Volume 2 — THE MONIST. (continued 2)

Physiological research also may have a purely physical character. I can follow the course of a physical process as it propagates itself through a sensitive nerve to the spinal column and brain of an animal and returns by various paths to the muscles of the animal, whose contraction produces further events in the environment of the animal. I need not think, in so doing, of any feeling on the part of the animal; what I investigate is a purely physical object. Very much is lacking, it is true, to our complete comprehension of the details of this process, and the assurance that it is all motion can neither console me nor deceive me with respect to my ignorance.

Long before there was any scientific physiology people perceived that the behavior of an animal confronted by physical influences is much better viewed, that is understood, by attributing to the animal sensations like our own. To that which I see, to my sensations, I have to supply mentally the sensations of the animal, which are not to be found in the province of my own sensation. This contrariety appears still more abrupt to the scientific inquirer who is investigating a nervous process by the aid of colorless abstract notions, and is required for example to add mentally to that process the sensation green. This last can actually appear as something entirely novel, and we can ask ourselves how it is that this miraculous thing is produced from chemical processes, electrical currents, and the like.⁠[35]

Psychological analysis has taught us that this surprise is unjustified, since the physicist deals with sensations in everything on which he employs himself. This analysis is also able to render it clear to us that the mental addition by analogy of sensations and complexes of sensations which at the time being are not present in the field of sense or cannot even come into it, is also daily practised by the physicist, as when for example he imagines the moon an inert heavy mass although he cannot touch the moon but only see it. The totally strange character of the intellectual situation above described is therefore an illusion.

The illusion disappears when I make observations (psychologically) on my own person which are limited to the sensory sphere. Before me lies the leaf of a plant. The green (A) of the leaf is united with a certain optical sensation of space (B) and sensation of touch (C), with the visibility of the sun or the lamp (D). If the yellow (E) of a sodium flame takes the place of the sun, the green (A) will pass into brown (F). If the chlorophyl granules be removed,—an operation representable like the preceding one by elements,—the green (A) will pass into white (G). All these observations are physical observations. But the green (A) is also united with a certain process on my retina. There is nothing to prevent me in principle from physically investigating this process on my own eye in exactly the same manner as in the cases previously set forth, and from reducing it to its elements X Y Z.... If this were not possible in the case of my own eye, it might be accomplished with that of another, and the gap filled out by analogy exactly as in physical investigations. Now in its dependence upon B C D ..., A is a physical element, in its dependence on X Y Z ... it is a sensation. The green (A) however is not altered at all in itself, whether we direct our attention to the one or to the other form of dependence. I see, therefore, no oppositions of physical and psychical, no duality, but simply identity. In the sensory sphere of my consciousness everything is at once physical and psychical.

The obscurity of this intellectual situation has arisen according to my conviction solely from the transference of a physical prepossession into the domain of psychology. The physicist says: I find everywhere bodies and the motions of bodies only, no sensations; sensation therefore must be something entirely different from the physical objects I deal with. The psychologist accepts the second portion of this declaration: To him, it is true, sensation is given, but there corresponds to it a mysterious physical something which conformably to physical prepossession must be different from sensation. But what is it that is the really mysterious thing? Is it the Physis or the Psyche? or is it perhaps both? It would almost appear so, as it is now the one and now the other that is intangible. Or does the whole reasoning involved rest on a fallacious circle?

I believe that the latter is the case. For me the elements designated by A B C ... are immediately and indubitably given, and for me they can never afterwards be volatilised away by any considerations which are after all based in every case on their existence.⁠[36]

To the department of special research having for its subject the sensory, physical, and psychical province which is not made superfluous by this general orientation and Which cannot be forestalled, the relations of A B C ... only remain to be ascertained. This may be expressed symbolically by saying that it is the purpose and end of special research to find equations of the form f(A, B, C, ...) = 0.

I hope with this to have designated the point in which I am in opposition to Dr. Carus, with whom I agree so much in other respects. I am obliged, notwithstanding the latter fact, to regard this point as essential, inasmuch as my whole mode of thinking and direction of inquiry have been changed by the view it involves, and because, moreover, I do not believe that the difference in question can be dissipated by any verbal explanations however exact.

