever so far,’ in which they might be thought to have met. To carry material actuality back to abstract points and mental activity back to the point at which it is at least so abstract as to have lost its conscious characteristics, is to yield up our clear convictions to the illusions of an indefinite perspective. So crude an error cannot rashly be attributed to Lotze: whatever his errors are they cannot but be refined, subtle, and significant. Yet that his occasionalism is modified by strong idealism cannot be denied, and it may be that the idealism completes without improving the occasionalism.

As there is a danger that the following remarks may be due to a misunderstanding of Lotze, I shall not attempt to pad out my interpretation of his thought with selected quotations: if the general impression is wrong the selection of definite phrases out of a book is only the addition of insult to injury. I state my own view and leave it to the reader to consult Lotze.

The vice of every system of philosophy is always some degree of abstraction. From the multitude of abstract points of view we trust we are slowly arriving at a concrete view which shall do justice to reality as we live it. Usually the abstract view is patently an intrusion of the influences of study: thought naturally occupies a predominant place in a system which its author has had to think out: less frequently it is an intrusion of temperament, or a mere reaction from the tyranny of the abstract thinker to a full-blooded view of things. In Spinoza we recognise the retiring thinker: in Leibnitz we see the effect of mathematical and logical thought mixed with the busy life of the man of affairs, and the influence of relations in which caution and impenetrability are of first importance. In Lotze we have equally the effects of scientific training, relieved however of any barrier to frankness, and united with a strong ethical and aesthetical tendency.

The ethical temperament, if that term may be used, is on its psychological side prone to believe: the aesthetical is prone to value form: the combination of the two makes possible a transcendent point of view which grasps at form with a strong psychological conviction that it must have real active value. The remarkable passage in which Lotze pleads for the animation of nature is a shock to the reader in its betrayal of new and startling elements in the author’s idea of a constructive philosophy. Apart from the particular point, which we do not intend to discuss, the passage is the first awakening of antagonism in a critical reader who will at once proceed to ask whether the whole construction is built on this foundation. He will, I think, find that it is.

The crucial point in the idealism of Lotze is the possibility of constructing and defending the unity of the Whole. The beginning is made from the Kantian element, the phenomenal character of the matter of thought. Kant’s view is modified in so far as the doing which we know is related to the being, the that-which-does, in an intimate way, such as does not hold of noumena and phenomena: from this it follows that the appearance is the life of the real rather than its output, the actual doing rather than the product of its work. It follows also from the Kantian element that our construction of reality is itself reality, real doing, though not creative activity. In this concrete point of view is involved the idea that our feelings, cravings, and inspirations are reality, which is the justification for demanding that reality should be presented as satisfying that craving. As we have a craving for unity and form we can assert that Reality is both one and formed. We see the force of the argument: we ask, what is its value?

To begin with—what is this craving? Is it ever universal, and if not, does the craving for unity in particular spheres justify an advance to a universal unity? The personal element is so manifest here that if consciousness cannot be shown to have that craving as part of its own nature the whole position is endangered. And it must be granted that consciousness has not got it quâ consciousness. To get it at all we must take consciousness as intimately bound up with impulse, will, and individual purpose, and each of these elements, while it enriches the notion of consciousness, draws me further away from the concept of a Whole. I cannot admit that impulse proceeds wholly from consciousness, or that will is entirely guided by reason, or that the unity I desire is capable of projection away from my individual scope to a hyper-individual Whole.

Reflection on the history of thought confirms the belief that ultimate unity is generally made acceptable by withdrawing oneself from the immediate conditions of life. Tradition ascribes this character to the philosopher, and the history of philosophy is a record of attempts to reach the higher truth by climbing down. Lotze gives us a fruitful idea in the notion of a whole whose parts are unified by reciprocal action. But here again he seems to have overstrained his parallel, which I take to be human society. In his war against abstractions he notes the hypostatising tendency expressed in such phrases as ‘the mind of the people,’ ‘the spirit of the times.’ He does not however seem to have fully estimated the value of these indications or seen how far they show that a generalisation expressed in a general term may be the sign of a real conceptual unity which in spite of its reality is not capable of action or reaction. Now, if unity lies in significance, does not the unity of anything partake essentially of the nature of concepts or ideas? And if so, is not the unity the one point about things of which nothing can be said in respect of action or reaction? This, I think, must be allowed, and the consequence follows that in a world of action and reaction unity must be irrelevant.

The point can be stated more clearly and directly, but I have put it in this form because that is the line of argument which Lotze suggests, and which seems to me to apply to him most aptly because it is the inversion of his own progress. The simpler and clearer way is to assert that the unity of the Whole implies a consciousness for which the Whole is a unity. This leads us to the idea of a God. But if God is outside our whole there must conceivably be a ‘higher unity’ giving a whole which comprises God. Either therefore the Whole is not truly the Whole or there is an infinite progress of wholes constituted by presentation to a unifying agency which is merged with them in ever higher and higher wholes.

