Volume 2 — THE MONIST.

THE PRESENT POSITION OF LOGICAL THEORY.

The remarkable fact in the intellectual life of to-day is the contradiction in which it is entangled. On one hand we have an enormous development of science, both in specialisation of method and accumulation of material; its extension and thorough-going application to all ranges of experience. What we should expect from such a movement, would seem to be confidence of intelligence in itself; and a corresponding organisation of knowledge, giving some guide and support to life. The strange thing is that instead of this we have, probably, the greatest apparent disorganisation of authority as to intellectual matters that the world has ever seen; while the prevalent attitude and creed of scientific men is philosophic agnosticism, or disbelief in their own method when it comes to fundamental matters. Such a typical representative of modern science as Mr. Huxley virtually laughs to scorn the suggestion of Mr. Frederic Harrison that science should or could become so organised as to give any support, any authoritative stay, to life.

Now I do not intend to discuss this apparent contradiction. It seems to me obvious enough that the contradiction is due to the fact that science has got far enough along so that its negative attitude towards previous codes of life is evident, while its own positive principle of reconstruction is not yet evident. But without urging this view upon the reader, I wish to ask how and where in the prevailing confusion logical theory, as a synopsis of the methods and typical forms of intelligence, stands. Logical theory at once reflects and transforms the existing status of matters intellectual at any period. It reflects it, for logical theory is only the express, the overt consciousness on the part of intelligence of its own attitude, prevailing spirit. It transforms it, because this express consciousness makes intelligence know where it stands, makes it aware of its strength and of its weakness, and by defining it to itself forces it to take up a new and more adequate place.

It is obvious, then, that as the prevailing influence in the intellectual world to-day is science, so the prevailing influence in logical theory must be the endeavor to account for, to justify, or at least to reckon with this scientific spirit. And yet if there is such confusion as we have indicated, then there is also manifested some chaos in logical theory, as to the true nature and method of science. Were it otherwise, were there at present a logical theory adequate to the specific and detailed practical results of science, science and scientific men would be conscious of themselves, and would be confident in their work and attitude.

The especial problem of logic, as the theory of scientific method, is the relation of fact and thought to each other, of reality and thought. It is, however, differentiated from the metaphysical theory of knowledge. Logic does not inquire into the ultimate meaning of fact and thought, nor into their ultimate relations to one another. It simply takes them from the attitude of science itself, its business being, not the justification nor refutation of this attitude, but its development into explicit doctrine. Fact means to logic no more, but certainly no less, than it means to the special sciences: it is the subject-matter under investigation, under consideration; it is that which we are trying to make out. Thought too means to logic what it means to science: method. It is the attitude and form which intelligence takes in reference to fact—to its subject-matter, whether in inquiry, experiment, calculation, or statement.

Logic, then, would have for its essential problem the consideration of the various typical methods and guiding principles which thought assumes in its effort to detect, master, and report fact. It is presupposed here that there is some sort of fruitful and intrinsic connection of fact and thought; that thinking, in short, is nothing but the fact in its process of translation from brute impression to lucent meaning.

But the moment such a presupposition is stated, ninety-nine persons out of a hundred think that we have plunged, ex abrupto, from the certainty of science into the cloudland of metaphysic. And yet just this conception of the relation of thought (method) to fact (subject-matter) is taken for granted in every scientific investigation and conclusion. Here, then, we have in outline the present position of logic. It is that any attempt to state, in general, or to work out, in detail, the principle of the intrinsic and fruitful relation of fact and thought which science, without conscious reflection, constantly employs in practice, seems “metaphysical” or even absurd. Why is this? The answer to this question will give the filling-up of the outline just presented.

The chief cause is that superstition which still holds enthralled so much of modern thought—I mean formal logic. And if this seems like applying a hard name to what, at best and at worst, is only an intellectual gymnastic, I can only say that formal logic seems to me to be, at present, fons et origo malorum in philosophy. It is true enough that nobody now takes the technical subject of formal logic very seriously—unless here and there some belated “professor.” It is true that it is generally relegated to the position of a subject which, for some unclear reason, is regarded as “disciplinary” in a young man’s education; just as certain other branches are regarded as elegant accomplishments in a young woman’s finishing. But while the subject itself as a doctrine or science hardly ranks very high, the conception of thought which is at the bottom of formal logic still dominates the Zeitgeist, and regulates the doctrine and the method of all those who draw their inspiration from the Zeitgeist. Any book of formal logic will tell us what this conception of thought is: that thought is a faculty or an entity existing in the mind, apart from facts, and that it has its own fixed forms, with which facts have nothing to do—except in so far as they pass under the yoke. Jevons puts it this way: “Just as we thus familiarly recognise the difference of form and substance in common tangible things, so we may observe in logic, that the form of an argument is one thing, quite distinct from the various subjects or matter which may be treated in that form.”⁠[1]

Professor Stock varies the good old tune in this way: “In every act of thought we may distinguish two things—(1) the object thought about, (2) the way in which the mind thinks of it. The first is called the Matter; the second the Form of Thought. Now formal ... logic is concerned only with the way in which the mind thinks, and has nothing to do with the particular objects thought about.”⁠[2]

It is assumed, in fine, that thought has a nature of its own independent of facts or subject-matter; that this thought, per se, has certain forms, and that these forms are not forms which the facts themselves take, varying with the facts, but are rigid frames, into which the facts are to be set.

Now all of this conception—the notion that the mind has a faculty of thought apart from things, the notion that this faculty is constructed, in and of itself, with a fixed framework, the notion that thinking is the imposing of this fixed framework on some unyielding matter called particular objects, or facts—all of this conception appears to me as highly scholastic, as the last struggle of mediævalism to hold thought in subjection to authority. Nothing is more surprising than the fact that while it is fashionable to reject, with great scorn, all the results and special methods of scholasticism, its foundation-stone should still be accepted as the corner-stone of the edifice of modern doctrine. It is still more surprising when we reflect that the foundation-stone is coherent only with the mediæval superstructure. The scholastics when they held that the method of thought was a faculty pursuing its own method apart from the course of things, were at least consistent. They did not conceive that thought was free, that intelligence had rights, nor that there was possible science independent of data authoritatively laid down. Really believing what they professed,—that thought was something in se,—they held that it must be supplied with a fixed body of dogmatic fact, from tradition, from revelation—from external authority. They held that thought in its workings is confined to extracting from this dogmatic body of fact what is already contained in it, and to rearranging the material and its implications. To examine the material, to test its truth; to suppose that intelligence could cut loose from this body of authority and go straight to nature, to history itself, to find the truth; to build up a free and independent science—to this point of incoherency mediæval scholasticism never attained. To proclaim the freedom of thought, the rejection of all external authority, the right and the power of thought to get at truth for itself, and yet continue to define thought as a faculty apart from fact, was reserved for modern enlightenment! And were it not somewhat out of my present scope, I should like to show that modern culture is thus a prepared victim for the skilful dialectician of the reactionary army. If the modern Zeitgeist does not fall a prey to the cohorts of the army of external authority, it is not because it has any recognised methods or any recognised criterion by which it can justify its raising the “banner of the free spirit.” It is simply the obstinate bulwark of outer fact, built up piecemeal by science, that protects it.

The two main forces, which have been at work against the formulæ of formal logic, are “inductive” or empirical logic on one side, and the so-called “transcendental” logic, on the other. Of these two, the influence of inductive logic in sapping in practical fashion and popular results the authority of syllogistic logic has undoubtedly been much the greater. I propose, briefly, to give certain reasons for holding, however, that the inductive logic does not furnish us with the needed theory of the relation of thought and fact. To show this adequately would demand the criticism of inductive logic in the detail of its methods, in order to show where it comes short. As this is impossible, I shall now confine myself to a couple of general considerations.

To begin with, then, the empirical logic virtually continues the conception of thought as in itself empty and formal which characterizes scholastic logic. It thus has really no theory which differentiates it, as regards the nature of thought itself, from formal logic. I cannot see, for example, what quarrel the most stringent upholder of formal logic can have with Mill as to the latter’s theory of the syllogism. Mill’s theory is virtually simply a theory regarding the formation of the major premiss—regarding the process by which we formulate the statement that All S is P. Now, if we once accept the syllogistic position, this process lies outside the scope and problem of formal logic. It is not an affair of what Jevons calls the form of argument at all, but simply of the matter, the particular facts which make the filling of the argument. I do not see that it is any part of the business of formal logic to tell where the major premiss comes from, nor how it is got. And, on the other hand, when it comes to the manipulation of the data contained in the premiss, Mill must fall back upon the syllogistic logic. Mill’s theory, so far as the thought-element is concerned, presupposes the syllogistic theory. And if this theory, on its side, does not presuppose something like Mill’s inductive theory, it is simply because the logician, as a philosopher, may prefer “intuitionalism” to “empiricism.” He may hold, that is, that the content of some major premisses is given by direct “intuition” rather than gathered from experience. But in either case, this consideration of the source of the content of the premiss belongs not to formal logic, but to metaphysics.