This whole train of reasoning has for me simply the significance of negative orientation for the avoidance of pseudo-problems. I restrict myself, moreover intentionally here, to the question of sense-perceptions, for the reason that at the start exact special research will find here alone a safe basis of operations.

Ernst Mach.

FOOTNOTES:

PROFESSOR CLIFFORD ON THE SOUL IN NATURE.

No one can read Clifford’s Lectures and Essays, without feeling that, if their author is less known and valued as an original thinker than as a master of mathematical analysis, it is only because having turned the force of his genius onto mathematics first he had time to complete some work in that direction, whereas his premature death in 1879 only allowed him to give us an earnest of the philosophical work which he had it in him to perform.

The short biography which Prof. F. Pollock contributed to the first edition of his lectures and essays gives an interesting sketch of the phases of opinion through which Clifford passed. It appears that before he took his degree in 1867 and for a little time after he was a high churchman; but, says Pollock, “there was an intellectual and speculative activity about his belief which made it impossible that he should remain permanently at that stage.” “He never slackened in the pursuit of scientific knowledge and ideas,” and conscious of a hiatus between orthodox views and some of the results of science he yet held that religious beliefs are outside the region of scientific proof and that there is a special theological faculty or insight, analogous to the scientific, poetic, and artistic faculties, the persons in whom this genius is exceptionally developed being the founders of new religions and religious orders. This is not unlike the solution of religious doubts which Hume playfully suggested and which John Henry Newman has seriously adopted, namely that “divinity, or theology, has a foundation in reason so far as it is supported by experience. But its best and most solid foundation is faith and divine revelation.” “When or how,” continues his biographer, “Clifford first came to a clear perception that this position of quasi-scientific Catholicism was untenable I do not exactly know; but I know that the discovery cost him an intellectual and moral struggle, of which traces may be found here and there in his essays. Most readers of these essays would consider that Clifford is very unfair to the Christian beliefs which he had abandoned and beyond doubt he felt a certain grudge against them for having so long duped him.”⁠[37] The theories of Mr. Darwin and Herbert Spencer took the place in Clifford’s mind of the old fashioned creed; Natural selection was to unriddle the universe, to yield a new system of ethics and education. We read that Clifford had an extraordinary power of taking up a theory provisionally, of throwing himself into it, accepting it, applying it, and of rejecting it in case it was not satisfactory; and this may account perhaps for his somewhat dogmatic assertion in many cases of crude views. There is one characteristic of Clifford however which all may emulate, and that is the candor and fearlessness of his thinking and speaking. Let me quote a few words from one of the best and most stirring of these essays:

“If I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.... If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call in question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it—the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.”

The essay on the nature of things in themselves marks the furthest limit at which Clifford’s speculation arrived. In it Clifford begins by discarding the ordinary distinction between reality and ideas, eternal object and eternal subject, of feeling and thing. The distinction is really between two orders of feeling; there is the subjective or inner order, in which sorrow succeeds the hearing of bad news, and the objective or outward in which the feeling of letting go is followed by sight of falling object. It is with the latter order that physical science concerns itself, and all the inferences of natural science are inferences of my real or possible feeling. Since an object is a set of changes in my consciousness and not anything out of it, is just my feeling real or possible and therefore part of me, it might seem as if we were shut up in ourselves and excluded from participation in any other reality. So we should be, says Clifford, if we made no other inferences beside those of physical science; but when I come to the conclusion that you are conscious and that you have objects in your consciousness similar to those in mine, I am not inferring any actual or possible feelings of my own, but your feelings, which are not and can never be objects in my consciousness. To feelings and consciousness thus inferred to exist in another, Clifford gives the name of eject, because in the very act of inference they are thrown out of my consciousness, recognised as outside of it, as not being a part of me. “The existence of my conception of you in my consciousness carries with it a belief in the existence of you outside of my consciousness.... How this inference is justified, how consciousness can testify to the existence of anything outside of itself I do not pretend to say; I need not untie a knot which the world has cut for me long ago.” (Vol. II, p. 73.)