We now seem to have reached a reductio ad absurdum. As stated, it is such a reductio; but the absurdity consists in the inner contradiction due to calling that the Whole which we at the same time do not make all inclusive. This contradiction indicates that the thought movement has become involved in itself. At the same time there emerges an idea which is fruitful and which was partially expressed in the doctrine of monads. The monad is a unity: the ruling monad is also a unity: this latter unity includes plurality, and is therefore properly a unity: the mere monad as simple nature ought not to be called a unity at all. Now, leaving out other implications of the term monad, we may say that the idea of progressive wholes comprehending at each stage the lower wholes, is justifiable. We associate with development range of adaptation, and increased range of adaptation is the objective manifestation of increased organisation of either physical or psychical powers. At each stage the being comprehends a wider plurality, and the scale of being is capable of gradation on this basis.

But is there _any_ unity which is not unity for a mind? If we say no, there is no course open but to set over against our Whole a mind for which it is one. This would be a finite God. Not being able to comprehend a world that sums itself any more than a series of feelings that sum themselves, I am unable to see how a pantheistic solution helps us. On the contrary, if I conceived unity to be necessary to the existence of the world, I should deduce from that unity the being of God, and admit that the unity was not only known but also felt and willed, but I could not admit that the world was the same as God, and therefore should not admit that the will was omnipotent. Thus the mere assertion of unity seems to lead us back into a transcendental dualism.

The conclusion of the whole matter is that unity is meaningless unless that which is unified is unified by some mind. In the first instance the unity will be that of _my_ mind, and we must start from that.

Now I take it that in my mind unity is the product of purpose. I do not consciously unify, but I do consciously subordinate: the tendency is to think in what respects the one is many rather than how the many can be one. This is due to the primacy of our practical life, in which the end is given with all its plurality implicit. In action this is obvious: the end is first and the discovery of means subserves it. In the world of things it may be less evident, but that which I call function is ultimately the power to fulfil my end or purpose, and the object as I know it is the manifestation in perception of the thing that has the function. What it is to itself I cannot know and need not ask.

It seems to me futile to speak of all existence as animated, or talk of the ‘experience of the atoms’ as Lotze does, if the nature of the whole cannot be determined. It is only as parts of a whole that the parts have any claim to these qualities, and if we fail to construct our whole so as to get a new edition of the old doctrine of a world soul (which Lotze confessedly aims to do) the consequences dependent on that proof must fail also.

Human society, coming last, seems the culminating point of all development, and a revelation of the significance of all lower forms of life. In it we have the fullest exhibition of reciprocal activity. But its unity is dependent on mind, and only a spurious analogy can enable us to regard the universe as a society. If we are not tempted to think of the material world as _associated_ atoms, we may yet feel an inclination to regard it as teleologically designed; we should then have formal unity of purpose among diverse actions. But here again it seems impossible to show that there is one supreme end, unless the whole is a unity; or that the whole is a unity, unless there is a supreme end. These ideas are so far implicated that a plurality of being necessitates a plurality of ends. It is equally wrong to reject or to accept teleology as usually advocated. The ethical view is right in emphasising the fact that there are ends in the world. But these ends arise with consciousness, are brought by us into the world, and take their place as forces because our mind directs our action. The hierarchy of ends is the ideal counterpart of the hierarchy of wholes, and each whole which exists for a mind is dominated by an end. But that there should be an end of ends seems unnecessary: we do not seek to unify ends, we seek to multiply them in their diversity: the progress of society is a perpetual production of minds which become more concrete in every generation, each one more capable of interpreting through itself the end for its society, and thereby increasing the number of ends that are efficient factors in life. Self-preservation is the root from which spring all ends, and if the higher organism of society seems to have its need of preservation and its end we must not forget that its existence depends largely on the extent to which individuals realise themselves by negation. Is it conceivable that for the end of ends negation is equally necessary? Leibnitz thought so when he limited the existent to the compossible. We too may think so if we admit that our totality has emerged from a crowd of possible totalities by a species of selection. If we are not prepared to sublimate our conceptions in this way but return to the world of unfulfilled purposes and unsatisfied desires, let us bravely acknowledge that _all_ things need not work together for good, that for such adjustment as we do achieve or help others to achieve we are grateful each to each, and each to all; but at the same time

‘could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits, and then
Remould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire?’

(3) In addition to these points of view we have in Lotze what may be called a realistic element. To explain this is, I think, impossible: to explain it away is unjustifiable. It is in opposition to Panlogism that Lotze retains ‘nuclei,’ irreducible elements, in his system of experience. This is the Leibnitzian factor retained against the Spinozistic trend: it is also the Democritean element preserved through Leibnitz for succeeding writers. No definition of these nuclei is forthcoming: they are primarily reached from the standpoint that all determination is not negation; that thought is a system of relations, but reality includes over and above relations the relata.