If, then, the theory of the syllogism is incorrect in its assumptions as to the relation of fact and thought, the inductive logic must be similarly in error. Its great advantage over the old scholastic logic lies not in its logic as such, but in something back of the logic—in its account of the derivation of the material of judgment. Whatever the defects of Locke’s or Mill’s account of experience, any theory which somehow presupposes a first-hand contact of mind and fact (though it be only in isolated, atomic sensations) is surely preferable to a theory which falls back on tradition, or on the delivery of dogma irresponsible to any intellectual criticism. But in its account of the derivation of the material of judgment, inductive logic is still hampered by the scholastic conception of thought. Thought, being confined to the rigid framework in which the material is manipulated after being obtained, is excluded from all share in the gathering of material. The result is that this material, having no intrinsic thought-side, shrinks into a more or less accidental association of more or less shifting and transitory mental states.

I shall not stop to argue that, on this ground, the “inductive” logic deprives science of its most distinctive scientific features—the permanence and objectivity of its truths. I think no one can deny that there is at least an apparent gap between the actual results of concrete science and these results as they stand after the touch of the inductive logic—that the necessity and generality of science seem rather to have been explained away, than explained. I think most of the inductive logicians themselves (while endeavoring to account for this apparent necessity as generated through association) would admit that something of science seems, at least, to have been lost, and that the great reason for putting-up with this loss is that the inductive logic is the sole alternative to a dogmatic intuitionalism and to arbitrary spinning-out of a priori concepts.

Certainly as long as thought is conceived after the fashion of syllogistic logic, as a scheme furnished and fixed in itself, apart from reality, so long scientific men must protest against allowing thought any part or lot in scientific procedure. So long some such modus operandi as that given by Mill must be resorted to in order to explain scientific methods and results. But, on the other hand, if the scholastic idea of thought as this something having its character apart from fact is once given up, the cause which at present cramps the logic of science into the logic of sensationalism and empiricism is also given up. And this brings us to the other point in general regarding the inductive or empirical logic. It is not strictly a logic at all but a metaphysic. It does not begin with the fact of science, the fact of the fruitful inquiry into fact by intelligence, at all. It does not, starting from this fact analyse the various methods and types which thought must take upon itself in order to maintain this fruitful inquiry. On the contrary, it begins with sensations, and endeavors by a theory of knowledge on the basis of sensationalism to build up the structure of cognition, ordinary and scientific. I am not concerned here with the truth of sensationalism as a metaphysical theory of knowledge, nor with the adequacy of the notion of sensation advanced by Mill. It is enough from the logical point of view to point out that such a theory is not logic—that logic does not deal with something back of the fact of science, but with the analysis of scientific method as such. And is it forcing matters to indicate that this retreat from logic to metaphysic is also caused by the syllogistic notion of thought? Formal thought, with its formulæ for simply unfolding a given material, is of no use in science. There is, therefore, the need of some machinery to take the place of thought. And this is found in sensation and in “experience” according to the peculiar notion of experience current in the inductive logic.

In a word, then (without attempting to show the insufficiency of inductive logic as the theory of science by reference to its treatment of specific points) inductive logic does not meet our needs because it is not a free, unprejudiced inquiry into the special forms and methods of science, starting from the actual sciences themselves. It is founded and built up with constant reference to the scholastic notion of thought. Where it is not affected positively by it, it is still affected by its reaction from it. Instead of denying once for all validity or even sense to the notion of thinking as a special, apart process, and then beginning a free, unhampered examination with an eye single to the fact of science itself, it retains this conception of thought as valid in a certain department, and then sets out to find something to supply the gap in another department. And thus we have the usual division of inductive and deductive logic, inductive being interpreted as empirical and particular, deductive as syllogistic and formal. They are counterpart and correlative theories, the two sides of the notion of the separateness of fact and thought; they stand and fall together.

“Transcendental” logic, while usually conceived as utterly opposed in spirit and in results to inductive logic, has yet been one with it in endeavoring to abolish formal logic as the sufficient method and criterion of scientific truth. I say this although well aware that inductive logic is usually conceived as specifically “scientific,” while the transcendental movement is regarded as the especial foe of science—as a belated attempt to restore an a priori scholasticism, and to find a scheme for evolving truth out of pure thought. This is because when the “transcendental” school talks of thought, of the synthetic and objective character of thought, of the possibility of attaining absolute truth through thought, and of the ontological value of thought, it is understood as meaning thought in the old, scholastic sense, a process apart and fixed in itself, and yet somehow evolving truth out of its own inner being, out of its own enclosed ruminations. But on the contrary, the very meaning of “transcendentalism” is not only that it is impossible to get valid truth from the evolution of thought in the scholastic sense, but that there is no such thought at all. Processes of intelligence which have their nature fixed in themselves, apart from fact and having to be externally applied to fact, are pure myths to his school. Types of thought are simply the various forms which reality progressively takes as it is progressively mastered as to its meaning,—that is, understood. Methods of thought are simply the various active attitudes into which intelligence puts itself in order to detect and grasp the fact. Instead of rigid moulds, they are flexible adaptations. Methods of thought fit fact more closely and responsively than a worn glove fits the hand. They are only the ideal evolution of the fact,—and by “ideal” is here meant simply the evolution of fact into meaning.

If this is a fair description of what the “transcendental” school means by thought, it is evident that it is a co-worker with the spirit and intent of “inductive” logic. Its sole attempt is to get hold of and report the presupposition and rationale of science; its practical aim is to lay bare and exhibit the method of science so that the true seat of authority—that is, the authority, the backing, of truth—shall be forever manifest. It has simply gone a step further than “inductive” logic, and thrown overboard once for all the scholastic idea of thought. This has enabled it to start anew, and to form its theory of thought simply by following the principles of the actual processes by which man has, thus far in history, discovered and possessed fact.

I shall not attempt here any defence of the “transcendental” logic; I shall not even attempt to show that the interpretation of it which I have given above is correct. It must go, for the present, simply as my individual understanding of the matter. Simply taking this view of “transcendental” logic for granted, I wish, in order to complete our notion of the present position of logic, to consider the reasons which have thus far prevented, say, the Hegelian logic from getting any popular hold—from getting recognition from scientific men as, at least in principle, a fair statement of their own basic presupposition and method.

The first of these reasons is that the popular comprehension of the “transcendental” movement is arrested at Kant and has never gone on to Hegel. Hegel, it is true, overshadowed Kant entirely for a considerable period. But the Hegelian régime was partly pyrotechnical rather than scientific in character; and, partly, so far as it was scientific, it exhausted itself in stimulating various detailed scientific movements—as in the history of politics, religion, art, etc. In these lines, if we trust even to those who have no faith in the Hegelian method or principles, the movement found some practical excuse for being. But the result of the case was—and its present status is—that because the principle of Hegel was, for the time, lost either in display of dialectical fireworks, or in application to specific subjects, the principle itself has never met with any general investigation. The immense amount of labor spent on Kant during the past twenty years has made method and principle familiar, if not acceptable, to the body of men calling themselves educated. And thus, so far as its outcome is concerned, the transcendental movement still halts with Kant.

Now, at the expense of seeming to plunge myself deeper in absurdity than I have already gone, I must say that the Kantian principle is by far more “transcendental” in the usual interpretation of that term—more a priori, more given to emphasising some special function of some special thought-power—than the Hegelian. As against the usual opinion that while some compromise between science and Kant is possible, the scientific spirit and Hegel are at antipodes, it appears to me that it is Kant who does violence to science, while Hegel (I speak of his essential method and not of any particular result) is the quintessence of the scientific spirit. Let me endeavor to give some reasons for this belief. Kant starts from the accepted scholastic conception of thought. Kant never dreams, for a moment, of questioning the existence of a special faculty of thought with its own peculiar and fixed forms. He states and restates that thought in itself exists apart from fact and occupies itself with fact given to it from without. Kant, it is true, gives the death-blow to scholasticism by pointing out that such a faculty of thought is purely analytic—that it simply unfolds the material given, whether that material be true or false, having no method of arriving at truth, and no test for determining truth. This fact once clearly recognised, dogmatic rationalism, or the attempt to get truth from the “logical” analysis of concepts was forever destroyed. The way was opened for an independent examination of the actual method of science.