Thus, objects in the sense of things presented in my consciousness, my phenomena, are not the sole or chief reality; ejects are equally real and my conviction of your existence as a conscious being like myself is coeval and of equal weight with my belief in my own conscious existence. You and your feelings are strictly speaking the only things which are real outside of myself and my consciousness. For though my objects or phenomena are external to my body they are not outside my consciousness, but part and parcel thereof. Nay, more than this an individual object, i. e. an object which is mine and mine only, never exists at all, according to Clifford, in the mind of man; for with each object as it exists in my mind is bound up the thought of similar objects existing in other men’s minds. All the objects in fact of which we are ever conscious are objects of consciousness in general, are in Clifford’s phrase social objects. “A fixed habit causes an object as it is found in my mind to be formed as a social object and insensibly embodies in it a reference to the minds of other men.” This belief in ejects is moreover the root of all language and all morals:—of language, because any sound which, becoming a sign to my neighbor, becomes thereby a mark to myself, must by the nature of the case be a mark of the social object and not of the individual object: of morals, because the “first great commandment, evolved in the light of day by healthy processes wherever men have lived together, is, ‘Put yourself in his place.’”

So far there is nothing to distinguish Clifford’s theory from ordinary Idealism, which denies that the universe is real except as a phenomenon or appearance before a Self conscious thereof. The future course of Clifford’s argument turns upon two assumptions. One of these, borrowed from the current physiology of the brain, is this: that the changes in my consciousness—ejective facts he calls them—run parallel with the changes in my brain, which are objective facts. The parallelism between them is one of complexity, an analogy of structure. The complex ejective facts are the same sort of complication of simple ejects as the complex motions of the brain are of simple molecular movements. Clifford illustrates the points from the relation of speech to writing, the sentence spoken is the same function of the elementary sounds as the same sentence written is of the corresponding letters. In like manner the complex human mind is the same function of simple feelings as the brain is of primary atoms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

F. C. Conybeare.

FOOTNOTES:

ARE THERE THINGS IN THEMSELVES?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II. KANT’S VIEW OF SPACE AND TIME.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Says Kant:

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

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

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

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

III. FORM NOT IMPORTED BY THE MIND INTO REALITY.

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

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

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

We fully agree with Kant when he continues:

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

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

“It is, then, the matter of all phenomena that is given to us a posteriori; the form must lie ready a priori for them in the mind, and consequently can be regarded separately from all sensation.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You are right. The thing in itself is a dangerous idea,—one that easily leads astray. But so long as we have no better expression to represent the relation for which it stands we shall have to use it. You also accept the following three momenta: (1) Objective existence or reality. (2) Effectiveness of Reality upon consciousness, i. e. sensation. (3) Effectiveness of sensation upon consciousness and reproduction of sensation in consciousness, i. e. representation. Nobody, however, can maintain that in sensation, and still less in representation, the whole of reality will appear in consciousness. First we learn from history what progress has been made in the cognition of reality and secondly it is obvious that we are infinitely far from an actual comprehension of reality. We have strong reasons to suspect that there are many processes in reality which in no way affect our sensibility and cannot enter into consciousness, and we know for sure that we do not comprehend—i. e. reconstruct from them assumed causes—many things, indeed most things, which we observe in their effects. Our cognition of nature, if we begin to construct, always leads us to some x. It may be doubted whether this x is an unknown or an unknowable. In my opinion it is both—anyhow we cannot eliminate it.

“I am convinced that many things which are unknown to-day and appear as unknowable will be known and knowable in a thousand years. But I doubt whether the total mass of the Unknowable has been noticeably diminished. For the Unknowable is infinite and the infinite if divided by any finite number can never produce a finite number. Every solved problem contains new and greater problems. What shall we call this? I believe that the term “thing in itself” is after all the best expression. Whoever wants to turn a mystic on account of it cannot be prevented. This state of things can be brought out of existence by an act of violence only.”