To define these nuclei is impossible, because thought in its progress moves away from the immediate point of contact given in sensation, moves away from the stimulus in which they are revealed, and in working up its material ignores existence in order to concentrate itself upon significance. The nuclei are in this sense the irrational factors.

It is not necessary here to do more than draw attention to this point. The preservation of these nuclei is of course one of the ways in which Lotze defends the content of common consciousness against such idealistic systems as seem to him to dissolve reality into the thin air of pure thought. His general attitude toward this point must be understood by reference to Kant’s views as expressed in the _Critique of Pure Reason_. We must also bear in mind the fact that pluralism grounds itself in some measure on the impenetrability of the individual consciousness, an idea which leads us to think of individual minds as being to themselves more than they can ever be to others. Hence the monad with its dual existence, as it is in itself and as it is in other monads in which it is represented. Hence, too, in more refined forms, the idea that to be perfectly intelligible is not to be thought but to be thinkable, an idea expressed by Lotze when he speaks of knowledge as a relation which would be destroyed if the thinker could _be_ that which is thought, and wholly absorbing into himself the object, exhaust not only the intelligibility but also the being of that which is known.

Criticism of this view would lead us to consider the claims of a higher unity. This criticism will not be attempted, for it is our immediate purpose to accept Lotze as he is, and only indicate how he remains in the mean position between the extremes of an idealism for which thought seems to exhaust being and a realism for which thought seems to confront an object only partly intelligible. The peculiar difficulty which Lotze creates for us lies in the extent to which the idealism is carried. For the nuclei certainly seem to be no more than nuclei of sensations, and it is only in so far as these have a peculiar unity which is given to us by the supersensible ground of objects, and not given by us to objects, that they maintain the character of being more than phenomena. They cannot be ‘matter’ in the crude sense, and if they are the matter of thought they seem to be ultimately subjective affections in a sense that makes it difficult to resist a progress toward pure idealism. Lotze’s refusal to make the advance must be ascribed to his idea of the worth of the individual, which is so bound up with the notion of consciousness that it becomes necessary to re-interpret the idea of the nuclei on the analogy of the individual consciousness as non-spatial units that maintain themselves in a unity of co-operation without fusion.

The revulsion which invariably follows excessive systematisation seems to indicate that if ever a ‘stable equilibrium’ is attained by thought, it will have more of the character of the mean position than of either extreme. For this reason a peculiar interest attaches to the line of thought whose last great representative is Lotze. It may seem at first sight paradoxical that realism should emerge finally as idealistic; but, from the first, atomism combines with realism an idealistic element, and the preponderance of idealism finally is a natural result due to the character of our progress in the realm of thought.

Seeley has pointed out the way in which History has gradually refined its content. At first it is a complicated mass such as we find it in the times of Livy or Pliny: from this mass various elements detach themselves and evolve into independence: natural history, for example, and political economy are branches that have struck root and grow for themselves, related to rather than dependent on the residuum which now takes the place of the original whole. In a similar way the progress of the sciences has slowly depleted philosophy of its original content and at the same time defined its central elements and true scope. A comparison between such a magnum opus as that of Gassendi and the worth of a modern philosopher shows the effect of progressive specialisation. It suggests also the question, What is to be ultimately the real matter of philosophy in the strict sense?

The answer must be, in a sense, what it has always been, that philosophy co-ordinates and systematises the results of the special sciences. There is however a strong and not unjustifiable tendency to think that the peculiar function of philosophy is the explanation of the possibility of the objects with which the sciences deal: in other words, philosophy is epistemology. In any case it seems clear that the duty of systematisation which falls upon philosophy in no wise compels the philosopher to unify his construction beyond the point which his material will admit. That is to say, the emphasis must be on co-ordination rather than systematisation, and philosophy mistakes its function if it in any way undertakes to dictate results to the special sciences, as it has notoriously done in some cases. We must, it seems, come back to the view of philosophy as a dialectic of results, a sifting of ends. Above all things, it must follow whithersoever the wind carries it, and not pre-determine its haven in the face of all the forces upon which it relies for progress.

Philosophy is then more than mere epistemology. But the epistemological problem is undoubtedly its own peculiar centre. Upon the decision of the nature of reality it centres its vital energies, and on this point we seem to-day to have arrived at a temporary decision that ‘idealism based on realism’ is the position which must be accepted for the present, though we may hope it is not the last standpoint.

The reason why no further progress is possible is that as yet the ‘nucleus,’ as Lotze understood it, remains unresolved. However much may be done to show that objects are ideal, that the ultimate is a unit ideal in its character, the fact remains that the unity characteristic of an existent thing is always a unity whose actuality does not come from the subjective side. It need not be disputed that a thing is a complex of universals; but this cannot blind us to the fact that the reason for any one object being _this particular_ complex is to be found in a determination _of_ our activity which comes to us, in perception, and does not go forth from us.