But while Kant revealed once for all the impossibility of getting truth, of laying hold of reality, by the scholastic method, he still retained that conception of thought. He denied, not its existence, but its worth as relates to truth. What was the result? Just this: when he came to his examination (criticism) of knowledge, it fell apart at once into two separate factors, an a priori and a posteriori. For if Kant finds, as against the dogmatic rationalist, that formal thought cannot give knowledge, he also finds, as against the sceptical empiricist, that unrelated sensation cannot give knowledge. Here too, instead of denying, in toto, the existence of unrelated sensation, he contented himself with denying its functional value for knowledge. Unrelated sensation and formal thought are simply the complementary halves of each other. Admit the one, and the other is its necessary counterpart.

Kant must now piece together his two separated factors. Sensation, unrelated manifold of sensation, is there, thought, isolated, analytic thought, is here. Neither is knowledge in itself. What more natural than to put them together, and hold that knowledge is the union of a matter or stuff, of sensations, atomic in themselves, on one hand, and a form, or regulating principle of thought, empty in itself, on the other? We have two elements, both existing in isolation, and yet both useless for all purposes of knowledge. Combine them, and presto, there is science.

Such a “transcendentalism” as this may well stick in the crop of scientific men. For consider what is involved in it: an a priori factor, on one side, and an a posteriori, on the other. Kant, from one point of view, seems thus to have simply combined the weaknesses of empiricism and rationalism. He still continues to talk of experience itself as particular and contingent, and denies that it gives a basis for any universal laws. Aside from his effort in the “Kritik der Urtheilskraft” to overcome his original separation, special scientific laws are to him only more or less extensive generalisations from experience—as much so to him as to Locke, or Mill. Scientific men indeed, have accustomed themselves to this derogation of their own methods and results, and, as “inductive” logicians, indulge in it quite freely themselves. But an a priori element, supplied by a thought fixed and separate, scientific men cannot do away with. Nor do I know any reason why they should.

It is coming short, in my opinion, of the full stature of science to treat it as a quantitative and varying generalisation of contingent particulars, but this, at least, leaves what science there is free and unhindered. But a priori elements supplied from outside the fact itself, a priori elements somehow entering into the fact from without and controlling it—this is to give up the very spirit of science. For if science means anything, it is that our ideas, our judgments may in some degree reflect and report the fact itself. Science means, on one hand, that thought is free to attack and get hold of its subject-matter, and, on the other, that fact is free to break through into thought; free to impress itself—or rather to express itself—in intelligence without vitiation or deflection. Scientific men are true to the instinct of the scientific spirit in fighting shy of a distinct a priori factor supplied to fact from the mind. Apriorism of this sort must seem like an effort to cramp the freedom of intelligence and of fact, to bring them under the yoke of fixed, external forms.

Now in Hegel there is no such conception of thought and of a priori, as is found in Kant. Kant formulated the conception of thought as objective, but he interpreted this as meaning that thought subjective in itself becomes objective when synthetic of a given sense-manifold. When Hegel calls thought objective he means just what he says: that there is no special, apart faculty of thought belonging to and operated by a mind existing separate from the outer world. What Hegel means by objective thought is the meaning, the significance of the fact itself; and by methods of thought he understands simply the processes in which this meaning of fact is evolved.

There has been, of late, considerable discussion of the place and function of “relations” in knowledge. This discussion in English speculation, at least, tends to turn largely about Thomas Hill Green’s reconstruction of Kantianism. I consider it unfortunate that this discussion has taken the form of a debate between empiricism and Kantianism. The question of knowledge has thus come to be whether or not certain relations are supplied by thought to sensations in order to make an orderly whole out of the latter, chaotic in themselves. Now when Hegel talks of relations of thought (not that he makes much use of just this term) he means no such separate forms. Relations of thought are, to Hegel, the typical forms of meaning which the subject-matter takes in its various progressive stages of being understood. And this is what a priori means from a Hegelian standpoint. It is not some element in knowledge; some addition of thought to experience. It is experience itself in its skeleton, in the main features of its framework.

“Refutations” of Hegel, then, which attempt to show that “thought” in itself is empty, that it waits for content from experience, that it cannot by any manipulation evolve truth out of itself are, if taken as having relevance to Hegel, simply meaningless. Hegel begins where these arguers leave off. Accepting all that they can say, he goes one step further, and denies that there is any such “thought” at all anywhere in existence. The question of the relations or “categories of thought” is just the question of the broad and main aspects of fact as that fact comes to be understood.

For example, Kant would prove the a priori character and validity of the principle of causation by showing that without it science is impossible, that it helps “make experience.” Now, in terms, Hegel’s justification of this relation would be the same; he too would show that the fabric of experience implies and demands the causal relation. But in Kant’s case, the justification of the principle of causality by reference to the possibility of experience means that thought must continually inject this principle into experience to keep it from disappearing: that experience must be constantly braced and reinforced by the synthetic action of thought or it will collapse. In short, the need of experience for this principle of causation means its need for a certain support outside itself. But Hegel’s demonstration of the validity of the causal principle is simply pointing out that the whole supports the part, while the part helps make the whole. That is to say, Hegel’s reference is not to some outside action of thought in maintaining fact as an object of knowledge; it is to the entire structure of fact itself. His contention is simply that the structure of fact itself, of the subject-matter of knowledge, is such that in one of its phases it presents necessarily the aspect of causality. And if this word “necessarily” gives pause, it must be remembered what the source of this necessity is. It does not lie in the principle of causation per se; it lies in the whole fact, the whole subject-matter of knowledge. It is the same sort of necessity as when we say that a complete man must have an eye; i. e., it is the nature of the human organism to develop and sustain this organ, while the organ, in turn, contributes to and thus helps constitute the organism.

It is then evident that the question upon which the “refutation” of Hegel turns is not in showing that formal “thought” cannot give birth to truth except through the fructifying touch of experience. The question is simply whether fact—the subject-matter of knowledge—is such as Hegel presents it. Is it, in general, a connected system as he holds it to be? And, if a system, does it, in particular, present such phases (such relations, categories) as Hegel shows forth? These are objective questions pure and simple; questions identical, in kind, with the question whether the constitution of glucose is what some chemist claims to have found it.

This, then, is why I conceive Hegel—entirely apart from the value of any special results—to represent the quintessence of the scientific spirit. He denies not only the possibility of getting truth out of a formal, apart thought, but he denies the existence of any faculty of thought which is other than the expression of fact itself. His contention is not that “thought,” in the scholastic sense, has ontological validity, but that fact, reality is significant. Even, then, if it were shown that Hegel is pretty much all wrong as to the special meanings which he finds to make up the significance of reality, his main principle would be unimpeached until it were shown that fact has not a systematic, or interconnected, meaning, but is a mere hodgepodge of fragments. Whether the scientific spirit would have any interest in such a hodgepodge may, at least, be questioned.

Having dealt at such length with the first reason why as yet the “transcendental” movement has found no overt coalescence with the scientific, we may deal briefly with the remaining reason.⁠[3] In the second place, then, the rationality of fact had not been sufficiently realised in detail in the early decades of the century to admit of the principle of the “transcendental” movement being otherwise than misunderstood. That is to say, the development and, more particularly, the application of science to the specific facts of the world was then comparatively rudimentary. On account of this lack of scientific discovery and application, the world presented itself to man’s consciousness as a blank, or at least as only stuff for meaning, and not as itself significant. The result was that Hegel must be interpreted subjectively. The difficulties in the way of conceiving a world, upon which science had not yet expended its energies in detail, as an organism of significant relations and bearings were so great, that Hegel’s attempt to point out these significant types and functions as immanent in reality was inevitably misconstrued as an attempt, on Hegel’s part, to prove that a system of purely “subjective” thoughts could somehow be so manipulated as to give objectively valid results.

Hegel, in other words, anticipated somewhat the actual outcome of the scientific movement. However significant fact may be, however true it may be that an apart faculty of thought is an absurdity, however certain it may be that there are no real types or methods of thought at all excepting those of the object-matter itself as it comes to be understood, yet to man this objective significance cannot be real till he has made it out in the details of scientific processes, and made it applied science in invention. Hegel’s standpoint was, therefore, of necessity obscure. When the significant character of fact was not yet opened up in detail, a method which worked upon the basis that the only possible thought is the reflection of the significance of fact, had no chance of fair interpretation.. And thus it was (and largely is) that when Hegel speaks of objective thought and its relations, he is understood as having the ordinary conception of thought (that is, of thought as a purely separate and subjective faculty), and yet as trying to prove that this apart faculty has some mysterious power of evolving truth.

The question which now confronts us, therefore, as to the present place of logic is just this: Has the application of scientific thought to the world of fact gone far enough so that we can speak, without seeming strained, of the rationality of fact? When we speak of the rationality, of the intrinsic meaning of fact, can these terms be understood in their direct and obvious sense, and not in any remote, or merely metaphysical sense? Has the theoretical consideration of nature in its detailed study, has practical invention, as the manifestation of the rationality of fact, gone far enough so that this significance has become, or could become with some effort, as real and objective a material of study as are molecules and vibrations?