It is most certainly true, as Professor Jodl says, that sensations do not depict the whole of reality. But why should they? Cognition is possible only by limiting the attention to a special point. Every sense organ is an organ of abstraction. Every sense depicts the effects of reality in its own way and in this way alone. It may freely be granted that there are many processes in reality which do not affect our sensibility. Yet there is nothing in reality which does not affect something in some way. If it did not, it could not be said to exist. The chemical rays of light do not affect our eye, they are invisible and were for that reason not noticed. But these rays are not without any effects. If we cannot observe them directly, we can invent sensitive plates or other instruments for observing their effects indirectly. Indirect observation makes it possible that the limitation of our senses does not result in a limitation of knowledge.

Says Professor Jodl:

“Our cognition of nature if we begin to construct always leads us to some x.”

This sentence indicates that Professor Jodl’s and our conception of cognition are different. Cognition is not a reconstruction of assumed causes; it is a unification of our representative sensations or ideas. Something is again noticed, it is re-cognised, to be the same thing. Cognition is adaptation of new facts to our present stock of knowledge; it is the proper arrangement of new data in our system of mental representations. Cognition, accordingly, is the reduction of the unknown to terms of the known. How can it ever lead to an x? The positive conception of cognition is, as Kirchoff defines, it “an exhaustive and most simple description of facts.” It is a reconstruction of facts or, as Mach says, Ein Nachbilden der Thatsachen. Cognition is based upon Anschauungen; it will lead to an ultimate x, only in case we expect that cognition instead of being a description of facts will have to give us information about how it happens that facts exist, how they originated out of nothing.

Professor Jodl’s thing in itself is not outside of Space and Time (as is Kant’s thing in itself) but it is the overwhelming infinitude of problems to be solved with which we cannot hope to get through even though our life lasted billions of light-years. Let me repeat here what I said in the second edition of “Fundamental Problems,”

“A philosophy which starts from the positive data of experience, and arranges them in the system of a monistic conception of the world, will meet with many great problems and in solving them will again and again be confronted with new problems. It will always grapple with something that is not yet known. The unknown seems to expand before us like an infinite ocean upon which the ship of knowledge advances. But the unknown constantly changes into the known. We shall find no real unknowable wherever we proceed. The idea of the unknowable is like the horizon—an optic illusion. The more we advance, the farther it recedes. The unknowable is no reality; the unknowable can nowhere prevent knowledge nor can the horizon debar a ship in her voyage, from further progress.” (p. 271.)

Man’s knowledge has value as positive information concerning the facts he has to deal with, and the infinitude of the not known, the infinitude of other problems and things which he will never face, is of no consequence whatever. Positivism commences and has to commence with the positive facts of the given experience and not with the infinitude of possibilities which lie beyond our horizon. Compare knowledge to property and suppose a man is to buy a farm. Shall we discourage him with the idea that the whole amount of soil on the surface of the earth and of other planets is infinite, and this infinitude of all existences if divided by his finite little possession can never result in a finite number. Even if it were doubled, if it were multiplied a thousand times, it remains as good as nothing in comparison with the rest of the world which he cannot acquire. However, his possession is something to him, whatever the relation of infinite possibilities may be in proportion to it.

The concept of infinitude serves a good purpose in its place, but we cannot use it for analogies in other fields or bring it in relation to concrete realities. We produce confusion and drop into mysticism as soon as we handle the idea of infinitude as if it were a positive thing. The infinite is a function which is mathematically expressed by 1/0 = ∞, and whenever we bring anything in relation to the infinite, we at once dwarf the greatest number no less than the smallest number into zero.

Clearness of thought is the indispensable method of sound philosophy for constructing a positive world-conception, which in great outlines is a description of the facts of reality. By suffering mysticism as a legitimate conception either in science or in philosophy, we enhance the interests of those who prefer the chiaroscuro of vague notions to clear thought.

V. CLIFFORD’S AND SCHOPENHAUER’S CONCEPTIONS OF THE THING IN ITSELF.

When Clifford speaks of things in themselves he does not mean Kant’s thing in itself, he means neither the object independent of the thinking subject nor the thing independent of space and time. He means the thing as it would be if viewed from the thing itself.

A man appears to other thinking beings as an active body, as an organism that is in motion; but to himself he appears as a feeling being. The subjectivity of things as they appear to the things themselves consists in our own case of states of awareness, and this subjectivity is called by Clifford the thing in itself.

A certain brain motion is in its subjective aspect a feeling. This feeling is according to Clifford the thing in itself of the visible, observable, and measurable motion. The thing in itself of so-called inanimate beings is not feeling, but elements of feeling. In other words, the world-substance is everywhere in itself potentiality of feeling and Clifford therefore calls it “mind-stuff.”

Schopenhauer arrives at his conception of the thing in itself practically in the same way. There is the world as it appears to us, the objective world of motion in space and time. What the kernel of this world may be, we can know from self-observation. The kernel of ourselves, Schopenhauer says, is Will; and the will is also the kernel of things; the will is the thing in itself.

We understand by will the passage into action, i. e. an incipient motion of the organism if accompanied with the psychical element of consciousness, and this consciousness is a state of awareness of the will including its direction and aim. Will, as the term is generally used, is always conscious. Schopenhauer however speaks of the will as being blind, i. e. without knowledge, without awareness of itself and its aim. This indicates that he uses the word not in its original but in a figurative meaning.

The fall of a stone may be characterised as a blind motion without awareness and without the stone’s having a consciousness as to its direction or aim; and in a similar (although not in the same) way Clifford speaks of the elements of feeling as being not rational. We agree with Schopenhauer that that factor in a stone which makes it fall when placed in a certain position is as much a natural process as the act of a man, only of a lower grade and a simpler kind. Schopenhauer calls that which both have in common “will.” Yet in common language we call the objective aspect of that which both processes have in common, “motion.” What then is the subjective aspect of a falling stone? It is not a state of awareness, it is no feeling, but it is the potentiality of a state of awareness, it is potential feeling. There is a subjective aspect, but this subjective aspect is so far as we can judge of no account to the stone.

That something in the stone which corresponds to man’s consciousness, viz. the stone’s subjectivity, is not mind, but it is potential mind. And potential mind is not as Mr. Conybeare expresses it “mind diluted,” potential mind is no mind at all.

The world-substance as it exists in inorganic matter is not mind. But the universe taken as a whole, the All, is for that reason not less than mind. On the contrary, it is infinitely more than mind. The All is not brute force and inert matter only, the universe is a cosmos, and its subjectivity necessarily develops, according to the laws of form which characterise the cosmos throughout, into mind. We disagree with Professor Clifford most emphatically when he describes the mind-stuff of which according to his terminology the world consists, as not rational.

The world it is true is not rational in its elements, but the world as a whole, the entire cosmos with its laws and especially in its formal order, is the prototype of all rationality. Human reason is rational only in so far as it conforms with, as it reflects, as it describes the order of the cosmos. The human mind is a microcosm. We do not call the macrocosm, in whose image the microcosm has been created, a mind, because we understand by the term mind not reality itself but reality pictured in symbols of feeling. We understand by mind the individual conception of the world as it is mapped out in the brain of a sentient being, and not the universe itself, not the all-being. We understand by mind a creature and not the creator, a soul and not God.

The cosmos, the All, God, that which creates the mind, is not dead, not irrational, and not inferior to mentality. It is the source of all life, it is the condition of all order, it is the standard of all morality. All the minds that exist are but parts of it. In it, with it, and through it we live and shall live forever. For although we shall die, our being can never be blotted out. Existence knows no annihilation and life knows no death. What we call death is a dissolution of life in a special part, but the contents of a life, the thoughts, the ideas, and the ideals are preserved and transmitted, they are implanted into other minds; the soul continues to live. And this continuance of the life of the soul is not a mere dissolution in the All, it is not the immortality of force and matter; it is the preservation of its special existence, of its most characteristic and individual features for an immeasurably long period hence, which will last as long as the conditions of life remain favorable upon earth. Yet even if a whole solar system were broken to pieces, life will reappear; mind will be born again to struggle for truth and to aspire to live in conformity with truth.