It seems to me that we are already at this stage, or are at the point of getting to it. Without arguing this question, however, (which, indeed, can be proved only by acting upon it, only ambulando,) I would point out that the constant detailed work of science upon the world in theory and in invention, must in time give that world an evident meaning in human consciousness. What prevents scientific men from now realising this fact, is that they are still afraid of certain “transcendent” entities and forces; afraid that if they relax their hostility to metaphysic, some one will spring upon them the old scholastic scheme of external, supernatural unrealities. To those who take the prevailing agnosticism not as a thing, but as a symptom, this agnosticism means just this: The whole set of external, or non-immanent entities, is now on the point of falling away, of dissolving. We got just so far, popularly, as holding that they are unknowable. In other words, they are crowded to the extreme verge. One push more, and off they go. The popular consciousness will hold not only that they are unknowable, but that they are not.

What then? Science freed from its fear of an external and dogmatic metaphysic, will lose its fear of metaphysic. Having unquestioned and free possession of its own domain, that of knowledge and of fact, it will also be free to build up the intrinsic metaphysic of this domain. It will be free to ask after the structure of meanings which makes up the skeleton of this world of knowledge. The moment this point is reached, the speculative critical logic worked out in the development of Kantian ideas, and the positive, specific work of the scientific spirit will be at one. It will be seen that this logic is no revived, redecked scholasticism, but a complete abandonment of scholasticism; that it deals simply with the inner anatomy of the realm of scientific reality, and has simply endeavored, with however much of anticipation, to dissect and lay bare, at large and in general, the features of the same subject-matter, which the positive sciences have been occupying themselves with in particular and in detail.

That we are almost at the point of such conflux, a point where the general, and therefore somewhat abstract lines of critical logic will run in to the particular, and therefore somewhat isolated, lines of positive science, is, in my opinion, the present position of logical theory.

John Dewey.

FOOTNOTES:

WILL AND REASON.

It has always been, I think, the practice in civilised society to speak of reason or good sense as in some way influencing action. And of course it must do so, if, as we suppose, it forms the radical distinction between man and the lower animals. “Be reasonable,” we say, in reference to action no less than to speculation. “Wisdom and blood,” says Shakespeare, “combating in so tender a body, we have ten proofs to one that blood hath the victory.” Blood here means passion. How does wisdom or knowledge combat passion? I do not say that wisdom and knowledge mean the same thing, but if they do not, we should like to know the difference between them.

In this prevalent notion of the conflict between reason and desire, it may be observed that reason is, as a rule, supposed to be negative or prohibitive. “Be reasonable” generally means “give up something you want very much.” According to one account, the inward monitor of Socrates was always negative, and throughout moral philosophy, and especially throughout moralising philosophy, which is not quite the same thing, you find the point of view that reason conflicts with desire, and has in fact for its function very much to prevent you doing or caring about whatever you very particularly want to do or incline to care about. This is what gives rise to the state of things satirised in the old saying “Any young man would rather face an imputation on his moral character than an imputation on his horsemanship.” If moral character means a sort of detachment from everything, this feeling is both natural and justifiable. The popular interpretation of Aristotle leans in the direction of this idea about reason, in so far as the conception of the reason seems to be connected with commonplace notions about the evils of excess, strongly represented in Greek proverbial philosophy. It was easy to add to these ideas the conception of the evils of defect, which is little more than a verbal refinement on the other. These quantitative expressions have not much meaning in morality. Unquestionably, I think, the popular aspect of the Aristotelian doctrine is an idea that you ought not to throw yourself very deeply into anything. Reason is, in short, according to these moralistic conceptions, though not according to Aristotle’s fundamental view, a sort of check upon desire and little more.

This negative character of reason will, I hope, explain itself away as we proceed. The primary point on which I want to insist is not why reason is thus treated as negative, but how it comes that reason can be supposed to conflict with or control desire at all. I speak for the present of Desire, not of Will, because the meaning of desire is clearer; whereas it is a doubt, until we have explained the nature of active reason, what Will is, and whether it is distinguishable from desire.

Now, on the other hand, there is a sentence of Aristotle “Intelligence as such moves nothing,” and this seems to come home to us quite as naturally as the idea that reason controls action. All plain or unambiguous instances of reason or reasoning or intelligence, seem to deal with discovery of fact, couched in a form which is capable of truth and falsehood. For our purpose we may treat it as elaborate perception, whether direct or assisted through inference, such as calculation. Calculation is the old meaning of reasoning, both in Greek and Latin.

How do we get across from perception or calculation to anything that can interfere with desire?

Of course there is a meeting-point in the idea that attends desire. Human desire, at least, is not blind. It is desire of something, which is before the mind as an idea; and in the case of desire which issues in action this something must be mentally specified in respect of the particular means needed to bring it about. And also, the end or purpose which is desired for its own sake, is, in the connection of cause and effect, itself de facto a means to other results ad infinitum, more or less of which are foreseen by the person who acts. Thus the act, as fully presented to the mind in idea, is a complication of external circumstances, which are ideally distinguished, supposing the act to be reflected on, as means, realisation of the purpose, and foreseen consequences both of the means and of the realisation of the purpose.

It is, I think, all-important to remember, that these distinctions are distinctions of relation to the acting subject, drawn very lightly by the acting subject on the shifting surface of a complicated set of results presented in idea, and are not at all complete distinctions, and lend themselves very readily to self-deception. We shall see the importance of this remark directly.

In the meantime, here we have one way in which reasonings about fact do help to modify our actions. If we know distinctly what we desire, say, a week’s holiday, then it is reasoning about matters of fact that will tell us what we must do to get it, and, in part, what the results will be both of our getting it and of what we do to get it. Now for philosophical purposes we need not consider the foreseen consequences separately. They must rank, morally, as means. That is to say, they are something which you have to take into the bargain in order to get what you want. They come in with all the other circumstances in determining whether you like the action or not.

Now is this connection between action and reason what we have in mind when we say that a person ought to act reasonably, or that reason combats desire? Do we understand by acting reasonably, that assuming some one part of the imagined circumstances to represent the purpose, the agent has got all the means to it, and the foreseen consequences of it, and the interdependence of the parts of the purpose itself, set out in a connection which is truly perceived or scientifically inferred?

We do sometimes appear to mean this. We say: it is unreasonable to ask me to be at the station at nine when the train does not start till ten. It is unreasonable, you may say, on the ground that the means demanded of me are not, scientifically speaking, necessary to the end agreed upon. Still more we should pronounce it unreasonable to adopt any means which actually defeats your purpose; which could only happen, one would think, either from moral self-deception, or in complicated matters where the means are disputable. This second case does not matter to us; the first carries us a little further, because it suggests that what you call the means may really contain your purpose, or one of your purposes, perhaps inconsistent with another. The hackneyed example of selfish charity is as good a case of this unreasonableness as can be found. The gift, which is professed to be merely a means to the good of another, is, under all the conditions, a means contrary to that good, and is given because it gratifies an impulse of the donor. It might seem, in this case again, a fair explanation to pronounce such conduct unreasonable merely because the means adopted are scientifically speaking inconsistent with the end proposed. We might bear in mind, however, that we seem to have detected here a probable conflict of ends, not merely of means to an end.

Admitting, then, for the moment, that we hold conduct to be unreasonable if the perception, implied in it, of the relation between means, ends, and consequences is flagrantly false, do we admit conduct to be reasonable simply because the intellectual perception in question is clear and true? Taking truth in its ordinary sense, as truth of simple fact, we must deny this. I may know perfectly well that so much wine will make me drunk, and may drink it with that object and with that result, and yet no one will pronounce this a reasonable action, though my judgment of facts and results was as true and reasonable as could be. It may be, however, that in a larger sense true judgment involves reasonable action.

Thus it does not seem that truth of perception or correctness of calculation as to the connection of the circumstances which are presented in the idea of an act are sufficient to make the act reasonable, although serious blunders in the perception or calculation seem to make the act which implies them unreasonable. I even doubt whether the last clause was rightly stated. I was obliged to say flagrant errors, serious blunders. For it seems doubtful whether a purely intellectual error, or blunder of perception, does make an act “unreasonable,” which owing to such a blunder misses its mark. I incline to think that the reason why we are forced, in such cases as I have instanced, to lay stress on the flagrancy of the blunder, is that it makes us suspect self-deception or moral neglect on the part of the agent, makes us suspect, in other words, that the inconsistency between means and ends was not owing to mere intellectual misjudgment, but was adopted with open or partially open eyes. I do not think that I should call my friend unreasonable for wanting to meet at the station an hour before the departure of the train, if he could show me bona fide grounds which made him imagine that it was necessary to arrive so early. I might in that case think him mistaken, but should not venture to call him unreasonable, unless his mistake seemed so obvious that I thought it was committed on purpose, that is, was not an intellectual mistake at all. When I call him unreasonable, perhaps I really suspect he is making a claim on my time to meet some private convenience of his own—to avoid a crowd or to make sure of some particular carriage, which I do not care about—and therefore perhaps it may after all be his purpose that I think unreasonable.