VI. THINGS AND RELATIONS.

The proposition that things in themselves are unknowable finds a strong argument in the statement that we can know relations only, that all knowledge is relative. It is undoubtedly true that all knowledge is relative and knowledge is a knowledge of relations. But what is a relation? When I once proposed this question, I was answered:

“A relation is the connection between two things; it is that something in which the one stands to the other, in short, it is the betwixtness of things.”

This is exactly what a relation is not. From such a definition of relation agnosticism will necessarily follow. It is a misstatement of the case, and when we come to follow out the idea, we shall be led into inextricable contradictions, and unless we revise the whole argument, we shall have to confess that we are at our wit’s end.

The question, what is a relation? was one of the issues between the two great mediæval schools of philosophy, the Nominalists and the Realists.⁠[45] The Nominalists answered: “A relation is a mere product of the mind,” while the Realists declared that “a relation without which the thing cannot be, is in the thing.”

Both schools relied upon Aristotle’s authority. Aristotle had declared that matter is mere possibility of existence (it is δυνάμει ὄν) and form is that which makes it real, the formal is the real, form is existence or being (οὐσία). The metal of a statue, Aristotle says, is its matter, the idea of the statue is its form, both together make the real statue. The metal having had another form before, did not exist with the inherent purpose of being this metal of the statue. The metal is the mere potentiality of becoming a statue.⁠[46] Hence, says Aristotle, not the matter but the form constitutes the reality of the statue, the form is that which is real, or that which makes actual, ἐνεργείᾳ ὄν, it is the being in completeness or actuality, ἐνετλεχείᾳ ὄν, i. e. that which makes a thing exist in its purpose (ἐν τέλει ἔχειν). If the formal alone is and makes real, relations must be real. This is in favor of the Realists.

Yet Aristotle’s philosophy is not in every respect clearly worked out. In fact there are two Aristotles, the one being a Platonist, the other a naturalist, the one believing in universals, the other investigating concrete things and taking individuals as real beings. But both Aristotles and with them both parties of the schoolmen had no clear conception of the nature of ideas, what they are, and what they purport, and how we can discriminate between their subjective and objective elements. Ideas have a meaning. Is their meaning purely mental or has it an objective value? We say that it has.

The same Aristotle who considered the formal as that which makes real, denied the objective existence of relations. He said that such qualities as greater, or smaller, double or half, indeed all relations (the πρός τι of things) did not belong to the things, but were added to them by the thinking subject. Ergo relations are mere products of the mind, they have no objective value. This was in favor of the Nominalists.

Now it is true that some relations are purely mental in so far as the comparison upon which they rest is purely imaginary. An answer to the question, Who was the greater, Alexander or Cæsar? depends upon the standard of measurement which we create for the special purpose. Some such relations have no objective value, they are not facts but a play of imagination dependent on the recognition of the standard of measurement. But how is it, if we express the relation between the gravity of a stone and the whole mass of the earth as it manifests itself in the stone’s fall? Is that also a mere product of the mind? Certainly Newton’s laws describing gravitation in exact and mathematical formulas are a product of the mind, but this product of the mind has an objective value, it has a meaning, it describes facts, and these facts are certain relations between certain things.

The fault of the modern misconception of relativity lies in the assumption that the two or more things are considered as things in themselves. We are apt to consider the gravity of two masses, of a stone and of the earth, as a relation between two independent things. Here is the stone and there is the earth and the relation is considered as some third item, being the connection in which the one stands to the other.

In reality there are not two things and, in addition to them a betweenness of the two things. The world is not a sum of things, not even a system of things, but a whole indivisible entirety and what we call things are abstractions which serve special purposes in the household of cognition. All things consist as it were of innumerable relations to all other things. When we abstract one special process which takes place in the province of what we are wont to call two things, we have to deal with a relation.