But there is one great doctrine of reasonableness which does reduce it to a question of means and ends, and that is, the doctrine that everything else is a means to pleasure, whether that of the agent or that of all sentient beings. I do not want to discuss Hedonism psychologically just now, I only want to use it as an illustration of one way in which intelligence may be alleged to control action. The ultimate theory would then be that this uniform purpose, pleasure, is a natural or obvious, or, so to speak, a given purpose, and that all definite action is or has been prescribed by the intelligence dealing with matter of fact, as a means to the realisation of this given purpose.

Then reasonable action would mean what our reasoning and perceptive powers, dealing with matters of fact, pronounce to make for pleasure, and unreasonable action would be all that does not. Here, though I wish to avoid hackneyed criticism, I must note that there is a certain difficulty in getting across from the idea of one’s own pleasure to that of other people’s pleasure as a natural purpose, and sometimes we find the contention that any person’s pleasure is a reasonable purpose to any person, which, like several indications before, takes us out of the connection between reason and the mere calculation of means to an end.

Apart from this, I have, for our object, only to refer back to the suspicion with which we regarded these distinctions between means, ends, and consequences, in the presented idea of an action. The burden of proof lies on those who limit the aspects in and for which activities or results can be or ought to be desired. If we say that the whole complex of our moral life is a means to a partial though necessary incident in it, it seems to me that we are putting the cart before the horse. If you could really say “moral life is the means, and pleasure is the end” then it would follow that, should calculation tell you that moral life was not the most effectual means, you would not prefer it. Now this old argument may be pronounced unfair on the ground that it puts an impossible case; just like the counter-question which is asked by the opposite side, “If morality led only to increased pain, would you prefer it then?” Still, if these two questions together bring out the fact that pleasure is an incident of a whole complex of functions and activities which we cannot suppose to be separated from it, we do get this much result, that there is no firm ground for distinguishing part of the complex as the end from the rest as the means. And it seems clear, also, that we differentiate pleasures in kind according to the activities which they accompany, just as we have constantly found that the so-called means differentiates and qualifies the so-called purpose.

Thus I do not think that it is possible to represent the reasonableness of action as consisting in its guidance by right calculation of the means to an end, not even to the alleged simple and universal end of pleasure. At the same time, this view has one essential element of truth, that is the recognition that a positive impulse or claim can only be combated or defeated by a positive impulse or claim. The view goes so far indeed as to say that one form of a general impulse can only be combated by another form of that same impulse through the discrepancy of the alternative means to its attainment. However this may be, so much does seem clear, viz. that reasonableness cannot be, as popular language tends to make it, something purely negative and prohibitive. Its negative aspect must be secondary, and according to the suggestions furnished by the notions we have been examining, must arise out of a discrepancy between two sets of means to the same acknowledged or accepted end. This I think is solid ground, so far that we are bound to deduce the negative side of reasonableness from a positive nature, whether a general relation to one and the same purpose, or relations to different purposes. We have learnt, on the other hand, to distrust the absolute distinction between means and end.

2. Now I turn for a moment to what I may describe as maxims of reasonableness. I will not call them “A priori principles,” because such an expression raises a question about the nature of experience which does not concern the point before us. But I do treat them as characteristic of a view which explains reasonableness rather by rules than by purposes; and it seems to follow from this that the rule must be alleged to be self-evident, because if they were derivative, they would most naturally be derivative from purposes. But in the history of speculation of course the same principle may be recommended at one time as analogous to an axiom of the reasoning power, and at another time as involved in the purposes which are recognised as good. Even the same writer may combine both views.

Now if such principles are supported as constituting the reasonableness of action, either because connected with the predominance of the speculative intelligence, or because of an analogy between such principles and any axioms acceptable to the speculative intelligence, I believe that this support of them is due to a sheer confusion.

I take two only, as illustrations, one of each type I have mentioned.

Plato, it seems to me, constantly fails to distinguish between the reasonableness of conduct, and the reasonableness of abstract reasoning, that is, of the scientific intellect. To the moral philosopher, scientific or theoretical interest and activity are one interest and activity among others; and the reasonableness of activity is not insured by pursuing an activity of reasonableness. It may be quite unreasonable, in the moral sense, to pursue abstract reasoning as a vocation in life. When we say that in every man the reason should be uppermost, we do not mean that every man should devote himself to intellectual pursuits. Plato knows this, as, in a sense, he knows everything; but he uses all arguments for his purpose, and among others I think he allows it to be supposed that occupation with intellectual matter is in a moral sense a predominance of the reason. I may instance his attempt to prove that intellectual pleasures are the pleasantest, more especially with reference to his aim in making the attempt, which is, I suppose, to recommend intellectual occupation as pre-eminently reasonable in the moral sense. To this I say No; if and in as far as the inference is meant to rest upon an identification of scientific with moral reasonableness, I think it a sheer confusion. It is like saying that because a doctor has to do with the promotion of health, therefore it is a healthy profession to be a doctor. But Plato’s argument shows how strongly this idea appealed to him, because he even recommends intellectual pleasures on the score of their sheer pleasantness, implying not only that intellectual occupation is reasonableness in the moral sense, but that intellectual occupation, even when chosen by way of self-indulgence, is still reasonableness in the moral sense. Of course the matter is complicated by a substantive connection, the degree of which is matter of opinion, between the two things, like that between being a physician and leading a healthy life. Intellectual exercise and ambition have a definite influence on certain capacities concerned in the reasonable will. But it cannot be made out, that a tendency to the more intellectual occupations is in itself a tendency to moral reasonableness. Moral reasonableness must be a general characteristic of moral action, not guaranteed by the special content of any form of activity.

Next I have to discuss a principle which is advocated as an expression of the morally reasonable, on the ground of having a sort of analogy to several maxims or axioms of the intellectual world. It used to be said that justice is like a square; or that the rightness of an action consists in its conformity to certain eternal proportions impressed upon the world by God. I take one more modern form of these principles as a type of them all. Bentham said, “One is only to count for one,” and it is a mere amplification of this when Mr. Sidgwick maintains, if I understand him, that it is objectively reasonable not to prefer my own interest or pleasure simply because it is my own, to that of some one else. This principle seems to me a commendable expression of moral judgment, and I do not think that it is needless or empty. There is a famous passage in Middlemarch where the heroine, in a matter which acutely touches her own feelings, thinks to herself, “Now how should I act if I could compel my own pain to be silent, and merely consider what is best for the lives of all the persons concerned in the situation?” That I suppose is a concrete rendering of what this principle means.

But if we look closer, we see its weak side. It is negative, and consequently abstract. You are not to heed your own feelings unless they are such that you would heed them if they were some one’s else in the same circumstances. This amounts to no more than saying, “We believe there is always, under all circumstances, a right course.” It is strictly parallel to the theoretical principles of Uniformity or Causation. “We believe that there is an explanation for everything; that nothing changes without some reason.” These are useful maxims if they make us look for the explanation, and so the other is a useful maxim, if it makes us look for the right course. But it really falls between two stools. It is not capable, as intellectual theorems are, of accurate development and application by measurement and analysis. Yet on the other hand it makes no special appeal to any special content, or tendency of reasonableness embodied in definite ends. It is neither theoretically fertile, nor is it a description of a practical influence.

It is a well-known phenomenon that those who suggest maxims or moral axioms of this kind as defining moral reasonableness are apt to be reduced to assuming a particular impulse, told off to assist or obey the reason. Such are Plato’s “Spirited” element in the soul, Kant’s reverence, Mr. Sidgwick’s general desire to do what is reasonable. This seems to me to be creating a rule which has no positive content, and therefore has not the character of a human purpose, and then imagining an impulse to obey it the nature of which is not accounted for in reference to any plan of life, but must simply be propounded as an isolated fact.

It kept suggesting itself to us above that reasonableness could not be thoroughly explained on the basis of a distinction between means and end, because actual ends are not simple and uniform, but are obviously qualified by the so-called means, or context of circumstance. We agreed, however, that what is reasonable must be so in virtue of a positive content, whether as means or perhaps as end, and that its negative or prohibitive aspect must arise from the conflict of two such positive contents.

We have in this section looked at two interpretations of moral reasonableness apparently suggested by analogies with intellectual reasonings or principles, and we could not deny that each of them had a certain appearance of truth, but one seemed to confuse the content with the form, the other to consist of a form without any content.