There are no relations of themselves and there are no things of themselves. Relations describe certain features of reality obtaining between what we call two or more things, and in this description all other features of which the real things consist are purposely omitted.

There is no quality of things but it is at the same time a quality of relation. Every quality of a thing characterises it under a certain condition; it appears as an effect upon something and thus it is actual as a relation. Cognition analyses things into bundles of relations and all these relations together make up the things.

The modern idea that we can know relations only and that there are things in themselves which are unknowable is an old error inherited from mediæval scholasticism, and its roots can be traced back to the philosophy of Aristotle. The difficulty disappears as soon as we consider the whole world (ourselves included) as an interacting whole, and that the conceptions “things” and “relations” have been invented for describing certain of its parts and certain of its interactions or interconnections.

If we push the idea of things in themselves to the ultimate extreme we arrive at the atomistic conception of the universe. Atoms are the things in themselves reduced to the point system. If we consider the world as a heap of innumerable atoms, we are at a loss how to explain the interaction among these atoms. The atomist universalises the substance-abstraction and will be disappointed afterwards not to be able to deduce from his universalisation other qualities which are found in reality, such as the relations of things, their interconnections, their spontaneity of motion, the life of organised beings, and the mind of thinking creatures.

Ideas are symbols and symbols have a meaning. The whole realm of mental representations may be viewed in their symbolism or in their significance. Considering their symbolism, ideas of things as well as of relations, are products of the mind, considering their meaning, ideas represent realities; in other words: their contents or that which they signify is real.

It appears that neither Nominalism nor Realism is right; yet if we stretch them only a little, if we are allowed to interpret them in the light of a monistic world-conception, both are right. They cease to be contradictory and become complementary. Universals are real, say the Realists, i. e. the forms and relations of things are actualities. Universals are names, say the Nominalists, i. e. the relations and forms in which we describe the world are mental symbols.

The Realists had the misfortune to defeat the Nominalists entirely, and thus had a chance to insist upon being right in every respect. All opposition having ceased, the errors of Realism grew in extraordinary exuberance. Nominalism in the mean time raised its head in opposition to the recognised authority of the church as well as the schools, slowly yet powerfully and irresistibly. The errors and the tyranny of Realism gave strength to the Nominalistic movement which reached its height in Kant’s philosophy. The Realists had gone to the extreme of declaring that universals were things, real substances, independent of single and concrete objects, and the Nominalists on the other hand, represented by Kant, went so far as to declare that all relations, time and space included were mere products of the mind.

If the relations are mere products of the mind, all knowledge being a knowledge of relations, knowledge becomes impossible. That last consequence was drawn by Kant and is emphatically insisted upon by agnosticism.

There is but one world-conception that can dispense with these conclusions: it is that View which conceives of the All as a whole; and of knowledge as a description of its parts, qualities, and relations, ever mindful on the one hand that the parts are parts, that qualities and relations are certain features only, not entire realities, or isolated entities, and that the symbols thereof frequently overlap each other; on the other hand that there is nothing absolute,⁠[47] and that there are no things in themselves.

The relativity of knowledge, whether we conceive of it as the relativity of the object to the subject in general or as an appreciation of the fact that all knowledge gives and can give information of relations only, does not lead to the conclusion that knowledge is impossible. Relativity is a fundamental feature of knowledge, and we shall understand that it must be so if we consider that reality itself is a great system of relations.

The interconnection of all things with all things appears to be so complete, that if we intended to explain or understand one single fact fully and exhaustively in all its relations, past, present, and future, we should be obliged to give a complete description of the universe. Says Tennyson:

We might address in the same way anything else, an atom of hydrogen, a grain of sand as well as the sun, the action of a tiny speck of irritable protoplasm as well as the soul of man.