3. It suggests itself therefore that moral reasonableness must be a characteristic which we ascribe to purposes of action. Then we get a variety of positive content, without relying on the distinction between means and end; while the abstract principles which we feel to be reasonable fall into their right place as very general descriptions of a purpose or scheme of life which can be called reasonable.

But the idea of a reasonable purpose requires explanation.

First, it is irreconcilable with abstract Hedonism. You cannot have any relations within a single and uniform purpose, and reason always involves relations.

Secondly, it is not the most intellectual purpose, the purpose that has most to do with reasoning. I have tried to explain this above.

Thirdly, it is such a life or purpose as possesses a self-consistent relation of the parts to the whole. This is the general characteristic of any reasonable totality qua reasonable, and it is this which forms the general characteristic of reasonable purpose qua reasonable.

Then what is the meaning of the self-consistent relation of parts to the whole in the case of a human scheme of life?

We cannot demand that our specific purposes should be related consciously to the purpose of the universe; because the universe as a whole is the object of theoretical knowledge only, and this does not furnish us with the idea of a concrete purpose at all. It seems then that the whole, by consistency with which human purpose is or is not reasonable, must be the whole of existing human purpose, taken of course as moving in a certain direction, owing to the modification continually introduced through the progressive realisation of purposes. I do not see that more than this can be said without entering upon the analysis of the actual structure of the moral world, of society and of history. What is important seems to me to be that we cannot construct the reasonable world of morality from a theoretical view of men in general and of nature. We have to take it as it is, and are then perhaps able to show that it is an organised movement in the direction of self-consistency of purpose.

Is there not more than one kind or type of self-consistency possible, as when self-indulgence is restricted simply within the bounds of health and decency? This is the question whether consistency demands completeness, i. e. whether mere omission destroys consistency. It has often been discussed, and I suppose the general answer is that assuming the unity of the total moral movement, any elements omitted in any portion of the movement must ultimately have their revenge by producing disturbance.

Then if we ask what after all is the relation of the theoretical reason to the reasonable will or moral reason, the only answer seems to be that the moral reason, in the individual or in the race, is the body of intellectual ideas which are in fact predominant as purposes in either, having become predominant by the power they have shown of crushing out or adjusting to themselves the active associations of all other ideas. And the power is what might be described as logical power; that is to say it depends on the range and depth which enables one idea to include in itself as in a system a great variety of minor purposes.

The intellect as such is for morality in the first instance simply the medium in which the moral world or content of the moral world exists; and which therefore conveys to that content its own peculiar character of system and totality. Then, further, in theoretical reflection on the moral world, I imagine that we notice this predominance of ideas which have organising power, and we frame to express this predominance such predicates as important, right, good. And the whole of these judgments we must call wisdom as opposed to knowledge. But I cannot myself see how these or any judgments can be judgments of the moral reason. They seem to me to be, as judgments, necessarily judgments of the theoretic reason dealing with the facts of the moral world. But then there is the further complication that these judgments themselves, forming the content of intellectual ideas, may, if they have organising power, become actively predominant, and then again they will form a portion of the actual moral world as general ideas or clues, inciting to the active search for concrete ideas which are concordant with them. In this case they are not acting as judgments, which are true and false, but only as dominant contents. It is one thing to judge that there is a right in the moral world, and another thing to be mastered by the right in one’s own mind.

If I am asked, what I mean by the predominance of dominant ideas, which I allege to form the content of the reasonable will, I start from the position that every idea would produce action if unchecked, simply by suggestions which through associative reproductions call up the necessary movement. Desire may, I believe, or may not intervene, as a state of tension between a pain of want and a pleasure produced by an idea. All that is essential, it appears to me, is this idea which can suggest an action.

In the formed life of a civilised man the organising ideas have long asserted their predominant power, and in every moment crush out countless intruders each of which has in itself suggestions quite capable of leading to action. In childhood or insanity the yielding to every suggestion is a mark of what is called absence or loss of will; that is, not the loss of a general power to check minor suggestions, but of perfectly definite habitual purposes which check them as a matter of course.

This view sounds no doubt like an iron Determinism, and I am not much concerned to defend it from that imputation. After all, if we are determined by the content of our own minds, why then I suppose we determine ourselves. And trivial examples of indifferent alternatives such as “I can blow out this candle or not as I please” seem to me very poor representatives of the moral will, compared with the necessary pressure of an over-mastering idea which drives the man up to the point of saying, “This is what must be decisive with one like me, and I have no alternative.” We feel, as we say, that “we shall have to do it.” Almost all really serious action, it seems to me, is of this type. And if I have read at all correctly this lesson of the new psychology which owes its origin largely to Herbart, it is an instructive meeting of extremes, that the most analytic of psychologies should more than ever represent the individual as the incarnation of a progressive order in ideas.

B. Bosanquet.

ETHNOLOGICAL JURISPRUDENCE.⁠[4]

There is in the history of jurisprudence no more significant event than the foundation of the historical school by Gustav Hugo and Carl von Savigny. Jurisprudence, up to that time, was not a science, at least not a science in the modern acceptation of the term. It was an art, which the practical lawyer learned and employed in strict conformity with practical traditions, without reflecting on the reasons in virtue of which a legal norm or a social institution existed. The only part of jurisprudence of a scientific tendency was the philosophy of law. This latter branch had, since Hugo Grotius, emancipated itself from the church, but it had advanced no farther than to substitute for the will of God, to which formerly right and wrong had been traced, the principle of human nature, and to found upon the social instincts of man a system of natural law,—an ideal jurisprudential state by reference to which positive laws were tested in respect of their conformity with the ideally right and the ideally wrong. This fundamental conception of the essential character of law was only slightly modified by the substitution of the human reason for human nature. The rational systems of jurisprudence also derived the state and the law from the individuality of man, especially from the social traits of this individuality, and definite notions and principles were thus enunciated from which state and law were deductively constructed.

The historical school first introduced a change in all this. It afforded the legal practitioner the possibility of seeing that the law which he applied was the slowly ripened product of a course of development that extended over many centuries, and it afforded the philosophical juristic inquirer the possibility of understanding, that the law was not founded on immutable ideas and principles, but that it was a product of the creative mind of a nation, that this product was subjected to processes of transformation and development, and did not admit of regulation by the individual reason of a single philosophical inquirer. But while the history of law has become a universally recognised discipline in the science of jurisprudence, the application of its underlying principles to the philosophy of law has as yet by no means been universally carried out. On the contrary, the reason still plays an extensive rôle as foundation and evolutionary principle; and to a great extent the history of law and the philosophy of law still pursue their solitary ways as independent branches of knowledge.

In recent times, through the influence of ethnology, jurisprudence has entered on a new epoch. A new branch of the science of law has arisen in Europe, the so-called ethnological jurisprudence, and has already found in Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Belgium, and Holland, enthusiastic supporters. Ethnology, as it is known, is the science that has for the subject of its investigations the totality of phenomena of social life of all the peoples of the earth, and which makes use, in this investigation, of the methods of inductive inquiry exclusively employed by physical and natural science. After the science of ethnology had advanced to a certain point, the extension of ethnological inquiry to the domain of jurisprudence followed as of course.

To a certain extent the investigations of the history of law had prepared the way for ethnological jurisprudence. The inductive method was common to both. The idea of a history of the development of law was no longer strange to jurisprudence. Only the courage was wanting to allow the eye to range over the legal systems of all the peoples of the globe, instead of, as before, restricting it to very narrow limits. The historical investigation of law began in Europe with the history of the Roman law. Thereupon it was immediately extended to the Germanic laws of Europe, so that now all West-European peoples possess a highly developed history of law of their own. Recently, also, the history of Slavonic law has been assiduously treated.

Whereas in every case here it was a question of the sources of the laws that stood in immediate historical connection with the prevailing systems of Europe, jurisprudential investigation was slowly extended to more remote ethnical fields. The first impulse in this direction came from comparative philology. This science had succeeded in tracing the languages of extended groups of peoples back to common primitive tongues. Among these primitive tongues the Aryan, the common original language of the Indo-Germanic group of nations, first occupied the attention of inquirers, and the law of this group of nations thus became the first object of investigation of a comparative jurisprudence extending beyond the more restricted provinces of the history of law. The provinces of Græco-Italic, Germanic, Slavic, Celtic, Iranic, and Indian law were investigated with respect to a common origin, and various agreements and various deviations were discovered. In very recent times the laws of the Armenians and the Ossetes in the Caucasus have been added to the laws of the Aryans, and the laws of the Afghans will probably soon follow these.

A number of more remote provinces of law have also been entered upon, in connection with theological, philological, and connate inquiries. Thus, particularly, in connection with biblical investigation the Israelitic law, in connection with the study of Arabic the Islamitic, in connection with the decipherment of the hieroglyphic writings the Old-Egyptian, in connection with the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions the Soumerian and the Assyrian-Babylonian, and in connection with sinology the law of China. In very recent times the Japanese law has also been treated.

In the laws of all these peoples, by the side of many peculiarities, were also found many phenomena of frequent and universal recurrence.

After the science of law had so far extended its activity in this direction, it was a final step only that ethnological jurisprudence took when it declared that the subject of juristic science was the investigation of the laws of all the peoples of the earth. And yet this step was perhaps a more important one than all that had hitherto been taken. For a considerable group of peoples had up to then been entirely neglected by the science of law, namely the uncivilised peoples, the so-called primitive peoples or Naturvölker. And just the laws of these savages furnished the most remarkable disclosures. They exhibited everywhere the most singular parallel phenomena, and made it possible to open up a complete early history of the law, and to bring to light periods of jural development of which the history of civilised peoples has preserved but a few unintelligible remains. Ethnological jurisprudence is thus able to supply complementary information at a point where the threads of the history of law are lost in the obscurity of early times.

The condition of jural life in these primitive periods is very singular. No juristic philosopher has ever lighted on the idea that primitive man could exist with such jural conceptions as he actually does. That which ethnological jurisprudence has brought to light in this connection is something absolutely new and astonishing, something that no brooding brain could have ever developed out of any idea or principle. Indeed, it is so strange that it could not be conceived at all if we did not have it before our eyes to-day among savage tribes.

The collecting of the laws of uncivilised peoples constitutes an independent task of ethnological jurisprudence. In this way the latter science will fill up the gaps which historical jurisprudential inquiry left open in our knowledge of the jural life of man. But more important than all, perhaps, will ethnological jurisprudence become for the future development of the philosophy of law. In this connection it goes hand in hand with the sociological tendency which dominates our time and has its surest foundation in ethnology.

The prime significance of ethnological jurisprudence lies in the fact that it is an ethnological science.

At first ethnology was a purely empirical science. It gathered together all the attainable phenomena of ethnic existence, and separately, at first, among single peoples and tribes. After an extensive store of material had accumulated in this manner, the discovery was made that in many provinces of ethno-social life, especially in the provinces of religion, law, and morals, especially also in all provinces of social custom, phenomena of essentially similar character presented themselves among a great number of peoples in the case of whom neither any original tribal relationship nor any infusion from one nation into the other could be assumed; and, curious to say, these were frequently the most singular phenomena, of which one would have thought at first that they had sprung from the individuality of a determinate people. This discovery of universal ethnographic parallels was all the more surprising in view of the fact that historical special inquiry, whose province up to then had been essentially national life, had placed especial emphasis on outwardly prominent events occurring in a different form in every nation, whereas phenomena that appeared uniformly among the different nations were little noticed. People had therefore grown accustomed to regard every nation as something existing by itself and peculiar to itself, and, particularly, had also declared it as inadmissible to employ phenomena of the life of one nation to explain corresponding phenomena of the life of another nation.

The discovery of ethnographical parallels led to wholly different ideas. It became clear that a great portion of human ethnical existence was not founded in the peculiar character of particular peoples, but in the character of the human race, in the universal nature of man. And it became in addition clear that that which repeated itself everywhere on the earth, which was therefore an expression of the universal human, was something entirely different from that which previous philosophy had declared to be the actual human. It also became clear, at the same time, that the nations thought quite differently from what the individual man did. With this, however, the foundation of the entire previous philosophy was shaken. If the axiom of modern ethnology is correct, namely that it is not we that think, but it that thinks in us,⁠[5] we shall no longer be able to explain our nature from our consciousness, from our ego, from our reason, but we shall have to pursue this momentous “It” that thinks in us, and since we cannot find it in us we shall have to search for it outside of us in the expressions of the human soul in the life of the race.

This is the fundamental idea of modern ethnology. It seeks to collect all the expressions of the human soul in the life of the species, and from them to derive its inferences as to the nature of man. It regards ethnic existence as the precipitate of human psychical existence, and not merely of that part of it which is conscious, but also of that part of it which is unconscious, that which is inaccessible to introspective observation, that which is not thought, but is merely lived. It enlarges accordingly the domain of psychology, which was restricted hitherto to the analysis of the human consciousness, by the incorporation of an additional domain unmeasured in extent.

These general conceptions of ethnology are also determinative for the science of ethnological jurisprudence, and from this results its peculiarity as contrasted with the other branches of juristic knowledge.

Ethnological jurisprudence places the centre of gravity of the science of law not like the previous juristic philosophy in the individual jural consciousness, but in the law viewed as a province of ethnic existence. It regards the laws of the nations as the precipitates of that which is now active and has been active as jural instinct in the entire human race. It assumes that when all the phenomena of law in the life of the nations have been fixed, an infinitely more valuable material will be drawn therefrom adapted to the disclosure of the nature of law than could have ever in the world been acquired by an analysis of the individual jural consciousness. It does not regard the individual jural consciousness as something innate in man and exempt from the altering effects of time, but as a product of the social conditions in which the individual has grown up. It assumes, therefore, that the individual jural consciousness changes with a change of the social conditions, so that a man who grows up under different social conditions possesses a different jural perception. This assumption, if we compare the expressions of the jural consciousness of races low in the scale of culture with those of civilised peoples, is one that cannot be escaped. We have only to recall to mind the irresistible force with which the jural sense of peoples that live under clan-constitutions demand vengeance of blood, whereas this species of retaliation no longer exists in our jural consciousness of to-day. Thus there are hundreds and thousands of jural instincts and conceptions which are present at certain stages of civilisation and disappear entirely at others.

Ethnological jurisprudence therefore assumes, that the juristic philosopher who lays at the foundation of his system essentially his own jural consciousness, simply enunciates therewith a system of law that answers perhaps to the current conceptions of his time and his people, but which can in no sense lay claim to a value beyond that.

Quite different, on the other hand, are matters conditioned when the inquirer has before him the laws of all the peoples of the earth from the lowest to the highest. Here he has in his possession a picture of the jural consciousness of the mind of humanity, which is no longer subject to alteration, but which, to the extent that the development of human jural life has advanced, is complete.

For the execution of its task ethnological jurisprudence first requires a collection of the laws of all the peoples of the earth. Each one of these laws is of equal value to ethnological jurisprudence in so far as the jural consciousness of humanity has found expression in it in any form. Especially deserving of consideration are the laws of the so-called savage peoples that have been so much neglected and contemned hitherto; since they bring to light the jural consciousness of humanity in its germinal stages, and since higher formations are invariably best understood when we know their first beginnings.

The solidest basis for ethnological jurisprudence would be furnished by a monographic treatment of the law of every single tribe and people of the earth. By such monographic treatments the entire social organisation of a given tribe or people would be exhibited in all its complicated reciprocal relations, and we should be able to follow the law in all the thousands of minute ramifications that connect it with the remaining provinces of national life. But such a monographic treatment of the law of all the nations of the earth is accompanied with great difficulties, and this part of the task of the science of law has as yet been undertaken only to a limited extent.

The condition of affairs is best in this respect where the nations themselves have collected and compiled their legal customs in books of laws. But such collections are found only among peoples that deserve to some extent the appellation of civilised peoples. Among the great majority of peoples the law is simply practised and handed down by oral tradition, so that here the legal customs must be collected by members of foreign civilised nations,—a very difficult labor and one that can be accomplished only by persons who take up their abode permanently among the races in question and become thoroughly familiar with their language and habits of life.

Collections of this character we possess unfortunately only to a very limited extent, and our knowledge accordingly of the law of uncivilised peoples is still very meagre. Even the books of law possessed by the various peoples have not all been made available to juristic science. In part they have not yet been printed, and in part they have not yet been translated into a generally understood language. Considerable time will yet be required before the existing material has been made wholly accessible.

Not before the legal customs of all the peoples of the earth have been collected will ethnological jurisprudence be in a position to furnish a successful solution of the task it has set itself,—the task namely of a causal analysis of all the phenomena of the jural life of the human race. Yet to a certain extent this task may be undertaken at present, even with a relatively limited store of material.