VII. IS THE EGO A THING IN ITSELF?

Prof. Lloyd Morgan in his excellent work “Animal Life and Intelligence” uses repeatedly the word “mind” as if it were a thing in itself. Professor Morgan is a monist and he does not intend the word to mean a thing in itself; yet such is the influence of language that we, all of us, unless we are constantly on our guard, will inadvertently slip into dualistic expressions. Professor Morgan says, with reference to certain sensations of animals (p. 309):

‘From these stippled sensations the mind in all cases elaborates a continuum.’

The unity which arises out of stippled sensations and which through their interaction becomes a continuum is called mind. To speak of mind as working out the continuum is mythological language, it is the transformation of the abstract idea “mind” into a real and independent thing whose existence is conceived to be independent of the reality from which it has been abstracted.

Again, Professor Morgan says: “Our constructs are literally our handiwork.” Our constructs, i. e. our mental signs constructed to represent realities, constitute our soul; they are we ourselves.

Professor Morgan, as I understand him, does not believe in a mind behind the psychical facts of mental activity, he does not assume the pre-existence of mind to the continuum elaborated. His view of mind appears to be the same as ours. The more noteworthy, then, is his usage of the term “mind.” It is a remarkable instance of how language naturally inveigles us into a belief in things in themselves. Words seem to denote concrete existences and as soon as we use words in this way we are entangled in dualism.

Prof. F. Max Müller as well as the late Prof. Thomas Hill Green, the founder of the Oxford transcendentalist school, start from this assumption, that man’s mental activity is performed by a something which is quite distinct from it. This something is the thing in itself of the human soul. Prof. F. Max Müller says:

“If mind is the name of the work, what is the name of the worker?... It is what we may call the ego as personating the self; it is what other philosophers call the monon. Let us call therefore the worker who does the work of the mind in its various aspects, the Monon or the Ego.”

This conception which asks for the worker of the work is based upon a materialistic view of the human organism. An organism is not a dead machine which must be set a-going by somebody who attends to it. Organisms are active and not passive, they are living and not dead. Every part of an organism is a worker and so is the whole. And if we speak of its “life” we must bear in mind that “life” is an abstract which denotes a certain inseparable quality of the organism. The work and the worker are two abstracts of one and the same thing. The reality from which these terms have been abstracted is “something working.” This something working does not consist of a worker and his work, but the worker is in every part of his work. The worker of our mental activity is the work itself. Both are identical.

The objection is made: “Whence does the activity come which appears in the realm of organised life.” The answer is: Activity is a universal quality of all existence. There is no such a thing as absolutely inert matter. Every chemical element combines with other elements spontaneously, according to its inherent nature and not through the influence of a worker manipulating its atoms. Spontaneity is a universal feature of reality. Nature is throughout self-working activity. And this its most remarkable character is preserved in its highest efflorescence in the soul of man.

The present number of The Monist contains a lucid presentation of the transcendentalist position by Mr. F. C. Conybeare, an Oxford scholar and a personal disciple of Professor Green, with special reference to the views of Prof. William Kingdon Clifford. Mr. Conybeare, like Prof. F. Max Müller, assumes a Self independent of the reality from which the idea of self has been abstracted, and he attempts to prove the existence of this self as follows:

“In truth there can be no relation of before and after between the two terms except for a self which takes note of the one disappearing and of the other appearing; and whenever we speak of things following one another we tacitly presuppose a self before whom the procession passes.”

The transcendentalist adopts, in the realm of psychology, the error of atomism. If we accept the view that the world consists of isolated atoms, we are at a loss how to bring the atoms into relations; the unity of every group of atoms, every thing and every system of things will become a mystery. And if we look upon feelings as unrelated things in themselves, their connection becomes a deep problem. Mr. Conybeare solves this problem of the connection that obtains among the feelings supposed to be atomical, by postulating a relation-producing entity, called the self. He says:

“No link is left, save a connecting self.”

And this assumed entity of a connecting self or ego is taken to be “the heart and centre of reality.” Reality, that which we have to deal with in real life and what is commonly called reality, appears as a second class of reality in comparison with this assumed thing in itself of our existence. The thing in itself is thus regarded as something realer than real; it is conceived to be a reality of a higher degree.