The starting-point for the ethno-juristic investigation of the phenomena of jural life is furnished by the ethno-juristic parallels, legal customs that are found uniformly appearing among the nations, without there being any reason to assume that one nation has received them from another. Legal customs of this character are in part so universally diffused over the earth that they may be characterised as a common possession of mankind; in part they appear sporadically among unrelated peoples; in part they are restricted to more limited domains. The most important legal customs are those that have universal dissemination; for here it may be assumed that they are a necessary emanation of the social side of human life. Legal customs that occur only sporadically, but appear uniformly among unrelated peoples, must likewise be regarded as the products of the universal nature of man, yet only as such that can arise under definite conditions of existence. Legal customs that occur only in limited ethnological domains will have to be referred to the peculiar character of definite peoples and tribes. Legal institutions of universal character are, for example, the forms of marriage by capture and purchase of the bride, blood-vengeance, the right of refuge, the systems of composition, ordeals, oaths, and so forth. Almost universal are the levirate, and the betrothal of children. Sporadically among unrelated peoples appear: the seizure of the corpse of the debtor for debt; execution by fasting, whereby the creditor brings pressure to bear upon his debtor by having him fast a definite period of time before his dwelling; the custom of the chief doing combat with his grown up son, to whom the command of the tribe passes if he conquers his father; and so forth.⁠[6] Frequently it is the most curious customs that thus recur, among peoples that are completely separated from each other by oceans and inaccessible mountain ranges and have unquestionably never been in communication with each other.

The explanation of these ethno-juristic parallel phenomena is in part not very difficult, inasmuch as many of them can be traced back to fixed forms of social organisation. Thus, for example, a whole group of universally recurring legal customs is associated with the peculiar formation of the clan-constitutions and clan-law which regularly appears among uncivilised peoples and characteristically differs from the form of political organisation familiar to the present age. Many legal customs are also based on religious conceptions and social customs, and their explication in such cases is frequently very difficult.

A complete explanation of all the legal customs of all the peoples of the earth with respect to their social causes would exhaust the work of ethnological jurisprudence as an ethnological discipline. But in the same way that the acquisitions of ethnology are in their turn utilisable towards the constitution of a universal philosophy, to which they will impart perhaps an entirely different character, so will the results of ethnological jurisprudence be in their turn utilisable towards the constitution of a universal science of law and for the philosophy of law, in which probably, through its means also, a powerful change will be inaugurated. These are the ideas, traced in their most general characters, that may be regarded as the fundamental ones in “ethnological jurisprudence.”

Albert Hermann Post.

FOOTNOTES:

AMERICAN POLITICS.

Nothing in this country appears to the stranger more intricate and inexplicable than our politics. The different parties, two big ones and several little ones, the various machines, county, state, and national, the “bosses,” “heelers,” and “workers” present such a confusion of ideas and a terminology so varied, that it is only after many years that the foreigner begins to comprehend our system of government and the principles underlying our political movements. Indeed, the majority of Americans themselves are no better off and have no clear perception of the part they are playing in the administration of affairs or the ethical effects of the ballot which they cast. Ask the ordinary voter why he supports the candidates of a certain party and you will find that his reasons are reducible to a few concrete facts, and are rarely governed by any general principles.

In the Southern states the vast majority of the whites are democrats through opposition to the republican party which fought the war and deprived them of their slaves. The negroes on the other hand are republicans because it is to that party they owe their freedom, and from it they expect protection for themselves in the exercise of their political rights and the blessings of opportunity for education. The political question there becomes a race question, utterly regardless of the principles which the two great parties represent. Let there be a complete change of platforms and the result would be precisely the same as it has been for the past generation—the South would still remain democratic, and the votes of their presidential electors would still be cast for the candidates of that party.

There is a minor race question in the feeling against foreigners, more especially Irish, Italians, and Germans, influenced to some extent by the fact that a large number of these foreigners are Roman Catholics and that there is an uneasy suspicion on the part of some Americans that the Catholic church is hostile to the spirit of democracy, a suspicion not entirely unfounded if one should judge solely by the sayings and doings of some of the prelates of that church for the past forty years. This “Know-nothing” sentiment at one time threatened to create a solid foreign vote in opposition. Germans and Irish united under the protecting wings of Tammany Hall and, aided by clergymen who hoped to obtain part of the state educational fund for their private parochial schools, formed a strong ally to the national democratic party. Happily prejudices of race and religion are dying out and neither party can now claim a monopoly of the foreign vote. Strange as it may seem, however, the Irish and German elements, so recently the objects of proscription themselves, have in late years become embittered against the Chinese. To the patient industry of the Mongolian immigrants is due the building of the Pacific railroads, when it would have been impossible to obtain white labor, and the cultivation and development of the Pacific coast states. Congress was terrorised into passing the law excluding all Chinese laborers. It was more than race prejudice which contributed to this hatred of the Chinese. The chief reason for Chinese exclusion was an economic one. Great masses of laborers feared that the Chinese by immigrating in vast numbers would deprive them of work by taking their places at lower wages, and, having the ballot, they dictated to Congress the terms of the Anti-Chinese Act.

The alien contract labor law is a measure conceived in the same spirit and directed against the hiring of laborers abroad by American contractors, who could thus displace their employés at lower wages by Hungarians, or Poles, or Russians, ignorant of the language of this country and whose compensation could be the more easily reduced to a bare maintenance, and who in sickness or old age could be turned out on the roads to die without costing the contractor any contraction of his bank account. There was some excuse for this law, or at least for the feeling which prompted it, when the miners of a whole section could be evicted and they and their families made to suffer the pangs of slow starvation because the owners of the coal lands found they could obtain human machines at a less cost from abroad. It was natural that the laborers should demand a law which offered some immediate relief even at the risk of meeting wrong with wrong, rather than that they should attempt to regulate affairs on abstract principles of justice while their stomachs were empty and their wives and children were dying for want of sufficient nourishment. That feeling, however, is also vanishing and American workingmen are beginning to see that the increase in population, native-born as well as that imported by contract, is steadily adding to the number of competitors and lowering the rate of wages. Their attention is becoming more and more directed to the opening of new opportunities for work rather than to the restricting of the number of workers.

Another class of men, if they vote at all, do so on no general principle of public welfare, but solely for their own advantage at the expense of their fellow men. These are to be found among the rich manufacturers, the coal, and iron, and railway kings, and the manipulators of the crops of the nation. Rarely casting a ballot in person, they give notice to their thousands of employés that if the latter do not support the candidates or the party which they happen to favor, the employés’ places will be given to more pliant servants. These men are as non-partisan as the most ardent reformer could wish. One of them, a few years ago when questioned by an investigating committee of the New York state legislature, said: “In a republican district I was a strong republican; in a democratic district I was democratic; and in doubtful districts I was doubtful, but in politics I was an Erie railroad man every time.” Another famous man of the same type said he had no politics; that he found it cheaper to buy up one set of legislators after they were elected than to purchase two sets of candidates before election. These corrupt men, counting their wealth by tens of millions, influencing state legislatures and the national Congress, and throwing their weight into Presidential campaigns, constitute the chief “dangerous class” in the United States to-day, far more threatening to the permanency of free institutions than the anarchists who were hanged at Chicago.

Then there are the illy-paid employés of these men who do their bidding at the polls, voting for the candidates of their masters. Promise of office or patronage lures others into the support of one party or the other. Lastly come the poorest of the poor who live in the most miserable tenement houses, or when single hive in the big lodging-houses which are found chiefly in New York and Chicago. A ton of coal or a barrel of flour is the bribe to the former, frequently effected through the medium of the poor wretch’s wife who does not care for politics but sees a very material advantage in the food or fuel offered by the ward worker. The lodging-house voters, paid by drinks of whiskey or dollar bills, until recently in New York were marshalled in squads of twenty or thirty early on the morning of election day, given their ballots and compelled to hold them aloft between the thumb and forefinger of the right hand so that the heeler or paid servant of some political faction might watch them from the moment they took their place in the line of voters until their ballots were handed to the election inspectors and dropped in the box. Both parties wink at such frauds and their henchmen directly countenance and assist in them but the party that happens to be in the majority in any locality is usually the one most guilty. The result is that the minority affects great virtue and loudly denounces the corruption of its opponents.

Among those who do vote on principle are the prohibitionists, the greenbackers, the adherents of ephemeral labor parties and the socialists. The anarchists generally refrain from voting because they do not believe in any government by force and say that an enlightened public opinion will lead the people to dispense with such things as the army and navy and police and law courts. The socialists occasionally vote for the men of other parties whom they think represent the worst measures, in order the sooner, as they frankly avow, to produce revolutionary conditions, which they expect would assist them greatly in their propaganda. The prohibitionists, greenbackers, and labor men each take a partial view of political economy. The first see the evils and degradation arising from intemperance and think that everything else must yield to the one consideration of the abolition of the liquor traffic. The panacea of the greenbackers consists in the destruction of the monopoly of the currency now enjoyed by the national banks. The labor men have different shibboleths at different times such as the prevention of child labor in factories, an eight-hour work-day and the like—measures which might effect some relief but are minor matters compared with the great social problem of the increase of poverty in the midst of the greatest productive energies which the world has ever seen, a problem which is rapidly coming to the front and overshadowing all others.